The Theatre Miniatures are a set of five pieces that can be combined into a suite or played on their own. Ever pragmatic, Adrian had in mind their use as light programme-fillers, prêt-à-porter pieces for any occasion. The orchestra can select their own wardrobe.

Some of the set are theatre cues that have been repurposed and given a new lease of life, expanded and rearranged for symphony orchestra.

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Programme note

Intermezzo was originally composed for Ben Power’s Husbands and Sons, an adaptation of D.H. Lawrence’s mining plays, staged in the National Theatre in 2015. Director Marianne Elliott describes it as ‘a story about the uncomplicated identity of mining men clashing with the trapped, frustrated and aspiring souls of the women they leave behind.’

Adrian’s initial task was to capture that yearning and unfulfilled aspiration in the women, their desire to escape the drudgery of the everyday and find adventure. Intermezzo is the result of essaying the right style, language and romanticism to express such intimate themes. In the end, the play’s music was constrained to darker tones, so this material did not get used.

The concert version of the Intermezzo is a rhapsody that plunges you straight into a maelstrom of repressed emotion. The writing recalls Mahler or Strauss, with the same elastic timing. Wide melodic intervals — reaching from low note to high — give romantic reach to the phrases, while chromatic harmonies add to the sense of unrest and inner turmoil.

Within just a few pages of score, Intermezzo gives us a glimpse of a rich internal world, the collective vulnerability and rawness of emotion that lay beneath a life of hardship and Edwardian mores.

- Words by Jon James

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(extract perf. BBC Philharmonic Orchestra cond. Michael Seal)