Few works in Western classical music have achieved the global reach of Antonio Vivaldi‘s The Four Seasons.
Antonio Vivaldi (engraving by François Morellon de La Cave, from Michel-Charles Le Cène’s edition of Vivaldi’s Op. 8, 1725)
Written around 1720 and endlessly reinvented ever since, these four concertos have become a gateway to classical music for countless listeners – especially on YouTube, where performances rack up tens of millions of views.
© Kathy Collins / Getty Images
Today, we’re looking at the most popular complete recordings of Vivaldi’s Four Seasons on YouTube, presented in reverse order, from least to most popular.
An important note: every video here presents the full cycle, from Spring through Winter, not individual concerto performances. (That would be another list entirely.)
Alongside traditional violin performances, some of YouTube’s most-watched Four Seasons recordings feature unexpected solo instruments, outdoor settings, crossover artists, and highly personal interpretive choices.
Take, for starters…
Jonathan Scott: Organ, Not Violin
176k views
We’re starting out with a performance of the Four Seasons that isn’t even for violin: it’s for organ!
As Jonathan Scott explains in his introduction to the performance, he arranged this organ transcription himself.
He pays close attention to the season-related poetry that inspired Vivaldi and appears in the score.
It is a joy to hear this familiar music played in a way that makes it sound so different. It’s astonishing to hear how an organ can imitate the colours of an entire orchestra.
This was recorded in the Bergamo Cathedral in Bergamo, Italy. Performing the work in a sacred Catholic space is fitting, given that Vivaldi was a Catholic priest.
Michelle Ross: A Visuals-First Version
888k views
This entry features a performance of the Four Seasons by violinist and composer Michelle Ross.
Ross is a fascinating and well-rounded figure. She studied at Juilliard, and her teachers included giants like Itzhak Perlman, Ronald Copes, and Dorothy DeLay.
But unlike so many other professional musicians, she also earned a degree in English Literature from Columbia University.
This performance comes from her Four Seasons album and is a fan-made music video consisting of stunning clips of the natural world that inspired Vivaldi.
Luka Šulić: Cello, Not Violin
931k views
Cellist Luka Šulić initially gained fame as half of the viral duo 2CELLOS, which released six albums and made viral music videos of classical crossover repertoire.
They experienced major success, but in 2019 took a step back to work on individual projects.
One of those projects was Šulić recording his transcription of the Four Seasons for solo cello. He spent a full two years on this transcription, working on it while touring.
He recorded it for an album in Rome with the Archi dell’Accademia di Santa Cecilia, but his particular live performance was recorded in Trieste, Italy.
Julia Fischer: In the Garden
4.3 million views
Julia Fischer was born in Munich in 1983. She was a prodigy, winning the Junior Category of the 1995 Menuhin Competition.
In the summer of 2011, she filmed this performance of the Four Seasons with the Academy of St. Martin in the Fields.
She and the orchestra performed in the National Botanic Garden of Wales: a fascinating choice that brings the music out of the confines of the concert hall. Here she is surrounded by gorgeous plant life, and you can hear birdsong in the background.
On top of her beautiful playing, it’s also a treat to see her wear different dresses inspired by the seasons each concerto portrays.
Gabor Szabo: In the Concert Hall
12 million views
Remarkably, this is the first performance on this list that features a violin soloist actually playing in a concert hall.
That soloist is Gabor Szabo. He was born in Budapest and studied at the Franz Liszt Academy of Music before pursuing his second degree at Southern Methodist University in the United States.
Today, he is the Artistic Director and concertmaster of the Madrid Soloists Chamber Orchestra.
This performance spotlights Szabo’s playing, as well as the Orquesta Reino de Aragón.
Alexandra Conunova: Sheer Virtuosity
18 million views
Violinist Alexandra Conunova was born in Moldova in 1988.
Over the course of her career, she has won the prestigious Joseph Joachim Violin Competition and been a prizewinner at both the Tchaikovsky Competition and the Singapore International Violin Competition.
In 2020, she tackled recording the Four Seasons. A couple of years later, she played and conducted performances of the Four Seasons and Astor Piazzolla‘s tango-infused set of concertos of the same name at the Tivoli Festival, the biggest classical music festival in Scandinavia.
The YouTube heat map indicates that one of the most popular stops for people to relisten is the breathless, vibrato-less ending of “Summer.” That is immediately followed by the flurry of its finale, marked presto. (This portion starts around 17:30.)
Her presto movement from “Summer” is one of the fastest high-profile performances circulating online, and it makes for a thrilling ride.
Janine Jansen: The Most-Viewed Four Seasons on YouTube
19 million views
Here it is, the most popular version of Vivaldi’s complete Four Seasons on YouTube: a 2014 performance by Janine Jansen with the Amsterdam Sinfonietta.
Jansen was born in 1978 in the Netherlands to a musical family. She began playing the violin at six, studying with legendary Soviet violinists Philippe Hirschhorn and Boris Belkin. Ever since, she has been enjoying a prestigious international career.
This performance of the Four Seasons is one of full-throated commitment and originality. Jansen isn’t afraid to make strange or scratchy sounds as long as it serves the purpose of the music.
For example, listen to the passage in the video above starting around 12:35. It may not be traditionally beautiful playing, but the sounds she’s making are atmospheric and just plain fascinating.
It’s also clear from her body language that she feels very attuned to what her colleagues are doing. The result sounds like chamber music in the best of ways.
Conclusion
It’s true that Vivaldi’s Four Seasons has a reputation of being overplayed, and that these works are omnipresent.
However, what critics fail to grasp when they mention this is that there are endless ways of making this music feel new.
These specific performances hint at the approaches that seem to appeal to wider audiences: integration of multimedia, surprising new performance settings, rearrangements and remixes, soloists with big personalities, etc.
So from organ transcriptions recorded in Italian cathedrals to blisteringly fast or historically informed violin performances, YouTube’s most popular recordings of Vivaldi’s Four Seasons demonstrate just how flexible – and resilient – this music remains more than three centuries after it was written.
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