Relayed from the Queen's Hall
Sir HENRY WOOD and his SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA
SUZANNE BERTIN (Soprano) ; HAROLD WILLIAMS
(Baritone); ARNOLD TROWELL (Violoncello)
London heard Oberon under the Composer's direction a few weeks before his death at the age of thirty-nine. It is a fairy-story Opera in which Weber's gift for composing imaginative music, full of romantic and pictorial suggestion, rose to the heights of genius. In this fine Overture we hear all sorts of graphic ideas-the magic horn of Oberon, fairy music, and the more positive strains of human loves and triumphs.
This fifth Symphony of Tchaikovsky, and its younger and still more emotional brother, the 'Pathetic,' appear to be still without rivals in popularity among the Symphonies written since Beethoven. This one is too well known to need close description. Those to whom it is not yet familiar should first know that there is a 'Motto' theme that binds the four movements together. It is the chief subject of the sombre Introduction that leads to the swinging FIRST MOVEMENT; it is noisily declaimed and abruptly sounded at the climax of the romantic SECOND MOVEMENT ; near the end of the Waltz which forms the THIRD MOVEMENT it enters, low down, with a suggestion of mockery; and as the spirited FOURTH MOVEMENT works to a climax it is thundered out triumphantly in the Major key.