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Douglas Lilburn  

A Birthday Offering

Duration: 11' 00" Year: 1956
for orchestra

Douglas Lilburn  

A Song of Islands

Duration: 16' 00" Year: 1946
for orchestra

Ashley Heenan  

A Time for Offenbach

Duration: 1h 00' 00" Year: 1967
ballet in one act based on the music of Offenbach with choreography by Jurek Shabelewski

Jack Speirs  

Divertimento for Orchestra

Duration: 18' 00" Year: 1958

Douglas Lilburn  

Drysdale Overture

Duration: 10' 00" Year: 1937
for orchestra

  • Instrumentation
    2222; 3230; timp, perc; strs.
  • Programme Note

    When I arrived at the Royal College of Music in London, in September 1937, and was accepted as a student by Vaughan Williams, he put me through routine disciplines of writing fugues and part-songs, and then one day said: “Isn’t it time you composed something?”

    I accepted the challenge and produced by Drysdale Overture, with its nostalgic memories in a musical language which rather disconcerted him. Still more did it upset Sir George Dyson, who brilliantly realised my rough orchestral score on the piano and then said: “Don’t bring me another manuscript like that.” He did, however, give it a reading rehearsal with the RCM first orchestra, and I took steps to improve my musical handwriting.

    In those far-off heady days, Hans Keller’s “functional analysis” had hardly impacted on the RCM – we students ignorantly and derisively called it “sweet FA”. And so I may hardly provide an “analytical synopsis”.

    With my meagre knowledge of classical forms, I thought that proper overtures should have a solemn introduction, with motifs recalled later in various structural guises, and that they should have a contrasting “second object” – hence my nostalgic oboe tune, with fitting Scottish inflections. Curiously, what might have been a routine “development” turned into a sunlit rondo, nostalgic of childhood happiness.

    I’m left with that lovely Mark Twain image of Jim and Huckleberry drifting on their barge down that great river, looking up at the stars and wondering “whether they was made, or only just happened”.

    Douglas Lilburn
    14 October 1994

  • Availability

Edwin Carr  

Electra

 Year: 1955
ballet music for piano, percussion and orchestra

Douglas Lilburn  

Festival Overture

Duration: 08' 00" Year: 1939
for orchestra

Jack Speirs  

Fioriture

 Year: 1969
for large orchestra

  • Instrumentation
    (1)22(1)22(1);06(3C,2B-flat)31;4perc;pf;cel;strs
  • Programme Note

    Commissioned for the centenary celebrations of the University of Otago, New Zealand, in 1969, this work is built in five sections arranged as an arch. The first section consists of four ‘fanfares’ – the first fanfare is for six trumpets characterised by crescendo-diminuendo effects and long sustained notes which rise steadily through a series of semitonal steps to a climax; the second fanfare is for woodwind and percussion, the third is an extended version of the first, and the final fanfare modifies the second. This section leads directly into an agile, toccata-like allegro based on material from the trumpet fanfares. The third, central section is a long lento based on material from the woodwind fanfares. Here, biting dissonance and angular melody is replaced by gentle melodic lines and an ever-present backdrop of soft string chords. The fourth section returns to the character and ideas of the second leading to the work’s major climax which subsides into the original fanfares with which the work opened. Now, however, the music is turned back to front so that the gradual intensification of the opening becomes a process of gradual relaxation.

  • Availability

Edwin Carr  

Five Pieces for Orchestra

Duration: 12' 00" Year: 1967
for orchestra

Douglas Lilburn  

Forest

Duration: 16' 00" Year: 1936
for orchestra - a tone poem