How much can you remove? How far can you depart before you’re suddenly in another country? The silvery thread between both composers stretches but never snaps. This is both a radical renewal and a considered one. One of the best things about Richter’s recomposition is that you feel he is in conversation with not only Vivaldi’s work but also Vivaldi’s intent. How do you thwart that impulse while respecting the instinct? When I found this album, there came a musical answer to that question. Just try acting Hamlet without someone joining in with “To be or not to be”. I’ve spent much of my career as a theatre director reinterpreting classics – plays whose genius has made their text so familiar that the audience’s singalong drowns out the sound of the original. It is propulsive: like a great dance remix, your body rises towards the promise of a familiar riff. As a filmmaker, it’s impossible not to dream moving images while you listen. I know a couple of writers who work to it. Like much of Richter’s music, it doesn’t impose thoughts – it provides a landscape for them. It’s a familiar house, but within moments of staring at it, you find yourself standing on its roof for the first time. Richter’s grasp of musical structure is so smart, you straightaway recognise Vivaldi’s music. It’s pretty and it’s ethereal at first, a gentle haunting of the future by the past, building to a lively conversation between the old and the new. It begins with delicate slithers of strings, whispering traces of the original. Ninety per cent of the music is Richter, but Vivaldi’s original weaves through the composition like a double helix – the DNA is unmistakable. In 2012, Max Richter released Recomposed: Vivaldi – The Four Seasons, and it shook everything up. Familiarity did not breed contempt I just stopped noticing it, this magnolia paint of soundtracks. It hovered in hotel lobbies, office elevators, and shopping complexes, and was the hold music of choice for delays: here’s The Four Seasons as you taxi to the runway. The Four Seasons became the muzak for those rooms you passed through. Yes, I was one of those awful child violinists who sawed their way through it. In 1989, the violinist Nigel Kennedy’s expressive performance of Vivaldi’s original became one of the most popular classical albums of all time. If not the piece itself, our relationship to The Four Seasons needed to be fixed.

Four seasons recomposed