Composer of the Week is broadcast on Radio 3 at 12pm, Monday to Friday. Programmes in August are:
31 July – 4 August Anniversary Special: Composers in Conversation
7-11 August Monteverdi
14-18 August Henriëtte Bosmans
21-25 August Liszt
28 August – 1 September Icons of British Light Music
A book on the Onslow family published in the 1950s gives the composer George Onslow short shrift. His music, we are told, ‘has a dry and fireless amateur competence; and surely it is remarkable that a musician of any sort could thus have appeared as an offshoot of the Onslow tree’. Certainly, that tree had produced figures of considerable distinction in their own field – pre-eminent among them Arthur Onslow who was a universally admired Speaker of the House of Commons for more than 30 years, and a close friend of prime minister Robert Walpole. Yet in his own time George Onslow, nephew of the second Earl of Onslow, was one of the
