Although Norwegian on his mother’s side, Edvard Grieg’s paternal great grandfather had left Scotland after the battle of Culloden. In Norway the Greigs became Griegs and during the 19th century established themselves comfortably in their new country, Edvard’s father and grandfather both having served as British consuls in Bergen.

The Grieg household provided a musical background for a child. Musicians visited the family and these visitors included the distinguished violinist Ole Bull, who persuaded the Griegs to send their son Edvard to Leipzig Conservatory, an institution he entered at the age of 15, to benefit from the demands of a traditional German musical education.

After finishing his education in Leipzig, he returned to Norwat for a short while. He soon moved to Copenhagen, Denmark, a city which was a cultural centre for both countries. Here he met some people who became major influences in his life, including Rikard Nordraak, a young Norwegian, who encouraged Grieg to seek inspiration in the folk music of Norway. Nordraak died soon after, but Grieg continued his ambitions and realised most of them.

In December of 1884, the Norwegian city of Bergen celebrated the bicentennial of the birth of one of its most famous native sons, the writer and dramatist Ludwig Holberg (1684­-1754). Holberg, whom those of a literary bent referred to as the “Molière of the North,” was credited with not only bringing about the Age of Enlightenment in the Scandinavian countries but also founding the entire Scandinavian school of literature. Though Norwegian by birth, Holberg spent most of his lifetime in Denmark and wrote in Danish. Despite this, Norway still considered him to be one of her own cultural icons.

As part of the celebratory festivities, Edvard Grieg, who was then Norway’s pre-eminent composer, was called upon to provide some appropriate music. Despite a symphony, a piano concerto and other larger-scaled orchestral works, Grieg was essentially a skilled miniaturist and was far more comfortable writing songs and piano pieces – especially descriptive ones. Apparently uninspired by any of Holberg’s literary works, he offered a five-piece suite of piano music that he entitled Aus Holbergs Zeit: Suite im alten Stil (“From Holberg’s Time: Suite in the Olden Style”). He later transcribed the work for string orchestra.

Grieg’s Holberg Suite is essentially an affectionate backward glance to the so-called “high baroque” era, a period of music history with which Holberg’s lifetime more or less coincided. Grieg drew much of his inspiration from the keyboard suites of the French clavecinistes of that time.

The Holberg Suite consists of five movements. The opening Prelude begins with a soaring ostinato figuration in the violins and violas that is soon followed by materials that are more melodic in character. Of particular note are the witty pizzicatos contributed by the cellos and basses.

Next comes a Sarabande, a typical Baroque dance in slow, stately triple meter. This is followed by a Gavotte, another typically Baroque dance that traditionally is in 4/4 meter and begins on the third beat of the measure.

The fourth movement is a gentle and delicate Air which recalls J.S. Bach’s famous Air on the G String.

The suite comes to a rousing conclusion with a bracing Rigaudon, a lively dance in duple meter that had its origins in Provence.

© Elizabeth Boulton

Composed in 1695, Henry Purcell’s Abdelazer suite takes us back to the theatres and masques (presentations of poetry, dance and music) of the late 17th Century. Henry Purcell wrote lots of incidental music for the theatre. In some ways it was used as film music is used today – to set different moods and transport us between different parts of the story.

England’s greatest composer until the 20th Century, Henry Purcell was an organist and composer who is still much admired for his English songs. He was from a musical family who lived very close to Westminster Abbey and as a youngster was made a chorister and then assistant to the organist and ‘Keeper of the King’s Instruments’. During this time, he learnt his craft composing mostly vocal music whenever the opportunity came his way.

Later, he split his time between writing sacred music for the Abbey, royal commissions and music for the theatre. Today, over 300 songs of his survive. Purcell died aged just 35 or 36. It seems that he was late home from the theatre and his wife locked him out. He caught a chill after spending the night outside and died shortly after from it. He is buried in Westminster Abbey and was mourned as a ‘very great master of music’.

© BBC

Most of Mozart’s miscellaneous orchestral works are in the nature of a form halfway between the suite and the sonata, be they called serenades, divertimenti or cassations. There are also a large number of separate movements, especially marches and minuets, which may or may not have been intended for incorporation in larger works. At Salzburg, where most of this kind of music was composed, Mozart clearly set down what came into his head whenever he found himself at leisure and had a few sheets of music paper to his hand.

A good many of these works are, accordingly, not of any great importance; but then it must be remembered that industrious composers of the eighteenth century, like Haydn and Mozart, would have been highly astonished if anybody had suggested to them that the entertainment music they were expected to write ought to be devised with an eye on the possibility of their inclusion in a complete edition more than two centuries later. It cannot be emphasised enough that they regarded themselves as craftsmen, not classics.

