Henry Balfour Gardiner

While Henry Balfour Gardiner should be ranked among the greater significant British composers of his era, he’s generally seen as having produced his greatest contribution to music when in the time of 1912-1913 he arranged and subsidized some concerts to market the compositions of fellow composers Vaughan Williams, Holst, Bax, Grainger, and many others. By himself behalf the privately rich Balfour was generally moderate and incredibly self-critical. Indeed, he’d stop compositional activity completely in 1925. However, the artistic well worth of his personal music can’t be overlooked. His most well-known piece, the 1908 Evening Hymn (Te lucis ante terminum), obtained for body organ and chorus, continues to be broadly praised and documented, and his orchestral functions Information from Whydah and Overture to a Humor (both 1906) may be rated as masterpieces. Today, while some of Balfour’s music is usually on recordings (from EMI, Naxos, Hyperion, and smaller sized labels), it really is generally contained on selections with functions by additional composers. Balfour was created in London on November 7, 1877. He was a talented kid, beginning piano lessons at five and composing his 1st compositions at nine. Balfour joined the Frankfurt Hoch Conservatory as a teenager to review piano with Lazzaro Uzielli and structure with Iwan Knorr. Though Balfour was quite energetic like a composer in early stages, it seems he previously aimed for any career primarily like a concert pianist. A incomplete paralysis from the hands in the middle-1890s derailed his programs and he concentrated instead on structure, taking additional lessons from Knorr and on performing. Balfour’s first essential works made an appearance early within the next hundred years and included a string quintet (1903) and several additional compositions, now dropped. His 1911 Shepherd Fennel’s Dance was an excellent achievement at a Queen’s Hall Proms concert. These 1912-1913 concert series advertising the music of Vaughan Williams, Holst, Bax, Grainger and additional colleagues also occurred at Queen’s Hall. In the post-World Battle I years, Balfour was still energetic like a composer, but turning even more doubtful of his innovative powers. His monetary support from the Royal Philharmonic Culture during this time period was among his most priceless contributions. From the middle-’20s Balfour experienced destroyed many ratings of his he considered substandard. In 1927, having abandoned composition, he started devoting a lot of his energy for an afforestation system on a plantation he bought and relocated to in Dorset.