MODERN FRENCH PIANOFORTE MUSIC
(1900-1925)
Played by Mrs. NORMAN O'NEILL
THOUGH Gabriel Grovlez (bom 1879) began his career as a concert Pianist, ho has become best known as a Conductor of the Paris Opera and a Composer of songs, Pianoforte pieces, Symphonic Poems and Ballets. Ho has also collaborated in editing the great edition of Rameau's works, and has brought out two other excellent collections of old French Operatic airs and instrumental pieces.
The graceful Sarabande is one of a series of pieces collectively known as L'Almanach aux Images (The Picture Calendar), based on poems of ' Tristan Klingsor.' In verse and music the piece conjures up an impression of old-time grace and lino manners.
ROGER DUCASSE (born 1873), a pupil of Faure, won one of the Rome Prizes in 1902. Ho was one of the composers who, with Faure at their head, founded in 1910 the French Independent Music Society, a body interested in making known modern music. ,
FLORENT SCHMITT , another pupil of Faure (of Massenet also), and a Rome Prize winner, was born in 1870. Ho is known to us chiefly by a few chamber pieces, in some of which there is a curious tartness. His output includes a Tone Poem on Poe's The Haunted Palace, incidental music for Anthony and Cleopatra, church music, Ballets, etc.
DEODAT DE SEVERAC (1873-1921) seemed to find happy inspiration in open-air scones. Amongst his interests was folk-song collecting. His delicate fancy is charmingly illustrated in the Pianoforte Suites, of which the best known is In Languedoc. Cerdana, sub-titled Picturesque Studies, contains somoof his liveliest sketches. The Return of the Mule Driver8 is accompanied by cheerily tinkling bells. We hear the clattering of the hoofs, above which rises now and again a fragment of a folk song sung by the drivers.
7 25 Prof. A. Y. CAMPBELL : 'Greek Plays for
Modern Listeners-VI, Survivals and Influences.' S.B. from Liverpool
TN this series of talks Professor Campboll has explained the underlying ideas of classical Greek drama and illustrated their working out in the plays of the three great tragic dramatists— ?schylus, Sophocles and Euripides—and of Aristophanes the satirist, the Gilbert of ancient Greece. This evening he will conclude the series by surveying the later course of the Greek theatre ; the fusion of tragedy and comedy, the influence of Aristotle's theorizing, and tho value to modern readers of these plays written for audiences who lived more than two thousand years ago.