(Section E)
(Led by MARIE WILSON)
Conducted by WARWICK BRAITHWAITE
DAVID WISE (Violin)
Jaromir Weinberger is the composer of the opera Schwanda the Bagpiper, which has been so extraordinarily successful that already more than 2,000 performances of it have been given in Central Europe ; the libretto has been translated into fourteen languages; it has been presented in the opera houses of practically every musical country in the world except Great Britain, and it has had the greatest popularity of any new opera since D'Albert's Tiefland, first produced nearly thirty years ago. The composer was born in 1896 in Prague, and had the advantage of studying with Max Reger in Leipzig. In 1922 he spent a short time in the United States as Professor of Composition at the Conservatorum of Ithica. The characteristics of his music are a conservative and very engaging gift of melody, a piquant sense of harmony, and a modern conception of counterpoint.