GABDA HALL (Soprano)
THE Champion BAND, METROPOLITAN
POLICE ' W,' or BRIXTON DIVISION
Conducted by H. A. BROUGHTON
HALFDANKJERULF was one of the earliest to give Norwegian music a place of its own in the concerts of Europe ; in his youth Norway was in the throes of its own struggle for freedom. His father had an important official post and he himself was intended for a legal career. But on the death of his father in 1840, when young Kjerulf was twenty-five, he threw himself whole-heartedly into music as a profession, and published the first of his songs before he had any real instruction. Grieg owed a good deal to his support and encouragement, and something of the same simple sincerity which we recognize in Grieg's music is to be heard in Kjerulf's. He was at his best as a composer of vocal music either for solo voices or chorus, and, as setting forth something of the national sentiment, many of these are still held in affection and reverence in his own country. His death in 1868 was made the occasion of something very like national mourning