ONE HITWONDERSALLEGRI BOCCHERINICANTELOUBEDUKAS MARCELLOMASCAGNIORFFPACHELBEL PERGOLESIPONCHIELLI and many more!

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One of the most prominent features of geekdom (and pub quizzes or P & C trivia night questions) is the subject of the actor who appeared in a famous motion picture and then immediately sank without the proverbial trace. (A good example is Tippi Hedren, who appeared in Hitchcock’s The Birds, most memorably attempting to row a boat in a full-length mink.) One Hit Wonders are also a popular topic among pop music obsessives. But classical music has its share, too: composers whose reputation has rested and will almost certainly continue to rest exclusively on one (usually relatively frequently performed) piece of music.

Whether this situation is deserved may depend on cultural Darwinian forces, or simply the excellent being the mortal enemy of the merely very good, let alone the just OK. With many One Hitters, it’s impossible to judge whether their other works are unjustly neglected, because they’re never

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performed or recorded. These days some record labels seem to have made it their mission to record every note ever composed – which has certainly redefi ned the notion of obscurity, as have pirate recordings taken from performances in provincial Italian opera houses, featuring operas which feed the appetites of the curious! But this explosion has made little dent on the sacred canon of the One Hit Wonders, which has existed for decades, even generations.

Here then is a list of some of classical music’s favourite One Hitters, and some details about their often undeservedly obscure lives.

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CD1 [76’04]

CARL ORFF 1895-1982

1 Carmina burana: O Fortuna 2’35 Words: Anonymous (12th century) Sydney Philharmonia Motet and Symphonic Choirs, Sydney Philharmonia Orchestra, Antony Walker conductor LIVE RECORDING

I remember a documentary on Carl Orff where two geezers in a pub speculate on which brand of beer the next person through the door will order (with ‘O Fortuna’ playing in the background), whereupon a surfboard rider sweeps in on a huge wave and asks for a pint of aftershave – a take on the ubiquity of Carmina burana in ads. The piece’s bold, insistent, repetitive rhythms produce an adrenaline rush which has sparked many an enduring interest in classical music, especially among younger audiences.

JOHANN PACHELBEL 1653-1708

2 Canon in D major 4’47 Adelaide Symphony Orchestra, David Stanhope conductor

No anthology of Baroque favourites would be complete without JS Bach’s Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring and Air on the G-String, Handel’s Arrival of the Queen of Sheba and Pachelbel’s Canon. A canon is a piece of music where the same melody, or tune, is sung by several different voices, with each starting at a different time. Rudimentary examples are Three Blind Mice, Row, Row, Row Your Boat and Frère Jacques. Like many Baroque composers, Johann Pachelbel was renowned as an organist but the origins of his Canon (which was originally followed by a lively Gigue, seldom included today) are obscure. It was rediscovered in 1919. One scholar has speculated that it was composed for the wedding, in 1694, of Bach’s oldest brother, Johann Christoph Bach, which Pachelbel attended. Today it is most frequently heard as a processional at al fresco weddings (usually held in a rose arbour), performed by enthusiastic students from the local conservatorium (very different from the occasions where the Widor Toccata is performed – see below). Its chordal structure seems to have cast a long shadow and is said to have infl uenced not only Haydn and Mozart but, consciously or otherwise, Sir George Martin in his song In My Life, composed for The Beatles in 1965.

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BENEDETTO MARCELLO 1686-1739

3 Adagio from Oboe Concerto in D minor 3’34 Diana Doherty oboe, Sinfonia Australis

Benedetto Marcello was a contemporary of Vivaldi in Venice, but very much from the opposite end of the social spectrum. His family was part of the hereditary social elite and, as well as being a prolifi c composer of chamber works, oratorios etc, Marcello also found time to be involved in public life and even held a position as a regional governor. After his death, his marriage was declared void because he had married a commoner, and his widow had to beg his brother (Alessandro Marcello, also a composer) for support. For many years there was a theory that the famous Oboe Concerto was, in fact, composed by Vivaldi, but truth will out. JS Bach made an arrangement of it for solo harpsichord.

