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Having absently, that’s to say dozily switched on BBC Radio 3 down in the kitchen as is my frequent small-hours wont I faintly recognise some emergent wisps of melody & at first while preparing coffee am tempted to switch it off again as the mood of the music feels a bit downbeat & I’m quite concerned to jerk out of darkish dreamtrace mode – but then it begins to gather up brighter themes that mount in more & more endearingly familiar spiraling patterns & I think the name Weber – & having completed the meticulously orchestrated ritual of coffee-making I turn up the volume so’s I’ll go on hearing the piece from the desk upstairs to which I carry the as near-perfect as I ever manage cup of coffee – and a quick check with Radio Times confirms it is indeed the Overture to Weber’s opera ‘Der Freischütz’ which my ears proceed to follow intently as it mounts to its exhilarated climax which arrives all too quickly for my taste & after a downbringingly brief pause the earnestly confidential voice of Jonathan Swain interposes to report who was playing it & introduce the next piece I reflect on the seeming oddity that I know next to nothing about this bloke Weber except that when I hear certain arrangements of instrumental sounds – some of whose titles such as ‘Invitation to the Dance’ I know – that one mainly because swing king Benny Goodman adapted its icerink-swirly introduction as theme tune for his 1930s NBC ‘Let’s Dance’ big band radio shows I’ve heard rebroadcast now & then – & a Quintet for Clarinet & Strings with a lot of deliciously ebullient up&down-scaled trills I always prick up my ears on hearing the faintest breath of – which I remember doing for example when the wondrously versatile Indian writer Vikram Seth chose it as one of his selections for Michael Berkeley’s Sunday noontide Private Passions programme also on Radio 3 some years ago The word Weber appears unbidden on the inbox of my mind when his or in some way Weberlike music turns up & I reflect that just about all the next to nothing I know about Weber textually is that the rest of his name is something like Carl Maria von – which suggests he was German or Austrian & of a perhaps somewhere