The Festival's Family Concert features a dazzling array of entertaining and engaging music. There’s an air of the Hoffnung Festival concerts about this event. Gerard Hoffnung presented a series of humorous concert extravaganzas in the 1950s and 60s in which he commissioned Malcolm Arnold (and others) to compose witty and ingenious musical items that found a lighter side to serious music making. The Grand Grand Overture (for vacuum cleaners, floor polisher and orchestra) and Carnival of Animals were both written for Hoffnung Festival concerts. In the same tradition we have commissioned a new work especially for this concert: Timothy Bowers’ highly imaginative and witty Carnival of Carnivores! The concert also features some delightful music by Nigel Hess who launches the Festival earlier in the morning.
The Malcolm Arnold Festival is now a much anticipated annual fixture in the composer’s birthplace, Northampton. Taking place at the town’s impressive arts’ venue Royal & Derngate over 15th – 16th October. This year's celebration features a major concert given by the BBC Concert Orchestra with works by Sir Malcolm Arnold and Sir William Walton. Guest artists over the weekend include guitarist Craig Ogden, trumpeter John Wallace, and conductor John Gibbons. The Festival will be launched by popular film composer, Nigel Hess.
Director Paul Harris introduces this year’s theme: “We’ve called it ‘The Voice of the People’ - which of course sums up Sir Malcolm’s intentions as a composer. He was always determined to write music that could be immediately appreciated and although he embraced many 20th century “isms”, his music remains utterly accessible.”
Paul Harris, who is a composer himself as well as one of the UK's leading educationalists and Malcolm Arnold's co-biographer, has worked tirelessly over the last decade to present the composer's genre in an accessible and exciting format for both enthusiasts of the music and to introduce it to those who are less familiar with it.
Malcolm Arnold's music is known for its extremes: high-octane multi-coloured invention, humour and occasional eccentricity and, by contrast, traumatic intensity of a searing personal nature. The Festival also includes entertaining films and talks on this many-faceted composer and his work, as well as some surprising world premieres; for example, the as yet un-performed opening 207 bars of his unfinished opera, ‘Henri Christophe’.
Following last year’s unique ‘all-Arnold’ programme, this year’s Gala concert on 16th October showcases works of two of the giants of the 20th century when Arnold’s overture, Tam O’Shanter, his Guitar Concerto and Serenade with soloist Craig Ogden, and Symphony No 6 are performed alongside Sir William Walton’s classic film scores from ‘Hamlet’ and his ‘Spitfire, Prelude and Fugue’. The BBC Concert Orchestra is conducted by John Gibbons, who is ideally suited as a committed programmer, educator and enthusiast of British music himself.
The Festival’s popular ‘Family Concert’ features a specially commissioned work by Timothy Bowers, Carnival of Carnivores, being performed together with Arnold’s Carnival of Animals by the Northampton Symphony Orchestra, again conducted by John Gibbons, and there will be a rare performance of Arnold’s Machines. Audience favourites include A Grand, Grand Overture, which will feature one of the original vacuum cleaners, the ever-popular ‘English Dances’, and music by film composer Nigel Hess, from his film Ladies in Lavender.
Guest artists include pianist Alice Pinto, soprano Claire Thompson, clarinettist Peter Cigleris, broadcasters Kriss Rusman and John Griff, the actor Nicolas Chagrin, the Janus Ensemble conducted by Ben Palmer, the Jenny Dyson Wind Quintet and the Northampton County Youth Orchestra. Legendary trumpet player John Wallace, together with the four winners of his new ‘Malcolm Arnold Fantasies’ competition, will perform the composer’s Brass Quintet.
Opening the Festival, popular film composer Nigel Hess will be following in the footsteps of Hayley Mills, Robert Hardy, Tim Rice, John Wallace and other distinguished Festival ‘launchers’.
Trains run frequently from Euston to Northampton (journey time: 50 mins)