Hans Gal was born in Vienna in 1890.  The latter part of his life was spent in Edinburgh and he died there in 1987.  He was a prolific composer and I recall his attending a concert at which we were performing one of his works - 'we' being the Glasgow String Orchestra, which Adrian Secchi had founded in 1956 - rehearsals I remember being in Cecil Street, off Great Western Road. This concert must have been around 1959 and by coincidence I shortly afterwards played alongside his daughter, in the Edinburgh Rehearsal Orchestra, I think.  

In 1934 Gal composed his "Lyrical Suite on Robert Browning's dramatic poem Pippa Passes", for soprano, flute and string quartet.  One of its earliest performances was in Vienna in  May 1936, and it was performed there again in October 1997, but nearer to home the work was played in Edinburgh in 1987, with George Gwilt the flautist and the Edinburgh Quartet, with soprano Francesca Green. (The text is a translation into German by Helene Scheu-Riesz.)

Also in 1987 Francesca sang Gals' Fünf Lieder, op.33, accompanied by Leon Coates, again in Edinburgh.

Something a little different this time!  Hannah Elizabeth ELLIS was born in Batley, Yorkshire, in 1872, and four of her scores have pride of place in my Library.  Which Yorkshire choir did she sing with, say in the 1890s or 1900s?
Perhaps someone looking at these scores (an Elijah too) might be able match them with old programmes of the era.  Wouldn't it be lovely if a programme still exists with Hannah's name among the performers!

I'm sure that my father studying singing at the Royal Academy of Music was a direct result of his mother's love of music.  And so my own life in music must, passed down through my father, also be partly thanks to Hannah Ellis's influence. 
And where did Hannah find her encouragement and inspiration?

Remembering Benjamin Britten in the year of his centenary.

The "Affinities" violin and piano sonata, mentioned above, is full of music in five beats per bar. I well remember my first encounter with this 'odd' time signature, when I was one of the string quartet accompanying The Little Sweep in Britten's Let's Make An Opera, sometime   in the 1950s.  Sadly I cannot now recall the venue; but it was probably when I was at school near Glasgow - so either somewhere in Renfrewshire or Ayrshire.

This interesting feature has been prompted by the delightful news from one of my ex-pupils, Alison, that one of her own pupils, Macie Wallis, has recently been accepted by Chetham's Specialist Music School in Manchester.

Giovanni Battista VIOTTI b. 1753

Charles Auguste de BERIOT b. 1802

Henri VIEUXTEMPS famous Belgian Violinist, Composer and Teacher, 1820 - 1881

Henryk WIENIAWSKI

Louis CARUS born 1927

- studied Brussels Conservatoire and Peabody Conservatoire Baltimore

Taught Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama

Kerry MILAN born 1942

studied with  Louis Carus at RSAMD and Maurice Raskin in Brussels.

Taught for Staffordshire Music Service and headed the county's school for its potentially talented young musicians.

Jean RENNIE Scottish violinist, born Paisley in 1920? who was leader of the Scottish National Orchestra in the 1950s.

David MARTIN, born 1911 in Winnipeg, a much loved performer and teacher in London.  (He and Frederick GRINKE played the Bach Double Violin Concerto at the funeral of Ralph Vaughan Williams.)

Alison GIFFIN born 1961

Macie Wallis born 2001

And we shall be told that this will be to improve provision.  Heaven help us.

An earlier photograph (above) shows how successful local education authority provision could be over sixty years ago (with me aged about nine in Doncaster, West Riding) and if as a country we could afford it then we can certainly afford it now.  Heaven help us.

These two light-hearted photographs are from the eighties.  Stafford Music Centre had an enthusiastic and dedicated 'Friends' support group - a kind of PTA - and on top of all the usual concerts / festival activities we had annual youth hostelling weekends - and no, I don't think they cost the County Council anything.

A few years later, in fact exactly forty years ago, pianist and lecturer Ian Gleaves and I were just a few hundred yards along the road from the Victoria Hall at the BBC studios doing recordings for two Listen In programmes produced by Ken Hopwood.   There were three sonatas, the Handel in G minor, Brahms is A opus 100 and the César Franck. 

