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Has anyone looked into performing or recording Rudolf Friml's Piano Concerto in B-flat major? There is something labelled "Concerto for Piano and Orchestra III" with MS score and parts in Boxes 93 and 94 in the Friml Collection at UCLA, and I know of no other work for piano and orchestra by Friml so I am guessing it is that work, especially as in the chronological order of boxes it seems likely (and there is nothing labelled "I" or "II").  As far as I know it has been either given very few or no performances since Friml himself premiered it at Carnegie Hall with the New York Symphony under Walter Damrosch on 17 November 1904, and it was never published. Most sources - including Friml himself - give the wrong date ("1906"), wrong orchestra ("New York Philharmonic") and even wrong key of the work ("B-major"). The earliest orchestral work of his I am familiar with is his 1906 intermezzo "A Garden Matinee", which my orchestra plays and which was recorded by the Victor Orchestra under Walter B. Rogers in New York on 7 November 1906; the little intermezzo is charming, but Friml was known as a good orchestrator, was a brilliant pianist, and had a fiery temperament (to say the least). I expect this concerto, whatever it is, would certainly be worth looking at; if it is the early B-flat work, Friml thought enough of it to keep it to the end of his very long life, even he seems to have only played it in public that one time when he was 25.

Hello again - this may be an off-kilter question, but I was scanning the Wikipedia article on Henry Hugo Pierson and it mentioned that the orchestral material for his oratorio Jerusalem (1852) is not extant, though a vocal score was published. Of course Wikipedia is infallible and the source for all world knowledge, but the title page of the J. Alfred Novello VS of Jerusalem lists the individual parts available for hire and/or purchase, from 1st violin to ophicleide and tympani. Earlier this summer, Mr. Eastick of this group mentioned a Suffolk warehouse of Novello's filled with orchestral material where a friend of his had gained access in 2012 through knowing people and persisting at getting in there.  Has there been any further news of this cache, and might the parts to Jerusalem be in there?  The piano reduction in the VS is extremely elaborate, it's a sprawling and decidedly unconventional choral work, and considering how unusual Pierson's music is (whatever other qualities you think it has) and how scarce any of his major works are, would more effort towards accessing the Novello holdings be worth pursuing?

(And at some point I'd like to ask if anyone in this forum has contacts, or contacts with contacts, with anybody at Ricordi to find out about material on Balfe's Pittore e duca [1854] in their "secret holdings" , but I'm already starting to veer way off topic!...)

It has been a long time since I have been on this forum, but I wanted to ask about Novello's holdings on 19th century choral music. I expect the question of their archival holdings (if they exist at all) has been discussed before, but one thing I always note in the cheap choral editions is that although full scores were MS., and therefore for hire, most of them had orchestral parts for sale. I presume these would have been engraved parts, and possibly some music societies bought them, or perhaps sets ended up in regional choral libraries. My question is prompted by looking over Henry Smart's cantata The Bride of Dunkerron (Birmingham Festival, 1864), which at least one 1980s historian thought highly of and which looks to me as a vigorous and colourful work. I doubt Smart's autograph score still exists, but maybe something else does. Any thoughts or information I should know?

I check every couple of months to see if someone has scanned this symphony, as it has been discussed in this forum and several people know I'm quite fond of it, and now it is up!  It is one of the very few 19th century British symphonies to be printed within a short time of its initial performances -- Stanley Lucas, Weber & Co. printed it the year after its 1874 premiere, and it's a handsome full score.  It's fascinating to read as well as hear (in the Myer Fredman BBC recording) and it shows how well Benedict understood orchestration -- it not only sounds good, but the writing for all instruments is idiomatic and often adventurous, especially in the context of mid-Victorian music.  The brass writing in particular is much more adventurous than Sullivan's or practically any other contemporary British composer, and it's fun to see Benedict's affinity for valve horns and bass trombone.  The woodwind writing is equally colourful and well-suited; Benedict sometimes uses instruments for very brief passages or even single notes to shade and colour sections very particularly, an unusual approach at the time.  Others may want to have a look now.

