Donald Burrows
speaker
179 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard May 2026
last heard 7 May
Donald Burrows’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in May 2026 with 1.
Appearances
If you wanted to try it out, get a few quill pens, a couple of pints of black ink and 250 pages of music paper and see if you can write it out in that time.
So, you know, it is very...
It is very quick, but it's the end of the process.
Composition has happened up to that point.
You don't just write the notes on paper.
A lot of thinking has gone into that.
And a lot of it's going on in his head.
A lot of it's going on in his head.
the business of composition from the first stage, which is reading Jennings' words and thinking, now, how's this going to go?
You have to think of the total structure of arias, what singers, who's going to sing this one, how's that going to go, what's the mood, is it major or minor key, is it fast, is it slow?
And then, of course, the business of actual musical themes.
ideas that sometimes the words stimulate a particular melodic line.
And quite often, because Handel's got a head full of tunes, he reads some words and thinks, hmm, I've got something for that.
And he riffles through his stuff and finds there's an old thing there somewhere that was just perfect for those words.
Well, in simple terms, it's something you perform in an oratory.
That is to say, a separate building, not for the mass, not for church services, but for presentation of religious topics, which may be from scripture, it may be symbols of characters operating on humans, selfishness or time or that sort of thing, or it may be lives of the saints or something like that.
opera and then oratorio came along together, and they used the same musical forms.
I don't think at this stage that was a really serious question.
He seems to have recovered very quickly from the 1737 stroke or whatever it was.
He goes abroad for a time, he comes back, he writes the funeral anthem for the Queen in no time at all.
Showing 21–40 of 179 · page 2 of 9
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