French by birth, of Spanish descent but declaring Germany to be his musical fatherland, Lalo was a cosmopolitan European to his fingertips. He was also a musical traveller, as evidenced by the two violin concertos that followed 1874’s Spanish-influenced Symphonie espagnole: 1878’s Fantaisie Norvégienne and 1879’s Concerto russe. Lalo was born in Lille in 1823 but spent most of his life in Paris. His success as a composer of orchestral music came relatively late—he was already in his fifties when the Symphonie espagnole caught the public imagination—but chamber music was the beneficiary. The influences of Schumann and Mendelssohn stalk the Piano Trio No. 1 in C Minor, Op.7 (1849/50), while Lalo’s Germanic leanings came to the fore in his Symphony in G Minor (1885-6). His opera Le Roi d’Ys, which he worked on for more than a decade, was finally staged four years before his death in 1892.