John Ireland (composer)
John Nicholson Ireland was an English composer and teacher of music. The majority of his output consists of songs with piano, his best-known works include the short instrumental or orchestral work "The Holy Boy", a setting of the poem "Sea Fever" by John Masefield, a much-played Piano Concerto, the hymn tune Love Unknown and the choral motet "Greater Love Hath No Man". John Ireland was born in Bowdon, near Altrincham, into a family of Scottish descent and some cultural distinction, his father, Alexander Ireland, a publisher and newspaper proprietor, was aged 69 at John's birth. John was the youngest of the five children from Alexander's second marriage, his mother, Annie Elizabeth Nicholson Ireland, was 30 years younger than Alexander. She died in October 1893, when John was 14, Alexander died the following year, when John was 15. John Ireland was described as "a self-critical, introspective man, haunted by memories of a sad childhood". Ireland entered the Royal College of Music in 1893, studying piano with Frederic Cliffe, organ, his second study, under Walter Parratt.
From 1897 he studied composition under Charles Villiers Stanford. In 1896 Ireland was appointed sub-organist at Holy Trinity, Sloane Street, London SW1, from 1904 until 1926, was organist and choirmaster at St Luke's Church, Chelsea. Ireland began to make his name in the early 1900s as a composer of songs and chamber music, his Violin Sonata No. 1 of 1909 won first prize in an international competition organised by the well-known patron of chamber music W. W. Cobbett. More successful was his Violin Sonata No. 2: completed in January 1917, he submitted this to a competition organised to assist musicians in wartime. The jury included the violinist Albert Sammons and the pianist William Murdoch, who together gave the work its first performance at Aeolian Hall in New Bond Street on 6 March that year; as Ireland recalled, "It was the first and only occasion when a British composer was lifted from relative obscurity in a single night by a work cast in a chamber-music medium." The work was enthusiastically reviewed, the publisher Winthrop Rogers offered immediate publication.
A subsequent performance of the Violin Sonata by Ireland and the violinist Désiré Defauw drew a packed audience to the Wigmore Hall in London. Ireland visited the Channel Islands and was inspired by the landscape. In 1912 he composed the piano piece The Island Spell while staying on Guernsey, his set of three pieces for piano Sarnia: An Island Sequence was written there in 1940, he was evacuated from the islands just before the German invasion during World War II. From 1923 he taught at the Royal College of Music, his pupils there included Richard Arnell, Ernest John Moeran, Benjamin Britten, composer Alan Bush, Geoffrey Bush, who subsequently edited or arranged many of Ireland's works for publication, Anthony Bernard. John Ireland was a lifelong bachelor, except for a brief interlude when, in quick succession, he married and divorced. On 17 December 1926, aged 47, he married Dorothy Phillips; this marriage was dissolved on 18 September 1928, it is believed not to have been consummated. He took a similar interest in another young student, Helen Perkin, a pianist and composer, to whom he dedicated both the Piano Concerto in E-flat major and the Legend for piano and orchestra.
She gave the premiere performance of both works, but any thoughts he had for a deeper relationship with her came to nothing when she married George Mountford Adie, a disciple of George Gurdjieff, she moved with Adie to Australia. Subsequently, Ireland withdrew the dedications. In 1947 Ireland acquired a personal assistant and companion, Mrs Norah Kirkby, who remained with him till his death. Despite these associations with women, it is clear from his private papers that his sexual proclivities lay elsewhere and many commentators support this view. On 10 September 1949, his 70th birthday was celebrated in a special Prom concert, at which his Piano Concerto was played by Eileen Joyce, the first pianist to record the concerto, in 1942. Ireland retired in 1953, settling in the hamlet of Rock in Sussex, where he lived in a converted windmill for the rest of his life, it was there he met the young pianist Alan Rowlands who would be Ireland's choice to record his complete piano music. In 1959 he declined the award of Commander of the Order of the British Empire.
