Alexander Armstrong, Orchestra of the Swan feat. Tom Hammond - Not Now, Bernard & Other Stories (2020) [Hi-Res]
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BAND/ARTIST: Alexander Armstrong, Orchestra of the Swan, Tom Hammond
- Title: Not Now, Bernard & Other Stories
- Year Of Release: 2020
- Label: Orchid Classics
- Genre: Classical
- Quality: flac lossless / flac 24bits - 96.0kHz +Booklet
- Total Time: 01:08:09
- Total Size: 322 mb / 1.15 gb
- WebSite: Album Preview
Tracklist
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01. Not Now, Bernard, Pt. 1
02. Not Now, Bernard, Pt. 2
03. Toy Symphony, Op. 62: I. Allegro
04. Toy Symphony, Op. 62: II. Allegretto
05. Toy Symphony, Op. 62: III. Vivace
06. Isabel's Noisy Tummy, Pt. 1
07. Isabel's Noisy Tummy, Pt. 2
08. Isabel's Noisy Tummy, Pt. 3
09. Annabel Lee (Arr. B. Hughes for Pierrot Quintet & Narrator)
10. The Knight Who Took All Day, Pt. 1
11. The Knight Who Took All Day, Pt. 2
12. Thread!, Pt. 1
13. Thread!, Pt. 2
14. Thread!, Pt. 3
Not Now, Bernard was always a favourite book of mine as a child – not least because I shared my unusual name with the protagonist. As a book it is brilliant for carrying different messages at the same time: for children it is a story about a boy beingeaten by a monster, for adults it is a cautionary tale about being too busy to engage with our children. When conductor Tom Hammond asked me to write a family-concert piece I had no doubt which book I wanted to set. The commission was from the British Police Symphony Orchestra, the national orchestra for those associated with the police force, and they gave the premiere at Symphony Hall in Birmingham in December 2010.
Not Now, Bernard is the first half of a double-bill with Isabel’s Noisy Tummy: the two can be performed individually or as a pair, and are linked by a shared overture and David McKee’s sense of the ridiculous. Isabel has the added element of audience participation in a live performance, as everyone in the room provides the sounds of Isabel’s tummy. In this recording Alexander Armstrong heroically creates all the sounds himself.
Bernard and Isabel have gone on to have a large number of performances around Britain, both separately and together. In 2015 I made a reduction for chamber forces that was first performed by the Assembly Project at the St Magnus Festival in Orkney, conducted by Alasdair Nicolson in front of a crowd of several hundred school children from nearby islands, and this is the version we have recorded.
A few years later Tom Hammond came back to me with another similar commission, this time for Hertford Symphony Orchestra. This time I chose to set The Knight Who Took All Day by James Mayhew which, like Not Now, Bernard, starts out like a cliched story about knights and dragons but turns into a fable about female empowerment and peace-making. In live performances James Mayhew brings the story to life by live-painting as he narrates, the knight, squire, princess and dragon conjured into being through the course of the piece.
Malcolm Arnold’s Toy Symphony is a good example of his penchant for combining the serious and the ridiculous. In this piece a quintet of professional players is pitted against a battery of comic percussion, including a train guard’s whistle, a quail whistle and three parping toy trumpets, played, at its premiere, by notable people of the day. It was premiered on 28 November 1957 in the Savoy Hotel, London, at a fundraising dinner for the Musicians Benevolent Fund. The composer conducted and the VIP performers included Australian pianist Eileen Joyce, composer Eric Coates, musical broadcaster Joseph Cooper and cartoonist Gerard Hoffnung. The music has an inimitable sense of fun, with Arnold happy to garland some wonderful tunes with the most outrageously noisy barrage.
The earliest of the pieces on this recording, John Ireland’s Annabel Lee was written in about 1910, but the dating is uncertain. It wasn’t published until 1998, long after Ireland’s death. Scored originally for piano and speaker and styled as a ‘melodrama’ it sets a poem by Edgar Allan Poe, first published on the day of his death in 1849. I made a new arrangement specially for this album, expanding the scoring from piano alone to a quintet of piano, flute, clarinet, violin and cello. This enabled me to widen the coloristic palette without losing the hypnotic desolation of the original.
Judith Weir’s Thread! is an early piece in her catalogue which, like the other pieces on the album, has hitherto escaped being recorded. Judith Weir has written of the piece:
It was written for Edward Harper and his New Music Group of Scotland in 1981. Its subject matter is the Bayeux Tapestry, in particular the laconicLatin text spread throughout the upper horizontal border, which is declaimed by a narrator. An octet of instruments creates a musical equivalent of the tapestry, providing continuous musical flow like a long sheet of linen, but also attempting to depict the constant incident of the story. Percussion (representing swords, axes, armour and so on) is an important feature of the score; in the original performances, some of this was played on junk metal and wooden objects found on building sites and beaches around Scotland.
