Lilburn: Orchestral Works

Description

Douglas Lilburn (1915-2001) Orchestral WorksThis comprehensive collection of Lilburn's orchestral music includes Aotearoa, regarded as a New Zealand classic, A Song of Islands, a tone poem which finds its parallel in New Zealand regional paintings, and A Birthday Offering which emphasizes the composer's interest in colourful sonorities. Douglas Lilburn grew up on 'Drysdale', an isolated hill country farm leading to the mountain plateau at the centre of New Zealand's North Island. He often described his home as 'paradise' and his first major orchestral work, the Drysdale Overture (1937), written whilst a student under the aegis of Ralph Vaughan Williams at the Royal College of Music in London, sets an archetypal scene of summer days on the farm. The music begins with an introduction depicting in upward gestures the sharp-edged vertical contour of the Drysdale hills. An exposition section follows presenting two ideas, one portraying the linear motion of a valley stream and the other, beautifully sounded as an oboe solo, recalling the folk lullabies sung by the composer's mother. The central section, described by Lilburn as a 'sunlit rondo' nevertheless shivers with momentary excitement. This leads to a hymnal presentation of 'mother's tune', aurally close to Vaughan Williams's Fantasia on a theme by Thomas Tallis, to express those special moments of vision sometimes experienced amongst the home hills. 'I'm left,' said Lilburn, recalling the impression of Drysdale, 'with that lovely Mark Twain image of Jim and Huckleberry drifting their barge down the great river, looking up at the stars and wondering "whether they was made, or only just happened."'The restorative power of the natural world is also the theme of Forest (1936), an apprentice work for orchestra. In the music - a tone poem depicting autumn at Mount Peel in South Canterbury - we hear Lilburn tracking Sibelius through the shadowy woods, keeping his own distance, but measuring his own hesitancy until he takes his own road. Forest won a competition initiated by Percy Grainger for an orchestral piece projecting 'New Zealand cultural and emotional characteristics.'Other prize-winning works resulting from his student days in London were Festival Overture (1939) and Overture: 'Aotearoa' (1940); the first of these works had its premi?¿re at the Royal College of Music under Sir George Dyson and the second at His Majesty's Theatre, London, as part of the New Zealand Centennial Matinee. Festival Overture speaks of the consolidation of New Zealand nationality and character amidst the mounting tensions of war. It begins with a fanfare, marked at its peak by reverberating trills, from which emerges a propulsive idea generated by the cellos. If the general thrust of the overture is held in the thrall of the fanfare, then a secondary folk-like theme, introduced in a clarinet solo over a drone bass, turns the psychological direction to an abiding home ground, a remembrance of things past and the expe