The key question about Havergal Brian’s Violin Concerto in C major is whether it ought to be regarded as one of the great British concertos or whether it deserves its relative obscurity. Now, the Brian aficionado will insist that this work is a masterpiece and deserves to be taken up by any number of leading soloists and orchestras. But what is the competition? I am sure that the readers do not need to be read a lecture on the repertoire, however it is worth a few moments just listing the some key British works in this genre.Few would argue that...
Thursday, May 30, 2013
Monday, May 27, 2013
HARRIET COHEN (1895 -1967)The Complete Solo Studio RecordingsHarriet Cohen (piano)APR Recordings APR7304I will not be the first person to have fallen into the trap of regarding Harriet Cohen as being merely a ‘pendant’ of Sir Arnold Bax. To be fair, I first heard of her through my early ‘study’ of Bax back in the nineteen seventies. The received wisdom suggested that for three decades, she ‘pursued a tempestuous affair with this composer’....
Friday, May 24, 2013
The Quartet for Strings No.7 in Eb was written in 1916: this was in the middle of the First World War. Therefore, it is hardly surprising that this work was subtitled 'Threnody'. It is a song of lamentation.This quartet is written in four movements with three of them being slow. The work opens with a very dark and lugubrious Lento. However there are some moments of warmth in this movement. With increasing complexity it builds up to a climax which...
Tuesday, May 21, 2013
Accompaniments as listed below.Recorded between 1928-1957See end of review for track-listingAPR RECORDINGS 7504 Myra Hess and I go back a long way. In the mid nineteen-sixties my late father bought a radiogram – complete with multi-stylus feature and auto-changer. I remember that at first he had only two records – one by the great Paul Robeson and the other was the ubiquitous ‘highlights’ from the Huddersfield Choral Society’s recording of Messiah....
Saturday, May 18, 2013
Charles Williams contributed a number of works celebrating railways. I think of the score to the film Night Train to Munich (1940), the miniature orchestral piece Model Railway and the present Rhythm on Rails. However, any listener imagining that this present piece has its genesis in a consideration of the Royal Scot speeding between London Euston and Glasgow Central, the Cornish Riviera travelling between Paddington and Penzance or the Talisman...
Wednesday, May 15, 2013
One of the minor pleasures, but ultimately of frustration, is noting piano works mentioned in old musical journals. In the present instance, the February 1929 issue of The Dominant devotes a column to recently published piano music with special emphasis on what was useful for ‘educational’ purposes. It is one of the unfortunate facts of programme makers and recitalists at present (2013) that they tend to avoid this ‘genre’. Presumably this is because they are deemed ‘too easy’ and do not show off the technical achievements of the maestro....
Sunday, May 12, 2013
It is always instructive to examine reviews of music from the past. There are two key issues here. Firstly, what was the contemporary estimation of a piece of music – especially if it was a first performance and secondly what has been the subsequent success or failure of the music in question. The author of this review from The Musical Mirror has singled out a fewpieces of British music which were given at the 1930 Promenade Concerts held at the Queen’s Hall between 9 August and 4 October 1930.On September 4 the evening opened with Lord Berners’...
Thursday, May 9, 2013
Charles Williams (1893-1978) wrote a huge corpus of music for the concert platform and for the film industry. However, most of the latter is un-credited. He is best known for the romantic tune The Dream of Olwen which was used in the 1948 film While I Live. Equally successful was the Devil’s Galop which was the theme music to the successful radio show Dick Barton, Special Agent. Other well-known tunes are the theme music to the...
Monday, May 6, 2013
Philip Scowcroft: British Light Music: A personal gallery of 20th-century composers 2nd edition 2013
The first problem faced in reading or reviewing this book is defining ‘light’ music: I believe that no-one has come to a truly satisfactory answer. A good characterisation is given on the web pages of the Light Music Society: - ‘Light Music bridges the gap between classical and popular music, although its boundaries are often blurred. It is music with an immediate appeal, music to entertain and to enjoy. It has a strong emphasis on melody…’...
Friday, May 3, 2013
One of the best-known pieces (if such is not an exaggeration) of Harry Farjeon’s (1878-1958) music is the ‘Tarantella’ for piano. This was made popular by the great Eileen Joyce in the late nineteen-thirties. However, there is a problem. The work does not appear to feature in the Farjeon’s 'catalogue'. I cannot find reference to it on WorldCat, the Royal Academy of Music or the British Library catalogues. Christopher Howell has suggested that ‘it...
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