Amazon listing for the CD "Sir William Walton's Film Music Vol. 3: Henry V" Chandos 8892. Recorded in 1990, Christopher Plummer narrates the great speeches from Shakespeare's Henry V, with music from William Walton's score to the 1944 Laurence Olivier film. The May 2, 2003 concert of Henry V was broadcast live on Minnesota Public Radio with internet audio, including a brief interview with Christopher Plummer.

In 1989, Christopher Plummer wrote the forward to "Henry V" for The Guild Shakespeare edition of Shakepeare's plays. The forward is here. Photos from the Henry V CD: Cover photo; Recording Henry V CD in St. Jude's Church, London, 14-15 May 1990.

Michael Lankester, conductor
Christopher Plummer, narrator
Toronto Children’s Chorus
The Toronto Mendelssohn Choir
May 5 & 6 at 8 PM
Roy Thomson Hall

Toronto, Ontario – Michael Lankester conducts these TSO concerts of English pageantry; The Toronto Mendelssohn Choir lend their resplendent voices to these concerts, as well. The first half of the programme is all Handel: The King Shall Rejoice; Water Music Suite No. 2; and Zadok the Priest, which has been performed at every English coronation since George II. The second half of the programme features Christopher Plummer (who has just completed a successful run as King Lear in New York with Canada’s Stratford Festival Company) narrating William Walton’s Henry V: A Musical Scenario after Shakespeare. The Toronto Children’s Chorus is featured in this as well.

The venerable Christopher Plummer has graced the stage at Roy Thomson Hall several times; he first appeared with the TSO in 1992/1993, when he gave the Canadian première of Walton’s Henry V. Since then, he visited the TSO in 1994/1995 performing Grieg: Peer Gynt; 1996/1997 performing Prokofiev: Ivan the Terrible; and 1998/1999 performing Mendelssohn's A Midsummer Night's Dream, all with Michael Lankester conducting. Christopher Plummer has been hailed by The New York Times as "the finest classical actor in North America" and named "a natural successor to Olivier" by the London Observer. An acting career spanning more than 50 years, Arthur Christopher Orme Plummer was born in Toronto in 1929 and grew up in Montreal. Plummer claims that his birth in Toronto was an "accident," since his family is from Montreal. "I always say I left Toronto because the smell of prohibition was in the air," Plummer has said, "and I wanted to go back to Montreal where the liquor flowed freely."

Plummer's distinguished family tree includes former Prime Minister Sir John Abbott, and the acclaimed pianist Janina Fialkowska. His parents divorced when he was very young, and Plummer was raised by his mother in Montreal. He had a cultured childhood -- piano lessons, private school, and frequent visits to the opera, ballet, and theatre. He even considered a career as a concert pianist. As a teenager sneaking into Montreal nightclubs, however, he discovered another style of entertainment. "I would sit at the bar," Plummer recalled in a New York Times interview, "and nurse a beer and watch all the French performers." He saw Frank Sinatra and Judy Garland in the same manner. "I couldn't believe all these wonderful people could hold an audience of drunks." Mr. Plummer’s first Stratford appearance was as Henry V in 1956, which he also performed at the Edinburgh Festival. For his performances on Broadway and London’s West End, on television and on film he has won Tonys, Emmys, Britain’s Evening Standard Award and the US Film Critics Award. He is also the recipient of honorary degrees from New York’s Juilliard School, Ryerson University, and most recently, the University of Toronto. He received the 2001 Governor General’s Award for lifetime achievement and is a Companion of the Order of Canada. He was inducted into the American Theater’s Hall of Fame in 1986 and into Canada’s Walk of Fame in 1998.

These concerts are part of the Acura May Concert Series. May 5th is sponsored by Stikeman Elliott LLP.

Media contact:
Liz Parker
Public Relations Manager
Toronto Symphony Orchestra
416 593-7769 x 310
lparker@tso.ca

One of the happiest memories of the Marriner Era (between 1979 and 1986, when Neville Marriner served as the Minnesota Orchestra's music director), comes from his last season: the British Festival.

Marriner conducted a considerable amount of British music during that season, and enlisted various theater and music organizations. He had held off on that, he said at the time, because he didn't want to do what people expected. Perhaps the most memorable of those programs came during the festival: his recreation of William Walton's score for the 1944 film of Shakespeare's "Henry V," which starred Laurence Olivier. Marriner himself put the piece together -- some of the score had been lost -- and Christopher Plummer did the narration.

For his return to the orchestra's podium this week after an absence of 17 years, Marriner brought brought back both the Walton music and Plummer. This was a nice touch. It's a great score, but the presentation Wednesday night at Orchestra Hall of what is now called "Henry V: A Shakespeare Scenario," was even better this time around. It's a longer piece now, and there's more music. Christopher Palmer is credited with the new version, which Marriner recorded a few years ago.

Sir Neville Marriner, former Minnesota Orchestra music director, returned to the orchestra's podium Wednesday for the first time in 17 years. (Photo by Tom Wallace, Star Tribune)

The texts come mainly from the prologues to the play's five acts, although there are also lines drawn from speeches by Henry and a few other characters, and there's a snippet from "Henry IV, Part II," which includes Henry's cold dismissal of his friend Falstaff ("I know thee not, old man"). Plummer, who is a master at this sort of thing, got just the right chill in Henry's voice at that moment -- it was as if the room froze up -- in contrast to Falstaff's lonely desperation.

Those great and familiar speeches poured forth -- the summoning to battle ("Once more unto the breach, dear friends") as well as that poignant final moment where the playwright himself speaks ("Thus far, with rough and all-unable pen . . ."). The cues are tricky, but these two old pros, Marriner and Plummer, made it a seamless tapestry of music woven into speech and speech woven into music, all greatly enhanced by bright, sonorous orchestral work and adroit, well-drilled singing by the two choruses: the Masterworks Chorale of Augsburg College and the Metropolitan Boys Choir.

Marriner looked, at 79, as fit and alert at the podium as ever. He walked onstage Wednesday night to specially warm applause and launched into Elgar's familiar "Enigma Variations," a performance that deftly projected both the musical shape of each variation and its place in the whole structure. The coquettish woodwind parts of the 6th Variation needed a bit more prominence, but everything else came through in fine balance.

The careful pacing of "Nimrod" gave its nobility a special sweetness, and the cello solos in the 12th Variation, taken slowly and beautifully played by Anthony Ross, underscored the sadness so often missed in the piece.
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IF YOU GO
Minnesota Orchestra
What: Elgar's "Enigma" Variations and Walton's "Henry V: A Shakespeare Scenario."
Who: Neville Marriner, conductor, with narrator Christopher Plummer, the Augsburg College Masterworks Chorale and the Metropolitan Boys Choir.
When: 8 p.m. Fri., Orchestra Hall, 11th St. and Nicollet Mall, Mpls.; 8 p.m. Sat., Ordway Center, 5th and Washington Sts., St. Paul.
Tickets: $21-$74. 612-371-5656.
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Michael Anthony is at manthony@startribune.com.
© Copyright 2003 Star Tribune. All rights reserved.

O, for a muse of fire — and decent amplification. A nasty echo nearly spoiled Christopher Plummer's splendid portrayal of Shakespeare's Henry V on Wednesday night at Orchestra Hall. But compelling acting and a fine performance from the Minnesota Orchestra and conductor Sir Neville Marriner prevailed.

When Christopher Plummer instructs an audience "On your imaginary forces WORK," we do. And the music gave us much to imagine. "Henry V: A Shakespeare Scenario" draws music from William Walton's score for Lawrence Olivier's patriotic 1944 film of "Henry V." The portrayal of Henry's heroic victory over the French was meant for an audience suffering under the Blitz of London. France was occupied by Germany and the Allied invasion was yet to come.

Premiered 46 years later, the "Scenario" intersperses the film music with speeches describing the action and Henry's most famous "set pieces." Listening in a hall a stone's throw from the site of Shakespeare's Globe Theatre, the first "Scenario" audience must have felt all the echoes of the music's history. But for many at Orchestra Hall, the "Scenario" was more like hearing a concert version of "The Wiz," if you hadn't seen Judy Garland in "The Wizard of Oz" or read the book.

But still, when Plummer incited the troops, "Once more unto the breach dear friends/Or close up the wall with our English dead," we could not fail to be stirred. Unfortunately, the amplification, which allowed him to be heard over the orchestra, slurred his words and gave his voice an ugly distortion when he spoke loudly without accompaniment.

