Description

EILEEN ANDJELKOVITCH (? IRELAND, 18 MARCH, 1896 – WORTHING, ENGLAND, U.K., 15 OCTOBER, 1941)

 

 

 

 

Her real name was Eileen Constance Smith. She was born in Ireland, the daughter of Frank and Annie Smith. By 1901, the Smiths were living in Buckinghamshire. She was adopted by the widowed Scottish-born music teacher Anna Alexander Russell Worby and became known as Eileen Russell Worby. She was usually described as Scottish and was living in London by 1911.

After successfully passing examinations at the Royal Academy of Music, she was granted a license to teach violin in 1923. As a young woman, she played the violin in theatres and served as musical director at the Broadway Gardens Kinema in Walham Green, London.

She became a concert violinist and gave a recital at London’s Aeolian Hall in 1927, also accompanying Welsh baritone Owen Bryngwyn at the same venue in another concert that year. She made several recordings in the 1920s. “She has an exceptionally rich tone and a great deal of temperament,” wrote one reviewer in 1925.

She performed on BBC Radio broadcasts throughout the 1920s and 1930s. On the London stage, she was musical director for the shows Jane and Genius (1934), The Mask and the Face (1934), and Within the Gates (1934). In 1936, she conducted the King’s Theatre Orchestra at a benefit concert in Hammersmith.

She was also known as a music educator, serving as principal of the Fulham Central College of Music in 1927 and, in 1932–1933, as principal of the Modern School of Music on Fulham Road, London.

She married a Yugoslavian diplomat, Vidoslav Andjelkovitch, in July 1921. She later married fellow musician Gregori (Grisha) Tcherniak in 1934, and married a third time to musician George Ernest Cathie. She died in 1941 at the age of 45, at a nursing home in Worthing.

 

 

TRACKLIST

 

A little love, a little kiss Un Peu D’amour (Silésu) Broadcast 174-B

Humoresque (Dvorak) Broadcast B 122 Z 2

Little grey home in the west (Lohr) Broadcast 322-A

Simple aveu (Thomé) Broadcast B 122 Z 3

Somewhere a voice is calling (Tate) Broadcast 322-B

Thaïs (Massenet) Meditation Broadcast 121

The bells of st mary’s (Adams) Broadcast 174-A

The Roses of Picardy (Wood) Broadcast 220 Z 304