The BBC Midland Orchestra
Leader, Alfred Cave
Conducted by Leslie Heward

Karl Ditters von Dittersdorf (1739-1799), contemporary and friend of Haydn and Mozart, is now remembered only because of the chamber music he produced so prolifically. But he also wrote some symphonic programme-music of great interest. His 'Ovid' symphonies are probably the finest examples of pre-Beethovenian programme-music in existence.
There were originally twelve, but those of the second set have been lost, though we know their subjects. 'Three years ago', wrote Dittersdorf in his autobiography, 'I hit upon the idea of writing some characteristic symphonies on subjects from Ovid's "Metamorphoses", and on my arrival in Vienna' (i.e., in 1786), 'had twelve of the kind ready.' In Vienna he performed the first six - the set that survives - at a concert in the Augarten, the others a week later at a theatre concert.

Henry Cowell
Henry Cowell (born at Menlo Park, California, in 1879) is one of the most adventurous of contemporary American composers. Among the peculiar features of his piano music are ' tone clusters', a term invented by himself to describe bunches of notes played with the clenched fist, the elbow, or the entire length of the fore-arm. This Sinfonietta for fourteen instruments (1928) is one of his attempts to transfer ' tone-clusters ' from the keyboard to the orchestra.
Cowell is largely self-taught but he studied for a time under C.L. Seeger at the University of California and later under Woodman at the Institute of Applied Music. During 1931-32 he studied comparative musicology at the University of Berlin. Cowell has written books on 'New Musical Resources' and 'The Nature of Melody'.