Naturally, Vivaldi kicks things off with Autumn from The Four Seasons – encapsulating the highs and lows of drinking and feasting, intoxicated dreams, and the early morning hunt.

It invites Georg Philipp Telemann to present his music for feasting: Tafelmusik, and Johann Sebastian Bach to break out a Michaelmas cantata: Herr Gott, dich loben alle wir (Lord God, we all praise you).

Plunging into the mellow season’s melancholy, Wilhelmine of Bayreuth’s Harpsichord Concerto gleams in the rich tones of G minor, a musical monument to a beloved royal sister who tragically died in the autumn of her own life. ‘Remember me’, intones Purcell through more melancholic G minor, in ‘Dido’s Lament’, and in the same key, Vivaldi takes us into the ever-lengthening darkness with his concerto La Notte (The Night).

The hunt was a quintessential autumnal sound of Vivaldi’s Mantua and another of his concertos La Caccia (The Hunt) shimmers in all the golden hues of the season’s turning leaves. ‘See my many coloured fields,’ Henry Purcell announces in The Fairy Queen and in Reinhard Keiser’s opera Pomona, the eponymous goddess of fruit-trees represents autumn and wins the seasonal superiority contest.

Autumnal plants inspired James Oswald’s view of the year too, and we encounter the many varied blustery visions of Christopher Simpson, Giovanni Guido, Francesco Marcello and Francesco Durante, before reaching a grand finale in the Autumnal section of Joseph Haydn’s celebratory oratorio: The Seasons.