Through the Night

[Quarky]

I was glad (as they say) to hear Danielle at 04.14 today while putting my coffee on, but it would be nice to be told .

Danielle seems to be losing a tough edge to her voice, that I've disliked in the past. I felt I was waking up this morning to a natural beautiful female voice.

[oddoneout]

I was looking up something else and came across this on Wiki.

The introduction of 24-hour broadcasting resulted in the introduction of a fixed programming point at 22:00 so that if live programme overran, later programming could be cancelled to allow Through the Night to begin promptly.

I don't know if the 22.00 pumpkin time still holds, but the incursion of dumbtime shows that TTN doesn't have the same priority status as was the case then.

[smittims]

At least that's an improvement from the days when the Nine o'clock News couldn't wait, and Dr. Adrian Boult was sometimes asked to speed up the music so they could finish in time . I remember the last movement of Brahms' 4th being cancelled in a live broadcast so that the next programme cold start on time (c. 1968).

[cloughie]

I was looking up something else and came across this on Wiki.

I don't know if the 22.00 pumpkin time still holds, but the incursion of dumbtime shows that TTN doesn't have the same priority status as was the case then.

Well maybe that would explain the music fillers after evening concerts and not giving us encores in the Prom season.

[James Wonnacott]

What a joy to hear Catriona this morning when I turned on the wireless; a pleasant, unintrusive voice. And she doesn't tell us her name in between each piece of music.
More Catriona please!!!

[smittims]

I think Ilike them all equally, and it was pleasant to hear Danielle again over Xmas.

[Serial_Apologist]

I was truly astonished to hear a version of Debussy's L'après-midi d'un faun in an arrangement by Schoenberg, Sachs (a pupil apparently) and Heinz Holliger at the start of last nights TTN. As a longtime Schoenberg devotee I of course knew of the interest the Second Viennese School group had in the music of Debussy - and Ravel - including performances of their music in their own private salons - but I had not noted L'après... as being among Schoenberg's re-arrangements of others' works.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WpZGYOBJsqI

Schoenberg said that in composing his symphonic poem Pelleas und Melisande he might have missed Debussy's capturing of the wonderful perfume of the poem, but I think he succeeded admirably in this effort, along with the other two, as does this performance.

[french frank]

I was truly astonished to hear a version of Debussy's L'après-midi d'un faun in an arrangement by Schoenberg, Sachs (a pupil apparently) and Heinz Holliger at the start of last nights TTN.

Wasn't the arrangement by Benno Sachs for the Schoenberg Verein, with Holliger conducting the performance? The playlist info seems very muddled.

[cloughie]

Wasn't the arrangement by Benno Sachs for the Schoenberg Verein, with Holliger conducting the performance? The playlist info seems very muddled.

The Debussy-Schoenberg arrangement I know is on the DG Boston Chamber Players recording.

[french frank]

The Debussy-Schoenberg arrangement I know is on the DG Boston Chamber Players recording.

This seems to be Schoenberg's own arrangement, performed by The Univ. of Cincinnati College-Conservatory of Music:

[AuntDaisy]

Wasn't the arrangement by Benno Sachs for the Schoenberg Verein, with Holliger conducting the performance? The playlist info seems very muddled.

Not sure if it helps, but there's a paper by Richard S. Parks "A Viennese Arrangement of Debussy's 'Prélude à l'après-midi d'un faune': Orchestrationand Musical Structure"
Here's a short extract with the two references / footnotes (which are longer!).

...Most of the chamber ensemble arrangements were never performed by the Verein; some of them survive, however, including a transcription of Debussy's Prelude a l'apres-midi d'un faune attributed to Benno Sachs[5]. Scored for eleven instruments, comprising flute, oboe, clarinet, harmonium, piano, string quintet and antique cymbals, the arrangement was probably completed as early as November 1920 but was in any case finished by October 1921 [6]. There appears to be little available information about Sachs. Joan Allen Smith tells us that his name appeared in the first prospectus of the Verein, where he was listed as one of the rehearsal conductors [7]. Donald Harris lists him in the role of Corresponding Secretary for the Verein towards the end of its existence [8]; in addition, Bryan Simms quotes a letter of 25 November 1920 to Schoenberg from the Verein member Pauline Klarfeld in which she attributes the arrangement of the Prelude to Sachs (whose name she spells as 'Sax') [9]. There is little mention of him after 1921, and hardly anything outside the Verein [10]. ...

[5] See Theo Hirsbrunner, 'Debussys Prelude a l'apres-midi d'un faune und seine "sinnlichen Hilfsmittel"', in Schonbergs Verein fir Privatauffiihrungen, ed. Metzger & Riehn, pp. 31-42.

