Conductor, Peter Montgomery
Maye Martin (soprano)
Clement Delibes was among the most successful composers of ballet music in the latter half of the Nineteenth Century when ballet was a very considerable part of the programmes in Continental opera houses. Delibes wrote two successful operas, amongst others, Le Roi I'a dit, and Lakmé. This latter work has been performed in recent years at Covent Garden Theatre, but Delibes is best known by his very successful ballets Cnppelia, Sylvia and La Source. Of these Sylvia is perhaps the best known, owing particularly to the Waltz and Pizzicato from it. The last movement is a Bacchanal, with satyrs, Bacchic priests, Muses, and Bacchus himself, in procession.
Sir Henry Bishop was for many years' musical director of both Covent Garden Theatre and the King's Theatre, Hay-market His duties entailed supplying a great deal of music of his own as well as other people's. This famous song is a setting of lines from Shakespeare's Venus and Adonis, and was first sung in a performance, under Bishop's direction, of The Comedy of Errors. For more than a hundred years it has been a prominent item in the repertory of all prima donnas.
When Johann Strauss wrote his ' Tales from the Vienna Woods ' he probably had no other idea about it than that it should be danced to. He may have thought of it as an entertaining concert piece; he certainly knew it to be a more than ordinarily good bit of work ; but he could scarcely have imagined that, more than fifty years after it was written, it would remain one of the most popular pieces in the whole repertory of waltzes, that the world-famous-Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra, conducted by the equally famous conductor, Bruno Walter , would include it in one of the two programmes given on one of their rare visits to London, as they at the Royal Albert Hall a few months ago. Listeners who heard the performance on that occasion realised what an exquisite, gossamer thing it is, and why the crown of the ' Waltz King' has never passed to a successor.