Whether Elgar’s scoring helped to create the concerto’s mood, or the mood led to the scoring, they fit miraculously. Few other works match this concerto’s air of wistful, nostalgic sadness. The tone is set in the first movement. After a few moments of assertion from the cello, a wispy, meandering tune begins, as if someone were aimlessly humming. A second, more athletic theme breaks in, before wispiness returns, leading directly to the second movement. This is a quiet scamper of cello notes interrupted by one of the shortest ‘big tunes’ ever written : nine notes, in this ethereal context as startling as if someone had yelled in church.

The slow movement, the heart of the concerto, seems designed specifically to break your heart. For years this concerto was associated with the cellist Jacqueline du Pre, who died of multiple sclerosis — which makes hearing it, especially her recording, even more poignant. The last movement is a kind of subdued march with agile cello passages, but at the end the (miniature) ‘big tune’ returns, a if to show up the hollowness of all the pomp we’ve just bees hearing.

EDWARDIAN ELGAR People who knew nothing o Elgar but ‘Land of Hope and Glory’ might imagine him as figure of typically Edwardian self-confidence and swagger, the British Empire personified. In fact, whenever he catches that mood in his music, he balances it with a melancholic nostalgia that seems to hint at private, unreachable sorrow. This is his personal voice, and though it’s missing from `Land of Hope and Glory’, it gives his bigger works, such as this concerto, their `Elgarness’. Nowadays people suggest that the whole English Edwardian Age was like this: a kind of Indian summer of Victorian values that everyone knew were doomed in a world of flappers, jazz and Fascism. If that’s so, Elgar is, precisely, the Edwardian to end them all.

Falla’s score is recorded complete (and is well worth exploring), but he made a separate suite of three short dances. They take us straight to the heart of sunny Spain. The Neighbours’ Dance is graceful and seductive (the women swaying while the lip-smacking official spies and drools). The Miller’s Dance alternates a wailing, Moorish tune and ever-quickening, flamenco stamping. The Final Dance is a jota: a whirling dance in three-time, with everyone mocking the soaked official as the orchestra supplies guitar-like strumming and clacking castanets. The music gets faster and faster, a rush of sound as heady as a cocktail. This may be picture-postcard Spain, but it sets every foot tapping in even the solemnest concert hall.

THE RUSSIAN BALLET Falla wrote The Three-cornered Hat in 1919 for Diaghilev’s Russian Ballet company (already known for such exotic dazzlers as Sheherazade and The Firebird). His collaborators included three of the century’s most glittering theatre talents: Picasso designed the ballet (basing it on pictures by Goya, no less) ; Massine did the choreography — and conceived the part of the Miller, alternately brooding and stupendously athletic, for himself; and the wife was played by Karsavina, the most elfin, but most seductive, of all Diaghilev’s harem of leading ladies.

FALLA Manuel de Falla (1876-1946) was fascinated by Andalusian folk music, with its Arab-inspired tunes and its stiff-backed, rhythmic flamenco dances, named for the flamingoes whose flounce and strut they imitate. He wrote this kind of local colour into songs, piano pieces, choral works, concertos, and above all three gorgeous stage works : The Three-cornered Hat, Love the Magician and La vida breve (`Life is Short’).

In Act 2 the Polovtsians take the captured prince to their desert camp, treat him with honour, and hold a banquet with lavish entertainment of singing and dancing (wild by the men, seductive by the women), and a wealth of whirl and colour. To our ears, these tunes blend Far Eastern exoticism and gypsy lilt, and Borodin’s scoring is a blur of castanets, tambourines, shrilling woodwind and surging strings.

Borodin’s heady music was too good to leave embedded in a rarely performed opera. It was soon extracted and became a bring-the-house-down concert-hall piece, a ballet, and the source of the stage musical Kismet. (`Hold my hand, I’m a stranger in Paradise’ was that show’s hit song, and it is the main tune of the Dances.)

BORODIN Alexander Borodin (I8 3 3-87) was a Sunday composer, working during the week as a doctor and university professor. He belonged to a group of composers who called themselves ‘The Mighty Handful’, and who tried, in their music, to revitalize the folk traditions and styles of ancient Russia. Borodin’s chosen area was Central Asia, the one-time home of such conquerors as Genghis Khan and Tamerlane the Great. The music of this area fascinated Borodin: even when he wrote symphonies or string quartets, the folk rhythms, exotic harmonies and skirling tunes of the East keep bursting in.

