Concerts & Tickets
Paul Lewis Plays Beethoven
- Webern
Programme note
Anton Webern (1883-1945)
Five Pieces, Op 5 (1929)
Webern composed several significant early works (songs, the orchestral idyll Im Sommerwind, the lovely Langsamer Satz for strings) that suggest little of the spikier manner he would later adopt.
Then in 1904 Webern began studies with Arnold Schoenberg, and his music altered dramatically, as he reduced his material to the barest essentials while - as in the Passacaglia Op 1 (1908) – mastering baroque and medieval techniques.
The Renaissance polyphonist Heinrich Isaac, whose works Webern edited for his thesis in 1909, was a key influence. That year Webern wrote Six Pieces, which while less cryptic than tonight’s work, anticipates it. Despite deploying a Mahler-sized orchestra he successfully compressed his musical argument while illustrating it producing richly varied tone colours. For added clarity he later reduced it to chamber orchestra dimensions.
By contrast tonight’s Five Pieces (1911-13) were originally written for chamber orchestra: Webern later issued this arrangement of them for strings. Again, simpler textures benefit the argument, for although instrumental colouring is lost, the string version helps us appreciate the linear flow and sense the intimate dialogue, giving each miniature piece the focused clarity of chamber music.
This short suite – he chose his five from a collection of almost 20 - make a short suite. It is not serial – strict serialism was only evolved by Schoenberg in 1924. But it heads in that direction: it is atonal, i.e. it avoids a specific key allegiance, but embraces or hints at many. The linear emphasis applies even when the ‘line’ is presented as chords (a device used by Brahms and Schumann).
How can one best to appreciate and enjoy Webern’s music? It is full of devices one associates with earlier composers: canons, inversions, fugue, stretto, such as one finds in Bach’s organ works or The Musical Offering. The compact, ‘pointillist’ style makes one think of other arts: Braque’s Cubism, which pares away colour; Picasso and Matisse, content with a few brushstrokes; or the poetry of Mallarmé and Apollinaire and experimental writing of Joyce or Samuel Beckett.
The Five Pieces have a mourning, fin-de-siecle , farewell feel, akin to many other works of the pre-Great War period (think of Der Rosenkavalier). Webern’s mother had died in 1906, and he felt her loss keenly.
Hence the work’s lonely, wistful, even funereal feel. Yet each piece is exquisitely carved like a small jewel. Three are scarcely half a minute long. The first is quiet and gentle, illumined by small intervals: languid, yearning, almost apologetic, ending suddenly on a slightly ominous triple note (an image of death?) No.2 is breezier: its hectic flurries lead to a rather startling brief climax.
No 3 features an otherworldly ostinato that feels like the eerie passing of time (think of Neptune from Holst’s The Planets). Falling wider intervals in a sad solo line in middle, then lower strings again suggest elusiveness and loss. The concluding whispers have a valedictory feel of finality. Someone perceptively observed ‘the only way to extend any of these pieces would have been with a sigh.’
No 4 - only six bars long - is like a Japanese haiku. It consists of three or four emotive short phrases, alternating wide and narrow intervals. Think of it as a tiny short story or quick-moving film scene. Who is it about? Where are they going? Percussive strings mimic the original’s hushed tympani; just as elsewhere they replace celesta and harp.
No 6 opens delicately, each line patiently arguing its case, before a brief, irritable climax arrives. Tentative calm returns, with yearning short phrases, before Webern cocks a snook with a perky, unexpected parting shot.© Roderic Dunnett
- Beethoven
Programme note
Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827)
Piano Concerto No 3 in C minor, Op 37 (1803)
Allegro con brio
Largo
Rondo: Allegro
With his Third Piano Concerto, it used to be said, Beethoven greeted the birth of the nineteenth century. The description seemed just right for a masterpiece which, compared with its predecessors in C major and B flat major, was nothing if not epoch-making. As we now know, however, this powerful work in Beethoven’s dramatic key of C minor was not written in 1800 at all, but three years later. The music with which he hailed the new century was his vivacious but rather less vanguard Symphony No 1 in C major.In his meticulous study of Beethoven’s concertos, published in 1999, the American authority Leon Plantinga has convincingly endorsed the later date, which means that the work followed, rather than preceded, the sweep of the Tempest sonata, the dynamic idiosyncrasy of the Second Symphony, and the heart-rending confession, in his Heiligenstadt Testament, that he was going deaf.
Yet he was not yet so deaf that he was unable to play his own music in public, or was in danger of losing his status as the greatest pianist-composer in Europe. This was a work definitely written for himself to play, which he first did in April 1803 as part of the famous Viennese concert in which, after a seven-hour rehearsal, his oratorio Christ on the Mount of Olives and his Second Symphony also had their premieres. The music was no mere 'comedy of manners', as the Edinburgh musical authority Sir Donald Tovey once described the C major concerto. Here, as a more recent Beethoven scholar Maynard Solomon has proclaimed, was the composer’s first concerto to move away from exterior wit and refinement into a world of dramatic oratory.
The starkly stalking theme which launches the first movement unmistakably makes this point, as do the three explosive scales with which the soloist enters. Not even the warmth of the secondary theme in E flat major can dispel the prevailing sombreness for long, but there is balm in the slow movement, radiantly suspended in the unrelated key of E major until its restless middle section brings fresh tension. If the closing rondo does contain comedy, it is comedy of a sardonic sort, resolved when, in the coda, the pace quickens, the metre changes, and C minor swings gleefully into C major.
© Conrad Wilson - Schubert
Programme note
Franz Peter Schubert (1797-1828)
Symphony No 6 in C major, D589 'Little' (1817-18)
Adagio - Allegro
Andante
Scherzo: Presto
Allegro moderato
Schubert’s first six symphonies are lovely works, not to be routinely slighted as 'early' Schubert or dismissed as schoolboy precursors of the more mature style of the 'Unfinished' or the 'Great' C major. Each has its own distinct personality, and it is the Sixth Symphony’s hard luck that it is in the same key as the 'Great' C major, thus causing it to be nicknamed the 'Little' C major for identification purposes. In fact it is not little at all, and although Schubert was only 21 when he wrote it, it is a self-confidently original work; emphatic, muscular, creatively alive to musical events of the period, not least the Rossini fever that had recently hit Vienna.
Clearly Schubert was as intoxicated as anyone else by the witty effervescence of the Italian composer, but he reacted to it in his own way. In a work that has been called a “meeting point of manifold influences”, we encounter a near-quote from Haydn at the start of the first movement’s Allegro section, some mock Beethoven in the scherzo, and Rossinian scales for the woodwind in the finale, yet everything sounds so utterly Schubertian that the result never seems merely derivative.
So if the first movement has a slow introduction of a sort Mozart might once have written, it is Schubert's Rosamunde incidental music that is brought first and foremost to mind. Phrases are turned and coloured in a wholly characteristic manner, and the sudden acceleration at the end of the movement is like a dry-run for the equivalent passage in the 'Great' C major. It is also a brilliant coda in its own right.
The slow movement, with its songlike main theme, swinging middle section and pounding drums, keeps veering into genuinely comic Schubert. The racy scherzo, apart from its Beethovenian flashbacks, not only anticipates the 'Great' C major but has a genially lurching trio section in slower tempo that could come from nobody but Schubert. And if the finale is a tribute to Rossini, it is Rossini placed within the sort of rhythmic pulsation which, once again, would be heard in the 'Great' C major.
© Conrad Wilson
- conductor
- piano
Anyone lucky enough to catch Manze and Lewis’s Mozart / Schubert programme last season will need no encouraging to book early for this. This programme sees them in more extrovert mood with Beethoven’s punchy Third Piano Concerto making a fine foil for Schubert’s genial Sixth Symphony – a work of sheer genius by the 21-year old composer.
Related audio clip
Beethoven Piano Concerto No. 3 - Rondo allegro - excerpt
Artur Pizarro plays the Rondo allegro from Beethoven's Piano Concerto No.3. Sir Charles Mackerras conducts.
Paul Lewis Plays Beethoven
- Webern
Programme note
Anton Webern (1883-1945)
Five Pieces, Op 5 (1929)
Webern composed several significant early works (songs, the orchestral idyll Im Sommerwind, the lovely Langsamer Satz for strings) that suggest little of the spikier manner he would later adopt.
