Ginastera’s music for the ballet Panambi (8.557582) might be seen as the Argentine composer’s own moment of dawn, in that it’s his Op. 1 and so dates from his early period when he was eager to promote an authentically national voice in his work. Panambi is based on a romantic and supernatural legend of the Guaraní Indians, a tribe from the headwaters of the Rio Paraná in northern Argentina. The ballet’s narrative is back-to-front for our purpose, in that it starts at night-time and ends at dawn. But here’s how Ginastera paints his daybreak scene.

Moving north, we have the setting for the final part of Leonardo Balada’s opera Christopher Columbus (8.660237-38) which premiered in 1989. Balada subsequently reworked four scenes from the opera into Columbus: Images for Orchestra (8.573047), the last of which is titled Dawn in the Indies, meaning the West Indies, the end-point of Columbus’ expedition and a way off from the route to Asia he had intended to discover. It begins with the rays of dawn and the calls of the dawn chorus, gradually taking in Indian chants and rhythms.

We stay with Columbus for our next selection, one that portrays the beginning of that momentous journey, rather than its culmination. Which puts us at Granada in Spain, specifically at the Alhambra Palace, taken in the Christian conquest of the city by King Ferdinand II of Aragon and Queen Isabella of Castile in 1492, both where and when Columbus obtained royal endorsement for his expedition. The Irish-born American composer Victor Herbert had his Columbus Suite (8.559027) premiered in 1903. It was his last major orchestral work and is one of those pieces where the genesis of the work, which began some ten years earlier, is as interesting as the music.

The “Columbian Exposition” was the brainchild of producer Steele McKaye, intended to mark the 400th anniversary of Columbus’ voyage in spectacular fashion at the Chicago World Fair of 1893. A huge auditorium was to present a depiction of Columbus’ spiritual and physical adventures as he sailed across a sea of mechanical waves. As part of this novel presentation, McKaye approached both Herbert and Dvořák to supply magisterial orchestral sections. Both agreed, but when McKaye failed to raise sufficient money, the whole project collapsed.

Herbert had been quick off the mark, however, and had already completed a work called The Vision of Columbus, and it’s likely that another movement, Sunrise at Granada, was finished at the same time. This material was worked into his Columbus Suite a decade later. Here’s the opening of Dawn and Sunrise at Alhambra, the first movement of the suite.

Next, we wing it  across the oceans to Japan and to one of that country’s leading composers from the first half of the twentieth century—Qunihico Hashimoto (1904-49). He studied with Egon Wellesz in Vienna and associated with Alois Hába and Ernst Křenek, before meeting Schoenberg in Los Angeles when he was returning to Japan. His music reflects an eclectic mix of late romanticism, expressionism and impressionism, as well as the traditional music of Japan.

Hashimoto composed the music for the ballet The Legend of Hagoromo, which premiered in 1932; he subsequently made a concert suite of his original score, Heavenly Maiden and Fisherman (8.555881). The story tells of a Heavenly Maiden who descends to earth and has her Hagoromo (a magic robe which enables her to fly) stolen by an earthly man. They marry, but after some years the Heavenly Maiden finds her Hagoromo and returns to heaven. The work opens with impressionistic music depicting dawn. The flute soon quietly presents the theme of the Fisherman and the music gradually becomes rhythmical, as if waking up from sleep.

Next, to Germany, and Wagner’s cycle of four music dramas, Der Ring des Nibelung. Naxos has already released the first three parts of this epic work to great acclaim, in recordings with Jaap van Zweden and the Hong Kong Philharmonic; the fourth instalment, Götterdämmerung, was recorded last week and will be released in November. The opera opens at night-time with the Norns, weavers of Fate, resolved to spin and sing; this is followed by dawn (8.572767), which leads to daybreak, portrayed on a more expansive timescale than the previous examples heard.

Peter Grimes is the dramatic opera by Benjamin Britten, in which the fisherman of the title is hounded to death by his fellow-townspeople for his cruelty to his apprentices. It had its first performance in 1945, when Britain’s east coast had no doubt spent years listening to the early-morning encroachment of enemy aircraft, rather than the hypnotic stillness of dawn. With the end of the Second World War in sight, however, here’s how Britten paints his dawn scene (8.557196), somewhat foreboding of the plot, with the stillness of the mighty sea and seagull cries, elements which were surely familiar to Britten from his childhood by the sea in Lowestoft.

