Tovey - Air for Strings

Aria and Variations in B flat major, Op. 22: Air for strings

Composer: Donald Francis Tovey (1875-1940)
Performer: Ulster Orchestra

Sir Donald Francis Tovey, the Reid Professor of Music at Edinburgh University from 1914 until his death in 1940, is best remembered as the author of a series of Essays in Musical Analysis. But Tovey regarded himself first and foremost as a musician: making music was the real business of his life; everything else was secondary. Yet he was not content to be a pianist, conductor and composer; as an editor, writer, broadcaster, scholar and teacher, his aim was to bring his knowledge and love of music to a much wider audience.

Born on 17 July 1875 at Eton, Tovey was the younger son of the Reverend Duncan Crookes Tovey and his wife, Mary. At the time of Donald's birth his father was assistant master of classics at Eton College but he eventually became rector of the parish of Worplesdon in Surrey, a little to the north of Guildford. Neither of his parents was musical, but their elder as well as their younger son had, to different degrees, a gift for music. The extent of Tovey's musicality was recognised not by his family but by a Miss Sophie Weiss, a piano-teacher and general musical educator who ran 'Northlands', a fashionable school at Englefield Green, near Windsor, and who took him as a pupil when he was five. She became his 'musical mother', and their association was to last for the rest of his life, with Miss Weisse acting first as tutor and then mentor -- a relationship which was to prove both a blessing and a curse. Although the Reverend Tovey was a master at Eton College, Miss Weisse succeeded in preventing the young Donald from going to public school at all. When his father became rector of Worplesdon he received private tuition from Miss Weisse, obtaining from one source or another the substance of a proper school education, as well as first-rate pianoforte training from Miss Weisse herself. His education was completed with an undergraduate career at Balliol College, Oxford, on a scholarship designed to give promising musicians advanced training in the history of philosophy and the literature of ancient Greece.

Tovey made his London debut in 1900 and the next year made London and the Home Counties his base until the First World War. He appeared regularly as a concert pianist and chamber musician. His repertoire was dominated by German music, the 'Goldberg' and 'Diabelli' Variations and 'Hammerklavier' Sonata often featuring in his concerts -- although they were hardly standard concert-fare in Edwardian recital-rooms. He also played Scarlatti and Chopin, and he performed in Debussy's Cello Sonata at one of the New Reid Concerts in Edinburgh in 1916. He wrote articles and reviews for The Times Literary Supplement -- and he composed: as well as two large-scale orchestral works -- the Piano Concerto of 1903 and the Symphony in D from ten years later -- four trios were composed between 1900 and 1910, a piano quartet and quintet in 1900 and two string quartets in 1909. In 1907 he began work on The Bride of Dionysus, an ambitious three-act music drama in three acts based on the Theseus-Ariadne-Phaedra triangle; it was completed in 1918.

In 1914 the Chair of Music in Edinburgh University fell vacant. Tovey successfully applied for the position and was to hold the Reid Professorship from then until his death in 1940. Perhaps his finest achievement in Edinburgh was the formation and maintenance of the Reid Symphony Orchestra. The Reid Orchestra gave its first concert in 1917 in the Usher Hall in Edinburgh, conducted by Tovey, and continued to perform eight concerts a year for the rest of his life -- with his characteristic analytical essays in the programme notes. In 1929 he was appointed European Music Editor of the next major edition (the fourteenth) of the Encyclopaedia Britannica.

Also in 1929 he was at last able to conduct the premiere of The Bride of Dionysus (in a staging by Charles Ricketts). In 1931 he published important editions of Beethoven's Piano Sonatas and Bach's '48' and The Art of Fugue. This last, for which Tovey wrote a conjectural ending to Bach's unfinished concluding Contrapunctus XIV, was a significant factor in persuading the then Master of the King's Musick, Edward Elgar, to recommend him for a knighthood, and he was duly dubbed Sir Donald in 1935. Hubert Foss of Oxford University Press persuaded (and then actively helped) him to collect, edit and revise a large number of his 'essays in musical analysis' so as to make up the famous six-volume set; 'looking it up in Tovey' became an entertaining and instructive activity all over the music-loving English-speaking world.
http://www.toccataclassics.com/artistdetail.php?ID=14

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• strings

[Kev3542]

I've got to be honest and say that I'd never come across Tovey's music before this video - it sounds well worth further investigation. Thanks for the very informative video notes, too.

[mellotron12]

Another beauty!