The orchestra played with color and passion for conductor Sir Neville Marriner, who served as its music director from 1979-86. The lamentation on Falstaff's death played by strings alone was particularly beautiful.

The Masterworks Chorale of Augsburg College and the Metropolitan Boys Choir clearly produced the lovely Hollywood wash of sound that the composer asked of them.

More satisfying musically was the concert's first half — Edward Elgar's affectionate, often teasing, portraits of his friends: the "Enigma Variations." You can only get some of the jokes by keeping your eyes glued to the program notes — the oboes imitating a friend's stammer, for example.

But even a listener with closed eyes could hear the clear character sketches created by Sir Neville and the orchestra. The "Troyte" variation rang out, joyous and boisterous, with bouncing pitches from timpani, cellos and basses in unison. Marriner dared to take "Nimrod" at a tempo so slow I wondered if the orchestra could sustain it. The piece flowered into an affirmation of warmth and reassurance.

Marriner addresses 200 Stillwater High School music students

Former Music Director Sir Neville Marriner and celebrated actor Christopher Plummer return to Minnesota Orchestra for concerts April 30-May 3. Plummer joins as special guest in the featured work on the program, Henry V: A Shakespeare Scenario, by English composer William Walton. This concert version suite was co-created by Plummer and Marriner and given its premiere performances with the Minnesota Orchestra in 1985. In addition, Marriner makes a special return appearance after 21 years to Stillwater High School to lead orchestra students in a morning rehearsal Thursday, May 1. Marriner served as the Orchestra’s seventh music director from 1979 to 1986, and these concerts mark Marriner’s first return to Minnesota after 17 years.

Minnesota Orchestra concerts this week take place at both Orchestra Hall in Minneapolis and the Ordway Center for the Performing Arts in downtown Saint Paul. The Wednesday, April 30 concert begins at 7:30 p.m. and the Friday, May 2 concert begins at 8 p.m., both at Orchestra Hall. The remaining concert Saturday, May 3 at 8 p.m. takes place at the Ordway Center. Free “Music Up Close” pre-concert talks are offered to all ticket holders prior to Orchestra Hall performances. Tickets are available for purchase through the Orchestra Hall Box Office, by calling 612.371.5656, or online.

THE PROGRAM
Edward Elgar is an early 20th-century composer who, along with Frederick Delius and Ralph Vaughan Williams, brought about a revival of classical music in England since the earlier days of Henry Purcell. Elgar came to national prominence with the premiere of his Enigma Variations in 1899. The most notable British orchestral work written to that date, Elgar recalls the Variations were begun “in a spirit of humour and continued in deep seriousness.” Each variation is a musical sketch of a friend, with the last portraying the composer himself. The title of the work comes from an unidentified theme that yet remains a mystery to scholars and musicians alike. The composer wrote: “The Enigma I will not explain – its ‘dark saying’ must be left unguessed.”

The second half of the program features Henry V: A Shakespeare Scenario by William Walton. The work is a concert hall adaptation from Walton’s celebrated film score for Sir Laurence Olivier’s 1944 film Henry V. The combination of Shakespeare’s play and Walton’s music bring sound and word pictures alive without the reliance on a movie screen. The Masterworks Chorale and the Metropolitan Boys Choir join the Orchestra for these performances, with actor Christopher Plummer as guest speaker. Marriner first presented Henry V to Minnesota audiences in 1985 using a suite from Walton’s work co-created with Plummer. They have since recorded this newer version for Chandos with the Choristers of Westminster Abbey and The Academy of St-Martin-in-the-Fields Chorus and Orchestra.

THE ARTISTS
Sir Neville Marriner appears frequently as guest conductor with the principal orchestras of Europe and the United States. Originally an accomplished violinist, he founded the celebrated Academy of St.-Martin-in-the-Fields in 1959, leading the ensemble as concertmaster before eventually turning to conducting. He went on to serve as music director of the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra before coming to Minnesota, and held a similar position with the Radio Symphony Orchestra in Stuttgart. In 1979, Marriner was made a Commander of the Order of the British Empire and in 1985 received his knighthood. During his Minnesota tenure, Marriner established the Orchestra’s first composer-in-residence program and led the ensemble on tours to Australia and Hong Kong.

Christopher Plummer, who has just completed his great personal success as King Lear in Sir Jonathan Miller’s much lauded production of same at Canada’s Stratford Festival, now Broadway bound, has enjoyed 50 years as one of the English speaking theatre’s most distinguished actors and as a veteran of international renown in over 100 motion pictures. The much honored actor made his debut professionally in his home-town of Montreal on radio and stage in both French and English. After his Broadway debut (1954) he went on to star in many celebrated productions on the Great White Way. He has won Tonys and Emmys and most of the prizes that theatre and television have to offer. He was also a leading member of the Royal Shakespeare Theatre, the Royal National Theatre of Great Britain and Canada’s Stratford Festival. He has worked with some of the greatest directors of the 20th century and is considered one of the finest classical actors of his time. His multi-varied screen appearances range from the Oscar winning The Sound of Music and The Man Who Would Be King to Michael Mann’s Oscar nominated The Insider (as Mike Wallace) and the Oscar Winning A Beautiful Mind. His latest releases are Ararat, Blizzard and Dickens’ Nicholas Nickleby. Apart from honors in the UK, USA, Austria and Canada, he was invested, sanctioned by Queen Elizabeth II as a Companion of the Order of Canada – an honorary Knighthood. An honorary doctor of Fine Arts at Juilliard, he was the first performer to be presented with the Jason Robard’s Award for Excellence in memory of his late great friend. He has written for both the theatre, television and the concert-hall. With Sir Neville Marriner he has performed Henry V many times on both sides of the Atlantic, and together they recorded it for Chandos Records with Sir Neville’s orchestra, The Academy of St. Martin in the Fields.

The Masterworks Chorale of Augsburg College, led by music director Peter Hendrickson, is a unique mix of college alumni, students, faculty, staff, and community participants. Since its inception eight years ago, the Chorale has established itself as a dynamic choral ensemble in the Twin Cities dedicated to performing great literature and exploring new works. The Masterworks Chorale has appeared several times with the Minnesota Orchestra since 1996, including performances of Berlioz’s Messe Solennelle, Mozart’s Requiem, and Handel’s Messiah.

The Metropolitan Boys Choir currently celebrates its 32nd season under the leadership of its founding director, Bea Hasselmann. The Choir has performed regularly with the Minnesota Orchestra since 1976, and has appeared with such ensembles as the Russian Bolshoi Ballet, The Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra, Joffrey Ballet, and Minnesota Opera. Ranging in age from five to eighteen, the membership totals nearly three hundred voices singing in eight choirs. The ensemble has toured throughout the United States and Canada, as well as to fourteen European countries and to Guatemala.

EDUCATION EVENT
In addition to conducting one week of Minnesota Orchestra subscription concerts, Marriner returns after twenty-one years to lead the Stillwater High School Chamber Orchestra in a special one-hour morning rehearsal on Thursday, May 1. “We are very happy to partner with Stillwater’s outstanding orchestral program to make Mr. Marriner’s visit possible,” remarked Minnesota Orchestra Director of Education and Outreach Jim Bartsch. “Connecting one of the world’s greatest conductors with these dedicated, talented students will surely result in one of those rare moments of pure, joyful, music-making.”

With music programs led by Jim Hainlen since 1979, Stillwater High School boasts one of the largest orchestral programs in the Greater Twin Cities area, with over two hundred high school students participating across the school’s four orchestras. In 1982, Marriner and Minnesota Orchestra musicians first met with Stillwater High School students upon the invitation of Hainlen. Twenty-one years later, Marriner returns to rehearse the school’s chamber orchestra in Haydn’s Symphony No. 103 (“Drum Roll”). The morning rehearsal begins at 11 a.m. and takes place in the school’s auditorium with 300 high school students in attendance.

"Sir Neville Marriner (music director 1979-1986) will return to the Minnesota Orchestra for the first time since his 1986 departure to lead an all-English program featuring Sir Edward Elgar's Enigma Variations and Sir William Walton's symphonic suite to Laurence Olivier's 1944 film Henry V (May). Titled Henry V: A Shakespeare Scenario, the work will feature narration by actor Christopher Plummer, who premiered this arrangement of the film score with Marriner in 1988."

