The composer Christopher Ball was born in Wigan on 7th July 1936 (coincidentally he shared his birthday with another distinguished personality of the recorder world: Michala Petri), and died of Alzheimer’s disease on 7th April 2022 at Denville Hall, Northwood, London. He had no fewer than six musical careers, successively as clarinettist, orchestral conductor, recorder player, publisher, arranger and composer, as well as becoming a distinguished and award-winning photographer. He also taught recorder at the Royal Academy of Music.
Ball started composing in his teens (there were early pieces for the piano and the clarinet), but like many other composers of his generation he was disillusioned by the William Glock ethos, and felt keenly that the type of modern music that he personally enjoyed was not welcome in the rarefied avant-garde musical climate of the ’60s and 70s. It is only since the last decade of the 20th century that his flair for composition blossomed. He produced a clutch of works for his own instrument, the recorder, that are much loved and have justifiably taken their place in the instrument’s repertoire. In addition to a very substantial and delightful recorder concerto (The Piper of Dreams), there are concertos for flute, oboe, clarinet, horn, violin and cello (2) and much light orchestral and chamber music. The composer himself explained the late start of his composing activities by pointing out that he was totally involved in the serious “classical” side of music-making and it was only when he realised that other composers had been continuing to write light classical music in a traditional style, aimed at a much wider audience, that the urge to create returned.
Both of Ball’s parents were lovers of classical music: his father began his working life trained as a piano tuner and his mother had reached a high technical standard as an amateur pianist. Ball used to play the piano by ear and, on coming home from school, would try to pick out tunes and songs he had been taught in music lessons. This led to his mother sending him for piano lessons. Later, having become intoxicated by the beautiful sound of the clarinet in George Butterworth’s The Banks of Green Willow (which he heard on the BBC radio programme Children’s Hour as the introductory music to a play), he gave his parents no peace until they bought him a clarinet.
As his skill on this instrument soon far overtook his ability on the piano, he began lessons with Michael Saxton, who played with the Yorkshire Symphony Orchestra and had studied at the Royal College of Music with the famous Frederick Thurston. Ball always felt immense gratitude to him for his meticulous early training, and particularly for his concentration on tone quality, breath control and lip development, by the practice of playing long notes. He became fanatical about the clarinet and through his school attended the regular weekly concerts of the Yorkshire Symphony Orchestra at Leeds Town Hall, where he would sit on the platform seats behind the orchestra, gaining valuable insights into the technique of the conductor, the quality and idiosyncrasies of the various orchestral instruments and the rapport between conductor and players.
There was a good student orchestra at Roundhay School (in which he played first clarinet) alongside future eminent professionals such as the violinists Barry Wilde (who led the orchestra) and the late Duncan Druce (subsequently to become a violinist in The Fires of London). The music master at the school, who also had a potent influence on the young boy, was Jack Longstaff, a skilled arranger for the school orchestra who was later to visit Manchester to see him conducting the BBC Northern Symphony Orchestra.
At the age of 16 Ball left school to study the clarinet under Norman MacDonald (first clarinet in the BBC Northern Orchestra), with piano as second study, at the Royal Manchester College of Music. His scholarship was for four years and during that time he was awarded the Hiles Gold Medal for Orchestral Playing and gained the Performers Diploma with Distinction, the examining panel being headed by Sir John Barbirolli; this was despite being plagued by mouth ulcers from about the age of eleven (which ultimately forced him to give up playing the clarinet).
His contemporaries at the RMCM included Harrison Birtwistle (a fellow clarinet student), Peter Maxwell Davies, Alexander Goehr, David Ellis (later Head of Music for BBC North), the legendary pianist John Ogdon and Rodney Friend (who later became leader of the New York Phil and the BBC Symphony Orchestra as well as a concert soloist). He particularly remembered playing at the Manchester Contemporary Music Society (a joint venture of the RMCM and Humphrey Procter-Gregg’s University music department), and highlights of those concerts for him were his performances of the Clarinet Sonata by Hindemith and the Sonatinas by Honegger and Malcolm Arnold (whose own popular and entertaining music has been a potent influence on Chris’s own works). Whilst at the College he gave several performances of both the Brahms and Mozart clarinet quintets, one of which was heard (and bravoed) by Sir John Barbirolli; this led to an invitation to perform with the Halle Orchestra, which he did on a freelance basis throughout the rest of his time at the College and beyond.
Eventually Chris moved to London in order to take up a scholarship to study with Jack Brymer at the Royal Academy of Music, but after a year Brymer resigned due to pressure of work; this happily coincided with the return from America of the equally distinguished Reginald Kell, who was invited by the Academy to take up the clarinet professorship. Later Kell was followed by Gervase de Peyer, so Chris received lessons from the three leading clarinettists of the time. During his three years at the Academy Chris also started to study conducting under Maurice Miles, the former conductor of the Yorkshire Symphony Orchestra, and later he won a Gulbenkian Scholarship for the Advanced Conducting Course at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama. Here he won the Ricordi Conducting Prize in his first year and took part in masterclasses with Pierre Monteux, Constantin Silvestri, Sir Charles Mackerras, Norman del Mar and (on TV) with Sir George Solti.
