If a ball drops in Times Square, and no one’s around to see it, is it still a new year? Call it the final conundrum of 2020.
This Sunday night on “The Lost Chord,” we laugh away a very rough year with highlights from the notorious and uproarious Hoffnung Music Festival concerts.
Gerard Hoffnung was a boy when his family arrived in London, refugees from Nazi Germany. In his new home, he cultivated the persona of an English gentleman, though one with a decidedly impish bent. 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. He also played the tuba well enough that he was able to tackle the Vaughan Williams concerto.
Following a successful April Fool’s concert in 1956, Hoffnung embarked on the enterprise which, alongside 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, might have been perceived as a rather stodgy art form.
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. An untimely finish for a character who seemed his entire life to be a brilliant, fully-developed, middle-aged man, always at the peak of his form.
I hope you’ll join me tonight as we celebrate Hoffnung’s whimsical legacy. We’ll hear Sir Malcolm Arnold’s “A Grand, Grand Overture,” for orchestra, organ, electric floor polisher, and three vacuum cleaners – the work was dedicated to President “Hoover” – and Franz Reizenstein’s “Concerto populare,” billed as “a piano concerto to end all piano concertos,” among others.
It’s a lighthearted playlist calculated to put a smile on your face and lend a boost to your spirits. He who laughs last laughs best. So “Have a Ball,” this Sunday night at 10:00 EST, on WWFM – The Classical Network and wwfm.org.