The English composer Roger Quilter was fellow student of Percy Grainger, Cyril Scott and Balfour Gardner at the Hoch Conservatory in Frankfurt. His reputation in England rests on his songs e.g. he wrote several well-known settings of Shakespeare lyrics, including his, Three Shakespeare Songs’ (‘Come away death’, ‘O mistress mine’, and ‘Blow, blow thou winter wind’), of 1906. But in addition Quilter is also known for his light music such as ‘Where the rainbow ends’, ‘As You Like it’, ‘Country Pieces’ and of course his ‘A Children’s Overture’, with its interwoven nursery rhyme tunes.

Son of a musical village wheelwright married to a musical cook, Haydn became a choirboy in the Cathedral of Vienna and later took pupils and lived sparingly. From 1760 to 1790 he became Kapellmeister to the Esterhazy family during which time he became recognised as the greatest composer of the period with eventually 100 symphonies 80 string quartets and 50 sonatas.

Toy Symphony i.e. ‘Children’s Symphony’, or ‘Symphony burlesque’ is a simple symphony in which toy instruments are employed in addition to the strings of the orchestra. It is in 4 short parts, Allegro, Minuet, Trio and Finale. The Finale is played three times.

Haydn is said to be its first composer although sometimes it is attributed to Leopold Mozart.

In the 19th century, Viennese dance music was dominated by Johann Strauss Sr. and his three sons Johann Jr., Josef and Eduard. Johann Strauss Jr. composed over 170 waltzes, the most popular being the Blue Danube (1867), Tales from the Vienna Woods (1868), Perpetual Motion (1869), Roses from the South (1880) and Emperor Waltz (1888)

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.

Of a distinguished intellectual, artistic and banking family in Berlin, he grew up in a privileged environment (the family converted from Judaism to Christianity in 1816, taking the additional 'Bartholdy'). He studied the piano with Ludwig Berger and theory and composition with Zelter, producing his first piece in 1820; thereafter, a profusion of sonatas, concertos, string symphonies, piano quartets and Singspiels revealed his increasing mastery of counterpoint and form.

Besides family travels and eminent visitors to his parents' salon (Humboldt, Hegel, Klingemann, A.B. Marx, Devrient), early influences included the poetry of Goethe (whom he knew from 1821) and the Schlegel translations of Shakespeare; these are traceable in his best music of the period, including the exuberant String Octet op.20 and the vivid, poetic overture to A Midsummer Night's Dream op.21. His gifts as a conductor also showed themselves early in 1829 he directed a pioneering performance of Bach's St. Matthew Passion at the Berlin Singakademie, promoting the modern cultivation of Bach's music.

His violin concerto was composed when he was about 35 years of age and the familiarity of this most popular concerto is such that the originality of its form is no longer remarked upon.