“John Rutter, choral composer” is how I am often described, but really I would prefer to be known just as “John Rutter, composer”. I love choral music with all my heart, and it’s true that the majority of my output is choral, but I have always cherished the rarer opportunities that have come my way to venture outside of that realm and write for orchestra, or indeed to compose all kinds of other music. This album is my first purely orchestral one, and to devise and conduct it has brought me great delight, which I hope you, the listener, can share.

The Celebration Overture was written in 2023 as a 25th-anniversary gift to the Oxford Philharmonic Orchestra at the invitation of its founder–conductor Marios Papadopoulos. With its lively, festive character it served as a curtain-raiser to their anniversary season, as it does to this album. I’ve always felt that every composer’s portfolio needs a slambang overture that can be called into service when it’s needed.

I wrote Reflections in 1979 in response to a commission from the Hemel Hempstead Arts Festival. They were looking for an orchestral work to be performed by their artist-in-residence, the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, and I was immediately drawn to the idea of a piano concerto. I called it Reflections because it reflected, or perhaps re-imagined, the music of so many of the composers and genres that had guided and influenced me as I found my own voice. As a lover of the epic film scores of Hollywood’s golden age, I couldn’t resist a grand orchestral “Prelude” to bring the soloist on stage, in this case with an almost shy first entry that builds in confidence and intensity to lead into the second movement, a glittering “Toccata”. A toccata is by definition a virtuosic keyboard piece, first cultivated in 17th-century Italy but with notable more recent examples by such composers as Ravel—to whom this movement is a homage, with even a taste of jazz, an attractive genre to us both. Is there a dash of Gershwin in there too? Certainly. The “Interlude” is the hardest of the concerto’s four movements to categorise. I marked it to be played sognando—dreamily—and it perhaps has something of the elusive quality of a dream. Much of it is in the unusual metre of five-four time, five beats to a bar, which contributes to a hall-of-mirrors feeling that you don’t quite know where you are. After drifting along for almost ten minutes, I decided to bring the audience back to earth with a boisterous “Finale alla burlesca”, inspired partly by Jacques Ibert’s delightful Divertissement which was written for a stage comedy in the 1920s. Echoes of Charlie Chaplin and the Keystone Cops are heard, egging the soloist on to ever more daring feats of virtuosity to bring the concerto to a helter-skelter conclusion.

The Four miniatures for orchestra, dating from 2021, were not in fact originally written for orchestra at all, but for solo guitar, at the suggestion of my guitarist friend Rafael Serrallet. Rather like Ravel with his piano music, I felt that this little set of pieces might have another life dressed in orchestral clothing—in this case not a full symphony orchestra but the more intimate medium of chamber orchestra. The four short movements call for only brief descriptions. An opening flourish, like a guitarist warming the instrument up, leads into a “Chanson triste”—song-like, and yes, sad, rather in the bittersweet vein of a French film composer like Michel Legrand or Francis Lai. A gentle, child-like “Lullaby” follows (I loved the Christopher Robin books as a child)—and for the finale I turned to a familiar folk song from the northeast of England, “Dance to your daddy”. My father’s family came from Newcastle.

It was in the 1970s that I began to receive my first non-choral commissions, and I jumped at the chance in 1974 to write a 25-minute work for the London Senior Orchestra, an excellent youth orchestra with an adventurous policy of commissioning new work from young composers. The result was Cityscapes, to which I originally gave the not very informative title of 'Partita'. After its premiere in the Royal Festival Hall, it received a handful of performances and a recording, but I couldn’t help wondering if I should have given it a title that conveyed better the idea of its style and content. In 2020, as a lockdown project, I pulled the half-forgotten score out of the attic, wondered about revising it, and decided there was nothing I wanted to change, except the title. The first movement seemed to me to embody something of the spirit of New York—hence “Big Apple”. The second movement, rather mysterious and atmospheric, might have been inspired by the legend of Atlantis—so, “Lost city”. The finale, with its bold opening fanfare, immediately seemed to summon up William Walton’s ceremonial and patriotic world, ushering in a bustling-streets-type theme. We are obviously in London, memorialised in William Dunbar’s 16th-century poem as “Flower of cities all”. Composers fight shy of attaching too many descriptive labels to their music, and Cityscapes can perfectly well be listened to as just a three-movement orchestral work. I didn’t have any specific images in my mind when I wrote it in 1974, but in 2020 when I asked myself the question “if this movement was used in a film, what sort of film would it be?” the titles soon came to me.

The Elegy, for the unusual medium of solo piano and strings, is the hardest item in this album to write about. It started life as a discarded movement from Reflections—discarded because it just didn’t seem to belong in that work. It seemed to take me into darker and more melancholy realms than I usually inhabit, and technically it makes use of quite intricate compositional devices—notably canonic writing (where one voice copies another some distance after it)—that don’t always make for easy listening. I felt quite shy of showing it to Steven Osborne, not knowing what he would make of it. His response was “no, it doesn’t belong in Reflections, but yes, we must record it; it stands on its own”. I doubt whether many people would recognise it as something I composed, but I do know it’s what I meant (as Vaughan Williams said of his Fourth Symphony), and I offer it as a perhaps enigmatic epilogue to the album in the hope that you, the listener, will understand it better than I do.

John Rutter © 2025