Violin Concerto no. 2 The American Four Seasons

Glass wrote The American Four Seasons for Robert McDuffie, and for a while meant it as a companion piece — music to stand beside Vivaldi's Four Seasons on the same programme. That plan quietly fell away. What survives of it is a decision not to decide: Glass never marked which movement belongs to which season, and left the matter to the soloist. McDuffie has said his own reading differs from the composer's, and Glass appears to have found this agreeable rather than troubling.

The concerto keeps Vivaldi's number and almost nothing else. There are four movements, each preceded by a solo prelude for the violin alone, so that the piece keeps stopping to let one instrument speak before the orchestra returns. The writing is unmistakably Glass — cycling figures, harmonic shifts that arrive a bar later than expected — but the violin is given a long, singing line of a kind he had not much used before.

Leaving the seasons unlabelled is a small joke with a serious edge. A listener who wants winter will hear winter. The music does not argue.