(Concert; Stratford Festival Theater; 1,500 Seats; $150 Top)
STRATFORD, Conn. A Stratford Festival Theater presentation of a concert in two acts featuring Christopher Plummer and the Hartford Symphony Orchestra conducted by Michael Lankester, with the Stratford Festival Theater Combined Choir. Reviewed May 29, 1999. Running time: 1 HOUR, 40 MIN.

Christopher Plummer has found himself an annuity in this 50-minute adaptation for narrator, orchestra and chorus of William Walton's glorious incidental music for Laurence Olivier's 1994 film of Shakespeare's "Henry V." Conceived by English conductor Neville Marriner and Plummer to make use of the music from the film (plus some Walton wrote for the TV documentary "A History of the English-speaking Peoples"), "Henry V: A Musical Scenario After Shakespeare" was first performed and recorded in London in 1990. Plummer continues to narrate it in concert, and on May 29 donated his services to a well-attended fundraising performance to benefit the embryo Stratford Festival Theater, whose artistic director, Louis Burke, hopes the state of Connecticut will finally close a deal with him for the purchase of Stratford's former American Shakespeare Theater on June 15.

Plummer is no longer young enough to play Henry, who was 28 at Agincourt, in a full production of "Henry V." But in this concert abbreviation he's impressive in a vivid display of the old school of Shakespearean acting including, not surprisingly, line readings that carry echoes of Olivier's in his film. Looking handsome in a claret velvet jacket and wearing a body mike, Plummer begins his narration with the play's prologue and then incorporates much of Henry's dialogue. Other characters, including Burgundy, are also essayed by Plummer, sometimes with the orchestra playing behind him.

His performance is big and bold, clear and full of poetry and soaring histrionics, the actor often literally leaping out of his chair at the side of British-born Hartford Symphony Orchestra conductor Michael Lankester to roam the stage in front of the orchestra and 150-voice choir of local men, women and children. It's possible that Plummer's peregrinations might be more effectively staged, and why not a throne rather than a mere chair for him to sit on? But there's no denying the actor's presence and impact, derived from years of Shakespearean experience.

The HSO under Lankester played the Walton score with real elan and finesse, backed by the choir, which sang wordlessly much of the time. There was just one musically insensitive passage; unfortunately it was when Walton's score was at its most quietly delicate as it used the "Bailero" from Canteloube's adaptations of Auvergne folksongs for an exquisite English horn solo backed by strings. Plummer's amplified voice simply overpowered it completely. This fleeting disappointment apart, the 50-minute piece was genuinely effective.

It took up the fundraiser's second part. The first began with a Waltonesque fanfare composed by Lankester, a unison reading of the prologue from Shakespeare's "Romeo and Juliet" by 28 members of the Stratford Festival Theater's Youth Training Program, and an underpowered performance of Tchaikovsky's "Romeo and Juliet" Fantasy Overture by the HSO and Lankester. Presumably most of the rehearsal time was given to the Walton.

Connecticut news clips about the concert in Stratford, CT, May 29, 1999

May 27, 1999, The Stratford Star	May 23, 1999, Connecticut Post	May 27, 1999, Connecticut Post	May 20, 1999, Westport Minuteman
May 27, 1999, Stratford Star
May 28, 1999, Connecticut Post	May 28, 1999, Norwalk Hour

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One of the unequivocally good things that have happened in the classical music universe lately is that film music is at long last being given the unpatronizing attention it deserves.

Not that there isn't a lot of junky, pretentious movie music out there, especially in our time. But hundreds of great and important scores have been composed over the decades, and we heard one of the greatest and most important of them Tuesday night at The Bushnell.

The Hartford Symphony Orchestra, joined by the Hartford Chorale and Connecticut Children's Chorus, did a thunderous concert version of William Walton's music to the 1944 Olivier film ``Henry V.''

Music director Michael Lankester led this sumptuous and thrilling performance, which was easily among the handful of most impressive things the HSO has done in recent memory.

But it would not have had nearly the impact that it did had it not been for the work of actor Christopher Plummer.

Plummer was billed as ``narrator,'' but that term is a gross understatement. This was no stock recitation from a lectern or dutiful reading from behind a standing mike. This was true theater, in ways that were often as unexpected as they were convincing.

Sporting a sharp cranberry dinner jacket, Plummer grabbed the stage from his opening invocation, with its appeal for a ``muse of fire.'' As the play unfolded (Plummer himself, along with conductor Neville Marriner, fashioned this concert version) the still-trim and steel- voiced actor strode left and right across the lip of the stage, bounced on his heels in time with the music, nodded and waved periodically to the players and singers, and at one point even excitedly grabbed the elbow o f Lankester, whose quizzical expression left some doubt as to whether this gesture had been rehearsed.

Working without text, Plummer almost sang his words, with a deft blend of disciplined economy and, on occasion, informed hamminess.

Meanwhile, the several hundred musicians and singers behind him brilliantly brought to life this teeming, affirmative music, which runs from the poignant theme of the departed Falstaff, to the crashing battle of Agincourt (and its desolate, albeit victorious aftermath) to the tender strains of Henry's encounter with his new queen by default, the apparently bashful Catherine of Valois.

Lankester outdid himself, masterfully stirring together these ingredients to make something, well, stirring.

The concert's first half brought two additional refreshing and under-performed English gems: Hubert Parry's coronation anthem ``I Was Glad,'' and Edward Elgar's playful but ingenious little tone poem ``In the South,'' which featured a fine viola solo by Sharon Dennison.

The HSO will repeat this concert tonight at 8 at The Bushnell. If you can possibly make it, do it.

One sorry little secret of the newspaper business: Many of our interviews with celebrities are conducted over the telephone.

These ``phoners,'' to use the colorful jargon of our trade, are often perfunctory affairs. The celebrity, who may schedule a dozen or more of them at a sitting, frequently sounds weary and put-upon. Strained over a telephone line (or increasingly, the clouded ether of cellular technology), the celebrity's wan voice is all too often at disappointing odds with his or her vibrant public personality.

Then again, there's Christopher Plummer.

Even just exchanging stock pleasantries, or irritably reciting a few details of his crowded itinerary, the rising and falling cadences, the crisp sibilants, the almost musical inflections and variations of tempo all tell you that you are talking to an actor, a true man of the stage. Ever pushing the boundaries of his craft, Plummer is perhaps instinctively pressing into heady new territory: the phoner as performance art.

``I actually wanted to be a musician at one point,'' he intones, speaking from his home in downstate Connecticut. ``But then I began to see what a lot of hard work it would be.'' Reflective pause. ``I thought acting might be a little easier. I thought I had it all beat!''

Plummer will be featured Tuesday and Wednesday nights at The Bushnell as he joins the Hartford Symphony Orchestra and a combined choir of more than 200 voices to perform a concert version of William Walton's massive and colorful score to Shakespeare's ``Henry V.'' HSO music director Michael Lankester, a personal buddy and sometime professional collaborator of Plummer's, will conduct.

The piece is an adaptation of Walton's celebrated soundtrack to Laurence Olivier's 1942 film. The concert version -- devised by Plummer along with English conductor Neville Marriner, with whom he recorded the piece -- uses about 60 minutes of Walton's music.

Plummer has developed a substantial sub-career as a narrator of classical orchestral works. A few seasons ago, he and Lankester cooked up a new concert version of Grieg's ``Peer Gynt,'' and he also performed Plummer/Lankester adaptations of Mendelssohn's ``A Midsummer Night's Dream'' and Prokofiev's ``Ivan the Terrible.''

Although it's a fairly rarefied specialty, Plummer scoffs at the suggestion that the narrating game might require some special skills.

``You just have to play the thing as if you were reading it. The more intimate the better. If you try to play it too stentorian it winds up being boring. The only real problem is that there are some parts of `Henry V' where the orchestral underscoring can make it hard for the voice to be heard. That's why I do permit myself a microphone in these performances. I should add that Michael is very good about keeping the orchestra down. Some conductors get, shall we say, carried away.''

In order to fully enter the spirit of the piece, Plummer also eschews a script.

``I should stand there with a text? If I don't know this play by now, I should quit.''

Epic Body Of Work

Plummer's illustrious career began in 1950. It has unfolded nicely ever since: a series of appearances on Broadway, followed by an even longer string of successes in London's West End; as a regular for Great Britain's National Theatre under such directors as Olivier and Sir Peter Hall; as a star in more than 60 motion pictures, of which the best-known, the ubiquitous ``Sound of Music'' is far from his most interesting; a smattering of TV work; some recordings.

