Red Riding Hood

Although this piece has been performed many times throughout the world, today sees the first performance incorporating songs from Paul Patterson’s “Little Red Riding Hood Songbook”. The Fiona Marshall Singers will charm us at appropriate moments with “Wolf”, the deliciously intoxicated “Drinking Song”, “Little Girl” before finally strutting their stuff in “Little Red Riding Hood”.

The following was written by Anthony Burton for the first performance of “Little Red Riding Hood”. Paul Patterson is one of the best known and most frequently performed British composers of his generation. He has shown a special flair for writing for large choral and orchestral forces, as for example in his two works commissioned by the Three Choirs Festival, the Mass of the Sea in 1983 and the Te Deum in 1988. He has also demonstrated an unusual lightness of touch in many of his works - including pieces for the King's Singers, and going right back to his Opus 1, a setting for children of Hilaire Belloc's cautionary tale “Rebecca”. Patterson was thus an ideal choice to compose music to match the words of Roald Dahl. The original suggestion, from the author's widow, was for a setting of a group of his much-loved “Revolting Rhymes”. Donald Sturrock, who had made a film about Dahl in 1985 and became a friend of the family, volunteered to adapt the text. Then, by great good fortune, a script Dahl had written for a possible television adaptation of one of the Rhymes was found; his inspired re-telling of the story of “Little Red Riding Hood and the Wolf”. Sturrock realised that this could form the basis of a single longer work and devised a text in which Dahl's original verses were augmented by prose dialogue and narration. This is the text which Paul Patterson has set as a concert piece, lasting a little under half an hour, for narrator and orchestra.

The words are spoken freely against the orchestral background without any attempt to notate exact rhythms for the verse - something Dahl disliked in previous settings of his words. The orchestra at the beginning becomes an Enchanted Forest, through which the Narrator makes his way to begin the story. Thereafter it illustrates the narrative, with themes to match the characters and the action, in the popular tradition of Prokofiev's “Peter and the Wolf” and Poulenc's “Babar the Elephant”. The music is straightforward, easy to follow and, the composer says, "very tuneful - amazingly so for me". But it is certainly not without its incidental delights for listeners of all ages: the little bursts of avant-garde free-time notation for the thunderstorm near the beginning and, later on, for a death scene; the musical menu of possibilities for the wolf's lunch, in the course of which Wagner's Isolde is scandalously identified as a juicy cow; Grandma's doorbell, which has unexpected classical aspirations; the representation of a wolf's burp by the percussion instrument called a lion's roar; and what Patterson calls the cat-walk music for Little Red Riding Hood's final appearance. Above all, in this story which hinges on characters pretending to be other characters, there is a great deal of ingenuity in the way that the themes associated with one character similarly impersonate those of another. But then, as the Narrator says near the beginning, in the Forest, "appearances can be very, very deceptive. Nothing is ever quite what it seems...."