Composers Datebook

SynopsisIf you had arrived early for the gala reopening celebration of Vienna’s Josephstadt Theater on today’s date in 1822, you might have heard the theater orchestra frantically rehearing a new overture by Beethoven. They had just received the score, and so at the last minute were getting their first look at the new piece they would perform that evening.Beethoven’s Consecration of the House Overture was a last-minute commission and interrupted Beethoven’s work on two bigger projects: his Missa Solemnis and the Ninth Symphony. This overture begins with a series of solemn chords, continues with a stately march, and closes with a fugue — a tribute to Handel, whose music was much on Beethoven’s mind at the time.One hundred forty-six years later to the day, another festive occasion was observed with new music, when, on October 3, 1968, the New York Philharmonic, as part of its 125th anniversary celebrations, premiered a new orchestral work by the American composer William Schuman. Leonard Bernstein conducted.Schuman’s piece, To Thee Old Cause, was scored for solo oboe and orchestra. Originally, Schumann planned an upbeat, celebratory work, but the 1968 assassinations of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert Kennedy changed all that and more somber music, dedicated to their memory, was the result.Music Played in Today's ProgramLudwig van Beethoven (1770-1827): Consecration of the House Overture; Berlin Philharmonic; Bernhard Klee, conductor; DG 453 713 Willliam Schuman (1910-1992): To Thee Old Cause; New York Philharmonic; Leonard Bernstein, conductor; Sony 63088

SynopsisThese days, the cost of commissioning a major American composer to write a major orchestral work requires, well, a major amount of money.Back in 2001, a group of smaller-budget symphonies around the country decided to pool their resources and commission American composer Joan Tower to write a new orchestral piece for them. What would have been cost-prohibitive individually proved very doable when they all chipped in, aided by foundation grant or two. 65 orchestras from all 50 states participated, with the idea being each of them would get first performing rights to Tower’s new work.“When they asked me to do this, they called the project Made in America, and that became the work’s title. [Since] it was going across the U.S., this word ‘America’ kept popping up in my brain. Also, the tune ‘America the Beautiful’ started to come in, and I thought, ‘I really love this tune. It’s a beautiful tune, and I think I’ll start with this,’” she said. Joan Tower’s Made in America received its first performance by the Glen Falls Symphony Orchestra in New York State on today’s date in 2005, then premiered in each of the remaining 49 states over the next two years, ending up in Alaska with the Juneau Symphony in June of 2007.Music Played in Today's ProgramJoan Tower (b. 1938): Made in America; Nashville Symphony/Leonard Slatkin (Naxos 8559328)

SynopsisOn today’s date in 1768, two regiments of British redcoats marched into colonial Boston accompanied by martial music provided by their regimental wind band. It was that city’s introduction to the exotic sound of massed oboes, bassoons and French horns.One Bostonian who was very impressed by these new sounds was Josiah Flagg, an engraver by trade and a boyhood friend of famous Boston silversmith Paul Revere. Before long, Flagg had formed his own musical ensemble, which he called The First Band of Boston.Flagg organized that city’s first concert series, presenting music by J.C. Bach, Stamitz, and other European composers. Occasionally, the First Band of Boston was augmented by musicians from the same British regiment whose entry into town had inspired Flagg’s own musical ambitions.In October 1773, Flagg presented a gala concert at Boston’s Faneuil Hall, which proved to be his last. He included music from Britain — excerpts from Handel’s Messiah — but closed with the “Song of Liberty,” the marching hymn of Boston’s patriots. We rather suspect the British troops did not participate in that concert.Soon after, Flagg moved to Providence, where he served as a colonel in the Rhode Island regiment during the American Revolution, and disappeared from our early musical history.Music Played in Today's ProgramOliver Shaw (1779-1848): Gov. Arnold’s March; Members of the Federal Music Society; John Baldon, conductor; New World 80299