Then in 1904 Webern began studies with Arnold Schoenberg, and his music altered dramatically, as he reduced his material to the barest essentials while - as in the Passacaglia Op 1 (1908) – mastering baroque and medieval techniques.
The Renaissance polyphonist Heinrich Isaac, whose works Webern edited for his thesis in 1909, was a key influence. That year Webern wrote Six Pieces, which while less cryptic than tonight’s work, anticipates it. Despite deploying a Mahler-sized orchestra he successfully compressed his musical argument while illustrating it producing richly varied tone colours. For added clarity he later reduced it to chamber orchestra dimensions.
By contrast tonight’s Five Pieces (1911-13) were originally written for chamber orchestra: Webern later issued this arrangement of them for strings. Again, simpler textures benefit the argument, for although instrumental colouring is lost, the string version helps us appreciate the linear flow and sense the intimate dialogue, giving each miniature piece the focused clarity of chamber music.
This short suite – he chose his five from a collection of almost 20 - make a short suite. It is not serial – strict serialism was only evolved by Schoenberg in 1924. But it heads in that direction: it is atonal, i.e. it avoids a specific key allegiance, but embraces or hints at many. The linear emphasis applies even when the ‘line’ is presented as chords (a device used by Brahms and Schumann).
How can one best to appreciate and enjoy Webern’s music? It is full of devices one associates with earlier composers: canons, inversions, fugue, stretto, such as one finds in Bach’s organ works or The Musical Offering. The compact, ‘pointillist’ style makes one think of other arts: Braque’s Cubism, which pares away colour; Picasso and Matisse, content with a few brushstrokes; or the poetry of Mallarmé and Apollinaire and experimental writing of Joyce or Samuel Beckett.
The Five Pieces have a mourning, fin-de-siecle , farewell feel, akin to many other works of the pre-Great War period (think of Der Rosenkavalier). Webern’s mother had died in 1906, and he felt her loss keenly.
Hence the work’s lonely, wistful, even funereal feel. Yet each piece is exquisitely carved like a small jewel. Three are scarcely half a minute long. The first is quiet and gentle, illumined by small intervals: languid, yearning, almost apologetic, ending suddenly on a slightly ominous triple note (an image of death?) No.2 is breezier: its hectic flurries lead to a rather startling brief climax.
No 3 features an otherworldly ostinato that feels like the eerie passing of time (think of Neptune from Holst’s The Planets). Falling wider intervals in a sad solo line in middle, then lower strings again suggest elusiveness and loss. The concluding whispers have a valedictory feel of finality. Someone perceptively observed ‘the only way to extend any of these pieces would have been with a sigh.’
No 4 - only six bars long - is like a Japanese haiku. It consists of three or four emotive short phrases, alternating wide and narrow intervals. Think of it as a tiny short story or quick-moving film scene. Who is it about? Where are they going? Percussive strings mimic the original’s hushed tympani; just as elsewhere they replace celesta and harp.
No 6 opens delicately, each line patiently arguing its case, before a brief, irritable climax arrives. Tentative calm returns, with yearning short phrases, before Webern cocks a snook with a perky, unexpected parting shot.© Roderic Dunnett
- Beethoven
Programme note
Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827)
Piano Concerto No 3 in C minor, Op 37 (1803)
Allegro con brio
Largo
Rondo: Allegro
With his Third Piano Concerto, it used to be said, Beethoven greeted the birth of the nineteenth century. The description seemed just right for a masterpiece which, compared with its predecessors in C major and B flat major, was nothing if not epoch-making. As we now know, however, this powerful work in Beethoven’s dramatic key of C minor was not written in 1800 at all, but three years later. The music with which he hailed the new century was his vivacious but rather less vanguard Symphony No 1 in C major.In his meticulous study of Beethoven’s concertos, published in 1999, the American authority Leon Plantinga has convincingly endorsed the later date, which means that the work followed, rather than preceded, the sweep of the Tempest sonata, the dynamic idiosyncrasy of the Second Symphony, and the heart-rending confession, in his Heiligenstadt Testament, that he was going deaf.
Yet he was not yet so deaf that he was unable to play his own music in public, or was in danger of losing his status as the greatest pianist-composer in Europe. This was a work definitely written for himself to play, which he first did in April 1803 as part of the famous Viennese concert in which, after a seven-hour rehearsal, his oratorio Christ on the Mount of Olives and his Second Symphony also had their premieres. The music was no mere 'comedy of manners', as the Edinburgh musical authority Sir Donald Tovey once described the C major concerto. Here, as a more recent Beethoven scholar Maynard Solomon has proclaimed, was the composer’s first concerto to move away from exterior wit and refinement into a world of dramatic oratory.
The starkly stalking theme which launches the first movement unmistakably makes this point, as do the three explosive scales with which the soloist enters. Not even the warmth of the secondary theme in E flat major can dispel the prevailing sombreness for long, but there is balm in the slow movement, radiantly suspended in the unrelated key of E major until its restless middle section brings fresh tension. If the closing rondo does contain comedy, it is comedy of a sardonic sort, resolved when, in the coda, the pace quickens, the metre changes, and C minor swings gleefully into C major.
© Conrad Wilson - Schubert
Programme note
Franz Peter Schubert (1797-1828)
Symphony No 6 in C major, D589 'Little' (1817-18)
Adagio - Allegro
Andante
Scherzo: Presto
Allegro moderato
Schubert’s first six symphonies are lovely works, not to be routinely slighted as 'early' Schubert or dismissed as schoolboy precursors of the more mature style of the 'Unfinished' or the 'Great' C major. Each has its own distinct personality, and it is the Sixth Symphony’s hard luck that it is in the same key as the 'Great' C major, thus causing it to be nicknamed the 'Little' C major for identification purposes. In fact it is not little at all, and although Schubert was only 21 when he wrote it, it is a self-confidently original work; emphatic, muscular, creatively alive to musical events of the period, not least the Rossini fever that had recently hit Vienna.
Clearly Schubert was as intoxicated as anyone else by the witty effervescence of the Italian composer, but he reacted to it in his own way. In a work that has been called a “meeting point of manifold influences”, we encounter a near-quote from Haydn at the start of the first movement’s Allegro section, some mock Beethoven in the scherzo, and Rossinian scales for the woodwind in the finale, yet everything sounds so utterly Schubertian that the result never seems merely derivative.
So if the first movement has a slow introduction of a sort Mozart might once have written, it is Schubert's Rosamunde incidental music that is brought first and foremost to mind. Phrases are turned and coloured in a wholly characteristic manner, and the sudden acceleration at the end of the movement is like a dry-run for the equivalent passage in the 'Great' C major. It is also a brilliant coda in its own right.
The slow movement, with its songlike main theme, swinging middle section and pounding drums, keeps veering into genuinely comic Schubert. The racy scherzo, apart from its Beethovenian flashbacks, not only anticipates the 'Great' C major but has a genially lurching trio section in slower tempo that could come from nobody but Schubert. And if the finale is a tribute to Rossini, it is Rossini placed within the sort of rhythmic pulsation which, once again, would be heard in the 'Great' C major.
© Conrad Wilson
- conductor
- piano
Anyone lucky enough to catch Manze and Lewis’s Mozart / Schubert programme last season will need no encouraging to book early for this. This programme sees them in more extrovert mood with Beethoven’s punchy Third Piano Concerto making a fine foil for Schubert’s genial Sixth Symphony – a work of sheer genius by the 21-year old composer.
Related audio clip
Beethoven Piano Concerto No. 3 - Rondo allegro - excerpt
Artur Pizarro plays the Rondo allegro from Beethoven's Piano Concerto No.3. Sir Charles Mackerras conducts.
Paul Lewis Plays Beethoven
- Webern
Programme note
Anton Webern (1883-1945)
Five Pieces, Op 5 (1929)
Webern composed several significant early works (songs, the orchestral idyll Im Sommerwind, the lovely Langsamer Satz for strings) that suggest little of the spikier manner he would later adopt.
Then in 1904 Webern began studies with Arnold Schoenberg, and his music altered dramatically, as he reduced his material to the barest essentials while - as in the Passacaglia Op 1 (1908) – mastering baroque and medieval techniques.
The Renaissance polyphonist Heinrich Isaac, whose works Webern edited for his thesis in 1909, was a key influence. That year Webern wrote Six Pieces, which while less cryptic than tonight’s work, anticipates it. Despite deploying a Mahler-sized orchestra he successfully compressed his musical argument while illustrating it producing richly varied tone colours. For added clarity he later reduced it to chamber orchestra dimensions.
