Another larger than life figure in the field of “humour in music” is Gerard Hoffnung. He organised a series of three festivals in the Royal Festival Hall – the third of which was coincidentally on my 8th birthday! I did have the CD set of these concerts, but somewhere along the line I loaned it to someone and they obviously enjoyed it a lot as well, since it was never returned 😁
It is one of the pieces from that third concert that I am sharing today.
Hoffnung’s humour relied quite a lot on the visuals – so any recording misses some of the point and, sadly, there seems to be very little in the way of film records of the concerts. So you do have to exercise your imagination a little to imagine what was being seen.
There are a few such moments in this link – but most of the humour comes from the music and libretto itself and so it works better than most as audio only. I should explain that the reason that the audience laugh at the first chorus entry was due to the fact that this was a bit of an “in joke” for those attending the concert. The programmed item immediately before this one was Sir William Walton conducting (armed only with a fly swat) an excerpt from his choral work “Belshazzar’s Feast” – which after a big build up consisted of a single chord and the chorus singing “slain”. The first choir entry in this recording is a sort of “tribute” to that….😃
We have all heard many Oratorios – but this is a Horrortorio, composed by Joseph Horovitz (in many styles)