How Vivaldi would have loved all those royalties! After a long and illustrious career in which he composed some 800 works - including 500 concertos for virtually every instrument extant in his time, as well as operas and church music - he died a pauper in 1741 in Vienna, far from his native Venice. For it was the LP that spread the Seasons' fame throughout the world, making it probably the most recorded classical work of them all. So popular is Vivaldi's The Four Seasons today that it seems incomprehensible that these four delightful concertos should have languished in the musical attic for more than 200 years before re-appearing around 1950, just in time for the invention of the long-playing record. Reporting credit: Sarah Kennedy/ChavoBart Digital Media.Born in Venice, Italy, Madied in Vienna, Austria, July 28, 1741 In the version played by Australia’s Sydney Symphony Orchestra, missing notes reflect declining bird populations, and the summer storm is more intense and prolonged.įor listeners, the result is familiar, but unsettling – and a warning about how the world could change if nothing is done to reduce global warming.

It allows them to create localized versions for any place where the piece is performed. The design agency partnered with composers and scientists to develop an algorithm that translates projected environmental changes into musical changes. “We really wanted to walk that line between being too ridiculously catastrophic and kind of meaningfully changing this to make it sound what we think it might feel like to live in that time,” says Tim Devine of AKQA.

Three hundred years ago, Vivaldi wrote “The Four Seasons.” It portrays the natural world, from birdsong to summer storms.īut the warming climate could radically alter the natural world by 2050, so a new version of “The Four Seasons” has been altered, too.

Vivaldi seasons