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| Tovey - Air for Strings |
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Aria and Variations in B flat major, Op. 22:
Air for strings
Composer: Donald Francis Tovey (1875-1940)
Performer: Ulster Orchestra
Sir Donald Francis Tovey, the Reid Professor
of Music at Edinburgh University from 1914
until his death in 1940, is best remembered
as the author of a series of Essays in
Musical Analysis. But Tovey regarded himself
first and foremost as a musician: making
music was the real business of his life;
everything else was secondary. Yet he was not
content to be a pianist, conductor and
composer; as an editor, writer, broadcaster,
scholar and teacher, his aim was to bring his
knowledge and love of music to a much wider
audience.
Born on 17 July 1875 at Eton, Tovey was the
younger son of the Reverend Duncan Crookes
Tovey and his wife, Mary. At the time of
Donald's birth his father was assistant
master of classics at Eton College but he
eventually became rector of the parish of
Worplesdon in Surrey, a little to the north
of Guildford. Neither of his parents was
musical, but their elder as well as their
younger son had, to different degrees, a gift
for music. The extent of Tovey's musicality
was recognised not by his family but by a
Miss Sophie Weiss, a piano-teacher and
general musical educator who ran
'Northlands', a fashionable school at
Englefield Green, near Windsor, and who took
him as a pupil when he was five. She became
his 'musical mother', and their association
was to last for the rest of his life, with
Miss Weisse acting first as tutor and then
mentor -- a relationship which was to prove
both a blessing and a curse. Although the
Reverend Tovey was a master at Eton College,
Miss Weisse succeeded in preventing the young
Donald from going to public school at all.
When his father became rector of Worplesdon
he received private tuition from Miss Weisse,
obtaining from one source or another the
substance of a proper school education, as
well as first-rate pianoforte training from
Miss Weisse herself. His education was
completed with an undergraduate career at
Balliol College, Oxford, on a scholarship
designed to give promising musicians advanced
training in the history of philosophy and the
literature of ancient Greece.
Tovey made his London debut in 1900 and the
next year made London and the Home Counties
his base until the First World War. He
appeared regularly as a concert pianist and
chamber musician. His repertoire was
dominated by German music, the 'Goldberg' and
'Diabelli' Variations and 'Hammerklavier'
Sonata often featuring in his concerts --
although they were hardly standard
concert-fare in Edwardian recital-rooms. He
also played Scarlatti and Chopin, and he
performed in Debussy's Cello Sonata at one of
the New Reid Concerts in Edinburgh in 1916.
He wrote articles and reviews for The Times
Literary Supplement -- and he composed: as
well as two large-scale orchestral works --
the Piano Concerto of 1903 and the Symphony
in D from ten years later -- four trios were
composed between 1900 and 1910, a piano
quartet and quintet in 1900 and two string
quartets in 1909. In 1907 he began work on
The Bride of Dionysus, an ambitious three-act
music drama in three acts based on the
Theseus-Ariadne-Phaedra triangle; it was
completed in 1918.
In 1914 the Chair of Music in Edinburgh
University fell vacant. Tovey successfully
applied for the position and was to hold the
Reid Professorship from then until his death
in 1940. Perhaps his finest achievement in
Edinburgh was the formation and maintenance
of the Reid Symphony Orchestra. The Reid
Orchestra gave its first concert in 1917 in
the Usher Hall in Edinburgh, conducted by
Tovey, and continued to perform eight
concerts a year for the rest of his life --
with his characteristic analytical essays in
the programme notes. In 1929 he was appointed
European Music Editor of the next major
edition (the fourteenth) of the Encyclopaedia
Britannica.
Also in 1929 he was at last able to conduct
the premiere of The Bride of Dionysus (in a
staging by Charles Ricketts). In 1931 he
published important editions of Beethoven's
Piano Sonatas and Bach's '48' and The Art of
Fugue. This last, for which Tovey wrote a
conjectural ending to Bach's unfinished
concluding Contrapunctus XIV, was a
significant factor in persuading the then
Master of the King's Musick, Edward Elgar, to
recommend him for a knighthood, and he was
duly dubbed Sir Donald in 1935. Hubert Foss
of Oxford University Press persuaded (and
then actively helped) him to collect, edit
and revise a large number of his 'essays in
musical analysis' so as to make up the famous
six-volume set; 'looking it up in Tovey'
became an entertaining and instructive
activity all over the music-loving
English-speaking world.
http://www.toccataclassics.com/artistdetail.p
hp?ID=14
Tags : Donald Francis Tovey Air for strings |
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Affichage : 176
Durée : 134 s |
| Jessica Tovey on Wicked Science |
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Jessica guest stars as Nadine Sterling, a
famous actress who comes to shoot a scary
movie. Sorry, the episode is just bits and
pieces, not the full episode, so it's a bit
choppy. Full credit to Channel Ten and Disney
Channel.
Tags : Jessica Tovey Home and Away Wicked Science |
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Affichage : 10899
Durée : 596 s |
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