Leader, William P. Donovan
Margaret Tann Williams (contralto)
Alfred Reynolds was Musical Director at the Lyric Theatre, Hammersmith, for the greater part of Sir Nigel Playfair's years of high adventure there. Playfair came to look to Reynolds for all the incidental music he needed for the many old comedies he put on at the Lyric, quickly learning that he could not find a better man. Sheridan's
The Duenna was only one of the many for which the incidental music was written by Alfred Reynolds , who, thus primed, was later to collaborate with A. P. Herbert in opera, and it is to this collaboration we owe that popular perennial, Derby Day.
The song cycle ' Sea Pictures ' consists of five songs for contralto voice and orchestra, and dates in order of composition between Elgar's ' Enigma' Variations and The Dream of Gerontius. They were first produced in 1899 at the Norwich Festival and were sung by Madame (now Dame) Clara Butt , to whom they were dedicated. Their delicate beauty has made them popular with almost every type of audience, and they rank rather with the more ambitious choral works than with Elgar's songs. The words of the five songs are by different poets, ' Where Corals Lie ' being -by Richard Garnett. The song expresses the longing, which has at one time or another attacked all of us, for the blue seas and the coral strands of islands in some warm ocean of the world.
(From Cardiff)