PETER DAWSON (Baritone)
BELINDA HEATHER (Pianoforte)
BEETHOVEN was twenty-six when he wrote this the most important of his early songs.
That it is a work of frankly emotional sentiment merely fixes its period and does not affect its beauty. Nor does the form in which it was written. It is planned formally, and is archaic in diction, but that plan was the only one in use for solo songs in the grand manner, and Beethoven accepted it at that time without question.
HENRI RABAUD is an important French musician of which we hear but little in this country. He was born in 1873, studied under Massenet, and gained a Prix de Rome. He has been conductor at the Opera Comique in Paris, and at the Paris Opera. Immediately after the war he spent a year as conductor of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, a post which is a kind of blue riband of the conducting world. Returning to France, he Was elected Director of the Paris Conservatoire in succession to Fauré. Rabaud has written a number of works for the stage, the most successful being the comic opera Marouf, on a book adapted from a story in the Thousand and One Nights. This has been 'performed all over Europe, has crossed the Atlantic, but somehow or other has never thought to make the short trip across the Channel.
FÉLIX FOURDRAIN, whose music appears
-*- occasionally in these programmes, is a Parisian composer of, light operas which are well liked in his own country, but essentially French in their appeal. He has written also some pianoforte pieces and songs, and is altogether at home in a city that requires that its music, however light, shall be the work of at least a well-equipped musician.