Sir Malcolm Arnold (1921-2006)
Homage to the Queen Op. 42 (1953) complete score
Sweeney Todd Op. 68 (1959) complete score*
BBC Concert Orchestra/Martin Yates
rec. January 2025, Fairfield Halls, Croydon,
* first recording
Dutton Epoch CDLX7420 SACD [82]
Substantially funded by The Malcolm Arnold Trust, at 82 minutes this is a very full disc indeed. It is also very welcome, as it gives us the first recording of the complete ballet Sweeney Todd and is the first digital recording of the complete score of Homage to the Queen of which an analogue complete recording was made in 1953 by the Philharmonia Orchestra under Robert Irving, who conducted the premiere (review).
It is wonderful to have on one disc these two classic scores from Arnold’s golden decade of the fifties before the electroshock treatment and insulin therapy darkened his thoughts in the ensuing years. His chronic overwork in the fifties was partly responsible for his breakdowns. Homage to the Queen was one of seventeen works completed in 1953, including the ever-popular Symphony No. 2, and Hobson’s Choice film score. Sweeney Todd was only one of eleven works completed in 1959, which included the sublime Guitar Concerto and underrated Song of Simeon.
Arnold’s ability to compose quickly to tight deadlines and specific timings found an excellent outlet in film. By 1953, there were close to sixty cinematic scores covering both film and documentary. His concert works were also gaining traction in the concert hall, and his English Dances Sets 1 and 2 which appeared in 1951 and 1952 had proven extremely popular. It is not really surprising, then, that when Humphrey Searle turned down the request to write a ballet to celebrate the coronation, citing time constraints, that he suggested Arnold. Youth was the buzz word of the day and Arnold at 31 fitted the bill.
The ballet was composed, orchestrated, designed, choreographed, and produced in the incredibly short period of two months. Arnold told me that such was the tight schedule that he composed during the night and handed the manuscript to the copyist the next morning. The ballet, with choreography by Frederick Ashton and designs by Oliver Messel, was first produced on Coronation Day, 2 June 1953. This was an odd affair, as the evening began with Act 2 of Swan Lake which was followed at 9 p.m. by the broadcast of the Queen’s coronation address to the nation; only then was the new ballet performed.
The original scenario provided for four sections each evoking the period of four different queens: Elizabeth I, Anne, Victoria, and finally the new Elizabeth. The designer Oliver Messell was less than keen on this idea, and it was dropped at an early stage, and the work became a divertissement in which the queens of the four elements and their courts pay homage to the new Queen Elizabeth.
Like the Russian masters before him, Ashton provided Arnold with a detailed scenario, complete with the timings of each section, which, with his cinematic background he had no problem in following. Arnold meets the constraints with some of his most appealing music. At the time Ninette de Valois compared the score to Tchaikovsky, and Arnold believed this did him some damage professionally. It is, however, not a totally unjustified comparison. Like Tchaikovsky, Arnold is able to create, within the eight- and sixteen-bar phrases required of him, music of real beauty and originality. Ashton was stunned by the speed Arnold could write and by his willingness to change things if the music did not quite work with his ideas.
Each section devoted to an element is shaped by the conventions of the Classical/Romantic ballet. The centre piece of each is a pas de deux, surrounded by different solos and group dances. The restrictions of the medium do not compromise his original voice. The music is wholly balletic and wholly Arnold.
The ballet begins (as requested) with an expectant note on the strings – echoes of Mahler’s Symphony No 1 – that provides the background for the quiet fanfares on the brass and woodwind. Be warned: this is almost inaudible here, so do not turn up the volume because it gets very loud very quickly. Yates is much gentler than Irving, the fanfares having a dreamlike quality. As they increase in volume, they lead into the brisk and joyous homage march to which the whole company entered, a grand défilé in all but name. Arnold early on shows his complete understanding of the ballet idiom, when in the trio section, a beautifully phrased, melody marked andante con moto gives plenty of opportunity for the movements on stage to breathe. Yates’ tempo for the andante con moto is the same as his allegro moderato for the opening for which I imagine he had his reasons.
Earth is the first and the most problematic of the elements to appear: how to make ballet dancers earthbound? Rather than write earthbound music, Arnold creates a pastoral scene complete with bird calls which is very Disneyesque. A joyous pas de six marked allegro scherzando is cut from the same cloth as his early comedy overture Beckus the Dandipratt. Yates is almost twice as fast as Irving here and it works much more effectively. The main pas de deux, which was danced by Nadia Nerina and Alexis Rassine, is a lugubrious waltz marked blandly moderato. The lugubrious melody constantly trying to rise is always being pulled back to the earth, the sense of weight being cleverly achieved by short musical phrases and a highlighted use of the lower instruments. The man’s variation (track 3) is beautifully caught and far more earthily masculine than Irving. The finale with its aggressive horns packs a punch.
Following the weight of Earth, Water, coloured by vibraphone, harps and celesta shimmers and glistens onto the scene. The themes flow seamlessly into one another, each depicting the many facets of water. The pas de trois is an elegant and gracious waltz interrupted by a sparkling woodwind shower which was a solo for Julia Farron. In what Arnold described to me as “the Respighi bit”, Brian Shaw’s variation full of great classical leaps is supported by a surging theme coloured by the use of harp, celesta and glockenspiel. Arnold’s fountains seem to outshine those of Rome. The ecstatic flourishes on the strings and the harp glissandi are well caught by the engineers (track 5).
After what has preceded it, the music for Fire comes as a shock. The themes are dissonant and angular with much use of muted and rasping brass with wooden percussion interjections. The sections are also less clearly defined, each blending into one another. The highlight of this section is, however, not the psychotic pas de deux for Beryl Grey and John Field, but the mazurka-like variation for Ashton’s then lover Alexander Grant. This athletic solo, which was full of spectacular leaps and dramatic falls, is accompanied by one of the gems of the score. A strongly accented 3/4 with volcanic overtones, coloured by whooping horns leads to a sharply phrased theme characterised by off-beat accents and unexpected pauses. Arnold has always understood the brass and how to use it, and in this section, they are certainly put through their paces (as was Mr Grant!) In the manuscript it is marked allegro con brio and then written in capital letters FAST; Irving (and also Gamba) follow this direction and the excitement is palpable. Having been brought up with Irving’s quick, exhilarating approach I find Yates’s much slower tempo hard to accept, though the orchestra give it their all.
The tarantella which ends Fire is swept away by the clear syncopated chords which open Air, the final movement. The flying soaring elements, including a transformation of the opening fanfares of the ballet, will be no surprise, coming as they do from a composer who in the previous year had written the music for David Lean’s aerial film The Sound Barrier. The use of high scurrying woodwind suggests stratospheric heights, while the clear, open-textured string writing conjures up the limitless blue.
The climax of the ballet was a pas de deux for Margot Fonteyn and Michael Somes, which Clive Barnes thought “one of the finest pieces of classical choreography yet produced”. The Air pas de deux is the most extended section of the ballet and Arnold allows his beautiful and shamelessly romantic theme to breathe and develop. The music is reminiscent of Khachaturian’s Spartacus, and more than stands up to comparison. But hold on; Spartacus appeared three years later – perhaps Khachaturian heard the Arnold score on disc. This digital recording allows the brilliant scoring to shine through.
One can only imagine the tumultuous applause that greeted the end of the Air pas de deux and Arnold wisely leads into the final grand défilé with a loud recap of the opening material. The trumpets brilliantly ring out above their colleagues with the horns joining in celebratory counterpoint. The balletends with a Firebird-like tableau with the entire company on stage and the fanfares with cymbals and tam-tam triumphantly heralding the new Elizabethan age.
The critic Richard Buckle suggested at the time that the ballet would have been better served had Glazunov’s score for The Seasons been used instead of Arnold’s. This hurt Arnold deeply, and apart from the fact that it would have deprived us of the score, missed the point that the ballet had been created by three Englishmen to celebrate the coronation of their new Queen. Buckle, unaware of the discomfort some of his reviews caused, told me shortly before he died that he had probably made the comment ”just to be provocative”.
He was, as this disc proves, completely wrong and it is one of the few ballet scores that is best heard complete and not as a suite. Only the second male variation in Water (track 7) is perhaps less than inspired; for the rest the melodies, the orchestration and the sheer invention are exceptional. It was a happy collaboration for Arnold and when the piano score of the ballet appeared the following year, Arnold signed a copy, which I now own, “To Fred, with best wishes and many thanks, Malcolm Feb/1954.”
Ashton was so taken with Arnold that in 1954 the two worked together again on Rinaldo and Armida Opus 49, which, despite having some highly effective music was not a great success, largely due to the subject matter and Ashton’s less-than-inspired choreography. Having had these first two ballets suggested to him, it was Arnold who suggested to the choreographer John Cranko what would be his third original ballet, Sweeney Todd Opus 68.
The tale of Sweeney Todd the Demon Barber of Fleet Street is still well known to the modern audience, largely due to Stephen Sondheim’s musical of the same name, but the character had first appeared in the 1842 melodrama The String of Pearls: or The Fiend of Fleet Street by George Dibdin Pit. Cranko and Arnold used that as their base but moved the action from the time of George II to that of Edward VII. The main characters are Sweeney Todd, his accomplice Mrs Lovett, Tobias the assistant, Johanna who here is not Todd’s daughter but the love interest for Todd and the hero Mark who has a string of pearls he wants to give her. For reasons known only to Cranko, Mark, who is surely of age, is chaperoned by one Colonel Jeffrey from the Indian army. Johanna’s father is a drunk manipulated by Todd and a chorus of incompetent policemen.
