QSO Music on Sundays: Musical Zoo at Concert Hall, QPAC

Composers like conjuring birds and beasts in their music. Be amazed by the depictions of fish, wolves, bees and revealing spider suppers, aquariums and balletdancing chicks in this light-hearted realm of animal inspired music. Respighi's The Birds, written in 1931, is not only a tribute to composers of the eighteenth century, it vividly captures birdcalls of the nightingale and cuckoo. In the third movement, there's a portrayal of a feathery riot of clucking hens and in the fifth, hear the woodwind imitating cuckoo strine. Flanders and Swann take a much less subtle and narrative approach in their amusing Warthog and Portuguese-Man-Of-War. Sometimes, the composer, like Haydn in Symphony No. 82, is not attempting to sketch any fauna at all but a musical gesture like the deep grumbling drone in the first movement sounds so much like a bear that the work is nicknamed after the very animal it suggests.