Antonio Vivaldi’s evergreen cycle of violin concertos titled The Four Seasons is an excellent candidate for alteration and reconceptualization precisely because it’s so familiar: no matter what you do to it, the bits and pieces that remain audible will be immediately recognizable to most listeners, making your recontextualization of those bits and pieces all the more effective. Composer Max Richter has taken advantage of that reality with this radical reinterpretation of The Four Seasons, which involved taking only a small percentage of the original work and using it as the basis of a new piece that involves lots of phasing and repetition – but is still designed to evoke clearly the moods and motifs of the original.

It’s a bit hard to say whether or not this was a good idea but it was a useful idea. Richter revised The Four Seasons, the wedding season’s ace in the hole, by taking out more than three-quarters of the music. Looping what was left and rearranging it, he essentially sent Vivaldi through Aphex Twin and Philip Glass and plonked him in the middle of the 21st century. That said, the results mostly work. What is most impressive is that he was able to keep the overall gestalt of this work—upbeat and clear—and retain it while reducing the music to a bright coil of motifs. Looping is possibly the most important development in the last fifty years, and making classical musicians play through its tendencies is an important step.