His overture for Shakespeare's The Tempest (op. 77) from a few years earlier is also up, and on first glance it is not as impressive a work.  It's also in G minor, but uses a larger orchestra (including cornets, ophicleide, and harp).  To me it seems a little "blocky" and not as well-organized as the Symphony; however, I'm going to take some more time next week and study it more deeply.

Now for someone to put up his overture to Dion Boucicault's controversial play The Octoroon -- that's very hard to track down, but it was published and I think it may be worthwhile!

Has anyone here looked into Ciro Pinsuti, best known as a singing teacher at the RAM and a composer of parlour songs and vocal quartets (including a really lovely setting of "Good night, good night beloved")?  I just noticed that his opera MATTIA CORVINO (1877) was staged in Hungary in 2008 and there are two extended video excerpts on YouTube. It seems rather good, if slightly old-fashioned; Verdi aside, it didn't appear to me on first hearing as up to Gomes or Ponchielli in the "punch" department.  However, the vocal writing is very attractive, the orchestration seems quite effective, and the drama (from what I could tell) seemed to be well-paced.  (It's hard to get a full sense of a four act work in 18 minutes of excerpts.) The Hungarians in these two bits give it their all; the baritone, soprano, and chorus are first-rate, but the tenor's a bit wobbly.  I wonder if the whole opera was recorded at that time and might be obtainable someway.  Anyway, any other thoughts or knowledge about Pinsuti and/or this? (Pinsuti also did his own Shakespearean opera on THE MERCHANT OF VENICE.)

My own term, I admit, but coined after reading about the Viennese bass-baritone/actor/dramatist Johann Nestroy and his regular composer Adolf Müller (1801-1886), the latter being Franz von Suppé's predecessor as conductor at the Theater an der Wien. He turned out over 600 stage pieces including incidental music, overtures, dances, etc., many of which survive in Vienna at the Landesbibliothek, and he was one of a groups of other popular Viennese theatrical composer-conductors doing the same thing at about the same rate.  I am tempted to call it a "school" because five of them are in an 1852 Kriehuber lithograph around a piano, at https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heinrich_Proch#/media/File:Wiener_Musiker_1852.jpg : Anton M. Storch (1813-1887), Karl Binder (1816-1860, remembered for what is usually thought of as Offenbach's Orpheus in the Underworld overture which he put together for the operetta's Vienna premiere shortly before his death), , Anton Emil Titl (1809-1882, known for the once-ubiquitous Serenade for Horn and Flute and - principally in bands - the overture to his opera Der Tambour der Garde). and Heinrich Proch (1809-1878, composer of the once-indispensable Theme and Variations op. 164 for soprano and orchestra).

Outside of the pieces named, and of course Suppé's works, has anyone here heard or had access to anything by these fellows? They were all active throughout their (mostly) long lives, and very successful. Suppé is so appealing and professional, and often much richer in content than he's given credit for, that there might be a whole realm of intriguing material here. 

I had a question, and I don't know if this is the right forum to post this on (if at all) so I leave it to the moderators:

So much of what we hear in the repertoire we discuss is in CD form, and the phrase "never makes it to the concert hall" is in many posts. Has anyone suggested the idea to the companies of making a specific series of performing these works, with the often first-class orchestras they use, with an audience with the idea of issuing the recording, even if it does not meet absolute perfection?  This is frequently the case with opera recordings coming from festivals specializing in rare repertoire, and it may be that the promise of recording actually helps fund those recordings; why not for symphonic literature on a structured basis?

Many critics dislike hearing the audience on record, preferring to hear only the music itself.  This seems to remove an important element of the experience, like watching films only on video rather than in the cinema. You might argue that films are "dead", fixed media, but they were designed to seen by groups of people in communal venues, and film companies often adjusted films based upon audiences' initial reactions. Thus many films make a very different impression when watched in the cinema than when watched alone, no matter whether they are comedies or dramas.  Likewise, most music was intended to be performed and heard in the presence (and company) of an audience, and historically many performers behaved much differently in the concert hall than in controlled recording environments. For myself I have always preferred "live" recordings to studio based ones; I've recorded quite a bit myself, and I always feel better playing live than in the studio, even dropping more than a few notes occasionally, as the audience presence informs my performance.

