The Augmented Station Orchestra, conducted by T.H. Morrison
Overture to 'Fingal's Cave'
Nearly a hundred years ago Mendelssohn and his friend Klingemann, having finished for the season with London concerts, balls and parties, set out to spend the rest of the summer in a holiday fashion in Scotland. Naturally, they visited the Hebrides, and in Fingal's Cave there came into the composer's mind the germ of this Overture - one of the most powerful of visual and poetic impressions put into tone.
The BLACKLEY MALE VOICE QUARTET:
E.E. KELLY (1st Tenor), J. USHER (2nd Tenor), E. Sipe (Baritone), T. CASE (Bass)
The Hunter's Farewell On the Water
'Tis the song whose spirit Serenade
SOME of Mendelssohn's happiest pieces were inspired by his travels, his pleasure in which always seemed to move him to composition. His male voice choral pieces for open-air singing, of which we are to hear one or two examples, were composed about 1839, when he was spending some time in visiting Frankfort and the Rhine. Ho writes to his friend Klingemann about his mixed voice four-part pieces : ' It does seem the most natural of all music when four people are rambling together in the woods, or sailing in a boat, and have the melody all ready with them and within them.'
For one of the songs we are to hear, The Hunter's Farewell, he wrote parts for four Horns and a Bass Trombone, to give a suggestion of the music of the chase.
ORCHESTRA
Suite from 'A Midsummer Night's Dream'
Overture; Scherzo; Nocturne; Wedding March
IN the Midsummer Night's Dream Overture you will hear: (1) Fairies (light flitting music for the first minute or so); (2) Festal pomp; (3) The bray of an ass (Bottom 'translated'). These are the three outstanding ideas from which this wonderful Overture grows. The work is famous for its fine quality, and for the fact that Mendelssohn wrote it before he was eighteen. The incidental music to the play was composed seventeen years later.
The delicious Scherbo, the Prelude to the Second Act, aptly suits the pranks of Puck and the dainty train of sprites, whom, in this Act, their Queen sends on their duties.
The Nocturne is called for by Titania to lull to sleep the poor, weary mortals, victims of the fairies' tricks.
The other famous extract, the Wedding March, is played for the marriages of the three pairs of lovers, when all their troubles (or shall we say, their pre-marital troubles?) are ended.
QUARTET
Farewell Meeting
The Merry Wayfarer
Song of the Worthy Man Night Song
ORCHESTRA
'Italian' Symphony
IN 1831, when Mendelssohn was about twenty-one, he went on an Italian tour, and we gather from his frequent letters home that he enjoyed himself immensely. A year or so earlier he had visited Scotland, and there stored up impressions for a Symphony, at which he was working while in Italy. The sights and sounds of that country inspired another big work in the same form. He writes to his sisters: 'The Italian one I must and will put off till I have seen Naples, which must play a part in it.'
Only in the last Movement is there anything characteristically Italian, but the general impression given by the music is that of happy,' healthy, abounding life, with perhaps a hint of impressive ceremonial in the Slow Movement often called (though never by the Composer) the 'Pilgrims' March.' The last Movement Mendelssohn described as a Sallarello - an Italian dance having a leaping figure in it.