Albert Ketèlbey - 6 Famous Light Orchestral Works (1915-31)

Albert William Ketèlbey, born Ketelbey; 9 August 1875 – 26 November 1959) was an English composer, conductor and pianist, best known for his short pieces of light orchestral music. Works as In a Persian Market (1920), In a Chinese Temple Garden (1923), and In the Mystic Land of Egypt (1931) became best-sellers in print and on records; by the late 1920s he was Britain's first millionaire composer.

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6 famous light orchestral works

1. In a Chinese Temple Garden (1923) (0:00)
2. In a Monastery Garden (1915) (6:59)
3. Sanctuary of the Heart (1924) (12:34)
4. In a Persian Market (1920) (17:48)
5. In the Mystic Land of Egypt (1931) (24:41)
6. Bells Across the Meadows (1921) (31:14)

Prague Festival Orchestra

In a Persian Market; became one of his more popular works. The musicologist Jonathan Bellman, calling In a Persian Market "immortal", describes it as "an 'intermezzo scene' for band or small orchestra; reprehensibly demeaning or delightfully tacky". The work was not without its critics; the composer and conductor Nicolas Slonimsky quotes the view of a Russian journal that "the suite ... had its 'immaculate conception' in imperialistic colonial England. The composer's intention is to convince the listener that all's well in the colonies where beautiful women and exotic fruits mature together, where beggars and rulers are friends, where there are no imperialists, no restive proletarians." In The Musical Times, the pseudonymous reviewer "Ariel" described the work as "naive and inexpensive pseudo-orientalism", which led to heated correspondence in the journal over the following months between the composer and the critic.

Ketèlbey, a capable player of the cello, clarinet, oboe, and horn, was a skilled orchestrator. He generally followed the normal style for light music of his day: picturesque and romantic, with colourful orchestral effects. Reviewing a collection of Ketèlbey's music, the authors of The Penguin Guide to Recorded Classical Music commented in 2008, "when vulgarity is called for it is not shirked—only it's a stylish kind of vulgarity!" Many of Ketèlbey's pieces are programmatic, typically lasting between four and six minutes. His penchant for arranging his works for various combinations of instruments makes them harder to categorise than the works of many other composers. His first two pieces to make a mark with a wide public were The Phantom Melody (1911) and In a Monastery Garden (1915), both best known in their orchestral versions, but originally written for cello and piano and for solo piano respectively.

Ketèlbey followed the same basic formula for many of his most popular later works. For In a Persian Market his synopsis notes "the camel drivers approaching, the cries of beggars, entry of beautiful princess (represented by a languorous theme given at first to clarinet and cello and then full orchestra) ... she watches the jugglers and snake-charmers ... the Caliph passes by, interrupting the entertainment ... all depart, their themes heard faintly in the distance, and the marketplace becomes deserted." Ketèlbey establishes the eastern setting in the opening section, employing the distinctive melodic intervals, A–B♭–E. The orchestral players are instructed to sing at two points in the score, a descending motif representing beggars crying for baksheesh. Although one contemporary critic belittled the music as "pseudo-orientalism", McCanna comments that "The princess portrayed by the big romantic theme is a cousin of the princesses in Stravinsky's Firebird".

Ketèlbey sought to repeat the exoticism of In a Persian Market in several later pieces. Among them is In a Chinese Temple Garden (1923), described as an "oriental phantasy", with episodes depicting a priestly incantation, two lovers, a wedding procession, a street brawl and the restoration of calm by the beating of the temple gong.[84] Another example is In the Mystic Land of Egypt (1931), which, like its Persian predecessor, opens with a vigorous march theme followed by a broad romantic melody. Again, the composer employs unconventional musical devices for colour—in this case a chromatic scale, descending at each appearance until the closing bars, where it is inverted. In 1958, the critic Ronald Ever wrote that Ketèlbey was noted for his use of "every exotic noisemaker known to man—chimes, orchestra bells, gongs (all sizes and nationalities), cymbals, woodblocks, xylophone, drums of every variety".

Among Ketèlbey's light orchestral works with a wholly British flavour is Bells Across the Meadows (1921), redolent, in the words of McDonald, of "rose-entwined thatched cottages standing amidst gardens full of hollyhocks with a gentle brook bubbling on its rustic way and cows grazing peacefully in the pastures beyond".