The title ‘divertimento’ was extremely common in eighteenth-century Austria. At first sight, the ideal it implies – of music as an elegant diversion to while away a potentially tedious hour – seems rather a climb-down from earlier aesthetic theories of music as a language of the emotions or as the most perceptible echo on earth of heavenly harmony. However, Mozart, along with Joseph Haydn, demonstrated time and again that music as entertainment can go along with the most original, enlightening, even profound ideas. Whereas Haydn used the title divertimento fairly indiscriminately, Mozart tended to use it either for music for wind ensemble or for chamber works in the extended six-movement form.

The Divertimento in D, K136, along with Divertimenti K137 and K138, was written in Salzburg early in 1772. As a set, they precede a series of string quartets written in Italy later the same year, and may themselves be played as quartets. K136 belongs firmly in the Austrian divertimento tradition – music that entertains through a lively interplay of ideas, melodic distinctiveness and an element of instrumental virtuosity. It is a model of classical clarity, its first movement, in the usual tripartite sonata form, followed by a moving andante. The final movement finds a place for counterpoint in its central development, adding a further dimension to music of concertante brilliance.

©  Elizabeth Boulton

Samuel Barber grew up in a house filled with music. Practicing piano was as important as playing ball, song recitals were a favourite evening entertainment, and the names of composers and performers were dropped during dinner table conversation. Barber’s parents were not surprised when their son began playing the piano when he was six years old and composing music at seven, and they did not argue when, at the age of nine, he told them he intended to be a composer. Barber’s aunt Louise was internationally known as Louise Homer, the great American contralto, and her husband Sydney was a highly regarded composer of songs.

Winning prizes such as the Pulitzer Traveling Scholarship and an American Prix de Rome enabled young Samuel Barber to spend extended periods in Europe studying, performing and composing. It was in Rome, in 1936, that he wrote his String Quartet, Op. 11. He subsequently made a five-part arrangement of the slow movement for string orchestra, the Adagio for Strings. He submitted this work, along with his first Essay for Orchestra, to Arturo Toscanini in response to the conductor’s search for the work of an American composer. Toscanini had fled Europe’s growing fascism and had taken a new post as conductor of the NBC Symphony Orchestra; he was therefore seeking American music to include in the 1938 concert season. From its first hearing on a radio broadcast, 5 November 1938, the piece was an instant success and continues to be Barber’s most performed and enduring work. In 1967 the composer explored the vocal qualities of the piece by making a choral setting employing the Agnus Dei text.

Like Mahler’s famous Adagietto from his Fifth Symphony, Barber’s Adagio has taken on a life of its own – one far removed from the composer’s original intent. Marked Molto adagio espressivo cantando (“very slowly, with songlike expressiveness”), it comprises a single, long melody that moves slowly, unfolding and building, as it weaves its way through the string orchestra. It reaches a peak and then dissolves. It was inspired by Barber’s reading of a passionate poem by Virgil from the Georgics, which begins:

“As when far off in the middle of the ocean

A breast-shaped curve of wave begins to whiten

And rise above the surface, then rolling on

Gathers and gathers until it reaches land

Huge as a mountain and crashes among the rocks

With a prodigious roar, and what was deep

Comes churning up from the bottom in mighty swirls

Of sunken sand and living things and water . . .”

In response to a BBC interviewer’s asking notable musicians to speak to the issue as to why Barber’s Adagio for Strings is such a “perfect piece of music”, Aaron Copland responded:

“It’s really well felt, it’s believable… not phoney… It comes straight from the heart, to use old-fashioned terms. The sense of continuity, the steadiness of the flow, the satisfaction of the arch that it creates from beginning to end. They’re all very gratifying, satisfying, and it makes you believe in the sincerity which he obviously put into it.”

© Elizabeth Boulton

Throughout his career Béla Bartók was influenced by folk music. Together with fellow countryman and composer Zoltán Kodály, he travelled extensively in Romania and neighbouring countries searching for and collecting thousands of authentic folk songs. They visited hundreds of villages and made numerous recordings of peasants singing and playing instruments. What Bartók and Kodály discovered was not just an unsuspected wealth of folk music but a highly original musical language which had little in common with the accepted forms of Western music. Its characteristics were a different arrangement of the different notes in the basic scale and their associated harmonies, and a strongly accented, complex rhythm. Both composers realised that they could create a new and powerful idiom for themselves by totally accepting the features of Hungarian folk music without adapting them, as Liszt had done, to the more ʽcivilisedʼ classical forms and harmonies. Bartók in particular seemed suddenly to have found his identity, and those of his works which established his fame as one of the greatest composers of the 20th century were all the result of this discovery.

