Thomas Oliver

Lord Berners was an eccentric novelist, painter and aesthete, but it is as a composer that he is best remembered. Berners saw Prosper Mérimée’s play Le Carrosse du Saint-Sacrement in 1917 and "was at once fascinated by the grace, the spirit and the character of this little work". Abandoning operatic tradition, this light and transparently orchestrated version of the narrative unfolds concisely and continuously. The amusing tale is one of domestic bickering and a minor miracle brought about by an act of charity, "held together in the style of a symphonic poem".

Paul Juon (1872–1940), named Pawel Fedorowitsch at birth, was Moscow-born to a Russian father and a German mother. In 1889, he entered the Moscow Conservatory where he studied violin under that bane of modern-day violin students, Jan H?ímalý, and composition under Anton Arensky and Sergei Taneyev, two teachers who instilled in Juon a strong grounding in traditional harmony and counterpoint. From there he went on to Berlin to continue his studies under Woldemar Bargiel, a composer who was part of the extended Schumann-Brahms circle. Juon must have liked it in Germany, for that’s where he remained for most of the rest of his life, retiring to Switzerland in 1934 where he died six years later in Vevey.