It’s been recorded by shred guitarists and unaccompanied choirs, solo accordionists and synth players, Turkish twin sisters on duelling pianos, and koto quartet. It’s been excerpted in film scores the world over, referenced by dozens of living composers, and played as background noise in every wine bar under the sun.

You’d think there’d be nothing new to add to Antonio Vivaldi’s linked quartet of violin concertos, The Four Seasons, but that’s not the case if you’re Monica Huggett—and even she took her time coming up with a unique approach to this most enduring of baroque masterworks.

“I don’t think I played it until my late 20s,” says the artistic director of Oregon’s acclaimed Portland Baroque Orchestra, taking a break from gardening on a fine spring morning. “I didn’t study it as a student, and as a baroque violinist I was slightly dreading having to do it, ’cause I thought I hadn’t anything new to say. But in fact I love playing it. It’s wonderful. I’ve played an awful lot of Vivaldi concertos—I mean, I’ve recorded about 50—but these are very special.”

At the heart of the version of The Four Seasons that Huggett and the PBO will play here this weekend is her imaginative approach to the score: each movement, she says, is linked to a specific visual image in her mind. Huggett treats the final section of “Winter”, for instance, as the sonic equivalent of a Pieter Brueghel painting.

“It starts off with one child going off onto the ice, and everybody is worried whether the ice will crack, and he’s going very gingerly,” she explains. “And then he realizes that the ice is strong enough, and he calls all his friends, and they all go out on the ice and everybody’s skating around and falling down.…It’s like one of those pictures, those old Dutch pictures where you see people skating on the canals.”

Huggett clearly has a deep intuitive rapport with Vivaldi’s music, but she backs that up with considerable musicological muscle. One of the reasons for The Four Seasons’ enduring importance, she says, it that it marks the beginning of the violin’s rise to preeminence in western music.

“The violin was looked down upon as not an instrument that a gentleman would play,” she notes. “It was played by professionals who tended to be itinerant musicians, who’d wander around Europe. Probably quite a lot of them were Gypsies. And they would play for events like funerals and weddings—huge parties which went on for days and days—but then in between they would make money by playing to people at markets, or playing in the plaza of a castle or something. And they wouldn’t be playing to noble people; they’d be playing to people who were not particularly educated, and one of the ways that they amused these people was by having tricks.”

These included imitating birds, animals, natural sounds, and other musical instruments, and Vivaldi includes many such impersonations in The Four Seasons. (“Summer”, Huggett suggests, includes “a lot of insects”.)

But the Italian composer found a way to incorporate them into a more refined format, not that Huggett plans on handling the score with kid gloves. In addition to her usual high-energy playing, the PBO’s rendition allows for a few comical interludes—but we won’t give them away here. Suffice it to say that this version of The Four Seasons will be upbeat, insightful, and, as Huggett stresses, fun.

Early Music Vancouver presents the Portland Baroque Orchestra at the Chan Centre for the Performing Arts on Friday (May 1).