The world for classical music lovers: 10 pieces to take you away

As the Austrian Airlines Airbus enters its final descent into Vienna International Airport, the public address system bursts into life, filling the plane with the strains of Strauss’s Blue Danube waltz. Immediately I think of the golden interior of the Musikverein concert hall, glittering chandeliers, a hundred couples waltzing in perfect synchronicity.

Czech Airlines uses a movement from Smetana’s Ma Vlast depicting the fast-flowing River Vltava passing under the ancient Charles Bridge as its landing music. Historically, the American carrier United utilised Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue when on approach to New York; several Gulf airlines have commissioned contemporary works featuring ouds, neys and other Arab instruments to welcome passengers to their final destination.

But it may be a while before we are able to board a plane again. Locked down in London, my most adventurous recent journey has involved crossing the Thames by bike, rather than crossing continents by jumbo jet. So I have resorted to travelling through my memories, using music to take me back to a particular place or event.

A massed choir singing Nkosi Sikelel’ iAfrika, first in Ndbele, then in Shona and English, transports me to a music festival in Bulawayo, Zimbabwe, the audience and performers under the shade of ancient baobab and mopane trees. My mind wanders to the dusty road out of the city to Matobo National Park, and the climb up to the eerily silent World’s View where the bodies of Cecil Rhodes and other colonial settlers lie.

Next it’s a medley of John Williams’s Oscar-winning film scores played by the Boston Pops Orchestra in an outdoor concert shell on the city’s Esplanade. It’s the Fourth of July. As the lights fade, the band plays America the Beautiful and The Star-Spangled Banner. A vast Stars and Stripes unfurls itself behind the musicians, fireworks fill the sky. Later, we eat lobster rolls and down bottles of Samuel Adams beer, and talk of returning one day to see the colours of the New England fall.

When the signature tune of The Archers strikes up on Radio 4, I remember a trip in an old Mercedes taxi from Tétouan back to Tangier. We’ve had paella and white rioja for lunch at the Spanish club, and bought coffee in the market. The car windows are down, Moroccan pop plays on the radio. I ask the driver if I can see what else is on the dial. Suddenly the car is filled with the sound of Arthur Wood’s Barwick Green, as a broadcast of the venerable radio soap opera floats on the airwaves over the Mediterranean from the British Forces station in Gibraltar.

The scent of herbs and spices can conjure up past trips to exotic places. My local supermarket has not yet run out of clotted cream, the taste of which, with scones and jam, immediately transports me to an ever-sunny Cornish beach. Pictures, faded from a drawer or still brilliant on my laptop, help relive past pleasures. But music really takes me there. This weekend you will find me working through my CD shelves and logging on to Spotify and YouTube – all to enjoy a mini-break of memories.

The Bavarian Alps

Elgar – Scenes from the Bavarian Highlands

Garmisch-Partenkirchen sits in the shadow of the Zugspitze, Germany’s highest mountain. Richard Strauss built an art nouveau summer house here in 1908, complete with tower and veranda, funded by the income from his opera Salome. He was not the first musician to fall in love with this place. In the 1890s, Edward Elgar and his wife, Alice, had four happy holidays staying with the Slingsby-Bethells, an English couple who took in paying guests. The trips inspired a set of choral songs that are imbued with clean Alpine air and memories of the folk music the couple heard in the town’s beer gardens and cellars.

Cambridge University Chamber Choir, Christopher Robinson (conductor). Naxos

Venice

Reynaldo Hahn – Venezia

Vivaldi’s music evokes Venice as much as any Canaletto painting of the Grand Canal. Monteverdi moved here from Mantua in the early 17th century and filled St Mark’s with beautiful sounds. Rossini, Verdi and Wagner were regular visitors; Igor Stravinsky is buried on the cemetery island of San Michele. But for me it is a simple song cycle that best captures the beauty of Venice – Venezia by Reynaldo Hahn. The songs are in Venetian dialect, the first offering an invitation to board a gondola and tour the spectacle of the lagoon. It was an experience Hahn knew well; from their berth at the Hotel Danieli, he and his friend Marcel Proust would venture out each day to explore canals, churches, palazzos and piazzas.

Anthony Rolfe Johnson (tenor), Graham Johnson (piano). Hyperion

Penzance

Malcolm Arnold – four Cornish Dances

Cornwall provides its own music. As visitors disembark the Cornish Riviera train at Penzance railway station, they are greeted by a chorus of seagulls accompanied by the percussive clamour of ropes clinking on the masts of yachts in the harbour. A virtuoso solo comes from the horn of the RMV Scillonian III, blasting twice as the ship prepares to set sail for the Isles of Scilly. When it comes to a real orchestra, no one has painted a more vivid picture of Cornwall than Malcolm Arnold, who lived here in the 1960s, and relished the local tradition of brass bands, male voice choirs and Methodist hymns. His Four Cornish Dances reflects the beauty of a landscape bordered by the sea. But there is grit, too – Arnold was well aware of the tough life lived by tin miners, fishermen and farmers.

