Overture Di Ballo

Unlike most of his overtures, Sullivan’s Di Ballo is not linked to any of his operettas. Indeed, at the time he wrote it he had composed comparatively little for the stage. No one listening to its first performance, at the Birmingham Festival in 1870, could have predicted that such a brilliantly promising score would be its 28-year-old composer’s last orchestral work. But such was the unrelenting nature of his collaboration with W.S. Gilbert, which was just about to begin, and such was the Victorian demand for oratorio, it did in fact turn out that Sullivan had no time for purely orchestral music in the remaining thirty years of his life.

The young composer’s evident enthusiasm for Mendelssohn was not unusual in this country in 1870. What was unusual was his gift for melody, which flowed so abundantly that this lively fantasy on a fashionable ballroom scene is never short of fresh and attractive ideas. It begins - after the seven opening chords and teasing anticipations of the first theme on woodwind and strings - with a graceful polonaise on violins accompanied by elegant horns. The main part of the overture, however, is based largely on waltz tunes, which Sullivan develops and transforms with unfailing wit and technical resource. Instead of tamely recalling the polonaise at the end, as his audience might have expected, he breaks into an exhilarating gallop, urging his material into ever more zestful rhythms as he approaches the closing bars.

Gerald Larner ©2006