Jon Lord is not one of England's better known composers. His total output of orchestral work has been comparatively small. He has composed a handful of orchestral suites, a few pieces of chamber music, some film scores, and one concerto. Oh, and approximately 200 rock songs. For Jon Lord is one of the very small number of musicians who have successfully combined careers in both popular and classical music.
This is the story of Lord's first major work to combine the talents of a rock group and an orchestra. He called it the Concerto for Group and Orchestra. It was (not surprisingly) an orchestral concerto featuring a rock group.
Lord's musical training was as a classical pianist but he began his professional music career playing in a jazz ensemble, The Bill Aston Combo. Throughout the 1960s, Lord worked extensively as a session musician and toured with a number of jazz, blues, and rock bands. Although he never abandoned the piano, Lord took up the electric organ, and it is with that instrument that he became most closely associated.
In 1968, Lord co-founded one of the most influential bands in rock history. After 30 years, eight (or so) different line-ups, several dozen albums, and many hundreds of concert appearances, Lord still plays the organ with that band, night after night, to packed concert halls. The band is called Deep Purple.
Deep Purple's members brought many diverse musical influences to the band. The result was a mix of blues-pop-jazz-classical-rock music that is hard to pigeonhole. Perhaps this lack of clear musical direction explains why the band's first three albums (recorded in 1968-9) were largely ignored in their native country (although the band saw some success in America). Lord has described Deep Purple's early years as "five musicians in search of an identity". Apart from the band's original compositions, the first three albums contained covers of "pop" songs by artists as diverse as The Beatles, Neil Diamond, Ike and Tina Turner, Donovan, Joe South, and Jimi Hendrix. Not content with this mixture, they threw in "electric" versions of classical pieces by Tchaikovsky, Wagner, and de Falla. Lord, in particular, was interested in bringing together rock and classical music. Two early songs featured baroque-style string arrangements, composed by Lord. The electric guitar, organ, and violins may have co-existed uneasily, but the songs were an important first step in what was to become a much greater musical experiment.
Lord had mentioned to his manager that he was interested in writing and performing a piece of music for a rock group playing alongside a full symphony orchestra. In April 1969, Deep Purple's manager quietly booked the Royal Albert Hall in London (a venue as prestigious as its name suggests) and told Lord to be ready for a performance in September of that year! Lord was touring full-time and recording new material with Deep Purple, the band was in the middle of a personnel change, and he had less than six months to score his first major (and ground-breaking) orchestral work!
Needless to say, Lord accomplished this feat. (A good thing, too, or this article would be a complete anticlimax.)
Dr Malcolm Arnold (now Sir Malcolm) was a well known and widely respected composer and conductor. With a few pages of his score completed, Lord met with Arnold and asked him to conduct the orchestra. Arnold, not afraid to take musical risks, looked over the score and immediately agreed. The date of the concert was set for September 24, 1969.
The orchestra would be the world-renowned Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, with which Arnold had long-standing association.
Rehearsals did not go well. The orchestra was obviously and openly resentful of performing with a group of long-haired rock musicians. Initial rehearsals were a disaster, prompting Arnold to tell the orchestra exactly what he thought of their playing and their professionalism, in his characteristically blunt manner. In the end, it was only Arnold's firm hand and patience in controlling the orchestra, and his and obvious belief in what they were trying to accomplish, that enabled the event to happen at all.
I can only imagine the atmosphere in the hall on the evening of the concert. The hall was sold out (the proceeds of the concert went to charity), but what did the audience expect? Nothing like this had been done before. Were the audience expecting classical music? A rock concert? Or something else entirely? And what exactly is a concerto anyway? Ah, I'm glad you asked.
A concerto is a piece of orchestral music that showcases a solo instrument. A violin concerto prominently features a solo violin. A piano concerto is built around a solo piano. It may seem a bit obvious, but just in case you've missed the point, Lord's Concerto for Group and Orchestra uses a rock group (Deep Purple, obviously) as the "solo" instrument. We're not talking about a formulaic, three-minute pop tune. Lord's Concerto is a major orchestral work in three movements, 45 minutes long, and following the established form of a classical concerto.
I'm not going to describe the music. I don't know all the musical terms, and I would make a very poor job of it. The Concerto isn't a rock group playing classical music. Nor is it an orchestra "backing" a rock group. The Concerto is a mixture of two different forms. Lord's orchestral score is a marvellous and sophisticated piece of modern symphonic music. And the five members of Deep Purple, each an accomplished and experienced musician in his chosen field, playing singly and as a group, play electric rock, blues, and jazz; interweaving their own unique styles; threading their instruments through the orchestral score. Sometimes they play in harmony with the orchestra, sometimes they fight against it. In Lord's words: "The idea is, then, simply to present, in the First Movement, the group and the orchestra as you would expect to hear them – as antagonists, and in the Second and Third Movements, as unexpected allies."
Was the experiment a success? Can the forms of rock and classical music stand together in a single work? I can't answer that. Music is in the ear of the beholder (or some such mixed metaphor). You have to listen to it, then you can decide whether it was a success or not. The Concerto received a mixed, though overall positive, critical reaction.
The performance was recorded and is now available on video (though almost impossible to find) and on CD (also difficult to find).
That was 30 years ago. Deep Purple went on to become one of the world's biggest-selling rock bands, and the memory of the incredible musical experiment of 1969 faded into the shadows cast by their later accomplishments.
Deep Purple performed the Concerto one more time, with the Los Angeles Symphony Orchestra at the Hollywood Bowl in August 1970.
And then they lost the score.
Nobody knows how or exactly when it happened but the sheet music, the entire orchestral score for the Concerto, went missing. Vanished into thin air. There were many requests, over the next three decades, to re-stage the Concerto, but without the score it was of course impossible.
And then, one day . . . [continued]
© 2000 by David Meadows. All rights reserved. 12 November 2000