He died of heart failure aged 82 at Rock Mill in Washington, is buried at St. Mary the Virgin in Shipley, near his home, his epitaph reads "Many waters cannot quench love" and "One of God's noblest works lies here." From Stanford, Ireland inherited a thorough knowledge of the music of Beethoven and other German classical composers, but as a young man he was strongly influenced by Debussy and Ravel as well as by the earlier works of Stravinsky and Bartók. From these influences, he developed his own brand of "English Impressionism", related more to French and Russian models than to the folk-song style prevailing in English music. Like most other Impressionist composers, Ireland favoured small forms and wrote neither symphonies nor operas, although his Piano Concerto is considered among his best works, his output includes some chamber music and a substantial body of piano works, including his best-known piece The Holy Boy, known in numerous arrangements. His songs to poems by A. E. Hous
William Walton
Sir William Turner Walton, OM was an English composer. During a sixty-year career, he wrote music in several classical genres and styles, from film scores to opera, his best-known works include Façade, the cantata Belshazzar's Feast, the Viola Concerto, the First Symphony, the British coronation anthems Crown Imperial and Orb and Sceptre. Born in Oldham, the son of a musician, Walton was a chorister and an undergraduate at Christ Church, Oxford. On leaving the university, he was taken up by the literary Sitwell siblings, who provided him with a home and a cultural education, his earliest work of note was a collaboration with Edith Sitwell, Façade, which at first brought him notoriety as a modernist, but became a popular ballet score. In middle age, Walton left Britain and set up home with his young wife Susana on the Italian island of Ischia. By this time, he had ceased to be regarded as a modernist, some of his compositions of the 1950s were criticised as old-fashioned, his only full-length opera and Cressida, was among the works to be so labelled and has made little impact in opera houses.
In his last years, his works came back into critical fashion. Walton was a slow worker, painstakingly perfectionist, his complete body of work across his long career is not large, his most popular compositions continue to be performed in the 21st century, by 2010 all his works had been released on CD. Walton was born into a musical family in Oldham, the second son in a family of three boys and a girl, his father, Charles Alexander Walton, was a musician who had trained at the Royal Manchester College of Music under Charles Hallé, made a living as a singing teacher and church organist. Charles's wife, Louisa Maria, had been a singer before their marriage. William Walton's musical talents were spotted when he was still a young boy, he took piano and violin lessons, though he never mastered either instrument, he was more successful as a singer: he and his elder brother sang in their father's choir, taking part in performances of large-scale works by Handel, Haydn and others. Walton was sent to a local school, but in 1912 his father saw a newspaper advertisement for probationer choristers at Christ Church Cathedral School in Oxford and applied for William to be admitted.
The boy and his mother missed their intended train from Manchester to Oxford because Walton's father had spent the money for the fare in a local public house. Louisa Walton had to borrow the fares from a greengrocer. Although they arrived in Oxford after the entrance trials were over, Mrs Walton pleaded for her son to be heard, he was accepted, he remained at the choir school for the next six years. The Dean of Christ Church, Dr Thomas Strong, noted the young Walton's musical potential and was encouraged in this view by Sir Hubert Parry, who saw the manuscripts of some of Walton's early compositions and said to Strong, "There's a lot in this chap, it is sometimes said that he was Oxford's youngest undergraduate since Henry VIII, though this is not correct, he was nonetheless among the youngest. He came under the influence of the dominant figure in Oxford's musical life. Allen introduced Walton to modern music, including Stravinsky's Petrushka, enthused him with "the mysteries of the orchestra".
Walton spent much time in the university library, studying scores by Stravinsky, Sibelius and others. He neglected his non-musical studies, though he passed the musical examinations with ease, he failed the Greek and algebra examinations required for graduation. Little survives from Walton's juvenilia, but the choral anthem A Litany, written when he was fifteen, anticipates his mature style. At Oxford Walton befriended several poets including Roy Campbell, Siegfried Sassoon and, most for his future, Sacheverell Sitwell. Walton was sent down from Oxford in 1920 without any firm plans. Sitwell invited him to lodge in London with him and his literary brother and sister and Edith. Walton took up residence in the attic of their house in Chelsea recalling, "I went for a few weeks and stayed about fifteen years"; the Sitwells looked after their protégé both materially and culturally, giving him not only a home but a stimulating cultural education. He took music lessons with Ferruccio Busoni and Edward J. Dent.
