‘Spring came along this last year, and it was the worst spring I’ve ever had in my life. And I’m not talking about anything else except the weather,’ says Sir Michael Morpurgo. He’s the voice of my literary childhood, and interviewing him is daunting enough; now I can’t even channel our shared Britishness by calling on the weather as a conversation card. So I try my luck with music. ‘Oh, why do you want me to recount my story of failure?’ he groans in mock exasperation. ‘My musical career ended with Grade 1 on the violin.’ Morpurgo recalls an end-of-term concert at his school, to an audience of about 200 people. ‘All I had in my mind was that I wanted to get to the end of the piece as fast as possible. So I started, and raced away. My teacher, a terrifying woman, was accompanying me. The trouble was that, a minute in, she stopped playing, saying in this awful voice, “Michael, I think that was a tiny bit fast, wasn’t it? Should we start again?” I mean, I could have killed her.’

Thankfully, Morpurgo has recovered from these scars. ‘What I love is being near music, being close to it. When I watch musicians play and see how connected they are to the instrument, it’s as if they become one.’ Morpurgo’s latest collaboration is with the violinist Daniel Pioro. Pioro had been invited to record Vivaldi’s The Four Seasons, and successful engagements with Manchester Camerata solidified it as his ensemble of choice (performing the ‘Manchester’ version and recording in Manchester’s Stoller Hall). Not content with that being poetry enough, he also wanted to include a reworking of the original sonnets to accompany the music. He sought a voice that combined fantasy and realism, and as Children’s Laureate from 2003 to 2005, co-founder of the charity Farms for City Children and generous and eloquent steward of the environment, Morpurgo was a no-brainer.

‘For me, words are music,’ Morpurgo muses. ‘They belong together – but not necessarily through singing. There is something wonderful about spoken word and music side by side, and I don’t care for the distinction between the two. We’re all telling stories. Vivaldi also felt it worthwhile to write words. His music says it all but he also wanted to talk about it. They go in parallel, and when they almost touch, as they do here, it’s very powerful.’

Pioro recommends that listeners of the album play with this ‘touching’, find malleability in the ostensibly fixed. ‘I would love somebody who wants to hear just the music to press play on track 5. I will give you the story, but I’m not going to ram it down your throat.’ For those keen to have Morpurgo’s poetry intermingled between the individual seasons, Pioro suggests making a playlist. ‘You can just drag and drop. And I don’t mean that in a jokey way: we have the means to do that as individuals. The reason I have put Michael’s poetry as the first four tracks is so that it can exist in its own right. There are elements of the music behind it, but people can experience it for the words, for the tale. I was very conscious that there’d be people who might just want to listen to the story.’

Indeed, Pioro has found this to be all too true. ‘My two-year old son is only interested in listening to “the man”! He doesn’t want to hear Papa play the violin. He gets furious when the poetry ends. We go, tracks 1, 2, 3, 4; 1, 2, 3, 4; 1, 2, 3, 4 – that’s all.’ Morpurgo reads this as a fortuitous sign for the project’s future: they plan to perform the poetry and music in live concerts aimed at children. He says, ‘They will have heard the music in a lift somewhere, or a dentist’s waiting room. But to hear it like this, with the intensity and fantasy that Daniel has brought to it – it will be totally memorable. They will hear it and it will stay in the mind. I think Vivaldi should be extraordinarily grateful. Because the poor man has simply been repeated and repeated. He must be sick to death of it.’

For those familiar with Pioro’s output, The Four Seasons reads as incongruous. Pioro is better known for his advocacy of new music. Composers Tom Coult, Joseph Davies and Jonny Greenwood have penned concertos for him, and music by Cassandra Miller and Nico Muhly are more likely to feature on his programmes than Mozart and Mendelssohn.

‘My life revolves around championing underplayed music. Suddenly, I’m recording the most ubiquitous piece of music that features the violin. I had doubts from day one of recording. “What am I doing? Why am I recording The Four Seasons?” All my ideas suddenly felt so vulnerable. In the opening of Spring, I just felt like such a charlatan.’ But something drove him on.

‘At the core of my logic was that I didn’t feel that I had heard the piece that Vivaldi wrote. It’s a tragic thing to say, and I do have love and respect for people who play it, but in a sense, I don’t care what anyone thinks, because it’s Vivaldi’s music. I don’t mean to be disparaging about other recordings, but if that’s how it comes across, so be it. My main issue is that I’ve heard people play the piece very well, and it’s always sounded to me like a wonderfully “instrumental” rendition of the work, but not the work itself – like a photograph of a photograph. Those things obviously can be very beautiful. My aim was that this is not going to be a photograph of a photograph, it’s not even going to be a photograph! I’m going to see how close I get to being inside the composer’s pen. It’s not that people don’t play it well; I’m not entirely sure that people play it.’

However much I disagree with Pioro, it’s difficult not to be seduced by his fervour. He is impressively poised and forthright, and the intense devotion to his artistry is occasionally overwhelming. He is perhaps the most infuriating thing to try to categorise: a dreamer.

Aged 38, Pioro tells me that to make this recording has been a desire of his for 30 years. ‘It’s been a long, slow, drawn-out percolation of thoughts. It’s obviously not a way of working that is particularly welcomed by a fast-paced life in which people want glittery, beautiful results immediately. But it’s something that I strive to do as much as I can: to take as much time as I can.’