JOSEPH CANTELOUBE 1879-1957

4 Chants d’Auvergne (Songs of the Auvergne): Baïlèro 6’09 Words: Traditional Sara Macliver soprano, The Queensland Orchestra, Brett Kelly conductor

Just as Bartók and Kodály scoured Hungary and Vaughan Williams traipsed around England collecting folk songs, Joseph Canteloube transformed the music of his native Auvergne and made it beloved in concerts and recordings throughout the world. The Auvergne is what the French call La France profonde, i.e. deepest France: rugged, isolated and barely populated, with volcanic peaks called puys – a place suffused with mystery and long-held secrets. As a fervent patriot, Canteloube prized these songs not only for their intrinsic merit but also for their freshness, charm and spontaneous expressions of national character. They are all in local dialect, and are in turn sad, jocular, dignifi ed and humorous, complemented by Canteloube’s inspired and piquant orchestration. The most famous, Baïlèro or ‘Shepherd’s Song’, has been called the most beautiful song ever written. Canteloube heard it sung by a shepherdess, answered by a shepherd singing the refrain who, the shepherdess explained, was actually six kilometers away!

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KARL GOLDMARK 1830-19155 Ländliche Hochzeit (Rustic Wedding), Op. 26: Brautlied (Bridal Song – Intermezzo) 3’12 Sydney Symphony Orchestra, John Lanchbery conductor

Karl Goldmark’s career was very nearly over before it began: in 1848, the Year of Revolution throughout Europe, the Vienna Conservatory where he was studying was closed because of the uprising. Goldmark was forced to look for work and found himself in a theatre orchestra in a Hungarian backwater called Györ, a radical enclave. The Hapsburg authorities suppressed the uprising there with particular brutality and rounded up the leading agitators for summary execution. Somehow, Goldmark was mistakenly included and it was only through the intervention of the theatre management, who proved he was a visitor not a citizen, that he escaped the fi ring squad. After this little local diffi culty, Goldmark went on to live a long and relatively happy life. Rustic Wedding, composed in 1875, is a fi ve-movement suite. It’s rarely performed these days but Sir Thomas Beecham was a champion of this delightful score.

MICHAEL WILLIAM BALFE 1808-18706 I Dreamt I Dwelt in Marble Halls from The Bohemian Girl 4’05 Words by Alfred Bunn Yvonne Kenny soprano, Melbourne Symphony Orchestra, Vladimir Kamirski conductor

Irishman Michael Balfe had one of the most chequered careers of all our One Hitters. He was an unsung child prodigy (composing a song called Young Fanny at the age of 9, the same year he made his debut as a violinist). He was a student of Cherubini in Paris and a protégé of Rossini, in whose opera Otello he appeared in Paris with Maria Malibran, Rossini’s muse. He was also an impresario who founded the National Opera in London, a venture which subsequently failed. The ‘Bohemian girl’ of Balfe’s 1843 opera is Arline, a count’s daughter kidnapped by gypsies as a baby, and raised as one of them. Now in her teens, she has only the vaguest memories of her former life of luxury:

I dreamt I dwelt in marble halls With vassals and serfs at my side, And of all who assembled within those walls That I was the hope and the pride.

The opening line now sounds like a piece of over-ambitious real estate copy and, not surprisingly, has been satirised, most notably by Lewis Carroll:

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I dreamt I dwelt in marble halls and each damp thing that creeps and crawls went wobble wobble in the walls.

The song has been recorded by singers as diverse as Dame Joan Sutherland, Enya and Aled Jones (accompanied by Julian Lloyd Webber), and is heard in the 1946 fi lm Dragonwick, with Gene Tierney and Vincent Price. It is considered unlucky to sing or whistle it in a theatre.