The Romanian Folk Dances were originally written for piano and date from 1915. Two years later Bartók arranged them for orchestra, and he, as well as others, made further arrangements for a variety of instrumental combinations. The works consist of seven short dances from different regions, and they are played with hardly a break between them.

© Stefan de Haan

The British composer Gustav Holst is known today mainly for his massive suite The Planets – one of the most performed of all orchestral works.  He also wrote smaller pieces, not least among them being the cheerful St Paul’s Suite, which was completed shortly before the outbreak of the First World War.

As well as having a busy career as a performer (on the trombone), composer and conductor, Holst was a great believer in teaching, and he had a long-standing relationship with St Paul’s Girls School in Hammersmith.  This Suite and a companion piece, the Brook Green Suite were both written for the pupils at St Paul’s, and he had previously also composed for the girls of James Allen’s School in Dulwich.  Holst took pains not to write down for his intended young performers, and these works are full of delightful intricacies.  The St Paul’s Suite is in four movements, whose titles are self-explanatory; Holst used a number of familiar folk tunes, combined with his own original material, and the work as the whole comes to a grand climax at the end of the lively Dargason.

© Ian Lush

In 1933, at the age of 20, Benjamin Britten put together a work which contained extracts from eight pieces he had written between the ages of 9 – 12 years old. Britten shaped and combined the different extracts to become one whole piece, and the result was the Simple Symphony, a work that has the spirit of youthful compositions, but is not at all child-like in its music and is one of Britten’s best known works from his early years.

The first movement is based on Britten’s Suite No. 1 for piano, written in 1926, and a song for voice and piano ‘A Country Dance (now the King is home again)’ of 1923. The material for the Playful Pizzicato is taken from the Scherzo for piano of 1924, and a song, ‘The Road Song of the Bandar-Log’ for voice and piano. The Sentimental Saraband is derived from the Third Piano Suite (1925) and the Waltz for Piano (1923), while the Frolicsome Finale is based on the Piano Sonata No. 9 of 1926 and a song composed in 1925. The piece is for string orchestra only and was first performed in Norwich, with Britten conducting an amateur orchestra.

© Deborah Guest

Recorded and published in 1974 in Milan, this sultry tango marks a change in style for composer Astor Piazzolla from classical tango to nuevo tango.

While you might not be familiar with the term ‘nuevo tango’, you’ll probably recognise this catchy number from Argentine composer Piazzolla. He revolutionised tango music, by incorporating elements of jazz and classical music into his traditional tango compositions.

Piazzolla is undoubtedly the master of the genre, and his ‘Libertango’ (a portmanteau that incorporates ‘Libertad’ and ‘Tango’) is one of the most performed of his works. Spicy rhythms and a fiendish melody have kept this one at the forefront of modern Tango, with countless brilliant interpretations to explore. It even features an accordion, adding a folky element to the music.

© Classic FM

Violin 1
Simon Blendis
Jessica Coleman
Ann Criscuolo

Violin 2
Antonia Kesel
Mabelle Park

Viola
Judith Busbridge
Christine Anderson

Cello
Leo Popplewell
Sarah Butcher

Double Bass
David Johnson

Simon joined LMP as leader in 2014. He was a member of the Schubert Ensemble for twenty-three years, from 1995 until the group retired in 2018, leaving a legacy of over 80 commissions, 25 CD recordings and a large library of live performances on YouTube.

Simon is in demand as a guest-leader and has appeared in this role with most of the UK‘s major orchestras. He has also appeared as a guest-director with orchestras such as the Academy of St. Martin-in-the-Fields, the English Chamber Orchestra and the Scottish Ensemble. Since 1999 he has shared the position of leader of Orchestra Ensemble Kanazawa in Japan, with whom he has recorded Vivaldi‘s Four Seasons for the Warner label. As a soloist he has appeared with orchestras including the Philharmonia Orchestra, the RPO and the CBSO.

During the Coronavirus lockdowns Simon spent time researching the light music legacy of legendary violinist Max Jaffa. The resulting CD of 25 lost or forgotten gems from this archive, entitled Love is Like a Violin, was released in July 2022 to critical acclaim, and has already garnered over 4 million streams.

Increasingly sought after as a teacher, Simon is a professor of violin at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama.