Directed by Arthur Fawcett
from the New Victoria Cinema, Bradford

with Carmen del Rio

Conductor, William Pethers from the Hippodrome Theatre, Coventry

Leader, Daniel Melsa
Conducted by Clifton Helliwell
Eda Kersey (violin)
Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco was born at Florence in 1895, and studied under the famous Italian composer Ildebrando Pizzetti. He has composed a considerable amount of music, chiefly choral and vocal. Among the latter is a series of Shakespeare songs, set to the original English words. Eric Blom points out that ' In his instrumental pieces Castelnuovo-Tedesco combines a strongly personal and highly refined manner of handling his means of expression with a poetry of feeling that shrinks from superficial realism. He never attempts a direct reproduction of the pictorial aspects of his subjects, but always transmutes them into such purely musical values as appear to him to produce similar emotions '.
Debussy's ' Petite Suite ' was originally composed, about a dozen years before the ' Nocturnes as a duet for piano (four hands), the medium to which Schubert was so much attracted, and to which many composers after him have been drawn at least once in their career. It was, for instance, the original form of Ravel's popular ' Mother Goose' suite which he afterwards expanded into a ballet.
The ' Petite Suite' was first played by the composer with Jacques Durand , a son of his publisher who had been a fellow student with him. It was the latter who made the piano solo transcription which is in general use, but the orchestral version is the work of Henri Busser , a prix de Rome of 1893, who is known as the composer of several operas and a ballet.

from the Pump Room,
Leamington Spa