Noticias

Simon Callow, Mark Elder and Gerard McBurney share a love for the music of Ivor Novello, which will be celebrated in a Prom, Glamorous Night

One day over lunch some 15 or more years ago, the trailblazing conductor of the Hallé Orchestra, Mark Elder, the Shostakovich scholar and avant-garde composer Gerard McBurney and I discovered our shared passion for the music of Ivor Novello. The slow-burning result of that encounter is the late-night Prom on 9 August celebrating the work and remarkable life of our hero. All those years ago we pledged that we Must Do Something About Ivor, but exactly what was unclear. Novello was the most successful British musical theatre composer of the 20th century before the meteoric rise of Andrew Lloyd Webber, and one of the great figures of his time. But it would have been hard at that moment in the 1990s to have chosen a less fashionable...