Sunday Afternoon at the Opera - Leigh: Jolly Roger

Sunday Afternoon at the Opera host Keith Brown writes:

Walter Leigh (1905-42) has been compared to Sir Arthur Sullivan. Yes, like Sullivan he wrote much music for the lyric stage, but he was also an all-round composer of serious classical music, British light classical music, chamber music, and film music. His untimely death was a great loss for British music overall. He served in a British tank regiment in World War Two and was killed in the battle for Tobruk.

Leigh is particularly remembered for his two operettas, The Pride of the Regiment (1931) and Jolly Roger, or The Admiral's Daughter (1933). The story of Jolly Roger is set in Jamaica in the eighteenth century and, as its title suggests, has piratical elements. BBC broadcast a concert performance of Jolly Roger, complete with its spoken dialog, on December 21, 1972. Ashley Lawrence conducted the BBC Concert Orchestra and Ambrosian Singers.

You would think the venerable British Broadcasting Corporation would have made its own archival recording of this operetta. Well, apparently not! The Jolly Roger broadcast was preserved for posterity thanks to a dedicated audiophile, Richard Itter, who made his own professional quality monosound airtape of it working off the radio signal. Over the years 1952-96 he built up a private home collection of such transmissions of many BBC classical music programs. The UK-based Lyrita Recorded Edition Trust received permission to release to the public in compact disc format priceless recordings from the Itter archive. Jolly Roger was released on two Lyrita CD's in 2014.