Nor, at 67, is he slowing. Plummer won a Tony award (his second) last season for his portrayal of the hard-living and hard-drinking actor John Barrymore, in the virtually one-man show ``Barrymore.''

But if Plummer's life and work will be well known to concertgoers next week, William Walton's will, for most of them, be hazy at best.

Walton (1902-1983) was one of England's most important and original 20th-century composers. He was also one of its most entertaining personalities.

Born to working-class circumstances, young William was sent to Oxford, where he was an indifferent student and from which he never did earn a degree.

He drifted into music almost casually. A self-taught composer (and later a self-taught conductor), Walton fell in -- and eventually moved in -- with the eccentric, literary Sitwell family. This arrangement led to the composition, in 1923, of ``Facade,'' a kind of mixed- media piece for speaker (set to words by Edith Sitwell) and small instrumental ensemble. It made Walton instantly famous and is to this day his best-known work.

From that point, Walton made his living solely as a composer, a claim that only a handful of people can make in our century. His reputation was furthered by a Viola Concerto (1929) and by the flamboyant choral/orchestral epic ``Belshazzar's Feast,'' scored for huge orchestra, brass ensembles and chorus.

Meanwhile, Walton enjoyed, and to some extent cultivated, a reputation as a bon vivant, and especially as a womanizer. Although he had several long and celebrated affairs, his bachelor status was not surrendered until 1948, when the 46- year-old composer met and shortly thereafter married 22-year-old Susana Gil. The marriage, which was disapproved of by Walton's family and friends, lasted 35 years until the composer's death in 1983.

Revisionism Revised

Walton's reputation, even in his native country, has undergone a series of ups and downs over the years. Originally an enfant terrible, he grew to be regarded as a stodgy reactionary, especially after World War II, when tonal, straightforward music such as Walton's suffered more or less automatic rejection by the classical academic establishment.

More recently, he has been enjoying revised approval. There is particular interest in his dozen or so film scores, of which ``Henry V'' is the acknowledged masterpiece. (Walton did two other Shakespeare films with Olivier: ``Hamlet'' and ``Richard III.'')

Olivier himself was overwhelmed by Walton's music for ``Henry,'' calling it ``the most wonderful score ever written for a motion picture.''

Plummer pays it perhaps an even higher compliment: that it is worthy to share equal billing with the bard.

``It is an absolute classic. The thing about this score is that it is so well balanced with the text. Walton, unlike most film composers, was careful to serve the text. And he did it superbly.''

Memo: William Walton's ``Henry V,'' performed by the Hartford Symphony Orchestra, the Hartford Chorale and the Connecticut Children's Chorus, and featuring narrator Christopher Plummer, will be presented Tuesday and Wednesday nights at 8 at The Bushnell, 166 Capitol Ave., Hartford. HSO music director Michael Lankester will conduct. The concerts will also include music by Parry and Elgar. Tickets are $17 to $47.Phone: (860) 246-6807.

Caption:
Christopher Plummer will narrate William Walton's ``Henry V'' soundtrack.
The score written by William Walton, shown here, for ``Henry V'' was called the best soundtrack ever by the 1942 film's star, Laurence Olivier.
Photo: (color), 1993 Courant file photo
Photo: (b&w)

When Walt Disney turned ''The Sorcerer's Apprentice'' into an escapade for Mickey Mouse in the animated film classic ''Fantasia,'' he immortalized this vivid score by Paul Dukas. Yet this has had an unintended result: the work seldom turns up these days on orchestra programs.

Leonard Slatkin, a conductor with an excellent record of championing neglected works, remedied the situation on Thursday night at Avery Fisher Hall with the New York Philharmonic. This scintillating performance was a reminder of what an inspired short piece this is, basically an ingenious set of variations on a bumptious tune. And not many works by Dukas's friend Debussy are scored more imaginatively.

As an uncoverer of neglected repertory, Mr. Slatkin has focused on American works of this century. He did so again here, conducting the Symphony in One Movement by Samuel Barber, another installment in the Philharmonic's valuable American Classics series. Barber completed this work in 1936 when he was 26, then revised it extensively six years later for Bruno Walter, who conducted and recorded it with the New York Philharmonic.

That Walter, no friend of American contemporary music, was attracted to the piece makes sense: the symphony is expansively lyrical and luxuriously diatonic. But though this youthful music broke no new ground, it is an arresting and skillful work. Four thematically connected movements are rolled into one continuous structure: a rigorous Allegro, a bristling Scherzo, a ruminative Andante and a restless finale that surges with melody but never docks into a home tonality until the blazing ending. Mr. Slatkin's performance was cogent and exciting.

The final work was an hour's worth of excerpts from Sir William Walton's score for Laurence Olivier's 1944 film of Shakespeare's ''Henry V,'' with speeches from the play read by the actor Christopher Plummer. This piece was arranged by Christopher Palmer in 1988, five years after Walton's death, as a project for Mr. Plummer and the conductor Neville Marriner.

It may sound hokey, but ''Henry V -- A Shakespeare Scenario'' was entertaining and often touching. Walton's music is vivid and crafty. The set pieces work best: evocations of old English dances, a wistful passacaglia based on a drinking song, an arrangement of an Auvergnat folk song for the courtship scene of Henry and Princess Katharine of France. The purely cinematic episodes, like the long battle sequence (heavily indebted to Prokofiev), are less effective in the concert hall.

But it was rewarding to hear this music so brilliantly performed, and Mr. Plummer delivered the speeches with clarity and old-fashioned flair, a homage, it seemed, to Olivier's stylized and classic performance.

October 18, 1995 Halifax Chronicle Herald Calling Mr. Plummer

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SOME of the most revered artists mix and match with young performers this week at the Caramoor Festival. This afternoon at 5:30, for instance, Alicia de Larrocha and Andre Previn offer four-hand Mozart, after which Mr. Previn joins some so-called rising stars, Ayako Yoshida and Wendy Warner (an Avery Fisher Career Grant Award-winner several years ago), for the Mendelssohn D minor Trio.

On Thursday afternoon at 4:15, another young-artist pairing brings the violin-piano duo of Maria Bachmann and Jon Klibonoff to the Spanish Courtyard for sonatas by Ravel, Saint-Saens and John Corigliano. On Friday evening at 8:30, the Emerson String Quartet plays Mozart, Barber and -- with the distinguished assistance of Menahem Pressler -- the Dvorak A major Piano Quintet.

On Saturday evening, Christopher Plummer stars in what Caramoor is calling "Shakespeare in Our Park, an Elizabethan extravaganza worthy of the great Bard."

Starting at 5:15, the normally serene estate will come alive with "sword-play, madrigals, acrobatics, wandering minstrels, a hurdy-gurdy man and fire jugglers."

An otherwise unspecified special event is scheduled for ticket holders in the Spanish Courtyard at 7:15, and the 8:30 program juxtaposes Tchaikovsky's "Romeo and Juliet" Overture with a semi-staged version of "Henry V" with Andre Previn conducting the Orchestra of St. Luke's in Walton's music for the Laurence Olivier film and Mr. Plummer in the title role.

It is all too rare that great works and great artists come face to face, whether in music, theater, film or dance. Moments of illumination must be cherished, and one arrived Saturday at Blossom Music Center.

The Cleveland Orchestra's final work of the weekend under Festival Director Leonard Slatkin was "Henry V - A Musical Scenario after Shakespeare," a suite for speaker, orchestra and chorus with music Sir William Walton composed for the 1944 film "Henry V," starring Sir Laurence Olivier. The orchestra's Henry, as well as several other characters, was Christopher Plummer, a Shakespearean actor of long distinction who gave Blossom a touch of thespian splendor it is unlikely to forget. The Walton was part of a program devoted to Bard-inspired music that included Weber's "Oberon" overture, Korngold's "Much Ado About Nothing" Suite and Tchaikovsky's "Romeo and Juliet." But Walton and Plummer dominated the proceedings, as the actor did the weekend's orchestra activity.

Sporting a burgundy dinner jacket, Plummer wasted no time in demonstrating how phrasing, inflection and dynamics are crucial not only to music. Here was a Henry of noble demeanor, infinite wisdom and bountiful temperament. Plummer rolled out Shakespeare's lines in electrifying cascades, pinpointing meaningful gestures and pulling us into the play's distinctive world of war and love. He adopted a number of accents and stances to distinguish among Henry, the chorus, the Duke of Burgundy and friends, all the while serving as host and complement to Walton's score. If the sound system echoed too much, Plummer brought crisp enunciation to everything he uttered.

