Malcolm Arnold

My first introduction to Arnold’s music came at a very young age. Through an enthusiastic music teacher at school – himself a very accomplished brass player – a trumpet was pushed under my nose around the age of 6. I played and practised with great gusto, but it would be fair to say my achievements in this field were fairly unremarkable…

By my teenage years I had stopped playing completely, but had never forgotten the bits of Arnold I’d played in the school wind/brass bands, and even a couple of solo pieces. The music felt energised and direct – I loved it.

A long silence fell over my connection with Arnold’s music. Besides finding myself listening to the odd piece at the Proms or on the radio, my attachment to it, regrettably, largely disappeared. It was a chance rewatch of The Belles of St Trinian’s during lockdown that started the wheels moving again. Before long I had made my way through the Symphonies, along with the vast amount Arnold wrote for wind, concert and brass bands. The light was relit.

Sometime later, it was purely by chance I stumbled across a recording of Arnold’s Organ Concerto. A lapsed organist myself, I had no idea the piece existed. The beauty of today’s streaming services is that they will keep feeding music to you, even once you’ve finished listening to the tracks/albums you originally selected. Sometimes the algorithms throw you something wildly inappropriate, but in this instance a recording of Poulenc’s Organ Concerto gave way to the opening of Arnold’s Organ Concerto. It was captivating.

I immediately thought it would be a piece to keep up my sleeve to programme in a concert one day, and so I went online to buy a copy of the score. Entering ‘Arnold’ + ‘Organ’ in the search field of a sheet music website was when the floodgates really opened. Suddenly appeared a multitude of pieces for choir and organ by the composer, none of which I had any knowledge of, and basically none of which have been recorded. In went a rather large order via the website, and before long I was devouring the scores at the piano.

George’s excellent notes below describe this music far more eloquently than I ever could. It’s a wonderful mix of the overtly direct (Two Ceremonial Psalms, The Pilgrim Caravan, and the Song of Praise), and the enigmatic (Two Part Songs and Laudate Dominum). The Laudate Dominum is particularly remarkable: such a boisterous and celebratory text has, inevitably, inspired similarly boisterous musical settings by almost all the composers I can think of who have approached it. Arnold’s isn’t lacking any grandeur in the middle sections, but the hushed and mysterious sections bookending the work are a masterstroke. The John Clare Cantata deserves a thesis all of its own. The colours and textures he summons from 4-part choir and piano duet are truly remarkable. This is all top- drawer choral writing, and I am at a loss as to why it’s been so overlooked.

I’m thrilled James was so keen to learn the Organ Concerto, and the organ at St John’s, Islington, is absolutely perfect for what Arnold intended. I hope that both the solo and orchestral elements of this piece fizz and sparkle as much through the speakers as they did in the recording sessions.

The Concerto for Two Violins appeared on my lockdown rediscovery of Arnold’s music. In another bizarre twist of fate, it was a random text message from Jack Liebeck one day, just as we were finalising the programme for this project – “Hey – do you know the Arnold double violin concerto?” – which got it firmly on the map for inclusion. In some ways it’s a darker piece than others on this album, but the ravishing, vulnerable middle movement prevents it being one-dimensional. I also pick up a ‘twinkle in the eye’ in the final movement: the mechanical Swiss-watch quality of the rhythmic dialogue between soloists and orchestra is somehow punctuated by just a little bit of cheekiness and playfulness.

As the album concludes, so do my thoughts by returning back to school. The Padstow Lifeboat needs little introduction. Knowing we would have some spare time in the Organ Concerto sessions, I couldn’t resist asking Owain Park to rescore the piece for these forces. I crashed through the cornet part at school, and it’s safe to say I was far from any brass instruments to trouble the waters on this occasion. As perhaps a metaphor for this great composer, even as the lifeboat gets into difficulty in the middle section, there’s an underlying cheekiness and wit which ultimately triumphs.

Michael Waldron

A prolific composer, Malcolm Arnold nevertheless made few sorties into the realm of choral music. Much of his choral output represented on this disc remains little known – certainly as compared to such a popular piece as The Padstow Lifeboat, written in 1967, the last year of his creative life to be sampled here.

