Larry Pruden's Flight of the Albatross is an excellent work for secondary students looking to perform lyrical contemporary music. It was originally written as soundtrack music for a documentary nature film and was later arranged especially for performance with young listeners in mind. This edition, based on the painstakingly edited version presented in Pruden's Collected Edition, is now presented as a performance set.
With Douglas Lilburn, John Ritchie and others, Larry Pruden belongs to the earliest generation of New Zealand composers to discover a genuine vernacular, and in his music is reflected the trail-blazing spirit of the pioneers, their passion for creativity and their rebelliousness of spirit. Throughout his output, whether the music is modest in scale and purely functional (civic fanfares and radio advertising jingles, for example) or more extended and overtly ‘serious’ in tone (such as the larger works for orchestra and strings), Pruden’s vivid response to urban society and rural life in New Zealand is revealed.
