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National Gramophonic Society
The National Gramophonic Society (NGS) was founded in England in 1923 by the novelist Compton Mackenzie to produce recordings of music which was ignored by commercial record companies. The Society was proposed shortly after Mackenzie had launched his monthly ''The Gramophone'' (still in publication today as ''Gramophone''), and its activities were announced and its releases promoted in the magazine's pages. The NGS was established for the publication by subscription of classical music, recorded complete and uncut. The Society's Advisory Committee, responsible for devising the recording programme and passing test pressings, consisted of Walter Willson Cobbett, Edwin Spencer Dyke (leader of a string quartet), ''Gramophone'' contributors W. R. Anderson, Alec Robertson and Peter Latham, and the magazine's Editors Compton Mackenzie and Christopher Stone, who was also NGS Secretary. Cobbett (b 1847), a lover and amateur performer of chamber music, had founded the Cobbett Competition i ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Compton Mackenzie
Sir Edward Montague Compton Mackenzie, (17 January 1883 – 30 November 1972) was a Scottish writer of fiction, biography, histories and a memoir, as well as a cultural commentator, raconteur and lifelong Scottish independence, Scottish nationalist. He was one of the co-founders in 1928 of the National Party of Scotland along with Christopher Murray Grieve, Hugh MacDiarmid, Robert Bontine Cunninghame Graham, R. B. Cunninghame Graham and John MacCormick. He was Knight Bachelor, knighted in 1952. Background Edward Montague Compton Mackenzie was born in West Hartlepool, County Durham, England, into a theatrical family of Mackenzies, many of whose members used Compton as their stage surname, starting with his English grandfather Henry Compton (actor), Henry Compton, a well-known William Shakespeare, Shakespearean actor of the Victorian era. His father, Edward Compton (actor), Edward Compton Mackenzie, and mother, Virginia Frances Bateman, were actors and theatre company managers; h ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Henry Purcell
Henry Purcell (, rare: September 1659 – 21 November 1695) was an English composer. Purcell's style of Baroque music was uniquely English, although it incorporated Italian and French elements. Generally considered among the greatest English opera composers, Purcell is often linked with John Dunstaple and William Byrd as England's most important early music composers. No later native-born English composer approached his fame until Edward Elgar, Ralph Vaughan Williams, Gustav Holst, William Walton and Benjamin Britten in the 20th century. Life and work Early life Purcell was born in St Ann's Lane, Old Pye Street, Westminster – the area of London later known as Devil's Acre, a notorious slum – in 1659. Henry Purcell Senior, whose older brother Thomas Purcell was a musician, was a gentleman of the Chapel Royal and sang at the coronation of King Charles II of England. Henry the elder had three sons: Edward, Henry and Daniel. Daniel Purcell, the youngest of the b ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Frederick Thurston
Frederick John Thurston (21 September 1901 – 12 December 1953) was an English clarinettist. Career From the age of 7 he was taught by his father and he won an open scholarship to the Royal College of Music, becoming a pupil of Charles Draper. During the 1920s he played with the orchestra of the Royal Opera House and the BBC Wireless Orchestra before becoming principal clarinettist of the newly formed BBC Symphony Orchestra. He left the BBC Symphony Orchestra in 1946 to concentrate on chamber music.Robert Philip/Pamela Weston,Thurston, Frederick, ''Grove Music Online''. Accessed 30 June 2007. He was principal clarinetist of the Philharmonia Orchestra and can be heard on the Toscanini recording of the Brahms Symphonies. Thurston can also be heard on Volume 1 of ''Historical Clarinet Recordings'' on the Victoria Soames Samek's Clarinet Classics CD Label. He gave the first performances of many new works, including Arnold Bax's ''Clarinet Sonata'', Arthur Bliss's ''Clarinet Qui ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Charles Draper (musician)
