Between the hours spent practising their instruments, the late-night concerts and the days lost in transport, the life of a professional musician often resembles that of a top-level sportsman. For this year’s Cultural Olympiad, the Concert de la Loge is back in Olympic form – and with it the Olympic epithet – and proposes to test your stamina with a concerto marathon, a sporting genre if ever there was one, but always a friendly battle. The programme includes Vivaldi, of course, the heavyweight of the discipline, with his five hundred concertos!

Vivaldi’s Four Seasons are much more than four violin concertos. The pinnacle of programme music, the work is packed with descriptive elements that make it as lively as ever, even after repeated listening. Extending the universal scope of the work even further by giving it both a choreographic and dramaturgical dimension would therefore seem to be the obvious choice, integrating musicians and dancers in a single celebration of all the arts!