British Tuba Concertos
Vaughan Williams • Gregson • Steptoe • Golland
The tuba, along with most woodwind and brass
instruments, was totally ignored as a concerto soloist
during the nineteenth century, but, unlike many of its
colleagues, it had no life as such before that. The
trumpet, for example, enjoyed some success in the
eighteenth century both in concertos and as a leading
obligato instrument, particularly in sacred music. The
tuba emerges during the 1850s as a replacement for such
instruments as the ophicleide, used by Mendelssohn and
Berlioz. In fact, when Berlioz came to prepare a German
edition of his Symphonie Fantastique of 1830 in the
1850s he sanctioned the use of the tuba in place of the
ophicleide in a note on the score. The tuba, however,
won its greatest lease of life in the operas of Wagner,
particularly those in the Ring cycle, where various
different types of the instrument appear regularly.
In the rôle of soloist most have come to see the
tuba’s potential through the children’s tale, Tubby the
Tuba, written in the 1940s by the American composer
George Kleinsinger, and made famous through Danny
Kaye’s classic recording. The whole point of the story is
to highlight the fact that most people would not think the
tuba capable of taking a soloistic rôle, and the fact that it
can, and very successfully, is amply confirmed by the
four concertos here, all written in the years after Tubby.
Edward Gregson was born in Sunderland and
studied at the Royal Academy of Music, winning several
prizes there. He is at present Principal of the Royal
Northern College of Music in Manchester. His
compositions range from chamber music, through works
for brass and wind band, to pieces for symphony
orchestra. He has composed concertos for violin,
clarinet and other wind instruments. The Tuba Concerto
began life with brass band accompaniment, but this
version was fashioned later and first given in 1983 at the
Scottish Proms in Edinburgh by John Fletcher, to whom
it is dedicated, under Sir Alexander Gibson. The first
movement has a sonata-form shell with two contrasting
themes, one rhythmic, the other lyrical. A cheeky nod in
the direction of the Vaughan Williams concerto flashes
by, before merging into the main material. The central
Lento is characterized by the string chorale heard at the
start and close of the movment. The middle section is
more chromatic in character and leads to a powerful
climax. The rondo finale is dance-like, with subsidary
themes, one broad and sweeping, the other jazzy, as
contrast before the virtuosic cadenza, after which the
work ends with a resounding flourish.
Roger Steptoe was born in Winchester and read
Music at Reading University, later studying at the Royal
Academy of Music in London, where he later taught,
before moving to France in 1999. He is active as a
composer, teacher and adjudicator, and his works range
from chamber music and songs to concertos for oboe,
clarinet and cello. His Tuba Concerto started life as
three pieces with piano accompaniment, and it was
James Gourlay who encouraged the composer to
develop the work into a concerto and gave the first
performance of it in that form at St John’s, Smith
Square, in 1986. The three movements, the second and
third linked by a cadenza, are marked by an inherent
song-like nature arising from the composer’s
preoccupation with the voice. Compositionally the
concerto is twelve-toned, with the intervallic
relationships between the notes, principally major
seconds, minor thirds and perfect fourths, colouring the
whole work.
Vaughan Williams’s Tuba Concerto is as near a
classic in the field as it is possible to be, given the
limited extent of that field. It was first performed in June
1954 by Philip Catalinet and the London Symphony
Orchestra, and is just one more work of originality and
freshness that belies the 82-year-old composer’s
advanced years. The concerto is dedicated to the entire
orchestra on the occasion of their jubilee, and in form
resembles something more akin to Bach than Mozart or
Beethoven. In the words of the composer, ‘there are
elaborate cadenzas in the outer movements which
enclose a central movement of exceptional lyricism and
tenderness’. Overall, Vaughan Williams thought the
music ‘fairly simple and obvious and can be listened to
without much previous explanation’. None the worse for
that.
John Golland was born in Ashton-under-Lyne, near
Manchester, and trained as a teacher, while studying
part-time at the Royal Manchester College of Music
with Thomas Pitfield. He relinquished full-time schoolteaching
in 1970, but later taught in the Department of
Media Studies at Salford College of Technology. His
original instruments were piano and violin, but in his
twenties he took up the euphonium, and played regularly
in a brass band for a while. This led him to write for the
medium, including two concertos for the euphonium,
and conduct both here and in Switzerland. In later years
he wrote and arranged for three television series of Dear
Ladies, featuring Hinge and Bracket.
The Tuba Concerto was given its posthumous
première in July 1997 by Andy Duncan and the Hallé
Orchestra in Manchester’s Bridgewater Hall. It is cast in
the usual three movements. The main theme of the
opening Allegro is based around the interval of a perfect
fourth, while the reflective Adagio pits the soloist, for
much of the movement, against the vibraphone whose
rising figure is fairly reminiscent of another adagio, that
in Khachaturian’s Spartacus. The finale returns to the
interval of a fourth and spices up the general flow with
passages in the slightly unnerving metre of 7/8. There is
no cadenza as such in the whole piece but passages of
virtually solo tuba are more than enough to show the
virtuosity required of the player.
Philip Lane