Charles Draper (23 October 1869 – 21 October 1952) was a British classical clarinetist, sometimes described as the grandfather of English clarinetists. Early life and education Draper was born in Odcombe, Somerset. His father and brother, having been cellists and clarinetists, respectively. In 1888, he studied with Henry Lazarus and he won a scholarship to the Royal College of Music, where he continued as a student of Lazarus until the latter's retirement. He also studied for a year under Julian Egerton. Career Draper premiered Stanford's Clarinet Concerto in 1903 with the Bournemouth Municipal Orchestra. Stanford's Clarinet Sonata was also dedicated to Draper. Draper was also a notable teacher, teaching at the Royal College of Music, Trinity College of Music, and Guildhall School of Music and Drama, and counting Frederick Thurston among his students. Personal life Draper's son, Paul Beaumont Draper, was also an accomplished bassoonist. Draper died in Surbiton ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
John Barbirolli
Sir John Barbirolli ( Giovanni Battista Barbirolli; 2 December 189929 July 1970) was a British conductor and cellist. He is remembered above all as conductor of the Hallé Orchestra in Manchester, which he helped save from dissolution in 1943 and conducted for the rest of his life. Earlier in his career he was Arturo Toscanini's successor as music director of the New York Philharmonic, serving from 1936 to 1943. He was also chief conductor of the Houston Symphony from 1961 to 1967, and was a guest conductor of many other orchestras, including the BBC Symphony Orchestra, London Symphony Orchestra, the Philharmonia, the Berlin Philharmonic and the Vienna Philharmonic, with all of which he made recordings. Born in London of Italian and French parentage, Barbirolli grew up in a family of professional musicians. After starting out as a cellist, he was given the chance to conduct, from 1926 with the British National Opera Company, and then with Covent Garden's touring company. On ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
André Mangeot
André Louis Mangeot (25 August 1883 – 11 September 1970) was a French-born violinist and impresario who later became naturalised in England. André's father was the piano-maker Edouard Mangeot. Life Born in Paris, Mangeot studied at the Conservatoire de Paris before settling in London, where he played initially in the Queen’s Hall Orchestra and at Covent Garden. In 1910 he married Olive Fowke, from whom he was divorced in 1931. He founded the International String Quartet in 1919, to which he invited the young John Barbirolli to become its cellist. This specialised in modern works, especially by young British composers. They made the first recording of Maurice Ravel’s String Quartet in 1927 and collaborated in the first (broadcast) performance of Benjamin Britten’s ''Phantasy Quartet'' in 1933. Later he formed the André Mangeot Quartet in 1947. Mangeot also acted as violin teacher to a number of students who went on to make a name for themselves as musicians, among them ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Edward Elgar
Sir Edward William Elgar, 1st Baronet, (; 2 June 1857 – 23 February 1934) was an English composer, many of whose works have entered the British and international classical concert repertoire. Among his best-known compositions are orchestral works including the ''Enigma Variations'', the ''Pomp and Circumstance Marches'', concertos for Violin Concerto (Elgar), violin and Cello Concerto (Elgar), cello, and two symphony, symphonies. He also composed choral works, including ''The Dream of Gerontius'', chamber music and songs. He was appointed Master of the King's Musick in 1924. Although Elgar is often regarded as a typically English composer, most of his musical influences were not from England but from continental Europe. He felt himself to be an outsider, not only musically, but socially. In musical circles dominated by academics, he was a self-taught composer; in Protestant Britain, his Roman Catholicism was regarded with suspicion in some quarters; and in the class-consci ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Arnold Schönberg
Arnold Schoenberg or Schönberg (, ; ; 13 September 187413 July 1951) was an Austrian-American composer, music theorist, teacher, writer, and painter. He is widely considered one of the most influential composers of the 20th century. He was associated with the expressionist movement in German poetry and art, and leader of the Second Viennese School. As a Jewish composer, Schoenberg was targeted by the Nazi Party, which labeled his works as degenerate music and forbade them from being published. He immigrated to the United States in 1933, becoming an American citizen in 1941. Schoenberg's approach, bοth in terms of harmony and development, has shaped much of 20th-century musical thought. Many composers from at least three generations have consciously extended his thinking, whereas others have passionately reacted against it. Schoenberg was known early in his career for simultaneously extending the traditionally opposed German Romantic styles of Brahms and Wagner. Later, his ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Eugene Aynsley Goossens
