Music for Special Occasions

The Anglo-Austrian Music Society is not unique in trying to shine on special occasions. We certainly tried and can take modest pride in some rather fine events: The Richard Tauber Memorial Concert held at the Royal Albert Hall on 20 February 1948, only a few months after Tauber had sung for us with the Vienna State Opera Orchestra at Covent Garden. The purpose was to establish a Tauber scholarship fund. All the artists contributed their services free - the BBC Theatre Orchestra, Sir Adrian Boult, Walter Goehr, George Melachrino, Ronnie Waldman, Elisabeth Schwarzkopf, Constance Shacklock, Rawicz and Landauer, the Luton Girls Choir and many more. The programme brochure featured personal contributions from Gigli, Bruno Walter, Elisabeth Schumann, Franz Lehar, Charles Cochrane, A P Herbert and Oscar Preuss. It was the Society's first great public success.

In May 1958 at the Oxford Town Hall a performance ofSchonberg's Pierrot Lunaire and Walton's Parade, with the poet Edith Sitwell speaking her own lines and Peter Stadlen playing the piano and conducting the Virtuoso Ensemble.

Two years later at the Wigmore Hall a concert of Austrian music with three first performances in this country - Johann Nepomuk David String Trio op 33/2, Egon Wellesz 5 Sonnets from the Portuguese by Elisabeth Barrett Browning translated by Rainer Maria Rilke, and Ernst Krenek Songs from the Diary of a Journey through the Austrian Alps.

1960 was the centenary of the birth of Gustav Mahler, a composer then little known and hardly ever performed in this country. We persuaded the Royal Festival Hall to mount a Gustav Mahler Centenary Exhibition and assembled for this, apart from varied memorabilia, the manuscript scores of all of Mahler's major works - we begged and borrowed from institutions in Vienna, Kassel, Amsterdam, from private owners in Europe and in America, items worth many millions. Now, thirty years on, we may wonder whether anyone would be willing to lend and, if they did, what the insurance premium might be.

Ten years later the Festival Hall tried a repeat on the occasion of the Beethoven Bicentenary. By then manuscripts were much harder to get, but we brought from Vienna by special messenger the master's death mask and his baton - or one of them. 1967 saw the long awaited opening of the Queen Elizabeth Hall. The fifth of the opening concerts was in celebration of the 25th Anniversary of the Anglo-Austrian Music Society - a recital by our old friends Peter Pears and Benjamin Britten. It included the first performance in London of Britten's Poet's Echo. The celebrations continued a few days later with two first performances conducted by the composers: Peter Maxwell Davies directed his Antechrist and Harrison Birtwistle Monodrama - the latter commissioned by the Society. Another of the Society's commissions was performed there in the same year by the Melos Ensemble - Thea Musgrave's Chamber Concerto No 3.

In June of 1967 the Vienna Boys Choir gave the first performance of Benjamin Britten's Golden Vanity at the Aldcburgh Festival. Britten wrote the opera for the Choir at the Society's request and conducted the premiere from the piano.

The Society's interest in contemporary music found further expression in the commissioning of Peter Racine Fricker's Praeludium op 60, first performed on the organ of the Royal Festival Hall by David Sanger in November 1970, and through encouraging the performance of many other contemporary works by prominent artists. The Vienna Boys Choirs cooperated particularly well in this and its performance of Benjamin Britten's Missa Brevis and of his Ceremony of Carols, to the harp accompaniment ofOsian Ellis, were fine examples.

The Second Vienna School was remembered in two remarkable public discussions in 1974 in the Purcell Room: Six contemporary British composers - Martin Dalby, Nicholas Maw, Humphrey Searle, Roger Smalley, Ronald Stevenson and Hugh Wood - gave their views on Schonberg Today, and on another evening Pierre Boulez persued this subject further in conversation with Peter Stadlen. In March 1979 we had a noteworthy concert at St John's of nine short works by Hanns Eisler, most of them not previously performed in this country. Schonberg was featured again at the Royal Academy in December 1990 in connection with the great Schiele exhibition.

It is perhaps fitting that the Society in its Golden Jubilee year should have returned to its roots with a Richard Tauber Centenary concert in the Queen Elizabeth Hall, when our sense of pride in the achievements on stage of our former Tauber scholars tempered the glow of nostalgia.