[10] In his sleeve notes for the Boston Chamber Players' recording of the transcription, Volker Scherliess credits the arrangement to another of Schoenberg's pupils, Hanns Eisler, but his evidence for the attribution is thin: see his notes for Transcriptions: Debussy, 'Prilude l'apris-midi d'unfaune'; Berg, 'Adagio'; Schonberg, 'Kammersymphonie' Opus 9 (Deutsche Grammophon 2531-213 (1980)). In an article published at about the same time, Scherliess claimed that the handwriting on the autograph resembled Eisler's (for comparison, he reproduced bars 43-7 of the score and a postcard from Eisler to Eduard Erdmann): Volker Scherliess, 'Hanns Eisler's Bearbeitung von Debussys Prilude d l'aprcs-midi d'un faune', Neue Zeitschrift fir Musik, cxli (1980), 130-32. For a long time I found the question of the arrangement's authorship puzzling. In vain I searched modem and contemporaneous biographical and bibliographical resources for information about Sachs, but he seemed to have appeared with the Verein in 1918 and to have disappeared with its demise in 1921. The only mention outside the Verein that I could discover was an entry under his name in the catalogue of the Library of Congress for a music item entitled Famous Favorites in Miniaturefor Piano (Boston, c. 1940). For a time I even entertained the possibility that Benno Sachs was a pseudonym. Recently, however, Marilyn McCoy, Assistant Archivist at the Arnold Schoenberg Institute, has shed considerable light on the subject. In two electronic communications to me (31 January 1997 and 4 February 1997) she referred to three letters in the Institute's materials related to the Verein that name Sachs as the arranger: to Schoenberg from Josef Travnicek (also known as Trauneck), dated 29 October 1920; from Pauline Klarfeld, dated 25 November 1920 (mentioned by Simms, as noted above); and from Sachs himself, dated 18 October 1920. She noted that the Institute's holdings include a total of five communications from Sachs to Schoenberg, including the three letters residing among the Verein materials, a birthday postcard to Schoenberg signed by Sachs, his wife and others (dated 1923), and from 1934 'an engraved visiting card from "Dr. Benno Sachs und Frau" with a handwritten birthday greeting' (McCoy, e-mail of 4 February 1997). She offered, as explanation for the dearth of references to Sachs, the fact that he was a physician, for whom music was a hobby. As for Scherliess's attribution to Eisler based on the handwriting in the score, it is McCoy's opinion that the handwriting in all of the documents attributed to Sachs is both consistent and unique. She asserts that among the Verein correspondents Erwin Stein's handwriting most closely resembles Sachs's but that there are clear differences both in penmanship and line-spacing. I am deeply indebted to Marilyn McCoy for this information.

[Serial_Apologist]

Not sure if it helps, but there's a paper by Richard S. Parks "A Viennese Arrangement of Debussy's 'Prélude à l'après-midi d'un faune': Orchestrationand Musical Structure"
Here's a short extract with the two references / footnotes (which are longer!).

Thanks very much to you, AuntDasie - most interesting. Hanns Eisler would seem most unlikely a suspect for having any part [sic] in the arrangement, given a view among Eisler commentators that he was very poorly versed in French music... which I think comes across wherever he tried unsuccessfully to emulate when setting French words.

[french frank]

Not sure if it helps, but there's a paper by Richard S. Parks "A Viennese Arrangement of Debussy's 'Prélude à l'après-midi d'un faune': Orchestrationand Musical Structure"
Here's a short extract with the two references / footnotes (which are longer!).

That seems a quite exhaustive article. As to

She offered, as explanation for the dearth of references to Sachs, the fact that he was a physician, for whom music was a hobby.

For a moment I thought I had made a discovery: A Dr Benno Sachs was a holocaust victim in 1943 which would roughly correspond with his disappearance - but he was born in 1870 which would have made him older than expected. On this and the Debussy transcription:

"I found multiple sources referring to Sachs as a medical doctor, but this seems to be conflating him with a slightly older Benno Sachs, a Viennese dental surgeon who also, confusingly, emigrated to the U.S. sometime in the 1930s."

At any rate, it seems clear that a Benno Sachs made a chamber transcription of L'après-midi, and so did Schoenberg.

[Serial_Apologist]

That seems a quite exhaustive article. As to



For a moment I thought I had made a discovery: A Dr Benno Sachs was a holocaust victim in 1943 which would roughly correspond with his disappearance - but he was born in 1870 which would have made him older than expected. On this and the Debussy transcription:



At any rate, it seems clear that a Benno Sachs made a chamber transcription of L'après-midi, and so did Schoenberg.

The "plot" thickens! Given the inclusion of the name of Holliger among the contributors, I am left wondering if someone has done some sort of amalgamation job on an original Schoenberg transcription of the Debussy in order to hear the version we heard on the programme - on which, incidentally I detected no harmonium, as included by Schoenberg. Heinz Holliger (assuming it be he) is a fine Swiss composer who, however, was not to be born until 1939. Some may better know of him as an oboist, whose wife, Ursula, plays harp, but as a composer very much in the lineage of the Second Viennese School (by way of the influence of Boulez) he would be well versed in what their music was about.

[french frank]

The "plot" thickens! Given the inclusion of the name of Holliger among the contributors,

I think this was just the BBC's faulty information retrieval system which has:

Prélude à l'après-midi d'un faune

Music Arranger: Benno Sachs. Music Arranger: Arnold Schoenberg. Music Arranger: Heinz Holliger. Orchestra: Kammerorchester Basel. Conductor: Heinz Holliger.

Which I would interpret as meaning the arrangement was the one attributed to Benno Sachs, Heinz Holliger conducted the Basel Chamber Orchestra and Arnold Schoenberg's name was, um, mentioned somewhere (Schoenberg Verein presumably}.