Morpurgo has similarly relished in slowness. ‘The poems are about my home here down in Devon. I live in probably one of the last deeply rural places in England. Every line I wrote, I see out of my window, and have done for 50 years; or I walk through it, and have done for 50 years – in all weathers, in all moods, in joy and in grief. I’m very connected to this place. I really do know every ditch, every fence, every bluebell and every tree. Really, every tree – and I mean that. When I go past trees, I touch certain ones.

‘When I was asked to write these poems, it raised the level of my connection to the world about me. What happens with nature is rather like Vivaldi: you get so used to it, you stop noticing it. Together with my wife, Clare, I’ve spent quite a lot of time walking round with kids saying, “Oh look, do you see that!” or, “Oh look, one of those!” and actually not looking hard enough myself. And so it was a help not to be a teacher, just to write it.’

Pioro, too, seems constantly to shift between the roles of teacher and student, approaching Vivaldi’s score with rigour and imagination in equal parts. ‘There are some ornaments that I consider pure, that must be stylistically accurate to engage along the lines of Italian Baroque music. And then there are the moments – and this is where Michael’s poetry becomes vital – where it seems that Vivaldi is asking for fantasy, for flights of fancy and imagination that have nothing to do with a specific space or time.’

Speaking of the second movement of Spring, Pioro codifies the non-traditional elements of his performance. ‘I do the quarter-tone trills very intentionally, always in specific places – anywhere that people dream. I add extra oddities that do not belong on, let’s say, Earth.’ In the second movement of Autumn, he gave harpsichordist David Gordon more or less free reign. ‘The brief I gave him was an opioid dream. In the poems, the peasants are all drunk. I was thinking of Sherlock Holmes in the opium den – you start giving yourself permission to walk into different stories.’

The poems are stunning (as is Morpurgo’s reading of them on the recording) – bursting with alliteration and teeming with onomatopoeia. There’s a vibrational agency to the way that I feel compelled to recite them out loud myself. I was sadly struck by the words I didn’t know – ‘soughs’, ‘jinking’, ‘gambol’. In this I was reminded of The Lost Words (2017) by Robert Macfarlane and Jackie Morris, a book of ‘charms’ which protested the removal of everyday nature words from a widely used children’s dictionary. It wasn’t a matter of mere vocabulary. Could it be that without the word, I didn’t know how to gambol myself?

Pioro summons such sadnesses as inspiration. ‘Everything we experience by living is sad. It’s a permanent saying goodbye to things, even if those things come back or are reborn. There is the constant tragedy of being around beautiful, young people who one day will not be beautiful, young people. There is that last time you had tea with your teddy, except you didn’t realise it was the last time. The last time grandad told you a story.’ I comment on how beautifully Pioro and Manchester Camerata leave movements, especially the hypnotic stasis of the second movement of Winter. ‘Yes, basically there’s a drone. But it’s not that at all. It’s a departing from what is to now was. We step out and see it more cosmically.’ It’s a beautiful concept, sure, but I wonder how these moments are navigated in practice. Pioro describes a process of trust. ‘I asked Hannah Roberts, the principal cellist of Manchester Camerata, to sit in the chord. Then – only when it was unbearable – to add that jarring note that tells us we’re transitioning to the next movement. And she just sat there, meditating in the sound. She gives me permission with her note to start the third movement, and even then, the second movement hasn’t ended – it’s still lingering in the background. It takes a while for me to introduce the murky danger of the third movement, for us to realise that we’ve left this beautiful postcard of winter behind.’ Mixing his tenses, it’s as if Pioro is simultaneously recalling and reliving the moment; it’s trippy and speaks of the process he calls ‘stepping into the dark’ together.

‘It’s easy to do in my solo practice because it’s just me. But when you’re not on your own, you have to hold hands.’ He gives the example of the barking dog in the second movement of Spring, a role played by the viola in often comedic loudness. ‘It makes me feel like a loon sometimes,’ he explains. ‘I stand in front of all these players who have children, anxieties (some are probably being hunted by HMRC) – they’ve got lives. And I’m standing in front of them, telling them about a dog barking. Could it be that the goatherd is sleeping and he thinks he can hear his dog? – that from bar 2, it’s the memory of its barking? The principal viola player has probably come from another rehearsal, probably has a concert in the evening after the recording session, and yet he’s listening to me, acknowledging me, and thinking about what it is I’m trying to express and how he can take that into his bow and fingers and do it.’

When I ask Morpurgo who he steps into the dark with, I expect him to reach for the same trees whose bark he strokes. But he cites his wife. ‘She was the one that got me writing, she gave me the confidence. Writing – and I’m sure it’s the same with musicians – is so much is about confidence, feeling you have a voice. You have to be courageous to do what Daniel does: I tremble for him every time I see him do it. I’m always amazed at musicians – not just their brilliance, their memories or the risks they constantly take. I’ve always needed someone to hold my hand; I did when was 10 and I do now that I’m 81. Clare is the one who holds my hand. Sometimes she gives me a little nudge, it has to be said. How you can nudge someone at the same time as holding hands, if you don’t know, ask her – she’s very good at it.’

Daniel Pioro’s The Four Seasons is released by Platoon on January 17