It is to Plummer's credit that his commanding presence didn't dwarf the musical side. The suite contains a large portion of the stirring, atmospheric music Walton wrote for the 1944 film - drawing on sources ranging from the Fitzwilliam Virginal Book to Joseph Canteloube's "Songs of the Auvergne" - plus a dandy march from an abandoned television series based on words by another British patriot, Winston Churchill. Christopher Palmer's adaptation of text and music provides a sweeping view of the Henry V saga, with speaker, orchestra and choral voices employed to highly dramatic effect.

Slatkin and the orchestra captured the spirit of the music by emphasizing the charm, vigor and militaristic pomp. Walton's colorful orchestration, which evokes myriad images, received powerful and detailed delineation, and the Blossom Festival Chorus and Cleveland Orchestra Children's Chorus, mostly assigned wordless lines, added magical layers to the sonic landscape.

Of the remaining Shakespearean works, Korngold's "Much Ado" suite proved most disarming. Written as incidental music to the play, the suite glistens with Straussian vitality and lyrical warmth. Korngold's ear for sparkling sonorities is everywhere apparent in the music as played by a chamber ensemble, and Slatkin and the Cleveland musicians gave it a loving reading. The Weber overture and Tchaikovsky overture-fantasia fared less well, sounding cursory and too brisk for the wondrous details and climactic moments to reach the heights.

The orchestra's concert Friday, also under Slatkin, was dedicated to the memory of Frank E. Joseph, a trustee of the Musical Arts Association for more than 40 years and the principal force, along with George Szell, behind Blossom. Among the pieces on the center's inaugural concerts in 1968 was Beethoven's Symphony No. 7, which Slatkin and the orchestra offered Friday.

That performance, alas, had much in common with too many Blossom experiences. Slatkin led a straightforward account, often literal to the point of being prosaic. The opening movement lacked rhythmic thrust and Beethoven's rugged jubilation, while unpersuasive tempo changes added bumps to the second and third movements. Only the finale exerted its breathless jolt as galvanized by this fearless, controlled ensemble. Slatkin and the players confirmed the hearty Americana in Morton Gould's entrancing "Fall River Legend," which comprises the lighter excerpts from Agnes de Mille's dark 1948 ballet about Lizzie Borden, without quite getting under its skin.

Friday's soloist was 19-year-old Swiss violinist Laurence Kayaleh, whose playing in Bruch's Violin Concerto No. 1 was best in the intimate passages. Otherwise, her performance was short of interpretive and instrumental flair. Kayaleh is a sensitive musician who may be destined for a fine solo career, but her debut engagement with the Cleveland Orchestra sounded premature.

July 8, 1995

The year is 1954. A young Canadian actor named Christopher Plummer has come to Cleveland in a pre-Broadway tour of "The Dark is Light Enough" starring Katharine Cornell and Tyrone Power. Who should Plummer meet at the opening-night party but George Szell, music director of the Cleveland Orchestra.

"He was a god even then," says Plummer four decades later. The celebrated actor of stage and screen is back for the first time since encountering Szell to make his debut with the orchestra the conductor raised to international stature. Plummer appears as speaker in "Henry V - A Musical Scenario After Shakespeare" tonight at Blossom Music Center under Leonard Slatkin.

The hour-long suite comprises music Sir William Walton wrote for the 1944 film starring Sir Laurence Olivier and a scenario created by Christopher Palmer at the request of Plummer and Sir Neville Marriner. Plummer first played Henry in 1956 in Edinburgh, Scotland, and Stratford, Ontario, and returned to the work 25 years later in Stratford, Conn.

"I had the arrogance to play both the chorus and Henry [in 1981], which was rather silly, because we'd keep meeting each other onstage," says Plummer, who is fit and trim at 65. "I got blasted for Henry. They were quite right. I was much too old and knowing. Henry has to be young to be believable."

Unless a symphony orchestra is onstage.

"In concert, you get away with it because you're in a smoking jacket," Plummer chuckles. "You haven't got costumes and age on you. You listen to the words. It's like a concerto for speaking voice and orchestra."

Returning to Shakespeare enables Plummer to keep his "technique in tune, like playing a great cadenza." His use of musical metaphor isn't haphazard. Plummer considered becoming a concert pianist until the acting bug bit. He developed his distinctive vocal equipment by repeating roles.

Plummer used his singing voice briefly as Capt. von Trapp in the movie version of "The Sound of Music" - "The introductions, which are half-spoken, half-sung, are me," he says - and "croaked" in the short-lived 1973 musical "Cyrano," for which he won a Tony award.

A decade earlier, Plummer asked "My Fair Lady" creators Alan Jay Lerner and Frederick Loewe to write him a musical version of "Cyrano de Bergerac." Lerner refused, insisting that nothing could compete with the music in Edmond Rostand's verse. Plummer already had auditioned for the role of Lancelot in the original production of Lerner and Loewe's "Camelot." After listening to the actor sing, Loewe told Plummer his best voice lay "somewhere in the middle. You have no highs or lows."

Acknowledging the highs and lows inevitable in a long career in theater and films, Plummer doesn't hesitate when asked which medium is most satisfying.

"I suppose the theater is always your preference," says Plummer, who lives in Weston, Conn. "I love making films, when they're good. There are so few good ones. They become a necessity. I'll say yes if it's in the south of France or no if it's in Bosnia, without looking at the script.

"The theater is where it all happens for us. We're not at the mercy of a committee. We're our own bosses onstage. If you invest in the theater at a young age, you've got an insurance policy that's unbeatable as you get old and gray."

Plummer recently completed work on "Twelve Monkeys," the Terry Gilliam movie in which he plays Brad Pitt's eccentric scientist father. His next project, aimed for an April opening in New York, is a one-man show on the actor John Barrymore.

The Barrymore play, by William Luce,"is about shining promise gone wrong," says Plummer. "If it works, it will show people who are too young to remember that Broadway was a street you could look up to. That doesn't happen anymore. I was lucky to be in the theater in the 1950s in New York. It was the last great time, with every great author in the world and musicals galore by people who knew what show business was about, who knew how to construct a musical."

GRAPHIC: PHOTO BY: JAMES A. ROSS/PLAIN DEALER PHOTOGRAPHER ; Christopher Plummer, left, rehearses with conductor Leonard Slatkin and the Cleveland Orchestra at Severance Hall Thursday. Plummer will perform with the orchestra in "Henry V-A Musical Scenario After Shakespeare" tonight at Blossom Music Center.

Although the program notes didn't explain it, Shakespeare was the unifying force in last night's Toronto Symphony concert at Roy Thomson Hall, to be repeated tonight and Saturday.

All three works on the bill were musical reflections on Shakespearean dramas: Beethoven's Coriolanus Overture, Tchaikovsky's Hamlet Fantasy Overture, and William Walton's Henry V film music.

The latter was the grand splash, an hour-long melodrama with actor Christopher Plummer declaiming excerpts from the play while the orchestra either whipped up our emotions or mimicked the dances of Renaissance England.

The score, dating from 1944, accompanied Laurence Olivier's film direction of Henry V: recently the Briton Christopher Palmer has adapted the work for live narrated performance, and the present renditions mark the North American premiere.

It is music very much of its era, calling to mind Errol Flynn or Esther Williams more readily than the Battle of Agincourt in 1415. Fetching woodwind swirls, trumpet blasts, and then scads of musicians chiming in - even a huge choir singing wordlessly - for the big English pastoral tunes.

The sort of fluff that makes even novice listeners begin to find charm in Schoenberg.

Plummer, one of Canada's cultural treasures, offered his lines with a musician's array of inflection, pitch, and volume: the most memorable music encountered was in the rich cadences of Shakespeare's English.

England's Michael Lankester was on the podium, and the orchestra sounded fine, brass department excepted.

Copyright © 1993 Toronto Star, All Rights Reserved.

NEW YORK - Christopher Plummer is tea'd off.

These Americans just can't make a decent cuppa.

Plummer resides primarily in Connecticut these days but buys extra strong tea at Marks and Sparks (Marks and Spencer) when back in Toronto.

