Dover Museum

Music for ‘Channel Firing’

Posted on November 3, 2014

Music for ‘Channel Firing’

This is a small selection of the repertoire which I have gathered around the texts, drawings and paintings for ‘Channel Firing’. Here, Leoš Janácek responds to the outrbeak of the war, an elegy from Enrique Granados, the great Spanish composer killed in a U-boat attack in the Channel, and Frederick Delius’s lullaby, a small thread of comfort from the ‘Great Silence’, the five years after the tragedy drew to a close.

Peter Sheppard Skaerved-Violin

Roderick Chadwick-Piano

(Recording outtakes-30 10 14 St Michael’s Highgate)

Engineer-Jonathan Haskell-Astounding Sounds

 

Leoš Janácek-Violin Sonata (1914-15)

I. Con moto


II. Ballada


III. Allegretto


IV. Adagio

Kreisler and his wife in uniform, Granados working on piano rolls in New York in 1916, and the attack on the SS Sussex, just out of Folkestone, after which he drowned.
Kreisler and his wife in uniform, Granados working on piano rolls in New York in 1916, and the attack on the SS Sussex, just out of Folkestone, after which he drowned.

Enrique Granados’ ‘Danse Espagnole’ transcribed by the great Austrian violinist Fritz Kreisler, who wrote a heart breaking account  of his time at the front. Granados died off the Kent coast, on his way back to Spain from making piano rolls in New York (pictured at top), and giving a recital at the White House for Woodrow Wilson. He and his wife were passengers on the SS Sussex, which was torpedoed shortly after it left Folkestone in 1916.

Granados/Kreisler-Danse Espagnole

Frederick Delius-Lullaby for a Modern Baby (1923)

Playing Janacek Sonata at the National Portrait Gallery, with Roderick Chadwik 2 5 2014
Playing Janacek Sonata at the National Portrait Gallery, with Roderick Chadwick 2 5 2014