Fand Catalogue

  

Out of the Blue

for piano duet

Hubert Bath

arr. John Mitchell

Out of the Blue was composed in the early 1930s for performance at an RAF display at Hendon. In 1931 it was published by R. Feldman & Co., London, in a piano solo arrangement, bearing a dedication to the Royal Air Force Depot, Uxbridge, Middlesex, and with words (written by Lt Col. Graham Seton Hutchinson) provided for the Trio section. The march gained enormously in popularity when BBC Radio began to utilise it in 1948 as the theme music for their regularly broadcast Sports Report. Very unusually, the BBC has kept it in use since the programme’s inception.

The piano solo arrangement has a few awkward corners in it, with it not being possible to play some of the counter-melody material. This prompted me to adapt the piece into piano duet format, so as to include more detail and hopefully make it more playable and easier to articulate. The arrangement is dedicated to Kevin Bull, pianist and sight-reader extraordinaire, with whom I have spent many happy hours playing music for two pianos.

—John Mitchell, January 2022

Note: The repeat of the main march after the Trio is specified in Bath’s original score. However, for reasons of balance, the work can be concluded quite convincingly at the end of the Trio, and some commercial recordings take this approach. The two sample recordings provided below demonstrate the piece in both of its forms, with the full version taking around 4¼ minutes and the abbreviated version requiring only 2¾ minutes. John Mitchell’s personal preference is for the abbreviated version.

Sample pages

(Click to enlarge)

	Composer	Title	Forces	Duration
	Hubert Bath arr. John Mitchell	Out of the Blue for piano duet	Piano duet	4¼ mins

Recorded performance

In the absence of a live recording of this piece, John and Jean Meccanico have obliged to give you an idea of how it sounds

Catalogue code: FM246 • Published: 26th April 2022
Entry last updated: 26th April 2022