PIETRO MASCAGNI 1863-1945

7 Cavalleria rusticana: Intermezzo 3’30 Adelaide Symphony Orchestra, Elyakum Shapirra conductor

In Cavalleria rusticana (‘Rustic Chivalry’) Pietro Mascagni single-handedly created a new genre of Italian opera, verismo (roughly, ‘realism’). While the term was originally applied to literature, it now invariably describes a style of opera dating from late 19th century until the 1920s which consciously eschewed historical and mythological subjects, aristocratic characters, rarefi ed settings and intellectual refi nement or psychological complexity, in favour of ordinary folk, usually toward the lower end of the social spectrum, often with a touch of visceral violence – grit not glitz. It would be lauded today as anti-elitist. You won’t see a chateau or sword fi ght and no-one discovers in the fi nal scene that they’re a duchess or the rightful heir to the throne – these characters are Sicilian peasants. The title is deliberately ironic: a reminder that grand notions of honour and chivalry can be just as deadly among illiterate village folk as they are in medieval tales of knights-errant. There’s also a certain irony in the fact that Bizet’s Carmen, premiered 15 years before Cavalleria rusticana, in 1875, perfectly anticipates the verismo spirit.

RICHARD ADDINSELL 1904-1977

8 Warsaw Concerto 8’04 Isador Goodman piano, Melbourne Symphony Orchestra, Patrick Thomas conductor

Rachmaninoff’s Second Piano Concerto spawned numerous offspring. Although it was composed in 1907, its musical idiom, lush sweeping romantic melodies and rhapsodic melancholia, remained dormant until the late 1930s and 1940s when it became the default style on both sides of the Atlantic for fi lm scores, especially melodramas. Richard Addinsell’s Warsaw Concerto is a highly successful example of a ‘tabloid’ concerto, composed specifi cally for the screen, with all the

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emotional range of a traditional concerto in highly condensed form. It was fi rst heard in the 1941 production Dangerous Moonlight, with the perpetually lugubrious Anton Walbrook playing a Polish concert pianist who joins the RAF. The fi lm’s title refers to the fact that bombing raids were more effective and less dangerous on nights when there was no moon. (Rachmaninoff’s own Second Piano Concerto was used throughout David Lean’s immortal paean to the stiff upper lip of the English middle classes, Brief Encounter.)

ALFREDO CATALANI 1854-1893

9 Ebben?...Ne andrò lontana (Well then?...I shall go far away) from La Wally 4’01 Words by Luigi Illica Yvonne Kenny soprano, Melbourne Symphony Orchestra, Vladimir Kamirski conductor

Alfredo Catalani is an über-One Hitter, as his reputation is based really on only one aria from one opera: ‘Ebben? Ne andrò lontana’, from the curiously named opera, La Wally. The aria became famous when used in the cult thriller Diva in 1985. Italians are blissfully unaware that the opera’s title means, roughly, ‘dork’ in Britain, as in ‘Didn’t Charlie & Wills look a right pair of Wallies in them Garter robes?’ Even more bizarrely, the great conductor Toscanini named his daughter Wally in Catalani’s memory (he died when only 39). She later married virtuoso pianist Vladimir Horowitz.

PAUL DUKAS 1865-1935

0 The Sorcerer’s Apprentice 11’31 Melbourne Symphony Orchestra, Christopher Seaman conductor LIVE RECORDING

Paul Dukas’ The Sorcerer’s Apprentice was based on a now forgotten poem by Goethe, but the work leapt to fame when animated in Disney’s 1940 Fantasia, with Mickey Mouse as the apprentice. (The sorcerer is called Yen Sid – ‘Disney’ spelt backwards.) Dukas eventually became Professor of Composition at the Paris Conservatoire and lived to rue the popularity of the work, which completely eclipsed all his other compositions, which he regarded as infi nitely superior.

