Four Sea Interludes from Benjamin Britten's opera "Peter Grimes." The ocean's beauty and menace, life's tedium and terror, the human mind's brilliance and dark secret corners, mob hysteria and small-town insularity, the nature of uncertainty and the impossibility of proof in the absence of witnesses are all here.
We'll never know whether Grimes killed his young apprentice, but of his own tragic end there can be little doubt.
I don't think any conductor has outdone Bernstein's version of this deeply disturbing piece.
Note to opera haters: There is no singing; these interludes are entirely orchestral.