The music here included is all closely associated with Vienna, where Mozart spent the last ten years of his life, where Schubert was born in 1797, and where Beethoven, from 1792 until his death in 1827, was a dominant musical figure.

The music here included ranges from Byrd to Elgar, by way of Handel, with excerpts from Haydn's London Symphony, Beethoven's Wellington's Victory, Verdi's Macbeth and Mendelssohn's music for A Midsummer Night's Dream.

The music here included is all associated in one way or another with Rome and its traditions. It ranges from the overture to Mozart's Roman opera La clemenza di Tito to Wagner's Tannhâuser, whose hero seeks pardon for his sins in the Eternal City, from Puccini's opera Tosca, set in Rome dominated by a corrupt chief of police, to Berlioz's evocation of the city in the age of Benvenuto Cellini, his Roman Carnival Overture.

Treves at the London Hospital and subsequently afforded celebrity status. Where the film is based largely on Dr. Treves' memoirs, the opera is based on biographies of Joseph Merrick giving his character a more central focus than in the film.

The opera is many ways the most original treatment of the story... The most revolutionary aspect of the opera is the writing of Merrick's part for a female singer. At first tempted to make Merrick a counter-tenor, Petitgirard finally decided that only the contralto voice could give him the effects he wanted. Certainly, in the theatre, this helps to create the aura of strangeness, of otherness, which Merrick personifies." The Independent

"Petitgirard's musical vocabulary reflects his French heritage - the influences of Faur», Ravel, Poulenc and Satie are evident - but his subtlety, melodic gift and sensitivity to the drama make him well-equipped to inherit the mantle and create his own outstandingly original idiom... No doubt [the opera] would prove even more powerful onstage than on disc." Opera News

Other districts too boast the extraordinary rock formations that are a feature of the area, set against the lakes and rivers. The region is the home to a number of the 56 ethnic minorities of China, with glimpses of the Yao and Tong peoples, of the spectacular Dragon Spine terraced hillsides where rice is grown in Longsheng Country and the thin ribbon of rushing water that forms the Longsheng Waterfall.

The music chosen for this tour of Guilin is played on traditional Chinese instruments. Performing the music are wind and string ensembles known as 'silk and bamboo', from their silk strings and bamboo pipes, and ensembles that also include percussion. Instruments given prominence include the dizi, a transverse bamboo flute, its characteristic timbre produced by a vibrating membrane over one of the holes, the yangqin, a Chinese dulcimer whose strings are struck with two bamboo sticks. Happy Family and Three Five Seven feature the Chinese shawm, or the suona, and the sheng, a free-reed mouth organ, can be heard in the music that accompanies Longsheng Waterfall. Traditional Chinese music, like Chinese painting, is largely representational, its character indicated in its titles, although these may sometimes be drawn from opera or from poems.

The Big Wild Goose Pagoda, completed in 704 on the orders of the Empress Wu Zetain during her period of rule as Empress of the Zhou dynasty, soon replaced by the restored Tang, is one of the oldest such structures in China. Of particular interest is the tomb of the Emperor Huang, regarded as the founder of the unified Chinese nation, and the remarkable terracotta warriors and horses discovered around the mausoleum of Qin Shi Huang Di, founder of the Qin dynasty who died in 210 B.C.. The tour ends with vies of the precipitous Huashan (Flower Mountain), so called from its five peaks, groups in the shape of a great flower.

The music chosen for this tour of Xi'an is played on traditional Chinese instruments. The excerpts include, to accompany the terracotta warriors, a contemporary composition inspired by Zhang Ji's poem 'Night at the Maple Bridge' giving particular prominence to the zhongruan, a form of Chinese lute of ancient origin. Other instruments heard are the Chinese transverse bamboo flute, the dizi, the Chinese plucked zither, the guqin, and the Chinese lute, the pipa. A glimpse of operatic stage performance finds a place for a Shaanxi opera tune, an example of the music to be heard in the many regional forms of Chinese opera.