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Ocean’s Kingdom, A 2011 Ballet Score by Paul McCartney, Co-Arranged and Conducted by John Wilson; Plus Howard Goodall and The Philippine Rondalla Serenata

From August, 2020: Like his coeval Pete Townshend, Paul McCartney never learned to read/write music, but like Townshend, that certainly didn’t stop him. Composer-arranger David Bennett talks about this in his latest YT podcast, “How Much Music Theory Did The Beatles Know?”

“‘The Beatles didn’t read or write sheet music, so surely they didn’t understand music theory…?’ Well, no. Reading sheet music is only part of what it means to understand music theory,” says Bennett. Which gets me fascinated enough to want to ask my beloved John Wilson how he and McCartney were able to musically communicate when they did Ocean’s Kingdom together…

gormenghast_castle_by_malex096-d65uust-1I prefer this second movement of Ocean’s Kingdom but the entire piece is worthwhile.

And just so you don’t think I’m always down on bonny John, who was himself brilliantly educated at the Royal College of Music, here’s his orchestration, written in 2002 when he was 30, of Howard Goodall’s score for the TV movie The Gathering Storm, a bit Elgarish. And here’s the orchestration he wrote when he was 28, of Richard Rodney Bennett’s music for the TV mini-series fantasy Gormenghast, which won the Ivor Novello Award for Best Film Score in 2000.

EXTRA! My favorite Beatle tune, just for my beloved conductor reverb and all: “I Feel Fine”

EXTRA EXTRA! The Philippine Rondalla Serenata* play that toe-tapping Beatles standard, “Ob-la-di, Ob-la-da” in traditional Philippine rondalla style

*Dedicated to showcasing the musical talent of blind and visually impaired musicians in the Philippines—here’s their Facebook page

The complete OCEAN’S KINGDOM is available on YT here

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Ralph Vaughan Williams’s “Greensleeves” Conducted by Sir John Barbirolli and Some Natter Between My Beloved John Wilson and Edward Seckerson; Plus Monty Python, Round the Horne and Polari

From June 2023. Sorry for my shaky handwriting but while listening to this I had a fantasy that gave me the giggles: John being interviewed by my favorite ohne palones—prime purveyors of the gay-gypsy-theatrical patois called polari—Julian and Sandy. Played of course by the inimitable Hugh Paddick and Kenneth Williams on Round the Horne. (This more-than-usual musical episode of Kenneth Horne’s 1967 radio show also includes Rambling Syd Rumpo, the Fraser Hayes 4 singing off-key not on purpose, and the screamingly funny takeoff sketch, “Young Horne with a Man”.)

Now John, John / Glorious John, I know that you know, and I know that you know that I know, that my long-distance lovemaking to you is being observed by a few; not many, just a few. So this rundown is for them, love:

In this very-recently posted pod chat with London-based culture maven Edward Seckerson, John talks about his idol, conductor Sir John Barbirolli; von Karajan; Leonard Bernstein; French romantic music of the early 20th century; conducting at Glyndebourne; reviving the Sinfonia of London; winning that BBC thingie for his Korngold Symphony (and confirming what I surmised in my review re his “austere” sound vs “chocolate sauce”); his other Korngold recording, the violin concerto, also with son vieil ami Andrew Haveron; Richard Rodney Bennett‘s compositional journey of self-discovery; and what we’re all waiting for, what’s up with The John Wilson Orchestra (seems like that psychic flash I had in April 2020 has proven true).

Here are the main points I took away from this podcast: “What I do try to do as a conductor is carry my sound around with me… It’s almost—I don’t really feel comfortable talking about because you know music is basically a doing thing and not a talking thing… My deepest musical creed is wrapped up with how an orchestra sounds…” Which pretty much confirms what I’ve suspected all this time about him.

John, fire of my loins, I respect your process.

Now, as heard on Monty Python:

Fantasia on “Greensleeves”
Ralph Vaughan Williams, composer
Barbirolli Conducts English String Music
RCA, 1963 first issue
The Sinfonia of London
John Barbirolli, conductor

23 JUNE 2020 UPDATE: Here’s Barbirolli again from that same album conducting Ralph Vaughan Williams’s Fantasia from a Theme by Thomas Tallis, which my beloved John Wilson will be conducting The Phiharmonia Orchestra in, in an online concert on 17 July.

