Aberystwyth academic helps stage world premier of 'lost song'
Thanks to the research of Dr David Russell Hulme, Director of Music and Reader at Aberystwyth University, BBC Radio 2 is set to broadcast the world premiere of a lost song by Gilbert and Sullivan. Friday Night is Music Night, which is hugely popular all over the world, presents a Gilbert and Sullivan evening on Friday 7 March, featuring several songs reconstructed from incomplete material by Dr Hulme, widely regarded as the world’s foremost authority on Sullivan’s manuscripts. The premiere is of a ballad for the principal contralto in The Sorcerer. It was cut just before the first performance in 1877 in a tightening-up operation and has never been heard in public. The words survived but the musical material was discarded, believed lost until an incomplete set of orchestral parts surfaced recently. From these Dr Hulme reconstructed a complete orchestral score and voice part. “Reconstruction of this kind is not about composing a tune in the right style that fits nicely with the surv...