MARC-ANTOINE CHARPENTIER 1643-1704

! Prelude from Te Deum, H146 1’47 West Australian Symphony Orchestra, Benjamin Northey conductor

Nowhere was musical patronage more crucial than at the court of Louis XIV at Versailles. The composer with the King’s ear, however, was Jean-Baptiste Lully, who had used his royal favour

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to establish a monopoly over opera in the capital. Undeterred, Marc-Antoine Charpentier turned to sacred music. The inherent theatricality of life at Versailles dictated that even religious works required an element of élan and splendour, and Charpentier’s Te Deum has these in abundance. To the usual combination of strings, woodwinds and organ, he added trumpets and drums, appropriately, as the Te Deum was composed in celebration of a military victory.

CHRISTIAN SINDING 1856-1941

@ Frühlingsrauschen (Rustles of Spring) from Six Pieces, Op. 32 2’16 David Stanhope piano

Christian Sinding composed Rustles of Spring (not ‘Rustle of Spring’, as it’s usually called) in 1896 and it, together with other short lyrical keyboard pieces and songs, led to his being regarded as Grieg’s successor. Now, it has been relegated to the same dusty attic as Paderewski’s Minuet in G and Anton Rubinstein’s Melody in F. This piece brings back unhappy memories for older listeners who instinctively associate it with piano lessons presided over by gimlet-eyed teachers armed with rulers. Affl icted by severe senile dementia in his later years, Sinding (who had earlier spoken out against the German occupation of Norway and fought to protect the rights of Jewish musicians) was in 1941 persuaded to join the Norwegian Nazi Party. The Nazis’ propaganda coup was short lived, however, as Sinding died eight weeks later.

FRANCESCO CILEA 1866-1950

£ Io son l’umile ancella (I am the humble handmaid) from Adriana Lecouvreur 3’17 Words by Arturo Colautti Yvonne Kenny soprano, Melbourne Symphony Orchestra, Vladimir Kamirski conductor

Francesco Cilea is generally regarded as a verismo composer (see Mascagni, above) but his only work in the repertoire, Adriana Lecouvreur, hardly fi ts the verismo template, with a famous actress and genuine historical fi gure (who lived 1692-1730) as the eponymous heroine, surrounded by aristocratic soldiers and a Russian spy thrown in for good measure. The plot, even by operatic standards, is ludicrous, and culminates in the heroine dying from sniffi ng a bunch of poisoned violets, a device regarded as one of the most far-fetched in all opera and totally discredited by toxicologists. One group which does seem to have been inspired, though, was the Mafi a, who traditionally warn their next victims of their imminent demise by ‘saying it with fl owers’, usually a funeral wreath.

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AMILCARE PONCHIELLI 1834-1886

$ Dance of the Hours from La Gioconda 9’10 Orchestra Victoria, Richard Divall conductor

Things take a surreal turn in La Gioconda, a grand opera by Amilcare Ponchielli which fi rst saw the light of day in 1876. Despite the title (in English, ‘The Happy Woman’), its heroine’s showpiece aria is about suicide. The most famous extract, ‘Dance of the Hours’, is a ballet (with no relevance to the story whatever, but the Parisian audiences of the day always insisted on having one). It represents dawn, daytime, twilight, night and morning, and in the opera is performed in a glittering ballroom at the local headquarters of the Inquisition, which happens to be next door to the death chamber. ‘Dance of the Hours’ was also immortalised in Walt Disney’s Fantasia with dancing hippos, complete with tutus. Another bizarre version was the 1963 hit ‘Hello Muddah, Hello Faddah’ by Allan Sherman. The last line of the opera is a cracker: the villain says to the dead Gioconda, ‘Your mother offended me, so I drowned her.’ La Gioconda is perhaps the only opera to have major roles for all six voice categories.

