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About
John Arthur Lanchbery OBE (15 May 1923 - 27 February 2003) was an English-Australian composer and conductor, famous for his ballet arrangements. He served as the Principal Conductor of the Royal Ballet from 1959 to 1972, Principal Conductor of the Australian Ballet from 1972 to 1977, and Director of the American Ballet Theatre from 1978 to 1980. Although he resigned from the position of Director of the Royal Ballet in 1972, he continued to conduct regularly for the Company until 2001.
Lanchbery worked with Sir Frederick Ashton, Sir Kenneth MacMillan, Dame Margot Fonteyn and Rudolf Nureyev in addition to his lifelong friends Peter Stanley Lyons and Kenneth Spring.
Lanchbery was widely considered (including by Nureyev) to be the greatest conductor of his time, and to be ‘a conductor and music director of unmatched experience’ who was ‘directly responsible for raising the status and the standards of musical performance'. Maina Gielgud, Artistic Director of Australian Ballet, stated that "He [Lanchbery] is not only the finest conductor for dance of his generation and probably well beyond". One critic wrote that ‘the music was always on its best behaviour’ when Lanchbery was conducting.
He was also famous for his re-adaptation of canonical works.
Musical career
Conductor of London Metropolitan Ballet and Sadler's Wells Theatre Ballet: 1948 - 1959
While Lanchbery working in the music press, he was recommended to apply for the post of Conductor of the Metropolitan Ballet. He obtained the position and made his debut with them at Edinburgh in 1948. Two years later the orchestra collapsed for lack of funds. However, working with choreographer Celia Franca, Lanchbery wrote The Eve of St Agnes (the story was based on John Keats' poem of the same name), one of the first commissioned ballets to be shown on BBC television. He composed film scores for Eric Robinson before joining the Sadler's Wells Theatre Ballet (later the Royal Ballet touring company) in 1951, with whom he proceeded to orchestrate, in 1953, the first professional ballet choreographed by Kenneth MacMillan: Somnambulism whose music was composed with music by Stan Kenton. Lanchbery also orchestrated The House of Birds (La Casa de los Pájaros) in 1955, with original music by Federico Mompou.
Principal Conductor of Royal Ballet: 1959 - 1972
He served as Principal Conductor of the Royal Bellet from 1959 from 1972. He arranged La fille mal gardée (original music by Ferdinand Hérold and others), to choreography by Frederick Ashton, for the Royal Ballet in 1960. Lanchbery's delightful re-working also included some Donizetti and much of his own invention. This work includes the famous Clog Dance used for many years as a theme tune for Home This Afternoon on BBC radio.
In addition to the revenue from his recordings, Lanchbery had his income supplemented by the copyright he earned from his orchestral arrangements, which were used by ballet companies all over the world. With Aston, he composed The Two Pigeons; A Month in the Country; and The Dream, one of the most critically acclaimed ballet versions of A Midsummer Night's Dream.
In 1966 Rudolf Nureyev asked Lanchbery to re-write Ludwig Minkus's Don Quixote. Arguably, Don Quixote was not a satisfactory ballet score until Lanchbery re-arranged it, although Minkus's original version has twice been recorded complete in recent years.
Although he resigned from the position of Director of the Royal Ballet in 1972, he continued to conduct regularly for the Company until 2001.
Principal Conductor of Australian Ballet: 1972 - 1977
Notable successes for Lanchbery included the arrangement of the Liszt music for Kenneth MacMillan's stormy multi-act Mayerling, which premiered at Covent Garden in 1978, and the arrangement of the Franz Lehár score for the first full-length ballet production of The Merry Widow for the Australian Ballet in 1976. In 1970 he arranged the score for the ballet film The Tales of Beatrix Potter. His sources were many and varied, including the operas of Michael William Balfe and Arthur Sullivan. He also arranged the music and conducted the orchestra for Nijinsky in 1980.
Lanchbery was the first to convert operas into ballets (The Tales of Hoffmann, The Merry Widow, Die Fledermaus), and he also wrote music for some British films of the 1960s, including Deadly Nightshade (1953) and Colonel March Investigates (1955). He was involved in The Turning Point (1977), starring Mikhail Baryshnikov and Leslie Browne, and his score for Evil Under the Sun (1982) was based on songs by Cole Porter, a memorable rendition of "You're The Top" by Diana Rigg. He also wrote scores for two silent film classics: D. W. Griffith's The Birth of a Nation and John Ford's The Iron Horse.
Director of American Ballet Theatre: 1978 - 1980
The American Ballet Theatre used 14 Lanchbery arrangements between 1962 and 2002: he was the Musical Director of the Company between 1978 and 2002. Their productions included his arrangement, for Natalia Makarova, Minkus's La Bayadère in 1980. Lanchbery arranged more than 30 pieces by Franz Liszt for Macmillan's Mayerling, which premiered at Covent Garden in 1978, and arranged another successful re-working of Minkus for Nureyev's production of La Bayadère in 1991. Nureyev considered Lanchbery to be the greatest conductor of his time, but critics who disliked innovation disliked Lanchbery's tampering with original scores.