THE WIRELESS MILITARY BAND
Conducted by B. WALTON O'DONNEL
MARGARET BALFOUR (Contralto)
HEDDLE NASH (Tenor)
WITH the same order of enthusiasm with which
Bra'ims and Dvorak collected and gave to the concert world the Hungarian and Slavonic Dances which are now so universally popular, Granados edited four volumes of national Spanish dances, arranging them in the first instance for pianoforte. The three to be played this evening, arranged by Sir Henry Wood for orchestra, are called Oriental, Andaluza, and Rondalla. In all of them rhythm, that typically Spanish feature, seems to matter almost more than the tunes themselves.
There are places where the tunes even disappear, leaving the rhythm alone to carry on. In that way, aa indeed in many ways, Granados* music is truly Spanish, strongly national in character. Ho was, like his older compatriot Albeniz, a native of Catalonia, a part of Spain where national feeling is inherent in the very bone and fibre of its people.
THOMAS AUGUSTINE ARNE was the son of an upholsterer and coffin-maker of Covent Garden, London; in his own day he was recognized as the foremost English musician, and, indeed, from the production of his music to Milton's Comus in 1738, until about the middle of last century, there was nono to challenge that position with him. Since then his music has been somewhat unaccountably neglected, and we owe it largely to the enthusiasm of some of our young musicians today that the best of it is being revived and presented in accordance with the modern canons of taste. Best known to the world at large by an inaccurate version of ' Rule, Britannia !' and by several Shakespeare songs which he set to music, he composed much in larger forms, and his masques contain some of the most beautiful music ever produced in this country. MARGARET BALFOUR