EXTRA! Here are 2 interviews with John from BBC 2 Radio: one (8 min long) from 24 April 2016 with Michael Ball, and one (4 min long) from 4 November 2013 with Steve Wright.

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On My Beloved English Conductor John Wilson—Rachmaninoff’s 2nd Piano Concerto—Sehnsucht—and Why I Write

From July 2023: I write in order to have a place in which to report on three things—connection, association, and context. Otherwise I’d just talk to God, and She knows these things already.

MY BELOVED JOHN WILSON

If you passed him on the street you wouldn’t look twice. He doesn’t have the most scintillating intellect, either… But his qualities as a musician have stirred and inspired me and sometimes when he conducts I feel so close to him I can almost smell his hair. This Sunday he’s going to be conducting Rach’s Piano 2 and I’m going to go to pieces.

Find the entire film BRIEF ENCOUNTER on my YT channel here

And if Eileen Joyce’s rendition isn’t enough for you, here’re two from Anna Fedorova at the Concertgebouw:

From Jeremy Paxman’s 1998 The English: A Portrait of a People:

Take David Lean’s 1945 tale of forbidden love, Brief Encounter. The couple meet in the tearoom of a railway station, where she is waiting for the steam train home after a day’s shopping. A speck of coal dirt gets caught in her eye and, without a word of introduction, the gallant local doctor steps forward and removes it. The following eighty minutes of this beautifully written movie depict their deepening love and guilt each feels about it. …

As Rachmaninov’s Second Piano Concerto comes and goes in the background, their affair unfolds, measured out in cups of tea in the waiting room of Milford station. … Being English, Celia Johnson feels no animosity towards her husband, whom she considers “kindly and unemotional”. Trevor Howard, equally trapped in a dry marriage, also expresses no hostility towards his wife and children. But the two of them are in the force of a passion they can hardly control. “We must be sensible,” is the constant refrain. “If we control ourselves, there’s still time.” In the end, despite all the protestations of undying devotion, the romance remains unconsummated…

What does this most popular of English films tell us about the English?

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Pete Townshend’s Dad Cliff and The Squadronaires Perform “Rock’n’Roll Boogie”, 1956

From November 2018: Who I Am: A Memoir by English progressive rock composer Pete Townshend of the Who (Harper, 2012).

The Squadronaires.jpgThe Squadronaires, “Rock’n’Roll Boogie”, 1956.

“In 1945 popular music had a serious purpose: to defy postwar depression and revitalize the romantic and hopeful aspirations of an exhausted people. My infancy was steeped in awareness of the mystery and romance of my father’s music, which was so important to him and Mum that it seemed the centre of the universe. There was laughter and optimism: the war was over. The music Dad played was called Swing. It was what people wanted to hear. I was there. …”

“As the son of a clarinettist and saxophonist in the Squadronaires, the prototypical British Swing band, I had been nourished by my love for that music, a love I would betray for a new passion: rock‘n’roll, the music that came to destroy it.”

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Two Horror Queens: Composer Elisabeth Lutyens (1906-1983) and Actress Veronica Carlson (1944-2022)

She was eaten by cannibals, bitten by Dracula, and raped by Victor Frankenstein. I adore her.

I am talking of course about English model-turned-actress Veronica Carlson, the most delectable of all of Count Dracula’s victims. Her movie career wasn’t long, but she made a lasting impression on countless adolescents in the 60s, many of whom, now grown, still look forward to watching Dracula Has Risen from the Grave for a really good stroke session.

Hammer, the film studio where Carlson did her best-known work, worked wonders when it came to dignifying luridness, which is what you’d expect from the Brits, wouldn’t you? The British were never sexier than in the 60s. I miss that.

Veronica Carlson, Peter Cushing.jpgIt’s Veronica Carlson’s deeply sexy love-trance gaze at kindly Peter Cushing that makes this publicity pic spring to life. Photo session was done following shooting of their utterly gratuitous, dramatically unfeasible but vigorous rape scene in Frankenstein Must Be Destroyed (1965, Terence Fisher, dir), which made the most of the gorgeous Hammer star’s drawing power.

