We recently took a vacation to the Bahamas. This was in the month of February, when the weather here in Boston was still gray and bone chilling. I carefully planned the music I would take on the trip—I had already scoped out the palm tree I wanted to lie under from a photo of the pool and beach area on the website of the British Colonial Hilton, where we had booked our stay. I wanted music that would fit in with the sunny, tropical setting of the islands. I wanted music that would lift my spirits and dissipate all the wintry gloom of Boston.

From my iTunes library, I assembled a playlist I called, simply, “Bahamas.” I searched for pieces that went beyond the usual “most relaxing” programming, which has been repeated on countless CDs, e.g., the Romanza from Mozart’s Eine Kleine Nachtmusik and andante from the “Elvira Madigan” concerto; the Meditation from Thaïs; the Air on a G string, etc. As beautiful as those pieces are, they are overdone. They wouldn’t serve my purpose.

Instead, my anti-gloom playlist included a lot of pastoral English music by Vaughn Williams, Butterworth and Parry. I included the two English idylls of George Butterworth, along with his evocative Banks of Green Willow; Parry’s Lady Radnor’s Suite; and Vaughn Williams’ The Lark Ascending (admittedly, an over-anthologized “relaxing” work, but an evergreen for me).

There is a large dollop of Schumann, including the complete Kinderszenen and other solo piano works, such as the slow movement of the Fantasie in C. Also included are the slow movements from the four symphonies of this allegedly bi-polar composer—though these are bittersweet in tone, they offer a kind of ecstatic music that lifts you into a realm of passion and transcendence.

The slow movements of Mendelssohn’s two solo piano concertos are there, and the slow movement from Mozart’s Piano Concerto No. 17. Chopin makes an appearance with the slow movement of the Piano Sonata No. 3 and the Nocturne in D flat (Artur Rubenstein’s performance), which always makes me think of a sunset on a beach for some reason.

I couldn’t leave off Schubert, of course, whose Impromptu in G flat reminds me of a rushing mountain stream. The lovely slow movement from the Schubert’s Piano Trio No. 1 is there, too. The waltz from Tchaikovsky’s Serenade for Strings is included, as well as Pachelbel’s Canon; I couldn’t completely avoid the “most relaxing” warhorses, after all.