Conducted by CHARLES LEGGETT
ARNOLD MATTERS (Baritone)
TRISH song owes much to Sir Charles Stanford. I Most of the songs he wrote have an Irish tang ; this cycle of seven songs, for instance, is set to words by John Stevenson from ' Pat McCarty , his Rhymes,' a number of poems written in racy, idiomatic Irish dialect. Stanford was very happy with such words, and in collaboration with Alfred Percy Graves , the Irish poet, who wrote the words to ' Father O'Flynn,' he produced some of the best original songs that have ever come out of Ireland. Besides this he edited a great number of Irish folk-songs, dressing them with great skill and charm. His most notable contribution, however, to the literature of Irish folk-song is the famous ' Petrio Collection of Irish Music,' which contains hundreds of lovely Irish melodies collected from all sources.
WHEN Sullivan died in 1901 he left his last opera, The Emerald Isle, unfinished. Edward German was offered the commission to finish it, and so skilfully did he do his work that it is not easy for those who do not know to distinguish which of the music is Sullivan's and which is German's. Naturally, the next opera to be put on at the Savoy was one all hy German, Merrie England, and this work ranks in charm and merit equally with the rest of the Savoy repertory. The book was by Basil Hood and deals with the days of Queen Elizabeth. Following a long and successful run at the Savoy Theatre, it quickly reached the amateur stage, and there it stays and will stay as long as amateurs continue to love good music.
SIR GRANVILLE BANTOCK 'S many songs are justly popular. The majority of them are upon Eastern subjects set to music with an Eastern bias in the mariner that has enabled Bantock to set Fitzgerald's Omar Khayyam verses so characteristically.
PETER WARLOCK 'S outlook upon music was many-sided. The serious student in him led him to delve in the Elizabethan past, to edit the Fantasies of Purcell. and to enrich our repertory of re-discovered Tudor music ; his regard for robust English idiom led him to interest himself in folk-song revival; and occasionally the sturdy humour of the man produced a song which though admirably made, was more or less a prank perpetrated for the good of his soul.