He attended the Russian ballet, met Stravinsky and Gershwin, heard the Savoy Orpheans at the Savoy Hotel and wrote an experimental string quartet influenced by the Second Viennese School, performed at a festival of new music at Salzburg in 1923. Alban Berg heard the performance and was impressed enough to take Walton to meet Arnold Schoenberg, Berg's teacher and the founder of the Second Viennese School. In 1923, in collaboration with Edith Sitwell, Walton had his first great success, though at first it was a succès de scandale. Façade was first performed in public at London, on 12 June; the work consisted of Edith's verses, which she recited through a megaphone from behind a screen, while Walton conducted an ensemble of six players in his accompanying music. The press was condemnatory. Walton's biographer Michael Kennedy cites as typical a contemporary headline: "Drivel That They Paid to Hear"; the Daily Express admitted that it was naggingly memorable. The Manchester Guardian wrote of "relentless cacophony".
The Observer condemned the verses and dismissed Walton's music as "harmless". In The
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, baptised as Johannes Chrysostomus Wolfgangus Theophilus Mozart, was a prolific and influential composer of the classical era. Born in Salzburg, Mozart showed prodigious ability from his earliest childhood. Competent on keyboard and violin, he composed from the age of five and performed before European royalty. At 17, Mozart was engaged as a musician at the Salzburg court but grew restless and traveled in search of a better position. While visiting Vienna in 1781, he was dismissed from his Salzburg position, he chose to stay in the capital. During his final years in Vienna, he composed many of his best-known symphonies and operas, portions of the Requiem, unfinished at the time of his early death at the age of 35; the circumstances of his death have been much mythologized. He composed more than 600 works, many acknowledged as pinnacles of symphonic, chamber and choral music, he is among the most enduringly popular of classical composers, his influence is profound on subsequent Western art music.
Ludwig van Beethoven composed his own early works in the shadow of Mozart, Joseph Haydn wrote: "posterity will not see such a talent again in 100 years". Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart was born on 27 January 1756 to Leopold Mozart and Anna Maria, née Pertl, at 9 Getreidegasse in Salzburg; this was the capital of the Archbishopric of Salzburg, an ecclesiastic principality in what is now Austria part of the Holy Roman Empire. He was the youngest of seven children, his elder sister was Maria Anna Mozart, nicknamed "Nannerl". Mozart was baptised the day at St. Rupert's Cathedral in Salzburg; the baptismal record gives his name in Latinized form, as Joannes Chrysostomus Wolfgangus Theophilus Mozart. He called himself "Wolfgang Amadè Mozart" as an adult, but his name had many variants. Leopold Mozart, a native of Augsburg, was a minor composer and an experienced teacher. In 1743, he was appointed as fourth violinist in the musical establishment of Count Leopold Anton von Firmian, the ruling Prince-Archbishop of Salzburg.
Four years he married Anna Maria in Salzburg. Leopold became the orchestra's deputy Kapellmeister in 1763. During the year of his son's birth, Leopold published a violin textbook, Versuch einer gründlichen Violinschule, which achieved success; when Nannerl was 7, she began keyboard lessons with her father, while her three-year-old brother looked on. Years after her brother's death, she reminisced: He spent much time at the clavier, picking out thirds, which he was striking, his pleasure showed that it sounded good.... In the fourth year of his age his father, for a game as it were, began to teach him a few minuets and pieces at the clavier.... He could play it faultlessly and with the greatest delicacy, keeping in time.... At the age of five, he was composing little pieces, which he played to his father who wrote them down; these early pieces, K. 1–5, were recorded in the Nannerl Notenbuch. There is some scholarly debate about whether Mozart was four or five years old when he created his first musical compositions, though there is little doubt that Mozart composed his first three pieces of music within a few weeks of each other: K. 1a, 1b, 1c.