CHARLES-MARIE WIDOR 1844-1937

% Toccata from Symphony for Organ No. 5 6’41 Jennifer Chou organ

Charles Widor has a number of distinctions: a surname beginning with ‘W’ (the Paris phone directory has only two pages of Ws); a 64-year appointment as the organist of the Church of Saint Sulpice in Paris (effectively France’s pre-eminent organist); and a fi rst marriage at 76 to a woman 40 years his junior. There were no children. His organ suites are dubbed ‘symphonies’ because the organ has so many voices, it seems like listening to a symphony orchestra. The Toccata from the Fifth Organ Symphony became famous when it was played as a recessional at the wedding of HRH the Duke of Kent to Katharine Worsley in York Minster in 1961. It works best in a large church, preferably a cathedral or somewhere posh and Anglican, with about 2000 guests, a horde of child attendants, boys in kilts, girls in ballet slippers, all with hyphenated surnames, and several members of the Royal Family present.

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CD2 [72’34]

MIKHAIL GLINKA 1804-1857

1 Overture from Ruslan and Ludmila 5’17 Sydney Symphony Orchestra, Edo de Waart conductor

Mikhail Glinka is generally regarded as the father of Russian classical music. It was he who fi rst gave Russian music its distinctive voice, which later inspired the members of the so-called Mighty Handful (the original Famous Five: Balakïrev, Borodin, Cui, Mussorgsky and Rimsky-Korsakov) in their establishment of a Russian nationalist school of composition. The pampered son of an establishment Czarist military family, Glinka spent most of his childhood swathed in furs and being fed chocolates in his grandmother’s boudoir (which was kept at a perpetual 25° Celsius). He became a hypochondriac. In 1857, on a visit to Berlin, Glinka caught a cold and died the next day. Ruslan and Ludmila is based on a Pushkin tale but the poet was killed in a duel before Glinka had a chance to start working with him on the opera’s libretto. As a result, the composer initially wrote quite a lot of the music with no words. The Overture (the only part of the opera heard outside Russia) is one of the greatest adrenalin rushes in all music and is the musical equivalent of a Formula One circuit practice run.

LUIGI BOCCHERINI 1743-1805

2 Minuet from String Quintet No. 5 in E major, G275 3’55 Tasmanian Symphony Orchestra, David Stanhope conductor

Like many One Hitters, Boccherini partly owes his position to the use of his most famous tune in a cinema classic: The Ladykillers (which also featured another One Hit Wonder, Katie Johnson, the 76-year-old actress plucked from obscurity to play the lead, wonderfully, and who appeared in one more minor British fi lm before her death two years later). Born in Lucca, Italy (as was Catalani) Boccherini was a prolifi c composer who composed many quintets and works for cello. He spent much of his composing life in Spain, not a smart career move, as it effectively sidelined him from the mainstream creative trends in France, Germany and Austria. He died invirtual poverty.

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JEREMIAH CLARKE c.1674-1707 orch. Henry Wood3 The Prince of Denmark’s March (Trumpet Voluntary) 2’24 West Australian Symphony Orchestra, Benjamin Northey conductor

Perhaps the most tragic composer in this anthology is Jeremiah Clarke (1674-1707), organist at the Chapel Royal, who conceived a ‘violent and hopeless passion for a very beautiful lady of a rank superior to his own’, prompting his suicide. One probably apocryphal account suggests he considered hanging or drowning as options and tossed a coin to choose between them, but the coin landed in the mud on its rim so, instead of regarding this as a reprieve, he shot himself. It’s generally accepted today that he was granted a dispensation normally denied to suicides, and buried in the crypt of St Paul’s, though there are those who claim he lies in an unmarked grave in an unconsecrated section of the churchyard. His most famous work, ‘The Prince of Denmark’s March’, was, until relatively recently, attributed to Clarke’s great contemporary, Henry Purcell, as ‘Purcell’s Trumpet Voluntary’. Sales of the piece soared when it was used as the processional at the wedding of Prince of Wales and Lady Diana Spencer in St Paul’s Cathedral in 1981. The Prince of Denmark of the title was the consort of Queen Anne (1665-1714), of whom her uncle Charles II said, ‘I’ve tried him drunk and I’ve tried him sober and there’s nothing in him.’

