Gertrude Johnson (Soprano)
The Gershom Parkington Quintet

The son of a musician, Henry Hadley had his first lessons in pianoforte and violin from his father. After a successful career as a student of the New England Conservatoire in Boston, he toured the United States as an operatic conductor. In 1894, at the age of twenty-three, he had an overture, Hector and Andromache, performed by Walter Damrosch in New York, and in the same year went to Vienna to carry on his studies of composition. Since then he has spent a strenuous and active life in conducting, playing, and composing, producing his own works in many parts of the world. He has won many of the prizes offered by American societies for native work, and is one of the most industrious and successful of present-day American composers. He makes no violent departures from tradition, and his music is all freshly melodious and vigorous in a robust and wholesome way. A good deal of it has been heard in this country, and he has at least once conducted the London Choral Society at the Queen's Hall in a performance of one of his own pieces.

Best known as the composer of what is by common consent the best dance music in existence, Johann Strauss left also many operettas which were, in his own day, no less universally successful than the inimitable waltzes. His vocal music is brilliant and melodious, as one would expect from the composer of so much that is gay and light-hearted; only singers with a real command of coloratura may hope to be successful with such pieces as the joyous song in honour of Spring which Miss Gertrude Johnson is to sing, as well as with the vocal version of the famous Blue Danube.

The violinist inclines to divide music for his instrument into two great classes - music, and violin music, meaning by the first, works composed by the great masters, and by the second pieces written by violinists. Many of these last are almost worthy to stand in the former class, some of Wieniawski's among them.
The son of a doctor in Poland, he showed his musical bent so early that at the age of eight he was allowed to enter the Conservatoire in Paris, winning the first prize for violin playing when he was only eleven. Most of his busy life was spent in concert tours, and even after his health was failing he continued to make brilliantly successful appearances. In one of his last concerts, he was seized by sudden illness, and had to break off. Joachim, who was in the audience, stepped on to the platform and, taking Wioniawski's fiddle, finished the piece, to the delight of the audience.

His music, although laid out chiefly to display the fine qualities of his own instrument, is graceful and melodious, and this Lt-gende has always enjoyed a well-earned popularity.