10.01: Good evening from Gordon Manning and welcome to programme No. 266 of Composers Gallery on 2MCR....Macarthur Community Radio,100.3FM. Starting this evening with music by Austrian composer Richard Heuberger.........the Overture to The Opera Ball, followed by Resphigi’s Suite No. 3 of ancient Airs and Dances with Christopher Lyndon-Gee directing the Australian Chamber Orchestra, a new recording of Sibelius’ Violin Concerto with Joshua Bell as the soloist, the major work is Grieg’s Peer Gynt Suite with a fine performance given by the Gewandhaus orchestra of Leipzig, Vaclav Neumann conducting with the voice of Adele Stolte, soprano. If time permits, we shall be entertained by a short and descriptive composition by English composer Ronald Binge, The Watermill. Do stay tuned for the next two hours for some enjoyable music.

10:04 : (1) HEUBERGER : The Opera Ball Overture
Sydney Symphony Orchestra, conductor, Patrick Thomas
PHILIPS LP (7:30)

It seems that during the last quarter of the nineteenth-century, Vienna was alive with opera and operetta, Johann Strauss II had provided the impetus, with Die Fledermaus, Carnival in Rome and A Night in Venice, Waldmeister and many more, Franz von Suppe followed with The Light Cavalry, Pique Dame, Donna Juanita to mention but three, there were many more, and of course, Franz Lehar who carried on into the twentieth-century with The Merry Widow and others. Enter Richard Heuberger, critic and composer born in Graz in 1850, although previously he was an engineer by profession, music eventually captured him and he devoted the rest of his life to its cause. He too like the others mentioned, produced opera and operetta, perhaps the most famous of all is the Opera Ball which appeared in 1898, an operetta which rivalled the Strausse’s and Lehar, and the story of mistaken identity at the ball, as Angele and Margeurite test the fidelity of husbands Paul and Georges. From it, the popular overture! (1:10)

10:15 (2) RESPIGHI : Suite No. 1 of Ancient Airs and Dances
Australian Chamber Orchestra, conductor, Christopher Linden Gee
OMEGA OCD 1007 (16)

Much of the reputation of Italian composer Ottorino Respighi rests on the kind of brilliant orchestra treatment offered in his Tone Poem triology, The Fountains of Rome, The Pines of Rome and Roman Festivals. His early composition studies in Bologna with Giuseppe Martucci just before the turn of the century and those a little later on with Russian, Rimsky-Korsakov at St. Petersburg ensured that he would have a considerable interest in instrumental music, unusual for an Italian composer. The Ancient Airs and Dances, of which Respighi compiled into three suites between the years 1917 to 1932, were a successful attempt at resurrecting the older style of music reminiscent of the early seventeenth and onward to the eighteenth-century, and bringing such music in line with the twentieth-century. These ingenuously conceived suites are anything but orchestrations in any literal sense, for in their tastefully modernised and even re-harmonised settings, can be admired as virtually newly composed pieces, with additional instruments added. Suite No. 1, composed in 1917 is the delightful music that you shall hear as the climax to this evenings program. (1:15)

10:35 : (3) SIBELIUS : Violin Concerto in D minor, Op. 47
Joshua Bell, violin, Los Angeles Philharmonic Orchestra, conductor, Esa-Pekka Salonen
SONY CD SK 65949 (32:03)

As a music student in Berlin and Vienna, Sibelius wrote several large works which were derivative of Brahms and Tchaikovsky. But it was not long before he evolved his own idiom. When, at the close of the century, he became the musical voice of Finland, he completely and permanently broke all ties with German and Russian Romanticism. After his epic work En Saga, the personality of Sibelius’ music was unmistakable. His austere, solitary, and frequently pastoral moods contrasted with the wild and brilliant outbursts of colour and passion consistent with the Finnish landscape and sagas in musical tones. So completely does this music realise the temperament of its country, that it is often believed that Sibelius utilises actual folk-melodies; but the materials he used, were all of his own.

However, critics point out that he really belonged more to the nineteenth-century rather than to the century which followed, for even though he abandoned romanticism in lieu of contemporary indulgences, he was still regarded as a romantic. I speak not of the Symphonies that he produced between 1899 and 1926, but rather of another interesting work that he composed first in 1903, and later, after thorough revision which took nearly two years, appeared as the definitive version of his Violin Concerto. Sibelius had pioneered a new narrative method in his preceding work, the Second Symphony, one in which cryptic, disconnected musical fragments appeared and disappeared tantalisingly in a fog, only gradually coalescing for a sun-drenched apotheosis. Fog and fragmentary utterances, however, simply will not do for a concerto, where we expect to hear eloquent orations from a soloist continually under a spotlight. To present the violin as a larger-than- Life Romantic hero, Sibelius had to modify his style, and it took him some time to fine- tune it to his liking. The work itself would probably never have been written at all had not a highly regarded virtuoso named Willy Burmester requested it in 1902, and when the final version was presented in Berlin in 1905, no less a person as Richard Strauss conducted it, and praised its performance highly. (2:40)

11:10 ; (4) GRIEG : Peer Gynt Suite
Leipzig Gewandhauss Orchestra, conductor, Vaclav Neumann,
Adele Stolte, soprano
PHILIPS LP (39:37)

The 1870’s are recognised today as a decade of transition. The first 60 years or so of the 19th-century had become characterised by numerous attempts to create nation states and this had resulted in a series of successful revolutions in Germany, Italy, Poland and Spain, and with these sort of victories, the age of imperialism had begun.

So far as culture was concerned there was also a growing national awareness based on democratic principals. Such composers as Glinka, Borodin and Mussorgsky in Russia, Grieg in Norway, Erkel in Hungary, Moniuszko in Poland, and Smetana and Dvorak in Bohemia drew inspiration from the pure forces of folk-music in an attempt to create a national musical culture. It was Edvard Grieg’s stage music to Peer Gynt that set the pace with the drama commissioned by Henrik Ibsen. The writing took him two years and cost him more effort and soul-searching doubts than any other work he had, or was to produce. In the end, almost as if in compensation, this music, begun so grudgingly, and written so painfully, was to be his greatest success. The Viennese critic, Eduard Hanslick went so far as to prophesy that Ibsen’s drama would survive only because of Grieg’s music, and to a certain measure he was right! To a great many people throughout the world, Peer Gynt, today means Grieg and not Ibsen! (1:38)

11:53 : (5) BINGE : The Watermill
New London Orchestra, conductor, Ronald Corp
HYPERION CDA 66868 (3:45)

THE END

NEXT WEEK: Our time is up and that’s all I have for you in This evenings edition of Composers Gallery, No. 266 of which I trust that you have enjoyed. Next week’s program will feature Rossini’s William Tell Overture, some highlights from HMS Pinafore by Gilbert & Sullivan, a Violin and Oboe concerto by J. S. Bach with Nigel Kennedy, violin and Albrecht Mayer, oboe, and Handel’s Alcina ballet, plus much more. This is Gordon Manning saying thank you for listening, and here’s an invitation to all music lovers inviting you to join me again next Wednesday evening at the usual time.