ENGELBERT HUMPERDINCK 1854-1921

4 Hansel and Gretel: Evening Prayer 1’55 Original German words by Adelheid Wette; English translation by Constance Bache Siobhan Stagg soprano, Kirsty Biber mezzo-soprano, Jonathan Bradley piano,

Michael Leighton Jones director

The real Engelbert Humperdinck was a friend and colleague of Wagner. His fairytale opera Hansel and Gretel is still in the mainstream operatic repertoire throughout the world. For many, though, Engelbert Humperdinck is an enduring, cheesy crooner whose real name was Arnold Dorsey and whose most famous number was ‘Please Release Me’. It was his manager (whom he shared with Tom Jones – the yin to his yang) who suggested the moniker. Both are still treading the boards at RSL clubs, to a shower of undergarments.

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JOHANN MARTINI 1741-1816 arr. Frederick Whaite5 Plaisir d’amour (Love’s pleasure) 3’17 Words by Jean de Florian Yvonne Kenny soprano, Melbourne Symphony Orchestra, Vladimir Kamirski conductor

Jean Paul Martini, after whom the American WASPs’ favourite tipple was almost certainly not named, wrote Plaisir d’amour in 1780. The opening lines are:

The pleasure of love lasts a moment, The pain of love lasts a lifetime.

Berlioz arranged it for orchestra and, down the years, it’s enjoyed renditions by singers as diverse as Dame Janet Baker, Paul Robeson, Joan Baez, Marianne Faithful, Brigitte Bardot, Nana Mouskouri and Montgomery Clift. It’s also the melodic basis for Elvis Presley’s ‘Can’t Help Falling in Love’.

GREGORIO ALLEGRI 1582-1652

6 Miserere 12’23 Cantillation (Solo quartet: Jane Sheldon, Belinda Montgomery, Jenny Duck-Chong, Richard Anderson), Antony Walker conductor

Gregorio Allegri composed his Miserere mei, Deus (‘Have mercy on me, O Lord’) probably during the 1630s, during the reign of Pope Urban VIII, making it, strictly speaking, Baroque although it is arguably the best-known example of sacred ‘Renaissance’ music. The hauntingly ethereal music is a setting of Psalm 51 (Psalm 50 in the Vulgate version) and it was sung in the Sistine Chapel on the Wednesday and Friday of Holy Week. In order to preserve the work’s mystique, the Vatican ordered that its own manuscript should never be copied, on pain of excommunication. However, when the 14-year-old Mozart visited the Sistine Chapel in 1770, he memorised the music on a single hearing, went back to his lodgings and wrote the whole thing out, note for note.

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OTTO NICOLAI 1810-18497 Overture from Die lustige Weiber von Windsor (The Merry Wives of Windsor) 8’00 Tasmanian Symphony Orchestra, Sebastian Lang-Lessing conductor

Otto Nicolai was prominent in musical life in both Berlin and Vienna. His Merry Wives of Windsor was the most successful comic opera of its day. These days, though, it is on the periphery of the mainstream, and all his other works are forgotten. However, Nicolai has one towering achievement to his name: he founded the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra in 1842!

ROMAN HOFFSTETTER 1742-18158 Serenade from String Quartet in F major, Op. 3 No. 5 3’36 Queensland Symphony Orchestra, Patrick Thomas conductor

Roman Hoffstetter was a Benedictine monk, and a composer who must rank as classical music’s ultimate example of imitation being the sincerest form of fl attery. His admiration for his contemporary Haydn was so obsessive that for many years the Andante cantabile of his String Quartet No. 5 in F major was thought to have been composed by Haydn himself. Hoffstetter must also have been an early example of multi-skilling, as he not only directed the choir and played the organ at the Amorbach Abbey and performed priestly duties at local churches, but also supervised the kitchen.

