Op. I for Vacuum Cleaners

Haydn's "Surprise" Symphony is so called because, after 15 bars of charming, tinkling music, the whole orchestra suddenly crashes into a shattering fortissimo chord. But as played in a British Columbia album, the symphony contains several surprises not in Haydn's score, including snatches from old-style Chicago jazz records, an ocarina solo and a septet of bottles--five hot-water and two beer.

This remarkable performance must be charged, more or less, to British Cartoonist Gerard Hoffnung, who for years has been satirizing the music business. In his cartoons, tubby Artist Hoffnung has created a wonderfully zany world--the bass fiddler peers from behind his instrument through a periscope; an old huge-wheeled bicycle becomes a harp; the phrenetic maestro sharpens his baton with a pencil sharpener. Purpose of the Hoffnung concert (recorded at London's Royal Festival Hall with a full symphony orchestra and some of Britain's leading musicians) was to translate the cartoons into sound. The result is spectacular, in a sort of highbrow Spike Jones vein.

Unforgettable Exordium. The program opens with a roll of drums and a dashing fanfare of twelve trumpets that ends in a sad plop. The fanfare is followed by Composer Malcolm Arnold's A Grand Grand Overture, dedicated to "President Hoover" (says the program note: "The momentous opening--the beginning of an introduction that is to contain the foreshadowings of all the principal thematic material--is among the unforgettable exordiums of music, echoing, as it does, what might be called the elemental power of the ethos of sublimity . . ."). The Overture is scored for "a prodigious array of percussion, pitched and unpitched," including three rifles, three Hoover vacuum cleaners (two uprights in B-flat, one horizontal with detachable sucker in C) and one electric floor polisher (in E-flat).

For fully half its length, the Overture builds and rebuilds tocrashingly percussioned climaxes followed by aimless twitterings of clarinets, culminates in the boom of a cannon. ("If the nature of the coda seems cursory . . . one has to remember that Arnold always stops when he has nothing further to say.")

Hose in the Horns. Other selections: a concerto in which the piano soloist is under the impression that he is supposed to be playing Grieg, while the conductor is concentrating on Tchaikovsky and the orchestra is working on Roll Out the Barrel; a second concerto, written by Mozart's father Leopold for alpenhorn and played on two lengths of garden hose by Britain's distinguished Hornist Dennis Brain; a set of variations for wheezy winds, featuring Hoffnung himself playing a tuba so big that it runs on wheels and requires built-in bellows to supply enough wind.

Impresario Hoffnung hopes soon to introduce his music to the U.S. live, by staging a similar production in Manhattan. Meanwhile, his record remains the funniest musical joke in years. "A breath of fresh air," said one London critic. "I admired particularly the coloratura attack and secure intonation," said another, speaking of a vacuum-cleaner player.

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