Paris Sketches - Martin Ellerby (born 1957)

Saint-Germain-des-Prés 

Pigalle 

Père Lachaise 

Les Halles

Martin Ellerby writes:

This is my personal tribute to a city I love, and each movement pays homage to some part of the French capital and to other composers who lived, worked or passed through it – rather as Ravel did in his own tribute to the work of an earlier master in “Le Tombeau de Couperin.” Running like a unifying thread through the whole score is the idea of bells – a prominent feature of Paris life.

Saint-Germain-des-Prés 

The Latin Quarter famous for artistic associations and bohemian lifestyle. This is a dawn tableau haunted by the shade of Ravel: the city awakens with the ever-present sense of morning bells.

Pigalle

The Soho of Paris. This is a burlesque with scenes cast in the mould of a balletic scherzo – humorous in a kind of “Stravinsky-meets-Prokofiev” way. It is episodic, but everything is based on the harmonic figuration of the opening. The bells here are car horns and police sirens.

Père Lachaise

This is the city’s largest cemetery, the final resting place of many a celebrity who had once walked its streets. The spirit of Satie’s “Gymnopedies” – themselves a tribute to a still more distant past – is affectionately evoked before what is in effect the work’s slow movement concludes with a quotation of the “Dies Irae”. The mood is one of softness and delicacy, which I have attempted to match with more transparent orchestrations. The bells are gentle, nostalgic, wistful.

Les Halles

A fast, bursting finale; the bells triumphant and celebratory. Les Halles is the old market area, a Parisian Covent Garden. And like the Pigalle, this is a series of related nbut contrasting episodes. Its climax quotes from Berlioz’ “Te Deum” which was first performed in 1855 in the church of St. Eustache – actually in the district of Les Halles. A gradual crescendo, initiated by the percussion, prefaces the opening material proper, and the work ends with a backward glance at the first movement before closing with the final bars of the Berlioz “Te Deum”.

Ellerby’s earliest essay for wind, the evocative Tuba Concerto (1988, Maecenas), has been followed by Dona Nobis Pacem (1995, Maecenas) a heartfelt elegy for the heroes of the second World War, commissioned by Colin Touchin for the Birmingham Schools Wind Orchestra and premiered at Symphony Hall, Birmingham. More ambitious is the Symphony (1997, Studio), commissioned for the 1997 BASBWE Conference by Kent Youth Wind Orchestra, and a wind version of his Euphonium Concerto (1996, Studio), while his Venetian Spells (1997 Studio) recalls the pastiche qualities of Paris Sketches, evoking the music of Gabrieli, Vivaldi and other Italian masters with telling use of both harp and harpsichord. New World Dances (1998, Studio) is a transcription of a brass band original, designed for a youth band tour of USA and readily accessible, and more recently there seems to have been a divergence between his more serious works, Meditations and Via Crucis, and the lighter side which includes the Clarinet Concerto and the educational piece The Big Easy Suite. He is now editor for Studio Music.