FRIEDRICH FLOTOW 1812-18839 M’appari tutt’amor (Like a dream) from Martha 3’07 Original German words by Friedrich Wilhelm Riese Thomas Edmonds tenor, Adelaide Symphony Orchestra, Henry Krips conductor

Friedrich von Flotow’s Martha was fi rst performed in 1847 but reached Australia as early as 1856, when it was performed in Melbourne. More in the French style than in the German Romantic tradition, it tells the story of a young noblewoman who is a lady-in-waiting to Queen Anne: to escape the suffocating protocol of court life, she and a friend visit the Richmond Fair where, in disguise, they allow themselves to be hired, for innocent domestic duties, to a farmer and his friend. The usual misunderstandings ensue but all is forgiven when the farmer turns out to be a nobleman and Martha can marry him without betraying her class. Flotow wrote the opera in German but its most famous aria, ‘Ach! wie fromm’ was recycled from one of his earlier works, L’âme en peine, which had a French libretto. Confusingly, the aria is best known today in its Italian version, ‘M’appari tutt’amor’. The opera also features Thomas Moore’s ‘The Last Rose of Summer’.

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HUGO ALFVÉN 1872-1960

0 Swedish Rhapsody: Theme 4’20 Sydney Symphony Orchestra, Stanford Robinson conductor

When Hugo Alfvén died in 1960 at the age of 88, he had long been hailed as the grand old man of Swedish music. His long life was distinguished, uncontroversial and relatively uneventful, which is probably why his paragraph in these notes is shorter than many of the others. His music is late Romantic, similar to that of Richard Strauss’s more conservative scores. Perhaps the most unusual thing about Alfvén was his third marriage, which took place in 1959, just a few months before his 88th birthday. Amid a vast output, his only famous work is the Swedish Rhapsody, which was actually the fi rst of several pieces composed with the subtitle ‘Midsummer Vigil’ in 1903. In the early 1950s, a truncated three-minute version made the Hit Parade.

HENRY LITOLFF 1818-1891

! Scherzo from Concerto symphonique No. 4 in D minor, Op. 102 6’58 Ian Munro piano, Tasmanian Symphony Orchestra, David Porcelijn conductor

Henry Charles Litolff was born in London to a Scottish mother and an Alsatian father (who had been captured and taken to London as a prisoner while fi ghting for Napoleon). In 1835, aged 17, Litolff eloped to Gretna Green with a 16-year-old. They separated in 1839 and he went to Europe. In 1844, he returned to England for a divorce but was imprisoned for adultery and fi ned heavily. The gaoler’s daughter helped him to escape, and he returned to Europe where he became friends with a music publisher, who conveniently died, leaving Litolff free to marry his widow in 1851. They in turn divorced in 1858. Litolff composed four Concertos symphoniques, which are essentially symphonies with solo piano parts. Only the elfi n Mendelssohnian Scherzo of the fourth Concerto symphonique, composed in 1852, is performed today. Litolff was the dedicatee of Franz Liszt’s First Piano Concerto.

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GIOVANNI BATTISTA PERGOLESI 1710-1736

@ Stabat mater: Stabat mater dolorosa (First movement) 4’20 Sara Macliver soprano, Sally-Anne Russell mezzo-soprano, Orchestra of the Antipodes, Antony Walker conductor

Pergolesi had the ultimate reason for not achieving a more prolifi c output: he died in 1736 at the age of 26, in the same year that he composed his masterpiece, the Stabat mater. This is a work traditionally performed on Good Friday, a contemplation on the anguish of Mary the mother of Christ as she stands at the foot of the cross watching her son die. The text dates from the 13th century; it didn’t enter the offi cial Roman Catholic Missal until 1727 but composers as diverse as Palestrina, Haydn, Verdi and Szymanowski have been attracted by the directness, warmth and tenderness of its expression. Pergolesi’s setting was commissioned by a group of pious and charitable gentlemen in Naples and it replaced the one composed under the same auspices only nine years earlier by Alessandro Scarlatti, which was regarded as old fashioned, indicating how quickly tastes changed during the late Baroque.

