1951 in British music

Last updated
List of years in British music
+...
See also 1951 in the United Kingdom

The cultural year was dominated by the Festival of Britain and the opening of The Royal Festival Hall, the first dedicated concert hall of its size to be built in London since 1893: located on the south bank of the Thames, this was to host concerts by major orchestras from Britain and abroad. [1] The Festival itself was a celebration of music, art and theatre. It notably provided an opportunity for the staging of many events seen during the first Folk music Festival held in Edinburgh, organised with the help of such talents as the American Alan Lomax, the Irish traditional musician Seamus Ennis and the political theatre director Ewan MacColl, who would go on to form the Ballad and Blues Club. [2]

Contents

Opera and other forms of classical music, while mainly attractive to a middle class audience, were popular in concert and on the radio. Operas sung in English struck a note of patriotism in a nation still recovering from the Second World War and then engaged in the Korea.

The biggest selling artists on both sides of the Atlantic were Bing Crosby and Doris Day but British singers such as Gracie Fields and Vera Lynn were also very popular, receiving radio play and performing in many live venues.

A style of jazz known as Trad or Traditional Jazz, or sometimes called the Dixieland sound was emerging, drawing for its inspiration the old New Orleans Jazz of an earlier period. The luminaries of this music were people like Ken Colyer who had formed the Crane River Jazz Band which included Chris Barber and later a banjo player called Lonnie Donegan who would introduce a musical style from America called skiffle which would influence the musical career of a young John Lennon. However, the seeds of rock and roll could not even be glimpsed in the UK of 1951.

Trad jazz was a reaction to the big band jazz of the previous decade with its 20 or sometimes even 40 member orchestras named after the band leaders such as Joe Loss and Kenny Baker. The latter were still popular in 1951 and played a form of jazz called Swing. Paramount among the band leaders of this time was Ted Heath whose Orchestra regularly featured on BBC radio programmes. They were an essential part of the nightclub scene in the big cities of the time and were heavily influenced by their American counterparts such as Benny Goodman and Duke Ellington. The smaller Trad Jazz groups in contrast included such then unknowns as George Melly and Acker Bilk, who had recently moved to London to play with Ken Colyer's band. [3]

Events

Classical music: new works

Opera

Film and Incidental music

Musical theatre

Births

Deaths

See also

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Benjamin Britten</span> English composer and pianist (1913–1976)

Edward Benjamin Britten, Baron Britten was an English composer, conductor, and pianist. He was a central figure of 20th-century British music, with a range of works including opera, other vocal music, orchestral and chamber pieces. His best-known works include the opera Peter Grimes (1945), the War Requiem (1962) and the orchestral showpiece The Young Person's Guide to the Orchestra (1945).

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Peter Pears</span> English tenor (1910–1986)

Sir Peter Neville Luard Pears was an English tenor. His career was closely associated with the composer Benjamin Britten, his personal and professional partner for nearly forty years.

This is a list of notable events in music that took place in the year 1951.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Imogen Holst</span> English composer and conductor (1907–1984)

Imogen Clare Holst was a British composer, arranger, conductor, teacher, musicologist, and festival administrator. The only child of the composer Gustav Holst, she is particularly known for her educational work at Dartington Hall in the 1940s, and for her 20 years as joint artistic director of the Aldeburgh Festival. In addition to composing music, she wrote composer biographies, much educational material, and several books on the life and works of her father.

Brian Easdale was a British composer of operatic, orchestral, choral and film music, best known for his ballet film score The Red Shoes of 1948.

<i>Noyes Fludde</i> 1958 childrens opera by Benjamin Britten

Noye's Fludde is a one-act opera by the British composer Benjamin Britten, intended primarily for amateur performers, particularly children. First performed on 18 June 1958 at that year's Aldeburgh Festival, it is based on the 15th-century Chester "mystery" or "miracle" play which recounts the Old Testament story of Noah's Ark. Britten specified that the opera should be staged in churches or large halls, not in a theatre.

The English Opera Group was a small company of British musicians formed in 1947 by the composer Benjamin Britten for the purpose of presenting his and other, primarily British, composers' operatic works. The group later expanded to present larger-scale works, and was renamed the English Music Theatre Company. The organisation produced its last opera and ceased to run in 1980.

Gordon Crosse was an English composer.

This is a summary of 1960 in music in the United Kingdom, including the official charts from that year.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">James Pease</span> American opera singer

James Pease was an American bass-baritone, notable for his Wagnerian roles. He was also a distinguished Balstrode in Benjamin Britten’s Peter Grimes, a role which he was the first to perform in the US in 1946, and later recorded under the composer’s direction in 1958.

