Three movements from Aladdin

Carl Nielsen (1865-1931) 

Arranged by Eric Crees

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Oriental Festival March

Hindu March

Negro Dance

 

Carl Nielsen grew up in a village some ten miles south of Odense, the seventh of twelve children born to a family of enthusiastic amateur musicians.  By the time he was seven he was learning the piano, violin and cornet, and won a place as an army regimental musician when he was only 14.  This position also offered him the opportunity to compose, and in 1882-83 he wrote a number of quartets for brass.  These were never published, however, and before long Nielsen began to lose interest in brass instruments, returning to them only once more when he wrote the Canto Serioso for horn and piano.

 

Instead, Nielsen turned to a wide variety of other ensembles and forms, and is particularly well known for his symphonies.  He also wrote incidental music for some 18 stage productions, and Eric Crees has now arranged for brass three of the movements which Nielsen wrote in February 1918 for Adam Oehlenschlager’s Aladdin. The first, Oriental Festival March, is written in Nielsen’s usual slightly quirky harmonic idiom, and therefore contrasts with his deliberate imitation of eastern music in the Hindu Dance.  The third arrangement, Negro Dance, is wild and energetic, but with an elegant middle section constructed in five bar phrases.

 

They were first performed by London Symphony Orchestra Brass under the direction of the arranger at the Barbican Centre on the 20th of October 1996.

 

© John Humphries

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Checkmate

Sir Arthur Bliss (1891 - 1975)

Arranged by Eric Crees 

 

I. Prologue - the Players

II. Dance of the Four Knights

III. Ceremony of the Red Bishops

IV. Finale - Checkmate

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Arthur Bliss had spent only one year at the Royal College of Music when World War 1 started and he joined the Royal Fusiliers. Undeterred, however, he returned to London in 1918 and began to build a reputation as a composer, discovering a particular strength in writing music for the stage. "I have great difficulty starting a work unless stirred by some dramatic intention," he wrote; "[then] I can write with facility."

 

The idea for a ballet based around a game of chess first occurred to Bliss in 1923 but came to nothing until 1936 when the Sadler's Wells Ballet was invited to take part in British Music Week at the Paris International Exposition the following year. They agreed a commission in which Bliss would put turn his ideas into reality and he began poring over books in the British Museum, "stimulating my imagination with ancient illustrations of Charlemagne playing with Death and of vast games contested in the open air with living pieces."

 

Checkmate had its first performance at the Theatre des Champs Elysees on 15th June 1937 under Constant Lambert but Bliss felt that the score also had potential as a concert piece and conducted the premiere of the suite from the ballet at the Queen's Hall in April 1938. He might equally well have arranged it for brass: his overture, "Kenilworth", was composed in 1936 as a test piece for the National Brass Band Championship, and his output is peppered with fanfares for ceremonial occasions.

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This arrangement was first performed by the Royal Opera House Brass Soloists on 4th June 2006 under the direction of the arranger.

 

 

Billy the Kid

Aaron Copland (1900-1990) 

arranged by Eric Crees

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Open prairie

Street in frontier town

Waltz

Prairie night

Gunfight

Celebration dance

Open prairie

 

Leonard Bernstein was a devoted admirer of Aaron Copland’s music long before they were introduced to each other in 1937.  The two quickly became firm friends, but Copland also adopted the role of guru to the younger man.  Bernstein became a frequent visitor to his house in New York, taking with him his own scores for comment and suggestions.  “In these sessions he taught me a tremendous amount about taste, style and consistency in music.  Through his critical analyses of whatever I happened to be working on at the moment, Aaron became the closest thing to a composition teacher I ever had.”  In fact, Copland’s influence was so great that Bernstein did not study composition at the Curtis Institute: “It never occurred to me.”

 

Bernstein was also privileged to play through Copland’s scores with him as they were finished.  “Not while he was composing it, though: Aaron would never show anything before it reached its reasonably final form.  But then would come that glorious day when he would pull something out and we would play it, four hands, from the score.  I learned such works as Billy the Kid that way before they were ever performed publicly.”

