Vivaldi’s Four Seasons is one of the world’s most popular and widely recorded collections of music, a set that instantly became an international hit after it was first published at part of the composer’s Op.8 in 1725. No doubt it was its imitative directness – extra musical occurrences/phenomena evoked in an extremely suggestive manner and even written into the score, such as ‘the barking dog’, etc. – that caused such a sensation in its time. Today nothing has changed: the concertos are performed both by violin virtuosos and hard rockers; they are works that are constantly being presented in new guises through the re-imagining and re-working of the musical score.
