Leighton Lucas

Leighton Lucas (5 January 1903 – 1 November 1982) was an English composer and conductor. He was born into a musical family: his father, Clarence Lucas, was also a noted composer from Canada and his English mother Clara Asher-Lucas (1867-1942) was a concert pianist who had studied with Clara Schumann.[1] Lucas began his career as a dancer for Sergei Diaghilev's Ballets Russes (1918–21) but soon branched out into conducting. He joined the Birmingham Repertory Theatre as musical director from 1923-25. During this time he conducted a performance of Rutland Boughton's opera The Immortal Hour in 1923.[2]

In the 1930s he joined the Markova-Dolin ballet company,[3] and in 1941 became musical director of the Ballet Guild, a wartime company for which he formed first a quintet, later an orchestra.[4] He also worked as an arranger for Jack Hylton's orchestra between c.1926 and 1930.

He served in the RAF during the war. Afterwards he formed his own orchestra and developed his conducting career, specializing in French music. In 1954 he conducted the first staged performance in Britain of Honegger's oratorio Jeanne d'Arc au bûcher at the Stoll Theatre.[3] Lucas gave broadcasts and lectures on ballet and theatre music, and was appointed professor at the Royal Academy of Music.[2]

Lucas was a self-taught composer of religious works, concert music and film scores.[5] He is particularly noted for his film compositions, including the scores for Target for Tonight (1941), Alfred Hitchcock's Stage Fright (1950), Ice-Cold in Alex (1958) and the incidental music for The Dam Busters, where he fashioned his music around the famous title march by Eric Coates. Philip Lane reconstructed the lost score, noting that Lucas created his own main theme "which seems to play hide and seek with Coates's throughout the film, both vying for supremacy."[6]

His first major concert work to receive recognition was the Partita for piano and chamber orchestra, broadcast in 1934 with the composer conducting the London Symphony Orchestra and his mother Clara Asher-Lucas as the solo pianist.[7] Benjamin Britten described it as "very interesting – especially the quite lovely Sarabande."[8] Lucas's Sinfonia Brevis (1936) for horn and 11 instruments may be one of the earliest British scores to incorporate Balinese gamelan effects. It was also heard by Britten, who went on to use such effects in his music from Paul Bunyan.[9]

Ballet de la Reine (1949, revised 1957) is a six movement suite taken from the sketches of an unperformed ballet, Pavan for Mary, which was originally intended for the Edinburgh Ballet Club. The music looks back to Elizabethan music forms (similarly to Peter Warlock's Capriol Suite) while also retaining a French flavour (because Mary, Queen of Scots spent her childhood in France).[10]

In the 1950s and 1960s Lucas was living at 25 Heathfield Gardens, London W4.[11]