We are taking (weak) tea in the offices of ICM, his new musical agent. He's released Henry V on CD, in which he narrates, Sir Neville Marriner conducts the Choristers Of Westminster Cathedral and the orchestra and chorus of the Academy of St. Martin-in-the-Fields. This Wednesday, Thursday and Saturday evenings, Plummer will be at Roy Thomson Hall narrating and performing Henry V, "as a musical scenario after Shakespeare," with the Toronto Mendelssohn Choir and Toronto Children's Chorus.

He looks wonderful. Tanned and jaunty in blue scarf, faded gray jeans, he exudes charm.

We compliment him on how fit he looks. He says he has to be fit.

"This (project) taxes my voice. I go from low to high C, I can't get a cold or I'm dead. This is a thermal scarf."

Plummer is Mr. Diversification. His Broadway credits include Home Is The Hero, The Lark, Othello and Cyrano, for which he won a Tony.

He's an old hand at the Bard. He's played every great Shakespearean role including Hamlet, Macbeth, Iago, Richard III and Marc Anthony, plus Oedipus Rex. He was a leading actor in Britain's National Theatre under Sir Laurence Olivier, in the Royal Shakespeare Company, and our own Stratford Theatre.

Henry V is project near and dear to his art.

"Four or five years ago," Plummer recalls, "Sir Neville Marriner, then the conductor of the Academy of St. Martin in the Fields - a darling man - decided to redo Sir William Walton's score of Henry V that Olivier made in the '40s. The old record from the film was outdated and scratchy. The aim was to make a concert version putting in more of the Shakespeare text. He called me, which was nice, and we became close friends. I'm playing the chorus, Henry V, the Duke of Burgundy and Sir John Falstaff. It's all bits and pieces, the best speeches of the play and it makes for a champagne like evening.

"I like it this way, you're all by yourself, doing the cream of the play, the stuff the audience waits all night to hear. The score is one of the best ever written. It's part of the classic repertoire, full of humor and grandeur."

Plummer is aiming for SRO at TSO.

"There are 3,000 seats, to fill this sucker is unfair," he grouses goodnaturedly. "And we can raise money. The third performance is a kind of benefit for the TSO. "

The material is not stuffy or intimidating, he stresses. No tux required.

"The audience will have a good time, it's full of fun. And it's wonderfully short; Henry only lasts 50 minutes. It's a joy to do, it's a show. I stand there in a smoking jacket, or something appropriate for Henry, something in a red color.

"We restored the chorus and the boys' group and we brought back the 14th and 15th Century to give it a medieval sound. We got Chris Palmer - bet they've screwed up the billing - who is an English scholar, to redo some of the text and music of Walton's, who is now dead. Palmer restored the choral passage for the boys and now we have the whole shebang. It's more exciting and a much bigger sound.

"Neville and I did Henry V on tour in Europe at the Royal Festival Hall and it was a big success. Three days later we recorded it. This is the North American premiere of this new version."

Plummer has a recording coming out of Ivan The Terrible, the Prokofiev score from the 1943 film, and is working on "the definitive concert version of Peer Gynt. That's what I've been doing, trying to adapt the classics.

"It's a new attack, kind of fascinating, not waiting for a film script to come along."

Yet Plummer still shows up on the silver screen. He has more than 40 films to his credit, his first being Star Struck in 1958. His range is impressive, from The Man Who Would Be King to Star Trek VI, but he's undoubtedly best remembered as Baron von Trapp in The Sound Of Music.

"In movies, it's the same guys up there, the same ones who can raise the money to make the picture. But by the time it's done, character actors like myself have their parts cut to nothing. All the good writing has gone down the toilet. You have to do a little movie yourself to get great parts. I'm too lazy."

Plummer most recently did a cameo as a priest in Malcolm X. He also played a priest in the Canadian movie Impolite, which screened at the Toronto film festival. Its witty screenplay was dashed off in eight days by Michael McKinley.

"McKinley has wit and style," Plummer enthuses. "They didn't do it justice, the film lacked the pace the script had. He promised to write me a proper script. I adore his writing. It's so rare for a young person to have that erudition, that style. Now it's the kick-him-in-the-testicles writing. (Ernst) Lubitsch would have loved it.

"I'm gonna make bloody sure it (McKinley's script) happens. I want to get my caps into something of style and length."

In Impolite, Plummer played Naples O'Rourke, twin brother to missing billionaire Paris O'Rourke, whose "disappearance" precipitates the action.

He's adept at playing billionaires. In the CTV series Counterstrike, he's Alexander Addington, billionaire industrialist who forms the elite strike team in the title.

"I'll stick to TV and film because of concert dates. I can't take a play because of time constrictions; I haven't been on stage except for my one-man show ( A Word Or Two Before You Go) for many years."

GRAPHIC: COLOR PHOTO: Christopher Plummer

SIR LAURENCE OLIVIER's film of Henry V has triumphantly outlasted its wartime origins, and so has Sir William Walton's music for it - or at least, short concert suites from it have. The rest of the music is another matter. Not only did it need reconstructing (the full score was lost) but the fragments would have had to be built into some kind of shape without the film to hang them on, and this the composer never did. Many people have believed the job worth doing, given the music's quality. The idea of ''Henry V - A Shakespeare Scenario'' (as Friday's premiere called it) came from Sir Neville Marriner and Christopher Plummer: it is a 50- minute piece for actor, chorus and orchestra, and the labour of love was assigned to Christopher Palmer. Far from presenting ''the complete film score'' as the advertisements had it, Palmer used about nine-tenths of it along with some other Walton to set up an essentially new structure. The reconstruction work in itself has gone painstakingly well, and, heard live for the first time Walton's links and melodramas are neatly woven in and sound as finely conceived for orchestra as the familiar set-pieces.

On the other hand, it is no slight on Palmer's editorial efforts to say that the enterprise as a whole works against the music. It is an irresistible vehicle for an actor who wants to do all Olivier's purple passages at one go. If this is the kind of thing that thrills you then you are not alone, to judge by its enthusiastic welcome. As performed by the Academy of St Martin-in-the-Fields, it meant that every few minutes a startled-looking Plummer would burst up from his seat as though heading for orbit, fling an arm in the air, deliver one of the great speeches at full tilt - or even both sides of a dialogue with Falstaff - and collapse to sit smouldering until the next bout.

Meanwhile the music would stutter on in short-winded sections, some of the best of it (''Touch her soft lips and part'') having to go under the words. The trouble is long-range cohesion. When Prokofiev turned the Alexander Nevsky score into a cantata he made sure that the music itself would give it shape. Henry V in this version, despite a few token recurring themes and the conscription of a march Walton wrote for an unconnected television programme (it sounds like overscored Eric Coates), is still too bitty and dependent on the action as a framework. If the music is worth hearing it is worth taking straight, and a simple way is just to add the choral prologue and epilogue to the usual orchestral suite, as the Royal Philharmonic Society did in its Shakespeare Festival last year: less complete, but in the end less frustrating.

Certainly there are delights in what the chorus does, including a relaxed, swinging version of one of the Auvergne songs from Joseph Canteloube's popular collection. The Academy Chorus and choristers of Westminster Cathedral delivered it with gusto, and Marriner kept the whole performance's energy levels well topped up. But the piece's prospects had been further subverted by the context, for the first half of the concert had included one of the high points of twentieth-century English music, the Symphony No 5 by Vaughan Williams, in a performance of outstanding finesse.

With only four double-basses the symphony sounded constantly luminous, making a nonsense of any reputation the piece might have for being clumsy. The scherzo for once was deft from start to finish, and the great visionary moments glowed with quiet certainty.

OF ALL film-scores, the two that for many music-lovers will stand out above all others are for comparable films, patriotic epics both Eisenstein's Alexander Nevsky with its Prokofiev score and Olivier's Henry V with its colourful music by Walton.

Yet where Prokofiev turned his score into a powerful concert piece, a large-scale cantata, Walton simply acquiesced in the creation of two relatively trivial suites from Henry V, which give a limited idea of his breadth of inspiration.

Now, thanks to the diligence of Christopher Palmer, something like an equivalent to Prokofiev's Nevsky cantata has been created out of the Henry V music. It is a concert piece 55 minutes long, which encapsulates the film, using nine tenths of Walton's score.

With Sir Neville Marriner conducting the St Martin's Academy, this 'Shakespeare Scenario' was given its world premiere at the Festival Hall on Friday, and will promptly be recorded with the same forces in Chandos's new Walton series, to give us the big and satisfying cantata we have long needed.

