The music of Christopher Ball has been welcomed as being the continuing traditional English style of Elgar, Vaughan Williams and Finzi but with its own individual voice and orchestral sound.
The Violin Concerto clearly displays these characteristics of mood and melody with its range of emotions from the poetic to the passionate.
The two orchestral items: Celtic Twilight and From the Hebrides reveal a strong celtic influence and the ability to produce a stream of memorable melody.
The 5 Bagatelles for wind trio are in a contrasting style described by MusicWeb international as ‘affable and swaggeringly cheery music… witty and utterly attractive’.
Christopher Ball has 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 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 in the last fifteen years or so that his flair for composition has blossomed, and he has produced a clutch of works for the recorder that are much loved and have justifiably taken their place in the instrument's repertoire (as well as other chamber and orchestral music). The composer himself explains this gap in 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.
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