Hostname: page-component-5c6d5d7d68-xq9c7 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-08-18T17:08:44.996Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

‘These Things Should Be Known’: Interview with Denis Aplvor

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 January 2016

Kenneth Derus
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

A fragment of an interview, really. Denis Aplvor began talking on tape early in 1998, when blindness made letter writing impossible. He talked about Margot Fonteyn and Bernard van Dieren and Federico García Lorca and old girl friends and being a doctor in India during the war. Mostly he talked about his music. This is ten minutes of conversation lifted from 16 hours of tape.

Type
Research Article
Information
Tempo , Issue 209 , July 1999 , pp. 19 - 21
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1999

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

1 Sorabji discouraged performances; Aplvor continued to promote his own work. Only the time-span connects them.

2 Yerma: poema trágico en tres ados y sets ntadros (1934)

3 Norman Tucker (1910–1978), joint director (1953–54) and sole director (1954–66) of Sadler's Wells.

4 Musician: an Autobiography (1978).

5 The Hollow Men for baritone solo, male voice chorus and orchestra, op.5 (1939).

6 Five commissions in five years: The Goodman of Paris (1951), A Mirror for Witches (1952), Blood Wedding (1953), Veneziana (1953), and Saudades (1955).

7 Lambert's last work was the ballet Tiresias and Aplvor orchestrated two of its numbers. (A greater beneficiary of labour of this sort was Bernard van Dieren. Aplvor prepared performing editions of the Chinese Symphony and many other of van Dieren's works – a fact rarely acknowledged by the BBC or anyone else involved with the material.)

8 Newsletter of the Denis Aplvor Society (Summer 1998), pp.l–10. Ivan Savidge is completing a biography.

9 The biggest works of this period have yet to be heard, viz. Altarwise by Owl-Light (1961) after Dylan Thomas, for soloists, speaker, chorus and chamber orchestra; Resonance of the Southern Flora (1972) after Paul Klee, for wordless chorus, organ and large orchestra; and the operas Ubu Roi (1965–6) and Bouvard and Pécuchet (1971–4).

10 Edward Clark (1888–1962), conductor and president (from 1947) of the ISCM.

11 Aplvor finished Lamentaciones, op.100 late in 1996. By January 1997 he was too blind to transpose the songs. His wife died three months later. Louisa Beard will perform Aplvor's Seis canciones de Federico García Lorca, op.8 (1945–6) – plus some of op.100 – on 28 July at the British Music Information Centre. Her recital is sponsored by the Oficina Cultural of the Spanish Embassy in London, with the collaboration of the Instituto Cervantes (London).