By contrast tonight’s Five Pieces (1911-13) were originally written for chamber orchestra: Webern later issued this arrangement of them for strings. Again, simpler textures benefit the argument, for although instrumental colouring is lost, the string version helps us appreciate the linear flow and sense the intimate dialogue, giving each miniature piece the focused clarity of chamber music.
This short suite – he chose his five from a collection of almost 20 - make a short suite. It is not serial – strict serialism was only evolved by Schoenberg in 1924. But it heads in that direction: it is atonal, i.e. it avoids a specific key allegiance, but embraces or hints at many. The linear emphasis applies even when the ‘line’ is presented as chords (a device used by Brahms and Schumann).
How can one best to appreciate and enjoy Webern’s music? It is full of devices one associates with earlier composers: canons, inversions, fugue, stretto, such as one finds in Bach’s organ works or The Musical Offering. The compact, ‘pointillist’ style makes one think of other arts: Braque’s Cubism, which pares away colour; Picasso and Matisse, content with a few brushstrokes; or the poetry of Mallarmé and Apollinaire and experimental writing of Joyce or Samuel Beckett.
The Five Pieces have a mourning, fin-de-siecle , farewell feel, akin to many other works of the pre-Great War period (think of Der Rosenkavalier). Webern’s mother had died in 1906, and he felt her loss keenly.
Hence the work’s lonely, wistful, even funereal feel. Yet each piece is exquisitely carved like a small jewel. Three are scarcely half a minute long. The first is quiet and gentle, illumined by small intervals: languid, yearning, almost apologetic, ending suddenly on a slightly ominous triple note (an image of death?) No.2 is breezier: its hectic flurries lead to a rather startling brief climax.
No 3 features an otherworldly ostinato that feels like the eerie passing of time (think of Neptune from Holst’s The Planets). Falling wider intervals in a sad solo line in middle, then lower strings again suggest elusiveness and loss. The concluding whispers have a valedictory feel of finality. Someone perceptively observed ‘the only way to extend any of these pieces would have been with a sigh.’
No 4 - only six bars long - is like a Japanese haiku. It consists of three or four emotive short phrases, alternating wide and narrow intervals. Think of it as a tiny short story or quick-moving film scene. Who is it about? Where are they going? Percussive strings mimic the original’s hushed tympani; just as elsewhere they replace celesta and harp.
No 6 opens delicately, each line patiently arguing its case, before a brief, irritable climax arrives. Tentative calm returns, with yearning short phrases, before Webern cocks a snook with a perky, unexpected parting shot.© Roderic Dunnett
- Beethoven
Programme note
Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827)
Piano Concerto No 3 in C minor, Op 37 (1803)
Allegro con brio
Largo
Rondo: Allegro
With his Third Piano Concerto, it used to be said, Beethoven greeted the birth of the nineteenth century. The description seemed just right for a masterpiece which, compared with its predecessors in C major and B flat major, was nothing if not epoch-making. As we now know, however, this powerful work in Beethoven’s dramatic key of C minor was not written in 1800 at all, but three years later. The music with which he hailed the new century was his vivacious but rather less vanguard Symphony No 1 in C major.In his meticulous study of Beethoven’s concertos, published in 1999, the American authority Leon Plantinga has convincingly endorsed the later date, which means that the work followed, rather than preceded, the sweep of the Tempest sonata, the dynamic idiosyncrasy of the Second Symphony, and the heart-rending confession, in his Heiligenstadt Testament, that he was going deaf.
Yet he was not yet so deaf that he was unable to play his own music in public, or was in danger of losing his status as the greatest pianist-composer in Europe. This was a work definitely written for himself to play, which he first did in April 1803 as part of the famous Viennese concert in which, after a seven-hour rehearsal, his oratorio Christ on the Mount of Olives and his Second Symphony also had their premieres. The music was no mere 'comedy of manners', as the Edinburgh musical authority Sir Donald Tovey once described the C major concerto. Here, as a more recent Beethoven scholar Maynard Solomon has proclaimed, was the composer’s first concerto to move away from exterior wit and refinement into a world of dramatic oratory.
The starkly stalking theme which launches the first movement unmistakably makes this point, as do the three explosive scales with which the soloist enters. Not even the warmth of the secondary theme in E flat major can dispel the prevailing sombreness for long, but there is balm in the slow movement, radiantly suspended in the unrelated key of E major until its restless middle section brings fresh tension. If the closing rondo does contain comedy, it is comedy of a sardonic sort, resolved when, in the coda, the pace quickens, the metre changes, and C minor swings gleefully into C major.
© Conrad Wilson - Schubert
Programme note
Franz Peter Schubert (1797-1828)
Symphony No 6 in C major, D589 'Little' (1817-18)
Adagio - Allegro
Andante
Scherzo: Presto
Allegro moderato
Schubert’s first six symphonies are lovely works, not to be routinely slighted as 'early' Schubert or dismissed as schoolboy precursors of the more mature style of the 'Unfinished' or the 'Great' C major. Each has its own distinct personality, and it is the Sixth Symphony’s hard luck that it is in the same key as the 'Great' C major, thus causing it to be nicknamed the 'Little' C major for identification purposes. In fact it is not little at all, and although Schubert was only 21 when he wrote it, it is a self-confidently original work; emphatic, muscular, creatively alive to musical events of the period, not least the Rossini fever that had recently hit Vienna.
Clearly Schubert was as intoxicated as anyone else by the witty effervescence of the Italian composer, but he reacted to it in his own way. In a work that has been called a “meeting point of manifold influences”, we encounter a near-quote from Haydn at the start of the first movement’s Allegro section, some mock Beethoven in the scherzo, and Rossinian scales for the woodwind in the finale, yet everything sounds so utterly Schubertian that the result never seems merely derivative.
So if the first movement has a slow introduction of a sort Mozart might once have written, it is Schubert's Rosamunde incidental music that is brought first and foremost to mind. Phrases are turned and coloured in a wholly characteristic manner, and the sudden acceleration at the end of the movement is like a dry-run for the equivalent passage in the 'Great' C major. It is also a brilliant coda in its own right.
The slow movement, with its songlike main theme, swinging middle section and pounding drums, keeps veering into genuinely comic Schubert. The racy scherzo, apart from its Beethovenian flashbacks, not only anticipates the 'Great' C major but has a genially lurching trio section in slower tempo that could come from nobody but Schubert. And if the finale is a tribute to Rossini, it is Rossini placed within the sort of rhythmic pulsation which, once again, would be heard in the 'Great' C major.
© Conrad Wilson
- conductor
- piano
Anyone lucky enough to catch Manze and Lewis’s Mozart / Schubert programme last season will need no encouraging to book early for this. This programme sees them in more extrovert mood with Beethoven’s punchy Third Piano Concerto making a fine foil for Schubert’s genial Sixth Symphony – a work of sheer genius by the 21-year old composer.
Related audio clip
Beethoven Piano Concerto No. 3 - Rondo allegro - excerpt
Artur Pizarro plays the Rondo allegro from Beethoven's Piano Concerto No.3. Sir Charles Mackerras conducts.
Beethoven and Brahms
- Beethoven
Programme note
Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827)
Overture, Fidelio (1814)Beethoven’s Fidelio, his only completed opera, was a triumph of personal will. He composed three versions of it, four overtures to it, and no fewer than eighteen variants of Florestan’s melody before he was satisfied that he had got it as right as it was ever going to be. The four overtures symbolised his struggle. Each of them contained masterly music. Yet, as one authority has put it, they were written by a composer who was worried either that he had not attained his object or that he had been mistaken as to what that object should be.
The three Leonora overtures, named after the opera’s plucky heroine, were inspired examples of trial and error. Only then, a decade after he had first written the opera, was Beethoven confident enough to produce an overture which would become known as Fidelio rather than Leonora No 4. The name carried an air of finality, though the overture was shorter and lighter than its predecessors and was written in haste – just in time, in fact, for the second performance of the perfected opera in Vienna’s Karntnertortheater in May 1814.
The lightness of touch was deliberate. By the time he recognised the need for it, Beethoven had become aware that Leonora No 3, for all its greatness, was too hefty a masterpiece for an opera whose heroic message was delivered through music which, at least in the opening numbers, had the pace and style of operatic comedy. The Fidelio Overture’s horn calls, clarinet extensions, cloudy modulations, and changes of pace may anticipate the romanticism of Weber, but the crackling energy of much of the music possesses an almost classical concision, to which Beethoven added his own characteristic pungency.
