Programme Notes

Sir Malcolm Arnold CBE (b.1921)

Little Suite No 2 (1962)

Overture, Ballade, Dance

Concerto for Guitar and Chamber Orchestra (1959)

Allegro, Lento (Blues for Django Reinhardt), Con brio

Music for the Cinema:

Whistle Down the Wind (1961)

You Know What Sailors Are (1953)

The Belles of St Trinian's (1954)

Malcolm Arnold, knighted for his services to music in 1993, reached his eightieth birthday on the 21st October this year. He is one of those not unusual composers who began their professional careers as orchestral players: he was 19 and still in his second year at the Royal College of Music when he joined the London Philharmonic Orchestra, and at 21 he became the LPO's principal trumpeter.

He had acquired his first trumpet when, aged 12, he had heard Louis Armstrong at, of all places, a thé-dansant in the Royal Bath Hotel, Bournemouth, and as many of his works testify, he has always been a jazz fan. He had studied composition, as well as trumpet, at the RCM: his Opus One was a Divertimento for Orchestra, written in 1945 and now lost, but he had already written his Three Shanties for wind quintet, which became, and has remained, one of his most popular pieces. His Manx Suite for Orchestra, published in 1990, is his most recent composition, and his complete canon amounts to an astonishingly diverse series of works. He has written music for oboe, clarinet, flute, horn, harmonica, recorder, bassoon, for brass and woodwind ensembles, for orchestra and for piano and for every brass and string instrument as well as this evening's concerto for guitar and chamber orchestra, written for his friend Julian Bream. He is also the composer of nine symphonies, now being belatedly recognised as one of the great symphonic cycles of the 20th century, and his music expresses a dazzling range of different moods - from ebullient comedy and wit to the most profound melancholy. The late Sir William Walton said of him: 'He is one of the most truly original English composers there have ever been.'

In addition to his concert music, Malcolm Arnold has written scores for no fewer than 116 films, from The Sound Barrier and The Bridge on the River Kwai to This Farming Business and Hawick, Queen of the Border. Tonight's programme ends with selections from three of his film scores, two of them well-known and a third (You Know What Sailors Are), a brilliant scherzo for clarinet, to be played at this concert by Richard Stockall.

Programme Notes by Paul Vaughan ©

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