A brilliant analysis of the music of the twenties and thirties, also discusses the music of composers like Stravinsky, Satie, Gershwin, and considers the contributions of jazz and other pop music of the time with classical music.

"To the economist and ballet enthusiast John Maynard Keynes he was potentially the most brilliant man he'd ever met; to Dame Ninette de Valois he was the greatest ballet conductor and advisor this country has ever had; to the composer Denis ApIvor he was the greatest, mostr lovable, and most entertaining personality of the musical world; whilst to the dance critic Clement Crisp he was quite simply a musician of genius. Yet sixty years after his ... death Constant Lambert is little known today. As a composer he is remembered for his jazz-inspired The Rio Grande but little more, and for a man who ... devoted the graeter part of his life to the establishment of English ballet his work is largely unrecognized today. [This book] looks not only at his music but at his journalism, his talks for the BBC, his championing of jazz (in particular, Duke Ellington), and, more privately - his longstanding affair with Margot Fonteyn. ..."--Book jacket.

"Using first-hand accounts, including contemporary correspondence, articles and interviews, this account of Walton's life also draws on material newly available relating to his friends and associates. The reception of Facade and Walton's work in both films and radio are fully explored."--BOOK JACKET.

"Laura King is a liberated, intelligent and successful woman: successful not only in her career but also with men. Although she has never married, hers has been an active and emotionally fulfilled life. Suddenly, at the age of forty-four, she learns that she is suffering from a rare liver disease and has only a year or two to live. In typically flamboyant style, Laura invites her ex-lovers to dinner. There she announces the unusual part they are to play in her final months. As The Constant Mistress unravels Laura's past, racing against time, Angela Lambert focuses on the relationships between men and women, sisters, parents and friends. Laura's last months concentrate her mind both on the tug between domesticity and freedom, between fidelity and desire, and, above all, on the experience and aftermath of passion. In a novel that is witty and moving, Angela Lambert reveals the dilemmas of the privileged generation of women who came to adulthood after the Pill but before Aids. 'A compulsive read...funny, observant and very real' Beryl Bainbridge 'Lambert refuses to shirk the no-go areas of a woman's life and lust, passion and death. The writing is compelling and the reader, w

Now in paperback. This innovative survey of large choral-orchestral works written between 1900 and 1972 and containing some English text examines eighty-nine works, from Elgar's Dream of Gerontius to Bernstein's Mass. For each work, the author provides a biography of the composer, complete instrumentation, text sources, editions, availability of performing materials, performance issues, discography, and bibliographies of the composer and the work. Based upon direct score study, each work has been evaluated in terms of potential performance problems, rehearsal issues, and level of difficulty for both choir and orchestra. When present, solo roles are described. The forty-nine composers represented include Samuel Barber, Arthur Bliss, Benjamin Britten, Henry Cowell, Frederick Delius, R. Nathaniel Dett, Gerald Finzi, Howard Hanson, Roy Harris, Paul Hindemith, Ulysses Kay, Constant Lambert, Peter Mennin, Gunther Schuller, William Schumann, Michael Tippett, Ralph Vaughan Williams, William Walton, and Healey Willan. Written as a field guide for conductors and anyone else involved in programming concerts for choir and orchestra, this text should prove a useful source of new repertoire ideas and an invaluable aid to rehearsal preparation. Cloth edition first published in 1994.

Articles, tributes and reminiscences of composer, pianist and author Peter Dickinson are here brought together for the first time.