Lambert, Constant

Constant Lambert – Horoscope

(b. London, 23. August 1905 – d. London, 21. August 1951)

Suite from the ballet

Dance for the Followers of Leo
Sarabande for the Followers of Virgo
Valse for the Gemini
Bacchanale
Invocation to the Moon and Finale

Preface
The orchestra suite of Constant Lambert’s ballet Horoscope (1938) is a piece drenched in legend, mystery, drama, and late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century musical beauty. Out of the four ballets he composed over his lifetime, Horoscope is considered by scholars to be his best.

Leonard Constant Lambert was born in London in 1901, the second son of Australian painter George Washington Thomas Lambert. Lambert was a sickly child, spending most of his time in the hospital recovering from various illnesses. When it came time to attend school, Lambert attended The Preparatory School for Christ’s Hospital, a boarding school in London. During his time at Christ’s Hospital, Lambert was ill, so he spent much of his early school years reading and studying art, literature, and music. In 1922, he earned a scholarship for the Royal College of Music, where he studied with Ralph Vaughan Williams and George Dyson for composition, Malcolm Sargent for conducting, Herbert Fryer for piano, and R.O. Morris for composition and counterpoint. Lambert was not interested in the “classics,” like Mozart and Beethoven but in French composers such as Satie, Delius, and Chabrier, and Russian composers like Stravinsky, Glinka, Borodin, and Mussorgsky. He is also remembered as a “child of the 1920s” for his interest in jazz, as seen in works like Elegiac Blues (1927). Strangely, scholars do not know much about Lambert’s early compositional style as he was not pleased with many of his student works, destroying most of them. …

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