---------
01. Not Now, Bernard, Pt. 1
02. Not Now, Bernard, Pt. 2
03. Toy Symphony, Op. 62: I. Allegro
04. Toy Symphony, Op. 62: II. Allegretto
05. Toy Symphony, Op. 62: III. Vivace
06. Isabel's Noisy Tummy, Pt. 1
07. Isabel's Noisy Tummy, Pt. 2
08. Isabel's Noisy Tummy, Pt. 3
09. Annabel Lee (Arr. B. Hughes for Pierrot Quintet & Narrator)
10. The Knight Who Took All Day, Pt. 1
11. The Knight Who Took All Day, Pt. 2
12. Thread!, Pt. 1
13. Thread!, Pt. 2
14. Thread!, Pt. 3
Not Now, Bernard was always a favourite book of mine as a child – not least because I shared my unusual name with the protagonist. As a book it is brilliant for carrying different messages at the same time: for children it is a story about a boy beingeaten by a monster, for adults it is a cautionary tale about being too busy to engage with our children. When conductor Tom Hammond asked me to write a family-concert piece I had no doubt which book I wanted to set. The commission was from the British Police Symphony Orchestra, the national orchestra for those associated with the police force, and they gave the premiere at Symphony Hall in Birmingham in December 2010.
Not Now, Bernard is the first half of a double-bill with Isabel’s Noisy Tummy: the two can be performed individually or as a pair, and are linked by a shared overture and David McKee’s sense of the ridiculous. Isabel has the added element of audience participation in a live performance, as everyone in the room provides the sounds of Isabel’s tummy. In this recording Alexander Armstrong heroically creates all the sounds himself.
Bernard and Isabel have gone on to have a large number of performances around Britain, both separately and together. In 2015 I made a reduction for chamber forces that was first performed by the Assembly Project at the St Magnus Festival in Orkney, conducted by Alasdair Nicolson in front of a crowd of several hundred school children from nearby islands, and this is the version we have recorded.
A few years later Tom Hammond came back to me with another similar commission, this time for Hertford Symphony Orchestra. This time I chose to set The Knight Who Took All Day by James Mayhew which, like Not Now, Bernard, starts out like a cliched story about knights and dragons but turns into a fable about female empowerment and peace-making. In live performances James Mayhew brings the story to life by live-painting as he narrates, the knight, squire, princess and dragon conjured into being through the course of the piece.
Malcolm Arnold’s Toy Symphony is a good example of his penchant for combining the serious and the ridiculous. In this piece a quintet of professional players is pitted against a battery of comic percussion, including a train guard’s whistle, a quail whistle and three parping toy trumpets, played, at its premiere, by notable people of the day. It was premiered on 28 November 1957 in the Savoy Hotel, London, at a fundraising dinner for the Musicians Benevolent Fund. The composer conducted and the VIP performers included Australian pianist Eileen Joyce, composer Eric Coates, musical broadcaster Joseph Cooper and cartoonist Gerard Hoffnung. The music has an inimitable sense of fun, with Arnold happy to garland some wonderful tunes with the most outrageously noisy barrage.
The earliest of the pieces on this recording, John Ireland’s Annabel Lee was written in about 1910, but the dating is uncertain. It wasn’t published until 1998, long after Ireland’s death. Scored originally for piano and speaker and styled as a ‘melodrama’ it sets a poem by Edgar Allan Poe, first published on the day of his death in 1849. I made a new arrangement specially for this album, expanding the scoring from piano alone to a quintet of piano, flute, clarinet, violin and cello. This enabled me to widen the coloristic palette without losing the hypnotic desolation of the original.
Judith Weir’s Thread! is an early piece in her catalogue which, like the other pieces on the album, has hitherto escaped being recorded. Judith Weir has written of the piece:
It was written for Edward Harper and his New Music Group of Scotland in 1981. Its subject matter is the Bayeux Tapestry, in particular the laconicLatin text spread throughout the upper horizontal border, which is declaimed by a narrator. An octet of instruments creates a musical equivalent of the tapestry, providing continuous musical flow like a long sheet of linen, but also attempting to depict the constant incident of the story. Percussion (representing swords, axes, armour and so on) is an important feature of the score; in the original performances, some of this was played on junk metal and wooden objects found on building sites and beaches around Scotland.
Year 2020 | Classical | FLAC / APE | HD & Vinyl
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