(Leader, J. Mouland Begbie )
Conducted by Alexander Gibson Lennox Berkeley 's Divertimento was commissioned by the BBC and first performed in 1943. It is dedicated to Nadia Boulanger, with whom Berkeley studied composition. As its title implies, the work is light in style-it comes to one, as has been said, ' with a smile on its face '-but it could only have been written by a composer of serious aims; one, moreover, who. though he belongs unmistakably to our day, has something of the elegance and sensibility of the eighteenth-century masters. Harold Rutland