Composers › Percy Grainger › Programme note
Country Gardens
Gerald Larner wrote 2 versions of differing length — choose one below.
Londonderry Air
One of the great eccentrics of music, Percy Grainger shared the interests of his contemporaries at least in making arrangements of folk song - an art of which, as Benjamin Britten acknowledged, he was a master. Country Gardens, a Morris dance tune, was sent to him by the English folk song collecter Cecil Sharp and, by way of a piano arrangement he made in 1918, became the most popular of all Grainger’s works. It was so successful in fact that, although it brough him a steady income for more than forty years, he began to hate it for distracting attention from more substantial and more serious compositions. Even so, it has never alienated public affection for his arrangement of The Londonderry Air or “Irish Tune from County Derry” as he called it on first publishing it in 1902. The sombre string-orchestra version of The Londonderry Air was made in 1918 and the sensational orchestral score based on Country Gardens was commissioned by Leopold Stokowski in 1950.
From Gerald Larner’s files: “Country Gardens”
Londonderry Air
One of the great eccentrics of music, Percy Grainger shared the interests of his contemporaries at least in making arrangements of folk song - an art of which, as Benjamin Britten acknowledged, he was a master. Country Gardens, a Morris dance tune, was sent to him by the English folk song collecter Cecil Sharp and, by way of a piano arrangement he made in 1918, became the most popular of all Grainger’s works. It was so successful in fact that, although it brough him a steady income for more than forty years, he began to hate it for distracting attention from more substantial and more serious compositions. Even so, it has never alienated public affection for his arrangement of The Londonderry Air or “Irish Tune from County Derry” as he called it on first publishing it in 1902. The sombre string-orchestra version of The Londonderry Air was made in 1918 and the sensational orchestral score based on Country Gardens was commissioned by Leopold Stokowski in 1950.
The orchestral version of Country Gardens was made for Leopold Stokowski in 1950 and the string-orchestra version of The Londonderry Air in 1918.
From Gerald Larner’s files: “Londonderry Air”