SynopsisOn today’s date in 1960, the second season of The Twilight Zone — the legendary TV series created by Rod Serling — began airing on CBS. For this, the producers added a new signature theme written by Marius Constant, a Romanian-born French composer. Constant had studied composition with Olivier Messiaen, Arthur Honegger and Nadia Boulanger and had a respectable career as a composer and teacher, but he’s best known for his brief, but iconic, Twilight Zone theme.During its five-season run, that show also employed the talents of other famous composers, including Jerry Goldsmith, Leonard Rosenman, Fred Steiner and Franz Waxman.And in case you’re wondering who wrote the theme for the first season of The Twilight Zone, well, that was another famous Hollywood composer: Bernard Herrmann.Music Played in Today's ProgramMarius Constant (1925-2004): The Twilight Zone Main Theme (second version); Orchestra; Joel McNeely, conductor; Varese-Sarabande VSD2-6087Bernard Herrmann (1911-1975): The Twilight Zone Main Theme (first version); Orchestra; Joel McNeely, conductor; Varese-Sarabande VSD2-6087

SynopsisOne of the most popular works of 20th-century orchestral music, The Planets by Gustav Holst, had its first performance on today’s date in 1918. This was at a private concert at Queen’s Hall, London, under the baton of Adrian Boult, who later became one of the most famous interpreters of this work. The first public performance of excerpts from The Planets took place in February 1919, after which it quickly became Holst’s best-known composition.The great success of The Planets actually dismayed Holst, who feared it would create a demand for more orchestral works in the same vein, and Holst always liked to do something new and different. He never considered The Planets anywhere near his best work, but posterity disagrees.Holst’s seven-movement orchestral suite is based on the symbolic astrological associations of the planets. Only seven planets are represented because Pluto had yet to be discovered when the music was written. This omission has recently been rectified by a contemporary English composer, Colin Matthews.At the request of conductor Kent Nagano, Matthews composed a Pluto movement, which had its premiere performance in England in May 2000. Matthew’s new piece has also been recorded, as you might expect, as an occasional eighth planetary appendix to new recordings of Holst’s original seven.Music Played in Today's ProgramGustav Holst (1874-1934): The Planets; Montréal Symphony; Charles Dutoit, conductor; London 460 606Colin Matthews (b. 1946): Pluto; Hallé Orchestra; Mark Elder, condictor; Hyperion 67270

SynopsisIt happens to all of us: you’re in some public space and overhear someone say something that strikes you as memorable, oddly poetical, or perhaps even moving. American composer Lisa Bielawa and soprano Susan Narucki started collecting such overheard phrases, and created a musical work incorporating them.Commenting on the phrases, Bielawa said, “I noticed … people often say things … that help locate themselves in space and time: ‘Last time I ate here by myself’ or ‘Remember — it was snowing horribly? And she was holding the dog?’” Or nostalgic phrases like “We used to have a house here, but then my father lost his job. I never go there now.”The resulting composition for soprano and 12 instrumentalists, Chance Encounter, was designed to be performed in a public spaces as well, with the performers arriving and leaving at different times and from different directions, taking up positions scattered around the site, with the soprano singing the overheard phrases as she strolls among them.This unusual work received its premiere performance at Seward Park in New York City on today’s date in 2008. Since then, Chance Encounter has been performed in Rome on a walkway along the banks of the Tiber River, and in other public spaces in places ranging from Venice to Vancouver.Music Played in Today's ProgramLisa Bielawa (b. 1968): Chance Encounter; Susan Narucki, soprano; The Knights (Orange Mountain Music 7004)

SynopsisOn this date in 1828, Franz Schubert attended a party at the Vienna home of one of his admirers and played some of his new piano sonata in B-flat, which he had completed only the previous day. That same month, Schubert composed one of his greatest works, the String Quintet in C Major.Tragically, in less than two months, Schubert would be dead, an apparent victim of tertiary syphilis, the most dreaded sexually-transmitted disease of Schubert’s day. In our time, antibiotics can treat this once fatal disease, but in the early 1980s, its place was taken by the AIDS epidemic, which, before effective treatments were discovered, shortened the lives of many contemporary artists.One of these was the American composer Kevin Oldham, born in 1960 in Kansas City. His piano concerto was premiered to critical acclaim and a standing ovation by the Kansas City Symphony conducted by Bill McLaughlin in 1993.At that time, Oldham was seriously ill in a New York hospital and weighed only 135 pounds. Nevertheless he checked himself out, flew to his home town to solo in his concerto, then returned to the hospital the following day. He died six weeks later at 32.When Schubert died, he was only 31.Music Played in Today's ProgramFranz Schubert (1797-1828): Piano Sonata No. 21; Alfred Brendel, piano (Philips 456 573) Kevin Oldham (1960-1993): Concerto for Piano; Ian Hobson, piano; Kansas City Symphony; Bill McGlaughlin, conductor (BMG/Catalyst 61979)

