BACKGROUND TO…

Piazzolla’s Four Seasons

Las Cuatro Estaciones Porteñas (The Four Seasons of Buenos Aires) were written by Astor Piazzolla (left) between 1965 and ’70. Unlike Vivaldi’s Four Seasons, they weren’t conceived as a four-part work, though by the time he had completed the set he often performed them together. Originally composed for violin, piano, electric guitar, double bass and bandoneon, they sounded quite different to the work often recorded today. Russian composer Leonid Desyatnikov arranged the parts into a more traditional violin concerto form in the late 1990s.