As the songs of these sirens fade into the distance, we find ourselves arriving in Rome, our host none other than Ottorino Respighi. Here the music tinkles gently through the fields, skipping along like a clear spring, before vanishing underground, and progressing through a network of harmonies of ever increasing pressure to where the great pipes of an organ and the resounding brass of the trumpets propel it skyward in a great swoosh, the fountain spurting into the air with the crash of three cymbals, and then the slow trickling down as the notes fall back to earth and the gushing momentum of the sound dies away in ripples. We are reluctant to leave – we keep turning around to look back – like characters in some old black and white movie, watching some familiar village scene grow fainter and fainter.
Falstaff goes off on an imaginary sight-seeing trip to Europe
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