Lucas, Leighton

  • From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia: See full biography at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leighton_Lucas
  • Wiki Biography:
    • Leighton Lucas (5 January 1903 – 1 November 1982) was an English composer and conductor. His career was wide-ranging: he was associated with the revival of interest in 20th century English ballet, arranged music for dance bands, conducted challenging contemporary classical works and wrote many original concert and film scores.
    • He was born into a musical family: his father, Clarence Lucas, was also a noted composer from Canada and his English mother Clara Asher-Lucas (1867-1942) was a concert pianist who had studied with Clara Schumann. Lucas began his career as a dancer for Sergei Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes (1918–21) but soon branched out into conducting. He joined the Birmingham Repertory Theatre as musical director from 1923 to 1925. During this time he conducted a performance of Rutland Boughton’s opera The Immortal Hour in 1923.
    • Lucas was a self-taught composer of religious works, concert music and film scores. He is particularly noted for his film compositions, including the scores for Target for Tonight (1941), Alfred Hitchcock’s Stage Fright (1950), Ice-Cold in Alex (1958) and the incidental music for The Dam Busters, where he fashioned his music around the famous title march by Eric Coates. Philip Lane reconstructed the lost score, noting that Lucas created his own main theme “which seems to play hide and seek with Coates’s throughout the film, both vying for supremacy.
  • Second Great Grandson of United Empire Loyalist listed in Loyalist Directory: https://uelac.ca/loyalist-directory/detail/?wpda_search_column_id=4834
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