Howard Hanson / By Jeeves

On this day in classical music: American composer Howard Hanson was born in Wahoo, Nebraska in 1896. At age 28, he became director of the Eastman School of Music, a post he would hold until his retirement in 1964. Hanson was a champion of new American music and conducted the premieres of many orchestral works by aspiring composers. With the Eastman-Rochester Orchestra, Hanson recorded works by Samuel Barber, Charles Tomlinson Griffes, Walter Piston, George Whitefield Chadwick, Edward MacDowell, Roger Sessions, Virgil Thomson, Ron Nelson, William Schuman, Peter Mennin, Charles Ives and William Grant Still Ives, among others. He composed seven symphonies, concertos for piano and organ, works for chorus, band and piano. His “Symphony No. 4” won the Pulitzer Prize in 1944. Listen to the Eastman-Rochester Orchestra perform the finale of Hanson’s “Symphony No. 2.” Howard Hanson conducts. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0vdpDd5_qHI

On this day in the musical theatre: Andrew Lloyd Webber’s musical “By Jeeves” opened on Broadway in 2001. The troubled musical, which was cobbled together from the Jeeves stories by P.G. Wodehouse, debuted in London in April 1975. When lyricist Tim Rice backed out of the production, Lloyd Webber collaborated with Alan Ayckbourn. This musical farce garnered unenthusiastic reviews and closed after 38 performances. A new version opened in London in 1996 and was far more successful than the 1975 production. The 2001 Broadway production managed a 73-performance run and starred Martin Jarvis as Jeeves and John Scherer as Bertie. Listen to Ian Knauer and Emily Loesser perform the work’s standout ballad, “Half a Moment.” http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EgOzgPhW6ug

Musical musings: The giggles and snorts induced by P. G. Wodehouse, the master of dry spoofery, have everything to do with the language of propriety applied to the presumption of privilege. Wodehouse’s best-known works are, of course, the tales of a harmless and helpless wealthy idler, Bertie Wooster, and his brilliant manipulator of a valet, Jeeves. It is Bertie who narrates in a voice that is delicious with honest self-appraisal and cluelessness and implicitly conveys the author’s bland nonsurprise at the foolishness of the feckless rich. The Jeeves stories are piffle of great sophistication: in their recounting of ill-advised infatuations and foolish wagers, it isn’t the plot or even the characters that make you laugh so much, but the narrative tone. That adult tone is precisely what is missing from “By Jeeves,” the well-traveled musical adaptation of Bertie Wooster’s adventures, which opened on Broadway at the Helen Hayes Theater yesterday. The book and lyrics (and direction) are by the playwright Alan Ayckbourn, and the music is by Andrew Lloyd Webber, neither of whom is known for pea-brained schoolboy humor. But what they have come up with is a slapstick farce reliant on routine stumblebum business with rare forays into original jokery (and only one episode of inspired lunacy), unenlivened by a score of 13 formula songs. – Bruce Weber in The New York Times

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