Stockport Symphony Orchestra December 2021
Engelbert Humperdinck (1854-1921) – Prelude: Hänsel und Gretel (1893)
Little of Humperdinck’s work is popularly known beyond his account of the brothers’ Grimm story, conceived during his time as professor at the Frankfurt conservatory in 1890. The preceding decade had seen a varied career taking him from Bayreuth, assisting Wagner in Parsifal and teaching his son, Siegfried, to a tutelage position in Barcelona. The first ideas for Hänsel und Gretel were born in four songs he wrote to accompany a home puppet show put on by his nieces. These evolved into a longer Singspiel before being fleshed out into the full opera, with a libretto by his sister. The first performance was given in Weimar, conducted by Richard Strauss in the days running up to Christmas 1893, followed soon afterwards by Mahler conducting the Hamburg première.
The opera is unmistakably Wagnerian (the children’s calls to a cuckoo in Act 2 directly invoke Wagner’s woodbird in Siegfried) but also finds great charm of its own. The prelude is much loved in its own right, demonstrating a burnished brassy chorale at its outset and more childlike frivolity and rich lyricism in its inner passages, often quoting from the opera itself.
Harry Gregson-Williams (born 1961), arranged Stephen Bulla: Music from The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe
The 2005 film adaptation of C.S Lewis’ classic achieved immediate success with critics and children alike. Remaining largely faithful to the novel, the film follows the Pevensie children through the wardrobe and into all kinds of family-friendly peril at the hands of an obstreperous housekeeper and the White Witch.
British composer and conductor Harry Gregson-Williams has written scores for a wide catalogue of films including the Shrek franchise, Chicken Run and contributions to the X-Men and Bridget Jones series. His Narnia score captures the frosty magic, fantasy villainy and epic grandeur of Lewis’ series, here distilled into an attractive medley by Stephen Bulla.
Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky (1840 – 1893): Sleeping Beauty Suite, Opus 66a (1889) (Lilac Fairy and Waltz)
When Tchaikovsky was first approached for a new ballet in 1888 by the director of St Petersburg’s Imperial Theatres, the proposed story was Fouqué's Undine. Having endured disappointing responses to his Swan Lake (1877) and the fifth symphony (1888), the composer was in a fragile mindset. The storyline for the new ballet was soon switched to Charles Perrault’s La Belle au Bois Dormant, in the Brothers Grimm version. A healthy sprinkling of other Perrault characters from Mother Goose (1697) also appear in the ballet, including Puss in Boots, Little Red Riding Hood and Bluebeard. After working on the score with enormous enthusiasm and energy, Tchaikovsky was, for once, able to appreciate and take pride in his own work. The Tsar, present at the 1890 première in St Petersburg, damned it with the faint praise of “Very nice”, but public and critical reception soon established it as a much-loved favourite.
The idea of a concert suite of big numbers from the four-hour ballet occurred to Tchaikovsky himself shortly after its early success, though he could never quite decide on his preferred excerpts. The commonly performed suite was therefore arranged posthumously. We can at least be confident that the composer would not have grievances with such a ‘highlights package’ arrangement: he was clear that the ballet was more about its music than the story, noting that ‘Going to the Ballet for the plot is like going to the opera for the recitatives’.
Edvard Grieg (1843 – 1907) – Peer Gynt (1874-76) Suite No.1; Morning and Hall of the Mountain King
After early studies in Leipzig, Grieg was swiftly adopted as the poster-boy of Norwegian romantic nationalism. After a near-fatal brush with pleurisy and tuberculosis in 1860, he enjoyed a period of relative success, most notably with the Piano Concerto of 1868 and his incidental music for the play Peer Gynt of 1874-76. The latter was written at the request of the play’s author, Henrik Ibsen (1828-1906), who persuaded Grieg that his five-act epic poem about the eponymous Norwegian folk-hero would be a worthy project. The text was by no means straightforward however, and the music initially proved difficult to write, the young composer bemoaning the ‘terribly unmanageable subject’. In short, after abducting another man’s bride, the roguish Peer sets out on disastrous intercontinental misadventures which see him getting uproariously drunk with mountain trolls and later waking up in Morocco, before being redeemed in old age by the love of the beautiful Solveig.
