This Sunday night on “The Lost Chord,” the only thing missing will be a dour Dame Maggie Smith, as we holiday on the Continent with the British. It’s an hour of music by English composers inspired by their travels abroad.
Elisabeth Lutyens must have been a rather prickly personality herself. She wrote principally in a modified twelve tone idiom. While she despised the modal melodies of the English pastoralists (in reference to whose works, she coined the term “cow-pat music”), she was equally dismissive of strict serialism.
It’s interesting that someone who made so many enemies could turn around and write a piece like “En Voyage,” a delightful suite of British Light Music. But I suppose it served to keep Lutyens in cucumber sandwiches.
Lennox Berkeley met Benjamin Britten at a contemporary music festival in Barcelona in 1936. While there, the pair witnessed some Catalan folk dancing in a park. Britten jotted down some of the melodies onto an envelope, and the two composers worked closely to create an orchestral suite called “Mont Juic.”
Finally, it was the remembrance of a trip to Upper Bavaria that inspired the Elgars to collaborate on a set of part-songs, which would be called “Scenes from the Bavarian Highlands.” Edward Elgar (not yet knighted), set texts of his wife, C. Alice Elgar. Three of the movements would later be published separately, in a purely orchestral version, much better known, as “Three Bavarian Dances.”
Send word for the valet to pack up your steamer trunk. We’ll be “Channel Hopping,” with the English abroad, this Sunday night at 10:00 EDT, on WWFM – The Classical Network and wwfm.org.