In his early years, Wolfgang's father was his only teacher. Along with music, he taught academic subjects. Solomon notes that, while Leopold was a devoted teacher to his children, there is evidence that Mozart was keen to progress beyond what he was taught, his first ink-spattered composition and his precocious efforts with the violin were of his own initiative, came as a surprise to Leopold, who gave up composing when his son's musical talents became evident. While Wolfgang was young, his family made several European journeys in which he and Nannerl performed as child prodigies; these began with an exhibition in 1762 at the court of Prince-elector Maximilian III of Bavaria in Munich, at the Imperial Courts in Vienna and Prague. A long concert tour followed, spanning three and a half years, taking the family to the courts of Munich, Paris, The Hague, again to Paris, back home via Zurich and Munich. During this trip, Wolfgang met a number of musicians and acquainted himself with the works of other composers.
A important influence was Johann Christian Bach, whom he visited in London in 1764 and 1765. When he was eight years old, Mozart wrote his first symphony, most of, transcribed by his father; the family trips were difficult, travel conditions were primitive. They had to wait for invitations and reimbursement from the nobility, they endured long, near-fatal illnesses far from home: first Leopold both children; the family again went to Vienna in late 1767 and remained there until December 1768. After one year in Salzburg and Wolfgang set off for Italy, leaving Anna Maria and Nannerl at home; this tour lasted from December 1769 to March 1771. As with earlier journeys, Leopold wanted to display his son's abilities as a performer and a maturing composer. Wolfgang met Josef Mysliveček and Giovanni Battista Martini in Bologna, was accepted as a member of the famous Accademia Filarmonica. In Rome, he heard Gregorio Allegri's Miserere twice in performance, in the Sistine Chapel, wrote it out from memory, thus producing the first unauthorized copy of this guarded property of the Vatican.
In Milan, Mozart wrote the opera Mitridate, re di Ponto, performed with success. This led to further oper
Blue plaque
A blue plaque is a permanent sign installed in a public place in the United Kingdom and elsewhere to commemorate a link between that location and a famous person, event, or former building on the site, serving as a historical marker. The term is used in the United Kingdom in two different senses, it may be used narrowly and to refer to the "official" scheme administered by English Heritage, restricted to sites within Greater London. The "official" scheme traces its origins to that launched in 1866 in London, on the initiative of the politician William Ewart, to mark the homes and workplaces of famous people, it has been administered successively by the Society of Arts, the London County Council, the Greater London Council and English Heritage. It remains focused on London, although between 1998 and 2005, under a trial programme since discontinued, 34 plaques were erected elsewhere in England; the first such scheme in the world, it has directly or indirectly provided the inspiration and model for many others.
Many other plaque schemes have since been initiated in the United Kingdom. Some are restricted to a specific geographical area, others to a particular theme of historical commemoration, they are administered by a range of bodies including local authorities, civic societies, residents' associations and other organisations such as the Transport Trust, the Royal Society of Chemistry, the Music Hall Guild of Great Britain and America and the British Comic Society. The plaques erected are made in a variety of designs, shapes and colours: some are blue, others are not. However, the term "blue plaque" is used informally to encompass all such schemes. There are commemorative plaque schemes throughout the world such as those in Paris, Oslo, Dublin; the forms these take vary, they are more to be known as commemorative plaques or historical markers. The original blue plaque scheme was established by the Society of Arts in 1867, since 1986 has been run by English Heritage, it is the oldest such scheme in the world.
Since 1984 English Heritage have commissioned Frank Ashworth to make the plaques which have been inscribed by his wife, Sue, at their home in Cornwall. English Heritage plans to erect an average of twelve new blue plaques each year in London. Many are unveiled by prominent public people: for example, in 2010 a plaque dedicated to John Lennon was unveiled in Montagu Square by Yoko Ono, at the house where the couple shot the cover of the album Two Virgins. After being conceived by politician William Ewart in 1863, the scheme was initiated in 1866 by Ewart, Henry Cole and the Society of Arts, which erected plaques in a variety of shapes and colours; the first plaque was unveiled in 1867 to commemorate Lord Byron at his birthplace, 24 Holles Street, Cavendish Square. This house was demolished in 1889; the earliest blue plaque to survive put up in 1867, commemorates Napoleon III in King Street, St James's. Byron’s plaque was blue, but the colour was changed by the manufacturer Minton, Hollins & Co to chocolate brown to save money.
