Patriot - Walton's Henry V score set for Brighton revival

What sort of composer was William Walton? "A great one!", shout his fogeyish fans in the right-wing press, who extol what they call his "Englishness" and sing along with his neo-Elgarian pomp-and-circumstance marches. "A minor one", say those of us for whom that Englishness is mere parochialism. But he had serious professional fans, including the great cellist Gregor Piatigorsky, who commissioned a concerto from him, and the great fiddler Jascha Heifetz, who did the same. Joshua Bell, who now plays the violin concerto, assures me that it is superb: "The melodies are haunting and beautiful, and the violin can really sing. As an American, I felt very honoured to be asked to play this work for Walton's centenary celebrations on the South Bank." In the view of Walton's biographer, Michael Kennedy, two contrary influences were at war in his nature: the spiky 20th-century Stravinsky/Prokofiev strain, and the brooding melancholy of Elgar.

But if there is one work on which pros and antis can all agree, it's the exuberant score that he wrote for Laurence Olivier's Henry V. Indeed, it's impossible to imagine that film without it, with the powerful evocation of the spirit that pervaded its composition in the dark days of 1943. Walton had been exempted from military service on condition that he would write music for films "of national importance". Yet, although he wasn't a pacifist like Britten or Tippett, at the same time he was wary of getting explicitly involved. "I don't believe there is any point in a composer 'joining in' at all, either as a war hero or as avoiding war," he wrote to a friend. "It's nothing to do with us. Tree conservation is much more my line."

Nonetheless he happily buckled down for a piece of war propaganda about the need for security in the era of "Careless Talk Costs Lives", and then composed a score for a film about the designer of the Spitfire aircraft, called The First of the Few. What set him on the right road was an invitation to write the score for a radio project about Christopher Columbus to mark the 450th anniversary of the discovery of the New World: he later dismissed his score as forgettable, but he'd gained a powerful fan in the shape of the actor who played the leading role - Laurence Olivier. For, while fascinated by Walton's "pale green hair, pale green face, palest ice-blue eyes", Olivier was also fascinated by his ability to catch a pugilistic mood, and he decided to rope him in for Henry V.

Walton set to, but when it came to setting the Battle of Agincourt he found the going hard. The original plan was to have the music written first and then fit the acting round it but, in the event, Walton had to write to fit the film. "Henry V is being more of a bloody nuisance than it is possible to believe," he told a friend. "I am by way of recording it on 21 May, but doubt I'm ready," he wrote. "Ten minutes of charging horses, bows, and arrows. How does one distinguish between a crossbow and a longbow, musically speaking?"

His solution to this and other problems was clever, weaving everything from 13th-century French songs and the Fitzwilliam Virginal Book to Canteloube's Chants d'Auvergne into an exultant sequence of musical tableaux that Olivier described as "fantastic", and wondered: "Why it didn't win every award throughout the film industry, I'll never know, because it's the most wonderful score I've ever heard for a film. In fact, for me the music actually made the film; otherwise it would have been a nightmare."

Carl Davis, who will conduct a live performance of this music at the Brighton Dome for the premiere of a newly cleaned print, is also of that persuasion. "Growing up in New York, and as an Anglophile from the start, I always loved Walton's music," he says. "I caught his film scores in tiny arthouse cinemas. When I came to England and started conducting, I often programmed Henry V simply because I liked it so much." But the new print is not the only thing to be premiered at the Dome: the score, as performed that night, will be getting its first outing as well.

The idea began with the Brighton festival's music programmer, Gill Kay, getting so enthused by a live performance of the Prokofiev/Eisenstein collaboration Alexander Nevsky that she cast around for something with which to follow it up. "Suddenly I remembered Olivier's blue plaque in Brighton, and bought an old video of his Henry V, and I realised that the battle scenes could be every bit as effective as the battle on the ice in Nevsky, so I decided to recreate it here." She got the support of Granada, who owned the film, and who also agreed to help sort out the complicated question of performing rights, but other problems seemed intractable. At some points the sound effects, speech, and orchestral music were all on one soundtrack, so that it was impossible to remove elements selectively. More seriously, the original score was lost.

A concert score had been put together, after years of painstaking work, by the film-music specialist Christopher Palmer, but that only accounted for 80 per cent of the original; searching in Europe and America, Kay found other bits of the score in many places, with the last 17 pages coming to light just a month ago. Since Davis had shown, with his orchestral versions of Charlie Chaplin films, that it was possible to scrape the music from a soundtrack and play it live, Kay hired the composer Dominic Sewell to create a performing version from all those disparate elements.

"This is the hardest work I've ever done," sighs Sewell. "The orchestration is not particularly adventurous, but it's effective, and for a film that's what you want. I wasn't a big fan of Walton's when I began, but I have to confess that his work has grown on me. I think this film unleashed something more interesting in him that his concert commissions did."

But how has he coped with those sections of the score where the original music in the soundtrack can't be erased? "By orchestrating it very lightly." When I ask Davis how he'll handle those sections, he laughs like the showman he is: "Pure virtuosity - I promise they will be seamless!" The result will be a new addition to the growing repertoire of scores that can be performed live to accompany their films.

'Laurence Olivier's Henry V', Brighton Dome (01273 709709), 21 May

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