FAMOUS MUSICIAN

Timaru Herald, Volume CXXXIX, Issue 20095, 30 April 1935, Page 7

FAMOUS MUSICIAN

DEATH OF SIR ALEXANDER MACKENZIE United Press Association—By Electric Telegraph—Copyright LONDON, April 28. The death is anounced of Sir Alexander Mackenzie, musician, composer and conductor. Sir Alexander Campbell Mackenzie the composer, for thirty-six years head of the Royal Academy of Music, was born in Edinburgh in August, 1847. lie was the son of Alexander Mackenzie, composer, violinist and conductor at the Theatre Royal, Edinburgh. At the age of 10 he was sent to in Germany to study music. When 14 he was a member of the Grand Ducal orchestra, getting to know the music of Wagner, Liszt and Berlioz. In 1862, however, he returned to England and entered the Royal Academy of Music, gaining the King’s Scholarship. While studying there he played in theatre orchestras. Afterwards he went back to Edinburgh where he became well-known as a .violinist, a teacher of music and a conductor. Received Many Honours. His compositions began to attract attention and in order to devote himself entirely to writing he went to Florence in 1879 and spent several years there, visiting England occasionally to conduct his works at musical festivals. In 1885 he became conductor of the Novello oratorio concerts and in 1888 principal of the Royal Academy of Music—a post he held until 1924. Under his able guidance ',t progressed by leaps and bounds. In 1911 his labours culminated in the rebuilding of the R.A.M. on the imposing scale. From 1893 to 1890 he conducted the Philharmonic Society and many concerts of the Halle Orchestra, Manchester; the Royal Choral Society, and the London Symphony Orchestra. Nevertheless he found time for composing. He was knighted in 1895 and received a host of distinctions and honorary degrees at home and broad. His eighty-sixth birthday was celebrated by the gift of a silver tray engraved with a suitable greeting and the signatures in facsimile of the forty-three British composers and conductors who had presented it. His faculties were still undimmed. He had a house at Ramsgate overlooking the harbour and there privileged visitors could listen to his fascinating musical reminiscences which covered threequarters of a century. Among his work are the operas "Colomba,” produced in London in 1883, “The Troubadour” (1886), “The Cricket on the Hearth” and “His Majesty,” a comic opera which had a considerable’ run in London in 1897; the cantatas, “The Bride” (Worcester, 1881), “Jason,” “The Rose of Sharon,” “Jubilee Ode,” “The Dream of Jubai” (jubilee of the Liverpool Philharmonic Society, 1889), “The Cottar’s Saturday Night” (Edinburgh, 1892), "Veni, Creator Spiritus” (Birmingham, 1891), “Bethlehem,” “The Sun-God’s Return”; incidental music for several plays; the overture, “Cervantes”; two violin concertos played by Sarasate at Birmingham and Leeds; a Scottish piano concerto, a

Canadian rhapsody, a suite, “London Day by Day,” a Scottish rhapsody, “Tam o’ Shanter,” “La Belle Dame sans Merci,” “The Benedictus” and many songs, part-songs and other pieces.