Lecture at the British Institute of Recorded Sound
First given as a lecture at the BIRS, Exhibition Road SW7, on 9 March 1970, as part of a series that ran through the 1960s and 1970s. The recordings played (all Decca LPs except where noted) were:
Falla, The Three-Cornered Hat – Finale (LXT 2716)
Stravinsky, The Rite of Spring – final dance (LXT 2563)
Debussy, Rondes de printemps (LXT 5650)
Stravinsky, The Soldier's Tale – Royal March (LXT 5321)
Stravinsky, Song of the Nightingale – excerpt (LXT 5233)
Stravinsky, Les Noces – excerpt (LXT 5639)
Handel, Concerto Grosso No 2 in F major – excerpt (T 113, 78rpm)
Stravinsky, Petrushka – dance of the wet-nurses (LXT 2502)
Roussel, Symphony No. 3 – Scherzo (LXT 5234)
Ansermet, What Everyone Should Know About Music – excerpt (LXT 6313)
Honegger, Symphony No. 2 – Finale (LXT 6003)
Martin, Concerto for seven wind instruments, timpani, percussion and strings (LXT 5676)
The lecture was later published in the journal of the BIRS – Recorded Sound 72 (October 1978), pp. 816–19 (the text printed here).
Ernest Ansermet died on 20 February 1969. For nearly half a century – excepting the duration of the last war – he was a regular visitor to London, a city to which he was devoted. I think I can do no better than plunge into my first illustration, which is Ansermet conducting a muchloved score – Manuel de Falla's Three-Cornered Hat – of which he gave the very first performance here in London, with the Diaghilev Ballet in July 1919.
In a series like this, I think it would have been so much more interesting for you to have heard someone discussing Ansermet's art as a conductor who knew him and worked with him in those distant days of the Diaghilev Ballet.