What seems incredible to me, looking back, is that all three works were recorded together on the same afternoon, in one take, as if capturing a live performance. Nowadays we might have been able to ask to 'do that bit again'; but, the odd slip notwithstanding, it was still a very worthwhile experience. 

Staffordshire School for Potentially Talented Young Musicians  - 1986.

1986 - almost a different world.  Mrs Thatcher was Prime Minister.  Local education authorities themselves provided some wonderful music provision, in schools, in music centres and in county youth ensembles.  And this in turn helped identify a generation of particularly talented youngsters who were given further tuition, not just on their instruments, but in aural, keyboard harmony, history, composition, chamber ensembles, recital platform and as seen here 'choir practice'!   Mike Revell is conducting, and staff members Lesley Park, Roy (AR) Wightman and I are also in the picture.   Darrell Wade (not seen here) was another longstanding member of our tutorial staff.

In 1986 we had nineteen students meeting every Thursday evening, working in three groups:

seniors:  Gwyneth Ellis, Deborah Kemp, Michael Murfin, Lee Nichols, Clarence Parnell, Richard Wade
intermediate: Neil Aston, Gavin Brooke, Harriet Edgar, Helen Jones, Susan Kitchen, Rosalind White
juniors: David Beaman, Damion Browne, Simon Browne, Patrick Heatherley, Jonathan Kitchen, David Shipley, Jonathan Smith

As well as their regular concerts, the children also took part in chamber competitions and ensemble workshops, with Louis Carus among our visiting guests.  Here below you can see nine of the children working with Dominic Aldiss, the brilliant jazz musician, orchestral conductor and arranger.  (The audience was made up of instrumental teachers.)

What a shame if all this is lost in the name of "Austerity".  Sadly, many people now have absolutely no idea how must has been lost, or how much state-educated children can achieve, given the right nurturing environment.

The Suzuki visit to London in 1971

Four days later they were in New York, then London Ontario, then playing in Carnegie Hall before the start of a hectic tour round the United States and Canada.

The children were:

Akihiro Miura (11 years old)
Tae Lizima (11 years old)
Shizuka Nakamura (10 years old)
Kyoko Ueda (12 years old)
Akiko Ueda (7 years old)
Okikazu Yokoyama (7 years old)
Yumi Higuchi (6 years old)
Ayumi Ohashi (6 years old)
Tomoyuki Nomura (cello) 12 years old
Siezo Azuma (piano) (10 years old)

The little girl on the left here was one of my own Suzuki pupils, Penny Ballard.

The Suzuki children impressed everyone greatly, though we were apt to modify the approach, so that reading was introduced, in my case, after a year. Paul Rolland also had a lasting effect on many teachers in Great Britain.

Who Else!!

Celebrating Times Past!

For many of us, who have lived through better times, before the full force of Austerity took its toll, foolish tears are again hard to keep back.  In 1980 the small Staffordshire town of Rugeley had a week of music making involving the local Music Centre, the parish church of St Augustine and the three secondary schools, Aelfgar, Fairoak and Hagley Park. One of the many groups taking part was the Fairoak Victorian Ensemble, whose members were Dawn Mace, Sue Bradbury, Joy Houldcroft, Mrs Jill Bennett, Simon Copley, Timothy Harvey and Sue Tatlow.

There were a lot of children taking part, and although the aim of the music service was  essentially to provide as many children as possible with a love of music that they would continue to enjoy  into adulthood, it is heartwarming to realise that for a considerable minority of these students music would in time become a professional passion.  For many more, though, it has proved to be a rewarding and fulfilling pastime well into adulthood - and long may it continue.

Lesley Park who sadly died on August 16th 2017

The very first photographin this photo gallery came with a request for any information that might help date the occasion and perhaps identify some of the Royal Academy of Music students.  Searching through old documents recently I came across a page in one of them where a photograph had clearly been removed - the photographs were not printed on to the pages but stuck on separately after printing.

: pages from the 1935 programme - pdf format, just click

Here it is, and it makes fascinating reading, the programme for the Royal Academy of Music's opera production for 1935, The Mastersingers, conducted by John Barbirolli.  A young Myers Foggin was one of the rehearsal accompanists.  My father sang the role of Ulrich Eisslinger.