In total the Society of Arts put up 35 plaques. The Society only erected one plaque within the square-mile of the City of London, that to Samuel Johnson on his house in Gough Square, in 1876. In 1879, it was agreed that the City of London Corporation would be responsible for erecting plaques within the City to recognise its jurisdictional independence; this demarcation has remained since. In 1901, the Society of Arts scheme was taken over by the London County Council, which gave much thought to the future design of the plaques, it was decided to keep the basic shape and design of the Society's plaques, but to make them uniformly blue, with a laurel wreath and the LCC's title. Though this design was used from 1903 to 1938, some experimentation occurred in the 1920s, plaques were made in bronze and lead. Shape and colour varied. In 1921, the most common plaque design was revised, as it was discovered that glazed ceramic Doulton ware was cheaper than the encaustic used. In 1938, a new plaque design was prepared by an unnamed student at the LCC's Central School of Arts and Crafts and was approved by the committee.
It omitted the decorative elements of earlier plaque designs, allowed for lettering to be better spaced and enlarged. A white border was added to the design shortly after, this has remained the standard since. No plaques were erected between 1915 and 1919, or between 1940 and 1947, owing to the two world wars; the LCC formalised the selection criteria for the scheme in 1954. When the LCC was abolished in 1965, the scheme was taken over by the Greater London Council; the principles of the scheme changed little, but now applied to the entire, much larger, administrative county of Greater London. The GLC was keen to broaden the range of people commemorated; the GLC erected 252 plaques, the subjects including Sylvia Pankhurst, Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, Mary Seacole. In 1986, the GLC was disbanded and the blue plaques scheme passed to English Heritage. English Heritage erected more than 300 plaques in London. In January 2013 English Heritage suspended proposals for plaques owing to funding cuts; the National Trust's chairman stated.
In the event the scheme was relaunched by English Heritage in June 2014 with private funding (including support from a new donors' club, the Blue Plaques
Edward Elgar
Sir Edward William Elgar, 1st Baronet was an English composer, many of whose works have entered the British and international classical concert repertoire. Among his best-known compositions are orchestral works including the Enigma Variations, the Pomp and Circumstance Marches, concertos for violin and cello, two symphonies, he composed choral works, including The Dream of Gerontius, chamber music and songs. He was appointed Master of the King's Musick in 1924. Although Elgar is regarded as a English composer, most of his musical influences were not from England but from continental Europe, he socially. In musical circles dominated by academics, he was a self-taught composer, he married the daughter of a senior British army officer. She inspired him both musically and but he struggled to achieve success until his forties, when after a series of moderately successful works his Enigma Variations became popular in Britain and overseas, he followed the Variations with a choral work, The Dream of Gerontius, based on a Roman Catholic text that caused some disquiet in the Anglican establishment in Britain, but it became, has remained, a core repertory work in Britain and elsewhere.
His full-length religious choral works were well received but have not entered the regular repertory. In his fifties, Elgar composed a violin concerto that were immensely successful, his second symphony and his cello concerto did not gain immediate public popularity and took many years to achieve a regular place in the concert repertory of British orchestras. Elgar's music came, in his years, to be seen as appealing chiefly to British audiences, his stock remained low for a generation after his death. It began to revive in the 1960s, helped by new recordings of his works; some of his works have, in recent years, been taken up again internationally, but the music continues to be played more in Britain than elsewhere. Elgar has been described as the first composer to take the gramophone seriously. Between 1914 and 1925, he conducted a series of acoustic recordings of his works; the introduction of the moving-coil microphone in 1923 made far more accurate sound reproduction possible, Elgar made new recordings of most of his major orchestral works and excerpts from The Dream of Gerontius.
