Pirated editions were circulated soon after the first printing in Amsterdam Anthony Pryer, a musicologist, says the compositions became “transnational works”. That trailblazing sparkle quickly won European fame. From sultry summer to shivering winter, its unexpected harmonies surprise and delight. For Mr Chandler, the work is “like an opera, but for one voice: the violin”.

The appeal of “The Four Seasons” rests on dramatic transitions from one cleverly staged scene-hunts, merry-making, storms-to another.

Indeed, “Spring” shares a theme with one: “Il Giustino”. Vivaldi spent much of his career as the music director of a girls’ orphanage in Venice: it is possible he wrote the “Seasons” with a star pupil, a violinist known as Anna Maria della Pietà, in mind. A set of pastoral sonnets, perhaps by Vivaldi himself, accompanied the music. (Play “like a sleeping goatherd”, runs one instruction.) Earlier Baroque composers had imitated natural sounds, yet this full-scale “programmatic” plan was novel. Each concerto evokes the climate and customs of its season with vivid descriptive episodes-birdsong, gales, frost, barking dogs and so on-often specified in the score. Mr Chandler underlines the originality of the sequence’s format.

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