Their brilliant, one-take recording from 1970 captured the zeitgeist and also flew off the shelves. According to music writer Norman Lebrecht, it’s the third best-selling classical record of all time, but the piece itself “was still an esoteric fad, not yet a tourist staple” until it fell into the hands of Britain’s Neville Marriner and his group, Academy of St. I Musici’s Four Seasons was such a success that they remade it four years later in stereo and sold many millions of copies over the next few years. And that’s just one curiosity of many in Vivaldi’s astonishing story. So, Vivaldi became a star for the second time in the same year that Bill Haley & His Comets had a hit with ‘Rock Around The Clock’, which broke rock & roll in the mainstream. And although it had been recorded a couple of times before 1955, it took an Italian group called I Musici with their co-founder Felix Ayo on lead violin to turn it into a big-selling album. Incredibly, it only crept back into public consciousness again after the Second World War, with The Four Seasons leading the charge. But, then as now, careers can collapse quickly and when he died in 1741, broke, so did his music. In his time, Vivaldi was famous and The Four Seasons, written in the 1720s, was a bona fide cross-Europe smash. Or rather, they had, but not for 200 years.
The Four Seasons is now so ubiquitous it’s almost impossible to imagine how strange it would have sounded when it was first heard, and almost no one had heard The Four Seasons before 1955. This might sound ridiculous, but if you’d walked into a record shop in 1955 on the hunt for new music that was radical and unusual, you might well have been handed a copy of an unknown piece of dazzling, nervy baroque music, The Four Seasons, by a fringe Italian composer called Antonio Vivaldi.
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