Just back from Cultureville Phil where Jon Lord’s Durham Concerto – subject of several largely favourable comments from IRF a while ago – was top of the bill.  I must say I enjoyed the piece enormously despite several reservations.  Chief among these was that it was rather syrupy in places – fine if you can go with the flow but an old cynic like me can’t help suspecting I’m being conned.  I also felt that Lord had difficulty finding his own voice as a composer.  At times he seemed to want to be Vaughan Williams or Sibelius, at others Bernstein; needless to say he couldn’t be any of those masters, yet he seldom convinced me we were listening to an original composer called Lord.  But I’m quibbling; I thoroughly enjoyed it, as did my young nephew.

Whatever quibbles I might have had about Mr Lord’s work, it was, in my opinion, infinitely superior to the Michael Nyman work receiving its UK premiere on the same programme.  Like many of MN’s works, ‘gdm for marimba and orchestra’ was lamentably short of interesting material.  There was nothing actually unpleasant about it, but why anyone would score this stuff for such huge forces is beyond me.  In fact the piece put me in mind of the late Neil Ardley’s ‘Kaleidoscope of Rainbows’ but the latter uses about a dozen musicians plus a synthesizer to good effect whereas Nyman uses the best part of a symphony orchestra and makes a 20 minute piece seem interminable.

The surprise on the programme and, for me, the highlight, was James MacMillan’s 2nd Piano Concerto.  The piece’s roots in a ballet score are pretty obvious and if I wanted to quibble I could ask whether or not it actually works as a concerto; but I couldn’t answer the question as my theoretical knowledge is non-existent – and the piece worked to the extent that it was interesting and exciting.  It was certainly out of the ordinary.  In all my concert-going history I can’t remember seeing the soloist in a piano concerto turn away from the keyboard to play a drum!  The concerto was a delightful mixture of folk-tinged melodies and gripping rhythm.  I’d certainly book a concert on the strength of this piece in future.

I can't really analyse the problems with either piece, I'm afraid, because I don't have the technical knowledge. 

If there was a problem with the Lord it's that it could be seen as derivative; but, if he did his own orchestration, it was pretty well executed.  I'm also not at all sure the Northumbrian Pipes sit well in front of a large orchestra; and ironically the Hammond Organ (soloist J Lord) sounded slightly incongruous, too, though it might grow on me.  Oh, and throwing in 'Gaudeamus Igitur' might have made some people wonder when the kitchen sink was coming.  Reading the above you wouldn't believe that I found the piece most enjoyable overall; but I did!

If I had to summarise the problem with the Nyman in three words they would be: dull, dull, dull.  A few very short melodies repeated ad nauseam with very little in the way of variation except increase/decrease in volume.  To this end he used a large orchestra: minus the conventional percussion section but with a marimba.


I bought my ticket out of curiosity to hear the Durham Concerto and it was some time later that it struck me all the pieces were by living composers.  I was upstairs and didn't really pop my head over the parapet to see if the stalls was full.  There were plenty of spare seats near me but the same was true of Ian Bostridge's recent concert and the extremely rare chance to hear saxophone legend Wayne Shorter.  The applause was rapturous, especially for Joanna MacGregor's latin-flavoured encore and for the DC itself which got half the audience on their feet for an ovation.

Thank you for your thoughts, HtoHe. I can't tell if I'm objective about a man whose rock music I've idolized for decades, so it's good to read an unbiased (and more knowledgeable) opinion. I find myself agreeing with everyword you wrote, even:


I understand exactly what you mean but I don't find it a negative point. To me the synthesis of those obvious influences is Lord's "voice". I can see the same in his writing for rock groups. Was any of it new? No, Deep Purple freely took apart the music that influenced them (rock'n'roll, blues, jazz, even classical) and put the pieces back together into something new. Isn't that how creativity works?


I'm led to believe (and have no reason to doubt) that he does his own orchestration. His first (and most famous) major orchestral work was written in 1969, when he was a virtually unknown jobbing musican who certainly couldn't afford to hire an orchestrator, though he freely admits that the piece's conductor, Malcolm Arnold, gave him guidance (he has described sitting up all night with books on orchestration, trying to learn what instruemnts could and couldn't do). Unlike the McCartneys of the world, Lord was classically trained since the age of six, though he's a self-taught composer.


I have a review of the concert on my web site: http://www.heroes.force9.co.uk/music/lord-2008.html

But in case you don't want to read through a whole page of sycophantic gushing, here's an extract which relates to the discussion of the half-empty hall:

I'm an expert on Piazzolla 



But seriously, they had a noticed pinned up in the bar where JL was signing CDs at the end of the show. I was wondering myself how to find out -- I thought I might have to give some incredibly vague description on the forum and get people to make guesses