Stockport Symphony Orchestra 8 December 2019
Ralph Vaughan Williams (1872-1952): The Wasps Overture (1909)
Though his later music came to be shaped by his reactions to war, Ralph Vaughan Williams’ music is chiefly associated with the rolling hills, trees and fields of the English countryside. This is largely thanks to his enthusiasm for English folksong, and an ability to create music immediately nostalgic for an idealised bygone age. In 1908, searching for new inspiration, he spent three months in Paris studying under the tutelage of Maurice Ravel, three years his junior. Vaughan Williams recalled that Ravel “Showed me how to orchestra in colour rather than in lines”, though his music never lost its English soundscape, Ravel noting that the Englishman was “The only one of my pupils who does not write my music”.
After returning to London in June 1908, Vaughan Williams wrote the immediately successful Fantasia on a Theme of Thomas Tallis, and while conducting his own Toward the Unknown Region in Cambridge, was asked to write a set of incidental music to Aristophanes’ satire of 422 BC, The Wasps. The request was from the Cambridge Greek Play Committee for an undergraduate production, and though work on the project was deferred until the next year, after completion of his epic first symphony (the Sea Symphony), he tackled it with enthusiasm. The extensive incidental music was later condensed into a five-movement suite, of which this overture is the most memorable part. The only real reference to the play’s content is the buzzing opening, representing its litigious bureaucrats, with the remainder of the overture an attractive selection of folksy melodies. A pentatonic theme is heard after the buzzing subsides, followed by a noble melody for horn and latterly a surging coming-together of the overture’s themes. It remains the most popular of Vaughan Williams’ music for the play, with the complete incidental music only having been recorded for the first time in 2005, in Manchester.
Howard Blake (born 1938) – The Snowman (concert version), Op. 323 (1982)
London-born and raised in Brighton, Howard Blake made a last-minute switch to music from planned history studies at Oxford when he won a scholarship to the Royal Academy of Music to study piano and composition. After leaving the Academy, he spent several years working in film, before returning to music via work as a pub and club pianist. Raymond Briggs’ wordless picture book The Snowman was published in 1978, and four years later Blake was asked to produce a score for an animated version, to be broadcast on the then two-month-old Channel 4 on Boxing Day 1982. What would go on to become the tune of the iconic Walking in the Air came to him while meditating upside down on a beach in Cornwall during a prolonged retreat from the stresses of a hectic composing schedule. The words were written during a single afternoon on a rented deckchair in a London park with a sandwich.
Though the music of The Snowman was written at a time of ‘Terrible turmoil’ for the composer, its evocative score has become a Christmas staple. The music is more than mere accompaniment: every line of the narration is reflected in the score, from the Snowman’s vigorous sneezing to the thrilling take-off and flight over villages, rivers and forests far below.
Louis Andriessen (born 1939): The Nine Symphonies of Beethoven for Orchestra and Ice-cream Vendor's Bell (1970)
Born in Utrecht in 1939, the Dutch composer Louis Andriessen counted the composer Luciano Berio among his teachers. With influences as diverse as serialism, minimalism, jazz and Count Basie, his musical style is unique. In the noble tradition of composers grappling with the burden of Beethoven’s towering legacy glowering over their shoulders, The Nine Symphonies of Beethoven for Orchestra and Ice-cream Vendor's Bell is an affectionate ‘Respectful parody’ of the great man, but above all at the culture of classical music. In his own words:
“It was a kind of criticism, not toward Beethoven himself, because from the first to the last minute of my life, I admired the composer. Almost nothing wrong with the guy, except I worry about his sense of humour…the piece was not criticising Beethoven, but…the bourgeois concertgoer or concert. The whole situation of the normal symphony orchestra concert.”
