Philip Sainton

The grandson of French violinist-composer Prosper Philippe Sainton and the celebrated English contralto Helen Dolby, Philip Sainton had the bad luck to be born into the next generation of his family, which didn't care for music -- his father discouraged and belittled his interest in performing and composing, and he studied music on his own until his teens, when he entered the Royal Academy of Music. He became a violist, earning the principal chair with the BBC Symphony Orchestra, and composed occasionally. Sir Henry Wood conducted the premiere of his Serenade Fantastique for Viola and Orchestra in 1935. His performing career came to an end in a freak accident in the early '40s -- an iron exploded in his hand, crippling his ability to finger the strings of his instrument -- and for the remainder of his life, Sainton struggled to provide for his family as a composer and conductor, despite a crippling lack of confidence, a residual effect of his father's treatment of his youthful musical aspirations. Sainton's most successful compositions, which were all tonal, post-Romantic works in the manner of Sir Arnold Bax, include the symphonic poems The Island, Nadir (inspired by what Sainton observed during the London blitz), and Sea Pictures, the Serenade Fantastique, and the ballet The Dream of a Marionette. His most widely heard music, however, was the score he wrote for John Huston's film Moby Dick (1956) -- Huston had chanced to hear a record of pieces by composer Jack Gerber that Sainton had orchestrated and conducted, and approached him about scoring his film. The result was a bold, expressive work about the sea that rivals the finest concert pieces of Bax and Frank Bridge as well as the best film music of Ralph Vaughan Williams, and which can stand separate from the movie.
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