THE STATION ORCHESTRA : Conducted by JOSEPH, LEWIS
BALAKIREF (1837-1910) was, after Glinka, the leader of the Russian ' Nationalist ' Composers who were tremendously active in the middle of last century. They aimed at founding a purely Russian art on folk-material-the songs, dances, religious themes, tales and legends of the common people.
He gathered round him a notable band of comrades-Cui, Borodin, Mussorgsky, and Rimsky-Korsakof, all of them keen nationalists and most of them strikingly original Composers. In later life he lived apart from his friends a good deal, and produced little music.
One of his excellent achievements was the founding, with the help of other musicians, of the Free School of Music in St. Petersburg. Here he gave concerts which served to introduce new Russian works as well as to make the best foreign music better known.
His only Piano Concerto, in three Movements, is a very characteristic work, often developing its brief themes in variation style, rather than in the ' classical ' manner, and showing a delight in detail and at the same time a certain discursiveness that we not infrequently find in Russian music.
HERBERT CAVE
BEETHOVEN'S Second Symphony was first performed in Vienna in 1803, when ho was thirty-three. Even in those days of his young manhood he was suffering from incipient deafness, and from other troubles. Just a few months before he completed this happy work he had been plunged into one of those fits of depression that became more common later, but which ho overcame with magnificent courage, as. he overcame many more trials in his later years.