Victorian overtures via Bonynge

[edurban]

The Naxos release of Robin Hood sent me back to see what Victorian Opera Northwest had in mind for the future.  It's mouth-watering stuff:

A recording of overtures by British and Irish composers conducted by Richard Bonynge is planned to take place during July 2011. The rise of a distinctive English opera movement started with John Barnett's The Mountain Sylph in 1834. Opera lovers will now be able to trace the development of its style over a period of 60 years and appreciate its influence on later music. 

The overtures will include:-

The Mountain Sylph (Barnett, 1834)

The Siege of Rochelle (Balfe, 1835)

Le Puits d'Amour (Balfe, 1843)

The Night Dancers (Loder, 1846)

The Amber Witch (Wallace, 1861)

The Lily of Killarney (Benedict, 1862)

She Stoops to Conquer (Macfarren, 1864)

The Golden Web (Goring Thomas, 1893)  

Unbelievable.  Overture's to Barnett's The Mountain Sylph & Macfarren's She Stoops to Conquer?
Be still my heart...

David

[Mark Thomas]

Fascinating. So, presumably, if they were due to be recorded this last July, we can expect to see them issued in the first half of 2012?

[Delicious Manager]

The Naxos release of Robin Hood sent me back to see what Victorian Opera Northwest had in mind for the future.  It's mouth-watering stuff:

A recording of overtures by British and Irish composers conducted by Richard Bonynge is planned to take place during July 2011. The rise of a distinctive English opera movement started with John Barnett's The Mountain Sylph in 1834. Opera lovers will now be able to trace the development of its style over a period of 60 years and appreciate its influence on later music. 

The overtures will include:-

The Mountain Sylph (Barnett, 1834)

The Siege of Rochelle (Balfe, 1835)

These two works are not 'Victorian'. Victoria didn't ascend the throne until 1837.

[albion]

Quite correct, although The Mountain Sylph especially is generally seen (and was certainly seen by Macfarren) as ushering in a new, and unexpectedly continuous, epoch in British opera which reached it's full (and richly rewarding) flowering in the 1850s and 1860s. In that sense it, and the early operas of Balfe could be described as proto-Victorian operas, perhaps!

[albion]

Scheduled for release next year, details of this exciting recording (with information about the operas concerned) have just been posted on the VONW website -

http://www.victorianoperanorthwest.org/Recordings/Overturesrecording.htm

[Dundonnell]

The Naxos release of Robin Hood sent me back to see what Victorian Opera Northwest had in mind for the future.  It's mouth-watering stuff:

A recording of overtures by British and Irish composers conducted by Richard Bonynge is planned to take place during July 2011. The rise of a distinctive English opera movement started with John Barnett's The Mountain Sylph in 1834. Opera lovers will now be able to trace the development of its style over a period of 60 years and appreciate its influence on later music. 

The overtures will include:-

The Mountain Sylph (Barnett, 1834)

The Siege of Rochelle (Balfe, 1835)

These two works are not 'Victorian'. Victoria didn't ascend the throne until 1837.

King William IV didn't really give his name to a particular epoch did he

We talk about Elizabethan, Jacobean, Georgian, Victorian, Edwardian...but very seldom, if at all, William..?  Nice old bloke too

Just a thought

[Delicious Manager]

King William IV didn't really give his name to a particular epoch did he

We talk about Elizabethan, Jacobean, Georgian, Victorian, Edwardian...but very seldom, if at all, William..?  Nice old bloke too

Just a thought

It seems that the short reign of William IV (1830-37) is still counted as part of the Georgian period, rather than the Victorian. Probably because he was George IV's brother and Victoria started a new younger generation.

[edurban]

Out now, apparently, as it has been very favorably reviewed here:

http://www.musicweb-international.com/classrev/2013/Feb13/British_opera_overtures_SOMMCD0123.htm

The libretto of John Barnett's Mountain Sylph, btw, is indeed "by Thackeray" as the reviewer states, but it isn't by the Thackeray.  It is by a somewhat obscure cousin of WMT, Captain Thomas James Thackeray.  The only reference I can find to him is that he seems to have written quite a bit in French and a one point had a house in the Rue de Faubourg St. Honore where JR Planche (librettist of Weber's Oberon) recalled first meeting the greater of the 2 Thackerays.

David

[Mark Thomas]

I had completely forgotten about this CD and am so grateful to have the reminder. Duly ordered.

[Jimfin]

The same as Mark, I'd somehow forgotten about this very exciting release! Great news it's out. As for certain works here 'ushering in a new era', I'd agree: a lot of these composers represent the beginnings for me of musical renewal in the UK. If the English Musical Renaissance proper started with Parry and Stanford and came of age with Elgar, there was definitely a kind of 'pre-renaissance' in the 1830s and onwards, when people like Macfarren, Bennett, Barnett, Balfe and Wallace appeared, coupled with the opening (in 1822) of the RAM and the founding in 1815 of the Philharmonic Society. Hopefully one day these people will be more appreciated. Richard Bonynge has certainly done a great deal for them.

[Mark Thomas]

Super quick service from Amazon meant that I could listen to the CD today.

The music is uniformly attractive, I must say. Although the works span almost 60 years they all generally owe a sizeable debt to the ghosts of Weber and Mendelssohn. Goring Thomas' work is an operetta overture, but the rest precede full-blown operas and, reading the synopses published in the very useful booklet notes, some of them had highly dramatic plots but, Wallace's The Amber Witch excepted, the overtures themselves are not high on drama. Every piece seems to be well written, strongly melodic and colourfully orchestrated. The Victorian Opera Orchestra under Bonynge acquit themselves very creditably. In short, this CD is a delightful discovery. It offers few surprises but lots of undemanding pleasure.

[Jimfin]

Thanks Mark: my copy is on the way to Japan and should be here by the weekend, but you've nicely whetted my appetite. What makes this such an excellent selection is that none of these works has been recorded complete (like 'Robin Hood' or 'Maritana'), so they're all new discoveries, and also they are works I've always been interested in, such as 'The Mountain Sylph' (for its 'Iolanthe' connection) and anything by Goring Thomas is welcome, as hardly anything exists on record.