LONDON: Poems from Roald Dahl’s Dirty Beasts have a musical cadence, which may explain why, after the success of stage versions of Matilda and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, three of them are being set to music to introduce young people to the orchestra.
The anteater, which gobbles a spoiled rich boy’s aunt, the flying toad that can turn itself into a roly-poly bird to escape frog-loving French gourmands, and the girl with a bag of sweets who sits on a porcupine and has to have quills removed by a dentist, have been orchestrated by composer Benjamin Wallfisch for a February premiere at London’s Southbank Centre.
“In these times when kids have so many options, I was hoping with this piece aimed at people under the age of ten, to inspire them to explore the orchestra,” said Wallfisch, 34, who comes from a distinguished British musical family.
The premiere will take place during Southbank’s Imagine Children’s Festival 2014, which features a major strand of Dahl tributes to coincide with the 50th anniversary of the publication of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.
Luke Kelly, Dahl’s grandson who helps direct his estate, said the late Welsh-born author and one-time fighter pilot had a knack for writing works that lend themselves to adaptations.
“The characters are so boiled down and the humour is so present [which is why] they translate to many mediums, whether it’s musicals, films or operas,” said the 27-year-old Kelly.
Wallfisch has scored movies ranging from the Norse action film Hammer of the Gods, with an all-electronic music track, to a lush, Vaughan Williams-esque score for Summer in February, set in an artists’ colony in the English county of Cornwall.
“In the 1980s, there were all these amazingly great pieces of music being written for film and I tried to understand and get my head around them. After we would come back from Star Wars or Indiana Jones, I would go to the piano and try to figure out what was going on there” in the film soundtrack.
“It does for me what music does best — it hits you hard emotionally,” Wallfisch said.
Published in The Express Tribune, February 3rd, 2014.
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