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The Company Of Heaven
''The Company of Heaven'' is a composition for soloists, speakers, choir, timpani, pipe organ, organ, and string orchestra by Benjamin Britten. The title refers to angels, the topic of the work, reflected in texts from the Bible and by poets. The music serves as incidental music for a mostly spoken radio feature which was first heard as a broadcast of the BBC in 1937. History Britten composed the music in between 8 August and 22 September 1937 as incidental music for a radio broadcast for Michaelmas on 29 September 1937. The associated text on angels, related to Michael (archangel), Michael as one of the archangels, was compiled by R Ellis Roberts. The broadcast was produced by Robin Whitworth, with an acting company headed by Felix Aylmer and singers led by Sophie Wyss and Peter Pears, with the BBC Chorus and the BBC Symphony Orchestra. The conductor was Trevor Harvey (conductor), Trevor Harvey."Broadcasting", ''The Times'', 29 September 1937. p. 10 The complete work lasted just ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Eugène Delacroix
Ferdinand Victor Eugène Delacroix ( , ; 26 April 1798 – 13 August 1863) was a French Romantic artist regarded from the outset of his career as the leader of the French Romantic school.Noon, Patrick, et al., ''Crossing the Channel: British and French Painting in the Age of Romanticism'', p. 58, Tate Publishing, 2003. In contrast to the Neoclassical perfectionism of his chief rival Ingres, Delacroix took for his inspiration the art of Rubens and painters of the Venetian Renaissance, with an attendant emphasis on colour and movement rather than clarity of outline and carefully modelled form. Dramatic and romantic content characterized the central themes of his maturity, and led him not to the classical models of Greek and Roman art, but to travel in North Africa, in search of the exotic. Friend and spiritual heir to Théodore Géricault, Delacroix was also inspired by Lord Byron, with whom he shared a strong identification with the "forces of the sublime", of nature in ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Trevor Harvey (conductor)
Trevor Harvey (1911—1989) was an English conductor. Biography Trevor Harvey was born in 1911 in Freshwater, Isle of Wight. He was a conductor, critic, and broadcaster. From 1935 to 1942 he worked as assistant chorus master at the BBC (in 1941 he conducted the BBC Singers and John Ireland performing ''Spring, the Sweet Spring'', ''A Cradle Song'', ''Variations on Cadet Rousselle'', ''When May is in His Prime'', ''Fain Would I Change That Note'', ''A New Year Carol''; the same Ireland dedicated ''The Holy Boy: A Carol of the Nativity'' to Harvey). From 1946 he was a free‐lance conductor. From 1951 to 1973 he was the conductor of Sir Robert Mayer children's concerts. From 1960 to 1972 he was with the British Youth Symphony Orchestra. He shared an apartment with Peter Pears and Basil Douglas in the 1930s and is responsible for some important broadcast performances of Benjamin Britten Edward Benjamin Britten, Baron Britten (22 November 1913 – 4 December 1976, aged ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Tenor
A tenor is a type of classical music, classical male singing human voice, voice whose vocal range lies between the countertenor and baritone voice types. It is the highest male chest voice type. The tenor's vocal range extends up to C5. The low extreme for tenors is widely defined to be B2, though some roles include an A2 (two As below middle C). At the highest extreme, some tenors can sing up to the second F above middle C (F5). The tenor voice type is generally divided into the ''leggero'' tenor, lyric tenor, spinto tenor, dramatic tenor, heldentenor, and tenor buffo or . History The name "tenor" derives from the Latin word ''wikt:teneo#Latin, tenere'', which means "to hold". As Fallows, Jander, Forbes, Steane, Harris and Waldman note in the "Tenor" article at ''Grove Music Online'': In polyphony between about 1250 and 1500, the [tenor was the] structurally fundamental (or 'holding') voice, vocal or instrumental; by the 15th century it came to signify the male voice that ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Soprano
A soprano () is a type of classical female singing voice and has the highest vocal range of all voice types. The soprano's vocal range (using scientific pitch notation) is from approximately middle C (C4) = 261 Hz to "high A" (A5) = 880 Hz in choral music, or to "soprano C" (C6, two octaves above middle C) = 1046 Hz or higher in operatic music. In four-part chorale style harmony, the soprano takes the highest part, which often encompasses the melody. The soprano voice type is generally divided into the coloratura, soubrette, lyric, spinto, and dramatic soprano. Etymology The word "soprano" comes from the Italian word '' sopra'' (above, over, on top of),"Soprano" '' |
Les Illuminations (Britten)
' (''The Illuminations''), Opus number, Op. 18, is a song cycle by Benjamin Britten, first performed in 1940. It is composed for soprano or tenor soloist and string orchestra, and sets verse and prose poems written in 1872–1873 by Arthur Rimbaud, part of his collection ''Illuminations (poems), Les Illuminations''. History Britten began writing the cycle in Suffolk in March 1939 and completed it a few months later in the United States. It was the first of his song cycles to gain widespread popularity. The cycle was originally written for a soprano; Britten's biographer David Matthews comments that the work is "so much more sensuous when sung by the soprano voice for which the songs were conceived".Matthews, p. 56 Nevertheless the work can be, and more often is, sung by a tenor: Britten conducted the piece with Peter Pears as soloist within two years of the premiere. The first performance of the cycle was given on 30 January 1940 at the Aeolian Hall, London, Aeolian Hall, Londo ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Edward Greenfield
