London, 2025

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During this interview, I change seats, place myself in front of another artist and ask him the questions I wish people asked me. Today, I speak to the English composer Frederick Paul Naftel who has just released a new orchestral suite entitled The Legend of Pandora. 

 

Frederick, what have you been up to since our last chat? 

 

Planning various projects and deciding in which order to do them, following requests and interest from several artists. Promoting the recording of my Legend of Pandora in the hope a professional orchestra/conductor takes it up.

 

Now, tell us about The Legend of Pandora, your latest project? 

 

The performance on 18th January this year was of the revised version of the original 2017 score, scored for larger forces and adding an extra movement. It started off as a ballet score, in the fervent hope I could interest dance companies in taking it up. I intend to expand the score further still to create a full length ballet.

The story of the mythological Pandora is fairly well-known but in my work, I wanted to imagine how Pandora was born and what adventures she experienced in life...not just the opening of the vessel. What did she look like and what skills/attributes did she possess. With whom she made contact... especially the gods. What happened after the vessel was opened. In other words, an imaginary scenario, ripe for the medium of dance.

 

How did you approach the composing of it, and how has it differed to some of your past projects? 

 

When I was first asked to compose a new work for a local orchestra, I decided to look back at a school project I was involved with on the theme of Pandora, involving year 8 children from a school in Buxton, Derbyshire. This involved three levels of music input... a small ensemble playing live, pre-recorded synthesised music and improvisation using a vast battery of percussion. The orchestral work expands on the actual story (not the music from the school project) and was the first orchestral piece I had written after a long hiatus from composition. I decided to break the story up into separate movements or scenes, as I feel I work best with shorter, individual movements, although there is some definite symphonic development in the score. I scored the work for a full modern orchestra with plenty of percussion, my own instrument. The main difference between this work and previous compositions is with the use of leitmotifs and recurring ideas throughout all sections.

 

What about the orchestration of The Legend of Pandora, can you tell us more about it?

 

The new version of the score is written for an orchestra commensurate with that of Holst's Planets, which also featured in the January programme. This allowed me to add extra colour and power where required and also to alter some of the melodic and harmonic lines. I also left out a couple of percussion instruments that were rather superfluous and gave the organ a more prominent role in 4 of the movements. I love the brass section, especially horns, with trumpet fanfares featuring several times in the music. I also wished to give soloist roles to instruments usually reserved for reinforcing the bass line, such as bass clarinet and contrabassoon. I added a euphonium to the brass section, which occasionally doubles the horn line although it has a few solo passages too.

 

There have been many great orchestral suites, and ballets written over the centuries; has there been one or more which have inspired you in the creation of your work? 

 

Interesting question...I would say ballets on a mythical theme such as Ravel's Daphnis et Chloe and Roussel's Bacchus et Ariadne. There may even be a touch (!) of Stravinsky's Rite of Spring and Ginastera's Panambi. Their colourful and often brutally rhythmic music was probably at the back of my mind when creating Pandora.

 

As an autodidact composer, what are some of the ways you have taught yourself to write in such an orchestral scale? 

 

I credit my ability to write for orchestra from my many years playing percussion with orchestras, discovering exciting music from within the ensemble, noting what works and sometimes what does not. Following scores while listening to recordings, thereby gleaning knowledge of the different facets of creating music. Another big influence comes from my great fondness for film music, not recent soundtracks but the great scores of the Golden Age and later on, the imaginative instrumentation of composers such as Leonard Rosenman, Jerry Goldsmith, Christopher Young and of course, John Williams.

 

So after The Legend of Pandora, what’s next? 

 

I have a number of planned projects, including being asked to compose the music for a sensory opera involving children with special needs, a song-cycle setting children's poems written in Terezin and other concentration camps to mark the 80th anniversary year of the liberation of Auschwitz (for the soprano Caroline Kennedy), various piano pieces for Haley Myles, whose playing features on my album released last October. I am also planning a recording of some of my orchestral works (including The Legend of Pandora) with Slaithwaite Philharmonic and Ben Ellin.

 

Thanks very much Frederick. One last for the road — one book, one album, one film —, tell us about your latest cultural discoveries?

 

Book: The Complete Ghost Stories of M.R. James; album: Quo Vadis: The Complete Soundtrack by Miklos Rozsa; film: Ben-Hur — the greatest film ever made, IMHO!

 

Bouncing on Frederick,’s words, Ben-Hur is to cinema what Der Ring des Nibelungen is to music; a massive masterpiece of complexity and grandeur and something to experience at least once in a lifetime! Read my review of The Legend of Pandora.