Any classical music lover will be familiar with Antonio Vivaldi's most famous work, The Four Seasons (Italian: Le Quattro stagione), a set of four violin concertos depicting the four seasons.
In the Bible, the chapter often quoted that relates to the seasons is the book of Ecclesiastes, in chapter three, which starts with: "For everything there is a season, and a time for every matter under heaven."
Here are four more wonderful music to identify each season as interpreted by three 19th century composers, and Mozart, from the 18th century.
Cecile Chaminade: Automne (Autumn or Fall)
Chaminade was a French composer and pianist born in 1857. She lived for a time in both the 19th and 20th centuries, and became a successful concert pianist. She composed over 200 works by the time she died.
It was as a miniaturist that she was at her best. Automne, a solo piano "salon-piece" written towards the end of the 1880s, became one of her most famous compositions. In fact, it became so popular that she had to make many transcriptions of it, for piano trio, violin and piano, among others.
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart: Winter Sleighride (K.605 No. 3)
Composing about the seasons did not escape the attention of the wunderkind and genius Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, a classical composer of the mid-18th century classical period. "Sleighride" comes from one of his sets of 'German Dances.' It earns its name from the posthorns and jingling sleighbells. Other composers might have their own Sleighride version.
Darius Milhaud: Spring Concertino (Concertino de Printemps)
French composer Darius Milhaud was born in 1892. He wrote this music for the violinist Yvonne Astruc, whose style of playing, both technical and interpretative, seemed to him ideal for a musical study inspired by spring. After almost 20 years of composing this work, Milhaud added the three other seasons, forming the suite Les Quatre Saisons, each a concertino or mini-concert for a different soloist: viola, two pianos and trombone. It was the violin work that remained closest to his heart.
Frederick Delius: Summer Night on the River
English composer Frederick Delius was born in Yorkshire in 1862, son of a German wool merchant. This music is an orchestral work, the second of his Two Pieces for a small orchestra (the other is On Hearing the First Cuckoo in Spring.) He worshipped nature, his energy much derived from landscapes, climates and wildlife that he knew well and loved: the green fields and woods of England and France, the snowy mountains of Norway, and the subtropical Florida in the United States.
