Richard Arnell (1917-2009)

[vandermolen]

RICHARD ARNELL DIED ON APRIL 10th. RIP to a great British composer-arguably the finest British symphonist of his generation.

Arnell would have been 92 in September. He lived long enough to have witnessed the revival-at least on disc-of his music through the recent superb efforts of Dutton. The recordings of seven of his symphonies(counting the Sinfonia con Varazioni), the Piano and (first) Violin Concertos and a number of other orchestral works and ballet music have been a revelation-big, colourful, romantic pieces full of life and energy rendered with supreme eloquence by the conductor Martin Yates. Arnell's almost total neglect in the British concert hall over the past thirty years is a musical disgrace.

(I have been on holiday in Rome and I found a notice of the death in the obituary columns of the London Times. I am shocked that to date-ten days after the death-there does not seem to have been a full Obituary published in either the Times or the Daily Telegraph(the British newspapers I read) or, presumably, in any other quality British newspaper(otherwise I would have imagined that vandermolen, at least, would have picked up on the sad news).

Oh my goodness - that is sad news - notwithstanding his great age. Certainly he was the greatest living British composer as far as I am concerned. I'm glad that I sent him a fan letter when I did.  Thanks for alerting us to this Colin. His symphonies 3-5, at least, should live on.

[J.Z. Herrenberg]

Oh my goodness - that is sad news - notwithstanding his great age. Certainly he was the greatest living British composer as far as I am concerned. I'm glad that I sent him a fan letter when I did.  Thanks for alerting us to this Colin. His symphonies 3-5, at least, should live on.

Sad news, indeed. I think I am going to listen to the Fifth later tonight.

[vandermolen]

I listened to Symphony No 3, in memoriam of Richard Arnell last night - was very moved in the circumstances.

[Dundonnell]

Ha....at last an obituary of Arnell-in the Guardian:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2009/apr/24/obituary-richard-arnell-composer

Heavens above-the man was married eight times. He also appears to have had "a fondness" for alcohol. Where have I heard that before? Searle, Leighton, Lambert, Warlock, Williamson, Arnold............. Composers often seem to have led extremely tangled personal lives.

Still....what really matters is the music

[Lilas Pastia]

I posted these last few day ago my impressions about Arnell's symphonies 3-5.

I was puzzled by 3 but definitively 'heard' the 4th and 5th's message. It's a pleasing thought that an appropriate obit will be a reference to recent phonographic documents rather than journalistic ones. For once the musical world got its act together before it was too late.

[vandermolen]

Ha....at last an obituary of Arnell-in the Guardian:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2009/apr/24/obituary-richard-arnell-composer

Heavens above-the man was married eight times. He also appears to have had "a fondness" for alcohol. Where have I heard that before? Searle, Leighton, Lambert, Warlock, Williamson, Arnold............. Composers often seem to have led extremely tangled personal lives.

Still....what really matters is the music

Thanks very much Colin for the link - quite an interesting obituary.

[Dundonnell]

Belatedly the Daily Telegraph has acknowledged Arnell's death-

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/culture-obituaries/music-obituaries/5252799/Richard-Arnell.html

[vandermolen]

Belatedly the Daily Telegraph has acknowledged Arnell's death-

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/culture-obituaries/music-obituaries/5252799/Richard-Arnell.html

Thanks again Colin for the link. I hope that the Times issues one in due course.

[vandermolen]

From Today's Times:

Richard Arnell: composer of Punch and the Child
(Hulton-Deutsch Collection / Corbis)
Arnell: he was, said Beecham, 'one of the best orchestrators since Berlioz'
In the 1940s and 50s, during his heyday, the music of Richard Arnell was as well known as that of his most prominent British contemporaries, among them Benjamin Frankel, Mátyás Seiber, Franz Reizenstein, William Alwyn, Malcolm Arnold and William Wordsworth, and enjoyed the advocacy of several distinguished conductors, including Leopold Stokowski, Bernard Herrmann and Sir Thomas Beecham. With the rise of British Modernism in the 1960s and its establishment thereafter as the lingua franca of serious composition, such music was to fall from institutional favour. But, although never of first-rate individuality, Arnell's oeuvre has in recent years — thanks to its solid craftsmanship and a number of important first recordings — enjoyed something of a revival and a cautious upward revaluation.

