Sullivan gave himself three weeks to compose the music and for opening with the dance of the fairies, deliberately avoided invoking the light and dancing music created by Mendelssohn for his A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Mendelssohn was depicting ‘real’ fairies while Sullivan’s ‘fairies’ were just regular people pretending to be fairies to fool Falstaff.

The overture to Die Afrikareise is a typical Suppé overture, full of the structure and focus that he
always brought to his overtures. This particular overture was used for the 1883 premiere.

Thalberg’s setting is dark from the very beginning, reflecting the ever-widening pool of deception and lies. Thalberg’s virtuosic writing results in soft and sweet runs up the piano, exquisite turns of phrase, and developments of Verdi’s already musical lines into something more pianistic.

It’s Vieuxtemps’ balance of emotional depth with virtuosity that makes his works so significant. This is especially true in this Beethoven variation set. Vieuxtemps extends the idea of the variation that it almost starts to enter the other genre of fantasy on a theme.

The Sonata for Strings was written in Milan in 1894 and it is in the work’s final movement, subtitled ‘O burrico de pau’ (‘The Wooden Donkey’), that Gomes’ skill and humour are showcased. Gomes uses pizzicato and melodic jumps to show the donkey braying, and rhythmic ostinatos to put the donkey in motion, galloping across the orchestra.

Romilda e Costanza is an opera semiseria, full of the usual problems of jealousy between brothers, false imprisonment, and rescue from the same. The work opens with Beethoven-like austerity before moving to a dancing dotted rhythm.

Thalberg turns the love song into an occasion for pianistic fireworks – runs up and down the piano, arpeggios in the right and left hands, melodies played in the thumbs – all of which emphasize and make variations on the familiar melody.

Completed in 1825, it's a unique work in both its structure and its orchestration. Much of it would be termed neo-classical in its formal and stylistic details, and, at the same time, it has romantic qualities. Given Arriaga’s age, we can probably best understand this work as a conglomeration of the stylistic trends that were active in the Paris Conservatoire at the time – including the very French scoring for the wind instruments, described as ‘generous and differentiated.’