SynopsisThe haunting melody September Song by Kurt Weill was first heard by the public on today’s date in the year 1938, during a trial run of a new musical, Knickerbocker Holiday in Hartford, Connecticut. Weill was 38 at the time and had been in America just three years. In Europe, he had been a successful composer of both concert and stage works, most notably the enormously popular Three-Penny Opera from 1928, a collaboration with the Marxist poet and playwright Bertolt Brecht. He had left his native Germany after being warned that he was under danger of imminent arrest by the Gestapo.In America, Weill set out to establish himself on Broadway, but to remain faithful to the philosophical thrust of his European work. The text for his Knickerbocker Holiday, for example, was by Maxwell Anderson, inspired by Washington Irving’s fanciful Father Knickerbocker’s History of New York. But in the Anderson-Weill treatment, the historical Dutch Governor Peter Stuyvesant comes off as a proto-Fascist dictator, a comic but pointed reference in the year 1938, when both Hitler and Mussolini were at the height of their power.Until his untimely death in 1950, Weill’s Broadway musicals continued to set serious subjects — ranging from psychoanalysis to South African apartheid — in a distinctive yet accessible style.Music Played in Today's ProgramKurt Weill (1900-1950): September Song (arr. Morton Gould); Hollywood Bowl Orchestra; John Mauceri, conductor; (Philips 446 404)

SynopsisOn today’s date in 1966, the 60th birthday of composer Dimitri Shostakovich was celebrated at the Moscow Conservatory with a gala orchestral concert of his music. Cellist Mstislav Rostropovich gave the premiere performance of Shostakovich’s new Cello Concerto No. 2, and the composer’s son, Maxim, conducted his father’s youthful Symphony No. 1 from 1926.On the morning of the concert, it was announced that, for his outstanding services in the development of Soviet musical culture, the Central Committee had awarded Shostakovich the title “Hero of Socialist Labor,” along with the Order of Lenin and the gold medal “Hammer and Sickle.”Ironically, earlier that year, Shostakovich had composed a self-deprecating parody piece for voice and piano, Preface to the Complete Edition of My Works and a Brief Reflection apropos of This Preface, whose text included a deadpan recitation of just a small portion of the many honorific titles he had received and the imposing but meaningless official posts with which he had been honored — and now, he found, he had been awarded several more to boot!All that must have seemed grimly comic to Shostakovich, who, about 30 years earlier, had written an opera which had so offended Joseph Stalin that the composer had come perilously close to disappearing without a trace into the Soviet prison system.Music Played in Today's ProgramDmitri Shostakovich (1906-1975): Symphony No. 1; St. Petersburg Philharmonic; Yuri Temikanov, conductor (BMG 68844)Dmitri Shostakovich (1906-1975): Cello Concerto No. 2; Msistislav Rostropovich, cello; Boston Symphony; Seiji Ozawa, conductor (DG 437 952)

SynopsisIn all, Polish composer Krzysztof Penderecki completed eight symphonies, and in 2013, to celebrate his 80th birthday, there appeared a box set of recordings billed as his “complete symphonies,” all conducted by their composer. But while that “complete” set included Symphonies Nos. 1-5 and 7&8, it was missing No. 6. The reason? Although Penderecki had begun work on his sixth symphony years earlier, it remained unfinished when the set was issued.Fast forward to today’s date in 2017 for the out-of-sequence premiere of Penderecki’s Symphony No. 6, given in China by the Guangzhou Symphony Orchestra. The venue was apt, since the symphony was subtitled Chinese Poems, and included settings for baritone and orchestra of eight ancient Chinese poems — with a Chinese instrument, the erhu, providing solo interludes.Curiously, Penderecki chose to set German translations of the Chinese poems, translations published back in 1907 in the same collection Gustav Mahler had sourced for his unnumbered song-symphony Das Lied von der Erde, the Song of the Earth. And it’s probably no coincidence that Penderecki’s Symphony No. 6 sounds very much like he was trying to channel both the spirit and sound world of Mahler’s early 20th century song-symphony into own his 21st-century one.Music Played in Today's ProgramKrzysztof Penderecki (1933-2020): Symphony No. 6 (Chinese Poems); Stephan Genz, baritone; Polish Chamber Philharmonic Orchestra Sopot; Wojciech Rajski, conductor; Accord ACD-270

