Welcome to St John's, Smith Square in the heart of Westminster.

The nation's politicians buzz around this area every day of the week; we are just a few metres away from the Palace of Westminster, Big Ben, Downing Street and Westminster Abbey, with St John's tucked away off the main road and the River Thames. We're here for this, the opening concert of the European Broadcasting Union's week of concerts celebrating London as a city of music, and we're broadcasting live to the following countries across Europe: Austria, Belgium, Croatia, Estonia, Finland, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Latvia, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Turkey, the United Kingdom and Yugoslavia. 

Barry Wordsworth conducts the BBC Concert Orchestra in music that is either about London, or associated with it. In the first half there are 2 works that were premiered in the capital : Mendelssohn's Overture The Hebrides, inspired by the Scottish isles but given its first performance here in London; and Haydn's 97th Symphony, one the 12 'London' symphonies that Haydn wrote for performance in the Hanover Square Rooms, where he was the resident composer. Then, in the second half, we take a trip around London courtesy of 4 composers who were directly inspired by the city : John Ireland's London Overture, Percy Grainger's witty Handel in the Strand, Eric Coates' trip around the West End in his London Again Suite and, to finish, a waltz - Memories of Covent Garden by Johann Strauss. 

Right now, London is basking in its status as one of the most popular cities in the world; every year  millions of visitors to the city sample its great buildings, art galleries, concert halls, restaurants and, of course, its ever-creative music scene - pretty much any kind  of music you can imagine is played here in London every day of the week; a multi-cultural melting pot of ideas and talent. It wasn't always quite like that, of course, but certainly in Haydn's day, over 200 years ago, and in Mendelssohn's day a little later, London was a popular centre for music-making and one of the cities in which composers liked to succeed. Mendelssohn arrived here in 1829, after a particularly rough English Channel crossing, green around the gills maybe but eager to establish himself in the city. He threw himself into everything the place offered - he went to plays, mixed with the hoi-polloi, studied scores at the British Library, went to the House of Parliament, was a regular at society balls and, of course, he gave a series of concerts. No wonder, when summer came around, he needed a holiday and for that Mendelssohn sped off to the highlands of Scotland. On the western coast, looking out at the Hebrides, the first notes of his Overture came to him there and then. The following day, on another rather sickly boat trip, he saw the caves of  Staffa and was taken with the largest, the one associated with the Celtic legend of Finn MacCool - Fingal. 

Joshua 

Handel's oratorio 'Joshua' was one of the composer's most popular works during his  lifetime and its lavish, dramatic score has ensured its enduring appeal. Handel depicts with vivid intensity the Old Testament story -- the collapse of the walls of Jericho, the razing by fire of the city, and the moment when Joshua stops the sun and moon in their tracks are amongst the most memorable moments of a consistently fine work. 

Mark-Anthony Turnage 

A composer of international stature, Mark-Anthony Turnage is indisputably among the most significant creative figures to have emerged in British music of the last two decades. Like Britten, Tippett and Birtwistle before him, he has achieved recognition in both the concert hall and opera house. Through music of flamboyant contrasts he has held up a mirror to the realities of modern life, and in so doing has made a broad appeal to an enquiring contemporary audience. 

Born in 1960, Turnage showed exceptional promise from an early age. By 1981, the year in which his orchestral Night Dances won him the Guinness Composition Prize, he had studied at the Royal College of Music with Oliver Knussen and John Lambert, and had also discovered the no less important musical influences of jazz and of Miles Davis in particular. Two years later, the award of the prestigious Mendelssohn Prize enabled him to work with Gunther Schuller in Tanglewood. Here, his talent was also recognised by Hans Werner Henze, who encouraged the young composer to write an opera for the Munich Biennale festival.The triumphant première of the resulting commission, Greek, in 1988, and the many ensuing productions worldwide of this two-act stage work based on Steven Berkoff's play, established Turnage's reputation as an artist who dared to forge his own path between modernism and tradition by means of a unique blend of jazz and classical styles. 

The major works that followed, Three Screaming Popes, Kai, Momentum and Drowned Out, harvest of a four-year period as Composer in Association with the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra and Sir Simon Rattle from 1989 and 1993, plus the song cycle Some Days (1989), opened up a greater freedom and confidence of expression. The process of assimilation reached an apotheosis in the saxophone concerto Your Rockaby (1993), and three years later Blood on the Floor. In this nine-movement suite, commissioned by Ensemble Modern, and written for the distinguished jazz musicians John Scofield and Peter Erskine, and Martin Robertson (the soloist in Your Rockaby), Turnage continued the searching social critique he had begun in Greek, exploring the tragedy of contemporary drug culture in terms of tough yet heartfelt lyricism.

