Mike Batt on Symphony No.1, 'Ukraine'

Mike Batt's first symphony, Ukraine, was released on his own label, Dramatico, on 1st June, with the composer conducting the London Symphony Orchestra. I enjoyed speaking to Batt about his first full-scale classical work, how the potential audience might make judgements before they even listen to it and the long musical journey that has led him to this point. There's much more to this music than you perhaps expect, and our conversation revealed the music lover and musician at the heart of everything Batt has achieved. We're excited to be welcoming him to Presto Music for a listening and Q&A session next month, but here's some insights to whet your appetite for one of the most welcome surprises of the year so far.

It was a surprise to me, as I think it will be to quite a few Presto customers, to see a symphony by you. After reading around it, I can see that there's a whole history of classical music going right back to when you were a child.

My first attraction and what really got me involved in wanting to know more about music was getting a copy of Schubert's Ninth Symphony from Concert Hall Record Club. I was one of four kids living in Bradford and the leaflet that came through the door said you can have four free classical EPs; in very small print underneath it said you have to pay twenty six shillings, which was about one pound nearly £1.50, to buy a full album, which was a lot of money.

The first of the EPs were things like Brahms's Hungarian Dances, a Gilbert and Sullivan one, a Swan Lake, I think, but certainly when I had to pick my first symphony it was almost like putting a pin in a map.

I chose Schubert's Ninth Symphony conducted by Carl Schuricht with the Stuttgart Radio Orchestra. When my parents were out on a Saturday morning with the rest of the kids, I'd hang behind and stay at home and sheepishly, secretly put the gramophone on and conduct this pile of furniture which had little notices all over it saying violins on the left, cellos on the right, oboes in the middle… I didn't have a score, but that's when I realised what I wanted to do. At the same time my granny also sent me an album called Music for Frustrated Conductors, which had a little cartoon of a conductor on it, and featured all sorts of popular classics. I read in an interview, years later, that Simon Rattle said that same record is what got him into conducting.

Of course he went fully into conducting, but with me regularly conducting Schubert's Ninth until it was perfect (which of course it was immediately having been already conducted by someone else) my whole world was blown apart by The Beatles suddenly jumping out of the woodwork in 1962, so I was a classical fan but with very wide tastes beyond that.

I loved other things like, for example Wagner’s Siegfried Idyll. I wasn't much into opera but I liked his instrumental work, and the orchestra became in my mind this ever-changing body, which persuaded me that I just had to be involved in orchestral music. Whether it would ever be my career or not I didn't know, but by the time I got to seventeen or eighteen I pretty much had the choice to go to Sandhurst and join the army or to strike out and try to be a songwriter and musician. I did a lot in the cadets at school but learned more about arranging and composition, so I decided to take the plunge and went into the music business. I've had the joy of being involved in many different sorts of music, but one thing I've always come back to is the orchestra.

You orchestrated the songs for the Classic Blue album by Justin Hayward of The Moody Blues, and then you wrote the musical, The Hunting of the Snark.

I did The Hunting of the Snark in 1984, with the London Symphony Orchestra - funnily enough the same band that I'm working with on this symphony, and I worked with them quite a lot in those days. In fact, just the day before the session in November last year, somebody pointed out to me that it was fifty years to the month that I had first conducted the LSO.

I knew some of the musicians because they would play in my freelance orchestra, and they said why don’t you come and work with us, so I did, and I said before we do that, come and play on one of my records. So, they came and played on a Wombles song called The Myths and Legends of King Merton Womble and His Journey to the Centre of the Earth, for the Superwombles album. It was a bit of a mickey-take on Rick Wakeman and two of his very grand projects, which was fun.

What made now the right time for a symphony?

To be honest, I looked at the watch of life and realised that it would one day stop ticking so I needed to get on with it.

Some of my early albums, which have a rhythm section on them and some brilliant rhythm players, also have the orchestra, and one or two people said some of the orchestral sounds had a Bartók or Stravinsky-esque feeling to them, and I guess that might be because that’s among the wide range of classical music I like – up there with Vaughan Williams, Elgar and all the way back to Bach.

I could maybe have written a symphony in my early twenties, but I was too busy jumping about in a Womble costume, and I look back on it unashamedly and with pride, because I’ve met a couple of well known classical names, far more ‘up there’ than me, who have told me they only got into the music because of the Wombles. I’m very pleased to have been part of their journey.

Obviously, I’m bracing myself for that headline, ‘Womble Writes Symphony!’, and there will be some people who will look down their noses a bit, but I have written purely orchestral music before, including the orchestral suite from Watership Down in five movements. I love the whole thing of performing with an orchestra and exchanging energy with them.

How did you approach writing the symphony, and reflecting the title, Ukraine?

Before I sat down to write the first movement, I set myself some parameters - and one which I didn't stick to was that each movement would be precisely ten minutes. I actually thought that was quite a good thing to have exactly symmetrical movements, and I nearly did it, but by the time I was going through the first movement, I realised the form it was taking didn't require it to be longer than seven and a half minutes, and it would have been just stupid to have extended it for the sake of it.

So, the general principle was that I mapped out four movements and I did write an order of thoughts which I followed as I composed the piece, without writing any sketches at all - no melodic sketches, no harmonic sketches. I didn’t want it to sound like a wedge of film music that described certain scenes. It’s wonderful to be asked to do this to please a director, but with a symphony you’re making a statement of your own and the only pictures you’re helped by might be ones in your own mind, and your own feelings and responses if there’s a title.

The second movement opens quite directly with the sound of the air raid sirens, and I thought this would probably take a while to discuss with the players how I wanted the portamento to sound, but the minute I started the rehearsal, the first time they played it, they were all absolutely as one voice. It jumped off the page; I'd written it as I wanted it, they'd interpreted it in the way I wanted it to be played and it speaks to their complete professionalism. It's quite violent the second movement, and if we had longer we could get into talk about the tonality, atonality and tension in the music, and how I think very often when you create a sound which is unpleasant it should you make you feel uncomfortable as a contrast to the more melodic sections.

I can hear hints of Shostakovich in the way you use the tension between notes when its appropriate but not for its own sake. I also hear an original voice throughout the symphony, and no sense of the pastiche that some listeners might expect.

I'm very pleased that to hear that. Funnily enough, I ran into a friend of mine who is a broadcaster and he said 'I really like the symphony - Shostakovich?'.  I mean I've been on this earth for seventy-seven years, and I don't think I've ever really sat down and listened to Shostakovich. I've been looking the other way and I've been too busy listening to Prokofiev and Stravinsky, and of course Beethoven and any other number of composers that we're all influenced by and love. I immediately went home and started listening to Shostakovich and I thought wow, he's copying me! But obviously I'm not putting myself on his level.

We talked further about Mike’s interesting use of harmony, the wide influences evident in the music, his huge pleasure at bringing the score to life with the professionalism of the LSO and the importance of crowdfunding in bringing this project to life – much more than there is space to share here. 

We are excited to be welcoming Mike to Presto Music on 23rd July for a more in-depth conversation, a play-through using our in-store hi-fi range and a Q&A session about the symphony. Join us for the opportunity to appreciate the inspirational depths of the symphony and the musicianship of a composer with a musical voice that deserves to be heard.