Vivaldi: The Four Seasons

Perhaps the single most popular piece of baroque music ever written, Vivaldi’s The Four Seasons is actually a collection of four violin concertos, each written to reflect the feeling of a different season of the year: the one titled “Spring” includes transcriptions of bird songs, while “Summer” conveys a feeling of heat and torpor, etc. The Four Seasons is considered one of the first, if not the first, examples of “program music” — music written to convey extramusical ideas, images, and concepts. This suite of concertos has been recorded hundreds of times; this album by the period-instrument ensemble Tafelmusik is particularly fine.