The key figure is the narrator, who in well-chosen Shakespeare extracts, links the eight big sections. Christopher Plummer raised all the necessary Olivier echoes, thrusting and passionate, almost but not quite going over the top.

It came home more clearly than ever just how much Walton had learnt from Prokofiev in the magnificent Agincourt music, far more extended than just the cavalry charge, which we know from the first of the two suites.

Walton may have no real equivalent to the magnificent Lament For The Dead in the Prokofiev his only elegiac movement is the simple passacaglia for strings lamenting Falstaff's death but otherwise his is an even richer and more varied score.

Its choruses are more evocative, not just rousingly patriotic but with their hint of Elizabethan pastiche bringing delicacy, tenderness and open joy alongside the fervour, not least those in the epilogue for women's and boys' voices alone.

The one questionable passage in this Scenario is the brief sequence imported by Palmer from a much later example of Walton's media music, a march written for a projected television series based on Churchill's History Of The English-Speaking Peoples.

THAT couple of minutes sticks out inconsis tently from its surroundings, when the patriotic tone of voice rings so clearly of modern coronations. It made one realise how subtly Walton in the rest fits his invention into a Shakespearean frame.

Sir Neville drew a near-ideal performance not just from the Academy, but from the Academy Chorus and the Westminster Cathedral Choristers.

As a preparation he also conducted a masterpiece among British symphonies, which was similarly a product of wartime, Vaughan Williams's Fifth.

It was apt in this context that Sir Neville consistently adopted fast speeds, most of them very close to the composer's markings, making the work tougher than usual, completely contradicting the general idea of this as a pastoral idyll.

If some of the rapture was missing, the symphonic strength was all the clearer.

ASMF Marriner Festival Hall

COULD this cockpit hold the vasty fields of France? And was it to be Christopher Plummer's finest hour since The Sound of Music? He had arrived hot from Wogan's presence, to incarnate Henry V in a South Bank Shakespearian scenario, sculpted to present the world premiere of Walton's complete film score.

His fellow warriors were the Academy of StMartin-in-the-Fields, the Academy chorus, and the choristers of Westminster Cathedral. Shoulders braced, feet firmly set apart and looking for all the world like an English archer in the field of Agincourt, Sir Neville Marriner directed Christopher Palmer's cunning restructuring of score for speaker, orchestra and chorus. It was left to us in the audience to piece out their imperfections with our thoughts.

Not that there were many. The heavenly chorus of women and boys could, perhaps, have given a sharper contour to their wordless arcs of sound over the slow moving orchestral figures in the overture. And the battle music, a little cut for fear of making a long movement overlong, could well have been heard in its entirety, so vividly paced and eagerly played was it. It takes something to cry God for Harry, England and St George to the sober, serried ranks of the Festival Hall, and to fling oneself once more into the breach without falling back into the cellos. But Plummer accomplished it, with consummate timing and a command of verbal pitch and timbre of which even the performance's dedicatee, Laurence Olivier, would certainly have been proud.

The presence of a chorus figure in the play acted as an ideal courier for such invisible journeyings. And the mind's ear and eye were nourished equally by the orchestra's rapid musical costume changes from Pied Piper wind-band as the Globe's Theatre orchestra, to fine-woven funeral passacaglia (''Falstaff is dead: the King hath killed his heart'') to Canteloubian Bailero, mourning France's overgrown garden.

Marriner's skilful marshalling of the ''Reveillez-vous Piccars'' theme, in all its fragmentation and transformation, made happy reference to an earlier part of the evening. It had been Vaughan Williams who had suggested the use of the theme to Walton; and it was his Fifth Symphony which had honed the orchestral ensemble and provided a most sympathetic overture in the first half.

GRAPHIC: (Photograph) - Painstaking work by the musician and journalist Christopher Palmer has led to the reconstruction of Sir William Walton's music soundtrack for Olivier's film of Henry V. The score is shown (above) being examined by the composer's widow, Lady Susana Walton, and the actor Christopher Plummer.

Plummer will speak some of Shakespeare's words at the Festival Hall tonight, when the reconstructed score is given its world premiere by the Academy of St Martin-in-the-Fields, directed by Sir Neville Marriner.

Walton made a concert suite from his original film score (which was lost in 1944, shortly after the film was made), but Palmer's version restores much of the Agincourt music, as well as some choral flourishes. Palmer estimates that about 90 per cent of Walton's original score is now restored. Recent performances of Eisenstein's 1938 film Alexander Nevsky, with Prokofiev's score played ''live'' by an orchestra, demonstrated fairly comprehensively that Olivier and Walton took at least some of their ideas from the earlier film: there are notable similarities between the Eisenstein Prokofiev ''Battle on the Ice'' and the OlivierWalton ''French cavalry charge'', for instance. Nevertheless, Walton's score remains a magnificent document of British bulldog spirit in dark wartime days. Festival Hall, South Bank, London SE1 (071-928 8800), tonight, 7.30pm, Pounds 5-Pounds 20. Richard Morrison

THE film-score which William Walton wrote for Olivier's Henry V, one of the most magnificent ever, is being performed complete in concert for the very first time on Friday at the Festival Hall. Christopher Palmer has compiled an extended suite of all the music, including the choral passages. Christopher Plummer will contribute the king's speeches, and Sir Neville Marriner will conduct the St Martin's Academy and Chorus as well as the choristers of Westminster Cathedral. Also in the programme is Vaughan Williams's Fifth Symphony.

Tonight at the Festival Hall the Japanese pianist Mitsuko Uchida will be soloist in Bartok's First Piano Concerto with Eliahu Inbal and the Philharmonia, who also play Kodaly's Dances of Galanta and Stravinsky's Petrushka.

At Queen Elizabeth Hall, also tonight, the highly individual Finnish pianist, Olli Mustonen, is giving a recital including Bach's Fifth French Suite, Beethoven's sonata, Opus 109 and the Brahms Handel Variations. Two very characterful artists, the violinist, Viktoria Mullova, and the pianist, Maria Joao Pires, form a duo on Friday at Wigmore, when they will give violin sonatas by Beethoven, Schubert and Brahms.

On Monday at the Festival Hall the first complete British performance is being given of Gabriel Pierne's oratorio, The Children's Crusade, using a new translation by Eric and Nancy Crozier. Michael Ashcroft conducts the Dulwich College Choir and Orchestra with members of the London Mozart Players and ten young soloists.

Oct. 26, 1971, Times London, news item about a gathering of "Henry the Fifths" at Westminster Abbey. Christopher Plummer talked about this in the forward to "The Guild Shakespeare."

The Guild Shakepeare (Vol. 6) Henry IV Part 2 and Henry V
Forward to Henry V
By Christopher Plummer
_______________________
Forward to book titled,
The Guild Shakespeare (Vol. 6) Henry IV Part 2 and Henry V
By William Shakespeare
Edited by John Andrews
With forwards by Patrick Stewart (for Henry IV Part 2) and Christopher Plummer (for Henry V).
Guild America Books
Copyright 1989 by Doubleday Book & Music Clubs, Inc.
_______________________
Let the Lords of Academe cavil if they must; let purists carp; let critics moan that it is not among the "great" plays, that, in fact, it is not a play at all, but an outworn allegory; that it has nothing in it save some fragmented scenes arranged to accompany one or two familiar "arias"; that even before the Empire had decided to crumble, the work had long since served its purpose; that it is merely flag waving and thoroughly old hat; that it simply out-Herods Herod; and worst of all sins, that it insists on glorifying war!

Well! Let'em grumble if they will, for Shakespeare's Henry the Fifth will forever remain one of the glories of literature in the theatre - a masterpiece of epic poetry and uncannily modern prose. A play rich in humanity, it is heroic and romantic, ruthless and profound, crackling with humour and charged with pathos. There is more variety of character within its impassioned sweep than in most of its author's offerings. It is a work for all sizes and ages. And, in spite of what some may think, it can change with the times as swiftly and as easily as the chameleon changes its colours. It has been conceived and executed with a burning energy and a searing imagination that are superhuman in their powers; and it contains, in its opening passage alone, the most eloquent description of the magic of the stage that was ever written by man.

You may have gathered that Henry V has long been a favourite of mine! I have known it like a good friend; for at various intervals during my life the old war-horse has quite frequently crossed my path, and each time has not only recaptured my excitement, my respect, and my love, but has brought me nothing but the greatest of good luck!

