ABSTRACT
Before the darkness of the first of the twentieth century's two world wars was to descend (and both were to have drastic effects upon the fortunes of the agency), a close study of some of the names which appear for the first time in the brochures between 1910 and 1914 makes fascinating reading. Among the instrumentalists there are many whose careers were now beginning, and whose names and reputations would echo down the century. Richter may have been about to retire, but London's public now had a mouth-watering choice of conductors to hear in opera and concert, such as Nikisch, Wood, Beecham, Landon Ronald, Hamilton Harty, Richard Strauss, Safonoff, Mengelberg, Fritz Steinbach and Elgar. The violinists Sarasate and Joachim may have died in 1907, but they were now replaced by Kreisler, Kubelik, Elman, Szigeti, Hubermann, Thibaud, Zimbalist, Daisy Kennedy and May Harrison, all of whom were making their mark in Britain (most of them with their careers already well established in mainland Europe), as well as the cellists Casals and Beatrice Harrison. The late nineteenth-century pianists Hans von Bülow and Anton Rubinstein were dead, but now more than adequately replaced by d'Albert, Busoni, Sapellnikoff, Rosenthal, Paderewski, Sauer, Borwick, Teresa Carreño and Fanny Davies. They in turn were joined by the next generation, including Cortot, Lamond, Scriabin, Dohnányi, Godowsky, Backhaus, Petri, Hambourg, Arthur Rubinstein, Grainger, Merrick, Dawson, and Rachmaninov. Prodigies continued to be presented to the public, among them the boy pianists Solomon (Cutner) and Ernst von Lengyel. The latter was taken up in a big way by Ibbs and Tillett and undertook a tour with Kreisler in 1912, but this highly promising Austrian's career was cut short in 1914, when he died of tuberculosis at the age of 20.
