Libretto by A. P. Herbert
Music by Thomas F. Dunhill
Cast :
THE WIRELESS CHORUS
THE B.B.C. LIGHT ORCHESTRA
Conducted by Thomas F. Dunhill
Listeners have heard enough of Dunhill's music ere now - orchestral, chamber music, shorter pieces and songs-to realize how wholesome it is; fresh and bracing, often with a real English flavour to it, melodious and virile, the kind of music, in short, which leaves its hearers well content to believe in the essential goodness and beauty of life. He is equally at home in the learned and serious aspects of his art and in its moods of mirth and relaxation, one who has done a great deal of hard work in many different directions. A brilliant student of the Royal College, he afterwards became a professor there : ho has been Music Master at Eton, too. His interest in youthful aspirants is shown by many simple and musicianly contributions to young people's music, among them a series of masterly arrangements of the Gilbert and Sullivan operas for ten fingers of modest skill on the pianoforte. He is the author of a standard book on chamber music, and has helped his countrymen in other, no less practical, ways. For years he gave series of chamber concerts at which the work of the younger English composers was given chances it could not otherwise have had. He knows the Near East well, especially the music of Serbia, and some years ago gave an all-British concert in Belgrade.
In this merry operetta his music is on the same high artistic level as the text to which it is so happily mated; higher praise could not easily be offered to it.