Like many of his orchestral works, the Nine Symphonies calls for unconventional forces, with the orchestra here reinforced by electric and bass guitars, and of course the ice cream bell. Written in Beethoven’s bicentenary year, 1970, it is a curious patchwork of brief excerpts from the nine symphonies, mostly in chronological order, though with occasional outbursts of Andriessen’s own creation. Funk beats spontaneously emerge from Beethoven’s more rhythmic figures, at first in the Eroica, while elsewhere the music seems to skip back on itself like a damaged CD. Some rogue non-symphonic Beethoven is also included, with unexpected snippets of Für Elise, the Moonlight and Pathetique sonatas, as well as an off-piste appearance from Rossini’s Barber of Seville, a socialist movement anthem and a hint of the Dutch National Anthem.
Michael Giacchino (born 1967): Star Trek ‘Into Darkness’ (2013)
The twelfth film in the enormous Star Trek franchise, Into Darkness was the second instalment in the most modern take on the series directed by J.J. Abrams. Michael Giacchino returned as composer for the new edition, adding new themes to his work from the 2009 Star Trek and building on familiar themes from the original films. Giacchino’s extensive catalogue of film scores includes the Incredibles films, Ratatouille, Star Wars: Rogue One and the Jurassic World sequels, as well as music for numerous video games. Into Darkness was originally recorded by the Hollywood Symphony Orchestra, an ad hoc ensemble of session musicians. The dramatic score features brassy outbursts of Giacchino’s own invention alongside Alexander Courage’s original soaring themes familiar from years gone by, and to keep the series’ most dedicated fans amused, a chorus singing entirely in Klingon.
John Williams (born 1932): Star Wars: Suite for Orchestra (2005)
1. Main Title
2. Princess Leia’s Theme
3. The Imperial March
4. Yoda’s Theme
5. Throne Room and End Titles
John Williams’ music for the Star Wars franchise stands as some of the most influential orchestral music ever written. Vast in scale and outlook, his ninth film will be released in December 2019, completing a legacy which has spanned generations, painting a universe so vast and diverse as to make Wagner’s Nibelung seem like a small village. His unapologetically neoromantic music has set the genre and standard by which similar films will be judged for decades to come. Away from the big screen, he achieved success as Principal Conductor of the Boston Pops Orchestra, and has also written a symphony and concertos for horn, cello, flute, violin and trumpet.
Williams was hired by George Lucas to score the original 1977 Star Wars film on the advice of Steven Spielberg, having already provided music to Jaws and Close Encounters of the Third Kind. The score owes much to the music of Richard Strauss, Holst, and above all Wagner, whose leitmotif concept Williams embraced wholeheartedly. Instantly memorable individual motifs are provided for specific characters, places, relationships and concepts, and few films have started with music as iconic as the blazing B-flat major chord which begins a Star Wars film. That music, accompanying the famous yellow opening crawl, begins this suite of music from the original trilogy. We also hear the beguilingly elegant Princess Leia’s Theme, the legendary Imperial March, the reverential theme for Yoda, the 900-year-old master of the Jedi order, and the triumphant closing credits. Though the series’ most celebrated themes are mostly from the original trilogy (1977-1983), highlights from the prequels (1999-2005) and sequels (2015-2019) seem certain to enter concert halls in the coming years. One only needs to watch one of the comically awkward clips of Star Wars which has been shorn of its music to realise just how essential Williams’ music is, not only to the Star Wars franchise but to the whole genre of orchestral soundtracks.
Malcolm Arnold (1921-2006) arr. Christopher Palmer (1946-1995): The Holly and the Ivy – Fantasy on Christmas Carols (1991)
The composer, biographer and orchestrator Christopher Palmer was a prolific writer on music and arranged a large amount of film music by the likes of Malcom Arnold, Arthur Bliss, William Walton and George Gershwin into neat concert packages. This 1991 arrangement draws together three different Christmas scores by Malcolm Arnold: the film score to the cockle-warming 1952 film The Holly and the Ivy, a television documentary called Christmas Round-Up and some carols arranged for the 1960 Save the Children appeal. The Holly and the Ivy is taken from the film of the same name, along with The First Nowell. The Christmas Round-Up supplied I Saw Three Ships. The Save the Children music provides a return to The First Nowell, and a snow-flake dusted rendition of Away in a Manger.