RUGGERO LEONCAVALLO 1857-1919

£ Vesti la giubba (On with the motley) from Pagliacci 2’41 Words by Ruggero Leoncavallo Rosario La Spina tenor, Orchestre Philharmonique de Monte-Carlo, Richard Mills conductor

Having witnessed the great success of Mascagni’s Cavalleria rusticana, Ruggero Leoncavallo decided to jump on the verismo bandwagon, and in 1892 Pagliacci (not I Pagliacci, as it is often mistitled) appeared. It’s about lust and homicidal jealously among a troupe of strolling commedia dell’arte players. (Leoncavallo was sued for plagiarism of the plot but defended himself by saying that his father, a police magistrate, had presided over just such a case.) For many opera houses, ‘Cav and Pag’, as they are affectionately known, are operatic Siamese twins, as their respective durations, just over an hour, are the ideal length for an opera double act. The famous aria ‘Vesti la giubba’ (literally, ‘Put on the costume’, but more familiarly known as ‘On with the Motley’) is a variation on the theme ‘Laugh, clown, laugh, even though your heart is breaking.’ Enrico Caruso’s three recordings of the aria eventually sold more than a million copies.

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MIKHAIL IPPOLITOV-IVANOV 1859-1935

$ Procession of the Sardar from Caucasian Sketches 3’57 Tasmanian Symphony Orchestra, Shalom Ronly-Riklis conductor

On fi nishing his studies at the St Petersburg Conservatoire, Mikhail Ippolitov-Ivanov, still a comparatively young man, eagerly accepted an important post which took him to Tifl is (now Tblisi) in Georgia to organise a school of music and conduct concerts. The invitation was a heaven-sent boon, as Ippolitov-Ivanov was already fascinated by the fabulous lands of the Caucasus, inspired by stories from fellow students from Georgia and Armenia. He spent 11 years there and on his return to Moscow, the happy memories inspired him to write Caucasian Sketches. ‘Procession of the Sardar’ (depicting a tribal chieftain’s progress through a city with his entourage) is the last of the four movements, and displays the talent for exotic colours and textures Ippolitov-Ivanov had learnt from his teacher, Rimsky-Korsakov.

EMILE WALDTEUFEL 1837-1915

% The Skaters’ Waltz, Op. 183 4’59 West Australian Symphony Orchestra, David Measham conductor

When Emile Waldteufel (literally, ‘forest devil’) won a place at the Paris Conservatoire, his entire family followed from their native Strasbourg. His father Louis repeated the success his ‘orchestra’ (actually an enlarged dance band of the type Johann Strauss II conducted in Vienna) had won in Strasbourg by becoming the most famous in Paris. At 27, Waldteufel became court pianist to Napoleon III and his consort, the Empress Eugénie. After the fall of the Second Empire the orchestra continued to play Waldteufel’s compositions at presidential balls for the Third Republic. The Prince of Wales (later Edward VII) was enthralled by his waltzes and arranged for the music to be played at Buckingham Palace before Queen Victoria, but The Skaters’ Waltz, composed in 1882, is the only one which has remained popular.

Greg Keane

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Executive Producers Martin Buzacott, Robert Patterson

Mastering Virginia Read

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CD1 % recorded in St Patrick’s Cathedral, Melbourne on 11 September 2011. Recording Producer, Engineer

and Editor: Thomas Grubb.

ABC Classics thanks Jonathan Villanueva.

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CD1 @, $, CD2 7, 8, @; � 2006 CD1 4, £; � 2008 CD1 2; � 2009 CD1 !, CD2 3; � 2010 CD2 4; � 2011

CD1 5, 8, 0, %, CD2 9, 0 Australian Broadcasting Corporation.

This compilation was fi rst published in 2011 and any and all copyright in this compilation is owned by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation. � 2011 Australian Broadcasting Corporation. Distributed in Australia and New Zealand by Universal Music Group, under exclusive licence. Made in Australia. All rights of the owner of copyright reserved. Any copying, renting, lending, diffusion, public performance or broadcast of this record without the authority of the copyright owner is prohibited.

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