The people of Troy celebrate deliverance from ten years of siege by the Greeks. A large wooden horse has been wheeled into the city. This must be an offering to Pallas Athene. So begins this epic opera, with both libretto (drawn from Virgil’s Aeneid) and music by Hector Berlioz. His biographer, David Cairns, writes, ‘an opera of visionary beauty and splendour, compelling in its epic sweep, fascinating in the variety of its musical invention... it recaptures the tragic spirit and climate of the ancient world.” I remember a master at school arranging a week of listening to the whole opera, an act a day, not compulsory but forcefully persuasive. He was right to be so.

One of those bluesy jazzy songs that catches ones attention unawares. Or did mine. An intensely musical modern American singer.

The interrogatory opening “Warum” (“Why ?) of this motet is always powerful and disturbing. Brahms pays homage to Bach in this intense setting of a text from the Book of Job. I can’t help feeling that there are sentiments expressed here which are not inappropriate for this time. “Why has light been given to the weary of soul?”

If I had to choose a favourite Girl Band, which I have to say has never been required of me (and my first thought would be the Andrews Sisters and the Supremes) it would be All Saints. This has ‘Amazing Grace’ as the hook with a hypnotic gospel-infused riff. Again, I admire their musical skills.

The best Handel operas all have at least one time-stopping, gut wrenching, heart rending aria. Ariodante has two, here it is sung by Lorraine Hunt, who touched her audiences deeply. She died catastrophically early. I was lucky to sing with her a few times, the first on the campus of Maryland University, in a concert mostly memorable for the arrest of the other soprano soloist an hour before kick-off for allegedly assaulting a campus parking cop. She had her 3 month-old baby in the back of the car and was dropping off her dress outside the church. Singers, eh! We finally started Handel’s Israel in Egypt with Lorraine deputising for her until Part 3. Back to Ariodante: “Have fun, you faithless deceiver, in the arms of your lover”. Lorraine gets to perfection the anger and the sadness.

Please don’t read anything into this choice. As much as any opera, this embodies the soul and tragedy of Mother Russia. A nobleman, Boris Godunov, has engineered his elevation to Tsar by means of the murder of the rightful young heir. He is haunted through his life to the point of madness with this dreadful secret and tries to cover it up with an imposter. At the end, he summons his son Fyodor and implores him to attend to the well-being of Russia. It was after Rimsky-Korsakov had improved the orchestration of this roughly-hewn score and presented in Paris and London with Fyodor Chaliapin in the title role that it found its place as a globally popular masterpiece.

This is really all about the saxophone. On this track there are two of the greatest, Johnny Hodges and Coleman Hawkins. Seamless vocal lyricism and effortless close harmony. One sighs in joyous admiration. I hope you agree.

A rhapsody, which tells the story in Nicholai Gogol’s novel about an old cossack warrior and his two sons, who travel to the Cossack headquarters in Ukraine to go to war against Poland. Janáček, a Moravian from Brno, loved all things Russian and celebrates the unquenchable vitality of the Russian spirit in this graphic depiction of the violent events of this tragic nationalistic adventure. This startling music was composed around the same time as one of his first operas Jenufa. The music has the rhythms and inflections of the Czech language infused within it. In this episode, the second son Ostap is captured in battle, taken to Warsaw for torture and execution, which is watched by his father in disguise. We hear his anguished cry from the watching crowd and the wild dance macabre mazurka of the triumphant Poles.

Rosa Ponselle is considered one of the great singers of the last century. She sang mostly at The Met, with occasional forays to Europe. We hear her here in perhaps unaccustomed repertory. 63 composers responded to the challenge to set this poem by Giuseppe Carpani in 1807-8. Beethoven’s stood head and shoulders above all the others, and remains a dark brooding tragic standard of the song rep. to this day.

The composer migrated from his native Hungary to America at the start of the 2nd WW. He initially struggled there both with composing opportunities, money and mental health. The joie de vivre of this music, written toward the end of his life, reveals a clear improvement in his disposition. It captures the infectious ebullient spirit of the folk song, which so much of his writing celebrates.

One of the singers I most miss making music with is Anthony Rolfe-Johnson. Every time I hear him on record, he improves. Here he is in live performance singing the Britten folk-song arrangement which I think is one of the most successful. One can almost hear the composer invent it as an improvisation as it unfolds.

We end with an organ voluntary. Crowds flocked to hear the composer improvise on the organ every Sunday. This is what he was most renowned for in his lifetime. Again, we can imagine him ‘making this up’ as he went along. A light dancy jig leads inexorably to contrapuntal depth and majesty.