Also,  I like the electricity and enthusiasm I hear from a responsive audience; one of my favourite opera recordings is a 1981 recording of Errico Petrella's JONE from Caracas, and although the performance isn't like one by the Met by a very long shot, Petrella's vigorous music is matched with a very enthusiastic audience that gives a real sense of the reaction the opera was supposed to elicit originally, and which at least some Central and South American audiences still give. I heard a similar audience response in an Italian performance of Apolloni's L'EBREO, and the conductor and singers gave the performance their all; I bought another live opera recording with the same conductor, and evidently the audience had been cautioned "this is for recording", what applause there was had been edited out, and it was a rather muted experience that I didn't enjoy half as much although the opera musically was rather more polished than Apolloni's rough-and-tumble work. (I wish I could remember off hand what it was.)

I know audiences have been cautioned strongly as to concert etiquette, and companies are always worried about money expended on something that isn't "perfect" within the strictures of current recording aesthetics, but what about the idea of just going out and doing this, announcing the intent, letting the audience be a regular audience, and let the chips fall where they may? Union regulations would have to be observed and/or adjusted, rights would have to be observed somehow, and maybe CD listeners expectations might have to be broadened. The most enjoyable performances of any works I've ever heard have been almost entirely in the company of other people, even if the performances themselves weren't spotless, because the reactions buoyed me up to appreciate the musicians more. If unsung repertoire is to make more of an impact with the public, maybe we should get the public in on it at the start.

These are just some thoughts, and I'd appreciate others' input if this interests them.

Did anyone get to attend the recent Chelsea Opera Group performances of this opera? Everything seems terrific about the work, and I've ordered the Swedish CD of it. In digging on Foroni, whose life was quite short, (1825-1858), some of his other works interest me tremendously - a Spartacus opera (I GLADIATORI, 1851) to a Peruzzini libretto that got into trouble with the Austrian censors (can't imagine why, it's such an innocuous subject) and three concert overtures that Ricordi published in full score. I just heard the C minor overture from a 1945 NBC Symphony/Toscanini broadcast - it must have been a very personal choice, and God knows where they got the parts - and it was brilliant; I'd put it in the very top rank of all Italian 19th century overtures, including Rossini and Verdi (it's much better orchestrated than any of Verdi's overtures).  Does anybody here know any more about him, have access to any of his scores, or have a report on CRISTINA? 

Has anybody here taken the trouble to look at the Cusins manuscripts in the British Library? I'm curious about the Piano Concerto (1866) and his Symphony in C (1892), both of which received performances at least, and the autograph scores are there. I just looked at a "Sarabande & Gavotte" and a "Valse de concert" for piano on the Bodleian's website and they're rather interesting. Both are fairly elaborately written, have some harmonic imagination, and are more demanding than standard drawing-room piano pieces (one solid page of rapid right-hand parallel thirds in the Valse, for instance). The generally available personal descriptions of him as conductor for the Philharmonic concerts tend to make him sound dull, but I wonder; there's a score of the Brahms First Piano Concerto in the BL's Philharmonic Society collection which has conductors' markings presumably by him, and I'd like to know what they consist of -- especially as I think he only was allowed one rehearsal for each concert, as I recall, and would have to work pretty efficiently.

He might not be an entirely ignorable figure - maybe? Any thoughts?

Is there any recorded performance out there which includes the entirety of the overture to LA JUIVE?  A recent German production was noted as including it, and it's big- about 13 minutes.  All recorded performances I've heard use the original prelude or a severely cut version of the overture. It's notable because it uses the ensuing cabaletta to "Rachel, quand du Seigneur" as its principal subject, which is a wonderful melody, but as that cabaletta is almost always cut you never get to hear it anywhere in the opera. I've played it in the piano duet version Schirmer put out in 1909, and it's really very good (save some repetition in the coda, which is, however, less obvious than that in the coda to Donizetti's otherwise excellent LINDA DI CHAMOUNIX overture).  I know it was not used at the first performance, but I'd still like to hear it.

