Stanford Violin Concerto No.2

[Alan Howe]

Em Marshall-Luck has made the following exciting announcement:

<<We are delighted and proud to announce another forthcoming and very special St John's Smith Square event – on 28th February 2013, the EMF will present the London première of Stanford's Second Violin Concerto. The Orchestra of St Paul's and conductor Ben Palmer will be joined by soloist Rupert Marshall-Luck (who gave the world première performance of the work earlier this year) in a programme that also features Moeran's Sinfonietta, Britten's Plymouth Town and Bridge's Vignettes de danse. Tickets will be on sale from 26th November from www.sjss.org.uk. I do hope to see you at this immensely exciting event.>>

Here's Jeremy Dibble talking about this work (which he orchestrated):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gLIisEdw6Z4

[eschiss1]

This is terrific news.

[Mark Thomas]

Well, that's made my little day! Sounds like Dibble (whose biographies of Stanford and Parry are models of their kind) has done a bang-up job of the orchestration, too. Unfortunately I can't be at the performance so I shall have to hope for a recording in the fullness of time.

[Jimfin]

How terribly exciting! After this we have only the early Piano and Violin concertos to complete the list. I utterly second the opinion of Dibble's biographies, especially after I was less impressed with the writing styles and information in a couple of other recent books on British composers. He has almost single-handedly rehabilitated Parry and Stanford: his reconstruction of bits of Parry's "Guenever" is tantalising in offering us a glimpse of what operatic Parry might have been like.

[FBerwald]

Isn't this technically his Violin Concerto No. 3. I seem to have read somewhere about an early Violin concerto [also a Piano Concerto in B flat?]. Are they still extant? 

[Alan Howe]

We need to consult Dibble's biography...

...the work list in which one can consult at Amazon.co.uk. This tells us that the early VC (in D major, no opus number) was completed in September 1875 and that it is unperformed (followed by a question mark) and unpublished. Then there follows this abbreviation: Aut.NEul - which means that the autograph manuscript is located somewhere I can't decipher because I don't have the key!

[Mark Thomas]

[Consults his copy of Dibble] - that'll be the Robinson Library at Newcastle upon Tyne University. For some reason, a lot of Stanford's manuscripts are there.

[Alan Howe]

I wonder whether Dibble has seen the manuscript...

[Jimfin]

Yes, there were three early concertos, for piano, violin and cello, which were unnumbered. The cello has been recorded twice and numbering is not an issue, since there was no later one. But the later piano and violin concertos were numbered from 1, ignoring these early works. Altogether there were 9 concertos, only four of them published. I guess the early ones could be renumbered 'zero' like Bruckner's symphony.

[JimL]

Or number them 3 or 4, as was done with Liszt's 3rd PC when it was rediscovered in 1988.

[Mark Thomas]

I don't really have a problem with sticking with Stanford's own wishes: the juvenilia are un-numbered and the mature works numbered. Why change it? It's not difficult to understand.

[Alan Howe]

Who cares about re-numbering anyway? I'd just like to hear the piece!

[Gareth Vaughan]

Hear! Hear!

[petershott@btinternet.com]

Quite so! Fortunately I've never suffered from some innate predisposition to number everything - that's a characteristic of train-spotters! And in the case of symphonies (or string quartets or sonatas or whatever) where new discoveries, revisions etc have rendered simple numbering problematic (Schubert, Dvorak, Schumann, Mendelssohn, and now perhaps Rufinatscha) it isn't beyond our native wit to devise a reasonably robust means of identifying works by means of dates, keys, names. True, it may make otherwise neat lists look 'messy' - but the music is the thing that counts.

Incidentally, a full and complete endorsement of the merits of the Jeremy Dibble books on Parry and Stanford. I know the latter - gloriously magisterial! And I acquired the Parry book recently, and with plenty of other things to do, I've promised myself not to open it until a few days before Christmas. Reading Dibble on Parry (and occasionally emerging to partake in the jollys) will be a wonderful way to endure that extended event - argh, you real sour-puss!

[Jimfin]

I think the problem with renumbering would be with the piano concertos: there are already three recordings available of no. 2 (ie, the 1911 one). It wouldn't really affect the violin concertos much yet, as only no. 1 (the 1899 one, or whenever it was) has been recorded, and that just as "Violin Concerto". With Dvorak the renumbering caused confusion for years but has now been accepted: with Schubert it remains confusing: on the continent the "Unfinished" is usually known as no. 7. Even that subtitle is confusing, since there are so many unfinished symphonies.