Isla Ratcliffe

Description

Isla Ratcliff’s second album, The Scottish Four Seasons, is a Scottish trad reinterpretation of Vivaldi’s famous work. Released in 2025 to mark the 300-year anniversary of the work’s original publication, Isla’s album highlights the dance-like nature of Vivaldi’s music and reflects on how Scotland’s seasons and climate have changed in the past 300 years. Featuring Isla on fiddle, accompanied by string ensemble and piano, the album crosses the genre boundaries of classical and folk music and highlights important environmental concerns.

Isla has taken Vivaldi’s famous melodies and made them sound Scottish, resulting in an album of lots of different moods in which each track tells a story – from the plants waking up and the lambs playing in spring, to the frenzy of midges and the increasing heatwaves that we are experiencing in summer, to the joyful playing with fallen leaves and the stags’ rut in autumn, and lastly to Hogmanay cèilidhs and the diminishing snowfall that we are experiencing in winter. And of course it wouldn’t be The Scottish Four Seasons without a bonus track at the end, “Four Seasons in One Day”, a playful nod to how many people in Scotland affectionately refer to the vagaries of the Scottish climate. Isla has also written poems to accompany each track, many of which are influenced by Scottish writers including Lady Nairne, Lady John Scott, Robert Burns, Nan Shepherd and Iain Crichton Smith.