This delightful collection illustrates the good humour central to the music of Hans Christian Lumbye, the “Nordic Strauss”. Musical Director of the Tivoli Gardens concert hall orchestra for over thirty years, Lumbye wrote in all the popular dance forms of the era, including the lively polka, the more stately polka-mazurka and the galop – which became almost synonymous with his name. Although the Strauss family gained international fame and fortune by writing similar music, Lumbye’s orchestrations have a distinctive, lyrical, almost pristine Copenhagen sound that differs from the Vienna composers’ more hot-blooded orchestral tone.