THE FOURTH DAY OF CHRISTMAS

This Sunday night on “The Lost Chord,” we do our best to maintain a festive spirit with selections from the notorious – and uproarious – Hoffnung Music Festival concerts.

Gerard Hoffnung was born in Berlin in 1925. His family fled the Nazis while he was still a boy and settled in London, where Gerard became more English than the English. Over the next two decades, he attained celebrity through his work as a cartoonist, a sparkling panelist and a public speaker. He was lauded as a brilliant improviser with a dry wit and a masterly sense of timing. In addition, he played the tuba well enough that he was able to tackle the Vaughan Williams concerto.

Following his participation in an April Fool’s concert in 1956, Hoffnung embarked on the enterprise which, aside from his cartooning, ensured a kind of immortality – the first of the Hoffnung Music Festival concerts. The concerts brought together representatives of England’s finest musical talent to lampoon what, especially at the time, could be perceived as a rather stodgy art form.

For the inaugural effort, Sir Malcolm Arnold wrote “A Grand, Grand Overture” for an orchestra augmented by a rifle, two electric floor polishers and a vacuum cleaner. (The work was dedicated to President “Hoover.”) Sir William Walton walked on to conduct a one-word excerpt from his cantata “Belshazzar’s Feast,” in which he picked up the baton and the chorus shouted, “Slain!”

There would be three Hoffnung concerts in all. Alas, the third was presented posthumously. Hoffnung collapsed at his home in 1959 and died of a cerebral hemorrhage three days later, at the age of only 34! He was a mere child by today’s standards, yet he seemed his entire life to be a brilliant middle-aged man, always at the peak of his form.

I hope you’ll join me for “Have a Ball: Laughing in the New Year with the Hoffnung Music Festival Concerts,” this Sunday night at 10 ET, with a repeat New Year’s Eve at 6; or that you’ll listen to it later as a webcast at http://www.wwfm.org.

PHOTOS: Gerard Hoffnung and one of his creations