Manoug Parikian was a British concert violinist and violin professor.

This is a summary of 1955 in music of all genres in the United Kingdom.

This is a summary of 1947 in music in the United Kingdom.

This is a summary of 1944 in music in the United Kingdom.

This is a summary of 1942 in music in the United Kingdom.

Our Hunting Fathers, Op. 8, is an orchestral song-cycle by Benjamin Britten, first performed in 1936. Its text, assembled and partly written by W. H. Auden, with a pacifist slant, puzzled audiences at the premiere, and the work has never achieved the popularity of the composer's later orchestral song-cycles, Les Illuminations, the Serenade for Tenor, Horn and Strings and the Nocturne.

This is a summary of 1940 in music in the United Kingdom.

This is a summary of 1939 in music in the United Kingdom.

This is a summary of 1936 in music in the United Kingdom.

Joseph Phibbs is an English composer of orchestral, choral and chamber music. He has also composed for theatre, both in the UK and Japan. Since 1998 he has written regularly to commissions for Festivals, for private sponsors, and for the BBC, which has broadcast premieres of his orchestral and chamber works from the Proms and elsewhere. His works have been given premieres in Europe, the United States and the Far East, and he has received prestigious awards, including most recently a British Composer Award, and a Library of Congress Serge Koussevitzky Music Foundation Award. Many of his works have been premiered by leading international musicians, including Dame Evelyn Glennie, Esa-Pekka Salonen, Leonard Slatkin, Sakari Oramo, Vasily Petrenko, Gianandrea Noseda, and the Belcea Quartet.

References

  1. ↑ Foreman, Lewis & Foreman, Susan. London: A Musical Gazetteer. Yale University Press, 2005: pp. 67–68.
  2. ↑ Peggy Seeger – Ewan MacColl: his life and works
  3. ↑ "Biography". Ackers Music Agency. Archived from the original on 2015-02-15. Retrieved 3 April 2009.
  4. ↑ Foreman, Lewis & Foreman, Susan. (2005): p. 67.
  5. ↑ Mitchell, Donald, Reed, Philip & Cooke, Mervyn (eds) (2004). Letters from a Life: Selected Letters of Benjamin Britten, Vol 3, 1946–1951. London: Faber and Faber. p. 534
  6. ↑ Carpenter, Humphrey. (1992) Benjamin Britten: A Biography. London: Faber and Faber. p. 296
  7. ↑ A. J., "Cheltenham Festival", The Musical Times 92, no. 1303 (September 1951): 416–17.
  8. ↑ Anon., "The Haslemere Festival", The Musical Times 92, no. 1301 (July 1951): 312.
  9. ↑ Margaret Reece-Evans, "The Swansea Festival", Musical Times 92, no. 1305 (November): 516.
  10. ↑ Anonymous, 'Royal Opera House: "Turandot"', The Times, issue 52139 (Tuesday, October 23, 1951): p. 6, col F.
  11. ↑ Mitchell, Donald (ed) (2004). Letters From A Life: Selected Letters of Benjamin Britten, Vol. 3 1946–51. London: Faber and Faber. ISBN   0-571-22282-X. p. 534
  12. ↑ Grogan, Christopher; Strode, Rosamund (2010). "Part II: 1931–52". Imogen Holst: A Life in Music (revised ed.). Woodbridge, Suffolk: The Boydell Press. ISBN   978-1-84383-599-8. p162-165
  13. ↑ Banfield S. George Lloyd. In: The New Grove Dictionary of Opera. Macmillan, London & New York, 1997.
  14. ↑ "THE MAYOR OF CASTERBRIDGE, Leppard, The Cambridge Review, Volume LXXIII, 13 October 1951". Peter Tranchell, Composer. Archived from the original on 5 September 2017. Retrieved 5 September 2017.
  15. ↑ Wilfrid H. Mellers, "Current Chronicle:London" (Subscription Access), The Musical Quarterly 37, no. 4 (October): 580–8.
  16. ↑ "David Coverdale: Still rocking after all these years". www.yorkshirepost.co.uk. Retrieved 19 September 2015.
  17. ↑ Obituary, The Times , 7 March 1951, p. 6
  18. ↑ Brad Hill (2005). Classical. Infobase Publishing. p. 292. ISBN   978-0-8160-6976-7.
  19. ↑ Stephen Lloyd (2001). William Walton: Muse of Fire. Boydell & Brewer. p. 54. ISBN   978-0-85115-803-7.
  20. ↑ David Pierce (1995). Yeats's Worlds: Ireland, England and the Poetic Imagination. Yale University Press. p. 332. ISBN   978-0-300-06323-3.
This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.