I had read quite a few Shakespeare plays before I was fourteen, and Henry V was one to linger in my mind. My artistic mother, God bless her, had seen to it that from the age of six on, I was taken to every museum, concert hall, and theatre that was remotely possible. From the gallery I watched such actors as Gielgud, Wolfit, Redgrave, Barrault, Vilar, Gerard Phillipe, Edwige Feuillere, Elizabeth Bergner, and that indomitable creature of the thousand faces and voices - the invincible Ruth Draper.

One day at school we were hustled into the assembly hall, and some old actor I didn't know, with long hair, a monacle, and a faded "Director's suit," declaimed Henry's "Once more unto the Breach" speech at us. I was in heaven of course (anything theatrical got me going); but strangely, all the children present, even the most cynical of them, sat spellbound, enthralled, riveted to their seats. The old boy was, to say the least, a bit of a ham, but, by God, those stirring words had found their mark that happy morning!

A few weeks later, as part of our English course, the school was given the day off to see Laurence Olivier's newly arrived and highly acclaimed film version of the play. Well, I tell you! Never had I seen Shakespeare presented like that! So modern, so natural, so full of action, and so damned attractive! I was hooked! In those days I fancied myself as a mimic of unusual brilliance (little horror that I was) and, with the help of one other wayward chum, would regale the class during breaks with unflattering imitations of various masters. This time, mightily inspired by the Henry film, I committed "Once more unto the Breach" to memory and I waited for the first break the next morning. Then, mixing the vocal style of the old actor with that of Olivier, I hurled at my captive fellow-students a barrage of iambic pentameter I was determined they'd never forget. It must have worked, for they rallied at the end, good little scouts that they were, responding with some pretty convincing war-cries of their own. It was at that moment that I somehow knew what the future held in store - O Fate, thou cruel and irresistible siren - that I, heaven help me, was to be sentenced for life to the theatre! Little did I think that ten years hence I would be the youngest of my country to lead the miraculous new Stratford Shakespearean Festival of Canada, both on home ground and in the Edinburgh Festival, as none other than King Henry the Fifth!

Ours was a unique production, French actors portrayed the French court and invaluably brought to the play a whole other world - a whole other life! Visually stunning, yet extremely intimate and human, our Henry V became the story of a rather angry young man reluctant to shed the debauchery of his youth and assume the responsibility of a kingship he did not want, only to discover at the last moment on the battlefield facing those insuperable odds that, without being aware, he at last had grown up: just another soldier, but a king nonetheless. It was a far cry from the rousing piece of Churchillian propaganda of the Forties which England "in its finest hour" had demanded of the film. But it was very raw and very right for the mid-Fifties: the emergence of John Osbourne, the growing influence of Brecht, and the birth of the anti-hero. It was like quaffing gallons of champagne to act in that play: I had the best time of my life and I shan't be anything but eternally grateful to Henry and his followers, for they literally gave me my career.

Twenty-five years later I had the audacity to attempt the role again, this time playing the Chorus as well! Can you imagine the arrogance?! Of course the press rightly clobbered me for my aging Henry, but my Chorus was praised. Chorus being an age-less creature, I shall go on playing him, if I can, til I'm ninety. Lately I've been having the most fun of all performing the concert version to William Walton's music with my friend Sir Neville Marriner conducting the symphony orchestras of London, Minneapolis, and Washington. It's a feast! I get to play Henry, Chorus, Falstaff (from Henry IV), Duke of Burgundy, and Williams all in a dinner-jacket. Perhaps one day in my dotage, I might even get to play the French Princess as well! Who knows?

There is an afternoon in London in the mid-Seventies I shall never forget. It was the anniversary of the victory at Agincourt, and the Dean of Westminster arranged a celebration in the Abbey, where of course the famous young King is interred. The Dean collected all the best-known living "Henry the Fifths" and huddled us into the narrow choirstalls that form a direct path to the Great Altar.

Filling both sides of the stalls, there we sat, all us "Henrys" - staring at each other. Then the senior "Henry" of us all, Sir Laurence Olivier, walked to the altar, turned, and gave us the "Crispin's Day" speech to honour the occasion. He spoke it beautifully, very quietly, with great dignity and simplicity. The silence was devastating as those words echoed through the vastness of the Abbey. High above our heads, the late afternoon sun shone through stained glass, casting long thin shafts that crossed each other in myriads of coloured lights which spilled upon the ancient stones. It was a haunting moment. One could almost believe that the Shades of Garrick and Irving had stolen away from Poet's Corner and now stood rapt in attention among the dark shadows beside us; and that even Henry of Monmouth himself, tiny Henry, had risen from his effigy in the next room and had come forward, his head pressed against the arches, to listen in the stillness. It seemed for one brief interval that some five hundred years had slipped away and we were suddenly there, all of us in Agincourt - and then the moment vanished. Not without leaving me with a deeply thrilling shiver down my spine which anyone, I swear, might have felt at that moment - anyone that is, who is a lover of pageantry, of chivalry, of daring, of the mystery and romance of the old Plantagenet days of the wind in the flags, of the rally of distant trumpets, of the everlasting magestry of language, and of the genius it took to have kept it all - these many centuries - so vividly and so wondrously alive!
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CHRISTOPHER PLUMMER is one of the established classical actors of his generation in the theatre today. He has performed almost all the great roles in the Shakepearean canon, ranging from Hamlet, Macbeth, Richard III, and Iago, to Benedick, Mercutio, and the two Mark Antonys. Apart from his starring appearances over the years on the stages of Broadway and London's West End, he has been a leading player at Great Britain's National Theatere, The Royal Shakespeare Company and, in its formative years, the Stratford Festival of Canada. Mr. Plummer is a veteran of over forty motion pictures, which have gained him international renown.

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Under Sir Neville Marriner's facile direction Saturday night, the National Symphony filled Wolf Trap with the sounds of Shakespeare. As if music for three of the bard's plays weren't treat enough, Christopher Plummer offered his own brand of drama. William Walton's virile score for Laurence Olivier's film production of "Henry V" is splendid on its own, but Plummer's elegant narration helped make the music jump to life. The engaging actor's voice was as fine an instrument as any other on the stage, and his delivery was just as musical. Marriner led a top-flight performance, with brilliant vigor, an enormous sound and a sense of genuine urgency and determination.

Mendelssohn's Overture and Incidental Music for "A Midsummer Night's Dream" moved with nimble feeling and a delightful evenness, although the opening might have stood a purer wind tone.

The Overture to Berlioz's comic opera "Beatrice and Benedict," based on "Much Ado About Nothing," made for a sterling opener. Marriner elicited trim, meticulous playing that showed the brass to full advantage. The second subject for horn and clarinets was simple exceptional.

For this latest edition of the British Festival of Minnesota, music director Neville Marriner delves into the world of British film music, and wisely so. A festival of American music might not touch on film music at all; in this country, film music is a world apart from what's considered serious music. With rare exceptions (Virgil Thomson and Aaron Copeland) serious American composers have stayed away from film, either because they thought it an inferior medium, or because they didn't know how to compose it, or because they simply weren't asked.

The Brits have felt differently. Most major British composers of recent decades have written for films, just as most major British stage actors occasionally work in movies.

Which is the healthier situation - the British or the American - could be argued. What is clearer is how much good music British composers have written for films. In the case of William Walton, a major figure in 20th-century British Music, it could be argued that except for "Facade" (his first success in the 1920s) Walton's finest music was written for the films. Certainly, his music for "Hamlet" and "Henry V," two 1940s Shakespeare films starring Laurence Olivier, is revered among film-score buffs.

The music from "Henry V" takes up the second half of the Orchestra Hall concert. A suite from the score survives and has been recorded several times. Marriner (who, as a violinist, played on the orchestral sound tracks of both Olivier films), combines portions of the suite with material from Olivier's old studio recording.

With actor Christopher Plummer reading the relevant speeches from a platform in front of the Orchestra, the result is a miniature "Henry V" that turned out to be surprisingly effective. The speeches are some of the most famous in Shakespeare: "O for a muse of fire ...," "Once for unto the breach ..." and so on.

Plummer infuses them with the requisite dignity and precise articulation, bringing the scenes alive with a simple gesture or an aptly turned phrase, his voice filling the hall. (He is miked, but only from a distance.)

Walton's film music speaks stirringly of military might and historical pageantry. Peter Maxwell Davies score for "The Boy Friend" speaks of lighter things ...

[Remainder of article omitted, unrelated to Henry V.]