SynopsisIf you were a member of the European nobility, the summer of 1798 was a scary time. That revolutionary wild man Napoleon Bonaparte had crushed your armies on land and now word had it his fleet had escaped a British blockade. The possibility that Napoleon would control both land and sea struck terror in many a nobleman’s breast.During this anxious time Prince Nicholas Esterhazy the Second’s favorite composer Joseph Haydn composed a Latin mass Missa in Angustiis or Mass in Time of Fear. It opens in the key of D minor, the key employed by Mozart for the spookiest scenes in Don Giovanni, an opera that had made a big impression on Haydn at its premiere in Vienna ten years earlier. As Haydn scholar H.C. Robbins Landon put it, in Don Giovanni, 18th century listeners were presented with ”the presence of real fear — nay terror.”So, when word reached the rattled princes of Europe that British Admiral Nelson had destroyed the French fleet, everyone breathed a huge sigh of relief, and, coincidentally, Haydn ends his Mass in the more optimistic key of D Major.First performed on today’s date in 1798, Haydn’s work soon came to be known as the Lord Nelson Mass, and in Robbins Landon’s view stands as “arguably Haydn’s greatest single composition.”Music Played in Today's ProgramFranz Joseph Haydn: Missa in Angustiis (Lord Nelson Mass)

SynopsisAs the season begins, we offer you this Autumn Music — a woodwind quintet by American composer Jennifer Higdon. She said she wanted to write a companion piece to another famous woodwind quintet, Summer Music by Samuel Barber. Higdon’s Autumn Music was commissioned by Pi Kappa Lambda, the national music honorary society, and premiered at their 1994 national convention in Pittsburgh.“Autumn Music is a sonic picture of the season of brilliant colors. The music of the first part represents the explosion of leaves and the crispness of the air of fall. As the music progresses, it becomes more spare and introspective, moving into a more melancholy and resigned feeling,” she said. Jennifer Higdon was born in Brooklyn in 1962, and teaches at the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia. Her chamber and orchestral pieces have been performed by ensembles coast to coast. She’s also active as a performer and, as she explained, as an enthusiastic member of the audience:“I love exploring new works — my own pieces and the music of others — in a general audience setting, just to feel a communal reaction to new sounds. Music speaks to all age levels and all kinds of experiences in our lives. I think it can express anything and everything.”Music Played in Today's ProgramJennifer Higdon (b. 1962): Autumn Music; Moran Woodwind Quintet; Crystal 754

SynopsisToday’s date marks the 1925 premiere in New York City of a classic operetta The Vagabond King by Rudolf Friml, the source of many once-popular sentimental tunes, including “Love Me Tonight,” and “Only a Rose.”Friml was born in Prague in 1879, and he studied composition there with no less a master than Antonín Dvořák. He started his career as a piano accompanist to the famous Czech violinist Jan Kubelik, then emigrated to the U.S. in 1906. In 1907, he appeared as a soloist in his own Piano Concerto No. 1 with the New York Symphony, and decided to make America his home.Friml wrote two piano concertos, a symphony, solo piano pieces — and three film scores for Hollywood. But he’s remembered today chiefly for 24 stage works, beginning in 1912 with The Firefire, his first big musical success, and continuing with many others, including the 1924 operetta Rose Marie — which in 1936 was made into a successful film starring Jeanette MacDonald and Nelson Eddy. Their rendition of Friml’s “Indian Love Call” has become a campy cult classic.Even Friml was occasionally embarrassed by the success of some of his flufflier pop works, and would publish some of these under the pseudonym of Roderick Freeman. He died in Los Angeles in 1972 at 92.Music Played in Today's ProgramRudolf Friml (1879-1972): Song of the Vagabonds from The Vagabond King; Eastman-Dryden Orchestra: Donald Hunsberger, conductor; Arabesque 6562 Rudolf Friml (1879-1972): Chanson ‘In Love’; New London Orchestra; Ronald Corp, conductor; Hyperion 67067

