(From Birmingham)
THE BIRMINGHAM STUDIO ORCHESTRA
Conducted by JOSEPH LEWIS
A GENERATION ago the songs of Erik Meyer Helmund used to be more often heard than they are now, and there is no good reason why they should have fallen into comparative neglect. The son of a musician, he studied first with his father and then in Berlin. For many years he was a distinguished singer, appearing on concert platforms of more than one European country, but in England we know him best by his songs, many of which are settings of his own poems.
He composed a good deal, however, in larger forms, and several operas of his have won real success, chiefly in Germany. Such world-famous Opera Houses as Dresden, Leipzig, Munich and Berlin have all staged operas of his, one of them so recently as 1912. In them he has followed both the tragic and the comic Muse, and at least one is a burlesque.
In this Suite ho is dealing with ground with which he is thoroughly familiar; he was born in St. Petersburg and spent his youth there.
EVERYBODY knows at least one of Daquin's pieces' the jolly little pianoforte solo in which he imitates the cuckoo. Horn in Paris before the end of the seventeenth century, he was a remarkable child prodigy and played the harpsichord before King Louis XIV when he was only six. At the age of twelve he was an organist, taking the place of his godmother's husband, and on one occasion defeated the great Rameau, whose name is now so much better known to most people, in a contest for an organist's post.
He is -best remembered by his many harpsichord pieces, especially the first book which contains the famous Cuckoo, but he wrote for organ and other instruments as well, and left besides a considerable volume of vocal music, both sacred and secular. He lived to the good old ago of seventy-eight, dying in Paris in 1772.