FOLK DANCING On-stage, the Polovtsian Dances are fast and furious. To stop the dancers dropping from exhaustion, no one person performs throughout. Small groups, or individuals, take turns to whirl, leap and cartwheel for a couple of minutes at a time, and then give way to others, so that the show is continuous. When Stalin wanted to show off the different parts of the Soviet Union, he formed dance groups to perform regional folk dances — and borrowed Borodin’s idea. Consequently, the Polovtsian Dances tend to remind us of such groups as the Red Army Ensemble, even though the influence is actually entirely the other way around.

Now TRY Borodin, In the Steppes of Central Asia; Symphony No. 1. Rimsky-Korsakov, Sheherazade. Stravinsky, The Firebird Suite.

The plot glamorized smugglers, gypsies and criminals, they said. It showed a woman dancing half-naked — and, worse, smoking cigarettes. It was about passionate, unmarried love (two men rivals for one woman), and culminated in a bloody knife-murder, centre-stage. Audiences of the time loved `exotic’ stories in their operas, and ‘realism’, but this was

What Tchaikovsky noticed (and seemingly no one else) was how glorious Bizet’s music was. Carmen may have a sordid story, acted out in wooden dialogue (especially lumpish, the way some opera singers perform it), but its music is colourful, heart-on-sleeve emotional, superbly dramatic and crammed with tunes. Soon after the production flopped, the gypsy choruses, the swaggering Toreador’s Song and Carmen’s sultry, seductive ‘Habanera’ were extracted, performed separately, sold as sheet music and as rolls for barrel-organs (the ancestors of gramophones). Their popularity was worldwide, and brought the opera back to the stage, where it has been a blockbuster ever since.

LISTENING TO CARMEN As with all operas, the best way to enjoy Carmen is to see it on-stage, or in one of the many productions on video. The Toreador’s Song, the Flower Song and ‘Habanera’ are hits on their own, unfailingly popular both as songs and as instrumentals. (They make a good start-point for anyone new to Carmen.) Bizet organized extracts from the music into a Carmen Prelude and a Carmen Suite, both of which catch all the opera’s passion and colour, and give you all the tunes, in pocket form.

Now TRY Individual numbers: Bizet, ‘Au fond du temple saint’ (from The Pearl Fishers); Serenade from The Fair Maid of Perth. Leoncavallo, ‘On With the Motley’ (from I Pagliacci). Verdi, ‘Caro nome’ (from Rigoletto). Preludes and suites: Bizet, Jeux d’enfants (orchestral suite); Chabrier, Espana; Falla, ‘Ritual Fire Dance’ (from Love the Magician); Smetana, Overture (or complete suite) from The Bartered Bride. Complete opera: Verdi, II Trovatore.

Bizet was asked to write the incidental music : a dozen numbers, ranging from a few mood-setting bars to preludes and interludes lasting several minutes. He had an orchestra of twenty-six, and the management requested `Provençal musical styles’ to match Daudet’s Southern dialect.

Daudet’s play is long forgotten, but Bizet subsequently worked the best numbers from his music into two orchestral suites, and these are now among his most popular, most tuneful works. The movements range from folk dances (the swaggering Prelude to Suite No. 1, the famous Farandole from Suite No. 2) to sound-pictures of the countryside, love scenes and church bells ringing out on Sunday morning. Suite No. 1 (Prelude, Minuet, Adagietto, Carillon) is better known than Suite No. 2, but conductors often cheat and add the best movements of Suite No. 2 (especially the final Farandole).

BIZET Georges Bizet (18 3 8-7 5) was a musical prodigy, beginning his career as concert pianist and prize-winning composer at the age of eleven. His ambition was to succeed in the theatre, and all his life, while supporting himself by hack work (arranging other people’s music for publishers, copying scores), he planned, wrote and rewrote operas of every kind, from a tragedy about Ivan the Terrible to frothy farce. Only a few projects actually reached the stage, and all were flops. The last and biggest disaster was Carmen in 187 5 — and Bizet died soon afterwards.

BIZET^‘S MUSIC Bizet admired Rossini, and imitated his perky scoring and penchant for a good tune. He envied the heavyweights of tragic opera, and tried to write sombre, emotion-racked music in grandest style. He succeeded with the lighter side, and (except in Carmen) failed with tragedy. He said bitterly that he was ‘too facile’, but the world has ever since been grateful for his unfailing zest and flair: the light thing done to perfection, every time.

