You end up with a rickety and slightly one-legged Vivaldi. He pulls the rhythm around, starts dropping quavers here and there. 'What really threw me was the first movement of Autumn. 'I had to deal with all the curveballs Max throws at you, the way he does things you don't expect.' The experience clearly messed with Hope's mind.

'It was incredibly thought-provoking,' he says. And imagine how it felt for Recomposed's solo violinist Daniel Hope: having played the original for decades, he – and more importantly his fingers – faced a surreal task when he first picked his way through Richter's score. Part of the fun of the album is that your ears play tricks with your memory of the original: these familiar melodies do unexpected things, resulting in an experience that's both disturbing yet full of strange delights. It's pattern music, in a way, so there's a connection with the whole post-minimalist aesthetic I'm part of.' I was pleased to discover that Vivaldi's music is very modular. 'There are times I depart completely from the original, yes, but there are moments when it pokes through. You can hear this chemical reaction particularly well at the opening of Richter's reworked Summer concerto, which has become a weird collision of Arvo Pärt-likemelancholy in the solo violin and a minimalist workout for the rest of the strings. This involved 'throwing molecules of the original Vivaldi into a test tube with a bunch of other things, and waiting for an explosion'.

Richter vivaldi