Buried treasure: Red Squirrel's plans for championing forgotten operas

The bawdy humour of Malcolm Arnold’s The Dancing Master was considered too strong for the BBC when he wrote it in 1952, but today the composer is having a posthumous last laugh, with a recent recording nominated for a BBC Music Magazine award and the comedy’s first-ever fully professional production scheduled for the Buxton International Festival this summer.

But perhaps the racy opera’s greatest achievement lies in the future, as it is among neglected works that have provided the catalyst for a new company, formed to revive the wealth of neglected music for the theatre.

Conductor John Andrews has won critical acclaim for his work with English Touring Opera, Garsington Opera and Opera Holland Park, and for his recordings of works rescued from obscurity, including Thomas Arne’s The Judgment of Paris and Arthur Sullivan’s Light of the World. It was making his Resonus recording of The Dancing Master last year that finally made him decide that he could bring music scholars alongside performers and 'make magical things happen' in a new company.

Named Red Squirrel, inspired by the endangered creature that digs up long-buried tasty morsels, Andrews sees the company as a conduit, forging collaborations between performers, opera houses, recording labels and scholars in an effort to bring music written for the English-language theatre back to life.

'I’m not arriving with great financial resources,' he says candidly, 'but I do think I can bring people together to revive works on a project-by-project basis.' He says he would seek to match the piece to appropriate sources of funding, pointing out that foundations exist to support theatrical endeavours in English and that individual donors often choose to help fund the work of particular composers.

The Covid-compliant Buxton performances of The Dancing Master will feature most of the singers who appear on the recording, including Eleanor Dennis, Catherine Carby, Fiona Kimm and Graeme Broadbent. It will be directed by Susan Moore, who directed a studio production of the one-act opera at the Malcolm Arnold Festival in 2018, using a four-player score reduction produced by Andrews. It was working on that production that impelled Andrews to make the full-score recording.

For Buxton, Moore has come up with a novel idea for the staging. 'It’s extraordinary to think that Arnold’s piece was considered too risqué, when only a few years later the public were lapping up the double-entendres of Round the Horne and the Carry On films,' says Andrews. 'The libretto does read rather like a saucy script, so we are going to set the piece, which is actually a Restoration comedy, in a radio studio.'

Andrews and his co-director, the agent John Owen, see Buxton as a springboard for the future. While he won’t go into specifics just yet, he has two further recording projects in the pipeline and is hoping to revive works by Malcolm Williamson, John Joubert, Lennox Berkeley and Ethel Smythe, among others. He is also keen to tackle the dramatic cantatas of Amy Beach.

In 2016, Andrews recorded Sullivan’s incidental music to Shakespeare’s The Tempest and Macbeth with the BBC Concert Orchestra, and would one day love to bring a full orchestra together with actors to recreate it – an example of Red Squirrel’s mission to combine performers who might not normally collaborate. (The Tempest, Sullivan’s graduation work from the Leipzig Conservatoire, received a rapturous reception in London in 1862 and launched his career.)

The musical archaeology necessary to discover and revive lost or neglected works takes many forms. Some scores are published, but only live on in archives and publishers’ catalogues. For example, The Dancing Master just missed its moment, and lay unperformed at Novello until the Guildhall School of Music and Drama put on a student production in 2015.

Other works languish in libraries in original manuscript form, or were published but the performing material is so old and delicate it is unusable. 'There are people out there who dedicate themselves to producing performable modern editions from these unpromising sources,' says Andrews. 'They are real labours of love.'

Red Squirrel sees itself as an enterprise that can make new art from these buried gems in the spirit of collaboration. Echoing the view of the recently formed industry group, Opera UK, he says: 'The pandemic has shown us that few companies and performers are big enough to act alone. We have to pool our resources and talents and find the funding to make it possible, project by project.'

And besides, all this musical detective work is surely suitable for a conductor who has named his cats Sherlock and Moriarty…

The Dancing Master opens at the Buxton International Festival on 9 July and runs until 22 July. www.buxtonfestival.co.uk/news-