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Christopher Francis Palmer (9 September 1946 – 22 January 1995) was an English author, arranger, orchestrator and composer. He was also a biographer of composers, champion of lesser-known composers and commentator on film music and other musical subjects; record producer; and lecturer. Involved in a very wide range of projects, his output was prodigious and he came to be regarded as one of the finest symphonic orchestrators of his generation. He was dedicated to the conservation, recording and promotion of classic film scores by composers such as Bernard Herrmann, Dimitri Tiomkin, Franz Waxman, Miklós Rózsa, Elmer Bernstein and others. He wrote full biographies as well as sleeve notes, radio scripts, reviews and articles on composers such as Benjamin Britten, Frederick Delius, Karol Szymanowski, Arthur Bliss, George Dyson, Herbert Howells, Maurice Ravel, Nikolai Tcherepnin and others.
He arranged music from the film scores and other music of William Walton, Malcolm Arnold, Ralph Vaughan Williams, Ernest Bloch. Artists who have performed his work include José Carreras, James Galway, Julian Lloyd Webber,[1] and Jill Gomez.[2] Outside the area of music, he put together anthologies of the prose of Arthur Machen and James Farrar.[3] He died of an AIDS-related disease at the age of 48.
Palmer was born in Norfolk in 1946. He early showed interest in music, encouraged by his father, a RAF pilot,[4] who had trained as a church organist. He was educated at Norwich School and studied the organ at Saxlingham, then went on to Trinity College, Cambridge, where he qualified in modern languages and music.[1][3] His teachers at Cambridge included Peter le Huray and Sir David Willcocks.
His first involvement in film music was as a writer, through which he met many film composers in the United Kingdom and United States. He struck up a friendship with Bernard Herrmann, who was living in London at the time. He assisted Herrmann with his scoring for Taxi Driver and Obsession (both released in 1976; Herrmann died in December 1975, just after completing the score to Taxi Driver). Through Herrmann, Palmer had met Charles Gerhardt, with whom he collaborated on at least 15 albums.[5] Miklós Rózsa was impressed by Palmer's critiques of his work and invited him to assist with the orchestration of his score for Providence (1977) and all his subsequent films. He then met Elmer Bernstein, who used Palmer's assistance in scoring Heavy Metal (1981). This led to further orchestration work with film composers such as Maurice Jarre (A Passage to India (1984), Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome (1985), and Stanley Myers (The Witches (1990).[1]
Not content to work only on new film projects, Palmer also sought to preserve the legacy of the past by arranging symphonic suites from the scores of composers such as Sir Malcolm Arnold, William Alwyn, Sir Arthur Bliss, George Gershwin, Bronisław Kaper, Erich Wolfgang Korngold, Jerome Moross, Alfred Newman, Alex North, Conrad Salinger, Max Steiner, Dimitri Tiomkin, Sir William Walton, Franz Waxman, and Roy Webb.[1] He appeared as himself in the 1992 documentary film Music for the Movies: Bernard Herrmann.
He collaborated with Sergei Prokofiev's son Oleg on the publication of Sergei Prokofiev, Soviet Diary, 1927 and Other Writings (Faber and Faber, 1991).[4] His planned biography of Prokofiev was left unfinished at his death, which was due to an HIV/AIDS-related illness in 1995, when he was aged only 48.[1]
Prone to overwork himself, one of the last things Palmer said to Ray Sumby, his literary editor, was "Ray, don't take on too much."[5]
Christopher Palmer's arrangements and orchestrations included:
His activities as a record producer included:
Christopher Palmer wrote at least a dozen books:
Palmer edited Miklós Rózsa's memoir, Double Life (1982), which he organized from the composer's dictated recollections. He also wrote a chapter on Nikolai Tcherepnin for The New Grove Dictionary of Opera (1992) edited by Stanley Sadie. Palmer's work on a new biography of Sergei Prokofiev was cut short by his death and his papers on this project are stored at the Serge Prokofiev Archive[4]
In addition, Palmer wrote hundreds of record reviews, program notes, radio scripts, lecture scripts, and record sleeve notes. Christopher Palmer was twice nominated for the Grammy Award for Best Album Notes:
Christopher Palmer composed the original music for Miloš Forman's film Valmont (1989).
He worked as an orchestrator or arranger on such films as Obsession (1976), Zulu Dawn (1979), A Passage to India (1984), Spies Like Us (1985), Legal Eagles (1986), Scenes from the Class Struggle in Beverly Hills (1989), Shirley Valentine (1989) and The Witches (1990).
He was the Musical Assistant/Associate on films such as The French Lieutenant's Woman (1981) and Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome (1985), Music Co-Producer on Greystoke: The Legend of Tarzan, Lord of the Apes (1984), and Music Consultant on Cape Fear (1991).[11]
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