Malcolm arnold

Thursday

Richard Bratby

Three cheers for the Three Choirs Festival

The Welsh composer William Mathias died in 1992, aged 57. I was a teenager at the time, and the loss felt personal as well as premature. Not that I knew him; and nor was he regarded – in the era of Birtwistle and Tippett – as one of the A-list British composers (John Drummond, the Proms controller of the day, was particularly snobbish about Welsh music). But Mathias was a composer whose music I had played; whose music, indeed, me and my peers actually could play. His Serenade was a youth orchestra staple. It felt good to know that its creator was alive and well and working in Bangor, and

Thursday

Richard Bratby

Zips along with enormous vim: Malcolm Arnold’s The Dancing Master reviewed

Malcolm Arnold composed his opera The Dancing Master in 1952 for BBC television. It never appeared, the problem being the source material — William Wycherley’s 1671 farce The Gentleman Dancing Master. Jokes about wedding nights and ‘scarlet foppery’ might have flown in the reign of Charles II but the New Elizabethans at Broadcasting House were altogether more shockable. ‘Too bawdy for family audiences,’ was Auntie’s official verdict, leaving The Dancing Master largely forgotten until a premiere recording late last year, and now — conducted by John Andrews and using almost the same cast — its first ever professional production, at the Buxton International Festival. Clearly, there are historic debts to

Thursday

Richard Bratby

The two composers who defined British cinema also wrote inspired operas

It’s my new lockdown ritual. Switch on the telly, cue up the menu and scroll down to where the vintage movies gather — Film 4, or the excellent Talking Pictures TV. Then search through their early-hours offerings, and press ‘record’ more or less at random. Gainsborough costume flicks; Rattigan adaptations; anything with John Mills in a submarine — it’s all good. Then, next day, trawl through the catch to see what’s surfaced, and who wrote the music. On a good night you might get Vaughan Williams in 49th Parallel, Richard Rodney Bennett in Billy Liar or — bewilderingly — the fire-breathing serialist Elisabeth Lutyens, keeping herself in cigarettes and brandy