When Saatchi & Saatchi co-opted the Flower Duet theme from Leo Delibes’ opera Lakmé for British Airways advertising in the late 1980s, it struck the kind of gold United Airlines had with George Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue.
The re-imagining of the vocal duet by Malcolm McLaren, of Sex Pistols fame, and Greek composer Yanni was linked to “The World’s Favourite Airline” tagline and an advertisement featuring thousands of extras forming a smiling face.
It’s now been transformed again but this time by a British Airways quality engineer with a passion for music.
Lyndon Ooi’s day job involves checking the airline’s planes are technically fit to fly but he is also the leader of the British Airways Orchestra made up of 30 BA workers and some external musicians.
READ: British Airways displays its retro fleet.
Ooi was commissioned to compose a piece for the airline’s centenary based on Lakme specifically for the orchestra rather than the vocalists it traditionally features.
“I felt very excited,’’ he said. “then I thought ‘OK. How can I design this piece?’.
“What came about was this idea of creating 100 bars to represent 100 years of British Airways history.’’
The composition is made up of 10 variations representing 10 significant milestones in BA history. It varies in tempo, rising and falling to cover ents from the formation of Imperial Airways to the opening of Heathrow Terminal Five.
And it does so in fiendishly clever ways.
For example, the theme was transposed from B major to G major so that the first two notes are “B” and A”, representing British Airways.
Years are used as bar numbers starting from 1919, the year BA forerunner Air transport and Travel was formed.
In variation IV, the version is “B” rest “A” “C “as the cello plays “B” “E” “A”, representing the British Overseas Airways Corporation (BOAC) and British European Airways (BEA) as they merge to form BA.
The time signature 7/4 in the bar 1971 represents the inaugural flight of the first British Airways 747.
The Concorde theme in bar 1976 — the year of the supersonic aircraft’s first commercial flight — rises and falls two octaves to signify Mach 2.
The end piece involves the entire BA fleet as numbers on the diatonic scale with the Boeing 787 and Airbus A320 represented as trills and the final bar speaking to the airline’s soon-to-arrive Airbus A350s.
“It was a real challenge to fit the entire 100-year history of British Airways into the piece but I’m really happy with the final result,’’ Oi said.
“And what a pleasure it was to perform it with my colleagues in the British Airways Orchestra.”
Judge for yourself by watching this video:
