My family keep pointing out that some of my choices are too well known on TV or film, and I therefore cannot possibly use them (e.g. Prokoviev’s Romeo and Juliet on The Apprentice). So, I thought I would face this head on and start with some stirring film music. It doesn’t get much more swashbuckling than this - Errol Flynn as the glamorous daredevil privateer and Flora Robson as Elizabeth 1. It’s all in the music.

Ravel’s ‘Jazz’ Concerto. Intriguingly he thought of the first theme on an English home counties train journey between Oxford and London. Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue then sidles in and we are off on a rumbustuous ride rich with allusions from the composer’s boyhood Spain but firmly on the rhythmic pulse of 20’s New York.

Still across the pond. Even in her mainstream songs there’s an edge of danger and protest and vulnerability. And always dazzling musicianship.

Just two of the 15 movements of this Orthodox All night Vigil: the opening Invocation to Prayer and the Nunc Dimittis. The composer chose the latter to be sung at his funeral. Vespers was written and first sung liturgically in 1915, and with the Russian Revolution in 1917 was banned. As much as any piece of music it marks the end of a gargantuan era.

Any latter day close-harmony group should pay homage to these German pioneers. They had six glorious years, starting in Berlin in 1928 and then touring the world, before the terrible rigours of Nazification ultimately stopped, indeed banned them. Their blend is remarkable, and their sense of fun endlessly infectious.

This is how the great opera singers used to sing. Enormous liberties taken, for sure, but such a range of colour, of dynamics, of expression such as to reach the back of the largest opera house down to murmuring in one’s ear all within a single note. Marvel at the legendary Enrico Caruso.

We started with film, now ballet music. This is the Russian Punch and Judy. Love and Violence as played out by puppets. One could call Petrushka a forerunner of Toy Story.

I daringly refrain from choosing the obvious excerpts, but instead the moving scene between Violetta and Alfredo’s father, Giorgio Germont, where he comes to persuade the courtesan to stop seeing his son for the dishonour their love affair may bring his family. She finally succumbs and relinquishes her one chance of happiness. He is touched by her grace and nobility under great duress.

For nearly two years the young Bach was employed in the Weimar Court as both violinist and valet. He wrote his 6 Partitas for himself to play. Dance rhythms infect all of this music, although this Prelude is not in itself a Dance number. Its exuberance and dazzling technical demands are clear to behold.

Beim shlafengehen (Falling asleep). The others are Spring, September and At Sunset. They are almost the last pieces that Richard Strauss wrote, infused with a calm acceptance of his coming mortality. They were first performed at the Proms in London in 1950, sung by the great Swedish Wagnerian Soprano Kirsten Flagstad, as requested by the composer. Here it is Jessye Norman, not strictly a soprano but blessed with as rich and flexible a sound as one could hope for.

I can reveal here that we plan to stage The Yeomen of the Guard at The Grange in a few years’ time, viruses nothwithstanding. To my mind, it is as strong musically as any of them, and has a stirring tragic story.

67 years span the first performance of The Yeomen of the Guard and that of Peter Grimes - almost the same as between Wagner’s Tannhäuser and Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring. It doesn’t seem that long, but the change of both sensibility and expression in each case is startling. This is the first of the four orchestral interludes in the opera. It paints a vivid picture.

This is from his ‘semi’ opera The Faerie Queene, written purely as incidental music and drama to Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. “Let noise and care, doubt and despair, envy and spite, (the Fiend’s Delight), be ever banish’d hence”. I hope your nights are full of soft repose.

Bossa Nova Heaven.

The last track is actually the last 6 tracks heard as a sequence (*). They are the last 6 movements of the total of 30 which comprise the whole. One of the most viewed portraits of the composer has him holding the manuscript of this masterpiece (Variation 13). The haunting ‘Aria’ is a slow Sarabande, which both begins and ends this astonishing set of variations.