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Viktor Ullmann was an Austrian composer, conductor and pianist who died in the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp in 1944. He composed this piece the previous year while in the Theresienstadt concentration camp.

There has been a lot of academic research in to sleep recently (notably by Oxford academic Russell Foster), but for those of us who struggle with the old shut-eye (and age doesn't help, we warn you) then how about Max Richter's 2015 Sleep, an eight and a half hour concept album based around the neuroscience of sleep. Its companion album, From Sleep, from which this track is taken, is only one hour long. The quick nap version, if you like. 

You have to admire anyone who can stay at the top of their game for over 20 years, especially in the world of popular music (and maths, of course). Beyoncé Knowles-Carter remains as commercially and critically successful as ever with this song high up in 2022 song of the year lists.

If you don't want Beyoncé swearing at you, here's the radio version

Dance away the January heartache with a Dobie.

Emahoy Tsegue-Maryam Guebrou is a 98-year-old Ethiopian nun whose solo piano music came to prominence in 2006 as part of the Ethiopiques collection. She was trained in the western classical tradition though her music has been described as bluesy, freewheeling waltzes with the influence of the chants of the Orthodox Church. It might all sound a bit obscure, but it is well worth a listen.

Christine McVie, singer and songwriter with Fleetwood Mac, died this week, Christine was part of the band's most commercially successful period, but its first incarnation was as a blues band led, as on this track, by Peter Green.

Ageing musicians playing the songs they wrote when young can be a little 'awkward'; but in this case Paul Weller makes it work. Boy About Town from his Jam days is a song about a defiant 21-year-old. Nearly 40 years of life later, with the same words, it is something different. 

Young first, then older.

Ballet music, where the music is as important as the dance, was a product of the late 19th Century onwards and was led by Russian composers such as  Tchaikovsky, Stravinsky and, here, Sergei Prokofiev. You can almost picture Cinders' dream.

For musicologists, the period between rock & roll and the Beatles first single in 1962 (Love Me Do) is often seen as rather quaint, but Runaway is certainly not quaint with Del's vocals and the instrumental break from the Musitron, an instrument, according to Wiki, based on the Clavioline, a forerunner to the synthesizer invented by Constant Martin in France in 1947. Check it out.

Lovers' Rock, romantic reggae put crudely, came to prominence in London in the 1970s, and has been a huge influence in the decades since, especially on R&B and hip-hop. One of film director Steve McQueen's recent Small Axe films was entitled Lovers Rock and featured this song, probably the best known of the genre.