The year 2002 marked the 10th anniversary of BBC Music Magazine and to celebrate the magazine’s editor asked British composer Colin Matthews to coordinate a bold commissioning idea: a set of seven orchestral variations on a theme by Henry Purcell: Hail, Bright Cecilia.

The resulting suite, Bright Cecilia Variations, had its premiere on today’s date in 2002 at a Last Night of the Proms concert at the Royal Albert Hall in London, with the BBC Symphony led by American conductor Leonard Slatkin.

Colin Matthews’ orchestration of the Purcell theme was followed by Matthews’ original variation, and in turn by six other variations composed by three additional British composers, namely Judith Weir, David Sawer and Anthony Payne, plus one each by the Danish composer Poul Ruders, Finnish composer Magnus Lindberg, and American composer Michael Torke.

Torke had this to say about his variation: “I wanted to create almost a jungle frenzy, by having four drummers from the percussion section playing tom-toms and shadowing those rhythmic beatings with melodic woodwind and brass fragments all drawn from the original theme … The result is vigorous.”

Colin Matthews (b. 1946): Bright Cecilia: Variations on a Theme by Purcell; (BBC Philharmonic; Gianandrea Noseda, conductor; BBC Music Vol. 11, no. 3

On today's date in 1993, the first gala preview screening of a new film, The Age of Innocence, based on the novel by Edith Wharton, took place at the Ziegfield Theater in Manhattan, as a benefit for the New York Historical Society. That was only appropriate, since Wharton’s historical novel describes upper-class New York society of the 1870s — an age, if the film is to be believed, so emotionally repressed that the unbuttoning of a woman’s glove can be a breathtakingly sensual moment.

The new film was directed by Martin Scorsese, famous for decidedly un-repressed thrillers likes Taxi Driver, Raging Bull and Cape Fear — and initially some thought Scorsese a poor choice to film Wharton’s novel. The skeptics were proven wrong.

Much of the success of the film can be attributed to its ravishing orchestral score by American composer Elmer Bernstein. “It was my personal tribute to the music of Johannes Brahms,” he said, who also credited Scorsese for appreciating the importance of music in bringing a movie to life: Unlike most directors today, Scorsese brought in Bernstein before Age of Innocence was filmed — not after.

“We started talking about the character of the music long before Scorsese ever shot a frame of film,” Bernstein recalled, with admiration. Bernstein’s Age of Innocence score was nominated for an Academy Award — the 12th time he had been so honored in his long and productive cinematic career.

Elmer Bernstein (1922-2004): Farewell Dinner from The Age of Innocence; Studio Orchestra; Elmer Bernstein, conductor; EMI Classics 57451

During her lifetime, pianist Nadia Reisenberg was regarded as one of this country’s finest concert artists. She performed at Carnegie Hall 22 times, often with the New York Philharmonic.

But she made history on today’s date in 1939 as she embarked on a series of concert performances encompassing of all 27 of the Mozart Piano Concertos. These were live radio broadcasts conducted by Alfred Wallenstein, originating at WOR in New York, relayed coast-to-coast via the Mutual Network and the CBC in Canada, and overseas via short wave. There were 29 broadcasts in all, one a week, starting on September 12, 1939 and ending on March 26, 1940.

Mozart’s 27 piano concerts were first published in 1850, almost 60 years after the composer’s death, but before Reisenberg’s broadcasts, no one had performed all of them in such a series. French composer and pianist Camille Saint-Saens played nine Mozart concertos in Paris in 1864/1865, and 11 during a series in London in 1910, but Reisenberg was the first to perform all 27 in one concert sequence, since even Mozart never played them all in just one season.

Amazingly, live aircheck recordings of most of these historic radio broadcasts have survived and are now part of the Nadia Reisenberg Collection in the International Piano Archives at Maryland.

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756-1791): Piano Concerto No. 26 (Coronation); Nadia Reisenberg; WOR studio orchestra; Alfred Wallenstein, conductor; (recorded March 19, 1940); IPA of Maryland Reisenberg Mozart Piano Concertos CD 13

On today’s date in 1950, Decca recording engineers committed to disc seven short works by American composer Leroy Anderson, with him conducting top-notch New York freelance musicians.

Since 1938, Anderson had been associated with the Boston Pops, for whom he had composed a string of very successful pieces, beginning with Jazz Pizzicato and Jazz Legato, complimentary works designed for the two sides of a 78-rpm disc. Anderson recorded both those pieces at his 1950 Decca session and also the first performance of a new work, The Waltzing Cat. In fact, after 1950 most of his premieres took place at Decca recording sessions. One of them, Blue Tango, sold over a million copies.

By 1953, one national survey found Anderson was the most-performed American composer of his day. That was the year he wrote his only extended orchestral work, a piano concerto. With the exception of a short-lived Broadway musical from 1958 Goldilocks, the bulk of his works are short, witty orchestral pieces, superbly crafted works intended to make audiences smile.

“I just did what I wanted to do, and it turned out that people liked it,” Anderson once said.

