Johann Strauss, Jr. was born October 25, 1825 the first of five children. A number of great composers encountered parental opposition when they decided to undertake a musical career, but none met more than Johann Jr. His father, Johann Sr., had decided that one musician in the family was enough and went to great lengths to keep his sons from following in his footsteps. Ironically, all three, Johann Jr., Josef (1827-1870) and Eduard (1835-1916) achieved success as musicians.

It was his mother, Anna, who encouraged Johann's ambition, who bought him his first violin and saw to it that he received musical instruction. Little Johann secretly studied the violin, making his first attempt at writing a waltz at 6 years of age.

An operetta is literally a “little opera”, originally a play with overture, songs and dances, but which has evolved into something indistinguishable from opera except for being set to “light music”.

Nevertheless, like so many works now firmly embedded in our affections, Die Fledermaus had a distinctly chilly reception, getting the chop after a measly 16 performances in Vienna

The overture is firmly in the tradition established by Rossini and continued in the 20th Century by the likes of George Gershwin, which is a “trailer” for the goodies in store. It even starts with a sparkling audience “shutter-upper” (so, be warned!), succeeded by a veritable cascade of mouth-watering melodies.It does, though, make considerable demands on the performers and musicians who must be alive to its many and extreme changes of pace: not generally a feature of his waltzes and polkas, these are the key to much of the hair-raising excitement of this incredibly entertaining music.

Max Bruch was born in Cologne, where he had his early musical training, going on to a career as a teacher, conductor and composer. From 1891 he was principally occupied in Berlin as professor of composition at the Berlin Academy.

He was long active as conductor of various musical bodies including Liverpool Philharmonic Soc.(1880-3), composer of choral works, works for violin and orchestra and ‘cello and orchestra.

Bruch’s First Violin Concerto is among the best known in the romantic repertoire. He was only 19 when he started work on it, but it was not completed for another 10 years, and even then he made extensive revisions following it’s first public performance. The concerto is in the customary three movements (the first movement joins the second without a break) with a particularly expressive central slow movement.

The outer movements contain equally strong melodies and it is interesting that the principal themes of both require the violinist to use the technique of double stopping (playing of two strings at once). These bold themes are then contrasted with more reflective melodies.

Violin Concerto in G Minor is the piece of music that gives Germanic composer Max Bruch his lasting legacy. It is by far his most popular piece. It is an outstanding achievement by this beloved composer!

Richard Strauss enjoyed early success as both conductor and composer, in the second capacity influenced by the work of Wagner.

He achieved great success with a series of impressive operas, at first on a grand scale and later tending to the more classical restraint.

His operas include Salome based on the play of that name by Oscar Wilde, which includes the Dance of the Seven Veils, Electra and Der Rosenkavalier (The Knight of the Rose).

Richard was surrounded by music early in his life. His father, Franz Strauss, was a famous horn player in Germany and his mother came from a wealthy family of brewers. Franz, Richard's father, played in the world's premier orchestra with Hans von Bulow and Richard Wagner. At the age of 4, Richard Strauss began playing piano and at 17, he had already composed a symphony (in Munich), a violin concerto (New York) and a Wind Serenade for 13 instruments in E flat major (in Dresden).

Born in St. Petersburg (Russia), little of Borodin's music was heard in his lifetime. When he died quite suddenly at the age of 53, he left behind most of an opera that he had been working on for some 17 years. Thanks to its completion by Rimsky-Korsakov and Glazunov, Prince Igor is now hailed as a masterpiece of Russian opera.

Borodin was a chemist by profession and founded a women’s medical school. In association with Balakirev, Mussorgsky, Cui, and Rimsky-Korsakov, he was considered part of the Kuchka (Stassov's expression, variously translated as the Mighty Five, Handful, Heap, and Bunch), and almost totally unknown as a musician outside of this circle. His first opera was a complete disaster, being performed only once. His second opera was never completed (Rimsky-Korsakov later used the idea) and his third involved only a contribution of one act to a joint work with Mussorgsky, Cui, and Rimsky-Korsakov. In Prince Igor he aimed at an operatic epic similar to Glinka's Ruslan i Lyudmila, but he died before it was completed.

The Polovtsian Dances are a sequence of normally Choral and Orchestral pieces forming a ballet scene in the opera. The Polovtsy were a nomadic people who had invaded Russia.