Is there a musical moment in the piece you're most proud of? The key thing for me to figure out when navigating through this material was just how much Vivaldi and how much Me was happening at any point - three quarters of the notes in the new score are mine, but that is not the whole story - Vivaldi's DNA is omnipresent in the work and trying to take that into account at all times was the key challenge for me. Somewhere in the collision between these the music starts to happen and take its shape.

I deliberately didn't want to give it a modernist imprint but to remain in sympathy and in keeping with Vivaldi's own musical language.ĭid you have a musical 'EUREKA!' moment where everything fell into place, or did the piece gradually shift and change over time?Ĭomposing is a whole series of little Eurekas but also what we might call Anti-Eurekas. When I was a young child I fell in love with Vivaldi's original, but over the years, hearing it principally in shopping centres, advertising jingles, on telephone hold systems and similar places, I stopped being able to hear it as music it had become an irritant - much to my dismay! So I set out to try to find a new way to engage with this wonderful material, by writing through it anew - similarly to how scribes once illuminated manuscripts - and thus rediscovering it for myself. How did the idea for the piece come about? The work is a new trip through the landscape of Vivaldi's The Four Seasons.

In a sentence or less, how would you describe the music to someone who's never heard it before? How do you make Vivaldi's popular masterpiece sound fresh? Composer Max Richter explains the motivation behind his brilliant re-working, 'Recomposed', which enables listeners to hear The Four Seasons with new ears.

Max richter vivaldi four seasons