Composers Datebook™ is a daily two-minute program designed to inform, engage, and entertain listeners with timely information about composers of the past and present. Each program notes significant or intriguing musical events involving composers of the past and present, with appropriate and accessible music related to each.
The “Cockaigne” Overture
Synopsis
On today’s date in 1901, the English composer Edward Elgar conducted the first performance of his cheery, upbeat, and slightly rowdy “Cockaigne” Overture, a commission from the Royal Philharmonic Society dedicated to his many friends in British Orchestras.
Now “Cockaigne” does NOT refer to the schedule 2 narcotic, but rather to an old nickname for the City of London, originating in a very old poem about a utopian land where rivers flow with wine and houses are made of cake and barley sugar.
Elgar said he wanted to come up with something “cheerful and London-y, stout and steak ...honest, healthy, humorous and strong, but not vulgar."
The new overture proved an instant hit, and critics of the day compared it favorably to the festive prelude to Act I of Wagner’s opera “Die Meistersinger.” Elgar made two recordings of the work, conducting the Royal Albert Hall Orchestra in 1926 and the BBC Symphony in 1933.
By chance during that 1933 recording session, as a back-up some takes were cut simultaneously to two separate wax master recording machines from two separate microphones, enabling engineers many decades later to blend the two simultaneous “takes” into an “accidental stereo” version of the old mono recording.
Music Played in Today's ProgramEdward Elgar (1857 – 1934): Cockaigne Overture (BBC Symphony; Edward Elgar, cond (1933 “accidental stereo”)) Naxos 8.111022