Captain Noah and His Floating Zoo

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Horovitz was born in Vienna in 1926 and emigrated to England in 1938. He studied music at New College, Oxford, with Gordon Jacob at the Royal College of Music where he won the Farrar Prize, and for a further year with Nadia Boulanger in Paris. The Festival of Britain in 1951 brought him to London as conductor of ballet and concerts at the Festival Amphitheatre. He then held positions as conductor to the Ballets Russes, associate director of the Intimate Opera Company, on the music staff at Glyndebourne, and as guest composer at the Tanglewood Festival, USA. I’m a secular person but of a generation that learned bible stories at school. The magic and richness of these stories has stayed with me as mythology, not theology. I was pleased to find old Noah step into my poem. I see him as played by John Houston. Many animal qualities in the poem are invented, but some are adapted from old bestiaries and a scurry around world mythologies. I am indebted to poet Alyson Hallett for information about the hyena. Joseph Horovitz composes concertos and ballets, operas and chamber music, yet he’s best known for Rumpole of the Bailey, and Captain Noah and his Floating Zoo. Over the past eighteen months I have been reading various poems translated from the Anglo-Saxon, and pootling about through some Old English poems and tracts. I found several long-forgotten Old English dictionaries belonging to my late husband Peter Redgrove. I studied these in a barefoot kind of way. Some of that strange and mysterious vocabulary has found its way into recent poems. A wish to write about animals sprang from a reading of the Chester Mystery Play of Noah and The Deluge. This article is about the British composer and conductor. For the American cultural historian, see Joseph Horowitz.

Feel the Spirit, written in 2016, is a cycle of seven familiar spirituals expertly arranged by John Rutter. These vivid and expressive arrangements can be performed individually, or as a complete cycle that showcases the rich heritage of the spiritual. The work brings new life to such well-loved titles as Steal Away,

Horovitz married Anna Landau in 1956, shortly after coaching at the bi-centenary celebration for Mozart and Glyndeborne. They honeymooned in Majorca, staying in Paguera and visiting Valldemossa. He later used these two names for two clarinet pieces, based on Spanish folk-tunes he had heard there. He was Professor of Composition at the Royal College of Music from 1961, and a Council Member of the Composers' Guild of Great Britain from 1970. [7] Between 1969 and 1996 he belonged to the board of the Performing Rights Society. An energetic, enthusiastic and erudite man, the sprightly Horovitz invariably showed genuine yet modest delight when his works produced a positive reaction. “If people find, for instance, three minutes of a piece of music of mine which they’d like to hear again, that’s a wonderful thing,” he said. One of a series of "pop cantatas", a form of music commissioned between 1963 and 1970, this tells the well-known Biblical tale of Noah's Ark. The music was written by the popular composer Joseph Horovitz and the lyrics byMichael Flanders, of Flanders and Swann fame. They settled briefly in London, where he attended Regents Park School for refugee children, but moved to Oxford during the Blitz, which he recalled in Ad Astra (1990), a march for concert band. He was educated at City of Oxford High School, dreamt of being an artist and took lessons at the Ashmolean, which had become home to the evacuated Slade School of Art. Novello & Company Limited are sad to announce the passing of distinguished composer, conductor and teacher Joseph Horovitz , who died peacefully on 9 February 2022, aged 95. He will be greatly missed by us all and the music world at large.

Gentleman's Island (libretto by Gordon Snell) in English or German for tenor, baritone and chamber orchestra His more serious religious vocal works included the psalm setting Sing unto the Lord a New Song (1971), which was the first work commissioned from a Jewish composer for the choir of St Paul's Cathedral. The oratorio Samson for voices and brass band followed in 1977, a commission from the National Brass Band Championships of Great Britain. Young Joseph was showing promise as pianist when the family fled Austria in 1938 after the country was annexed by the Nazis. Memories of their departure remained vivid. “It’s indelible,” he said more than half a century later. “You cannot have the experience of being ejected from your home without remaining intensely uneasy.” Children from seven primary schools took part, more than 150 all together, and each school had the opportunity to sing a song of their own. These included two traditional songs, Belemama and I’ve been to Harlem. Captain Noah was recorded by The King’s Singers ( EMI 1972, reissued Dutton Vocalion 2005 as CDLF8120). One of the ensemble's earliest recordings, the performance features Joseph Horovitz at the piano. The work was also commercially recorded as an animated version intended for television broadcast (1972; VHS, 1978).

He is survived by his wife, Anna (nee Landau), whom he married in 1956, and their two daughters, Isabel and Sally, six grandchildren and three great-grandchildren.