Invierno Porteño (Cuatro Estaciones Porteñas)

The four pieces were never conceived as a cycle. Piazzolla wrote Verano porteño in 1965 as incidental music for a play, then added Otoño, Invierno and Primavera in 1969 and 1970, scoring them for his quintet of bandoneón, violin, piano, electric guitar and double bass, and playing them together only occasionally. The set acquired its present shape through Leonid Desyatnikov's arrangement for violin and string orchestra, made in the late 1990s, which reorders the movements against Vivaldi's and plants quotations from the older Four Seasons — the seasons of the southern hemisphere deliberately crossed with those of the north.