Walter Leigh - Concertino for Harpsichord and Strings

Performed by Neville Dilkes and the English Sinfonia.

One of the great underrated classics of English music, small but perfectly formed.

Low-fi (24K/80kbps) and hissy, sampled from vinyl. You can get the full-fi version on CD at

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Field-Nocturn...

Walter Leigh was born in 1912 and tragically killed at Tobruk in 1942, serving with the Queen's Own Hussars.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walter_L...

http://www.ww2talk.com/forum/geoffs-s...

Times, 20th August 1942

The death of Lance-Corporal Walter Leigh, Hussars, at the age of 37, on active service in Libya is a loss to English music in its most precarious tradition - that of the stage. For his two comic operas, The Pride of the Regiment and Jolly Roger, followed in the Sullivan tradition of satire and burlesque served up with frank melody and good craftmanship.

Besides these two operas Leigh wrote much other dramatic music:- For the straight stage, when he directed the music of the Festival Theatre at Cambridge; for the Cambridge Greek Play Committee, when in 1936 he set The Frogs of Aristophes; for revue, as in Clinton-Baddeley's Aladdin and in Nine Sharp; and for films.

Leigh also wrote chamber music, a concerto for harpsichord and orchestra, and miscellaneous songs and piano pieces. His versatility and businesslike attitude to the matter in hand he had learned from Hindemith, with whom he studied for two years after an English training with Dr. Darke and Professor Dent and after taking an arts degree at Cambridge. His style was simple, effective, and well turned, and, through all the frantic experimentation of the years between the wars, he kept his head, his ideals, and his popular touch.

Times, 25th August 1942

A correspondent writes:-
The death of Lance-Corporal Walter Leigh on active service in Libya deprives both British music and British films of one of the best and most sincere of contemporary composers. After a brilliant career at Cambridge in the late twenties he studied music under Hindemith. Leigh was probably the best known to the general public for the music which he wrote for a number of intimate revues and for such operas as The Pride of the Regiment and Jolly Roger.

His more serious works included chamber music, songs, and several concertos, and he was moreover, the first British composer to undertake a complete study of the many problems relating to the sound-track in the production of films. In this respect he was closely associated with the makers of documentary films from 1933 until the outbreak of the present war, when he joined the Hussars in the ranks. His sound score for the film Song of Ceylon still remains a classic example of the creative use of music and sound in relation to the visuals on the screen. One of the last film scores he composed before joining the Army was that for a film of The Times.