Leroy Anderson (1908–1975): Jazz Pizzicato and The Waltzing Cat; Decca studio orchestra; Leroy Anderson, conductor; MCA 9815

We tend to think of Paris as the most sophisticated and worldly of European capitals — a city whose residents are unlikely to be shocked by anything they see or hear.

Ah, but that’s not always the case, as poor Hector Berlioz discovered on today’s date in 1838, when his new opera Benvenuto Cellini premiered at the Paris Opéra. One line in the libretto about the cocks crowing at dawn was considered, as Berlioz put it, “belonging to a vocabulary inconsistent with our present prudishness” and provoked shocked disapproval. And that was just the start of a controversy that raged over both the morality and the music of this new opera.

Following the dismal opening night, Berlioz wrote to his father: “It’s impossible to describe all the underhanded maneuvers, intrigues, conspiracies, disputes, battles, and insults my work has given rise to … The French have a positive mania for arguing about music without having the first idea — or even any feeling — about it!”

From the fiasco of the opera’s premiere, however, Berlioz did retrieve some measure of success. His famous contemporaries Paganini and Liszt both admired the work — and said so — and one flashy orchestral interlude from Benvenuto Cellini did prove a lasting success when Berlioz recast it as a concert work: his Roman Carnival Overture.

Hector Berlioz (1803-1869): Benvenuto Cellini and Roman Carnival Overtures; Staatskapelle Dresden; Sir Colin Davis, conductor; BMG/RCA 68790

Today is the birthday of American composer and teacher Edward Burlingame Hill, born in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1872.

Hill studied at Harvard, which was not surprising, since his grandfather had been President of the college, and his father taught chemistry there. “My father sang the songs of Schubert, and was a great admirer of Bach. Thus at an early age I was imbued with a deep love for serious music,” he recalled. Hill studied with 19th-century American composer John Knowles Paine, who had established at Harvard the first music department in any American university. After he took all of Paine’s courses, he went on to study in Paris with Charles Widor.

Hill’s early works were in the French style, and you might say that he “wrote the book on the subject” — literally. In 1924, he published a study, French Music, and was awarded the French Legion of Honor for his efforts. During his lifetime, major American orchestras performed his music, but today, if he’s remembered at all, it’s as a teacher at Harvard. Toward the end of tenure, one his students was Leonard Bernstein, who, in 1953, made a recording of his teacher’s Prelude for Orchestra. Hill died at 88 in New Hampshire in 1960.

Edward Burlingame Hill (1872-1960): Prelude for Orchestra; Columbia Symphony; Leonard Bernstein, conductor; CBS/Sony 61849

On today’s date in 1971, the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, D.C., was inaugurated with a gala performance of a new work by Leonard Bernstein. Mass was a musical and visual extravaganza which reinterpreted the text of the Latin liturgy and involved more than 200 singers, dancers, and instrumentalists.

Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis had asked Bernstein to write a piece to open the new Center but was conspicuous by her absence. President Richard Nixon also chose to stay away, rightly fearing that Bernstein’s Mass would be interpreted as an embarrassing protest against the war in Vietnam.

The Washington Post’s front-page review, “A Reaffirmation of Faith,” was glowing in its praise, but Time magazine’s assessment was condescending, quoting some New York wits who dubbed it the “Mitzvah Solemnis.” The New York Times review was brutal, calling Bernstein’s Mass “a combination of superficiality and pretentiousness…[and] the greatest mélange of styles since the ladies’ magazine recipe for steak fried in peanut butter and marshmallow sauce.”

But Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, when she finally did hear Bernstein’s work, sent the composer an inscribed photograph which read: “Lenny — I loved it, yes, I did, and I love you, too. Thank you for making Mass so beautiful.”

Leonard Bernstein (1918-1990): Sanctus, from Mass; Empire Brass; Telarc 80159

Leonard Bernstein (1918-1990): Simple Song, from Mass; Boston Pops; John Williams, conductor; Philips 416 360

The Three Choirs Festival is one of England’s oldest musical traditions. Established around 1715, it showcases the cathedral choirs of Gloucester, Worcester and Herford, and presents both choral and orchestral works by British composers

Vaughan Williams’ Fantasia on a Theme of Thomas Tallis was premiered there in 1910, and in the audience was an 18-year-old aspiring composer named Herbert Howells, who later would relate how Vaughan Williams had sat next to him for the remainder of the concert and shared his score of Elgar’s The Dream of Gerontius with him.

Howells studied music at Gloucester Cathedral before heading off to London and the Royal College of Music. He also got married and had two children. In 1935, his 9-year-old son Michael contracted polio and died three days later. The grief-stricken Howells began composing a memorial work as private therapy, choral sketches he considered too painful to complete and too personal to have performed.

But in 1950 Howells was asked for a new work to be premiered at Three Choirs Festival, and, at the urging of Vaughan Williams and others who had seen Howell’s private sketches, Howells completed his work Hymnus Paradisi, and led the premiere himself on September 7, 1950, one day after the 15th anniversary of his son’s death.

Herbert Howells (1892-1983): Hymnus Paradisi; Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Choir and Orchestra; Vernon Handley, conductor; Hyperion 66448