Titles in this category are currently being re-categorised into new sections in the website which are INSTRUMENT SPECIFIC to make your browsing easier - these new sections already exist.
Once this process has been completed over the next few weeks this section SOLOS will disappear, and you will look for solos by INSTRUMENT.
1. The Time Traveller
2. The Final Problem
3. The Great Race
COMPOSER’S NOTE
Playing the euphonium was something of a family tradition in the Graham household. With my father (Peter) and late grandfather (Thomas) active in their respective local Salvation Army Brass Bands, my uncle Tommy solo euphonium with the mighty Tullis Russell Mills Band and my school brass teacher Robert Sands also an aficionado of the instrument, hardly a day passed when performances and recordings by the “greats’, dough, Groom, Sullivan et al were being discussed and appraised. And so when one of the greats of today, Steven Mead, asked me to write a concerto it was with this background in mind that I set to the task.
In League with Extraordinary Gentlemen combines two of my life interests - composition and 19th century popular fiction. Each of the concerto’s three movements takes its musical inspiration from extraordinary characters who have transcended the original genre and have subsequently found mass audiences through film, television and comic book adaptations.
The first movement follows a traditional sonata form outline with one slight modification.
The order of themes in the recapitulation is reversed, mirroring a plot climax in the H.G. Wells novella The Time Machine (where the protagonist, known only as The Time Traveller, puts his machine into reverse bringing the story back full circle).
The Adventure of the Final Problem is the title of a short story published in The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes by Arthur Conan Doyle. This is an account of the great detective’s final struggle with his long-time adversary Professor Moriarty at the Reichenbach Falls in Switzerland. The music takes the form of a slowed down ländler (a Swiss/Austrian folk dance) and various acoustic and electronic echo effects call to mind the alpine landscape. The final bars pose a question paralleling that of Conan Doyle in the story — have we really seen the last of Sherlock Holmes?
The final movement, The Great Race, follows Phileas Fogg on the last stage of his epic journey
“Around the World in Eighty Days” (from the novel by Jules Verne). The moto perpetuo nature of the music gives full rein to the soloist’s technical virtuosity. As the work draws to a conclusion, the frantic scramble by Fogg to meet his deadline
at the Reform Club in Pall Mall, London, is echoed by the soloist’s increasingly demanding ascending figuration, set
against the background of Big Ben clock chimes.
The concerto is dedicated to the aforementioned family members, three “extraordinary gentlemen”, P.G. Graham, T.H.
Stewart and T. Stewart.
Click on MORE DETAILS to view an image (PDF) of the Solo Cornet part of this work.
Written especially for Peter Roberts and featured on his solo CD, Legend (CD21216). This lovely, delicate solo was one of Kenneth Downies first projects as Composer in Residence of Yorkshire Building Society Band.
To view 