Leader, BERTRAM LEWIS
Conductor, RICHARD AUSTIN
Solo pianoforte, THELMA BRYAN
Relayed from
The Pavilion, Bournemouth
Overture, The Wasps Vaughan Williams Aristophanes' play, The Wasps, turns on a quarrel between a father and son, and the Wasps of the title form the chorus. The name suggests the sting in the comments that they make on the action, after the traditional manner of a Greek chorus. In Vaughan Williams 's music, written specially for a production of the play at Cambridge in 1909, their buzzing is vividly suggested.
Most of the melodies are old Greek modal tunes, which the characters sing in the course of the play, and the last ones are taken from a point near the end where the father and son become reconciled. (Soloist, THELMA BRYAN> )
This is the famous ' Coronation Concerto ', so called because Mozart played it for the first time at Frankfurt on October 15, 1790, in the course of the festivities following the coronation of the Emperor Leopold II. According to the title-page of the old Andre edition, Mozart also played the F major Concerto (K. 459) on the same occasion. Both works had been composed years earlier, however, the F major in 1784, the D major in 1788.