The Four Seasons, the delightful CD recently issued by Oxford’s premier period instrument ensemble the Band of Instruments, is not, as you might assume, by Vivaldi. This is by his contemporary Giovanni Antonio Guido, an Italian working in Paris, whose delicious seasonal Suites — Like Vivaldi’s, illustrating a set of poems — are almost as French as Vivaldi’s are Italian. Well, almost. Guido was an international violin virtuoso; born in Genoa but trained in Naples during the 1680s and ‘90s, at a time when the city’s Conservatories were the greatest musical schools in Europe. By 1703, he had moved to Paris, where he is mentioned as “an excellent violinist in the service of the Duke of Orleans” — significantly enough, at a ‘Concert for the Queen of England’ (ie, the ‘Queen over the Water’). How touchingly her title suggests the rather shaky ‘legitimacy’ of James II’s exiled court at St Germain (though apparently the Queen — Mary of Modena — was very musical and a lot more popular in France than her husband). Guido’s distinguished patron — Phillip Duke of Orleans — was to become Regent of France 12 years later, on the death of his uncle Louis XIV in 1715, and it seems to have been about then that Guido created these Seasons. But they are not, like Vivaldi’s, written for international publication (the effect of Vivaldi’s Concertos on German musicians, particularly Bach, is well known). Instead, they were written for performance at a brand new Parisian private house, that of the banker Pierre Crozat, for a party to unveil a decorative scheme by the greatest artist of the age, Antoine Watteau. This whole event vividly suggests a decisive moment in French — indeed European — culture. The death of Louis XIV brought to an end a gloomy period in which the Sun King, debilitated by military defeat in the War of the Spanish Succession and by his reliance on his last, ultra-Catholic mistress Mme de Maintenon, seemed increasingly out of touch in Versailles. The new Regent promptly moved the seat of government (and the five-year-old infant King) back to Paris, to the Orleans family seat at the old Palais-Royal, whence Louis XIII and Richelieu had ruled France 100 years before. He also, as a passionate art-collector and musician, created the enlightened (to some ‘frivolous’) atmosphere from which flowered the incomparable art of the French 18th century.

How vividly the Palais-Royal still suggests that epoch, with its lovely courtyard (so triste et Verlainien as Proust called it) still used as a playground by the most impossibly well-dressed French middle-class children. The nouveau-riche banker Pierre Crozat built his house just a little way from it along the Rue Richelieu (alas, it was pulled down in the 1790s). Crozat, known as ‘le pauvre’ to distinguish him from his even-more-outrageously rich brother, was a self-made millionaire art-dealer whose collection rivalled the Regent’s — Crozat spent much of his time in Italy buying for them both. In fact, he had just returned from one of these trips when he commissioned Watteau to paint four over-door panels representing the Seasons for the dining room of his new house. Suitable verses on the subject were then run up by one of Crozat’s in-house poets and Guido commissioned to write these pieces, rather more closely illustrative of the texts than Vivaldi’s similar Concerti. ‘L’air s’enflame’ begins the ‘Summer’ poem, and we can feel the burning summer heat both in Watteau’s showing the summer harvest goddess Ceres — the only one of his four paintings that survives — and in Guido’s highly expressive musical treatment. Perhaps the most notably effective music, however, accompanies ‘Autumn’ where Guido cannot resist portraying the effect of sudden hunting-horn calls, interrupting a somewhat woozy sleep, followed by a complete description of the hunt, with, as its climax, a typically 18th-century ‘pathétique’ rendition of the death of the stag. Add in ‘weather-effects’ such as ‘winter’s frost forming’ and a sudden summer storm which definitely rival Vivaldi, and it is surprising that all this is accomplished by the Band of Instruments with just three violins, cello, bass and harpsichord. But their leader is Caroline Balding, a brilliant baroque soloist who, with lovely tone and refined elegant ornamention, merges her playing in the whole.

Just as Watteau, inspired by Crozat’s Italian paintings, was going on (in some of the best-loved paintings in the Louvre) to pring Pierrot, Colmbine and the other commedia dell’arte figures into a French landscape, so Guido was gently turning Italian violin concertos into French suites — at this delightful moment when French and Italian arts meet.