If John Huston’s 1956 big-screen version of Herman Melville’s masterpiece has always tended to divide opinion, there has never been any argument about the magnificent quality of the extensive musical score supplied by a little-known English composer named Philip Sainton (1891-1967).
Sainton’s reputation in his lifetime as a superb professional violist (he was to attain the post of principal in both the Queen’s Hall Orchestra and BBC SO) tended to eclipse the merits of his own creative output (he actually studied composition under Frederick Corder at the Royal Academy of Music), but thanks to the pioneering efforts of the RVW Trust, Chandos and Matthias Bamert, we now have fine recordings of three of his orchestral pieces: The Island, a headily voluptuous tone-poem first performed in 1942 (10/93), a 1929 ballet score called The Dream of the Marionette and the slumbering 1942 symphonic elegy, Nadir (both 10/97). The breathtakingly confident and richly evocative sea music in Moby Dick will come as no surprise to those acquainted with The Island. Moreover, in certain scenes, most notably “Queequeg’s entrance” (track 3), the two dock scenes (tracks 6 and 7) and the towering climactic sequence entitled “Eerie calm/He rises” (track 25) Sainton profitably recycles material from Marionette and Nadir.
The overriding impression left by Moby Dick is one of intense vitality and engaging personality: here is music of richly stocked imagination and uncommonly fertile resource. Not only does Sainton perceptively convey Captain Ahab’s tortured personality and the mounting obsession of his vengeful search for the giant white whale, but there’s an immensely subtle long-term scheme too. For instance, that ominously descending chordal sequence (subsequently cut from the final print) which accompanies Elijah’s doom-laden prophecy at the start of “Stranger/Ready for departure” (track 11) is destined to reappear at key points later on, above all when the Pequod finally sinks beneath the waves. In sum, Sainton’s Moby Dick is a genuine tour de force and its subsequent neglect unaccountable. My overall assessment chimes resoundingly with that of annotator Bill Whitaker, when he declares that it “deserves a spot alongside the best of Britain’s sea music, including Vaughan Williams’s A Sea Symphony, Frank Bridge’s The Sea and Arnold Bax’s Fourth Symphony”.
Though the Moscow SO under William T. Stromberg’s urgent direction don’t always offer the last word in polish, they respond with great zest and commitment, and the sound is more than acceptable too. Reading Marco Polo’s extraordinarily informative booklet, it’s clear that the whole enterprise was a great labour of love, and all involved certainly deserve our hearty gratitude.'