Edward Harry Greenfield OBE (3 July 1928 – 1 July 2015) was an English music critic and broadcaster. Early life Edward Greenfield was born in Westcliff-on-Sea, Essex. His father, Percy Greenfield, was a manager in a labour exchange, while his mother, Mabel, was a clerk. He was briefly evacuated to Belper in Derbyshire when the Second World War began. He attended Westcliff High School for Boys, and then did two years of National Service. During his service, which began in 1947, he was with the Royal Army Educational Corps, where he was promoted to sergeant. He was deployed with the British Army of the Rhine in Germany. He went to Trinity Hall, Cambridge, to study modern languages, but ended up graduating in law. Career Greenfield joined ''The Manchester Guardian'' in 1953, where he began as a filing clerk. He then became a lobby correspondent in the House of Commons. He was a record critic for the newspaper from 1955, a music critic from 1964, and was chief music critic from ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Symphony No
A symphony is an extended musical composition in Western classical music, most often for orchestra. Although the term has had many meanings from its origins in the ancient Greek era, by the late 18th century the word had taken on the meaning common today: a work usually consisting of multiple distinct sections or movements, often four, with the first movement in sonata form. Symphonies are almost always scored for an orchestra consisting of a string section (violin, viola, cello, and double bass), brass, woodwind, and percussion instruments which altogether number about 30 to 100 musicians. Symphonies are notated in a musical score, which contains all the instrument parts. Orchestral musicians play from parts which contain just the notated music for their own instrument. Some symphonies also contain vocal parts (e.g., Beethoven's Ninth Symphony). Etymology and origins The word ''symphony'' is derived from the Greek word (), meaning "agreement or concord of sound", "concert of ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Bruno Walter
Bruno Walter (born Bruno Schlesinger, September 15, 1876February 17, 1962) was a German-born conductor, pianist and composer. Born in Berlin, he escaped Nazi Germany in 1933, was naturalised as a French citizen in 1938, and settled in the United States in 1939. He worked closely with Gustav Mahler, whose music he helped to establish in the repertory, held major positions with the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra, New York Philharmonic, Concertgebouw Orchestra, Salzburg Festival, Vienna State Opera, Bavarian State Opera, Staatsoper Unter den Linden and Deutsche Oper Berlin, among others, made recordings of historical and artistic significance, and is widely considered to be one of the great conductors of the 20th century. Biography Early life Born near Alexanderplatz in Berlin to a middle-class Jewish family, he began his musical education at the Stern Conservatory at the age of eight, making his first public appearance as a pianist when he was nine; he performed a concer ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Gustav Mahler
Gustav Mahler (; 7 July 1860 – 18 May 1911) was an Austro-Bohemian Romantic composer, and one of the leading conductors of his generation. As a composer he acted as a bridge between the 19th-century Austro-German tradition and the modernism of the early 20th century. While in his lifetime his status as a conductor was established beyond question, his own music gained wide popularity only after periods of relative neglect, which included a ban on its performance in much of Europe during the Nazi era. After 1945 his compositions were rediscovered by a new generation of listeners; Mahler then became one of the most frequently performed and recorded of all composers, a position he has sustained into the 21st century. Born in Bohemia (then part of the Austrian Empire) to Jewish parents of humble origins, the German-speaking Mahler displayed his musical gifts at an early age. After graduating from the Vienna Conservatory in 1878, he held a succession of conducting posts of rising ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Variations On A Theme Of Frank Bridge
Variation or Variations may refer to: Science and mathematics * Variation (astronomy), any perturbation of the mean motion or orbit of a planet or satellite, particularly of the moon * Genetic variation, the difference in DNA among individuals or the differences between populations ** Human genetic variation, genetic differences in and among populations of humans * Magnetic variation, difference between magnetic north and true north, measured as an angle * ''p''-variation in mathematical analysis, a family of seminorms of functions * Coefficient of variation in probability theory and statistics, a standardized measure of dispersion of a probability distribution or frequency distribution * Total variation in mathematical analysis, a way of quantifying the change in a function over a subset of \mathbb^n or a measure space * Calculus of variations in mathematical analysis, a method of finding maxima and minima of functionals Arts * Variation (ballet) or pas seul, solo dance or ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Aldeburgh Festival
The Aldeburgh Festival of Music and the Arts is an English arts festival devoted mainly to classical music. It takes place each June in the Aldeburgh area of Suffolk, centred on Snape Maltings Concert Hall. History of the Aldeburgh Festival The Festival was founded in 1948 by the composer Benjamin Britten, the singer Peter Pears and the librettist/producer Eric Crozier.Aldeburgh Town Council Retrieved 7 March 2019.Archives Hub Retrieved 7 March 2019. Their work with the (which they h ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Cantata
A cantata (; ; literally "sung", past participle feminine singular of the Italian verb ''cantare'', "to sing") is a vocal composition with an instrumental accompaniment, typically in several movements, often involving a choir. The meaning of the term changed over time, from the simple single-voice madrigal of the early 17th century, to the multi-voice "cantata da camera" and the "cantata da chiesa" of the later part of that century, from the more substantial dramatic forms of the 18th century to the usually sacred-texted 19th-century cantata, which was effectively a type of short oratorio. Cantatas for use in the liturgy of church services are called church cantata or sacred cantata; other cantatas can be indicated as secular cantatas. Several cantatas were, and still are, written for special occasions, such as Christmas cantatas. Christoph Graupner, Georg Philipp Telemann and Johann Sebastian Bach composed cycles of church cantatas for the occasions of the liturgical year. ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
