This is an unusually imaginative and attractive concert overture by an English composer who, if not rated as one of the top composers his country produced in the twentieth century, is certainly an unusually good one. This overture demonstrates what can be done with the simple and too-often hackneyed fanfare and, moreover, does it to brilliant effect within the simplified writing necessary for a work for youth orchestra.

Ian Parrott (born Horace Ian Parrott in London in 1916) received his musical education at New College, Oxford, and the Royal College of Music in London. A developing career had to be put on hold when he joined the Army in World War II as a Signal Corps officer. He participated in the North African campaign. This service affected his music, which for much of the 1940s was full of references to the music or the events that he experienced there. These included an opera, The Sergeant-Major's Daughter, which received its premiere in Cairo in 1943.

Just before joining the service he had married an Elizabeth Cox, a Welsh artist particularly noted for her portraiture, and in 1950 they settled in Wales, where Parrott became a faculty member of the Music Department of University College in Aberystwyth. He remained on the faculty for 33 years, training several notable Welsh composers and becoming associated more with Welsh music than English. He won several prizes for his compositions, but for the most part his academic reputation has outshone his fame as a composer.

In 1983 he retired from his college post; ten years later he was honored by a special Parrott Music Festival. Its organizers requested a new work from him for the occasion, and he obliged with this excellent overture. Modestly, he subtitled it as being for "a Somerset Festival" rather than for "a Parrott Festival."

One expects any work with "fanfare" in its name to be brash and brassy. The Overture starts out that way with a fanfare figure in the brass that is quite inventive. The strings answer the brass with a descending figure containing an interesting rhythmic twist. This rhythm and some of the melodic outline of the fanfare then combine as the main subject to the overture proper (for the fanfares are, structurally speaking, the introduction to the main body of the work).

Much of the work is not particularly fanfarish in sound, but instead is a most imaginative and diverting development of the main ideas. However, as the music is developed the work gets louder and the fanfares resume their prominence. At the very end of the work a thrilling passage for trumpets shows us that Parrott has most effectively reserved the most blazing expression of the fanfare idea for just that moment.

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