Programme Notes

ALAN RAWSTHORNE (1905-1971)

Overture: Street Corner

Rawsthorne was a prolific composer but his style was at variance with the prevailing pastoral fashion in English music at the time when his career was taking off. The composer Anthony Payne wrote of him that it was the expressive structure and 'pattern-making' of his music that 'ran contrary to the picturesque rhapsodising which in many quarters was considered the main hope for a sincere British school of composition. In a word, it was considered continental.'

In fact Rawsthorne, born in Haslingden, Lancashire in 1905, had an unusual beginning for a composer: he set off to become a dentist. After that he switched to architecture and not until he was twenty did he finally commit himself to music, enrolling at the Royal Manchester College of Music in 1925 to study the piano and the cello. Afterwards he studied abroad, then moved to London to devote more time to composing, and he had already written a number of chamber works, including a Viola Sonata which declared his debt to Walton and Hindemith, when his Theme and Variations for Two Violins was heard at the International Society for Contemporary Music in 1938.

In the same pre-war period, again at an ISCM Festival ­ in Warsaw ­ his Symphonic Studies were heard, an unjustly neglected piece, and a work of far greater scope, which showed his confident writing for full orchestra. The second world war interrupted his trajectory as a composer but after the war he wrote the scores for no fewer than 22 films and four plays, as well as two concertos for piano and two for violin, two symphonies and a number of chamber works. His quartet for clarinet and strings has been recorded by Dame Thea King.

Tonight's overture, Street Corner, was actually written when Rawsthorne was in the army in 1944. It can be read as a product of that optimistic period when the end of the war was in sight and the broad perspectives of peace were just over the horizon. It is 'city' music - a genre of which there are numerous examples through musical history ­ and it can be bracketed with Elgar's Cockaigne Overture (1901) and John Ireland¹s London Overture (1936). But while Elgar gives us an accurate picture of a brass band marching down Whitehall and Ireland imitates the cry of a bus conductor, Rawsthorne attempts no obvious imitations of life, although there are suggestions here and there of martial swagger and even traffic noises: but Street Corner does suggest, with its ebullient, busy, forward momentum the character of a crowded town. The vivacity and lively invention of Street Corner death are another strong argument for a reappraisal of Rawsthorne¹s stature.

Programme Notes by Paul Vaughan ©

Back

Main Page

The Wimbledon Symphony Orchestra is a registered charity (No. 259860)