As for Elisabeth Lutyens, she tells her own story in this short interview with the BBC. Her work for Amicus films is best exemplified by her theme for Dr Terror’s House of Horrors, above. But this short piece is much more to my liking and demonstrates her superior musical gift.

 “Lament of Isis on the Death of Osiris”
composed by Elisabeth Lutyens, 1969

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Silly Sexy Love Songs: “You Can Leave Your Hat On” Written by Randy Newman and Sung by Tom Jones; Plus Cultural Jamming Through Banksy! Just for My Beloved English Conductor John Wilson

Dedicated to he who makes my heart beat at 60 per.

John Wilson Banksy.gifConstructed from pic stolen from John, 2019. Source photo by Banksy

FREE DOWNLOAD! CULTURAL JAMMING THROUGH BANKSY

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The Equalizer Comes to New York’s East Village, Plus Stewart Copeland’s Theme Music

With the coolest theme on American TV, The Equalizer introduced Copeland’s stunningly unique sound to the mainstream audience. In keeping with the series’ mash-up concept of “tradition merged with New Age high tech,” Copeland’s musical accompaniment would, one: with the exception of hero Robert McCall himself, forego the Wagnerian structure of identifiable leitmotifs, and instead choose to score the city of New York itself as a primary character; and, two: fuse classical structure with the combo of  “percussion carrying melody and synthesized strings” attached to world rhythms. Copeland’s would be a coldly ethereal yet dense “urban ballet” sound inexorably linked to the modern cityscape. This sound would influence composers such as Hans Zimmer and Thomas Newman.

610 East 9th Street NYCThey shot several episodes in my old neighborhood, the East Village, at great risk to star Woodward (two heart attacks and once he fell through an apartment building roof–not ours thankfully). That’s 610 East 9th Street, where we lived 1981-86. Rent for our 4-room inc full kitchen and full bathroom, 2 bedrooms and 1 living room, facing street: $250/m. You read that right. $250 a month.

Copeland was born in 1952. The son of CIA officer Miles Copeland, Jr (who appears as a character in Norman Mailer’s epic spy novel Harlot’s Ghost), he took up the drums at 12, was raised internationally in Cairo, Beirut, the US and England; and throughout the 1970s alternately worked as road manager and backup drummer for various groups until founding in 1977, along with Sting and Henry Padovani (later replaced by Andy Summers), the English progressive rock band The Police. After The Police went on extended hiatus in 1986, the drummer with a composer’s sensibilities dove headlong into scoring—to this day, one of his most notable works is as musical voice of The Equalizer, on which he composed 51 of 88 total episodes of the series.

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JFK and Red Dwarf, Season 7, Episode 1 (BBC2, 1997): “Tikka to Ride”; Plus the Red Dwarf Theme and That Movie About Churchill, Scored by Howard Goodall and Orchestrated by My Beloved John Wilson

From 25 November, 2022: On the 59th anniversary of the funeral of our own murdered-in-broad-daylight John Fitzgerald Kennedy, nothing moves me as much as the handful of scenes (here on my YT channel) where RD’s time-traveling spaceship crew—Kryten the android, Rimmer the Hologram, Cat the evolved cat, and Dave Lister the last human in the universe—unite with a disgraced JFK to right a timeline gone wrong and restore our 35th president’s shining legacy to history. That’s American actor Michael J Shannon playing Kennedy / The Shooter on the Grassy Knoll.

Red Dwarf Above Robert Llewellyn, Chris Barrie, Danny John-Jules, Craig Charles and Michael J Shannon as Kennedy /  The Shooter on the Grassy Knoll: The Red Dwarf theme by Howard Goodall, who also wrote the score to The Gathering Storm (2002), which was orchestrated, at age 30, by my beloved John Wilson.

EXTRA! This seems to be the best place for this Howard Goodall piece: “The Lord Is My Shepherd (Psalm 23)” aka theme for the BBC’s sweet and funny 1994 series The Vicar of Dibley. Please enjoy its delicate and reverent scrumptiousness.

EXTRA EXTRA! The long, clear, laughtrack-free jukebox version of “Tongue-Tied”! Danny John-Jules never looked more fantastic.

