The triumphal march we present today is taken from the end of the third and final act of the opera. It is played after Riccardo triumphs over Isacio, so that he can finally pledge eternal fidelity to Costanza. In the original setting, the march is played by two trumpets, oboes and strings.

Of the eight pieces, the seventh is without any doubt the best known; as with all of Dvorák's most successful piano works, it exhibits his talents for rhythmic originality and idiomatic textures that lie gratefully under the fingers. Indeed, the piece quickly became one of the most popular classical pieces in existence, and the publisher made vast amounts of money on it by publishing it separately in arrangements for all imaginable instruments and ensembles.

The plot of the opera is based around the eponymous hero, King Richard the Lionheart, and his marriage to Constanza, a Spanish princess. On her sea journey to be married to Riccardo, Costanza and her party are shipwrecked off the coast of Cyprus, where they find shelter at the court of the local governor, Isacio. Upon seeing Costanza, Isacio makes violent advances towards her, and has the idea to send his daughter, Pulcheria, in place of Costanza to Riccardo, whilst keeping the real Costanza for himself.

This “Largo cantabile” is étude No. 10 from Giuseppe Gariboldi's Vingt petites études, or Twenty Studies. While it is a Largo, it shouldn't be played too slowly.

The can-can is regarded today primarily as a physically demanding music hall dance, performed by a chorus line of female dancers who wear costumes with long skirts, petticoats, and black stockings, that hearkens back to the fashions of the 1890s. The main features of the dance are the lifting up and manipulation of the skirts, with high kicking and suggestive body movements.

Offenbach's operetta Orpheus in the Underworld (Orphée aux enfers) is an irreverent parody and scathing satire on Gluck's Orfeo ed Euridice, culminating in this well-known “galop infernal” which has often been copied and has widely been used as the background music for the can-can dance.

During his stay in America, when Dvořák was director of the Conservatory in New York from 1892 to 1895, the composer collected many interesting musical themes in his sketchbooks. He used some of these ideas in his American compositions, notably the “From the New World” Symphony, but some of them remained unused. While in holiday in the summer of 1894 in his beloved home in Bohemia, he worked out some of these sketches into a cycle of 8 piano pieces. Initially, the composer considered naming them “New Scotch Dances” (after an earlier set of Ecossaises he wrote) but eventually settled for the title “Humoresques”.

This is étude No. 10 from the first book of Ernesto Köhler's Progress in Flute Playing, Op. 33. From its very beginning it is evident that this is mainly a study in thirds. It starts off in D major, and explores the keys of G major and E minor before going back to the original key to restate the initial theme.

Dingle is a small port town on southwest Ireland's Dingle Peninsula, known for its rugged scenery, trails and sandy beaches.

The original key of the piece is G-flat major (with six flats), but we decided to transpose it up a semitone to G major in order to make it more accessible. Since the piece contains few accidentals, the fussy among us can easily try to play it in the original key by considering a six-flat key signature instead of the printed one. Unfortunately this trick does not work in the minor-mode part, where an enharmonic transposition to F-sharp minor would be needed.

Riccardo Primo (Italian for Richard the First) is one of Handel's unjustly neglected operas, and musically speaking it is arguably one of his finest. The German-English composer wrote the work as homage to the newly crowned King George II and to the nation of England, where he had just received citizenship.

This jig is taken from Chicago Police Captain Francis O'Neill's celebrated collection Music of Ireland, published in 1903. A Cape Breton jig titled “Northside Kitchen” shares a closely related first strain.