Meanwhile, back in Manchester, the BBC was starting up its apprentice conductor scheme. He was appointed to the post of apprentice conductor with the BBC Northern Symphony Orchestra in 1964, conducting frequent concerts and broadcasts. Shortly afterwards, Meredith Davies was responsible for Ball’s appointment for one season as Assistant Conductor of the Vancouver Symphony Orchestra. This was a very happy period in his life, conducting standard symphonic repertoire in a scenic and delightful city. On his return to the UK, he was immediately appointed as one of the conductors of the Royal Ballet, conducting seasons on tour both in this country and abroad as well as seasons at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden. This was a post he found very congenial, as ballet had always been one of his interests and he was very familiar with the repertoire. However, the Royal Ballet’s financial crisis in 1970 resulted in the touring company being reduced to a third of its previous size and, in addition to the loss of many dancers, economies had to be made in the musical staff, including conductors. In this way his time as a ballet conductor came to an end.
This was the era of the early music revival and both Musica Reservata (under John Sothcott and John Beckett) and the Early Music Consort (under David Munrow) were starting to make their names and attracting new and enthusiastic audiences. The striking and unfamiliar repertoire and colourful instrumentation appealed greatly to Ball, who decided to form his own early music group and became almost a resident customer at Richard Wood’s Early Music Shop in Bradford. Consequently he spurned two invitations to return to ballet conducting and spent some considerable winnings from commercial competitions on buying crumhorns, shawms, rauschpfeifen, rackets, recorders and the like.
In common with many early musicians of the time (including David Munrow, and indeed the present writer) he was entirely self-taught on the recorder, but his virtuosity and breath control stood him in good stead, and he founded the Praetorius Consort with a group of like-minded professionals including the oboist and recorder player Paul Arden-Taylor, who became a close friend and whose company Dinmore Records issued numerous recordings of Ball’s music, particularly the concertos, which are still available.
In the early days the Consort gave some six London concerts a year and toured both in the UK and abroad. The group had a heyday of some 10 years until about 1982 when the sheer volume of work required for programme planning, the logistics, changing fashions in early music and the increasing number of other early music groups made him turn to more rewarding fields. However, the colourful rendition of Praetorius dance tunes and other popular items from the Praetorius Consort’s repertoire led to the reissue to great acclaim of these classic recordings on a worldwide basis.
Ball’s renewed interest in arrangement and original composition was probably rekindled by the many arrangements that he had to make (and write out by hand) for the recitals of the Praetorius Consort, but the determining factor was the remarkable success of King Henry’s Consort. This record of “renaissance pop” was the brainchild of the producer Philip Love of Eden Studios. Ball’s collaborator in this project was the lutenist Michael Lewin who arranged five genuine tracks of Renaissance music whilst Ball himself composed seven more in Renaissance style. This recording was taken up by Terry Wogan, Gloria Hunniford, Jimmy Young and other radio producers and was on the airwaves two or three times a day for several months. Distribution problems however ultimately conspired against the record climbing to the top of the charts.
As a result of hearing King Henry’s Consort, a producer for BBC Radio 2 contacted Ball with the request that he should prepare arrangements for the BBC Midland Radio Orchestra, and during the following decade Ball regularly came into the Birmingham studios to conduct (and often play in) his own arrangements and original light orchestral compositions, frequently featuring recorders and early instruments with the BBC orchestra. Sadly, the BBC had a policy at the time not to credit arrangers on air or in the Radio Times, but the many pieces that resulted were broadcast frequently over a period of some 10 years. Recordings do however survive and it is to be hoped that one day these can be issued commercially as a testament to his skills and imagination as an arranger and orchestrator.
Original composition began in earnest with the substantial Recorder Concerto, written in 1995, and following the success of this Ball wrote as a companion piece an Oboe Concerto for the skills of Paul Arden-Taylor, who was equally adept on the recorder, and who is the soloist in the commercial recording of both concertos. The Oboe Concerto does in fact make use of a setting of John Masefield’s Sea Fever that Ball composed at the age of 11. As well as original works for the recorder (all published by Peacock Press), and numerous recorder arrangements, other compositions include two works for wind trio (5 Bagatelles and 4 Dances), a wind quintet (Scenes from a Comedy), the haunting A Summer Day, Adderbury in Spring, The Coming of Summer, Autumn Landscape, Christmas at the Rookery and Celtic Moods – all for orchestra, in addition to the concertos.
An abiding interest was photography – Ball won the Zenith Photographer of the Year competition in 1971, with a spectacular picture of a snarling tiger, which was published in photographic magazines worldwide. Other striking images appear on his website: http://www.christopherballcomposer.com/
Asked about his love of the recorder, Ball says that this began in his schooldays, although there were no lessons in recorder playing at his school. He played recorder in the incidental music to Shakespeare’s The Tempest and Twelfth Night in school productions and although his chief instrument was the clarinet, his love of the recorder lingered on and eventually led to the founding of the London Baroque Trio which flourished alongside the Praetorius Consort in the 70s and ’80s. He played on many occasions in this group using an original Bressan treble recorder of circa 1710 which was kindly loaned to him for 10 years by Michael Uridge, after he had heard Ball’s debut with the Trio at the Wigmore Hall, in which Chris had played a copy of the same instrument by Hans Coolsma.
On a personal note, for me he wrote From the Hebrides, for recorder and piano (or string orchestra), which I premiered with Stephen Bettaney in its piano version at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, in 2005, and, in 2003, A Cheerful Little Piece and Homage to Dvorak, both for recorder and piano. The composer said that these two short pieces were intended to form part of a Sonatina or Suite, though sadly the other movements failed to materialise. The titles are editorial but are adapted from information in letters from the composer. Both pieces stand well on their own, and are now published as tributes to Chris.
Chris was predeceased by his long-time partner Roy Evans.
Tribute written by John Turner, October 2022
