Pair of nuisance insects those opening the July 2 concert: an incessantly hopping grasshopper and an irritatingly buzzing wasp. There should have been five Insects pieces by Benjamin Britten Instead, who knows why, no more were written by the 22-year-old musician; then, in 1935, still in the early stages of a career that engaged him mostly in film and radio. Instigator of the two pages was oboist Sylvia Spencer, formerly his fellow student at the Royal College of Music in London, who, however, apparently never played them in public. The first performance took place in 1979, three years after Britten's death.

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Mindful of La Fontaine's fable is the Grasshopper and the Ant, first of the Five Pieces for Oboe by Antal Dorati, a celebrated Hungarian conductor of the last century, also a prolific composer. The collection, dated 1980, is dedicated to Heinz Holliger, a leading oboist for New Music. In this picture, the instrument doubles into the two protagonists of the story, enacting the discussion between the prescient ant and the slacker cicada, bearers of opposing visions of existence.

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No small talk, but a tactical chase in The cat and the mouse. One has to imagine Tom and Jerry chasing each other on the keyboard. Except that when, in 1920s Paris, Aaron Copland wrote this "humorous joke," the Hanna and Barbera cartoon did not yet exist. In Europe, the 20-year-old Copland had come there to study with Nadia Boulanger, who was setting up her own "boulangerie," the school from to which a flood of overseas composers would transit for decades, including Gershwin, Piazzolla, Philip Glass, Herbie Hancock. Copland was one of the first. And it gave him immediate satisfaction this piece in which the cat seems to prevail over the mouse (toward the end there is a funeral march, although then the prey manages to to come out of the feline's jaws, albeit limply). Immediately, in fact, the most prestigious publisher in France, Durand, offered to publish it.

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With Sylvano Bussotti's Voliera we find ourselves in the twilight of the 1980s. In the cage fabricated by the multifaceted Florentine artist there is room for a dozen large and small birds, including the Skylark and the Mouse (a variety of swallow). It is not accidental the choice of animals nor the fact that most of them are to be played with instruments to wind, since the music of the homosexual Bussotti loves to play with the erotic double entendre.

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Back again from one end of the twentieth century with Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov's Flight of the Bumblebee, celebrated, arranged for the most disparate ensembles, which originated not as a self-contained piece but as a symphonic page in a melodrama, The Tale of Tsar Saltan (first performance: Moscow, 1900). Transformed into a bumblebee is the tsarevic who was taken away as an infant from his father and who, once an adult, wants to find him again. Thanks to this transformation succeeds.

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A forest of animals is finally depicted in Leoš Janáček's Concertino for piano and six instruments (1925). These are the same animals that the 71-year-old Czech composer had brought to the stage some time earlier inopera The Crafty Little Fox, an almost Disney-like story with woodland creatures that speak and act like humans. There each was identified from specific instrumental colors, from shredded melodies and rhythms repeated again and again, overlapping and alternating with other equally shredded and repeated rhythms and melodies. The same happens here: Janáček reveals correspondences between the natural world (the Moravian countryside where he grew up) and their reflection in music in letters to friends and to Kamila Stösslová, a senile passion forty years his junior. In those writings he explains that spring air circulates in the Concertino, that one has to imagine the appearance of a cricket, gnats, a deer, a man; in particular he speaks of the presence of a hedgehog in the first movement (duet between piano and horn), a squirrel in the second (duet between piano and clarinet), many nocturnal animals in the third and a stream in the last.