THE WIRELESS ORCHESTRA, conducted by JOHN ANSELL
APRIL PENDARVIS (Contralto)
SAMUEL SAUL (Baritone)
JULIUS UNGERSON (Violin)
MESSAGER (born 1853) was a pupil of Saint-Saens, and for some years was artistic director at Covent Garden and at the Paris Opera. He made a great success in light music-Operettas and Comic Operas. He is almost the last of a long line of French composers in this vein. Most listeners remember his Little Michus , and Veronique is still popular. He helped to make known a very different kind of music—Debussy's.
He has been fairly prolific, and has continued to produce musical works until late in life. Only two or three years ago, when lie was seventy, he brought out the opera Masked Love, from which we are to hear a selection.
STRADELLA was that seventeenth-century composer about whom there grew up a story (which may or may not be true) to the effect that he eloped with a lady and was followed by assassins, who were so moved by hearing some of his music that they repented of their evil intention, and spared his life. Stradella, however, was murdered later, so the tale goes.
On this exciting story Flotow wrote an Opera when he was twenty-five (in 1837). It was first brought out as a lyric drama, and then adapted as a Grand Opera, and as such produced at Hamburg and Drury Lane.
The Overture shows Flotow's best quality-the capacity to write flowing melody. There is a gentle moving Introduction, and then the main body of the Overture begins with a declamatory phrase, going on to a jovial, dancing theme. From this material the Overture is brightly built up, and a sonorous Coda brings it to a conclusion.
7.0 Mr. GILCHRIST ALEXANDER:
' A Pirate Stevenson Missed '
MUTINY on the high seas, and piracy itself-the crime par excellence of the literature of adyenture—did not finally go out with Long John Silver and the survivors of the crews who sailed with Captain Flint. In this evening's talk Mr. Alexander, who once held a legal appointment in the South Seas, will describe a modern desperado who was convicted of piracy in Suva, the capital of Fiji, only twenty years ago.
BACH'S FRENCH SUITES
Played by JAMES CHING
Sixth French Suite in E
Allemande; Courante ; Sarabande ; Gavotte ; Polonaise ; Bourree ; Minuet; Gigue
Nobody could have a more varied experience of amateur Association football than Mr. Sloley, who has been a Cambridge Blue, a Corinthian, and an Amateur International. He was a member of the English XI in the Olympic Games of 1920, and he has played as an amateur for Aston Villa.
WISHWYNN (Character Sketches)
NEIL KENYON (Scots Comedian)
NORMAN GRIFFIN (Comedian)
HAROLD SCOTT and ELLA LANCHESTER
('Old Time ' and Modem Songs)
OLIVE KAVANN (Contralto)
THE WIRELESS MILITARY BAND, conducted by B. WALTON O'DONNELL
GREGORY STROUD (Baritone)
THE name of Francesco Ezechiele Ermengildo Cavaliere Suppe Demelli gives uncertain clues to this composer's nationality. He was of Belgian descent, but his family had lived for many years in Italy. Ultimately, he settled in Vienna and was thenceforth known as Franz von Suppe.
Operettas and farces with music were his speciality. He turned out in all about a couple of hundred such pieces. Nowadays, we in this country know very few of his works, but these Overtures are among the most familiar items in wireless programmes. That to Poet and Peasant has been arranged (and deranged) for nearly sixty different combinations of instruments.