Sir Malcolm Arnold (b.
1921): Chamber Music
Piano Trio, Op. 54;
Violin Sonatas Nos. 1 & 2, Opp.15 & 43
Five Pieces for violin
and piano, Op. 84; Fantasy for cello, Op. 130
Malcolm Arnold was born in 1921 in Northampton, where his father was a
well-to-do shoe manufacturer. There was music in the family, both from his
father and from his mother, a descendant of a former Master of the Chapel
Royal. Instead of the usual period at a public school, he was educated
privately at home, particularly with the help of his aunts, and subsequently
with music lessons from the organist of St Matthew's Church in Northampton. As
a twelve-year-old he found anew interest in the trumpet and in jazz alter
hearing Louis Armstrong, and three years later he was able to study the instrument
in London under Ernest Hall, subsequently winning a scholarship to the Royal
College of Music, where his composition teacher was Gordon Jacob. Two years
later he left the College to join the London Philharmonic Orchestra as second
trumpet. Meanwhile he had won a composition prize for a one-movement string
quartet. It was as an orchestral player that he was able to explore the wider
orchestral repertoire, in particular the symphonies of Mahler.
Early in the 1939-45 war Arnold was a conscientious objector, in common
with a number of other leading musicians. He was allowed to continue his work
as an orchestral player, taking the position of first trumpet in the London
Philharmonic in 1943. In the same year, however, he volunteered for military
service, but was discharged after shooting himself in the foot, playing,
thereafter, second trumpet to his teacher Ernest Hall in the BBC Symphony
Orchestra and then rejoining the London Philharmonic, where he served as
principal trumpet until 1948. During these years he had continued to work as a
composer, with a series of compositions that included the popular overture Beckus
the Dandipratt, a clarinet concerto and a symphony for strings, as well as
a variety of chamber music, the latter including the well known Three
Shanties for wind quintet.
From 1948 Malcolm Arnold has earned his living as a composer. In the
1960s he settled in Cornwall, where he became closely involved with the musical
activities of the county. In 1972 he moved to Dublin, his home for the next
five years, and then, in 1977, to Norfolk. Over the years his work has been
much in demand for film scores, of which he has written some eighty, including
music for the David Lean film The Bridge on the River Kwai, for which he
won an Oscar, The Inn of the Sixth Happiness and David Lean's The
Sound Barrier. He has written concertos for flute, guitar, harmonica,
French horn, oboe, organ, piano duet and two pianos, the last of these for
three hands for the use of Cyril Smith and Phyllis Sellick, recorder, trumpet,
viola and two violins, nine numbered symphonies, sinfoniettas, concert
overtures and other orchestral works. His chamber music is equally varied and
there is a set of works for solo wind and other instruments, aptly meeting the
demands of competitive as of solo recital performance.
In style Malcolm Arnold has a command of popular idiom and this may have
suggested to some an unfavourable identification with the world of light music.
He is, in fact, a composer of considerable stature, technically assured, fluent
and prolific, providing music that gives pleasure, but also music that may have
a more sombre side, work that may be lyrical and tuneful, or even astringent
and harsh in its revelations. Donald Mitchell has compared Arnold,
illuminatingly, with Dickens, both of them great entertainers but both well
aware of the human predicament, unsettlingly revealed, as he points out, in the
remarkable series of symphonies.
Malcolm Arnold's Piano
Trio, Opus 54, was written in 1956. In the first movement, marked Allegro
con fuoco, the violin and cello offer a strong theme, in unison, while the
piano, which has joined in the first three notes, adds three other thematic
elements, a running semi-quaver figure, falling fourths and a simple chromatic
chordal pattern. A cantabile cello melody is taken up by the violin and
then, in canon, by the piano, as the strings take over the latter's
accompanying rôle. The descending fourths already heard from the piano now
return in plucked strings and subsequently the running semi-quavers are heard
again. These varied elements form the substance from which the whole movement
grows, with its lyrical melodic material, contrapuntal technique and unified
structure, to end after the piano has returned to the cantabile theme,
with its accompaniment from violin and cello. The Andante offers an
opening canon, in which the violin enters in imitation of the cello, at a
written interval of a compound diminished fourth, convenient enharmonic
notation. The piano seems about to follow suit, but offers, instead, an
expressive complementary melody, before the violin returns to the canon, now
inverted, followed by the cello at the interval of a major sixth. The piano
answers as before in an inverted version of its earlier passage. There follows
a section of dramatic dynamic contrast, before the cello returns with the
violin in canon, as at the opening of the movement, answered by the piano,
which ends the movement. The last movement is in the form if not the mood of a chaconne,
its chromatic basis stated emphatically by all three instruments. The
seven-bar ground, often varied, returns a semitone higher each time, passing
through twelve tonalities, before reaching again the final tonality of D, the
tonality of the whole work, in conclusion.
The first of Malcolm Arnold's violin sonatas was written in 1947. It
opens with an Allegretto which introduces highly characteristic
figuration for both violin and piano. Elements that appear early in the
movement, notably in the strongly marked themes for violin and for piano with
which the work opens, are developed to form its substance in a generally
contrapuntal texture. The tonality of B flat, to which the Allegretto returns
in conclusion, is followed by that of G in the following Andante tranqaillo,
with its repeated accompanying pattern for the piano and its initial
lyrical violin theme, interrupted by the intrusion of a fierce passage marked Allegro
iracondamente (quick-tempered), an unusual direction that has already been
briefly suggested. The original mood returns, with the piano accompanying
pattern and the gentle principal theme of the violin. The final movement opens
brusquely and once again the elements from which it develops make an early
appearance. There are lilting passages in the prevailing 6/8 metre, cross
rhythms suggesting a lighter idiom and at times a more percussive element, the
last of which dominates the final Presto coda.
The second of the violin sonatas was written in 1953 and is in one
continuous movement of four short sections, embryonic movements in themselves.
All four sections make use of the same thematic material, although its first
lyrical appearance is markedly different from the mainly pizzicato scherzo
that follows. The third section transforms the material yet again in an Andantino
quasi allegretto waltz and the work ends with an Adagio that reaches
a final resolution in its last bars.
The Fantasy for cello, Opus 130, is a further example of Arnold's
understanding of the instruments for which he writes, as he had done in earlier
fantasies for solo instruments. The new work was written in 1987 for the
cellist Julian Lloyd Webber and is framed by its gently lilting opening Andantino,
in which the cello offers a generally descending melody. The following Vivace
makes use of the same melodic contour in a very different context, as does
the succeeding Lento. A similar pattern to that of the first sections
marks the Alla marcia, its course interrupted by insistently repeated
octaves, and the pizzicato section that follows. It is again the
descending melodic contour that characterizes the second Lento, before
the return of the framing first section.
Malcolm Arnold wrote his Five Pieces for violin and piano, Opus
84, in 1964 for Yehudi Menuhin, intending them primarily as encore pieces,
although they form a possible
suite. The Prelude, like some latter-day Kreisler tribute to Vivaldi,
opens boldly with a rising sequential pattern that takes the violin into a high
register, with something of its figuration taken into the contrasting piano
part. The Con energico of this first piece leads to a remarkably
energetic Aubade, marked Vivace, derived from an Indian raga, the
notes of which are repeated insistently in increasingly rapid accompaniment to
a melody derived from the same material. There is a Waltz, marked Grazioso,
and a moving Ballad that makes use of material from Arnold's earlier
ballet Rinaldo and Armida, written for Covent Garden and Frederick
Ashton in 1955. The set of pieces ends with an asymmetrical Moto perpetuo, with
jazz-like implications in its rhythms and descending sequences.