Nigel Hess Composer
Born and brought up in Weston-supermare, Somerset, Nigel Hess’s career as a composer has spanned nearly 50 years. His work includes well-known music for television (Wycliffe, Vanity Fair), theatre (the Royal Shakespeare Company), film (Ladies in Lavender) and the concert hall. His latest recording, The Way of Light, on Orchid Classics, features a selection of stirring concert works for voices, brass bands and orchestras.
I’m told I started early as a pianist – at two-and-a-half, I heard Eric Coates’s The Dam Busters March on the radio, picked out the tune and added some harmonies! Musical talent must have skipped a generation: my great-aunt was Myra Hess, the pianist who, from
1939 onwards, entertained war-weary Londoners with her one-shilling concerts in the National Gallery. She died when I was 12, but I remember visiting her St John’s Wood home (the lawn was shaped like a piano lid) and playing for her. Years later I was asked to write a show about the concerts, which became Admission: One Shilling, performed by Patricia Routledge and Piers Lane. Myra will always be associated with her arrangement of BACH’S Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring which she recorded three times, and I include a tribute on my new recording.
I’m a Somerset lad and went to Westonsuper-mare Grammar School. A young music teacher called John Brock had just joined the staff, and I owe him a lot. He took us to the Proms to hear WALTON’S Belshazzar’s Feast, which knocked me sideways, and I’ve been a Walton devotee ever since. My wife and I recently visited Walton’s home on Ischia where he wrote so much unmistakably ‘English’ music while looking out over the Mediterranean. I’m told my music has an ‘Englishness’ to it too, however that can be defined.
Encouraged by John Brock, I went to St Catharine’s College, Cambridge to read music. I joined the Footlights at the same time as performers like Griff Rhys Jones, Douglas Adams and Clive Anderson and found myself writing music to impossible deadlines – a taste of things to come. In my final year, I travelled to London to play keyboards on a little-known show called Jesus Christ Superstar at the Palace Theatre and was soon offered the job of conducting, followed by other West End musicals. An accidental foray into the world of television introduced me to professional composing – those impossible deadlines again – and I’ve been a composer-for-hire ever since.
Another great discovery for me was the music of KORNGOLD. While I was a student in the early 1970s I visited the old Decca studios in West Hampstead and watched Charles Gerhardt and the National Philharmonic record Korngold’s film scores, including The Sea Hawk. This was just at the beginning of the Korngold ‘renaissance’, and those scores are part of a direct line to composers like John Williams and Hans Zimmer – music that can stand on its own, even when separated from its original inspiration.
I’ve always wanted my music to communicate – almost every commission I get now asks for ‘good tunes’! The Prince of Wales apparently enjoyed my music for the film Ladies in Lavender and asked me to write a piano concerto in honour of his grandmother. Lang Lang gave the première in a beautiful church near Sandringham, and the occasion reminded me of an unforgettable performance of FAURÉ’S Requiem in the chapel of King’s College, Cambridge conducted by David Willcocks. I remember Fauré’s music floating up from beyond the choir screen with the sun shining through those glorious stained glass windows. It was simply perfection.
I first heard MAHLER’S Resurrection Symphony via conductor Otto Klemperer’s recording with the soprano Elisabeth Schwarzkopf. For me, it’s always been a go-to piece for solace and rejuvenation.
The final movement seems to transcend what an artist is capable of creating and, at that level, composing becomes a mystery. And when Myra Hess played those wartime concerts, she understood the power of music to heal us. It’s happening again in these deeply troubled times.