Programme Index

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Conductors of the World-X
Introduced by Mr. Victor Hely-Hutchinson
WILLEM MENGELBERG
The Concertgebouw Orchestra. Conductor, Willem Mengel berg : Sinfonia (Bach) ; The Ruins of Athens (Turkish March) (Beethoven) ; Les Preludes (Symphonic Poem) (Liszt) ; Waltz, Serenade for String Orchestra (Tchaikovsky) ; Hungarian March (The Damnation of Faust) (Berlioz).
Willem Mengelberg was born in Utrecht in 1871, and has been conductor of the famous Concertgebouw Orchestra in Amsterdam since 1895--a period of distinguished public service in one centre almost identical in duration with that of our own Sir Henry Wood at Queen's Hall. Mengelberg is known to us as a very welcome guest conductor-and to other European and American cities too, for he has toured the world extensively. He is undoubtedly one of the outstanding conductors of modern time-some go so far as to say the greatest.

Contributors

Introduced By:
Mr. Victor Hely-Hutchinson
Introduced By:
Willem Mengelberg
Conductor:
Willem Mengel
Unknown:
Willem Mengelberg
Unknown:
Sir Henry Wood

Sung by The Wireless Singers
Conducted by Leslie Woodgate

Now what is love, I pray thee tell f
It is that fountain and that well,
Where pleasure and repentance dwell. It is perhaps the sauncing bell
That tolls us into heaven or hell, And this is love, as I hear tell.

These twelve Love Songs range over four centuries of English poetry, and reveal Elizabethans, lovers of Stuart England, Victorians and moderns prostrate before the blind god, in postures angry, plaintive, defiant, cynical or enraptured. The first song, Edmund Waller 's Go, Lovely Rose,' is the frank, impatient cry of the seventeenth century, elegant but insistent. Samuel Daniels's 'Love is a Sickness' is a modish Elizabethan plaint. Then comes Sir Walter Raleigh's plea for the tongue-tied lover : ' Silence in love betrays more woe, Than words, though ne'er so witty.' Sir Courtenay Mansel's 'In Caelia's Face My Heaven Is' is a sentiment of the golden age, but a tell-tale accent marks the pretty conceit as modern in origin. William Morris 's ' A Love Song ' is heavy with emotion recollected in tranquillity: no true lover ever sang in such immaculate metre, and one detects the veritable pre-Raphaelite fall in 'dear rain of thy weeping.' ' She is Not Fair to Outward View ' is a jolly little mock-lament by Hartley Coleridge , in which the poet ' ceases not to behold the love-light in her eye.' M. E. Colderidge 's ' Plighted ' reveals another sturdy Romantic wooer, very, very sure of himself: '... I shall come back to you by-and-by, And you will come to me.' ' A Dilemma,' from John Wilbey's 'First Set of Madrigals ' (1598), is another problem piece, laden with euphuisms, but, by some magic, alive beneath its conceits. In 'When I was One and Twenty,' the Lucretian sadness of A. E. Housman cuts like a sword through the roses and raptures, and contrasts amusingly with ' You Stole My Love, fy upon you, fy,' in which Antony Munday, one of the earliest English lyric poets, complains of an ancient wrong, vehemently. In ' Fain would I change that note,' from Captain Tobias Hume 's 'The First Part of Airs, etc.,' (1605), the singer is tired of an age-long cant, 'O Love, they wrong thee much, that say thy sweet is bitter': matter here for a modern moralist. But the plaintive touch recurs in ' Love's Tempest.' One takes refuge in the Russian origin of the words - they are by Maikov-and agrees with Hume, or his contributor, that the melancholy note is sounded too often always to be sincere.
Hear, ye ladies that despise,
What the mighty love has done : Fear examples and be wise /
(Continued overleaf.)

Contributors

Conducted By:
Leslie Woodgate
Song:
Edmund Waller
Unknown:
Samuel Daniels
Unknown:
Sir Walter Raleigh
Unknown:
Sir Courtenay Mansel
Unknown:
William Morris
Unknown:
Hartley Coleridge
Unknown:
M. E. Colderidge
Unknown:
John Wilbey
Unknown:
A. E. Housman
Unknown:
Antony Munday
Unknown:
Captain Tobias Hume

National Programme Daventry

About National Programme

National Programme is a radio channel that started transmitting on the 9th March 1930 and ended on the 9th September 1939. It was replaced by BBC Home Service.

Appears in

About this data

This data is drawn from the Radio Times magazine between 1923 and 2009. It shows what was scheduled to be broadcast, meaning it was subject to change and may not be accurate. More