Tag: Aulis Sallinen

Lumos Solem!

This Sunday night on “The Lost Chord,” it’s an hour of musical enchantments inspired by “Harry Potter” and “The Lord of the Rings.”

Herbert Chappell composed the occasional concert work (including an impressive guitar concerto for Eduardo Fernandez), in between writing television scores and producing documentaries for the BBC. Unquestionably, his greatest coup was in cutting a deal on behalf of Decca Records for his telecast of “The Three Tenors.” No one, not even the tenors themselves, anticipated its staggering success.

According to Chappell, his concert overture “Boy Wizard,” an impression of Harry Potter, is meant to conjure “an academy of wizardry and witchcraft, owls that deliver letters, cats that act as lie-detectors, unicorns with silvery blood, and a helter-skelter death-defying game of aerial acrobatics, where one whizzes around the sky on turbo-charged broomsticks.” The work appeared in 2001, the same year as the first of the “Harry Potter” film adaptations.

In 1995, American composer Craig Russell was reading “The Hobbit” and “The Lord of the Rings” aloud to his family, when he became “an unexpected party” to a commission for string orchestra. Russell responded with a seven-movement suite. In 1997, he added two more movements and expanded the orchestration to create “Middle Earth.”

We’ll hear “Frodo Leaves the Shire,” “Gimli, the Dwarf,” “Galadriel and Her Elvin Mirror,” “Gollum,” “Gandalf: The White Rider,” “Shelob’s Lair,” “Orcs and Ring Wraiths,” “Strider and the Crowning of Aragorn,” and “Frodo and Company Return.”

Aulis Sallinen is one of the most respected of contemporary Finnish composers. In 1996, he completed his Symphony No. 7, on a commission from the Gothenburg Symphony Orchestra, which he gave the subtitle “The Dreams of Gandalf.” Its origins were in a projected ballet inspired by “The Lord of the Rings.” However, the composer hastened to add that the symphony doesn’t actually depict any of the events in the story, but rather its atmosphere and its poetry.

To round out the hour, we’ll have a few minutes to enjoy selections from a fondly-remembered song cycle on Tolkien texts, “The Road Goes Ever On,” by Donald Swann (of Flanders and Swann fame).

I hope you’ll join me for this program of music inspired by pop-cultural and quasi-literary wizards. The effect is guaranteed to be pure magic, on “Spellbound,” this Sunday night at 10:00 EDT, on WWFM – The Classical Network and wwfm.org.

In addition to the considerable achievements noted above, Herbert Chappell also wrote “The Gonk,” employed so memorably in George A. Romero’s “Dawn of the Dead.” Get your hit of whimsical zombie music while awaiting tonight’s broadcast by following the link below.