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Billy Wilder & IAL Diamond’s The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes, Scored by Miklós Rózsa (Mirisch, 1970)

I have a lot of toasty warm affection for this underrated movie (which I saw second-run in Minneapolis the summer before I started music school), not least because of Hungarian-born Miklós Rózsa‘s score, which he based on his Violin Concerto, op 24.

the private life of sherlock holmes bw
Robert Stephens as the great detective and Genevieve Page as his latest client. Yes, that’s Sherlock Holmes embracing a beautiful, nude, warm and willing woman while heroically subduing his id.

This is Austrian-born Wilder and Romanian-born Diamond at their best, examining—through impish Hollywood eyes, of course—that weird combination of emotional reticence and superciliousness that makes English men just sooo attractive. Their great detective, however, turns out in the end (not to give anything away) to be a lonely man, unsophisticated, profoundly vulnerable, and something of a loser. Stephens’s highly original performance makes his my favorite Holmes of all.

The entire film THE PRIVATE LIFE OF SHERLOCK HOLMES is available here

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Richard Rodney Bennett’s Concerto for Stan Getz Played by the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra and Conducted by Bonny John Wilson (Chandos, 2017)

A few insights on the orchestral pieces of the lively and prolific Richard Rodney Bennett (“A Collage Artist” will be the post’s title) to be finished as soon as I, one, do a little necessary sex writing, and, two, actually buy the complete Chandos 4-volume set of the work of John’s distinguished mentor, conducted by John. For now, here’s a recording from a BBC broadcast (yes, bonny John is conductor) that starts off with a few words from the composer himself:

John AlbumAbove my beloved John at 28 and his major musical influence, Richard Rodney Bennett (1936-2012) [download PDF of Feb 2020 issue of Gramophone with John’s interview here]: Concerto for Stan Getz (I know I knocked their album Orchestral Jazz and rightly so, but this is a swell picture)

By the way John, with your brimming schedule I can imagine you’re not much of a reader, but I’m sure like many you like having useful books at hand, so here are three in pdf:

NOTE: “[The English temperament] is disciplinable, and steadily obedient to certain limits, but retaining an inalienable part of freedom and self-dependence, [with a propensity for] spending its exertions within a bounded field, the field of plain sense, of practical utility.” ~ Matthew Arnold The Study of Celtic Literature (1867)

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My Beloved John Wilson Appointed to the Henry Wood Chair of Conducting at the Royal Academy of Music and Conducts the RAMSO in Arnold Schoenberg’s “Verklärte Nacht” (1899) at Snape Maltings, 6 June 2021

O sieh, wie klar das Weltall schimmert! / Es ist ein Glanz um alles her / Du treibst mit mir auf kaltem Meer / doch eine eigne Wärme flimmert von Dir in mich von mir in Dich… ~Richard Dehmel

Look, how brightly the universe shines! / Splendour falls on everything around / you are voyaging with me on a cold sea / but there is the glow of an inner warmth from you in me / from me in you…

John Interview

Above my beloved: Leopold Stokowski conducts the 1943, final and most popular composer’s edit of the string orchestra version of this exquisite one-movement sextet based on Richard Dehmel’s poem. (The 1924 version was conducted by Edward Clark of the BBC in Newcastle that year.) Find the Hollywood String Quartet’s version here.

I adore John and The John Wilson Orchestra at the BBC Proms. Honest I do. All that thrill and spectacle. That fetching full dress. And a third of the numbers he’s plucked from The Great American Songbook no one could do better. But last January 2020 I got my wish when my bonny conducted a program of Dean, Prokofiev and Tchaikovsky at London’s Royal Academy of Music and for the very first time I got to watch him work entirely as a conductor rather than a showman. (The cover of John Wilson An English Conductor is himself preparing for the 4th movement of the RAM’s rendition of Tchaikovsky’s “Pathetique”. The magazine picture above is from the 23 October concert at RAM.)

It was not a revelation, I knew John was going to be wonderful and the orchestra was going to be wonderful. I’d heard the “Mars” part of Holst’s The Planets that he conducted in Leeds with the National Youth Orchestra of Great Britain (see John above wearing the bright blue NYOGB hoodie) and was impressed with its energy. RAM trumpet Rebecca Toal (heard in Brett Dean’s “Komarov’s Fall”) had this to say about my dear one:

“John is particularly generous with his energy and he’s so committed. I think I’ve done one project with him before, and both times he’s just thrown himself into the projects. It’s so nice to have people come in from the outside and completely splash their energy everywhere and leave you feeling on a high and motivated, even after they’ve left.”