The stage again dominated Turnage's activities in the second half of the 1990s. The major work was his second full-length opera, The Silver Tassie (1997-1999), premièred to great acclaim at English National Opera in February 2000, and the fruit of his term as Composer in Association to the company, and advisor to its Contemporary Opera Studio. In this skilful adaptation of Sean O'Casey's masterpiece, Turnage pursued his quest for directness of expression, which had already ranged from fusion and football chants to the paintings of Francis Bacon, into new and exciting syntheses. His achievement won The Silver Tassie both the South Bank Show and the Olivier Awards for Opera in 2001. In Silent Cities (1998), commissioned by the Tokyo Philharmonic Orchestra, he translated the fury of the opera's wartime setting into a stark, orchestral canvass; and in the millennial commission for modern and period instruments, About Time (1999), he boldly challenged the divide between contemporary and authentic historical performance practices. Mark-Anthony Turnage's appointment in 2000 as the BBC Symphony Orchestra's first Associate Composer, brilliantly initiated with Another Set To for trombonist Christian Lindberg, heralded a new and no less productive phase for a composer who has always thrived in the heat of creative partnership. 

With instrumental writing currently the focus of his work, he completed two movements of his orchestral triptych for the BBC SO, A Quick Blast (Cheltenham Festival 2001) and Uninterrupted Sorrow (Proms 2002) and a joint ASKO and BCMG commission, Bass Inventions, premièred by the bass player Dave Holland in Amsterdam in May 2001. Dark Crossing was premièred at the 2001 Basel 'Music Month' by Oliver Knussen and the London Sinfonietta, with whom Turnage has had a long and fruitful collaboration. Scorched, co-written with John Scofield for jazz trio and orchestra, is another large-scale product of his engagement with the work of jazz musicians, and it received a triumphant première in September 2002 with Scofield, Patitucci, Erskine and the Frankfurt Radio Symphony Orchestra and hr Big Band conducted by Hugh Wolf. 

Wigmore Hall 

London's one hundred year old Wigmore Hall sees the return of one of its most popular artists. The acoustics of this intimate recital room in Wigmore Street, in London's West End, make this a favourite concert hall for chamber musicians the world over. As one famous pianist remarked recently: 'I wish I could carry that hall around with me in my suitcase.' As well as enjoying fine acoustics the hall's audiences are famed for their discernment. And it was this audience which took Joshua Bell to its heart when he first played here as a teenager. It was suggested that he really made hearts race - and not just for his dazzling playing !  

Tonight this American virtuoso returns with a typically fascinating programme: a very late Schumann rarity - suppressed by his widow - which gives every indication that tragedy was never far away, Beethoven's shocking final Violin Sonata and Janacek's Sonata written between 1914 and 1921. The programme ends with the last of Ysaye's solo dazzling Sonatas, this one dedicated to the Spanish virtuoso, Manuel Quiroga. It comes duty-paid with a crackling habanera. 

Jukka-Pekka Saraste

The Finnish conductor Jukka-Pekka Saraste is the recently-announced new Principal Guest Conductor of the BBC Symphony Orchestra. His programme includes the UK premiere of a clarinet concerto by one of the most exciting of the younger generation of Finnish composers, Magnus Lindberg. The soloist is Kari Kriikku, a virtuoso interpreter of contemporary music. The BBC Symphony Orchestra's current Prokofiev Symphony Cycle continues with the darkly tragic Sixth Symphony, a work in part inspired by Prokofiev's reaction to the Second World War and initially denounced by the Soviet authorities. The concert comes to a close with Janacek's spectacular Sinfonietta, whose movements are named after places in his adopted town of Brno and which opens with a nine-trumpet fanfare. 

La Cenerentola

La Cenerentola [La Cenerentola, ossia La bonta in trionfo ('Cinderella, or Goodness Triumphant')], dramma giocoso in two acts after Charles Perrault's Cendrillon and librettos by Charles-Guillaume Etienne for Nicolas Isouard's Cendrillon (1810, Paris) and Francesco Fiorini for Stefano Pavesi's Agatina, o La virtu premiata (1814, Milan)  Rossini wrote La Cenerentola in a little over three weeks in January 1817. As with two earlier comic masterpieces, L'italiana in Algeri and Il barbiere di Siviglia, Rossini and his librettist had important precedents with which to work, enabling a text to be assembled and musical and dramatic perspectives to be calculated in the shortest possible time. The prima was noisily received by the Roman audience but the fiasco of the first night of Il barbiere di Siviglia was not repeated. Rossini's Rosina in that production, Geltrude Righetti Giorgi, sang Cenerentola, Giacomo Guglielmi sang Don Ramiro and Giuseppe de Begnis, Dandini. The Don Magnifico, Andrea Verni, had sung the same role at La Scala on 10 April 1814 in the prima of Pavesi's Cinderella opera. (Grove)