Malcolm Arnold

The popular and much-decorated English composer Malcolm Arnold died on Saturday 23 September 2006, aged 84, following an illness which had lasted more than twenty years.

Born in Northampton on 21 October 1921, Arnold studied trumpet from the age of twelve and won a scholarship to the Royal College of Music when he was sixteen. Ernest Hall taught him trumpet, and Gordon Jacob composition.

Beginning his professional career in 1941 as second trumpet with the London Philharmonic Orchestra, Arnold was promoted to principal trumpet in 1946 after military service. In the same year his Phantasy for String Quartet - Vita Abundans [listen] won the Cobbett Prize, and within ten years he turned all his energy to composition. His relationship with the LPO continued, with the orchestra performing much of his flamboyant and often raucous music [listen - 'The Pre-Goodman Rag' (Clarinet Concerto)].

But there was an especially English sadness to Arnold's music too [listen - Symphony No 5, slow movement], which, light on the surface [listen - Little Suite for Brass Band], plummeted to strange and rare emotional depths, and earned him the title of 'Britain's most misunderstood composer' (Malcolm Arnold: Rogue Genius by Anthony Meredith and Paul Harris, Thames, 2004).

One of his 132 film scores, Bridge on the River Kwai, won him, in 1958, the first ever Oscar awarded to a British composer. A friend of Walton and Shostakovich, Arnold was also associated, along with colleagues John Amis, Lawrence Leonard and Gerard Hoffnung, with the notorious Hoffnung music festivals, for which he wrote A Grand Grand Overture for vacuum cleaners, floor polishers, rifles and orchestra.

Although both the composer's pen - he wrote his music straight into full score - and his baton had been silent for some years before his death, much of his music has been played, recorded and become popular in recent years [listen - Symphony No 5, first movement]. Some of his best scores, such as the Double Violin Concerto, still remain comparatively unknown, however.

The Arnold Festival 2006 (21-22 October at the Royal and Derngate Theatres in Northampton), planned as a celebration of the composer's 85th birthday, now gains added poignancy as a celebration of the composer's life and music.

British conductor George Vass described Arnold's death as 'the end of an era in English music. What he actually did, he did brilliantly.'

Information: www.malcolmarnold.co.uk

Posted: 26 September 2006

Next item: Thomas Stewart >>