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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