Malcolm Arnold was renowned for his catalogue of lively concert works and film scores but also created several celebrated works for choreographers. Following the first ever recording of the complete score for his ballet Sweeney Todd from the BBC Concert Orchestra and Martin Yates (Dutton Vocalion), we look at Arnold’s music for the dance stage.
Arnold’s one-act ballet after the legend of Todd – first brought to life as a villain in a Victorian penny dreadful – was created for the Royal Ballet in 1959. It was devised and choreographed by John Canko, with designs by Alix Stone evocative of Victorian toy theatres, and premiered at the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre in Stratford before a national tour, conducted by John Lanchberry.
The 35-minute score is bound together by a series of leitmotifs for the characters. A grisly with snarling brass and muffled bass drum becomes the Demon Barber’s music – a grotesque, violent waltz. Johanna, Todd’s love interest, dances an unearthly pas-de-deux to the sound of solo flute and oboe, harp, glockenspiel and celesta; one character’s hiccups as they try to swallow a button from Mrs. Lovett’s dubious pies is given witty rendering with string glissandi and woodblock. The music that accompanies Todd’s murder of a customer is among Arnold’s most garish and explosive, though the score’s Grand Guignol impulses are offset elsewhere by wit and lightness – an opening chorus of dancing policemen, or the decorous allegretto that introduced Mrs. Lovett.
The release also features Arnold’s first ballet Homage to the Queen, commissioned in 1953 for the Coronation of Queen Elizabeth II and choreographed by Frederick Ashton. He would collaborate once again with Ashton in 1955 for Rinaldo and Armida – Ashton was reportedly impressed by the speed at which Arnold could work and his adaptability when staging and scenic rehearsals where underway. Rinaldo and Armida is a dance-drama in one scene and created for Sadler’s Wells Ballet to dance at Covent Garden, conducted by the composer.
Sorcery, love, and daring are packed into its 23-minute span: on their way to the Holy Land, Rinaldo and his friend Gandolfo are lured into the sorceress Armida’s garden. Rinaldo falls in love with the enchantress, which she returns despite its fatal consequences; after she dies, a dramatic storm erupts, and Rinaldo escapes. The ballet’s mysterious opening – searching figures in harp and winds against an uneasy harmonic backdrop from the strings – as well as ferocious brass and percussion writing in the conclusive storm sequence showcase Arnold’s gifts for vivid and dramatic scene-setting.
The Three Musketeers was Arnold’s final stage work, premiered on the day the composer died at the Alhambra Theatre in Bradford in 2005, choreographed by David Nixon for Northern Ballet Theatre. Arnold had toyed with the idea of writing a swashbuckling ballet to Alexandre Dumas’ novel, even sketching the work in the 1970s. But it was only in 2005 that Arnold compiled a sequence of works from his catalogue into an 80-minute evening-length work.
Alongside excerpts from Arnold’s symphonic, film, and television scores, The Three Musketeers draws on several works from his Faber Music catalogue: the first of his foot-stomping Irish and Cornish Dances respectively; the lyrical and impassioned Andantino from his Flute Sonata; and, to conclude the ballet, his jubilant, energetic Anniversary Overture (1968). After its 2005 premiere, the Nixon’s choreography appeared with the Estonian National Ballet in 2009, Alberta Ballet in 2014, and was revived by Northern Ballet for a UK tour in 2018.