Antonio Vivaldi was a priest and composer who worked in Venice at in the first decades of the 18th century, putting him into the Baroque period:
The Four Seasons (Le quattro stagioni) is a set of four concertos for violin, with one for each season, written around 1716. A concerto is a piece for a solo instrument (in this case the violin) with orchestral backing. Typically for the Baroque period, the orchestra in this piece consists only of stringed instruments together with a harpsichord:
There are lot of things in the music that bring to mind an icy winter’s day.
In 2012, Max Richter ‘recomposed’ The Four Seasons. He discarded around 75% of Vivaldi’s music, and applied phasing and looping to what he kept, to give it a post-modern, minimalist feel. Here is his version of Winter – compare it with Vivaldi’s original.