Grand Concerto gastronomique

Martha was playing the part of the waitress in Malcolm Arnolds Grand Concerto Gatronomique as part of the Malcolm Arnold festival at the weekend. I love Arnolds music, and the evening brought back memories of my Dad listening to the Hoffnung concerts on the radio. The review below said it was very "English", and it was! gloriously so!!

Arnold’s non-symphonic orchestral music was understandably little in evidence, though Saturday evening’s concert featured two pieces stemming from his involvement with the Hoffnung Music Festivals. Carnival of Animals (1959) is occasionally revived and should be heard more regularly for the piquancy of its depictions of gawky Giraffes, canonic sheep, cavorting cows, scurrying mice, dextrous elephants and aleatoric bats – interspersed with witty poems from members of Northampton’s Malcolm Arnold Academy, stylishly read by Martha Shrimpton and William Sitwell. The Ealing Symphony was in its collective element here as in Grand Concerto Gastronomique (1961), which appears to have gone unheard for half-a-century: scored for ‘Eater, Waiter, Food and Orchestra’, this 20-minute (and highly English!) precursor of 1960s performance-art was admirably ‘served up’ by Richard Brooman, Shrimpton and an elegantly Schubertian vocalise from Jennifer Smith, yet the musical content proved surprisingly effective on its own terms: a conflation of Arnold off-cuts, to be sure, though one that was not merely apposite to the course at hand but deftly assembled as an extended span of superior library music. Well worth periodic revival and not just at Arnold-centred events such as this