The earliest pieces here are the Two Part Songs [14+15], written during the summer holidays in 1939 while Arnold was a 17-year-old student at the Royal College of Music. The composer had been introduced to the works of Ernest Dowson by his sister Ruth, herself a poet and artist. These five-part unaccompanied settings are the result.

Completed on April 9, 1950, Arnold’s setting of Psalm 150 [7] was commissioned by the recently appointed Vicar of St Matthews’ Church, Northampton, the Rev. Canon Walter Hussey, who would later go on to become Dean of Chichester Cathedral. Throughout his career Hussey was an ardent believer in the inclusion of the works of living artists in acts of worship: his other musical commissions included scores by Britten, Tippett, Arnold’s fellow-Northamptonian Edmund Rubbra, Gerald Finzi, Lennox Berkeley, and Leonard Bernstein.

For Arnold, the commission came ‘at time when I was very down’ – something of an understatement. In May 1950 Arnold had a serious mental breakdown, spending nearly six months in a private hospital and discharged home a few days before the birth of his son Robert on 22 September. It is not known if he attended the first performance of Psalm 150 at St Matthew’s Church Northampton on 21 September (St Matthew’s Day).

The Ceremonial Psalms [5+6] for unaccompanied boys’ chorus were written for the wedding of Anne Mendoza to Philip Goldesgeyme at the Marble Arch Synagogue in January 1952. Arnold had got to know Anne’s brother Joe when the latter was a scriptwriter (later director) at Denham Studios: they subsequently worked together on two operatic projects, The Dancing Master and Henri Christophe, the second eventually abandoned. The sung texts were selected from Psalms 95 and 100.

Written in October 1954, Arnold’s Organ Concerto [1-3] is a relatively short piece composed for the wide-ranging Australian musician Denis Vaughan and the organ of London’s Royal Festival Hall, where it was premiered with members of the London Symphony Orchestra under Leslie Woodgate at a Robert Mayer concert on 11 December. For a concerto, the solo part is relatively modest – perhaps more like an extensive obbligato. The orchestra consists of three trumpets (two of them high, Baroque-style instruments), timpani and strings.

The muscular open-air fanfares of the first movement carry distinct Baroque echoes, with the two Handelian trumpets to the fore suggesting something written for a celebratory occasion. Characteristic touches of brilliance alternate with thoughtful, delicate moments on the manuals; later on, there’s a soaring theme on violins.

The strings are initially muted in the following Lento, with the organ floating a simple, even sentimental melodic line on top. The solo instrument takes the lead in the rhythmically playful, sometimes fugal finale, which near the end refers back to the opening movement. The trumpets return for the jubilant close.

Scored for the unusual combination of SATB chorus and piano duet, the John Clare Cantata [8-13] was commissioned by William Glock for the advanced music students of the 1955 Dartington Summer School. Consisting of settings of six poems that chart the year from one winter to the next, it was first performed at Dartington on 5 August 1955 conducted by John Clements.

It is a piece of great charm. Arnold suggests a frozen landscape in the opening Winter Snow Storm. Given their own motifs, insects start to appear in March, while the outdoor freshness of May provides the aural background to Spring. Summer at its joyous height buzzes once more with insects, reaching a climax of merrymaking. The year’s decline is depicted in the falling lines of unaccompanied Autumn, though there’s a resurgence in the Epilogue with the return of winter and its promise of spring to come.

Like Arnold, Clare – sometimes known as ‘the Northamptonshire peasant poet’ – had strong links to the county. He was born in Helpston in 1793 and died in Northampton in 1864 as an inmate of what was then called the General Lunatic Asylum, later to become St Andrew’s Hospital, where Arnold himself would spend the years 1979-83. The composer was naturally aware of this connection.

John Clare’s Song of Praise: Imitation of the 148th Psalm [4] was the source of the text of Arnold’s unison setting commissioned by Ruth Railton (whom Arnold had long supported in her endeavours for the National Youth Orchestra) for the platinum jubilee of Wycombe Abbey School for Girls, where it was premiered on 6 July 1956. Here it is performed with organ accompaniment.

A unique work in Arnold’s output, the ‘nativity masque’ Song of Simeon remains little known, despite a general consensus is that it is a fine piece: choral expert Simon Toyne has described it as ‘an unqualified success,’ and ‘utterly charming,’ while in their ground-breaking biography of the composer, Rogue Genius, Anthony Meredith and Paul Harris call it a ‘jeu d’esprit.’

