The Orchestra Leighton Lucas
(Leader, Ronald Good )
Conductor, Leighton Lucas
It was Edwin Evans who suggested the collaboration of Bax, Bridge, Ireland, and Goossens in an arrangement (for voice and piano) of the French folk song ' Cadet Rousselle' for Mile. Collignon, the diseuse. Each composer was responsible for a number of verses, and afterwards Eugene Goossens orchestrated the various versions as a set of variations.
' Cadet Rousselle ' is hinted at in the music Erik Satie wrote for the ballet Relâche, produced in Paris in 1924. It was Satie's last work, and a very eccentric affair. When the fashionable audience arrived at the theatre for the heavily publicised ' first night ' they found the doors closed, relâche being a term used in France to mean No Performance. The ballet was actually produced three nights later; it had a cinematographic episode devised by René Clair, and dances with wheelbarrows and revolving doors.
Milhaud's Carnaval de Londres, which dates from 1945, contains allusions to The Beggar's Opera, Chelsea, the Thames, and the Tower of London.
Harold Rutland