Now TRY Bizet, Overture to Doctor Miracle; Symphony in C. Grieg, Peer Gynt Suite No. 1. Edward German, Henry VIII Suite.

The concerto has showy moments — the piano’s first entry, for example, sounds as if six people are playing, not one — but it is generally thoughtful rather than melodramatic. Its themes — abrupt, tender, virtuosic — wind in and out like dream-shapes. Those that stick in the mind are the gruff opening, a rustic flute tune (re-decorated by the pianist on each reappearance), a fleet-footed dance whose scoring made one critic complain that this was ‘a concerto for triangle’, and a yearning, slow melody eventually transformed into a march with showers of piano fireworks.

LISZT AND THE ORCHESTRA In 1847, after giving up touring, Liszt was made conductor of the Weimar Court Orchestra, and threw himself into orchestral composition. He devised a new kind of piece, the ’symphonic poem’, in which musical form was determined by story or mood. He invented new kinds of harmony and scoring. In short, just as he’d revolutionized piano playing, now he upturned people’s views of what orchestral music could be like.

THE BEAR AND THE PUSSY-CAT Liszt was often invited to parties, and always asked to play. One tactless hostess even dragged the piano into the middle of the room before he arrived, and when he did he searched in mock despair before asking, ‘Don’t you have a piano ?”There in front of you, maestro.’ `Oh, good,’ he said. ‘I need somewhere to put my hat.’ On another occasion, a young pianist advertised herself for a forthcoming recital as ‘Pupil of Liszt‘, and was horrified to hear that he was visiting the town on the day of her performance. She ran to his hotel to beg forgiveness. He asked her to play, gave her some tips on pedalling, and said, `Now you are a pupil. Best wishes, for tonight.’

Now TRY Liszt, Piano Concerto No. 2. Saint-Saens, Piano Concerto No. 2; Khachaturian, Piano Concerto.

If one can have a sound-equivalent of these carvings, Turangalila is it. It is a two-hour, ten-movement symphony for outsize orchestra, a sensual orgy. It creates its own world, and you can only succumb to it or reject it outright.

The Indian connection is vital. In Sanskrit, turanga means ‘the rhythm of time’ and lila means ‘play of the universe: birth, love and death’. That, no less, is Messiaen’s theme. He mixes his sound-cocktail from the rhythms of Indian music and ancient Greek poetry, from birdsong, jazz, Roman Catholic chant, fanfares, church bells and cathedral organs, and blends it with solo piano, symphony orchestra, Far Eastern percussion instruments, and (literally above all) the disembodied, banshee squeal of the ondes Martenot, a 193os electronic instrument to which he was addicted.

The symphony’s ten movements alternate gush and jam session, and at their heart is a ten-minute explosion of sexual energy and rampant sound, one of the most orgasmic sequences ever put on paper. Messiaen called this movement, the fifth, ‘Joy in the Blood of the Stars’, and said that it represented the ‘peak of carnal passion’. For newcomers to the work, it makes a superb taster for the whole experience.

M ESSIA EN Olivier Messiaen (908-92) was the son of the mystical poet Cêcile Sauvage, and he inherited her taste for extravagant exoticism. He was a devout Catholic, and the Mass and its music are at the heart of his inspiration. He also collected birdsong, notating the cries of over a thousand species and arranging them for instruments in many of his scores. (Revell des oiseaux is made from nothing else.) He studied Greek and Sanskrit literature, Balinese music, Japanese religious opera, Indian classical music and jazz. From each, he took what he wanted, and they all colour his unique style. His works have extravagant titles — Forgotten Offerings, From the Canyons to the Stars, Timecolour — and the titles are matched each time by the sounds themselves.

Now TRY Messiaen, Quatuor pour la fin du temps; Revell des oiseaux (`Dawn Chorus’). Tippett, Symphony No. 3. Ginastera, Panambi.

The next movement depicts the Day of Judgement, complete with panic-stricken choruses, ominous trombone fanfares and foreboding from the tenor and bass soloists. Only the soprano and alto soloists lighten the mood, offering visions of redemption and heaven like sunshafts irradiating the darkness.

In the work’s second half, despair is softened by the hope that God will remember the promise he made to Abraham. Thanks to Christ’s mercy, our enemies will be scattered and we will take our places in Heaven with the righteous. The Requiem ends with a full-throated assertion of this idea. Earlier, the choral fugues sounded confused and terrified; now they are confident and trusting, as if humanity were not scattered but united in a single, radiant hope.

