Leader, Alfred Barker
Conductor, T. H. Morrison

Georges Bizet had written operas, including La jolie Fille de Perth, before the war of 1870, but at that date he was little known and success had not come to him. This overture to Sardou's Patrie (Fatherland) was admittedly inspired by the sufferings of his country during its terrible ordeal in the Franco-German war, and in power and originality it exceeded anything that he had composed hitherto.
Cherubini, born in Florence in 1760, lived to the great age of eighty-two. In the important development which music underwent during those years he had a considerable share, particularly with regard to church and theatre music in France.
The opera Ali Baba, though not completed until 1833, when the composer was seventy-three, is actually a revised version of an early work -Â Koukourgi - written forty years earlier.