 

Billy the Kid was commissioned in 1938 by Lincoln Kirstein, who, as director for the dance group Ballet Caravan, wanted to steer ballet away from its established Russian traditions.  He therefore specified that the work should be based on the life of William Bonney, a notorious cowboy who was born in Brooklyn in 1859 and died in 1881 claiming to have killed 21 men, “not counting Indians”. Copland had never enjoyed cowboy music, but accepted the challenge and started the score in Paris during the summer of 1938.  As he worked, folk-tunes began to appeal – “perhaps there is something different about a cowboy song in Paris” – and as a result the finished score is full of music in the popular style. 

 

The ballet opens on a street.  According to the composer, “Cowboys saunter into town, some Mexican women to a Jarabe which is interrupted by a fight between two drunks.  Attracted by the gathering crowd, Billy, a boy of twelve, is seen for the first time, with his mother.  The brawl turns ugly, guns are drawn and Billy’s mother is killed.  Without an instant’s hesitation, in cold fury, Billy draws a knife from a cowhand’s sheath and stabs his mother’s slayers.  His short but famous career has begun.  In swift succession we see episodes in Billy’s later life – at night, under the stars, in a quiet card game with his outlaw friends, and hunted by a posse.  A running gun battle ensues and a drunken celebration takes place when he is captured.  Billy makes one of his legendary escapes. Tired and worn out in the desert, Billy rests with his girl.  Starting from a deep sleep, he senses movement in the shadows.  The posse has finally caught up with him.  It is the end”.

 

The first performance was given the by the Ballet Caravan in Chicago on 6th October 1938 and received excellent reviews.  During the following summer, Copland re-used about two thirds of the original score in an orchestral suite, and as a result Billy the Kid became one of his best-known works.  As royalties of £40 per performance began to flood in, even Copland’s mother was impressed, admitting that “the money spent on piano lessons was not wasted!”

 

The orchestral suite was arranged for sixteen brass and three percussion for London Symphony Orchestra Brass by Eric Crees and first performed at the Barbican Centre Concert Hall.

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© John Humphries

 

 

Fancy Free

Leonard Bernstein (1918-1990)

arranged by Eric Crees 

 

Big Stuff – Opening dance – Scene at the bar – Girls’ entrance – Pas de deux

Competition scene:

Variation 1 (Gallop)

Variation 2 (Waltz)

Variation 3 (Danzon) - Finale

 

In 1943 the group Ballet Theater asked Jerome Robbins to choreograph a new work.  Having chosen a theme – the story of three sailors on shore leave in New York – he turned first to Morton Gould and then to Vincent Persichetti to write the score.  Both declined, but in doing so suggested that Robbins should approach Bernstein.

 

The two men immediately established a rapport, but had such hectic work schedules that they could only rarely collaborate in person.  They therefore agreed that as Bernstein finished a section of the score, he would record it in a four-handed piano version with Aaron Copland.  The tapes were then posted to Robbins, who in turn sent back his comments.

 

The ballet begins with the blues song Big Stuff.  The curtain then rises on a New York side street and the three sailors make their entrance.  They meet two girls, but eventually lose them after buying them drinks, entertaining them with solo dances and fighting over them.  They set off in pursuit of another instead.

 

Fancy Free was first performed on 18 April 1944, and was immediately acclaimed by the New York Times as “a smash hit… a modern ballet in the best sense of the phrase … a rare little genre masterpiece”.  160 performances followed during the next twelve months, and then in 1946 Bernstein included it in a programme of ballet which he had been invited to conduct at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden.  On this occasion, however, it was his conducting style, rather than the dancing or music, which stole the show.  The Daily Express commented that Bernstein himself looked, in action as though he too was “playing a part choreographed by Jerome Robbins.  He swayed, stabbed, crouched and leaped in the air, both feet off the ground, several times, like a pocket-sized Tarzan.”

 

Eric Crees arranged the complete score for large symphonic brass and three percussion in October 1993 and it was premiered by London Symphony Orchestra Brass in the Barbican Centre Concert Hall.

 

© John Humphries

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