The Four Seasons of Buenos Aires: Verano porteño

Verano porteño is the earliest of the four Buenos Aires seasons: Piazzolla wrote it in 1965 as incidental music for Melenita de oro, a play by Alberto Rodríguez Muñoz, with no intention of adding to it. The other three followed between 1969 and 1970. Its opening figure, played on the strings behind the bridge, became one of the signatures of Piazzolla's sound. The piece is played both in the original quintet scoring and in Leonid Desyatnikov's version for violin and string orchestra, where Vivaldi's Winter is quoted against the Argentine summer.