As it now stands, his reputation would seem to rest on six symphonies (seven if an earlier Sinfonia Quasi Variazioni is included in the canon), six string quartets, sundry concertos, the "symphonic portrait" Lord Byron, and several ballets, notably Punch and the Child, which was staged in New York by George Balanchine and soon after its premiere in 1947 recorded by the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra under Beecham, who was perhaps the staunchest of his champions.

Beecham, whom he had first met in 1941 through Virgil Thomson, once described Arnell as "one of the best orchestrators since Berlioz". During the course of the association, which lasted until the conductor's death in 1961, he performed no fewer than eight of Arnell's pieces, beginning with the Sinfonia Quasi Variazione at Carnegie Hall in 1942. Later Arnell made good the debt of gratitude by writing an Ode to Beecham to mark the RPO's 40th anniversary in 1986.

Arnell has also been dubbed the English Rachmaninov, an epithet that recognises not only his penchant for orchestral colour but also an essential musical conservatism epitomised by his fondness for richly harmonised and upward-thrusting romantic melody tempered, however, by a typically British emotional reticence.

Arnell wrote prolifically, perhaps too prolifically for reflection and renewal. The First Symphony dates from 1943, the last from 1994, yet the overall style, at times redolent of Aaron Copland and Roy Harris in its New Deal optimism, remains largely unmodified. Great claims, for instance, have been made for the Fifth Symphony (1956-57), which is now available for closer scrutiny thanks to recent CD releases by Dutton of all six symphonies and various other works. Its approachability is beyond question. Whether it endures, only time will tell.

Born in Hampstead towards the end of the First World War, Richard Anthony Sayer Arnell was an only child whose grandfather had been a violinist in the Hastings Municipal Orchestra and whose builder father was the brains behind the Kingsway and Aldwych development of 1905. His mother was a keen amateur pianist and he had his first piano lessons with his governess. At University College School he made 16mm films and formed a dance band. At the Royal College of Music he studied composition with John Ireland and piano with John Dykes. In his final year he won the Ernest Farrar Prize and enjoyed a student performance of a now withdrawn violin concerto. When war broke out in 1939 the newly married father found himself stranded in New York while attending the World Fair. He stayed on, initially on the advice of the British Consulate, but in the event he remained in the United States until 1947, with a steadily growing reputation and a job as music consultant to the BBC's North American Service.

It was a busy time for the emergent composer. Following his op.1, a set of orchestral variations broadcast by the New York radio station WQXR, Arnell managed to complete nearly a quarter of an oeuvre which would reach upward of about 200 compositions, including four symphonies, a piano concerto championed by Moura Lympany, The War God, a setting of a text by Stephen Spender to celebrate the opening of the United Nations, The Land (the first of many film scores) and a Ceremonial and Flourish for brass to mark the occasion of Sir Winston Churchill's visit to Columbia University in 1946.

And although there were disappointments — the planned premiere by Beecham of the Second Symphony in 1944 failed to materialise, resulting in its postponement for nearly 50 years — his music was in general well received, catching as it did the mood of the times and preparing him well for the second Elizabethan age, with its Festival of Britain optimism, to which he contributed on his return to the United Kingdom in 1947. He continued to make transatlantic visits after his repatriation, principally during the late 1960s as a Fulbright visiting lecturer.

Soon after Arnell's return to England, he became a professor of composition at Trinity College, London, and he remained there until the 1980s. He also directed courses in film music, eventually publishing a book on the subject, The Technique of Film Music, and worked as music consultant to the London International Film School. From 1961 to 1964 he edited Composer magazine and later served as chairman and vice-president of the Composers' Guild.

Arnell's symphonies were ideally suited to the Cheltenham Festival of the 1950s. The most significant of his performances there was probably of the Third Symphony, dedicated "to the political courage of the British people" and already broadcast by the BBC Northern Symphony under Norman Del Mar in 1952. It was publically premiered at Cheltenham a year later by the Hallé Orchestra under Sir John Barbirolli, who excised 20 minutes from the 65-minute score.

From the 1960s onwards Arnell's music began to fall from favour. And although he continued to compose as prolifically as ever — one of his last pieces, written in his late eighties, was an Ode for Mandela — and was taken up by prominent British musicians such as Sir Charles Groves, John Ogden, Edward Downes and Richard Hickox, he was never to rekindle the success of the Beecham years.

He was married eight times. Four children survive him.

