The Four Seasons were written by Antonio Vivaldi, the Venetian composer and violinist. They are four concertos for violin and string orchestra, published in Amsterdam in 1725 as part of his Op. 8, Il cimento dell'armonia e dell'inventione. Each concerto follows a sonnet describing a season of the year. Two and a half centuries later, Astor Piazzolla composed in Buenos Aires his Cuatro estaciones porteñas, four tango pieces that are now often programmed alongside Vivaldi's.
Vivaldi spent much of his life in Venice, where he taught the violin at the Ospedale della Pietà, an institution for orphaned girls famous for its orchestra. The Four Seasons are the finest example of his taste for descriptive music: each concerto is accompanied by a sonnet, perhaps written by the composer himself, and the score notes precisely which image each passage illustrates.
Each season is a concerto in three movements, fast, slow and fast, in which the solo violin converses with the orchestra. The collection was an immediate success across Europe and remains one of the most recorded works in the repertoire.
In Spring, birds sing, a brook murmurs and a passing storm breaks. Summer is tension and sultry heat: the final movement unleashes a hailstorm that flattens the fields. Autumn celebrates the harvest with a peasants' dance, the sleep of the drinkers and a hunt.
Winter is the boldest: strings that shiver like chattering teeth, rain falling in pizzicato and footsteps slipping on the ice. Few works of the Baroque tell so much with so little.
Between 1965 and 1970, Astor Piazzolla composed four pieces for his quintet of bandoneon, violin, piano, electric guitar and double bass: Verano porteño, Otoño porteño, Primavera porteña and Invierno porteño. They were not conceived as a cycle, but together they portray the turning year in Buenos Aires in the language of the new tango.
The Russian composer Leonid Desyatnikov later arranged them for violin and string orchestra, weaving in quotations from Vivaldi. That version made it common to hear the seasons of Venice and those of Buenos Aires in a single concert.
The dialogue between Vivaldi and Piazzolla works because both start from the same idea, describing the year in music, from opposite worlds: the Venetian Baroque and the tango of Buenos Aires. The hemispheres are reversed, too: when it is summer in Venice, it is winter in Buenos Aires, and some performers play with that mirror when ordering the programme.
Heard together, the eight seasons show how far a musical idea can travel across centuries and continents without losing its freshness.
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