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Bardly mistaken

I thoroughly enjoyed Claire Jackson’s piece about the musical scene in Stratfordupon-avon (Destinations, February) and she is quite right that the Royal Shakespeare Company has ‘an illustrious history as a commissioner of new scores’. But the example she gave – its commissioning of Vaughan Williams to compose music for a production of Richard II – is incorrect.

Vaughan Williams’s music for that play was commissioned by the BBC in 1944 for a planned radio production that never happened. I am sure that the RSC would have loved to commission music from RVW but he died in 1958, three years before it was founded! He did create scores for three productions at Stratford: for As You Like It in 1912 (credited as the ‘arranger’ of the music), Richard III in 1913, and Cymbeline in 1946.

As Jackson says, some of the RSC’S recently commissioned music has been recorded alongside a selection of speeches and scenes from productions and issued on

CD. What most intrigues me, though, is that the CDS also include some of the music from much earlier productions at the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre. The 2018 Troilus and Cressida that she mentions also has music from a 1960 production composed by Humphrey Searle while the 2017 Coriolanus has music from a 1926 production written by Rosabel Watson, a forgotten female composer. I can understand Jackson’s confusion: the CD of speeches from its 2013 Richard II has some of RVW’S music as its bonus extra and is unhelpfully misdescribed as being from a 1913 production of the play by the RSC. So even the RSC gets its own history wrong!

Peter Holland, Cambridge

Where are the words?

I agree with Christopher Cook (February, Choral and Song reviews) that El na Garan a’s Wagner and Mahler recording with Christian Thielemann from the 2021 Salzburg

Festival is indeed excellent.

But how much better would the listening experience be if we could see the lyrics on screen? The service I subscribe to is Apple Music and on their App for Samsung TVS, they are able to display the lyrics for singers such as Adele and Taylor Swift. However, classical recording artists such as Garan a and Anna Netrebko do not fare so well. We simply get a picture of the album cover. I cannot speak for other services, but it would be wonderful if this technology could be extended to classical artists. If current technology only allows one language to be displayed at a time, the default could be the principal language of the country of the subscriber’s account. However,

it seems hard to believe that two languages couldn’t be displayed side by side. I am sure your readers would be grateful if you could take this up with the recording industry and streaming services.

Tony Sanderson, Daventry

Reclaimed sound

With reference to Claire Jackson’s article on the use of recycled materials (A sustainable sound, January), the Edinburgh luthier Steve Burnett has for many years done this and his efforts would make an interesting feature. Earlier this year, the Scottish Press wrote about his use of floor boards that he found in a skip outside the house lived in by explorer Ernest Shackleton when he was secretary of the Royal Scottish Geographical Society. Burnett combined this with driftwood from the East Lothian coastline and the names of all aboard the Endurance are inscribed inside. He has also used sycamore from Haworth to make his Brontë violin. My own instrument made by Burnett in 2019 is from Bosnian maple for the back, spruce from the Dolomites for the belly along with willow blown down in the Millennium gales alongside the Union Canal.

Douglas Mackenzie, Cheshire

Favourable finds

Jeremy Pound’s Acting Editor’s Letter on musical discoveries (January) struck a chord. My mother and I used to share an enthusiasm for discovering the music of unfamiliar composers off the beaten track. In the early 1970s this was very difficult, and being able to share a new name was a rare occurrence. How different it is today, thanks to the greater adventurousness of record companies (sadly, not of concert promoters) and also the existence of online communities of music lovers with similar interests. I find a new name every few days, but my mother is no longer here to share them with. My latest discovery? The Swedish Helena Munktell (1852-1919), another unjustly neglected female composer.

Roger Musson, Edinburgh The editor replies: These are, as you say, wonderful times for exploring neglected repertoire, facilitated by the scholars, musicians and record companies who put in the hard graft of bringing it to our attention. We try to highlight as much as we can in these pages, but readers’ recommendations are always very welcome too!

Absent critic

Neville Cardus was not the only critic to miss an event (Letters, January). Back in the 1980s I went to a concert in the Royal Festival Hall and found myself sitting next to the celebrated music critic William Mann. Mann left at the interval but the concert review in the following day’s The

Times newspaper nevertheless included his thoughts on the symphony which had been the whole of the second half. Patrick Hoyte, Minehead

Bruckner scores

Back in the 1970s, Manchester City fans would clap the rhythm of the third movement of Beethoven’s First Symphony and now they sing ‘Oh, Kevin De Bruyne’ to what sounds like the finale of Bruckner’s Fifth. A friend says it’s a tune by a popular music combo called White Stripes – they must have nicked it from Anton!

Anthony Ingham, Bury