Joseph Elliott Needham Cooper (7 October 1912 – 4 August 2001), pianist and… Read Full Bio ↴Joseph Elliott Needham Cooper (7 October 1912 – 4 August 2001), pianist and broadcaster, best known as the chairman of the BBC's long-running television panel game Face the Music.

Cooper was born at Westbury-on-Trym, near Bristol, England. He was educated at Clifton College, and then at Keble College, Oxford, where he was an organ scholar, During the 1930s he worked initially as a church organist and piano teacher before joining the GPO Film Unit, where he wrote incidental music for documentaries, including Mony a Pickle (1938) and A Midsummer Day's Work (1939). Here his colleagues included the poet W.H. Auden and the composer Benjamin Britten. He had already embarked on a promising career as a concert pianist when the outbreak of World War II forced him to give up the concert platform for the duration of hostilities. He resumed his career in 1946, studying briefly with Egon Petri and making his London debut in 1947.

Cooper made a number of successful recordings and also began broadcasting on radio. In 1954 he accepted an invitation to work on the BBC radio quiz show Call the Tune. In 1967 the show transferred to television under the title Face the Music. Transmitted on BBC2 and repeated on BBC1, it ran until 1979 and was briefly revived in 1983-4. The show kept Cooper in the public eye, and the "Hidden Melody" round, a regular feature of the show in which he improvised in the style of a composer and cloaked a well-known tune in his elaboate extemporization, served as a vehicle for his great pianistic talent. Face the Music also featured the Dummy Keyboard, in which Cooper played a well-known piano piece on a silent keyboard and the panel had to identify it. The music was gradually faded in for viewers at home.

During the 1960s, Cooper occasionally appeared as one of the presenters of Here Today, a daily 15-minute light current affairs programme broadcast by the independent company TWW, which served South Wales and the West of England. He became known for his acerbic, rather irascible interviewing style and for the fact that he regularly played out the programme with a gentle piano piece.

Cooper was awarded the OBE in 1982. He was married twice, first to Jean Greig from 1947 until her death in 1973, and then Carol Borg, from 1975 until her death in 1996.

Retrieved from "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Cooper"

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Beethoven: Piano Sonata No.14 in C sharp minor Op.27 No.2 -"Moonlight"
Joseph Cooper Lyrics

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Sergio Cánovas

The third movement commences with an undulating motion over which a sombre theme on strings and woodwind unfolds, to which woodwind append a more defiant idea. This subsides in the strings, the soloist entering in conciliatory mood that brings a prayerful idea from trumpets and woodwind. This is the basis of a barcarolle-like motion for the soloist that develops as new motifs are heard across the keyboard and the strings take up the prevailing motion as a mood of hieratic calm comes to the fore. Rumblings in the lower strings do not as yet undermine this, but a seemingly peaceful close is denied by an impulsive gesture from the brass. An intensive rhythm on strings provides the basis for a heroic new theme from the soloist, taken over by lower strings then woodwind and on which the soloist comments accordingly. Tension increases and the music surges forward in a welter of keyboard texture, behind which woodwind continue with aspects of the heroic theme until the soloist charges ahead and elements of the sombre initial theme are passed heatedly around the orchestra. After a powerful climax, the soloist winds down to a now eloquent recollection of the defiant theme on brass and woodwind, making way for a return of the opening music on woodwind and strings. The soloist eases into the barcarolle theme, unfolding with stealthy intensity to an ominous restatement of the defiant idea with trumpets to the fore. This subsides into a return of the introduction, combined with aspects of later themes that secure a calm though (given the ominous timpani underpinning) ambivalent conclusion.

The fourth movement starts with restless strings and inquisitive woodwind as the soloist launches the main theme over a purposeful tarantella rhythm. This builds through excited repartee between the soloist and woodwind to an energetic climax with brass and percussion to the fore. Curtailed soon afterwards, the music subsides with dreamy recollections of ideas from earlier in the work, but the tarantella rhythm is not to be denied and soon ushers in a swaggering new episode that accelerates first into a hectic march and then into a return of the initial energy. The soloist soon propels the orchestra into a pulverizing restatement of the main theme that at length makes way, by way of pounding timpani, for a nonchalant theme on woodwind then strings which surges forward to an animated climax. After this the soloist re-enters for a highly virtuosic cadenza that culminates in a ricocheting fanfare from full orchestra, to be followed by three questioning pizzicato chords.

The fifth movement opens in great uncertainty with elements of themes heard earlier mused upon by woodwind and brass against eddying strings and delicate arabesques from the soloist. At length the music takes on greater affirmation and, over easeful strings, moves toward the introduction of the offstage male voices, which solemnly intone in rhythmic unison a variant on the hymn-like theme with which the work began an hour earlier. This is extended at some length, maintaining a rapt and Olympian calm, until the tempo increases and tension picks up accordingly. Having remained in the background thus far, the soloist is here allotted a largely accompanimental rôle but, when the chorus alights on the heroic theme from the third movement, it again withdraws in deference to the orchestra, which soon propels the steadily accumulated intensity towards a climax. This culminates in a triumphal restatement of the fanfaring theme from the first movement, its optimism soon halted by an ominous recollection of the defiant idea from the third movement, but the final entry of the chorus acts as a benediction from which soloist and orchestra surge onward to a fervent statement of the incantatory motif that ended the first movement: now suffused with a certainty borne of conviction.

It is worth noting that Busoni later devised an extended version of the fourth movement cadenza which leads straight into the finale’s orchestral coda, removing the need for the male chorus. Yet this procedure has never found favour, performers wisely choosing to give the work as the five-movement entity that the composer intended.

Sergio Cánovas

Text of the fifth movement Cantico for distant men’s voices

Lift up your hearts to the eternal Force;
Feel Allah close to you, observe his works!
Joy and pain alternate in the light of the earth;
Here the terrestrial columns are peacefully at rest,
Thousands and thousands and yet again thousands
Of years, as now, a force at rest,
The brilliance and power of lightning strikes
A representation of indestructibility.

Hearts grew warm and hearts turned cold
As life and death, as in a game, gave way to each other.
But, serenely waiting, they expanded
Gloriously, powerfully, at once and thereafter.
Lift up your hearts to the eternal Force
Feel Allah close to you, observe his works.
Now the dead world is fully alive.
Praising the divinity the poem falls silent.