To say that the result is less great than Leonora No 3 is perfectly true but beside the point. The Fidelio overture was not meant to be great, but it was certainly meant to fit its context and to make the audience sit up. In both these aims it succeeds admirably.
© Conrad Wilson
- Beethoven
Programme note
Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827)
Violin Concerto in D major, Op 61 (1806)Allegro ma non troppo
Larghetto
Rondo: Allegro
The piano was Beethoven’s instrument, the one upon which he proved himself a brilliant soloist and improviser, and for which he composed the bulk of his sonatas, concertos, and sets of variations. But like Haydn and Mozart before him, he also studied the violin and learned enough about it to produce what posterity has decreed to be perhaps the greatest of all violin concertos. Insufficiently adept to play it himself, he entrusted its first performance to the leader of the orchestra, Franz Clement, a Viennese virtuoso whose musical versatility included such feats of showmanship as improvising a sonata on one string with his violin turned upside down. It was doubtless the latter trick that prompted Beethoven to inscribe on his manuscript the pun, "Concerto per Clemenza pour Clement"; but, as things turned out at the Theater an der Wien in December 1806, Clement did not give Beethoven the clemency he sought. After playing the first movement without incident, he inserted one of his own freakish sonatas before proceeding to the sublime larghetto.Beethoven’s may have been a pianist’s violin concerto - so was Brahms’s - but it is as inspired in its tiny details (such as delaying the use of pizzicato notes until the finale, and then using them in just one single bar) as in its long-spun lines. Clement, moreover, must have possessed qualities that prompted Beethoven to let him play it. As one commentator has remarked: "Tone, not display, is its secret." It dates from one of the most productive periods in Beethoven’s life, the two years in which he also composed Fidelio, the Fourth Symphony, the Fourth Piano Concerto, the three Rasumovsky string quartets, and the 32 piano variations in C minor. In mood it corresponds most closely with the Fourth Piano Concerto, but is even more lyrically spacious in design, treating its material with still greater patience. The soloist’s entry in the first movement is delayed until what seems like the last possible moment, and not until the coda is the wondrous (and sublimely simple) second theme heard in its entirety on the solo violin.
The first movement’s binding factor is the rhythm of the five soft drum taps heard at the outset. Tossed from section to section of the orchestra, this motif underpins, punctuates, and inspires the wealth of themes from which Beethoven builds the music, adding a high clarity of definition to a movement otherwise dependent principally on lyrical flow. The larghetto in G major, though only 92 bars long, has the idyllic stillness found in some of Beethoven’s other great slow movements - that of the Emperor concerto springs particularly to mind - although its dreamy beauty (based largely on a series of ethereal variations on the muted opening theme) is finally interrupted by bold orchestral chords, dramatically signalling the return of the home key. These lead without a break to the genial finale, a rondo with a rocking main theme in 6/8 time, with contrasted episodes (one of them employing a solo bassoon to droll yet curiously poignant effect) and a radiance that anticipates the equivalent movement of the Pastoral symphony, composed two years later.
© Conrad Wilson
- Brahms
Programme note
Johannes Brahms (1833-1897)
Symphony No 1 in C minor, Op 68 (1876)Un poco sostenuto – Allegro
Andante sostenuto
Un poco allegretto e grazioso
Adagio – Piu andante – Allegro ma non troppo, ma con brio"Long and not exactly amiable" was Brahms’s typically gruff description of his First Symphony, completed at the age of 43, fourteen years after he had sent a sketch of its opening bars to his friend Clara Schumann. A neurotically unwilling symphonist, he had already transformed a previous such work into his first piano concerto. Then he had produced his Alto Rhapsody, his Variations on the St Anthony Chorale, and much fine chamber music in further avoidance of the issue. Yet his would-be symphony would not go away. By the time he completed it, the teenage Mahler and Richard Strauss were heading for fame, and Beethoven (with whom he feared comparison) had been dead for half a century. Brahms was running late, but he triumphed in the end. His Symphony in C minor – Beethoven’s favourite key of conflict – rose above the gibes that musicians of the period hurled at it.
The similarities, as Brahms himself asserted, were in any case superficial. The first movement’s portentous, not exactly amiable introduction is wholly Brahmsian in texture and tension. The succeeding
Allegro, signposted by a drum thwack, is similarly sinewy and restless, its pulse increasingly like that of a grimly grinding scherzo, which is eventually stopped in its tracks. A back reference to the introduction, with a brief glimpse of the work’s C major goal, brings the movement to its close.
But C major is still a long way off. The slow movement, which Eduard Hanslick – Vienna's pro-Brahmsian, anti-Wagnerian critic – described as a "sustained, noble song," turns instead to E major and the strings sing a tender melody, extended by oboe. Towards the end, the intertwining of horn and solo violin is a radiant masterstroke by a composer sometimes dismissed as a severely functional orchestrator.
Sustaining the mood, the third movement is a clarinet intermezzo of a very Brahmsian sort. It postpones the forthcoming struggle between C minor and C major by being cast in the key of A-flat, and is characterised by the very definitely amiable melody with which it opens.
The finale, by far the biggest of the four movements, brings the music back to its C minor roots before battling its way to C major. Muttering pizzicati and fierce swirls of string tone set the stage for drama. Then, with a powerful, almost Wagnerian drum-roll, the atmosphere clears and the horns sound a bell-like theme over shimmering strings. Trombones intone a solemn chorale and the allegro section is launched with the broad melody that was to be compared (to Brahms’ discomfort) with Beethoven’s Ode to Joy. From here the music moves inexorably into sunshine.
© Conrad Wilson
- conductor
- violin
SCO Principal Guest Conductor, Olari Elts, directs one of the great late-Romantic symphonies. This is the SCO grown as big as it gets but without sacrificing that close-up energy and attention to the subtleties that makes it so special. Beethoven’s luminous Violin Concerto is performed by the brilliant young Armenian, Sergey Khachatryan.
Related audio clip
Brahms - Symphony No 1 in C minor, Op 68 - Un poco sostenuto - excerpt
Sir Charles Mackerras conducts Brahms Symphony No 1 in C minor, Op 68
Beethoven and Brahms
- Beethoven
Programme note
Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827)
Overture, Fidelio (1814)Beethoven’s Fidelio, his only completed opera, was a triumph of personal will. He composed three versions of it, four overtures to it, and no fewer than eighteen variants of Florestan’s melody before he was satisfied that he had got it as right as it was ever going to be. The four overtures symbolised his struggle. Each of them contained masterly music. Yet, as one authority has put it, they were written by a composer who was worried either that he had not attained his object or that he had been mistaken as to what that object should be.
The three Leonora overtures, named after the opera’s plucky heroine, were inspired examples of trial and error. Only then, a decade after he had first written the opera, was Beethoven confident enough to produce an overture which would become known as Fidelio rather than Leonora No 4. The name carried an air of finality, though the overture was shorter and lighter than its predecessors and was written in haste – just in time, in fact, for the second performance of the perfected opera in Vienna’s Karntnertortheater in May 1814.
The lightness of touch was deliberate. By the time he recognised the need for it, Beethoven had become aware that Leonora No 3, for all its greatness, was too hefty a masterpiece for an opera whose heroic message was delivered through music which, at least in the opening numbers, had the pace and style of operatic comedy. The Fidelio Overture’s horn calls, clarinet extensions, cloudy modulations, and changes of pace may anticipate the romanticism of Weber, but the crackling energy of much of the music possesses an almost classical concision, to which Beethoven added his own characteristic pungency.
To say that the result is less great than Leonora No 3 is perfectly true but beside the point. The Fidelio overture was not meant to be great, but it was certainly meant to fit its context and to make the audience sit up. In both these aims it succeeds admirably.
