BBC Northern Orchestra (Leader, Reginald Stead )
Conductor, Charles Groves
Kathleen Ferrier (contralto)
The Enchantress, which was completed last June, is dedicated to Kathleen Ferrier , for whom it was specially written. The Second Idyll of Theocritus relates how Simaetha, a beautiful, well-born Syracusan girl, is deserted by her lover, and in despair resorts at night to sorcery to win him back.
Stravinsky wrote his First Symphony during the years 1905-7, when he was in his early twenties and still a pupil of Rimsky-Korsakov. It was performed at St. Petersburg soon after it was completed; some years later Stravinsky revised it, and this new version was conducted by Ernest Ansermct at Montreux in 1914. The Scherzo from it introduces a nursery tune, Caw, Caw, Jackdaw, which Stravinsky also made use of in the last of his Three Little Songs, Memories of my Childhood, written in 1913.