And I think this young player has hit it. John [continued at “John Wilson Conducts the Royal Academy of Music Symphony Orchestra in Barber, Delius and Ravel, July 2021 Live/Streamcast on YouTube”]

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Vincent Price Makes Love to Coral Browne in Theatre of Blood (United Artists, 1973)

In an earlier posting (“A Sexy NYC Memory to Celebrate the 3rd Anniversary of Falling in Love with Conductor John Wilson; Plus the BBCSO Doing Elgar’s Bach Fantasia; and Theatre of Blood, United Artists, 1973”) I mentioned TofB, which came out the summer I moved to Greenwich Village. Recently I discovered a new bio of Vincent Price entitled Vincent Price: The British Connection (Telos, 2020) where, to my delight, Gateshead-based author Mark Iveson reveals the torrid affair between Price and the noted Australian-born actress, Coral Browne:

Theatre of BloodAbove Diana Rigg, Coral Browne and Vincent Price: Michael J Lewis’s excellent, elegant opening music for Theatre of Blood. Full movie here.

Price’s infatuation intensified, regarding Coral as “the Great Barrier Reef—beautiful, exotic and dangerous. I was like a bird dog!”

“I remember he electrocuted me on my birthday,” Browne recalled when she performed her death scene with Price. Ironically her acting isn’t very good in this scene because she doesn’t look even remotely terrified of her murderer. Instead, she prefers gazing into his eyes instead of screaming in fear.

After the day’s filming, Price once again approached Diana Rigg for advice. “I said to Diana, ‘I understand it’s Ms Browne’s birthday. What could I get her?’ And Diana said, ‘Well, you know what she wants. You!” 

And from then on,” added Rigg, “they never looked back. I think they fell into bed and I think it was a wildly sexual relationship. Incredibly sexual. I remember Coral saying that they worked out their combined ages were 120-something, and when you saw these absolutely shagged out people on the set, it was really quite funny. And that was the start of it.”

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By Grabthar’s Hammer: The Soundtrack Suites from Star Trek IV (Paramount, 1986) by Leonard Rosenman; and Galaxy Quest (Dreamworks, 1999) by Yet Another Newman, David

To my mind, Star Trek IV and Galaxy Quest are the two movie scores which best convey the whole Star Trek ethos: the jaunty energy of military adventure + the thrilling, life-changing mix of wonder and belief… A very 1960s spirit and I doubt we’ll ever be able to return to it, but anyway. Leonard Rosenman, incidentally, was a pupil of Schoenberg.

Galaxy QuestAbove Missi Pyle, Tony Shalhoub, Tim Allen, Alan Rickman, Ted Rees, Sigourney Weaver, Sam Rockwell, and Darryl Mitchell: Galaxy Quest Soundtrack Suite played by the City of Prague Philharmonic Orchestra.

Soundtrack Suite
from Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home
Leonard Rosenman, composer

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Sean Hayes and Kristin Chenoweth’s Deep-Tongue Kiss at the 2010 Tonys and the Songs of Burt Bacharach

You all remember the flap behind this. But that kiss at the Tonys (starts at :40) was awfully convincing. Hey, my hormones percolated…

kristen-chenoweth-sean-hayes.jpgAbove that hot kiss Sean Hayes sings the title song. No Jerry Ohrbach, but the kid’s got pipes.

But to get on with this posting. One of the nominees at the 64th Tony Awards was the revival of Promises, Promises with a score by Burt Bacharach, including some of his interpolated standards (like “A House is Not a Home” and “I Say a Little Prayer”, neither of which were in the original production), so I’m thinking that this bootleg vidcomp from an actual performance would be a good introduction to the work of this (as my beloved John Wilson, Conductor might deem him) “top-drawer American tunesmith”.

The connection to my posting on Milhaud above? Bacharach was a student of Darius Milhaud, and you can hear what he retained from the modernist master in his distinctive, almost Latin, rhythms—think of Eddy Mitchell’s “Always Something There to Remind Me” or Dusty Springfield‘s “Twenty-four Hours from Tulsa”.

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