SynopsisToday’s date commemorates the death, in 1957, of the most famous Finnish composer of modern times, Jean Sibelius. Born in 1865, Sibelius studied at the University of Helsinki, developed a strong sense of nationalism in the 1890s, and achieved world fame in the first years of the 20th century. He wrote little after the World War I, however, and lived his last 30 years in almost complete seclusion.Even so, he was one of the most popular composers of his time. In 1938, a recording of his tone-poem Finlandia was selected as one of only three pieces of music to be deposited along with other artifacts of modern civilization in an indestructible time capsule buried on the site of the New York World’s Fair.By 1957, the enormous acclaim that Sibelius enjoyed during his lifetime had faded somewhat, but these days his reputation seems on the rise once again, as does the influence of Finnish music in general.A remarkable number of talented composers are thriving in that tiny nation today, and operas, orchestral works and chamber pieces by contemporary Finnish composers like Aulis Sallinen, Einojuhanni Rautavaara, Magnus Lindberg and Kaija Saariaho are increasingly finding worldwide audiences.Sibelius would have been very pleased.Music Played in Today's ProgramJean Sibelius (1865-1957): Alla Marcia from Karelia Suite; Finnish Radio Symphony; Jukka-Pekka Saraste, conductor; (RCA 7765)

SynopsisOn today’s date in 2002, a little over one year after two passenger jetliners had crashed into the twin towers of the World Trade Center in New York City, the New York Philharmonic gave the premiere performance of a new work by American composer John Adams.On the Transmigration of Souls, this high-profile commission sought to address a nation still in shock and grief at the terrorist attack of September 11, 2001.“I realized right up front that the public didn't need any more reiteration of the narrative of that day,” Adams said in an interview. “Certainly it didn't need some tasteless dramatization of the events … If I was going to do something meaningful, I was going to have to go in the opposite direction.”Adams chose to set some of the words scribbled on posters plastered around Ground Zero by families searching for their loved ones. “They were a mixture of hope and a slowly dimming acceptance of reality,” Adams said. “When people are deeply in shock … they don't express themselves in fancy language … they speak in the most simple of terms.”Adams said he hoped his new piece would provide “memory space,” a musical work that could be at once a platform for either communal or personal reflection.Music Played in Today's ProgramJohn Adams (b. 1947): On the Transmigration of Souls; New York Philharmonic; Lorin Maazel, conductor; Nonesuch CD 79816

SynopsisOn this day in 1918, Russian composer Serge Prokofiev arrived in America to give a recital of his piano works in New York. He told interviewers that despite the revolution in his homeland and widespread conditions of famine, Russian musicians continued to work.Prokofiev, however, stayed away from his homeland for years. His opera The Love for Three Oranges and his Piano Concerto No. 3 received their premieres in Chicago in 1921. From 1922 to 1932, Prokofiev lived mainly in Paris before eventually returning home for good.Another temporary expatriate composer, Jón Leifs of Iceland, has an anniversary today, when in 1950, his Saga-Symphony was performed for the first time in Helsinki. Leifs was born in Iceland in 1899 and died there in 1968. He studied in Leipzig, where, in his words, he (quote) “began searching whether, like other countries, Iceland had some material that could be used as a starting-point for new music … some spark that could light the fire.”Leif’s years in Germany coincided with the rise of the Nazis, who at first found him a sympathetic Nordic composer. When Leifs married a Jewish woman, however, he soon fell out of favor and eventually fled to Sweden with his family. After the war he returned home and today is honored as Iceland’s first great composer.Music Played in Today's ProgramSergei Prokofiev (1891-1953): Piano Concerto No. 3; Martha Argerich, piano; Montréal Symphony; Charles Dutoit, conductor; EMI Classics 56654Jón Leifs (1899-1968): Saga Symphony; Iceland Symphony; Osmo Vänskä, conductor; BIS 730

SynopsisIn 1962, American jazz composer, performer and bandleader Duke Ellington was 63 — an acknowledged master, but trends in American jazz were changing, and there were much younger figures emerging, with more challenging styles.Take, for example, bassist Charles Mingus, Jr., a master of collective improvisation, and drummer Max Roach, a pioneer in the be-bop movement. Despite their age and stylistic differences, these three jazz titans went into a recording studio on today’s date in 1962 and, while tape rolled, using bare-bones charts provided by Ellington of melodies and harmonies, the three jazz titans improvised. The results were issued the following year as a classic LP, Money Jungle. Despite his fame, Ellington did not have a recording contract in 1962, and, perhaps after decades experiencing the highs and lows of life as a Black jazz musician in a segregated society, Money Jungle reflects a certain bitterness. Along with the charts he gave Mingus and Roach, Ellington also provided poetic story lines for each track, like: “Crawling around on the streets are serpents who have their heads up; these are agents and people who have exploited artists. Play that along with the music.”Music Played in Today's ProgramDuke Ellington (1899-1974), Charles Mingus (1922-1979) and Max Roach (1924-2007): Money Jungle; Blue Note 31461