Edward Elgar was born outside Worcester, England. His father, William Henry Elgar, was raised in Dover and had been apprenticed to a London music publisher. In 1841 William moved to Worcester, where he worked as a piano tuner and set up a shop selling sheet music and musical instruments. In 1848 he married daughter of a farm worker. Edward was the fourth of their seven children. Ann Elgar had converted to Roman Catholicism shortly before Edward's birth, he was baptised and brought up as a Roman Catholic, to the disapproval of his father. William Elgar was a violinist of professional standard and held the post of organist of St. George's Roman Catholic Church, from 1846 to 1885. At his instigation, masses by Cherubini and Hummel were first heard at the Three Choirs Festival by the orchestra in which he played the violin. All the Elgar children received a musical upbringing. By the age of eight, Elgar was taking piano and violin lessons, his father, who tuned the pianos at many grand houses in Worcestershire, would sometimes take him along, giving him the chance to display his skill to important local figures.
Elgar's mother encouraged his musical development. He inherited from a passionate love of the countryside, his friend and biographer W. H. "Billy" Reed wrote that Elgar's early surroundings had an influence that "permeated all his work and gave to his whole life that subtle but none the less true and sturdy English quality". He began composing at an early age; until he was fifteen, Elgar received a general education near Worcester. However, his only formal musical training beyond piano and violin lessons from local teachers consisted of more advanced violin studies with Adolf Pollitzer, during brief visits to London in 1877–78. Elgar said, "my first music was learnt in the Cathedral... from books borrowed from the music library, when I was eight, nine or ten." He worked through manuals of instruction on organ playing and read every book he could find on the theory of music. He said that he had been most helped by Hubert Parry's articles in the Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians. Elgar began to learn German, in the hope of going to the Leipzig Conservatory for further musical studies, but his father could not afford to send him.
Years a profile in The Musical Times considered that his failure to get to Leipzig was fortunate for Elgar's musical development: "Thus the budding composer escaped the dogmatism of the schools." However, it was a disappointment to Elgar that on leaving school in 1872 he went not to Leipzig but to the office of a local solicitor as a clerk. He did not find an office career congenial, for fulfilment he turned not only to music but to literature, becoming a voracious reader. Around this time, he made his first public appe
English Heritage
English Heritage is a charity that manages over 400 historic monuments and places. These include medieval castles, Roman forts and country houses; the charity states that it uses these properties to ‘bring the story of England to life for over 10 million people each year’. Within its portfolio are Stonehenge, Dover Castle, Tintagel Castle and the best preserved parts of Hadrian's Wall. English Heritage manages the London Blue Plaque scheme, which links influential historical figures to particular buildings; when formed in 1983, English Heritage was the operating name of an executive non-departmental public body of the British Government titled the Historic Buildings and Monuments Commission for England, that ran the national system of heritage protection and managed a range of historic properties. It was created to combine the roles of existing bodies that had emerged from a long period of state involvement in heritage protection. In 1999 the organisation merged with the Royal Commission on the Historical Monuments of England and the National Monuments Record, bringing together resources for the identification and survey of England's historic environment.
On 1 April 2015, English Heritage was divided into two parts: Historic England, which inherited the statutory and protection functions of the old organisation, the new English Heritage Trust, a charity that would operate the historic properties, which took on the English Heritage operating name and logo. The British government gave the new charity an £80 million grant to help establish it as an independent trust, although the historic properties remained in the ownership of the state. Over the centuries, what is now called'Heritage' has been the responsibility of a series of state departments. There was the'Kings Works' after the Norman Conquest. Responsibility subsequently transferred to the Ministry of Public Building and Works to the Department of the Environment and now the Department for Culture and Sport; the state's legal responsibility for the historic environment goes back to the Ancient Monuments Protection Act 1882. Central government subsequently developed several systems of heritage protection for different types of'assets', introducing listing for buildings after WW2 and conservation areas in the 1960s.
In 1983 Secretary of State for the Environment Michael Heseltine gave national responsibility for the historic environment to a semi‑autonomous agency to operate under ministerial guidelines and to government policy. The Historic Buildings and Monuments Commission was formed under the terms of the National Heritage Act 1983 on 1 April 1984; the 1983 Act dissolved the bodies that had provided independent advice – the Ancient Monuments Board for England and the Historic Buildings Council for England and incorporated these functions in the new body. Soon after, the commission gained the operating name of English Heritage by its first Chairman, Lord Montagu of Beaulieu. A national register of historic parks and gardens, was set up in 1984, a register for historic battlefields was created in March 1995.'Registration' is a material consideration in the planning process. In April 1999 English Heritage merged with the Royal Commission on the Historical Monuments of England and the National Monuments Record, bringing together resources for the identification and survey of England's historic environment.
