Relayed from the Queen's Hall, London
(Sole Lessees, Messrs. Chappell and Co., Ltd.)
35th Season
ISOBEL BAILLIE (Soprano)
LEYLAND WHITE (Baritone)
HAROLD CRAXTON (Pianoforte)
SIR HENRY WOOD and his SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA
(Leader, CHARLES WOODHOUSE)
Mozart and Schubert Programme
MOZART'S favourite opera centres round the wedding of Figaro with Susanna. He is now majordomo to the Count, in whose successful wooing of his Countess, the fair Rosina, he lent invaluable aid, in the days when he was still the cunning ' Barber of Seville.' Susanna is the Countess' maid, and she and Figaro are a delightful couple. Nothing stands in the way of their happy union but the infatuation of the Count for his good lady's pretty attendant; his plans and schemes to prevent the wedding, and to beguile Susanna into yielding to his own advances, make up most of the story of the opera-an involved series of plots and counterplots, intrigues and disguises. In the end, as everyone knows, the amorous Count is defeated, and a happy future promised to Figaro and Susanna.
In this recitative and aria, the Count bewails
Susanna's coldness to him. He has just learned that a lawsuit-one of his schemes to keep the happy pair apart-has turned in their favour : he is still determined, however, that Susanna must bo his, hating the thought of Figaro's successful rivalry for her good graces. Shall I so choice a blessing,' he sings, ' behold my slave possessing t '
'HERE is certainly no one of Schubert's works in the larger forms quite so full of the qualities which we love and admire in his music as this Unfinished Symphony. Besides the two complete movements, Schubert loft only a few bars of a Scherzo, and though later admirers have had the temerity to complete the work by adding other movements, no one has now the temerity to perform them.
Schubert's first movement begins with what has been called a three-fold theme, but there is no need to think of the three tunes as forming one subject between them, and it is simpler to listen to the first, rather as an introduction-the one which begins softly on the basses. Eight bars later the violins enter with a quavering theme, which almost immediately becomes the accompaniment to a melody for the oboe and clarinet. The second subject is introduced by a beautiful modulation to the key of G, played by the horns and bassoons, and the second main tune itself is a real Schubert song-like theme played first by the violoncellos. These tunes appear in various disguises in the course of the movement, but the attentive listener will always make them out, and the closing section of the movement brings them back again in their original form.
The second movement, in slower time, begins, just as the first did, with a tune for the basses, but now they are accompanied by soft chords on liorns and bassoons. Then there is a tender little tune for the first violins alone, which leads to the other principal melody, played first by the clarinet. The whole impressive movement is built up on these, and it is difficult to think of any other of the great masters who could have made so beautiful a movement from such simple material.