In 1874, Brahms reluctantly sat on the jury of the Austrian State Stipendium with the critic Eduard Hanslick and the Director of the Imperial Opera, Johann Herbeck. The jury was to award financial support to talented composers in need within the Habsburg Empire. Brahms encountered a massive submission from an obscure Czech composer: fifteen works including two symphonies, several overtures and a song cycle (Op. 7). Brahms was visibly overcome by the mastery and talent of this unknown individual. As a result of Brahms’s support, Antonin Dvorák received the stipend (and twice more in 1876 and 1877).

The Czech suite was written at the point in Antonín Dvořák’s career when his fame as a composer was burgeoning. The popularity of nationalist music was growing. Liszt had had great success with his set of Hungarian rhapsodies, composed from 1846 onwards, and Brahms had followed on with his famous set of 21 Hungarian dances.

Brahms’ music publisher, Fritz Simrock was looking for more music of this kind, and on the recommendation of Brahms approached Dvořák to commission a new work. The commission saw the publication of a set of 16 Slavonic dances which were originally written for piano duet. The work was a huge success. Simrock made a handsome profit and Dvořák received a pitifully small fee. At Simrock’s request Dvořák orchetrated the dances and they were published as his Opus 46. This time Dvořák insisted on and received a much higher fee. The Czech suite was written the following year.

The work is made up of five movements, three of which are traditional Czech dances, and two are descriptive of the Bohemian countryside which inspired much of Dvořák’s music.

The first movement is a pastorale in which the bucolic atmosphere is created by drone sounds accompanying a long lyrical melody and the sounds of bird-like songs.

The second movement is a Polka, the most celebrated of Bohemian dances. It is in a minor key and in duple time.

The third movement is a sousedská, a calm swaying dance in three quarter time. Some refer to the style as the grandparents’ dance.

The fourth movement is a romance that takes us back into the countryside. It is slower and gentler than the two preceding dances. The final movement is a furiant. This is a fast energetic dance that frequently shifts accents between duple and triple time. It provides a lively and exuberant conclusion to the work.

It was an open secret in Mozart’s day that Wolfgang wished to free himself from service at the Salzburg court of the Archbishop Hieronymous von Colloredo. Mozart’s letters are full of colorful rants about the archbishop.

Colloredo became exceptionally annoyed with Mozart’s frequent absences. After a number of arguments, he ultimately dismissed him with the words, “Soll er doch gehen, ich brauche ihn nicht!” (“He should just go then; I don’t need him!”)

Mozart’s letters to his father recount his indignation at what he portrays as abusive and insulting behavior by the Archbishop. In his letter of June 13, 1781, Mozart recounts that the final indignity of his dismissal by Colloredo was a kick up the backside administered by the Archbishop’s steward, Count Arco.

Free at last Mozart left to pursue a career as a freelance performer and composer in Austria’s capital. In Vienna, Mozart met Constanze Weber (a cousin of the composer Carl Maria von Weber) and they were to be married on August 4, 1782. Mozart’s father, Leopold objected strongly to the wedding but in the end relented and gave his approval.

Just before the wedding, Wolfgang was involved in a rather large and influential project. A recent artistic trend in Vienna focused on the Ottoman Empire. Just a century before, Vienna has been attacked by the Turks, so it is somewhat unusual that music, art, clothing were so influenced by the Near East. Mozart’s contribution to this fad was his singspiel (an opera with spoken dialogue) The Abduction from the Seraglio.

In the singspiel, Mozart uses the “alla Turca style.” Inspired by the sounds of Turkish military bands, this style features strong downbeats and jangling grace notes that imitate the sounds of the Turkish Crescent, an instrument consisting of a long pole with an Islamic crescent adorned with small bells that jingled when the pole struck the floor in time with the music. The Overture to The Abduction from the Seraglio contains the perfect example of this style. The Abduction takes place in sixteenth-century Turkey and concerns the efforts of Belmonte to find his lover Konstanze who has been abducted by pirates and sold to a Turkish Pasha named Osmin. All ends well after Osmin takes pity on Belmonte and pardons both him and Konstanze (and their devoted servants) from further punishment for their attempts at escape. This story was a popular farce in Vienna in the eighteenth century and was familiar to audiences. The work was first performed on July 16, 1782, at the Burgtheater in Vienna.

It is rare indeed that a musical composition might highlight the differences between the North and South Hemispheres of Planet Earth. But today we’ll experience one.

It is true that January, the coldest month in Venice, has an average temperature of 3.5 °C (38 °F),and that of the warmest months, July and August) is of 23 °C (73 °F). It is also true that January is the hottest month in Buenos Aires with an average temperature of 25°C (77°F) and the coldest is June at 12°C (54°F). It would follow then that music written about the seasons in the Northern Hemisphere would have an atmosphere quite different from a similar work written in the Southern Hemisphere.

Ástor Piazzolla was born in Argentina, raised in New York and educated in Paris by the legendary composition teacher Nadia Boulanger. It seemed he was destined for a satisfactory but unremarkable career penning orchestral ditties with a South American accent. But one day Boulanger heard Piazzolla nonchalantly playing a Tango at her piano before a lesson. She urged her pupil to follow this direction with the proclamation that ‘here is the true Piazzolla.’ But she also insisted that he continue his rigorous study of Baroque and High Classical music.

When the young composer returned to Buenos Aires, he began to do for the Tango what Johann Strauss had for the waltz over a century before. He thrust classical complexities, harmonies and textures into the form, cultivating it and adapting it without compromising its raw ingredients.

Piazzolla’s most famous concert work is a monumental salute to Vivaldi entitled The Four Seasons of Buenos Aires (‘Las Cuatro Estaciones Porteñas’). In a sense, it represents the apex of the Argentine’s ‘Tango Nuevo’ style, music that was born from the Tango but was designed to be listened to, rather than danced to.

This particular piece, though, was crafted carefully and slowly. The first season, Verano Porteño (Summer), arrived in 1965, scored for string quartet and designed to accompany a play by the composer’s colleague Rodriguez Munoz. In 1969 Piazzolla wrote Autumn for the same forces and in the following year, Spring and Winter.

The present version for solo violin and string orchestra postdates Piazzolla’s death by several years. The Russian violinist, Gidon Kremer wanted a piece to complement Vivaldi’s Four Seasons and commissioned composer Leonid Desyatnikov to make this arrangement, which was completed in 1998.

Desyatnikov did not confine himself to mere transcription. To a degree he recomposed the pieces to fit Kremer’s concept, adding quotations from the Vivaldi Seasons as well as cadenzas for the solo violinist and principal cellist. He did preserve certain special effects Piazzolla devised to compensate for the lack of percussion in his quintet—slapping the back of the bass and scrubbing behind the violin bridge to produce an imitation of the stick-scratched gourd called a guiro, as well as violin slides both slow and whipped. Buenos Aires is located about two-thirds down the East coast of South America on the Rio de la Plata; its climate is classified as subtropical. But a warning for the meteorologically unprepared: in recognition of the reversal of seasons south of the Equator, in Desyatnikov’s arrangement Vivaldi’s Winter is quoted in Piazzola’s Summer, and Vivaldi’s Summer in Piazzola’s Winter. Spring and Autumn references are similarly switched.

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