Norman O’Neill conducts the Court Symphony Orchestra) in the Prelude and Call from ‘Mary Rose,’ recorded on 16 March 1923.
From Wikipedia: Norman Houston O’Neill (14 March 1875 – 3 March 1934) was an English composer and conductor of Irish background who specialised largely in works for the theatre.
O’Neill was born at 16 Young Street in Kensington, London, the youngest son of the Irish painter George Bernard O’Neill and Emma Stuart Callcott. He studied in London with Arthur Somervell and with Iwan Knorr at the Hoch Conservatory in Frankfurt from 1893 to 1897. His studies there were facilitated by Eric Stenbock. He belonged to the Frankfurt Group, a circle of composers who studied at Hoch’s Conservatory in the late 1890s.
He married Adine Berthe Maria Ruckert (29 July 1875 – 17 February 1947) on 2 July 1899 in Paris. Adine was a celebrated pianist (a pupil of Clara Schumann) and music teacher in her own right – she later became head music mistress at St Paul’s Girls’ School in Hammersmith.
O’Neill began to have some success with concert music, including a 1901 performance of his overture In Autumn given at the Henry Wood Proms. In 1904 he composed the incidental music to John Martin-Harvey’s production of Hamlet at the Lyric Theatre, London. In 1909 he began his long association with the Haymarket Theatre when he was appointed Music Director.
O’Neill was treasurer of the Royal Philharmonic Society from 1918 until his death and taught harmony and composition at the Royal Academy of Music. A very sociable man, he was a member of the Savage Club, where he liked to meet musical colleagues. He and Adine frequently hosted fellow composers and musicians at their house, 4 Pembroke Villas in Kensington, including Frederick Delius, Theodore Holland, Gustav Holst, Ernest Irving, Percy Grainger and Cyril Scott.
On 12 February 1934 O’Neill was walking East on Oxford Street on his way to Broadcasting House for a recording session. As a crossed Holles Street he was struck by a carrier tricycle. As a result he developed blood poisoning and died on 3 March. He was cremated at Golders Green Crematorium, London, as was his wife in 1947. There is a plaque there in memory to both of them.
O’Neill’s works for the stage include over fifty sets of incidental music for plays, including many by Shakespeare…, J. M. Barrie…and Maurice Maeterlinck… Mary Rose, perhaps his best received theatre score, first opened in London at the Haymarket on 22 April 1920, continuing until 26 February 1921, with Fay Compton as Mary Rose, a role which was written for her by Barrie…
Norman O’Neill’s original music for the 1920 production gained widespread acclaim. At the end of the first night Barrie greeted the composer with ‘Well, O’Neill, I think we have made a success,’ and later wrote him a letter that ‘it was a lucky day for me when you had that inspiration.’ Barrie also described the effect of the music in the stage directions of the published text, effectively incorporating the music into the play. Fay Compton wrote of ‘that beautiful, haunting music which in turn inspired us; the tremendous debt of gratitude I owed to that music I can never hope to repay.’ Ernest Irving compared a performance of Mary Rose without O’Neill’s music to ‘a dance by a fairy with a wooden leg.’
In 1910, O’Neill became the first British composer to conduct his own orchestral music on record, directing the Columbia Graphophone Company’s house ensemble, the Court Symphony Orchestra, in a suite taken from his Blue Bird music on two double-sided gramophone discs. He received personal congratulations from Sir Edward Elgar on his music for the innovative central ballet sequence of the 1924 revue The Punch Bowl, which ran for over a year with O’Neill’s contribution being widely singled out for praise in press coverage.
His concert works include a number of symphonic suites, chamber and instrumental music, most of it written pre-war, before his theatre music career took off…Adine O’Neill…frequently gave first performances of her husband’s piano compositions…
I made this transfer from Columbia 941.
source
Beautifully written, played and restored. Reminds me a bit of Delius.