Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

The Marriage of Figaro: Overture
Conductor: Louis de Froment

Although the Marriage of Figaro is the sequel to The Barber of Seville, it was first made into an opera some 30 years before. Both operas are based on a stories by Baumarchais, a popular late 18th Century writer.

Like most comic operas, The Marriage of Figaro centres around infidelity, slapstick humour and cross dressing. It is a little bit like an 18th century 'Carry On' film with music.

While it isn't directly related to the plot, the overture mirrors the jovial nature of the storyline beautifully. Probably the most comic part of it is the opening. It isn't too taxing for the strings to play this fast, but for the bassoons, it is a total nightmare.

Unlike much of Mozart's music, this piece is quite overtly jubilant from start to finish. This is sometimes called the egg-timer overture, because it takes as long to play as it does to boil an egg. To avoid litigation for food poisoning, we should point out that this is a particularly fast recording, and would probably leave your beakfast soft-boiled.

Antonio Vivaldi

The Four Seasons: Spring
Conductor: Johnathan Carney
 

It's alway pretty easy to write about Vivaldi's Four Seasons, because he basically did it for you. Each of the four violin concertos is preceeded by a sonnet evoking the character of the season that the piece is supposed to represent.

Spring is a particular favourite of many and it is suggested that the repeated loud interjections from the violas in the second movement are meant to represent the barking of the dog described in the sonnet that goes with this work.

The other Baroque favourite that makes it's way in here is Pachelbel's Canon in D. This piece is based entirely on a sequenced of eight chords which repeat again and again, over which three violins weave a series of variations.

The chord sequence is made up of a series of descending fourths - a particulary satisfying sound (this is the chord change to which church choirs sing "amen"). It is the repetition of this interval that has led to several musicologists describing this piece as "theoretically perfect".

Dubious though this argument is, Pachelbel's Canon is certainly both restful and uplifting at the same time.

Sergey Prokofiev

Symphony No. 1 Classical
Conductor:  Yuri Simonov

Prokofiev's Classical Symphony was written at a time when composers like Schoenberg and Holst were writing huge sprawling romantic works. The Russian composer looked back to the strict and neat structures of more than 100 years earlier in order to produce this miniature masterpiece.

While the piece has its feet firmly rooted in the past, this didn't stop Prokofiev using more recent orchestration techniques to add sparkle to produce this, one of his most enchanting pieces.

The Classical Symphony is probably most notable for its energy which, like Mozart's overture to The Marriage of Figaro, gives the music a sense of direction from beginning to end.

He described it as "the kind of Symphony Haydn or Mozart might have written, had they lived in the twentieth century". Bach to the future indeed.