Grieg’s enthusiasm for the story steadily grew. The final set of incidental music consisted of around ninety minutes of orchestral and choral music and was necessarily made up of relatively short numbers, for which brevity Grieg blamed the Swedish theatre management. At the play’s 1876 première in Kristiania (now Oslo), the reception was mixed; one critic hailed it for its ‘Satire on Norwegian egotism, narrowness, and self-sufficiency’, though others, including Hans Christian Andersen, were less enthusiastic. The performing version was condensed into two suites by the composer in 1888 and 1893, from which Morning and The Hall of the Mountain King remain the most popular. Morning depicts the serene Moroccan sunrise from Act IV, while Mountain King sees Peer chased wildly by his troll and goblin drinking companions. George Bernard Shaw saw this piece as a ‘Riotous piece of weird fun’, though the composer himself was less fond of it, writing that ‘I literally can't bear to listen to: it reeks of cow pies, exaggerated Norwegian provincialism and trollish selfishness’.
Iain Farrington (born 1977): Scary Fairy: Red Riding Hood
Following studies in Cambridge and at the Royal Academy of Music, Iain Farrington has built a multi-faceted career as composer, arranger, pianist and organist. He has performed as a solo and orchestral pianist and organist across the UK, perhaps most visibly as Mr Bean’s ‘serious’ keyboard counterpart in the opening ceremony of the 2012 Olympics. His arrangements and compositions have been widely played at the BBC Proms, with successful scores for both children and grown-ups. Alongside Peppa Pig, The Gruffalo and music for the CBeebies, Horrible Histories and Wallace and Gromit, he has arranged solo piano scores for all of the Mahler and Elgar symphonies, plus The Dream of Gerontius and Mendelssohn’s Lobgesang. He is General Editor of the Elgar Complete Edition, an ambitious project publishing definitive scores of Elgar’s complete works.
Scary Fairy: Red Riding Hood is one of a triptych of orchestral pieces for orchestra and narrator, alongside Scary Fairy: Hansel and Gretel and Scary Fairy Saves Christmas. The works combine the sharp poems of Craig Charles with continuous musical accompaniment, often flatulently and emetically graphic in detail…
Robert Lopez (born 1975), (arr Bob Krogstad): Music from Frozen
When it was released in 2013, Frozen quickly became a modern Disney classic. The plot is a much-lightened adaptation of Hans Christian Andersen’s dark tale The Snow Queen of 1845: After Princess Elsa exiles herself due to her unwieldy powers over snow and ice, her sister Anna sets out to rescue her, accompanied by the sun-loving snowman, Olaf. When Anna sacrifices herself to save Elsa, the act of true love thaws Elsa’s frozen heart, and the older sister’s tears resurrect Anna.
The film’s popularity rests largely on its music, with score and lyrics by husband-and-wife duo Robert Lopez and Kristen Anderson-Lopez. This medley combines a host of feel-good tunes from the show including Frozen Heart, In Summer, Let it Go, Do You Want To Build A Snowman? and For The First Time in Forever.
Leroy Anderson (1908-1975) – A Christmas Festival (1950)
Most famed for his large catalogue of easy-on-the-ear light orchestral music, Leroy Anderson was born to Swedish parents in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and studied Scandinavian languages at Harvard. Alongside a successful career in military intelligence and linguistics, publishing on Icelandic grammar among other subjects, he developed a strong relationship with the Boston Pops Orchestra and its conductor, Arthur Fiedler.
A staple of the Christmas repertoire, Anderson's Christmas Festival is one of the most popular medleys of seasonal tunes. In its original format the work consisted of 9 carols In rapid succession, though Anderson later arranged a trimmed-down version at the expense of an attractive brass chorale on The First Noel. The festival begins with a proud setting of Joy to the World, followed by Deck the Halls, God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen and Good King Wenceslas. After Hark! The Herald Angels Sing, a distant churchbell punctuates Silent Night. Jingle Bells then sparks into life in cat-and-mouse style before erupting into a noisy march. Out of this, O Come All Ye Faithful blazes out from the low brass, driving the music excitably towards its grand close.