Thus you could say that the Four Seasons are an 18 th century multi-media project. The works themselves were inspired by a series of four paintings depicting the seasons by Marco Ricci. They are often considered the first example of “program music,” as Vivaldi published them with companion poems sharing the natural aspects of the seasons he meant to evoke with his music.

You can pull them apart easily, sort of like a Lego kit.” Contemporary composer Max Richter described its movements as “quite concise, but on a micro level it is modular music, made of these little atoms. The works were written sometime between1720 - 1723 and first published in 1725. The Four Seasons are really the first four concertos of a collection of twelve concertos written by Vivaldi called Il cimento dell'armonia e dell'inventione (The Contest Between Harmony and Invention). However, there’s one point everyone can agree on: what’s in the top spot. Inevitably, some people will be upset by a work that did or did not make the list. So picking his top five greatest hits for violin was always going to be a difficult task. He wrote over 500 concertos, nearly half of them with solo pieces for violinists.

Vivaldi, one of the Baroque era’s greatest composers, loved the violin.

The best of vivaldi