In a culture hooked on doom narratives about classical music’s decline, French reminds us that attention itself is the radical act.
Why it matters
- Hannah French’s book, The Rolling Year, makes a compelling case for active listening.
- The book focuses on Vivaldi’s Four Seasons and transforms traditional programme notes into engaging reading.
- French’s writing combines musical study with history, using lively prose that maintains reader interest and momentum.
- Contributors from the classical music industry enhances the discussion, illustrating the joy of connection listening brings.
- Published by Faber on 6 November 2025, The Rolling Year invites readers into a participatory experience of classical music.
Estimated reading time: 3 minutes
While noisy commentators continue to bemoan classical music’s failings, its supposed irrelevance and impending demise, Hannah French writes a book that underlines how it remains alive. In The Rolling Year (Faber), French examines Vivaldi’s Four Seasons – a work so well-known as to be scarcely listened to – and in so doing invites us to listen more actively, not with dogma but with infectious enthusiasm and curiosity.
“French wrests the traditional programme note from the cold, desiccated hands of earnest writers and transforms it into something you actually want to read.”
— Thoroughly Good
At around 330 pages, The Rolling Year is a quick yet comforting read. Part musical study, part history, French’s language wrests the traditional programme note from the cold, desiccated hands of earnest, self-absorbed concert-programme writers and transforms it into something you not only want to read more of, but which shares the delightful and unexpected details that make you want to listen again.
She peppers descriptive prose about the music – a way of hearing the work afresh – with background history, present-day parallels and reflections. All this is tied together with the kind of active language finessed in radio-script writing, with the added benefit of the reader not being subjected to the interruptions of station self-promotion.
This is a book you’ll read too quickly and want to slow down over. That’s partly down to the immediacy and momentum of the language. It avoids self-consciousness or contrivance. French’s voice about the music she and many of her contributors love is genuine, sincere and unequivocal. Her crisp, economical sentences sustain that momentum.
More than that, in drawing together multiple contributors from across the classical-music industry – Rachel Podger, Daniel Pioro and Tom McKinney to name a few – French is also indirectly illustrating one of the other joys that listening to classical music surfaces, and one that often goes unreported: connection. Thoroughly Good doesn’t enjoy this stuff simply because it sounds nice. Listening isn’t a passive experience, but an act of participation – in performance, in recordings, and in conversation.
The Rolling Year invites the reader into that world, even if the reader doesn’t realise it – and perhaps all the more so when they don’t.
Hannah French’s The Rolling Year is published by Faber on Thursday 6 November 2025.
