Thomas Beecham, 2nd Baronet News
British conductor and impresario
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2024-03-29
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2024-02-23 12:43:00
Being performed for the first time for almost 20 years: Murray Hipkin & the North London Chorus give us a chance to finally experience Ethel Smyth's The Prison in concert
Whilst the last few decades have seen a remarkable increase in the amount of exploration of neglected 19th and 20th century British music, there has still been a tendency to view individual composers through quite a narrow lens. So, Stanford's most popular opera during his lifetime, Shamus O'Brien is only now getting its first studio recording, whilst Parry's oratorios, highly popular and influential in their day, have similarly only recently arrived properly on disc.Ethel Smyth is another one of those composers. Whilst The Wreckers has long been available on disc, it took Glyndebourne in 2021 to finally explore the composer's original version of the opera and her other operas have all had a patchy life and though finally we have all but one (the score of which has disappeared) available on disc. But what about the rest of Smyth's oeuvre? The early Mass certainly, but the rest of her work is only patchily […]
The Boston Musical Intelligencer
2024-02-20 20:24:21
Lookouts Aloft! A Composer Puts Out to Sea
[caption id="attachment_33427" align="alignleft" width="228"] Smyth in 1901 by Sargent[/caption] Dame Ethel Smyth (1854-1944) said, “I want women to turn their minds to big and difficult jobs, not just to go on hugging the shore, afraid to put out to sea.” This is the story of a woman — in the long history of women stifled by important or influential men in their lives or eras — who did the big and difficult job over and over. Ethel Smyth, a strong-minded musician, fought against her father’s pontifical noise and ‘put out to sea’ (or at least crossed the channel) in 1877 at age 19 to study at the Conservatorium in Leipzig. One of the top Smyth scholars, Amy Zigler, has a brief biography available HERE. BMInt is happy to publish this preview in the context of a Cappella Clausura’s performance of Smyth’s Mass in D at Emmanuel Church at 4pm on […]
2023-12-14 04:30:00
Is It Time for New Classic Recordings?
by Bill HeckAll right, I admit it, I confess: I'm spoiled by modern digital recordings by amazing musicians. Many readers of Classical Candor have been around long enough to know about the "classic" recordings of classical music, the ones on any number of "recommended performances" lists. Whose collection of recordings would be complete without, say, the Reiner / Chicago recording of Bartok's Concerto for Orchestra, the Kleiber / Vienna Beethoven 5 and 7 pairing, or Beecham’s conducting of anything by Delius? I'm speaking here of stereo recordings, which puts us after the mid-1950s or so. There are specialists, as well as the more curious among us, who want to hear Toscanini's Beethoven symphony cycle, or Schnabel's set of the piano concertos, recordings of Rachmaninoff playing his own works: the list goes on and on, and for those folks, even bad recordings are better than no recordings at all. […]
2023-12-07 08:36:00
Voce Chamber Choir to premiere David Briggs' accessible adaptation of Walton's Belshazzar's Feast
Rembrandt: Belshazzar's FeastWilliam Walton's cantata, Belshazzar's Feast wasn't always intended to be the large-scale monster that it became. Walton's original commission from the BBC, in 1929, was for a short work for small forces!After the work had grown, to double choir and full orchestra, the Leeds Festival took on the premiere in 1931. The director of the festival that year was Sir Thomas Beecham and he was conducting Berlioz' Requiem. Supposedly Beecham said to Walton "As you'll never hear the thing again, my boy, why not throw in a couple of brass bands?" [at the time, Walton was 29 and Beecham was 52]The result, as they say is history.The work might be enormously popular, but it requires huge resources, any choir wanting to perform it must gather the wherewithal for an extended symphony orchestra and two brass bands.Now, with the support of the Walton estate, organist David Briggs has produced […]
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