THE WEEK’S RADIO Music From The Age Of Beethoven

Press, Volume XCVIII, Issue 28822, 17 February 1959, Page 15

THE WEEK’S RADIO Music From The Age Of Beethoven

. In his monthly programme of new records (YC’s, 8 o clock tonight) John Gray features music from the age of Beethoven, although none of it is by Beethoven. It is by some of his contemporaries whose fame in their day equalled his. Hummel and Ludwig Spohr—-were even considered to be greater < composers than Beethoven.

Hummel was, like his teaeher Mozart, a child prodigy who toured widely as a pianist He also studied with Beethoven's teacher, Albrechtsberger. Beethoven himself was a friend of Hummel, but they quarrelled and it was not until Beethoven lay on-his death--1 bed that their friendship vzas restored. The allegro movement from Hummel's Piano Sonata in F sharp minor will be heard played on a replica of a piano of Hummel’s day. The sound is very different from that of a modern piano and it will give listeners an idea of the type of piano for which Beethoven himself wrote. John Field was an Irish pianist and composer, to whom Chopin owed the name and form of the nocturne. He also appeared in public as a pianist at a very early age. He was a pupil of Clementi, whose pianos he used to demonstrate. He toured extensively as a virtuoso and later settled in Bussia, where he died at the age of 55. A pastorale and rondo from a Divertissement for piano and strings by John Field will be heard, played by the pianist, Lamar Crowson and a string quartet. , Spohr was also an executant musician. He was famous as a violinist and a conductor and is believed to have been the first conductor to use a baton in the modern manner. His fame persisted until the second half of the nineteenth century, as can be seen by the Illustrious names with which , his is' coupled in the Mikado's “punishment" song. The adagio and allegro from Spohr’s Octet will be heard. The programme also contains Mozart’s Minuet and Trio, K. 409, and Three German Dances, K. 605, played the London Mozart Players conducted by Harry Blech, and Brahms’s Waltzes played by the Greek pianist, Gina Bachauer. Poems By Auden Louis MacNeice, who introduces a BB C. programme of poems by W. H. Auden. (3YC, 9.45 tonight) is a distinguished poet and writer himself and has known Auden since they were at Oxford together. In 1937 they collaborated in writing “Letters From leer land.” The poems Louis MacNeice has selected for the programme are: “O who can ever gaze his fill?’’ “Like a Dream”; “His Excellency”; Musee des Beaux' Arts”; “Lay your sleeping head, my love”; “Nursery Rhyme”; and “The Shield of Achilles.” 'The readers are Robert Eddison and Allan McClelland. Auden, who was born in England in 1907 and published his first book of poems in 1930, is at present professor of poetry at Oxford University.

Radio Astronomy Dr. A. Hewish, who answers the question, “What Is Radio Astronomy?” from the YA’s at 1.30 p.m. on Sunday, is assistant director of research at the Cavendish Laboratory, Cambridge. He has for some . time been closely associated with the radio-astronomy observatory there. Restoration Play Sir John Vanbrugh, whose comedy, “The Confederacy,” will be heard from the YC stations at 9.5 p.m. on Wednesday, was a distinguished architect as well as one of the most popular playwrights of the Restoration period. One of his most famous buildings is Blenheim Palace, the residence of the Duke of Marlborough. “The Confederacy,” which was adapted for the N.Z.B.S. by Oliver A. Gillespie, is the tale of a young man who endeavours successfully to pass himself off as a gentleman in order to marry into a rich merchant family. Chaliapin

Vladimir Rosing, whose extempore reminiscences of the great Russian bass, Feodor Chaliapin, will be heard from the YA’s at 3 o’clock on Sunday afternoon, was himself a famous Russian' Singer of opera and Russian songs, but a tenor. He studied with the great Polish tgnor, Jean de Reszke, and made many stage and concert appearances in Europe and America, where he now lives. He first met Chaliapin when the bass first appeared in London in I£l3. Their next meeting was in America, when he learned that he had greatly annoyed Chaliapin by singing in a higher key a song which Chaliapin had made his own—“ Mussorgsky’s “Song of the Flea.” However, as listeners will hear, nothing could affect his appreciation of the man whose voice, he says, “was like a Niagara Fall m sound ... it poured out of him; the beauty would sweep . . . with a power of emotion in the sound just incredible.” At the end of this programme, listeners will hear Chaliapin himself. He will sing Don Basilio’s “Slander” aria from “The Barber of Seville,” and the “Death of Don Quixote” from “Don Quixote,” the opera which Massenet wrote specially for Chaliapin. In the recording he sings the parts of both Sancho Panza and Don Quixote. The first recording was made in 1926 and the second in 1930. Intelligence Coup "The Zimmermann Telegram” (YA’s, 9.30 ajn,. Sunday) is the story of the most successful intelligence coup of World War I. It tells how the Naval Intelligence Department of the Admiralty discovered a German plot to bring about an attack by. Japan and Mexico on the United States; a discovery which had an important

bearing on the American decision to enter the war in April, 1917. The German proposal was contained in a telegram sent by Arthur Zimmermann, the German Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs. David Woodward's 8.8. C. programme tells how the telegram was intercepted and decoded and of the subsequent Indecision of Lloyd George’s Government on what to do with it.