Sir Eugene Aynsley Goossens (; 26 May 189313 June 1962) was an English conducting, conductor and composer. Biography He was born in Camden Town, London, the son of the Belgian conductor and violinist Eugène Goossens, fils, Eugène Goossens (''fils'', 1867–1958) and Annie Cook, a Carl Rosa Opera Company singer. He was the grandson of the conductor Eugène Goossens, père, Eugène Goossens (''père'', 1845–1906; his father and grandfather spelled Eugène with a grave accent; he himself did not). He studied music at the age of ten in Bruges, three years later at Liverpool College of Music, and in 1907 in London on a scholarship at the Royal College of Music under composer Charles Villiers Stanford and the violinist Achille Rivarde among others. He won the silver medal of the Worshipful Company of Musicians and was made associate of the Royal College of Music.Banfield, Stephen'Goossens, Sir (Aynsley) Eugene' in Grove Music Online, 2001 He was a first violin in Henry Wood's Qu ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
The Curlew
''The Curlew'' is a song cycle by Peter Warlock on poems by W. B. Yeats. It is generally considered one of the composer's finest works. It was written between 1920 and 1922 for singer and an unusual accompanying group of flute, cor anglais and string quartet (two violins, viola and cello). Warlock completed the work in Cefn Bryntalch, his family home in Llandyssil, near Montgomery in Wales. There are four songs, with a short instrumental interlude. The poems they are based on (with the first line in parentheses) are: #"He Reproves the Curlew" ("O Curlew, cry no more in the air") #"The lover mourns for the loss of love" ("Pale brows, still hands and dim hair") #"The Withering of the Boughs" ("I cried when the moon was murmuring to the birds:") #Interlude #"He Hears the Cry of the Sedge" ("I wander by the edge of this desolate lake") "The Withering of the Boughs" was taken from '' In the Seven Woods,'' while the other poems were taken from '' The Wind Among the Reeds''. There is ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Peter Warlock
Philip Arnold Heseltine (30 October 189417 December 1930), known by the pseudonym Peter Warlock, was a British composer and music critic. The Warlock name, which reflects Heseltine's interest in occultism, occult practices, was used for all his published musical works. He is best known as a composer of songs and other vocal music; he also achieved notoriety in his lifetime through his unconventional and often scandalous lifestyle. As a schoolboy at Eton College, Heseltine met the British composer Frederick Delius, with whom he formed a close friendship. After a failed student career in Oxford and London, Heseltine turned to musical journalism, while developing interests in folk-song and Elizabethan era#High culture, Elizabethan music. His first serious compositions date from around 1915. Following a period of inactivity, a positive and lasting influence on his work arose from his meeting in 1916 with the Dutch composer Bernard van Dieren; he also gained creative impetus from a y ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Arnold Bax
Sir Arnold Edward Trevor Bax, (8 November 1883 – 3 October 1953) was an English composer, poet, and author. His prolific output includes songs, choral music, chamber pieces, and solo piano works, but he is best known for his orchestral music. In addition to a series of symphonic poems, he wrote seven symphonies and was for a time widely regarded as the leading British symphonist. Bax was born in the London suburb of Streatham to a prosperous family. He was encouraged by his parents to pursue a career in music, and his private income enabled him to follow his own path as a composer without regard for fashion or orthodoxy. Consequently, he came to be regarded in musical circles as an important but isolated figure. While still a student at the Royal Academy of Music Bax became fascinated with Ireland and Celtic culture, which became a strong influence on his early development. In the years before the First World War he lived in Ireland and became a member of Dublin literary ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
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