Finally, to Ravel’s music for the daybreak scene in Part III of the ballet Daphnis and Chloe (8.570992), an example of magical scoring that never fails to hit the mark: night passes away, the only sound is that of the streams of dew flowing down over the rocks as, little by little, day dawns, birds sing, and the sun rises in an orchestral blaze. And with music like this to start the day, who needs coffee?

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Moscow is our first stop, with Shostakovich setting the scene. He wrote the operetta Moscow, Cheryomushki in 1958, combining his popular musical style with the work’s satirical commentary on the issue of Moscow’s housing shortages and redevelopments. The orchestral suite assembled from Shostakovich’s score has a first movement titled A spin through Moscow (C71096). Its light-hearted fizz may not fit the common perception of a land currently beset by a raft of sanctions, but it’s perfect as a reflection of Shostakovich, the optimistic Russian survivor.

Next stop Buenos Aires, the capital of Argentina and home to Astor Piazzolla (1921–1992), whose name has become synonymous with tango, the signature dance of his native country. Piazzolla said that Buenos Aires taught him the secrets of the tango. He learned these “in a cold room in a boarding house, in the cabarets in the 1940s, in the cafés with balconies and orchestras, in the people of yesterday and today, in the sounds of the streets.” Top that off with the sound of the bandoneón, which is joined at the hip with the tango concept, and you have Piazzolla’s Sinfonia Buenos Aires (8.572271). Here’s part of the opening movement.

I’ve lost count of how many years a visit to Prague has been on my to-do list. It has a distinguished history as regards classical music. Whenever life was proving bumpy for Mozart, for example, he could always rely on a genuinely warm welcome from the people of Prague. The city witnessed two Mozart world premières in the year 1787, with his Symphony No. 30 (‘Prague’) receiving its first airing in January of that year, and Mozart himself conducting the first performance of his opera Don Giovanni in October. But I’ve chosen Dvořák (1841–1904), one of the early leading exponents of Czech musical nationalism, to give us our Prague sound bite. Here’s the opening of his Five Prague Waltzes (8.557352).

There’s no such gaiety to be found in the next snapshot; it paints instead a typically plangent episode in Warsaw’s turbulent history. Schoenberg wrote his A Survivor from Warsaw (8.557528) in 1947. It’s a fully formed music drama, despite being only seven minutes long. The economy of statement and formal compression are extreme, even for Schoenberg: militaristic Germans, limping Jewish victims, stark contrasts in instrumentation, tempo and metre. They all make their mark, not least in the opening couple of minutes.

Krzysztof Penderecki (b. 1933) takes us from Warsaw to Jerusalem, a city of special significance for the Polish composer. He first visited it during the aftermath of the ‘Yom Kippur’ War in 1974. In 1995 he was commissioned to write a work to celebrate the city’s third millennium, and so opted for an oratorio entitled Seven Gates of Jerusalem (according to Jewish tradition, the eighth ‘golden’ gate remains closed in anticipation of the Messiah’s arrival). Penderecki subsequently renamed the work his Seventh Symphony (8.557766). The piece is scored for five soloists, speaker, three mixed choirs and a large orchestra that includes unusual instruments such as the bass trumpet and the tubaphone. The end of the fifth movement, Lauda Jerusalem, gives an idea of the score’s potency.

Rome was recently baking in searingly high temperatures, which put me in mind of the cooling waters in The Fountains of Rome (8.550539), the first of three sets of symphonic poems by Ottorino Respighi (1879–1936) that depict different aspects of the city. The four movements capture the famous fountains of the Eternal City at different periods of the day and night. At noon, the ornate Trevi fountain is portrayed, a solemn theme followed by trumpets announcing the triumph of the sea-god Neptune, in his chariot drawn by sea-horses.

Finally to the The Washington Post, but with no intention of stirring the pot of issues simmering between the established journal and the current occupant of the top Washington post. The (F major) Washington Post (8.559248) is the march that made Sousa famous, the march that made the newspaper famous and the march that made the two-step famous. Composed in 1889 for the U.S. Marine Band to perform at a children’s essay contest sponsored by the newspaper, the march is thought to have been concocted to be the perfect music for a new dance called the “two-step”. By the early 1890s dancing the two-step to the music of Sousa’s The Washington Post March became the popular ingredients that sparked a huge world-wide dance craze.

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