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Thirty-somethings
I can’t believe that BBC Music Magazine has been going for 30 years (September issue). Like many, I have benefitted from the magazine through the breadth of music I have been introduced to. In the first couple of years, two discs in particular became firm favourites: the majesty of Richard Strauss’s Alpine Symphony was a revelation; and Takemitsu was completely unknown to me before you chose to pair Walton’s Symphony No. 1 with his astonishing From me flows what you call time. As well as the marvellous discs, the Building a Library feature has introduced me to a whole host of wonderful works, and your reviews have been the catalyst to buy a range of classical CDS. Happy birthday and thank you for three decades of pleasure! David Pearce, Rainham
Fishless foursome
The editor’s mention of Quatuor Ébène’s album
Fiction in her Welcome page (September) brought back a happy memory. At the East Neuk festival several years ago, one of the recitals we’d booked was given by the Ébènes, who performed Ravel and Debussy. The recital ended at lunchtime, so we proceeded to a fish-andchip restaurant in Anstruther and queued up waiting to be served. A few minutes later the Quatuor Ébène team turned up at the door – it was Wimbledon fortnight, and they’d seen through the door that, on the shop’s TV, the French tennis star Jo-wilfried Tsonga was playing. Sadly, once it became clear they wouldn’t be buying fish and chips, an officious manager asked them to move on. They did so, reluctantly and despite protests from ourselves. Once I got home, I purchased two of their albums.
Peter Slimming, Fleet
Fantasia fantasy?
In his September Timepiece feature, Terry Blain gives the impression that Vaughan Williams’s Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis generally had a positive reception. I would say the response was mixed. Certainly, the people he quotes, including Howells, appreciated what they had heard, but this wasn’t universal. My research has led me to the opinion that to most present the premiere was a mere footnote to a concert devoted to Elgar conducting the first complete performance of his Dream of Gerontius in Gloucester Cathedral. The only comment in the official Festival Annals on the Fantasia was ‘Dr Vaughan Williams also conducted a new work’. Neither was it considered the most noteworthy premiere of the Festival. That honour was shared by the new works introduced by Granville Bantock and Basil Harwood.
Contemporary local opinion wasn’t enthusiastic, according to the local paper’s music critic: ‘the impression left on the mind by the whole composition was of unsatisfaction … We had short phrases repeated with tiresome literation and at no time did the Fantasia rise beyond the level of an uninteresting exercise … there was a feeling of relief when (it) came to an end and we could listen to something with more colour and warmth.’ Even the Musical Times critic described it as ‘…exhibiting power and much charm of the contemplative kind, but it appeared overlong for the subject matter.’
Simon Carpenter, archivist and historian, Three Choirs Festival
Symphonic Pole
Rebecca Franks’s survey of female symphonists (August) might have included four by the Polish-lithuanian Grażyna Bacewicz (190969), written from 1945-53, in addition to a Concerto for Symphony Orchestra (1962). I was delighted to see Augusta Holmès mentioned, especially as your lead letter from Kevin Quin said that he had never heard of her.
Her symphonic poem Irlande (1882), celebrating her Irish ancestry, was recorded by the Deutsche Staatsphilharmonie Rheinland-pfalz on the Marco Polo label in 1994.
Richard Pine, Corfu, Greece
Harry’s howler
During my early career, colleagues at University of Salford commissioned Harrison Birtwistle to pen a second Grimethorpe Aria, this time specifically for our new brass band programme of undergrads to premiere. As Ivan Hewett explains
in Composer of the Month (August), ‘Birtwistle’s music is indeed instantly recognisable, but not because it’s always the same’. It isn’t. In this case, while it broke new ground there was something awry, leading to hours leafing through Harry’s manuscript scores and poring over transpositions. ‘Unrecognisable’ did not quite do it – in short, and in contrast to solo and tutti sections, the soprano cornet in E flat had been scored erroneously for a B flat instrument, in company with cornets and flugel horn. Years later, we fell across each other in Oxford. Of course, Harry had taken it back unreservedly at the time, and now chortled at the ridiculous thought of someone years later reminding him of what amounted to nothing more than a faux pas; characteristically, in helping younger musicians he was so involved in the minutiae he had overlooked a bigger splash. Kit Thompson, East Riding
I wonder if any of your readers can recall the one live concert which, above all others, they regret having missed or were unable to attend? Mine would be the legendary Leonard Bernstein/ Vienna Philharmonic performance of Mahler’s
Fifth Symphony at the BBC Proms in 1987 (see Letters, September). I was recuperating from an eye operation at the time, but at least I could listen to the live broadcast on Radio 3. To this day I can remember the seemingly dazed and certainly breathless announcer at the end of the performance gasping, ‘The applause is so deafening I can hardly hear myself speak.’ It capped the excitement of the occasion wonderfully.
Neil Sinyard, Saxby All Saints
We would love to hear about the concerts that readers really wish they had been able to attend, but couldn’t for some reason. We have had a go ourselves on the Contents page (see p4).
Late-night Serenade
Your cover CD for July featuring Vaughan Williams’s Serenade to Music took me back to a warm summer night in 1957, sitting in a car on a bluff overlooking the Ohio River in Huntington, WV. The car radio was tuned to WBBM, a clear channel radio station out of Chicago; we were listening to Pierre Andres’s programme Music till Dawn. At about 2am he played the Serenade to Music and I was enchanted. It put me on a yearslong search for that recording. I have loved it ever since and was enchanted once again when I played this month’s cover CD. Thank you for taking me back to my youth. Paul G Koko Oak Park, IL, US
Name that composer
I have been greatly enjoying Minds in Flux by George
Lewis on your July cover
CD, although I do confess to finding your listening guide to the piece well nigh incomprehensible! I am puzzled by the fact that, despite it being by some way the longest piece on the CD, it was not mentioned on the cover, or even in the previous month’s preview of the July edition. Why was there such seeming reticence to publicise a contemporary work? Nonetheless, it has proved to be a delightful surprise, alongside the more familiar Vaughan Williams and Wagner.
David M Wilkie, Tain