© Conrad Wilson
- Beethoven
Programme note
Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827)
Violin Concerto in D major, Op 61 (1806)Allegro ma non troppo
Larghetto
Rondo: Allegro
The piano was Beethoven’s instrument, the one upon which he proved himself a brilliant soloist and improviser, and for which he composed the bulk of his sonatas, concertos, and sets of variations. But like Haydn and Mozart before him, he also studied the violin and learned enough about it to produce what posterity has decreed to be perhaps the greatest of all violin concertos. Insufficiently adept to play it himself, he entrusted its first performance to the leader of the orchestra, Franz Clement, a Viennese virtuoso whose musical versatility included such feats of showmanship as improvising a sonata on one string with his violin turned upside down. It was doubtless the latter trick that prompted Beethoven to inscribe on his manuscript the pun, "Concerto per Clemenza pour Clement"; but, as things turned out at the Theater an der Wien in December 1806, Clement did not give Beethoven the clemency he sought. After playing the first movement without incident, he inserted one of his own freakish sonatas before proceeding to the sublime larghetto.Beethoven’s may have been a pianist’s violin concerto - so was Brahms’s - but it is as inspired in its tiny details (such as delaying the use of pizzicato notes until the finale, and then using them in just one single bar) as in its long-spun lines. Clement, moreover, must have possessed qualities that prompted Beethoven to let him play it. As one commentator has remarked: "Tone, not display, is its secret." It dates from one of the most productive periods in Beethoven’s life, the two years in which he also composed Fidelio, the Fourth Symphony, the Fourth Piano Concerto, the three Rasumovsky string quartets, and the 32 piano variations in C minor. In mood it corresponds most closely with the Fourth Piano Concerto, but is even more lyrically spacious in design, treating its material with still greater patience. The soloist’s entry in the first movement is delayed until what seems like the last possible moment, and not until the coda is the wondrous (and sublimely simple) second theme heard in its entirety on the solo violin.
The first movement’s binding factor is the rhythm of the five soft drum taps heard at the outset. Tossed from section to section of the orchestra, this motif underpins, punctuates, and inspires the wealth of themes from which Beethoven builds the music, adding a high clarity of definition to a movement otherwise dependent principally on lyrical flow. The larghetto in G major, though only 92 bars long, has the idyllic stillness found in some of Beethoven’s other great slow movements - that of the Emperor concerto springs particularly to mind - although its dreamy beauty (based largely on a series of ethereal variations on the muted opening theme) is finally interrupted by bold orchestral chords, dramatically signalling the return of the home key. These lead without a break to the genial finale, a rondo with a rocking main theme in 6/8 time, with contrasted episodes (one of them employing a solo bassoon to droll yet curiously poignant effect) and a radiance that anticipates the equivalent movement of the Pastoral symphony, composed two years later.
© Conrad Wilson
- Brahms
Programme note
Johannes Brahms (1833-1897)
Symphony No 1 in C minor, Op 68 (1876)Un poco sostenuto – Allegro
Andante sostenuto
Un poco allegretto e grazioso
Adagio – Piu andante – Allegro ma non troppo, ma con brio"Long and not exactly amiable" was Brahms’s typically gruff description of his First Symphony, completed at the age of 43, fourteen years after he had sent a sketch of its opening bars to his friend Clara Schumann. A neurotically unwilling symphonist, he had already transformed a previous such work into his first piano concerto. Then he had produced his Alto Rhapsody, his Variations on the St Anthony Chorale, and much fine chamber music in further avoidance of the issue. Yet his would-be symphony would not go away. By the time he completed it, the teenage Mahler and Richard Strauss were heading for fame, and Beethoven (with whom he feared comparison) had been dead for half a century. Brahms was running late, but he triumphed in the end. His Symphony in C minor – Beethoven’s favourite key of conflict – rose above the gibes that musicians of the period hurled at it.
The similarities, as Brahms himself asserted, were in any case superficial. The first movement’s portentous, not exactly amiable introduction is wholly Brahmsian in texture and tension. The succeeding
Allegro, signposted by a drum thwack, is similarly sinewy and restless, its pulse increasingly like that of a grimly grinding scherzo, which is eventually stopped in its tracks. A back reference to the introduction, with a brief glimpse of the work’s C major goal, brings the movement to its close.
But C major is still a long way off. The slow movement, which Eduard Hanslick – Vienna's pro-Brahmsian, anti-Wagnerian critic – described as a "sustained, noble song," turns instead to E major and the strings sing a tender melody, extended by oboe. Towards the end, the intertwining of horn and solo violin is a radiant masterstroke by a composer sometimes dismissed as a severely functional orchestrator.
Sustaining the mood, the third movement is a clarinet intermezzo of a very Brahmsian sort. It postpones the forthcoming struggle between C minor and C major by being cast in the key of A-flat, and is characterised by the very definitely amiable melody with which it opens.
The finale, by far the biggest of the four movements, brings the music back to its C minor roots before battling its way to C major. Muttering pizzicati and fierce swirls of string tone set the stage for drama. Then, with a powerful, almost Wagnerian drum-roll, the atmosphere clears and the horns sound a bell-like theme over shimmering strings. Trombones intone a solemn chorale and the allegro section is launched with the broad melody that was to be compared (to Brahms’ discomfort) with Beethoven’s Ode to Joy. From here the music moves inexorably into sunshine.
© Conrad Wilson
- conductor
- violin
Elts directs two late-Romantic symphonies this season – Brahms here, and Sibelius in April. This is the SCO grown as big as it gets but without sacrificing that close-up energy and attention to the subtleties that make it so special. Beethoven’s Violin Concerto offers a wonderful contrast to the previous week’s piano concerto, as luminous and poised as the other is brilliant and fiery.
Related audio clip
Brahms Symphony No 2 in D major, Op 73. Allegretto grazioso (Quasi Andantino) - excerpt
Sir Charles Mackerras conducts Brahms' Symphony No 2 in D major, Op 73
Beethoven and Brahms
- Beethoven
Programme note
Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827)
Overture, Fidelio (1814)Beethoven’s Fidelio, his only completed opera, was a triumph of personal will. He composed three versions of it, four overtures to it, and no fewer than eighteen variants of Florestan’s melody before he was satisfied that he had got it as right as it was ever going to be. The four overtures symbolised his struggle. Each of them contained masterly music. Yet, as one authority has put it, they were written by a composer who was worried either that he had not attained his object or that he had been mistaken as to what that object should be.
The three Leonora overtures, named after the opera’s plucky heroine, were inspired examples of trial and error. Only then, a decade after he had first written the opera, was Beethoven confident enough to produce an overture which would become known as Fidelio rather than Leonora No 4. The name carried an air of finality, though the overture was shorter and lighter than its predecessors and was written in haste – just in time, in fact, for the second performance of the perfected opera in Vienna’s Karntnertortheater in May 1814.
The lightness of touch was deliberate. By the time he recognised the need for it, Beethoven had become aware that Leonora No 3, for all its greatness, was too hefty a masterpiece for an opera whose heroic message was delivered through music which, at least in the opening numbers, had the pace and style of operatic comedy. The Fidelio Overture’s horn calls, clarinet extensions, cloudy modulations, and changes of pace may anticipate the romanticism of Weber, but the crackling energy of much of the music possesses an almost classical concision, to which Beethoven added his own characteristic pungency.
To say that the result is less great than Leonora No 3 is perfectly true but beside the point. The Fidelio overture was not meant to be great, but it was certainly meant to fit its context and to make the audience sit up. In both these aims it succeeds admirably.
© Conrad Wilson
- Beethoven
Programme note
Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827)
Violin Concerto in D major, Op 61 (1806)Allegro ma non troppo
Larghetto
Rondo: Allegro
The piano was Beethoven’s instrument, the one upon which he proved himself a brilliant soloist and improviser, and for which he composed the bulk of his sonatas, concertos, and sets of variations. But like Haydn and Mozart before him, he also studied the violin and learned enough about it to produce what posterity has decreed to be perhaps the greatest of all violin concertos. Insufficiently adept to play it himself, he entrusted its first performance to the leader of the orchestra, Franz Clement, a Viennese virtuoso whose musical versatility included such feats of showmanship as improvising a sonata on one string with his violin turned upside down. It was doubtless the latter trick that prompted Beethoven to inscribe on his manuscript the pun, "Concerto per Clemenza pour Clement"; but, as things turned out at the Theater an der Wien in December 1806, Clement did not give Beethoven the clemency he sought. After playing the first movement without incident, he inserted one of his own freakish sonatas before proceeding to the sublime larghetto.Beethoven’s may have been a pianist’s violin concerto - so was Brahms’s - but it is as inspired in its tiny details (such as delaying the use of pizzicato notes until the finale, and then using them in just one single bar) as in its long-spun lines. Clement, moreover, must have possessed qualities that prompted Beethoven to let him play it. As one commentator has remarked: "Tone, not display, is its secret." It dates from one of the most productive periods in Beethoven’s life, the two years in which he also composed Fidelio, the Fourth Symphony, the Fourth Piano Concerto, the three Rasumovsky string quartets, and the 32 piano variations in C minor. In mood it corresponds most closely with the Fourth Piano Concerto, but is even more lyrically spacious in design, treating its material with still greater patience. The soloist’s entry in the first movement is delayed until what seems like the last possible moment, and not until the coda is the wondrous (and sublimely simple) second theme heard in its entirety on the solo violin.