By adoption this included responsibility for the national record of archaeological sites from the Ordnance Survey. These, together with other nationally important external acquisitions, meant that English Heritage was one of the largest publicly accessible archives in the UK: 2.53 million records are available online, including more than 426,000 images. In 2010–2011 it recorded 4.3 million unique online user sessions and over 110,000 people visited NMR exhibitions held around the country in 2009/10. In 2012 the section responsible for archive collections was renamed the English Heritage Archive; as a result of the National Heritage Act 2002, English Heritage acquired administrative responsibility for historic wrecks and submerged landscapes within 12 miles of the English coast. The administration of the listed building system was transferred from DCMS to English Heritage in 2006. However, actual listing decisions still remained the responsibility of the Secretary of State for Culture and Sport, required by the Planning Act 1990 to approve a list of buildings of special architectural or historic interest.
Following the Public Bodies Reform in 2010, English Heritage was confirmed as the government's statutory adviser on the historic environment, the largest source of non-lottery grant funding for heritage assets. It was retained on grounds of "performing a technical function which should remain independent from Government"; however the department suffered from budget cuts during the recession of the 2010s resulting in a repairs deficit of £100 million. In June 2013 the British Government announced plans to provide an £80 million grant to enable English Heritage to become a self-financing charity; the national portfolio of historic properties remain in public ownership, but the new English Heritage will be licensed to manage them. The change occu
Johan Halvorsen
Johan Halvorsen was a Norwegian composer and violinist. Born in Drammen, Norway he was an accomplished violinist from a early age and became a prominent figure in Norwegian musical life, he received his musical education in Kristiania and Stockholm, was a concertmaster in Bergen before joining the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra. He was a concertmaster in Aberdeen, Scotland a professor of music in Helsinki, became a student once again, in St Petersburg, Berlin, Liège. Returning to Norway in 1893, he worked as conductor of the theatre orchestra at Den Nationale Scene in Bergen and of the Bergen Philharmonic Orchestra, he became concertmaster of the Bergen Philharmonic in 1885, principal conductor in 1893. In 1899 he was appointed conductor of the orchestra at the newly opened National Theatre in Kristiania, a position he held for 30 years until his retirement in 1929; as well as theatre music, Halvorsen conducted performances of over 30 operas and wrote the incidental music for more than 30 plays.
Following his retirement from the theatre he had time to concentrate on the composition of his three symphonies and two well-known Norwegian rhapsodies. Halvorsen's compositions were a development of the national romantic tradition exemplified by Edvard Grieg though written in a distinctive style marked by innovative orchestration. Halvorsen married Grieg's niece, orchestrated some of his piano works, such as a funeral march, played at Grieg's funeral. Five days after Halvorsen died, Grieg's cousin and widow Nina Grieg died, his best known works today are the Bojarenes inntogsmarsj and Bergensiana, along with his Passacaglia and Sarabande, duos for violin and viola based on themes by George Frideric Handel. In early 2016, librarians at the University of Toronto announced that they had located the manuscript score of his violin concerto, performed only thrice in 1909 and considered lost; the piece is to receive its second debut in July 2016. OperettaMod Nordpolen, in 3 acts. Op. 32 Scène funèbre Sérénade, Op. 33 Bergensiana, Rococo Variations on an Old Melody from Bergen "Jeg tog min nystemte Cithar i Hænde" Norske rapsodie No. 1 in A major Springar I went so to my bed Halling - SpringarNorske rapsodie No. 2 in G major Dance tune from Åmot Han Ole SpringarSymphony No. 1 in C minor Symphony No. 2 "Fatum" in D minor Symphony No. 3 in C major Norske eventyrbylleder, Op. 37.
Veslemøy's Song for orchestra.
United Kingdom
