There's a strain of classical music fan who gets frustrated with these kinds of recompositions or remixes. I thought, 'Well, why don't I just treat this like a loop, like something you might hear in dance music, and just loop it and intensify it, and cut and paste - jump-cut around in that texture, but keep that groove going.' 'I took the opening motif, which I always thought was a dazzling moment in the Vivaldi, but in the original it's only four bars.

from Recomposed by Max Richter: Vivaldi's Four Seasons.

Richter's 'recompositions' are both subtle and forward, and, in some cases, start a groove. The opening bars have been recorded, re-recorded and Muzak-ed to death. For me, the record and the project are trying to reclaim the piece, to fall in love with it again.' We hear it everywhere - when you're on hold, you hear it in the shopping center, in advertising it's everywhere. Then, later on, as I became more musically aware - literate, studied music and listened to a lot of music - I found it more difficult to love it.

'It's beautiful, charming music with a great melody and wonderful colors. 'As a child, I fell in love with it,' he tells NPR's Audie Cornish. But as he grew older, that passion faded. Richter says that as a child, he loved The Four Seasons.

He has a new album simply titled Recomposed by Max Richter: Vivaldi, The Four Seasons.

Composer Max Richter's new album takes on Vivaldi's Fo ur Seasons.Ĭomposer Max Richter has done a brave thing for any artist in any medium: He's messed with a classic, specifically, Vivaldi's four violin concertos known as The Four Seasons.

Richter vivaldi