Relayed from The National Trades and Industrial Exhibition, Bingley Hall, Birmingham
Medley of Dance Tunes
This is really a piece of festival music called 'The year 1812', and not an overture at all. It was written to be performed at the consecration of a church in Moscow which had just been built, some sixty years after the event, to commemorate the retreat of Napoleon's army of 1812, but the performance on that occasion was after all abandoned, probably because of the difficulties involved.