Leader, PAUL BEARD
Conducted by LESLIE HEWARD
EILEEN JOYCE (pianoforte)
Les Francs Juges (the German Secret Tribunal of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries) was to have been an opera, but ' All that the human heart can contain of rage and tenderness is in this overture,' as the composer confessed. He has furnished a brief programme. An accused man is led blindfold before the dread judges. The dreadful accusations which they hurl at him in chorus, his own appeals for mercy, breaking in on these, interrupted ever and anon by a thunderous ' No ' are all to be heard in the music, and at last the accused man's final breaking down, resigned to his awful doom.