This Friday marks the anniversary of the Irish composer's birth. Tune in every day @ 1PM when host Chris Wolf will have a complete recording of one of Stanford's works.
A composer, music teacher, and conductor, Sir Charles Villiers Stanford was born to a well-off and highly musical family in Dublin. In the 1860s Dublin received occasional visits 
John Stanford hoped that his son would follow him into the legal profession but accepted his decision to pursue music as a career. However, he stipulated that Stanford should have a conventional university education before going on to musical studies abroad. Stanford tried unsuccessfully for a classics scholarship at Trinity Hall, Cambridge, but gained an organ scholarship, and later a classics scholarship, at Queens' College. By the time he went up to Cambridge in 1870 he had written a substantial number of compositions, including vocal music, both sacred and secular, and orchestral works (a rondo for cello and orchestra and a concert overture). Stanford was, in fact, instrumental in raising the status of the Cambridge University Musical Society, attracting international stars to perform with it.
While still an undergraduate, Stanford was appointed organist of Trinity College, Cambridge. In 1882, aged 29, he was one of the founding professors of the Royal College of Music, where he taught composition for the rest of his life. From 1887 he was also Professor of Music at Cambridge. As a teacher, Stanford was sceptical about modernism, and based his instruction chiefly on classical principles as exemplified in the music of Brahms. Among his pupils were rising composers whose fame went on to surpass his own, such as Gustav Holst and Ralph Vaughan Williams. As a conductor, Stanford held posts with the Bach Choir and the Leeds triennial music festival.
Stanford composed a substantial number of concert works, including seven symphonies, but his best-remembered pieces are his choral works for church performance, chiefly composed in the Anglican tradition. He was a dedicated composer of opera, but none of his nine completed operas has endured in the general repertory. Some critics regarded Stanford, together with Hubert Parry and Alexander Mackenzie, as responsible for a renaissance in music from the British Isles. However, after his conspicuous success as a composer in the last two decades of the 19th century, his music was eclipsed in the 20th century by that of Edward Elgar as well as former pupils.
Stanford composed about 200 works, including seven symphonies, about 40 choral works, nine operas, 11 concertos and 28 chamber works, as well as songs, piano pieces, incidental music, and organ works. He suppressed most of his earliest compositions; the earliest of works that he chose to include in his catalogue date from 1875.
The commentator Richard Whitehouse writes that Stanford's seven symphonies embody both the strengths and limitations of his music, displaying "a compositional rigour and expertise matched only by his older contemporary ... Parry, while seeming content to remain well within the stylistic ambit of Mendelssohn, Schumann and Brahms." Whitehouse comments that although Stanford's symphonic construction is conventional, "an often subtle approach to movement forms and resourceful orchestration make his symphonies worth exploring."
Stanford's first two symphonies (1876 and 1879) were not published and were excluded from his catalogue of works. The Third Symphony in F minor, known as the Irish, was first performed in 1887. It was the most popular of Stanford's symphonies during his lifetime. In his study of Stanford's works, John Porte refers to it as "full of the spirit and tunes of his country ... with its contrasting expressions of jollity and sad beauty." In this, as in many of his works, Stanford incorporated genuine Irish folk tunes. Like Parry and Mackenzie, but unlike Sullivan and Elgar, Stanford liked and respected folk songs. He generally avoided programmatic music, but his Sixth Symphony, composed in memoriam G F Watts, was, Stanford acknowledged, inspired by Watts's sculptures and paintings.
Of Stanford's other orchestral works, his six Irish Rhapsodies all date from the 20th century, the first from 1901 and the last from the year before his death. Two of the set feature solo instruments along with the orchestra: the third (cello) and the sixth (violin). In Dibble's view some of the concertante works such as the First Piano Concerto (1894) and the Violin Concerto (1899) are in their orchestration and their lyricism as much in the tradition of Mendelssohn as of Brahms, with whom Stanford's music is often compared.
Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Villiers_Stanford
Fri, May 3, 7:30 PM
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