MYSTERIOUS STRANGER In the play and film Amadeus, a hooded stranger visits Mozart and asks him to write this Requiem. Mozart superstitiously takes him for a visitor from beyond the grave, and assumes that the Requiem is to be for his own funeral. Soon afterwards, poisoned by Salieri, he dies. It’s a good story, but the mysterious stranger is the only true thing in it. He came not from the Devil but from Count Walsegg, a nobleman who commissioned works from composers, anonymously, and passed them off as his own. The supernatural story was put about after Mozart’s death, perhaps by his widow as a way of arousing interest in the

Requiem itself — and, stunt or not, it worked. The Requiem has been Mozart’s most popular choral work ever since, and the story has an honoured place in musical (not to mention cinematic) myth.

SUSSMAYR When Mozart died, the Requiem was only three-quarters finished. Anxious to earn money from it as soon as possible, his widow asked one of his pupils, Franz Xaver Sussmayr, to complete it. He did this so skilfully and discreetly that scholars are still squabbling about which sections were supplied by him and which written by the maestro.

Now TRY Mozart, ‘Coronation’ Mass K 3 17. Stravinsky, Symphony of Psalms (twentieth-century harmonies, but a similar mood).

Over the next few years it brought him worldwide fame. For the rest of his life, wherever he went and whatever else he played, audiences demanded it ; when he was sixty-nine, with a shelf full of mature masterpieces to his name, he was still best known by a piece he’d written as a boy half a century before. If he’d kept the copyright, this one short piece would have made him a millionaire.

Rachmaninov may have come to hate his `Frankenstein’s monster’ (as he once called it), but it’s easy to see why audiences adored it. It has no story, but conjures up atmosphere and mood so decisively that by the end you feel as satisfied as if you’d heard an entire dramatic scene. It begins with hectoring bass notes accompanied by anguished chords higher up the keyboard. The lower the bass descends, the higher the chords climb, as if trying to escape. The middle section is a pleading melody accompanied by agitated runs and flutterings ; then the dominating opening music returns to end the piece.

RACHMANINOV Sergei Rachmaninov (1873-1943) was not only a composer, but one of the great piano virtuosos of the twentieth century. He settled in the USA at the time of the Russian Revolution, and never went home. Like many exiled creators, however, he filled his works with nostalgia for his native land ; in fact he is one of the most ‘Russian’ of all composers. His works include symphonies, sonatas, operas, songs (little known, but worth seeking out), and some of the most popular piano music ever written.

EXPLORING RACHMANINOV From his shorter works, we recommend ‘Vocalise’ (originally a song, but better known as an instrumental solo), the piano solo Prelude Op. 23 No. 5 and the beautiful Eighteenth Variation from Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini. From his longer works, try the whole of the Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini, the ripely Romantic Symphony No. 2 and the bubbly Symphonic Dances.

Hollywood discovered the concerto in the 1930s, and made it a star. In one musical, 200 dancing-girls play it, four to each piano, and the pianos come to life and dance. In a horror film, a dead pianist’s hands are grafted on to the arms of a murderer, and semiquavers alternate with strangling. In one war movie, the finale’s big tune is set to the words ‘Full Moon and Empty Arms’ (sailors yearning for their dear ones). In another, Brief Encounter, Celia Johnson falls in love with Trevor Howard in a station waiting-room, while this concerto breaks our hearts on the soundtrack.

The concerto starts with piano chords leading to a sonorous string melody, accompanied by piano ripplings. The music builds to a full-throated climax on the big main tune. The slow movement is a delicate piano reverie over orchestral murmurings. The last movement contrasts martial bustle and the ‘Full Moon’ tune — and the battle, inevitably, is won by melody.

RACHMANINOV AND STRAVINSKY It would be hard to imagine two composers less alike than romantic Rachmaninov and dry Stravinsky. They lived in Hollywood, but avoided one another. One day their wives, fed up with this interminable, unspoken quarrel, arranged a dinner party. After a somewhat edgy meal, R. and S. retired to the drawing room with a bottle of vodka. Tiptoeing in later, the wives found them maudlin. Stravinsky had discovered that Rachmaninov had sold his greatest hit, the C sharp minor prelude, outright, and Rachmaninov had found out that Stravinsky had done the same with the Firebird Suite. As the vodka level sank, the two musical giants had spent a happy time with paper and pencil working out just how rich they’d have been if they’d insisted on royalties.