London Philharmonic Orchestra, Malcolm Arnold (conductor). Lyrita

St Petersburg

Tchaikovsky – the Nutcracker

Shoppers swathed in fur process down Nevsky Prospekt, its richly decorated Christmas shop windows filled with toys, games and elaborate displays of chocolates, crystallised fruits and bonbons. A few hardy skaters make their way to the frozen River Neva; a carpet of snow covers the courtyard of the Winter Palace. And at the Mariinsky Theatre, the curtain has just risen on The Nutcracker, the ballet that premiered here in December 1892. The sound of Tchaikovsky’s rich score seeps out through the closed auditorium doors, his waltzes and national dances gently echoing around the lavish space of the concert hall, where across the years imperial tsars, Soviet secretary-generals and Russian presidents have taken their interval caviar and champagne.

Kirov Orchestra, Valery Gergiev (conductor). Philips 

Havana

Gershwin – Cuban Overture

You can taste the salt in the air as you glide along the Malecón in an open-topped Fifties Chevrolet. From a distance, the buildings that line the seafront esplanade reflect an assured era of glamour. Close up, they are cracked and subdivided into tiny apartments. It wasn’t like this in 1932 when George Gershwin spent a fortnight in Havana. He spent most nights at the city’s casinos, but he also found time to meet local musicians. As a souvenir he bought a set of Cuban percussion instruments, including claves and güiro. Back in New York he used them with orchestral instruments in his Cuban Overture, the ultimate musical “wish you were here”.

Boston Pops Orchestra, Arthur Fiedler (conductor). RCA

Cluj-Napoca

Bartok – Romanian Folk Dances

Listen to Bartok’s Romanian Folk Dances and allow yourself to be transported to the terrace of a café on Piata Unirii, the grand square in the centre of Cluj-Napoca. The menu has been considered, grilled sausages and paprika chicken ordered, along with a bottle of chilled white wine made from the local feteasca alba grape. As a Hungarian, Bartok knew this elegant Transylvanian city by its old name, Kolozsvar. From here, he set out to remote villages to collect local folk songs played on fiddle or shepherd’s flute. He arranged six of them for piano. They were published in Budapest in 1915, just five years before the Treaty of Trianon saw Transylvania transferred to Romanian rule.

Sir Andras Schiff (piano). Denon

Newcastle

Charles Avison – Concerto Grosso in D, Opus 6

Charles Avison was an 18th-century musical pioneer. As a young man, he studied in London but soon returned to Newcastle, his home city, where he became a church organist and tireless impresario. His fortnightly concerts in the Assembly Rooms put Newcastle on the map as a cultural centre with a lively music scene. Listen to his Concerto Grosso and imagine you are walking along the gentle curve of Grey Street, one of the UK’s finest Georgian streets. Continue toward the colonnade of the Grade I listed Theatre Royal, and on to the River Tyne, its bridges evoking Newcastle’s history as a great mercantile and maritime city.

The Avison Ensemble, Pavlo Beznosiuk (violin/director). Naxos

Tasmania

Peter Sculthorpe – Djilile

It doesn’t take much more than five hours to drive the coastal route between Launceston and Hobart – but it’s a trip that warrants three or four days. I did it a few years ago and the music of Tasmanian composer Peter Sculthorpe brings that journey vividly back to life: giant eucalyptus trees, Honeymoon Bay, oysters by the sea in Swansea, Georgian houses in Evandale, Longford and Richmond. One night we watched the sun set and the bright southern stars burst into life. The experience was accompanied by repeated plays of Djilile, Sculthorpe’s mournful, haunting string piece inspired by an indigenous Australian chant, translated as “whistling duck
on a billabong”.

Australian Chamber Orchestra, Richard Tognetti (director). Chandos

A Nile Cruise

Saint-Saens – Piano Concerto No. 5 ‘Egyptian’

The French composer Camille Saint-Saëns found the northern European winters too harsh, so he made an annual trip to warmer climes. When he stepped from his ship on to the quay at Luxor in 1896, he had in his possession a tune he had transcribed en route, a Nubian love song he had heard sung by a Nile boatman. It was to become the starting point of his Piano Concerto No. 5, a gloriously exotic work. Cast aside memories of crowded, polluted Cairo, and think of warm evening breezes blowing across teak decking as Saint Saëns suggests chirping crickets and Arabic scales. All that is missing is the sound of the muezzin’s call to prayer echoing across the water.

Stephen Hough (piano), CBSO, Sakari Oramo (conductor). Hyperion

Buenos Aires

Astor Piazzolla – Estaciones Portenas

There was steak for dinner with chimichurri sauce and a bottle of dark, meaty malbec. We eat late, so as not to be early for the tango club. The entrance is hidden away on a side street, and I wouldn’t have found it without a guide. From inside I could hear the band playing – Astor Piazzolla’s Estaciones Portenas, also known as The Four Seasons of Buenos Aires. Piazzolla composed his first tango aged 11 while he was growing up in New York – perhaps it helped him remember his distant homeland. He was a musician celebrated internationally by the time he started this work in the 1960s – a celebration of both Vivaldi and the portenos, the citizens of his adopted home city.

Katherine Hunka (violin), Irish Chamber Orchestra. Orchid Classics

Petroc Trelawny presents Breakfast on BBC Radio 3. He is featuring daily requests for pieces of music that bring back memories of times when travel was easier.