Andrew Lloyd Webber

You're quite dismissive of Benny Andersson's talents. He's composed film scores and musicals as well as a huge number of pop classics. The score of Kristina från Duvemåla alone totally outclasses anything written by Lloyd Webber in terms of melody, variety and sheer emotional depth.
And Neil Sedaka has written many more hits than ALW too. I'd place him well above ALW as a composer too!

I'm being just as objective as you are Oliver. You're the one proclaiming Lloyd Webber is the greatest melodist, I merely pointed out that plenty other composers are just as good or even more accomplished. He's more of a Salieri than an Amadeus.

The Lord's "colossal outpouring of great melody" mostly stolen from Puccini, Ravel, Debussy, Mendelssohn, Rachmaninoff, Pink Floyd and many others....😜

Andrew Lloyd Webber piece among new coronation music www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-64682655

Is Charles III your Bad Kingderella?

ALW at the BBC documentary showing on BBC2 this Saturday at 9.25pm to mark his 75th birthday.

Sadly Andrews son has passed away.
Condolences to the family.

So extremely sad for someone so young. At least he stayed in the UK to be with him.

Andrew will feature in the new series of Who Do You Think You Are? on BBC One in June.

Yes it was wasn't it ? The story itself was interesting but also the small insight it gave into what ALW was like "in real life" - I found him surprisingly endearing (not so his brother). 

I am not sure what him being the "most financially secure composer of musicals on earth" has got to do with any of this. 

Also not sure why you despair. It's hardly unusual that an older creative who's been in the industry his entire life is going to have opinions on current themes in that industry.

The conversation about who's the stories are to tell is increasingly out there. Not giving a position either way but it is VERY much a conversation being had and I think he was right to be concerned about a backlash had he written the Botswana story. (My God, in the current climate he seems to get backlash for much less).

Finally lots of people really enjoyed Cinderella. Yes, it got bashed on here, but most of the GBP in the theatre had a great time. Saw it several times at the Gillian Lynne, I really enjoyed it and it always got a great reception. "Bloody awful" is a matter of opinion. 

I’ve copied a section of blamerobots post from the International thread on Sunset Boulevard Australia, as I'd have taken it too off track. It could have gone in an ‘Evita’ thread but it’s really about what BlameRobots was describing: ALW’s repurposing of his music across many shows. BlameRobots said:

Evita's Buenos Aires is basically an amalgamation of an older pop song ALW and TR wrote, and an unreleased work. And who can blame them, because it's an absolutely damn beautiful song!! But it wasn't written for Ross Hannaman to sing in Evita, was it?

(Some small trivia about that Evita example specifically; the modern orchestrations seem to be trying to step away from how blantant this recycling is in Buenos Aires, instead replacing that section that borrows this melody with a new dance break. It does however, mean that when this melody later appears in the Waltz, it makes no thematic sense. Oops!)

‘Buenos Aires’ is so intriguing. As BlameRobots says, drawn from the one-off 1967 pop song ‘Down Thru Summer’ there’s (in all orchestrations) “And if ever I go to far….real eiderdown and silence” which repeats at the end of the Waltz “Oh what I’d give for a hundred years….I hope you know that”. On the 1976 concept album that was all we heard of that motif, and it works so well as Eva’s ‘contract with fate’ theme: a contract with the city/fame, then later admonishing God for breaking that contract by designing her with ill health.

After “and if ever I go too far” the orchestral break brings a new tune, it’s the same for the 1976 album and 1978 staging but just shifts from electric guitar to brass. Then for 1979 broadway it's more obscured, with a small tinkling piano still playing the exact 1976 tune but brass pulling more attention in a different direction (more like 'Down Thru Summer').  So what is that tune….?

It’s played on the concept album by Hank Marvin of The Shadows. It must have been a fun thing for ALW to work with a hero (as with the Everly Brothers later); he’s often said his classical composer father described The Shadows (in the 1960s) as one of the best chamber orchestras. The tune that Hank Marvin played for Evita is very recognisably the opening riff from The Shadows’ 1964 hit ‘Theme For Young Lovers’.



Did ALW think it was perfect and ask to use it, or did Hank Marvin get invited to the Evita session and that’s what he came up with? To make things more strange: ‘Theme For Young Lovers’ was written by another member of The Shadows (Bruce Welch) not Hank Marvin - though Welch didn’t play on his own Shadows track because he was away from studio that day (?!). So it’s likely that although Welch wrote the substantive melody of ‘Theme For Young Lovers’, Hank Marvin wrote that intro riff.

Hank Marvin’s contribution gets used in two places on the concept album - the middle of ‘Buenos Aires’ and final sad moments of the Waltz - there are never lyrics set to it.  The riff could have been excised after the 1976 Concept Album as it didn’t appear anywhere else, until…..

The 1978 staging’s addition of ‘Peron’s Latest Flame’ at the front of what (on the concept album) was just ‘Dangerous Jade’. ALW’s own ‘contract theme’ (“and if ever I go too far”) is back - but not so tightly used now, perhaps the beginning of ALW being less precise about use of motifs and reprises (Che sings “At the watering holes of the well to do….that would rise for the girl”).

Then, rather than distancing from it, for the first time Hank Marvin’s riff is more fully embedded in Evita, with lyrics: “Such a shame she wandered into our enclosure”

In 1978, once Evita had opened in London The Shadows had their biggest hit for 12 years with a non-lyric version of ‘Don’t Cry For Me Argentina’ which reached number 5 in the UK singles chart. They had a few hits after, but that was their last Top 10 single. I wonder if they did a friendly deal between musicians.