It was written for a charity matinee in aid of the church of St Martin-In-The-Fields, given at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, on 5 January 1960. The libretto was by the experienced Christopher Hassall while John Cranko supplied the choreography, and the show was directed by Colin Graham. Arnold himself conducted.

We hear a short extract from the piece, The Pilgrim Caravan [20] for SATB chorus and piano (here organ), which was published separately in various arrangements as a Christmas hymn.

In January 1962 Arnold spent some time in India researching music for the film Nine Hours to Rama whose subject was the assassination of Gandhi. There he made a start on a concerto [17-19] commissioned by Yehudi Menuhin for himself and his pupil Albert Lysy to play at the 1962 Bath International Music Festival, which Menuhin was then directing. When Arnold conducted the Bath Festival Orchestra in the premiere on June 24, 1962, the piece was rewarded with an instant encore.

Arnold had initially intended to incorporate Indian music into the piece but subsequently dropped the idea. Instead he seems to have made the piece a personal memorial to two of his elder brothers who had both died in 1961: Clifford and Aubrey, the latter, together with his wife, having committed suicide following the failure of a family business.

Menuhin considered the piece ‘absolutely stunning, full of brilliance and not a little pathos … There is that element in the work of a teasing nature. To some extent it is mocking itself and mocking the sentiments — I mean the sentimentality and sweetness of the slow movement is handled in such a way that it is transparent, one feels that Malcolm was possibly hiding something from his depths.’

Bach’s concerto for two violins and strings is an obvious model. Replete with some taut modernist gestures, the first movement is tense, the two violins not so much in competition as operating as a pair. The mood is mettlesome, even truculent, though the second subject is gentler and somewhat melancholy; yet overall the spirit is wiry, thin, and discomfiting and there is an uneasy throwaway ending.

In the Andantino the soloists float two lyrical lines as part of a more widely spaced though still scarcely consoling melody. Something more characteristically Arnoldian takes over after a minute or so in a sad though not desolate theme, but the overall mood remains sombre. Near the end, a duo cadenza offers little in the way of showiness.

The final Vivace, though, is more virtuosic, with some darkly playful echoes of the Baroque. Its progress is once again tense and terse, with a sudden, jubilant finish.

In January 1965 Arnold moved to St Merryn in Cornwall with his second wife, Isobel, subsequently identifying with the county and its people to the extent that he became a proud Cornishman: his appointment as a Bard of the Cornish Gorseth in 1968, for instance, meant a lot to him.

One of the best-known results of his Cornish years is the march The Padstow Lifeboat [21], a piece apparently written over just three days in 1967.

Arnold knew that the Padstow lifeboat had ‘a long, heroic and distinguished record’ in saving lives at sea. Two years earlier one such rescue had been led by coxswain Gordon Elliott: the piece was originally to be called the Joseph Hiram Chadwick after the lifeboat whose crew were involved on that occasion.

The outlandish sound made by the Trevose Head Foghorn was a central inspiration. ‘The new lifeboat station’, Arnold explained, ‘is near Trevose lighthouse, whose foghorn varies in pitch between middle C and D. For the sake of musical unity, it remains in D throughout this March’ – making an indelible mark in the overall key of A flat (or in this arrangement in B flat, with E the ‘wrong’ note).

There are clearly some moments of danger on the gallant crew’s plucky rescue mission, though otherwise, the result – essentially a traditional march with a big tune in the middle ‘trios’ section that returns in glory at the end, surrounded by a whirl of decoration – is both thrilling and witty. Arrangements have been made by various hands: this new one by Owain Park is for three trumpets, organ, strings and percussion.

The march’s first performance was given by the Black Dyke Mills Band and the BMC Concert Band under the composer at the Royal Festival Hall on 10 June 1967 as part of the BBC International Festival of Light Music. Its first Cornish performance took place at the inauguration of a new lifeboat near Trevose Head Lighthouse when the Saint Denis Silver Band played it in Padstow Harbour on 19 July 1968; both performances were conducted by the composer.

In 1967 the Daily Telegraph invited Arnold to make a setting of a Christmas carol text by the poet Mary Wilson, wife of the then Prime Minister, Harold Wilson. The result was first performed at 10 Downing Street on December 22, 1967.

© George Hall