It is rare indeed that a musical composition might highlight the differences between the North and South Hemispheres of Planet Earth. But today we’ll experience one.

It is true that January, the coldest month in Venice, has an average temperature of 3.5 °C (38 °F),and that of the warmest months, July and August) is of 23 °C (73 °F). It is also true that January is the hottest month in Buenos Aires with an average temperature of 25°C (77°F) and the coldest is June at 12°C (54°F). It would follow then that music written about the seasons in the Northern Hemisphere would have an atmosphere quite different from a similar work written in the Southern Hemisphere.

Ástor Piazzolla was born in Argentina, raised in New York and educated in Paris by the legendary composition teacher Nadia Boulanger. It seemed he was destined for a satisfactory but unremarkable career penning orchestral ditties with a South American accent. But one day Boulanger heard Piazzolla nonchalantly playing a Tango at her piano before a lesson. She urged her pupil to follow this direction with the proclamation that ‘here is the true Piazzolla.’ But she also insisted that he continue his rigorous study of Baroque and High Classical music.

When the young composer returned to Buenos Aires, he began to do for the Tango what Johann Strauss had for the waltz over a century before. He thrust classical complexities, harmonies and textures into the form, cultivating it and adapting it without compromising its raw ingredients.

Piazzolla’s most famous concert work is a monumental salute to Vivaldi entitled The Four Seasons of Buenos Aires (‘Las Cuatro Estaciones Porteñas’). In a sense, it represents the apex of the Argentine’s ‘Tango Nuevo’ style, music that was born from the Tango but was designed to be listened to, rather than danced to.

This particular piece, though, was crafted carefully and slowly. The first season, Verano Porteño (Summer), arrived in 1965, scored for string quartet and designed to accompany a play by the composer’s colleague Rodriguez Munoz. In 1969 Piazzolla wrote Autumn for the same forces and in the following year, Spring and Winter.

The present version for solo violin and string orchestra postdates Piazzolla’s death by several years. The Russian violinist, Gidon Kremer wanted a piece to complement Vivaldi’s Four Seasons and commissioned composer Leonid Desyatnikov to make this arrangement, which was completed in 1998.

Desyatnikov did not confine himself to mere transcription. To a degree he recomposed the pieces to fit Kremer’s concept, adding quotations from the Vivaldi Seasons as well as cadenzas for the solo violinist and principal cellist. He did preserve certain special effects Piazzolla devised to compensate for the lack of percussion in his quintet—slapping the back of the bass and scrubbing behind the violin bridge to produce an imitation of the stick-scratched gourd called a guiro, as well as violin slides both slow and whipped. Buenos Aires is located about two-thirds down the East coast of South America on the Rio de la Plata; its climate is classified as subtropical. But a warning for the meteorologically unprepared: in recognition of the reversal of seasons south of the Equator, in Desyatnikov’s arrangement Vivaldi’s Winter is quoted in Piazzola’s Summer, and Vivaldi’s Summer in Piazzola’s Winter. Spring and Autumn references are similarly switched.