Daniel Hope’s ‘For Seasons’ album is struggling to be high-concept but much of the music that supports the concept is insipid and dull. The bulk of the disc is devoted to Vivaldi’s Four Seasons, recorded in a sprightly, clean, conventional manner with the Zurich Chamber Orchestra. There’s not really any pressing need for another version of these works, with hundreds already in the catalogue and this new one not particularly insightful or innovative. But it does follow up on an earlier Hope project, the ‘recomposition’ of Vivaldi’s favourite work by Max Richter (2/13). The new album includes one selection from Richter’s version, ‘Spring 1’, as one of 13 seasonal meditations programmed after the Vivaldi score. It also includes artworks in the album booklet and brief descriptions of the inspiration they provide to the soloist.

The Vivaldi readings strike one as perfectly contoured for radio, nothing too theatrical, no vexing or challenging extremes. The pesky insects of the Adagio from ‘Summer’ are more of the kind one finds meticulously painted on a still life than a genuine nuisance, and the violin figuration of the subsequent storm scene so scrupulously rendered that one has no doubt that this is an image of a storm, not a tempest in itself. There’s no fault to be found here and some admirable playing, but little that is deeply memorable.

The segue into the conceptual part of the album – short works inspired by each month of the year, with a ‘Postscriptum’ – is disheartening. Nils Frahm, whose Ambre is pegged to January, has contributed a conventionally pretty bit of soundtrack music, the sort of thing used to illustrate misty morning dew on the grass from any of the zillions of period-piece dramas on Public Television. A fast paced and heavy-handed version of Rameau’s ‘Danse des sauvages’ (from Les Indes galantes) accentuates the percussion so strongly that it becomes ungainly and unidiomatic, while a piece called April 14 by Aphex Twin is standard pop fare. The addition of a harp line to ‘Am leuchtenden Sommermorgen’ from Schumann’s Dichterliebe only makes the accompaniment awkward and intrusive, and a reading of ‘Amazing Grace’ is hyperbolic and clichéd. The weather doesn’t improve from there.

Vivaldi’s Four Seasons is a great work diminished for modern audiences through repetition. Hope’s ‘For Seasons’ doesn’t rediscover or refresh the work but seems designed merely to extend its easy-listening aura for another half hour or so.