The Beggar's Opera piece satirised Italian opera, which had become popular in London. According to "The New York Times": "Gay wrote the work more as an anti-opera than an opera, one of its attractions to its 18th-century London public being its lampooning of the Italian opera style and the English public's fascination with it." Instead of the grand music and themes of opera, the work uses familiar tunes and characters that were ordinary people. Some of the songs were by opera composers like Handel, but only the most popular of these were used. The audience could hum along with the music and identify
Radius (music ensemble) Radius (music ensemble) Radius is a London music ensemble founded in 2007 by the British composer Tim Benjamin. The ensemble specialises in the performance of new music from around the world (though primarily in the Western classical music tradition) written by living composers and 20th-century masters. The ensemble's artistic director is the British composer Ian Vine, a contemporary of Tim Benjamin at the Royal Northern College of Music from 1994 to 1997. Modelled on the 1960s ensemble The Fires of London, (which in turn was derived from the instrumentation of Schoenberg's Pierrot Lunaire), the core instrumental line-up of Radius is