One of the most majestic of all operatic openings. Its inclusion here flirts with cliché. I remember a fun exchange with the film director Baz Luhrmann who claimed that his first film Strictly Ballroom and The Mastersingers of Nurenberg were to all intents and purposes the same story, which they are. If you cannot manage the full five and a half hours (with intervals) of the latter I recommend the somewhat shorter former version, albeit with slightly different music.

Piazzolla = Tango = Buenos Aires. It is hard to think of any musician who so embodies a dance which so embodies a culture.

This solo cantata would work well staged at The Grange. Here is the last scene of the tragic monologue of the raped Lucretia, vowing vengeance throughout until she finally contemplates and then enacts suicide. A 20-minute opera as dramatic and affecting as anything in the Baroque era.

An enduring international hit, written in 1917, and heard since in all shapes and sizes. Its first popular incarnation was on a theatre organ played by Ethel Smith, and a decade later sung by Carmen Miranda opposite Groucho Marx in “Copacobana’. Here the full virtuosic power of the best horn players in the UK reveals it in astonishing rhythmic and chromatic brilliance.

The opening (and closing) track of a truly pioneering landmark album from the 70s. Its inclusion here highlights not only its musical importance but also its continued relevance for our times, particularly now.

For my money, as powerful a Handel chorus as any. The heightened expectation of the dotted orchestral rhythms presaging the powerful choral statement, “The people shall hear, and be afraid’” never fails the tingle-factor test. Moses and the children of Israel have suffered a litany of plagues, floods, frogs, locusts, fire, hail. 2020 has offered all these and more. We live in biblical times.

A Serenade from Schubert’s swansong: a tender lovesong potent with amorous entreaty but shot-through with vulnerability and uncertainty. In the last 14 weeks of his life, his mind filled with both delirium and lucidity, the typhoid/syphilis ravaged 31 year-old composer wrote 3 piano sonatas, The Shepherd on the Rock, the C major quintet (the slow movement played in our week 3), and the 14 songs of this his last song cycle. I have no words.

Let us go to the shore;

There the waves will kiss our legs.

With mysterious sadness

The stars will shine down on us.

— Aleksey Pleshcheyev

I highly recommend this quirky movie with this haunting theme song. Tumbleweed, a truckstop in the Mojave Desert in California and magic tricks from a travelling hausfrau. There must be an opera there.

It is said that this music marks the composer’s journey from ‘bad boy’ street urchin to ‘cloistered’ monk, following the violent death of a close friend. This is rare combination of organ and symphony orchestra, premièred in a private Parisian house (large pipe-organ standard) and now a regular treat in symphonic programmes.

Following his successful pleading for pity from the furies in the underworld, Orpheus arrives in Elysium and marvels at the purity of the air and the ineffable beauty of the arcadian landscape. The absence of Euridice denies him joy until his entreaties to the spirits finally yield her to him. The neo-classical representation of a pastoral paradise and Orpheus’s lyrical responses to it provide rich food to the singer. In this instance, I must claim authorship.

The Billy Joel classic in great hands and smokey voice.

Don’t go changin’ Trying to please me You never let me down before

The last movement of one of those pieces which alters the genre. Daring, revolutionary, we have experienced adventure and exoticism until this point where the music becomes intimate, introspective and a little sad. It is a personal frustration of mine that not enough attention has been paid to the vast rich vistas of this repertoire.

My venerable singing teacher named his lapdog after Muzio, his favourite soprano. He heard her sing many times, as indeed he heard most of the great singers of the 20th century in the flesh. As with Caruso and Ponselle in previous playlists, it is the clarity of sound and the clarity of diction which mark them out against their modern counterparts. Muzio also sounds effortless. We can but dream to emulate these gods.

As heart-rending a two-minutes’ worth as anything Bach ever wrote. Two viola da gambas, two recorders and a chamber organ. I have recommended to brides that they walk up the aisle to this music, momentarily forgetting the tragic nature of the whole cantata which follows this opening. But as a salve to sadness, it has few rivals.

Trumpets and drums and choral vim celebrate this festive opening, exactly as they do for Bach’s party-spirit beginning of the Christmas Oratorio. Revelling in the bier keller (where the trumpeters will be found the moment this music ends) isn’t far away. Nothing changes! “Praise God in his kingdoms’.

From his million selling album, Concert by the Sea, the king of the super cool jazz keyboard dazzles.

Starting with the A-B-C of it Getting right down to the X-Y-Z of it

Help me solve the mystery of it Teach me tonight

The two lovers are about to meet by a well and finally declare their love for each other; disastrously, since they are watched by her suspicious husband. This seamless score is interspersed with rich orchestral interludes. Here we are in Act 4, as crepuscular gloom enfolds the parkland, and tragedy beckons.

Smoky indolence. Irresistible.

My room is shaped like a cage The sun slips its arm through the window

But I who want to smoke to make mirages I light my cigarette on daylight's fire

I do not want to work I want to smoke

Intended as an ikon of sound, the solo ‘cello sings the voice of the Mother of God, revealing Her cosmic power. John Tavener’s deep Orthodox faith shines through this music, commemorating a vision of the Virgin which inspired the people of Constantinople to drive off besieging Saracens in the 10th century. It has remained one of his most celebrated compositions.