Writing in the booklet accompanying this record, the Uruguayan composer and conductor Jose Serebrier (b. 1938, and a protege of Stokowski) says: ''Around Christmas in 1981, Michael Guttman approached me with an idea to record the Four Seasons, but not by Vivaldi. He knew only two works: the Milhaud and the Rodrigo … I was asked to locate an autumn and a winter concerto, but the search proved very frustrating. There are a number of works inspired by the seasons, but they are symphonies, ballets, oratorios, not violin concertos.'' Eventually they settled for Chaminade's ''Automne'' (in an arrangement for violin and orchestra by Paul Uy, based on her own transcription for violin and piano of the original for solo piano), but Serebrier decided that he would have to deal with winter himself. ''I had never meant to portray literally the season of winter,'' he writes. ''My winter concerto would have to be a poetic vision of winter, not so much the actual season as the winter of life: the time approaching death, when presumably all memories come back in a flash, when reality, futility, purpose, memories all mix in a mocking parade, a never-ending dream.''
Serebrier's Winter Concerto is a substantial (16piece in one movement, in a rather flashy Hollywood style, based on a motif from his own first composition (a solo violin sonata written when he was nine) and quoting the Introduction to ''Winter'' from Haydn's oratorio The Seasons, the beginning of Glazunov's ballet with the same title and an excerpt from Tchaikovsky's First Symphony (Winter Daydreams). Of the three other items the most interesting is Milhaud's compact lyrical, slightly jazzy Concertino de printemps of 1934, and the most immediately attractive Chaminade's unashamedly sentimental ''Automne'' of c. 1880; but Rodrigo's Concierto de estio of 1943 (four years later than the familiar Concierto de Aranjuez for guitar), expertly written though it is, suggests that the old chestnut about Vivaldi having composed the same concerto umpteen times over could with more accuracy be applied to the veteran Spaniard.
The programme, then, is scarcely of desert-island disc calibre, but the playing, and ASV's recording, are of high quality.'