Richard Arnell, composer, was born on September 15, 1917. He died on April 10, 2009, aged 91

[Dundonnell]

I was about to post the link

Not, I think, written by a huge enthusiast!

[vandermolen]

I was about to post the link

Not, I think, written by a huge enthusiast!

Yes, rather damned with faint praise I think.

[Dundonnell]

Whoever wrote The Times obituary is also guilty of at best carelessness and at worst downright ignorance

He names "Benjamin Frankel, Matyas Seiber, Franz Reizenstein, William Alwyn, Malcolm Arnold and William Wordsworth" as Arnell's "most prominent British contemporaries".

This is just rubbish! Seiber, Reizenstein and Wordsworth have never been "prominent" British composers and to suggest that their music has ever been "well known" is nonsense.

Arnell's contemporaries-if by that word we might include those composers born within five years either side of 1917-would include
Daniel Jones(1912), Benjamin Britten(1913), George Lloyd(1913), Humphrey Searle(1915), John Gardner(1917), Peter Racine Fricker(1920), Robert Simpson(1921), Iain Hamilton(1922) and...yes..Sir Malcolm Arnold(1921). They would not include William Alwyn(1905) or Benjamin Frankel(1906).

[vandermolen]

Whoever wrote The Times obituary is also guilty of at best carelessness and at worst downright ignorance

He names "Benjamin Frankel, Matyas Seiber, Franz Reizenstein, William Alwyn, Malcolm Arnold and William Wordsworth" as Arnell's "most prominent British contemporaries".

This is just rubbish! Seiber, Reizenstein and Wordsworth have never been "prominent" British composers and to suggest that their music has ever been "well known" is nonsense.

Arnell's contemporaries-if by that word we might include those composers born within five years either side of 1917-would include
Daniel Jones(1912), Benjamin Britten(1913), George Lloyd(1913), Humphrey Searle(1915), John Gardner(1917), Peter Racine Fricker(1920), Robert Simpson(1921), Iain Hamilton(1922) and...yes..Sir Malcolm Arnold(1921). They would not include William Alwyn(1905) or Benjamin Frankel(1906).

Why don't you write in Colin.

[Sean]

Dundonnell, interesting to see your reviews of Arnell here. I got hold of his Third symphony and Punch and the child not so long ago but wasn't so much taken by these works. The symphony is reminiscent of the way Bax's material moves but without the intuitive insight and is just rather longwinded and unoriginal, asking for my patience rather than providing interest in the detail, as English music typically does. Music I felt hard to care about. I'd certainly try another work though.

[vandermolen]

Dundonnell, interesting to see your reviews of Arnell here. I got hold of his Third symphony and Punch and the child not so long ago but wasn't so much taken by these works. The symphony is reminiscent of the way Bax's material moves but without the intuitive insight and is just rather longwinded and unoriginal, asking for my patience rather than providing interest in the detail, as English music typically does. Music I felt hard to care about. I'd certainly try another work though.

I'm not Dundonnell but I'd recommend you try Symphony 4 and 5 (on the same CD).

[vandermolen]

Well, here is an interesting new CD. In fact the best items are Stanley Bate's Third Symphony and I loved Erik Chisholm's 'Pictures from Dante' in which the 'Inferno' sequence conveys a great sense of looming catastrophe (I always relate to this  ) but the 'Paradise' sequence offers a movingly poetic contrast. I have only listened to the Bate work once but I shall be returning to it with pleasure. It did not grab me as immediately as the wonderful (IMHO) Viola Concerto but I'm sure it will grow on me.  Arnell's 'Black Mountains' (as in USA) is very short but a dramatically atmospheric work - this is a fascinating CD.

http://www.duttonvocalion.co.uk/proddetail.asp?prod=CDLX7239

[Lilas Pastia]

Thanks for this, Jeffrey. Looks like a most interesting - and unusual - program. Dutton does it again !

[vandermolen]

Thanks for this, Jeffrey. Looks like a most interesting - and unusual - program. Dutton does it again !

It is a GREAT CD Andre.  The Bate Symphony No 3 and Chisholm's 'Pictures from Dante' are not to be missed.

[Elnimio]

This guy writes some seriously awesome melodies. I find him to be more optimistic than a lot of his British colleagues (not necessarily a bad/good thing).


Anyone know where I can but or download mp3 files files of Stanley Bate's music?

[Elnimio]

The more I listen to this guy the more I like him. Oh, and that Stanley Bate symphony is indeed awesome.