SynopsisBritish composer Sally Beamish was born in London and studied music there and in Germany, but more recently has come to be associated with both Scotland and Sweden due to successful composer residencies in those two countries. Her saxophone concerto, The Imagined Sound of Sun on Stone, is a perfect example of this association. “The piece begins with a reference to a Swedish herding call, a special high-pitched song which carries over long distances… after this the music becomes more fragmentary, half-heard glimpses, as if the shaft of light has somehow released sounds stored in stone for millennia, layers of music long forgotten… drawing on psalms and chants from different tradition celebrating the enlightenment of [Pentecost],” she explained. The work was a joint commission of the St. Magnus Festival which takes place at midsummer on the islands of Orkney off the north coast of mainland Scotland, a landscape of wind-swept cliffs, and the Swedish Chamber Orchestra. The premiere performance took place at the St. Magnus Festival in June of 1999, and on today’s date that same year, the concerto’s Swedish herding call was heard in that country at its Örebro premiere.Music Played in Today's ProgramSally Beamish (b. 1956): The Imagined Sound of Sun on Stone; John Harle, saxophone; Swedish Chamber Orchestra; Ola Rudner, conductor; BIS 1161

SynopsisIf you’ve ever witnessed a spectacular display of the Northern Lights, you’ll know the feeling: jaw-dropping wonder at the powerful forces unleashed in the vast spaces of the night sky.American composer Henry Brant experienced something like that in St. Paul, Minnesota, in 1982 during a visit, and later translated the experience into his Northern Lights over the Twin Cities, a work commissioned by Macalester College in St. Paul to celebrate its 100th anniversary in 1985.Like most of Brant’s works, this piece employs several distinct groups of performers separated by space, a technique called spatial composition. For his Macalester Centenary commission, he utilized all the musical ensembles the College had to offer, including its chorus and orchestra, its wind, marching and jazz bands, and even its bagpipe ensemble, all positioned at various points around the college’s cavernous field house.Brant said his own spatial works were inspired by the antiphonal works of the Renaissance composer Giovanni Gabrieli, the multiple brass ensembles in the Requiem Mass by French Romantic composer Hector Berlioz, but above all by The Unanswered Question, by modern American composer Charles Ives.Brant was born on today’s date in 1913. He was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Music in 2002, and died at 94 in 2008.Music Played in Today's ProgramHenry Brant (1913-2008): Northern Lights Over the Twin Cities; Combined musical forces of Macalester College; with six conductors, including Henry Brant; Innova CD 408

SynopsisThe year 2002 marked the 10th anniversary of BBC Music Magazine and to celebrate the magazine’s editor asked British composer Colin Matthews to coordinate a bold commissioning idea: a set of seven orchestral variations on a theme by Henry Purcell: Hail, Bright Cecilia.The resulting suite, Bright Cecilia Variations, had its premiere on today’s date in 2002 at a Last Night of the Proms concert at the Royal Albert Hall in London, with the BBC Symphony led by American conductor Leonard Slatkin.Colin Matthews’ orchestration of the Purcell theme was followed by Matthews’ original variation, and in turn by six other variations composed by three additional British composers, namely Judith Weir, David Sawer and Anthony Payne, plus one each by the Danish composer Poul Ruders, Finnish composer Magnus Lindberg, and American composer Michael Torke.Torke had this to say about his variation: “I wanted to create almost a jungle frenzy, by having four drummers from the percussion section playing tom-toms and shadowing those rhythmic beatings with melodic woodwind and brass fragments all drawn from the original theme … The result is vigorous.” Music Played in Today's ProgramColin Matthews (b. 1946): Bright Cecilia: Variations on a Theme by Purcell; (BBC Philharmonic; Gianandrea Noseda, conductor; BBC Music Vol. 11, no. 3