The first movement’s binding factor is the rhythm of the five soft drum taps heard at the outset. Tossed from section to section of the orchestra, this motif underpins, punctuates, and inspires the wealth of themes from which Beethoven builds the music, adding a high clarity of definition to a movement otherwise dependent principally on lyrical flow. The larghetto in G major, though only 92 bars long, has the idyllic stillness found in some of Beethoven’s other great slow movements - that of the Emperor concerto springs particularly to mind - although its dreamy beauty (based largely on a series of ethereal variations on the muted opening theme) is finally interrupted by bold orchestral chords, dramatically signalling the return of the home key. These lead without a break to the genial finale, a rondo with a rocking main theme in 6/8 time, with contrasted episodes (one of them employing a solo bassoon to droll yet curiously poignant effect) and a radiance that anticipates the equivalent movement of the Pastoral symphony, composed two years later.
© Conrad Wilson
- Brahms
Programme note
Johannes Brahms (1833-1897)
Symphony No 1 in C minor, Op 68 (1876)Un poco sostenuto – Allegro
Andante sostenuto
Un poco allegretto e grazioso
Adagio – Piu andante – Allegro ma non troppo, ma con brio"Long and not exactly amiable" was Brahms’s typically gruff description of his First Symphony, completed at the age of 43, fourteen years after he had sent a sketch of its opening bars to his friend Clara Schumann. A neurotically unwilling symphonist, he had already transformed a previous such work into his first piano concerto. Then he had produced his Alto Rhapsody, his Variations on the St Anthony Chorale, and much fine chamber music in further avoidance of the issue. Yet his would-be symphony would not go away. By the time he completed it, the teenage Mahler and Richard Strauss were heading for fame, and Beethoven (with whom he feared comparison) had been dead for half a century. Brahms was running late, but he triumphed in the end. His Symphony in C minor – Beethoven’s favourite key of conflict – rose above the gibes that musicians of the period hurled at it.
The similarities, as Brahms himself asserted, were in any case superficial. The first movement’s portentous, not exactly amiable introduction is wholly Brahmsian in texture and tension. The succeeding
Allegro, signposted by a drum thwack, is similarly sinewy and restless, its pulse increasingly like that of a grimly grinding scherzo, which is eventually stopped in its tracks. A back reference to the introduction, with a brief glimpse of the work’s C major goal, brings the movement to its close.
But C major is still a long way off. The slow movement, which Eduard Hanslick – Vienna's pro-Brahmsian, anti-Wagnerian critic – described as a "sustained, noble song," turns instead to E major and the strings sing a tender melody, extended by oboe. Towards the end, the intertwining of horn and solo violin is a radiant masterstroke by a composer sometimes dismissed as a severely functional orchestrator.
Sustaining the mood, the third movement is a clarinet intermezzo of a very Brahmsian sort. It postpones the forthcoming struggle between C minor and C major by being cast in the key of A-flat, and is characterised by the very definitely amiable melody with which it opens.
The finale, by far the biggest of the four movements, brings the music back to its C minor roots before battling its way to C major. Muttering pizzicati and fierce swirls of string tone set the stage for drama. Then, with a powerful, almost Wagnerian drum-roll, the atmosphere clears and the horns sound a bell-like theme over shimmering strings. Trombones intone a solemn chorale and the allegro section is launched with the broad melody that was to be compared (to Brahms’ discomfort) with Beethoven’s Ode to Joy. From here the music moves inexorably into sunshine.
© Conrad Wilson
- conductor
- violin
Elts directs two late-Romantic symphonies this season – Brahms here, and Sibelius in April. This is the SCO grown as big as it gets but without sacrificing that close-up energy and attention to the subtleties that make it so special. Beethoven’s Violin Concerto offers a wonderful contrast to the previous week’s piano concerto, as luminous and poised as the other is brilliant and fiery.
Related audio clip
Brahms - Symphony No 1 in C minor, Op 68 - Un poco sostenuto - excerpt
Sir Charles Mackerras conducts Brahms Symphony No 1 in C minor, Op 68
CL@SIX - Wind Serenade
- Strauss
Programme note
Richard Strauss (1864-1949)
Suite in B flat major for thirteen wind instruments, Op 4 (1884)Praeludium (Allegretto)
Romanze (Andante)
Gavotte (Allegro)
Introduction and Fugue (Andante cantabile - Allegro con brio)Strauss began and ended his career with wind music. Though this evening’s suite was not quite the first work he ever wrote and though the second of his two wind sonatinas was not quite the last, they show between them that one of his youthful enthusiasms - the sound of a large group of woodwind instruments blended with a quartet of horns - never wholly deserted him, even if operas and symphonic poems formed the mainstream of his output.
The fact that he enjoyed conducting wind music was one reason why he enjoyed composing it. His lifelong love of Mozart was obviously another. It is unlikely that he would have produced a Suite in B-flat for thirteen wind instruments if Mozart had not already done so. True, he did not choose exactly the same instruments, nor did he write the same number of movements. But then, he was under orders from the great and irascible conductor, Hans von Bulow, who had commissioned it and had precise ideas about what he wanted. Strauss, initially unaware of this, had written the first two movements in his own romantic manner before he realised that von Bulow expected something more baroque. To conceal his error, he slapped the archaic title ‘Praeludium’ on the first movement, hoping that the conductor would thereby be duped, but knew he could do nothing about the second, which was very definitely a Romanze. In order to retrieve the situation, he completed the work with an old-fashioned gavotte and fugue, as von Bulow had stipulated.
Whatever von Bulow thought of the structurally compressed opening movement, the ravishing oboe solo in the slow movement, or the deliberately academic finale, there is no doubt that his demand for a gavotte was the stroke of genius that ensured the work’s success in Strauss’s native Munich in 1884. The tyro composer himself, as things turned out, was forced not only to conduct it himself, but to do so without benefit of rehearsal. As von Bulow impatiently insisted, there was no time for such niceties on tour.
© Conrad Wilson
- Dvořák
Programme note
Antonín Dvořák (1841-10904)
Wind Serenade in D minor, Op 44 (1878)
Moderato, quasi Marcia
Menuetto
Andante con moto
Finale: Allegro molto
Of Dvořák’s two serenades – another was started but emerged as his colourful Czech Suite – the second, in D minor, Op 44, is the potent obverse of the first. Sunlit string tone is transformed into pungent wind tone. The vein is robustly outdoor rather than delicately indoor (members of the SCO played it one summer in the shade of a fountain at the Aix-en-Provence Festival). Radiant major keys become starker minor ones. Five movements are compressed into four. The sound of Mozart’s wind serenades, with their marches and minuets voiced by pairs of oboes and clarinets, audibly lurks in the background, but this is music with a nineteenth-century savour and a Czech accent. The depths of double bass and double bassoon tone may evoke Mozart’s Gran Partita for thirteen instruments (Dvořák here employs twelve, including a cello as ballast) but the strains of the music, shot through by a trio of horns, are largely Bohemian.
Completed within a fortnight in 1878, the work is exuberantly Czech in spirit, yet for all its joie de vivre there is a rigour about it that Dvořák did not display in all his works. True to classical tradition, it opens with – and ultimately returns to – a march, one of the traits of eighteenth-century entertainment music. But it is more succinct than its classical predecessors in that it curtails the two minuets and two slow movements – Dvořák deemed one of each to be quite sufficient – that were considered desirable in some of the more leisurely scores of an earlier era.