Does anyone here have any information on this composer/conductor?  From what little I've been been able to find, he's turning out to be a figure that may have an interesting story.  Here's what I've dug out to date:

1) He published some string compositions around 1910, listed in The Strad, and continued to publish works for string ensemble until the year of his death;
2) He was conductor at the Carlton Cinema, Swansea, in the mid-teens (1914-16 at least), and the quality of the orchestra garnered some interest in the local press. The papers also list him conducting some of his own works with the cinema orchestra, including a grandly-titled "Sardanapalus" concert overture;
3) He continued to compose and arrange through the 1920s, doing orchestration work for John Mackenzie-Rogan, Barbara Phillips, and even Billy Mayerl;
4) He seems to have been a cartoonist and illustrator as well - there is a 1916 cartoon of a cinema pianist playing "Battle Music" that was published in Pictures and Picturegoer credited to "Fred Adlington", and there are a number of concert programmes and books on musical subjects with the credit "Ornamented by Fred Adlington";
5) He may be the same Fred Adlington credited with writing some song texts for Julius Harrison and others;
6) He conducted the "Old English Chamber Orchestra" in mid 1920s radio broadcasts, and continued broadcasting with "Fred Adlington's Wireless Octette" when -
7) he became musical director for the Metropole Gramophone Company in 1927-28, conducting their "Athenaeum Symphony Orchestra", "Athenaeum Light Orchestra", and other groups (including his "Wireless Octette") on both Metropole and its cheaper (but more successful) Piccadilly label, including possibly providing orchestral accompaniments for classical singers the company recorded (like Joseph Farrington, Sydney de Vries, Sydney Coltham, and Lenghi-Cellini).

I only found his dates on the blog "The Land of Lost Content" in an entry published six years ago, and I'd like to find out more about him.  The Metropole/Piccadilly sides are colourful, if slightly rough-and-ready performances, possibly due to Metropole's budgets precluding their getting the best London players (and in a sense the discs are more interesting for that).  If what I've outlined is all his work, he did a fair bit before his early death - the same year Metropole went bankrupt, incidentally.  If he was a composer-conductor-illustrator-poet at once, that's impressive (at least to me). I wonder what his music is like, and what his training was.

It's been my customarily long time since I've been on here, but I was going through IMSLP to-day and someone has posted a score, parts, and _recording_ of Henry Bishop's String Quartet in c minor (1816) on that site.  The recording is quite good, if echo-ey, and the piece is a stunner; some critics have labelled it Mozartean, but it's much more Romantically styled and surprisingly committed.  In fact, it's the kind of piece that makes you say "HE wrote THAT??"  Terrifically intricate once it gets going, well structured, energetic, lots and lots of harmonic surprises.  Does anyone else know this? Have I missed this being discussed before? This really should be a standard repertory piece.

It's been a very long time since I was on this forum, but I have a composer who has stumped me, despite some fairly intense looking around.  I can't remember the circs that led me to him, but I came across an opera _L'albatro_ (1905), supposedly based upon a portion of Coleridge's "The Ancient Mariner", by Ubaldo Pacchierotti (1875/6/7 [it's very uncertain] - 1916) that the Gramophone Co.'s Milan branch invited him to conduct several excerpts of for records; they even made it into Victor's foreign series.  Most of the excerpts are on IRCC's _Souvenirs of Verismo Operas_ vol. 1, which I'm awaiting a copy of, and I found an original Gramophone Monarch disc of the orchestral interlude from it on eBay which I am awaiting from Italy - the only bit I've heard, however, is from a series of audio samples that Lawrence Holdridge made available for one of his record auctions, with Carmen Melis and Giuseppe Taccani and the composer conducting, and it was really, REALLY lovely.  What was also impressive was how well the orchestra played for Pacchierotti, and a fair bit of colour came through.  His most successful opera was _Eidelburgo mia!_ (1908), which uses the same play source as Sigmund Romberg's operetta _The Student Prince_ but evidently treats the material much more lavishly and emotionally; it was even staged in the US in German.  But through all of this, and he does have a short Wikipedia entry, I can find out _nothing else about him_  He evidently died in Milan, but I don't know if it was through disease or due to the war; he was certainly very young, and critics thought very well of him up to his last opera, _Il santo_ (1913), which seems to have been harshly received.  Does anyone here know _anything_ more about him?  He seems a worthy figure to examine.