Travel the world in music

Music knows no boundaries, so it’s easy to travel in sound without leaving home. Come on a musical journey with us, and let your mind and ears do the travelling. Many of these examples are available with your free trial with classical streaming specialists Primephonic, and also on YouTube and many other platforms.

First, let’s head head across the water to France with Debussy’s turbulent sea symphony, La Mer (which was actually finished in Eastbourne…), and make for the capital, where you can pretend to be George Gershwin's jazzy An American in Paris. Then follow the sun and go south, accompanied by the seductive Bailero from Joseph Canteloupe’s Songs of the Auvergne or Reflets dans l’eau from Debussy’s painterly, impressionist Images.

Cross the border into Italy and bask in British composer Edward's Elgar’s sunny In the South overture, written after a family holiday on the Italian Riviera. Or take in the heady scents in the gardens of the Villa Borghese in Respighi’s Pines of Rome. But for something really swooningly romantic, go straight to Venice and climb aboard Reynaldo Hahn’s La Barcheta, his limpid, languorous gondolier’s song. It's impossible to play it only once...

For a taste of Spain, travel with Russian composer Rimsky-Korsakov’s brightly coloured Capriccio Espagnol, a captivating depiction of a country he had visited only briefly, when serving as a young naval officer. Alternatively, across the Mediterranean, Scheherazade, one of Rimsky’s most popular works, whisks you straight to the warm, sultry world of Arabia, all perfumed, steamy passion.

Maybe you miss the mountains. Never mind, climb ever upward with Richard Strauss’s pulsating Alpine Symphony, an epic dawn-to-dusk depiction of Austrian grandeur.


When you get to New York, stop off at the Metropolitan Opera for the John Adams opera Nixon in China on Thursday 2 April.

If you prefer strolling through the German countryside, set out with Beethoven’s jauntily bucolic Pastoral Symphony, or go further east and admire the rural tranquility of Bohemia, so evocatively captured in Smetana’s Má vlast ('My homeland'). And over in Budapest, you can add a dash of Brahms’s energetic Hungarian Dance No 5 to your musical goulash.

Go north and see Helsinki through the lens of Sibelius’s stirring tone poem Finlandia or cross the border into deepest Russia with Borodin’s In the Steppes of Central Asia.

Across the Atlantic is the USA, the land of opportunity so vividly depicted by Dvorak in his New World Symphony. See the dust fly – not least when you kick up your own heels – in cowboy country, with Copeland’s Rodeo Suite. Or walk the mean streets of New York in the company of Bernstein’s suite from his modern Romeo and Juliet tale, West Side Story.

But if you truly want to get away from it all, look to the skies, with Holst’s wondrous Planets Suite. It's music that is truly out of this world. Safe journeys, everyone.