In fact Dvořák’s single minuet turns out in its central section to be a stampingly fast and not at all minuet-like Czech furiant, with exhilaratingly cross-accented syncopations. The slow movement is a tenderly pulsating nocturne, warmed by clarinet and oboe on a bed of cello and bass tone. At times exquisitely ornate, it is eventually displaced by the dapper finale, incorporating a repeat of the opening march before bubbling to its close. John Clapham, the distinguished Edinburgh-based Dvořák authority, appreciatively called it – in one of his books on the composer – a “unique work, rewarding to both audiences and performers”
© Conrad Wilson
- Director
A brace of sumptuous pieces that catch both composers on the cusp of international fame. Dvořák’s folksy Serenade helped put him on the map. “A more lovely, refreshing impression of real, rich and charming creative talent you can’t easily have...” wrote Brahms. “I think it must be a pleasure for the wind players!’’
Homecoming
- Leighton
Programme note
Kenneth Leighton (1929-1988)
Concerto for String Orchestra Op 39Lento sostenuto
Molto ritmico
Adagio maestoso, all marcia e largamente – Allegro precipotoso – Largo ed alla marciaBy birth and by education – he was born in Wakefield, trained as an Anglican cathedral chorister and studied at Oxford – Kenneth Leighton was an English composer. But he was also, in a real sense, an Edinburgh composer. He spent more than 30 years teaching at Edinburgh University, the last 18 as Reid Professor of Music, and played a prominent part in the musical life of the city, not only as an academic but also as a conductor and pianist. Many of his major works were written in Edinburgh and first performed there.
It would be wrong to assume from this, however, that his music is in any way provincial or parochial. His early works, like the Symphony for Strings of 1949, are certainly very English, in the Vaughan Williams tradition, but his months of study with Goffredo Petrassi in Rome in 1951 widened his horizons more than a little. By the time he came to write the Concerto for String Orchestra in 1961 he was a very much more sophisticated, even cosmopolitan composer who had absorbed the most important developments in 20th century European music. He did not, on the other hand, abandon traditional values.
The melodic line on muted violas at the beginning of the Concerto might, in its extreme chromaticism, sound like a Schoenbergian twelve-note row, but it isn’t one and doesn’t actually behave like one. While it is the source of later thematic material, it does not exclude tonality – the work gravitates towards C major –- and it does not dominate Leighton’s structural thinking, which is more spontaneous than the serial appearances would suggest. Nor does it inhibit his melodic imagination, which flows freely in a score characterised above all by a contrapuntal virtuosity comparable to that of Tippett’s Concerto for Double String Orchestra.
The most significant aspect of the viola melody that opens the Lento sostenuto is the motif formed by its first four notes. It is presented again and again, though not in the same rhythm, as second violins, cellos and basses, and then first violins make their respective entries. There are two more main themes: one is introduced quietly by second violins over a dotted-rhythm ostinato on cellos; the other appears on second violins and violas to be joined by the rest of the ensemble in imitative counterpoint that grows in intensity on approaching a central fff tutta forza climax. The apex of the arch construction having been reached in this way, the tension is gradually relaxed as, over pizzicato cellos and basses, the opening theme is lyrically recalled on violins, all but dying out on muted solo instruments just before the closing bars.
The rhythmically ingenious, brilliantly sonorous, scherzo-like second movement, which is played pizzicato throughout, might well owe something to Bartók’s Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta –- not least the 'Bartók pizzicato' resounding against the finger-board towards the end. But its material, with a prominent minor third, derives from the pizzicato episode in the middle of the Lento sostenuto.
With its heavily articulated double-dotted rhythms reminiscent of Shostakovich’s Fifth Symphony, the slow introduction to the last movement seems, to be going in a different direction. At an early stage, however, violins introduce an idea derived from the Lento sostenuto which, as the tempo changes, is taken up at twice the speed as the robustly vigorous first theme of the main Allegro precipitoso section. It retains its impetus as broader melodic lines are set against it, just as they are set against busy fugal and scherzando episodes. They lead, intermittently but with ever gathering strength, to another fff con tutta forza climax, now arresting the impetus to make way for a coda recalling both the tempo and the emphatic gestures of the Adagio maestoso introduction to the movement.
© Gerald Larner
- MacMillan
Programme note
James MacMillan (b. 1959)
Tryst (1989)
When James MacMillan first set William Soutar’s love poem The Tryst, in the style of an old Scottish ballad, in 1984 he little guessed how significant his simple tune would prove to be. Having performed it himself – in folk clubs and bars around Scotland with his group, Broadstone – he was unable to let go of its melodic features and haunting resonances. Aspects of the song have resurfaced and echoed, reworked or transformed, in several subsequent pieces including a congretational mass setting, the slight After the Tryst for violin and piano, and his music-theatre piece Búsqueda. And it provides not only the title, says the composer, but also “the emotional core” of his chamber orchestra version of Tryst (an agreement, as between lovers, to meet at a certain time and place).
The lyrical material inspired by the words in the Scots vernacular (printed below for interest) is firmly associated in the composer’s mind with “commitment, sanctity, intimacy, faith and love”. But, he adds – and this ties in with the gentle quality of illusion in Soutar’s poem, suffused with loneliness and unfulfilled desire – “the music is also saturated with a sadness as if all these things are about to expire.”
Tryst is in one movement which falls into five unbroken sections. The swaggering energetic opening is punctuated by high clarinets screeching like banshees, MacMillan’s imaginative instrumental sonorities hinting at the supernatural world suggested by Soutar’s poem. Sustained wind chords herald the second section, their slow pace rudely interrupted by impatient string flurries. As these interjections become more frequent and expansive, the strings and winds swap roles, the strings taking up the more meditative role, while the winds become the violent intruder.
At the heart of the work is a slow section in which the original Tryst tune is teased out in the strings, sometimes tenderly, sometimes queasily, wind-chimes and bell-tree adding eerie glitter. Trumpets and horns sound a ghostly flourish and, with accelerating tempo, the opening material returns on jogging strings with blasts of brass and an audacious bass clarinet marked “expressive, bluesy”, questioning and answering each other as a verse and refrain. Vehement instrumental lines meet above the dense washes of chorale-like chords recalled from the central section. Finally, high chirruping woodwind suddenly stop as if throttled and the hum of low strings and timpani fades, as Soutar’s summer days did, “like they had never been”.© Lynne Walker
The Tryst
O luely, luely cam she in
And luely she lay doun:
I kent her be her caller lips
And her breists sae sma’ and roun’.
A’ thru the nicht we spak nae word
Nor sinder’d bane frae bane:
A’ thru the nicht I heard her hert
Gang soundin’ wi’ my ain.
It was about the waukrife hour
Whan cocks begin to craw
That she smool’d saftly thru the mirk
Afore the day wud daw.
Sae luely, luely, cam she in
Sae luely was she gaen
And wi’ her a’ my simmer days
Like they had never been.
William Soutar (1898-1943) - Harper
Programme note
Edward Harper (1941-2009)
Symphony No 2 (2006/07)Below is the programme note which Edward Harper wrote for his Symphony No 2 when it was first performed by the SCO in November 2006. At this time the first movement 'Overture' had still to be written. Therefore, we have added a short note on this movement by John Fallas.
Overture
The Turnen Stile
Them! Not Us!
Miracles
EpilogueThe texts for Symphony No 2 come from a wide range of sources but are linked by two themes, firstly the particular tragedy of death involving children and secondly a hope that out of such tragedy can come peace and reconciliation.
The largest movement is the third, Them! Not us! The words are from a poem by the Edinburgh-based poet Ron Butlin, commissioned for the occasion. Behind the poem lie two outstanding gestures of generosity and forgiveness which I wanted to commemorate in music. Just over three years ago [at the time of writing] a Jewish student from Britain, on a visit to Tel Aviv, was killed by a Palestinian suicide bomber. The family donated an organ from the body to save the life of a Palestinian girl. More recently, the family of a Palestinian boy shot by an Israeli soldier donated his organs to a number of people, including two Israeli children.
The movement opens with music which aims to create a mood of mindless, ritualistic violence. This gives way to a section in which the father of the boy reflects on the death of his son. The movement ends with a prayer for peace and hope which is taken up again in the Epilogue. Here, after a brief, orchestral reference to the violence of the second movement, the choir sings words from the Agnus Dei of the Latin Mass while the soloist has the famous prophesy of ultimate reconciliation from the Book of Isaiah.
