Jean Pougnet (violin)
Frederick Riddle (viola)
The Leighton Lucas Orchestra
(Leader, Ronald Good)
Conductor, Leighton Lucas
(Continued in next column)
Rameau's most successful opera, Castor and Pollux, was produced in Paris in 1737; this Suite of music from it has been compiled and arranged for modem orchestra by Francois Auguste Gevaert.
Mozart wrote his Sinfonia Concertante for violin and viola at the age of twenty-three when he was employed at the Court of the Archbishop of Salzburg, chafing under the restrictions of his aristocratic taskmaster and longing to be out in the world realising his genius to the full. Eric Blom describes it as 'a beautiful, dark-coloured work in which a passion not at all suited to an archiepiscopal court, and perhaps disclosing revolt against it, seems to smoulder under a perfectly decorous style and exquisite proportions.' It certainly strikes a vein of deep personal emotion that is not to be found in Mozart's previous music, especially in the central slow movement where the composer seems to express his innermost feelings with unusual clarity. The cadenzas of the first and second movements were written by Mozart himself.
The title of the piece by Ravel means
' Pavane for the Death of a Spanish Princess,' but Ravel himself said of it: ' When I put together the words which make up this title, my only thought was the pleasure of alliteration.'
In writing his Classical Symphony,
Prokofiev's intention was not, as is often thought, to parody the style of the eighteenth century, but to compose a symphony such as Haydn might have done, had he lived in our day.' Deryck Cooke