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Coffee Break Classics
Time out with relaxing music

Put your feet up, pour out a cup of coffee and listen to some beautiful music! Take a few restorative moments of calm in the company of some of the world’s finest melodies: flute, harp and piano combined with orchestras in concertos by Albinoni, Mozart and Beethoven, plus some lovely Spanish music for guitar duet.

This selection of music by some of the world’s greatest composers combines a series of slow concerto movements with some fine duets for classical guitar. The pace is slow, the atmosphere deliberately calm. The concertos feature gentle instruments such as the flute and harp (a delightful combination), the piano and the violin. The guitar duets, played by two of Britain’s leading guitarists, are carefully paced to provide a complete musical programme for relaxation: perfect for a coffee break snatched from a busy day!

Behind every successful woman…is a substantial amount of coffee.
Stephanie Piro

Coffee is not my cup of tea.
Samuel Goldwyn

Gaspar Sanz was a Spanish-born priest who studied theology in Salamanca and music in Italy, becoming one of Spain’s most important seventeenth-century composers. He worked for royalty and published a famous and very detailed tutor on how to play the guitar. The lovely ‘Pavanas’ is a gentle work, based on the rhythms of an ancient Spanish dance.

Mozart and Beethoven were the classical composers par excellence. They made their careers in Vienna (where Sanz had also worked around a hundred years earlier). Both men were performers as much as composers, and wrote some of their greatest works for their own concert appearances. Mozart’s ‘Concerto for flute and harp’ is one of his most elegant works. He understood the special sonorities of these instruments extremely well. The ‘Piano Concerto No 23′ is one of his best-known works, and this ‘adagio’ movement (track 6) one of his most-loved. Beethoven’s early concertos could be very flamboyant, as befitted a young and great virtuoso pianist, but this ‘adagio’ (track3) is restrained and gentle. The ‘Violin Concerto’ is a later work, it’s central movement calm and serene: one of the finest melodies ever written.

It’s back to Spain for nineteenth-century contemporaries Granados and Albéniz. The moods and colours of Sanz’s music carry through to these much more modern composers, who often through caution to the winds and abandon the mood of restraint which characterises many slow movements.

Remo Giazotto was a scholar and academic who focused much of his efforts on the music of Albinoni, a Venetian opera composer who also published many concertos. Giazotto claimed to have discovered the ‘Adagio’ in a manuscript found in a Dresden library. In fact, Giazotto composed the entire work himself in 1957!

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