As a string player, though, there is a special interest in seeing the names of all the orchestral players.  Robert Masters joined the Academy in 1933 at the age of sixteen and he is here sitting near the back of the seconds. At the back of the cellos notice a young Muriel Taylor.   Four years later, in 1939, Robert Masters would go on to found his piano quartet with Kinloch Anderson, Muriel Taylor and  Nannie Jamieson (1904-1990) on viola.  It was Nannie who set up the memorial fund when her young friend Muriel Taylor died in 1970 (the same year as John Barbirolli).  I did not know Robert Masters (1917 - 2014); but Nannie was the first Organising Secretary for  ESTA (UK)  founded  just a year or two before I joined in 1976, and I sat in a number of happy meetings with her.

When our family moved to Glasgow in 1953 my father asked Barbirolli to recommend a teacher for me there; for of course before moving to the Halle John Barbirolli had himself been in Glasgow with the Scottish (National) Orchestra.   And so it was that I became the SNO leader Jean Rennie's only pupil!  She was rightly very popular with Glasgow audiences, not least perhaps because she was a local girl, from nearby Paisley.  I still remember Jean as soloist in the St Andrews Hall, playing the two Beethoven Romances with the orchestra.  And I still have and treasure much of her old music!

So thank you, Sir John.  Father never said how he came to know you.

What a coincidence that just weeks after the Donauwellen Waltz arrangement for strings was added to the Stringsters pagethis photograph should turn up among some old documents I was browsing through - for this is the very ensemble for which the arrangement was made, back in 1991, when peripatetic string staff from my part of Staffordshire were touring local schools with a "Strings and Things" concert programme.  (Jeremy Dutton's "thing" is a Stroh violin!)   From left to right this happy  band reads:

This photograph takes us back over a hundred years, and is included here now at a time when our theatres and concert halls are so desperately hit by the Covid-19 pandemic restrictions.

I was taken aback recently to realise that it is now over ten years since the Affinities Violin / Piano Sonata was recorded -
at All Saints Church East Finchley, in July 2010, by recording engineer Michael Ponder.

And what a really splendid performance by Jane Faulkner and Steinway pianist Timothy Ravenscroft.
The work is highly demanding, especially the third movement Scherzando; but as you can hear from this recording it is played brilliantly, the music bubbling and sparkling with a delightful playfulness, which makes light of the technical demands.

I recall my dear departed teacher Louis Carus, writing from back in Glasgow to congratulate me on the work (finished in 2008) - but then adding 'why did you have to make it so hard?!'   I suspect it was this movement to which he was referring, with its challenging mix of 5/8 and 5/4 time signatures.   I remember my first ever experience of quintuple time, back in the 50s, when as a schoolboy I played my violin in a performance at Ayr of Britten's Let's Make an Opera - "swee -ee-eep - 4 - 5"  still going through my head!

For the  Scherzando tempo marking I had indicated a rather cautious quaver = 250, i.e. each 5/8 bar = 50; but for the recording  I can still hear Tim Ravenscroft saying to Jane "shall we give him it a bit faster?" and amazingly the music flies along with complete abandon at no less that 58.  I find it breath-taking and if ever a recording deserved to be named 'recording of the year' it should have been this!

<<Play the Scherzando>>

In 1952 Patricia was in her school production of The Mikado.
The school was Eastwood Senior Seoondary, at Williamwood near Glasgow, their music teacher Peter Mooney, who would later move to Hamilton Academy and take on the conductorship of the Glasgow Phoenix Choir, previously Sir Hugh Robertson's Glasgow Orpheus Choir.
I wonder how many state schools today could even imagine taking on such an ambitious project; but then, the value and importance of the arts in education was rather better appreciated than in today's rather Philistine environment, to quote Julian Barnes!

St Mary's Collegiate Church, Stafford
Coffee Concert, 17th June 2023

Patrick Park and me with John Savage at the keyboard

Anne-Mauraide Hamilton with Patricia and me in October 2000

In 2009 and I sent Anne-Mauraide a copy of my Affinities violin/piano sonata and out of the blue back came a splendid recording made at her home in Stow Gardens Manchester with the brilliant pianist Roderick Barrand.  Here, to remember Anne-Mauraide and her great playing, is their performance of the sonata's last movement, Rondo  "The Bee-sting Waltz".