Twelve-tone horror at KCO

Tonight and tomorrow night, the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra kicks off the fourth season of the AAA series, with film music under the title 'Suspense'. But not everyone will immediately associate composers like Bartók, Lutyens and Schoenberg with cinema. Their works stand alongside film scores by Bernard Herrmann at Vertigo and Psycho by Alfred Hitchcock and world premieres by Joey Roukens, Vincent van Warmerdam and Fons Merkies, who wrote music to a film clip of their own choosing. Most notable, however, is a suite from the soundtrack to The Skull by Freddie Francis, which Elisabeth Lutyens composed in 1965. Unfortunately, it will only be performed tomorrow night (Friday the 13th!).

Elisabeth Lutyens (1906-1983) became known as 'twelve-note Lizzy' because she was one of the first in England to embrace the twelve-note music of Schoenberg et al. She was a flamboyant personality, who agitated against the misogynistic nature of the music world and fought like a tiger to get her compositions performed. Besides, it would have been a hair's breadth away if the suite from The Skull was still thrown out of the programme. While, nota bene, being performed publicly for the first time.

The daughter of the architect Sir Edwin Lutyens, Lutyens belonged to the British upper class and learned to play the violin and piano at an early age. She started composing her own pieces and was determined to become a composer - certainly not an obvious choice in her circles, especially for a girl. However, she was encouraged by her aunt Constance Lytton, a militant suffragette. After studying music briefly in Paris, where she became enthusiastic about the work of Claude Debussy, Lutyens went on to study composition at the Royal College of Music in London in 1926. Thanks to her teacher Howard Drake, some of her works were already performed during her studies, but she later withdrew these.

A turning point came when Lutyens met Edward Clark in 1938, who had studied with Arnold Schoenberg and had introduced a lot of contemporary music to the UK as a programmer for the BBC. From then on, she started composing twelve-tone music. However, she herself always maintained that she had developed her serial techniques independently of Schoenberg, by listening to the Fantasias by Henry Purcell. Unfortunately, her progressive style was not appreciated in her homeland, and conversely, she had only contempt for her composing peers, whom she described as 'the cowgirl school'.

As her concert music was hardly performed, Lutyens was forced to make a living composing film scores. Although these are less radical than her concert music, she also uses twelve-tone techniques in them. Incidentally, she was well aware that film scores often had to be realised at short notice, and when called for a commission, she invariably asked: 'Do you want it good, or do you want it Wednesday?'

Lutyens wrote mostly for horror films, and British author David Huckvale argues that her soundtracks played an important role in the acceptance of modernist music in Britain. On her approach, he writes: 'It is striking that she often leaves out the music at the moment of death, or finding a victim.' In The Skull music sounds only after a very long prologue, 'so that the effect is all the greater when the orchestra deploys full on a close-up of the skull'. Lutyens also uses two bass clarinets, omits the violins from the string corps and includes the cimbalom, still unusual in 1965, in the percussion group. Thanks to the Concertgebouw Orchestra, we can finally hear this work live.