Charles Mackerras and 'Pineapple Poll'

The young Charles Mackerras

The eminent conductor Sir Charles Mackerras (1925-2010) is remembered as a Janáček and Mozart specialist, but he first became known for adapting the tunes of Sir Arthur Sullivan into the ingenious ballet score Pineapple Poll.

Sir Arthur Sullivan as seen by Spy

That came early in Mackerras' career, soon after he joined the Sadler's Wells Theatre Ballet as an assistant conductor. The future Sir Charles was a Gilbert & Sullivan aficionado, having both sung and played in Australian productions when young.

So when Sullivan's music left copyright in 1950, Mackerras had the idea of using the famous tunes for a ballet score. He and a colleague chose one of W.S. Gilbert's stories - which also had become the basis of HMS Pinafore - and turned it into a ballet scenario called Pineapple Poll. (That's "Poll" as in "Polly," not "poll" as in "polling booth.")

John Cranko

Mackerras' employer was intrigued - the ballet seemed like a good candidate for an appearance at the 1951 Festival of Britain - and enlisted two superb artists to bring the endeavor to life: the young choreographer John Cranko (1927-73) and the popular cartoonist Osbert Lancaster (1908-86), who had long had the ambition to design for the stage.

The result was a smash success, so much so that three months after the ballet's March opening, Mackerras and the Sadler's Wells Orchestra were in the studio, taping the score for UK Columbia. Today's post presents that LP and a follow-up stereo recording for HMV dating from 1960. Mackerras went on to record the piece twice more.

The 1951 Production and Recording

Pineapple Poll is a simple tale with four primary characters - Poll, a waterfront vendor, dashing Capt. Belaye, whom she and all other women on stage adore, Jasper, the pot boy who loves Poll, and Blanche, the high-class betrothed of Belaye.

Cranko's ballet somehow manages to convey the essence of Gilbert's nonsense without using any of his words. At the end, Belaye surprisingly becomes an admiral and walks off with Blanche (and her aunt), and Jasper even more surprisingly becomes a Captain himself and finally wins over Poll.

Osbert Lancaster's original painting for the Scene 3 set

From Scene 3: Elaine Fifield as Poll, Sheilah O'Reilly as the aunt, Stella Claire as Blanche and David Blair as Belaye

Mackerras did his own conjuring trick with the music; every last bar is taken from Sullivan, but all of it has been reorchestrated into a ballet score as irresistible as Gaîté Parisienne, which Manuel Rosenthal's had compiled from Jacques Offenbach's music for a 1938 ballet. 

The download includes an review of the 1951 Pineapple Poll production by Irving Kolodin, who praises the conductor-arranger: "As rearranged (mostly rescored, to get away from Sullivan's work-a-day treatment of the pit orchestra) by Charles Mackerras and vivaciously conducted by the same talented young man this was as far from the Savoy Theatre as the Savoy is from the Savoy-Plaza."

Elaine Fifield as Poll, David Poole as Jasper 

The subsequent recording was a hit with the critics, who praised Mackerras' ingenuity and for the most part the orchestral performance and recording. Seventy years later, the sound struck me as having a peculiar screechiness, which I've tamed.

The popularity of the ballet meant that the Mackerras recording soon had two rivals on the market - led by his fellow Sadler's Wells conductors, Robert Irving and John Lanchbery. This hardly seems collegial. 

The download includes a couple dozen production photos, some from the premiere, some from later in the decade. It also contains photos of all Osbert Lancaster's set designs and many of the costumes.

Sir Osbert Lancaster

The 1960 Recording

Probably seeing the benefit of a new stereo recording and possibly spurred by a 1959 televised production from Sadler's Wells, HMV invited Mackerras to visit Abbey Road Studio 1, where he and the Royal Philharmonic re-recorded the Pineapple Poll score in resplendent sound. At least it has long been considered to be resplendent - I found it both boomy and tinny, the products of a boosted low-end and high-end, the usual recipe for "high fidelity."

Slightly tamed, however, it is revealed to be quite an improvement on the first recording, and Mackerras' mastery of the orchestra and score continue to be impressive.

For its cover, HMV decided to give us a close-up of a pineapple rather than something more germane to the ballet. That said, I am not sure that US Columbia's cover for the 1951 recording (see above) is much more attractive, with its focus on Capt. Belaye's muttonchops. The UK Columbia reissue cover is below - it at least has a production photo on view.

Second cover design for the UK Columbia recording

Seeing the Production

From the Birmingham Royal Ballet production

Pineapple Poll is still produced; the Birmingham Royal Ballet (successor to the Sadler's Wells Theatre Ballet) has staged it, and a few photos are in the download.

The ballet was presented on television in 1959, with Mackerras conducting. The production has come out on DVD, but is now out of print. You can see it, however, on Medici.tv, a subscription service. Part of the first scene can be found on YouTube.

Also available on YouTube is a good 1980 performance from the Australian Ballet. It's in color, but appears to have been transferred from a VHS copy with distorted sound.

The download includes a detailed list of the sources of Mackerras' G&S plundering. This and the vintage souvenir photos come from the Gilbert & Sullivan Archive. The Columbia LP was cleaned up from lossless files on Internet Archive. The HMV disc is from my collection. The download also contains quite a number of reviews of the 1951 disc.

Charles Mackerras by James Romaine Govett (1966)