The ballet was first performed on 11th December 1959 at the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon. The size of the orchestra pit necessitated the use of a small ensemble of six woodwind, six brass, percussion, piano/celeste, harp and strings, though such is Arnold’s skill that a much larger ensemble sounds at play. The number of instruments further enhanced the music hall sound of the work.
On tour the ballet proved hugely popular with audiences but when it arrived in London the critics ever suspicious of the popular tore it to shreds. Noel Goodwin, reviewing the ballet for Dance and Dancers, found the music “bland, featureless and bereft of character”, also “without substance or imagination.” Richard Buckle strangely thought the music had “no grasp of the period”, which it does, while Clement Crisp critically found it “brash and vulgar” which it is but then that is the point.
The music disappeared from sight although a Suite Op. 68a, using about half of the score, was created by David Ellis in 1984. This has been recorded by the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra and Vernon Handley on Conifer (later in the Decca and then the Sony box sets) and the BBC Philharmonic Orchestra and Rumon Gamba on Chandos (review).
Updating the setting to Edwardian times allowed Arnold to conjure up a romantic world of hansom-cabs, gas lamps, and general bawdiness and to include many of the music hall styles associated with the period. Also, as in the music hall, many of the orchestral effects match the stage action precisely: trombone slides for the pratfalls, hiccups marked by a wood block, and so on. All these effects and styles effortlessly become Arnold’s own.
The score is cinematic in conception and Arnold drew on his experiences of working on a wide variety of films and documentaries, around about ninety by 1959, to produce music that got to the heart of the scene in question without beating about the bush. Each character in the ballet is helpfully identified by a theme or motif and as the ballet progresses they are ingeniously interwoven and developed. The music veers from scary, horror film chromaticism to music hall pastiche, to romantic love music. Unlike Homage to the Queen, with its clearly differentiated tableau, Sweeney Todd sounds more thoroughly organic, one scene merging into the next.
Yates and the orchestra are wonderful in shaping the disparate material, and it is disparate. The grisly opening prelude with its rising chromatic scales will sound familiar to anyone who knows Tam O’Shanter and introduces the important Todd theme, sinisterly snarling. Both these ideas appear throughout and provide a most satisfying unity to the score. The noise and bustle disappear suddenly and chorus of singularly ineffective policemen, modelled on the Keystone Cops, dance to a gracious soft shoe shuffle, the elegance punctuated by vulgar “have a banana” cadences (track 20).
Johanna’s theme is an ingratiating, if somewhat saccharine, waltz and first appears in a scene with her mother and father who is drunk. The orchestra’s first trombone does sterling work accompanying this with seamless glissandos. Still later, the waltz, more appropriately accompanied, is used for a pas de quatre in which one of the ‘characters’ is a table called upon to execute some stunning pirouettes.
There are some comical onomatopoeic moments such as when Todd calls his assistant Tobias and the three syllables To-bi-as are echoed in the music. Later when Tobias eats a ‘meat’ pie his hiccups are also heard in the orchestra while glissandi on the strings accompany his discovery of a long hair.
Some tiny sections have marvellous melodies which other composers would have saved for larger works but not Arnold. The appearance of a ‘rich gentleman’ is accompanied by a big tune that Walton would have been proud of, but it is there for not quite thirty seconds, never to appear again (track 22).
After many farcical goings on and much slapstick the ballet ends in a riotous finale, named in the score as “Virtue Triumphant”, in which Arnold goes full Ketèlbey and instructs percussionist to “blow on a Nightingale whistle as loudly as possible. “
The score is a delight from start to finish, and the orchestra and conductor seem to be having great fun. It is the sort of story that ballet choreographers no longer engage with, so we are unlikely to see a stage version by any company of note. Perhaps some interested or interesting film maker would make an animated version. That I would pay to see!
The liner notes by Piers Burton-Page, are rather limiting of the composer’s talents and not what I would expect from one of Arnold’s biographers. The booklet has an outstanding selection of photographs, and the design of the cover is exceptionally beautiful.
For sentimental reasons I will not be getting rid of my Irving recording of Homage to the Queen; the period recorded sound is remarkably good, and I do prefer his tempo choices. Yates and the ever-brilliant players of the BBC Concert Orchestra are however on excellent form reminding us of what a brilliant work this is. Sweeney Todd is a must have as it is the only version of the full, very entertaining score, though I do think the tempi could have been pushed a bit more to add to the drama and excitement.
Paul RW Jackson
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