MUSIC

Briton’s ties to Arkansas impetus for kids concert

In 1945, when Caroline Pugh was a child in England, a friend of her parents wrote a piece of music that he “affectionately inscribed ‘To the children of John and Jean Maud: Humphrey, Pamela, Caroline and Virginia, for their edification and entertainment.’”

That family friend was British composer Benjamin Britten, who had dedicated to the siblings a work that proved to be a classic of 20th-century music and a perennial children’s favorite: The Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra.

Now, with Pugh’s 75th birthday on May 29, her husband, Joel Pugh, formerly dean of Little Rock’s Trinity Episcopal Cathedral, is, in a sense, giving the well-loved work to her a second time - and to Arkansas children as well. It’s a special tribute in the form of a free Arkansas Symphony Orchestra concert at 3 p.m. Sunday in Roosevelt Thompson Auditorium at Central High School in Little Rock.

“In thinking of a birthday present for Caroline, I decided not to give her something, an object, but to give her a performance of this, which had been dedicated to her,” Pugh says. In December 2012, he wrote to Arkansas Symphony Orchestra Music Director and Conductor Philip Mann to persuade him to incorporate the work in the 2013-14 season calendar - 2013 being the centenary of Britten’s birth.

“Joel didn’t have to sell me,” Mann says. “My first reaction was ‘What a beautiful gesture and extraordinary gift to his beloved wife and his community.’ I’m thrilled that Arkansas audiences will hear this piece that has introduced generations to classical music. And it is exciting for me as a musician to have such a direct connection to this ubiquitous and well-loved work.”

Associate Conductor Geoffrey Robson, who also is director of the ASO Youth Orchestra Ensemble, helped shape the program. Nancy Rousseau, principal of Central High School, has worked closely with ASO to coordinate the event.

Britten’s Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra is subtitled “Variations and a Fugue on a Theme of Purcell.” The work is based on a rondeau composed by the 17th-century English Baroque composer Henry Purcell. Britten illustrates the personalities of the various instruments of the orchestra by having the theme played first by the whole orchestra and then, in 13 variations, by different sections of instruments. At the end, it returns to Purcell’s original theme. Britten’s Young Person’s Guide is a teaching tool that ranks with Saint-Saens’s Carnival of the Animals and Sergei Prokofiev’s Peter and the Wolf.

Caroline Pugh’s father, John Redcliffe-Maud, was a civil servant, diplomat and master of University College, Oxford. Her mother, as Jean Hamilton, was a concert pianist. The couple became friends with Britten and his lifelong friend, the tenor Peter Pears, during World War II. In 1942, when they met, Britten was working on his groundbreaking opera Peter Grimes. He showed the Mauds the first two acts and they then talked far into the night. Their friendship grew from then on.

Caroline Pugh says her brother, the late Sir Humphrey Maud, also a diplomat, was an accomplished cellist, who found in Britten a musical mentor: “He used to go to their home in the school holidays and Ben and Humphrey would play piano and cello sonatas together. Ben, who loved families - not having children of his own - adopted us as a proxy family. My parents were very touched by his inclusion of [my sister] Pamela’s name in the dedication, as he didn’t know her. She died the day before her fifth birthday, in 1941.”

Caroline Pugh turned from violin to an acting career, performing with the Royal Shakespeare Company and later with the Arkansas Repertory Theatre in Little Rock. In the early 1960s, she met her husband in Oxford.

“You have to be careful when you accept invitations to lunch,” Joel Pugh says. He has roots in Portland, a little burg in Ashley County. The couple came to the state in 1977. After retirement, they lived in Florida and England and returned to Arkansas in 2009.

The Pughs see the Sunday concert as a means of initiating Mann’s vision of having children’s concerts as a regular feature of the orchestra’s season. It’s hard to imagine a better vehicle than the enduring present given to a child by a composer she described later as having had “a generous spirit and a compassionate heart.”

The story of the Arkansas link to Britten’s piece, Mann says, “is a reminder of how connected music can make our world.”

Arkansas Symphony Orchestra Family Concert

3 p.m. Sunday, Roosevelt Thompson Auditorium, Central High School, 1500 S. Park St., Little Rock

Admission: Free (reservations recommended)

(501) 666-1761, Extension 100

arkansassymphony.org/rsvp

Style, Pages 28 on 04/22/2014

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