Philip Glass tackled the challenge of re-inventing Antonio Vivaldi's Four Seasons in an American way with his violin concerto No. 2, "American seasons," presented last night at Herbst Theater by SF Performances with violinist Robert McDuffie and the Venice Baroque Orchestra. Vivaldi succeeded beyond expectations in depicting a light airy spring, a forceful winter blizzard, storms thundering and birds chirping. But for the American version, which four seasons? An Arizona summer with a Maine fall and a Utah winter? Glass' answer to the riddle seemed to pick all four seasons from ... San Diego: where no one can tell spring from summer from fall because it's all the same, balmy and steady.

Glass lifted a few motifs from the original Vivaldi four seasons, and they struck out of the bare landscape with their timeless originality. In the program notes, Glass himself writes that "there will be no instructions for the audience, no clues as to where Spring, Summer, Winter and Fall might appear in the new concerto." He adds that it is "an interesting, though not worrisome, problem for the listener." We would have liked to tell them apart, the similar blandness of all seasons was a problem for us.