In between these movements comes Miracles, a setting of Walt Whitman’s expression of the wonder and mystery of everyday things. This is the scherzo of the Symphony – the ostinato pizzicato bass line is intended to have faint implications of jazz. The second movement sets part of a Dorset dialect poem by the nineteenth-century poet William Barnes. The soloist, accompanied just by solo violin, begins with a description of a family going to church, ushered on their way by stile. This sets off the main part of the movement, a purely orchestral waltz whose constant movement reflects the turning of the stile. At the climax the mood suddenly changes (marked by the tubular bell) to one of sadness and loss. The soloist sings the final lines of the poem, accompanied now by muted solo viola and bells.
The first movement, for orchestra alone, is weightier and more substantial than its heading ‘Overture’ might suggest, and serves both to introduce motifs on which the later movements will be built and to establish a dialogue between radiant stillness and a joyous propulsion which will return in the symphony’s last two movements.
© Edward Harper, 2006
© John Fallas, 2008
- conductor
- baritone
- -
The SCO believes passionately in performing work by composers based in Scotland, and the Orchestra’s concerts of contemporary music are consistently among its most rewarding. In this concert, the Orchestra celebrates the music of three great composers – Kenneth Leighton, James MacMillan and Edward Harper. We are very grateful to Alexander Robin Baker who has replaced Leigh Melrose for this concert at very short notice. Leigh Melrose has had to withdraw due to ill health.
Related audio clip
Harper Symphony No 2 - The Turnen Stile - excerpt
Garry Walker conducts the SCO and Chorus and baritone David Wilson-Johnson in Edward Harper's Symphony No 2.
Homecoming
- Leighton
Programme note
Kenneth Leighton (1929-1988)
Concerto for String Orchestra Op 39Lento sostenuto
Molto ritmico
Adagio maestoso, all marcia e largamente – Allegro precipotoso – Largo ed alla marciaBy birth and by education – he was born in Wakefield, trained as an Anglican cathedral chorister and studied at Oxford – Kenneth Leighton was an English composer. But he was also, in a real sense, an Edinburgh composer. He spent more than 30 years teaching at Edinburgh University, the last 18 as Reid Professor of Music, and played a prominent part in the musical life of the city, not only as an academic but also as a conductor and pianist. Many of his major works were written in Edinburgh and first performed there.
It would be wrong to assume from this, however, that his music is in any way provincial or parochial. His early works, like the Symphony for Strings of 1949, are certainly very English, in the Vaughan Williams tradition, but his months of study with Goffredo Petrassi in Rome in 1951 widened his horizons more than a little. By the time he came to write the Concerto for String Orchestra in 1961 he was a very much more sophisticated, even cosmopolitan composer who had absorbed the most important developments in 20th century European music. He did not, on the other hand, abandon traditional values.
The melodic line on muted violas at the beginning of the Concerto might, in its extreme chromaticism, sound like a Schoenbergian twelve-note row, but it isn’t one and doesn’t actually behave like one. While it is the source of later thematic material, it does not exclude tonality – the work gravitates towards C major –- and it does not dominate Leighton’s structural thinking, which is more spontaneous than the serial appearances would suggest. Nor does it inhibit his melodic imagination, which flows freely in a score characterised above all by a contrapuntal virtuosity comparable to that of Tippett’s Concerto for Double String Orchestra.
The most significant aspect of the viola melody that opens the Lento sostenuto is the motif formed by its first four notes. It is presented again and again, though not in the same rhythm, as second violins, cellos and basses, and then first violins make their respective entries. There are two more main themes: one is introduced quietly by second violins over a dotted-rhythm ostinato on cellos; the other appears on second violins and violas to be joined by the rest of the ensemble in imitative counterpoint that grows in intensity on approaching a central fff tutta forza climax. The apex of the arch construction having been reached in this way, the tension is gradually relaxed as, over pizzicato cellos and basses, the opening theme is lyrically recalled on violins, all but dying out on muted solo instruments just before the closing bars.
The rhythmically ingenious, brilliantly sonorous, scherzo-like second movement, which is played pizzicato throughout, might well owe something to Bartók’s Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta –- not least the 'Bartók pizzicato' resounding against the finger-board towards the end. But its material, with a prominent minor third, derives from the pizzicato episode in the middle of the Lento sostenuto.
With its heavily articulated double-dotted rhythms reminiscent of Shostakovich’s Fifth Symphony, the slow introduction to the last movement seems, to be going in a different direction. At an early stage, however, violins introduce an idea derived from the Lento sostenuto which, as the tempo changes, is taken up at twice the speed as the robustly vigorous first theme of the main Allegro precipitoso section. It retains its impetus as broader melodic lines are set against it, just as they are set against busy fugal and scherzando episodes. They lead, intermittently but with ever gathering strength, to another fff con tutta forza climax, now arresting the impetus to make way for a coda recalling both the tempo and the emphatic gestures of the Adagio maestoso introduction to the movement.
© Gerald Larner
- MacMillan
Programme note
James MacMillan (b. 1959)
Tryst (1989)
When James MacMillan first set William Soutar’s love poem The Tryst, in the style of an old Scottish ballad, in 1984 he little guessed how significant his simple tune would prove to be. Having performed it himself – in folk clubs and bars around Scotland with his group, Broadstone – he was unable to let go of its melodic features and haunting resonances. Aspects of the song have resurfaced and echoed, reworked or transformed, in several subsequent pieces including a congretational mass setting, the slight After the Tryst for violin and piano, and his music-theatre piece Búsqueda. And it provides not only the title, says the composer, but also “the emotional core” of his chamber orchestra version of Tryst (an agreement, as between lovers, to meet at a certain time and place).
The lyrical material inspired by the words in the Scots vernacular (printed below for interest) is firmly associated in the composer’s mind with “commitment, sanctity, intimacy, faith and love”. But, he adds – and this ties in with the gentle quality of illusion in Soutar’s poem, suffused with loneliness and unfulfilled desire – “the music is also saturated with a sadness as if all these things are about to expire.”
Tryst is in one movement which falls into five unbroken sections. The swaggering energetic opening is punctuated by high clarinets screeching like banshees, MacMillan’s imaginative instrumental sonorities hinting at the supernatural world suggested by Soutar’s poem. Sustained wind chords herald the second section, their slow pace rudely interrupted by impatient string flurries. As these interjections become more frequent and expansive, the strings and winds swap roles, the strings taking up the more meditative role, while the winds become the violent intruder.
At the heart of the work is a slow section in which the original Tryst tune is teased out in the strings, sometimes tenderly, sometimes queasily, wind-chimes and bell-tree adding eerie glitter. Trumpets and horns sound a ghostly flourish and, with accelerating tempo, the opening material returns on jogging strings with blasts of brass and an audacious bass clarinet marked “expressive, bluesy”, questioning and answering each other as a verse and refrain. Vehement instrumental lines meet above the dense washes of chorale-like chords recalled from the central section. Finally, high chirruping woodwind suddenly stop as if throttled and the hum of low strings and timpani fades, as Soutar’s summer days did, “like they had never been”.© Lynne Walker
The Tryst
O luely, luely cam she in
And luely she lay doun:
I kent her be her caller lips
And her breists sae sma’ and roun’.
A’ thru the nicht we spak nae word
Nor sinder’d bane frae bane:
A’ thru the nicht I heard her hert
Gang soundin’ wi’ my ain.
It was about the waukrife hour
Whan cocks begin to craw
That she smool’d saftly thru the mirk
Afore the day wud daw.
Sae luely, luely, cam she in
Sae luely was she gaen
And wi’ her a’ my simmer days
Like they had never been.
William Soutar (1898-1943) - Harper
Programme note
Edward Harper (1941-2009)
Symphony No 2 (2006/07)Below is the programme note which Edward Harper wrote for his Symphony No 2 when it was first performed by the SCO in November 2006. At this time the first movement 'Overture' had still to be written. Therefore, we have added a short note on this movement by John Fallas.
Overture
The Turnen Stile
Them! Not Us!
Miracles
EpilogueThe texts for Symphony No 2 come from a wide range of sources but are linked by two themes, firstly the particular tragedy of death involving children and secondly a hope that out of such tragedy can come peace and reconciliation.
The largest movement is the third, Them! Not us! The words are from a poem by the Edinburgh-based poet Ron Butlin, commissioned for the occasion. Behind the poem lie two outstanding gestures of generosity and forgiveness which I wanted to commemorate in music. Just over three years ago [at the time of writing] a Jewish student from Britain, on a visit to Tel Aviv, was killed by a Palestinian suicide bomber. The family donated an organ from the body to save the life of a Palestinian girl. More recently, the family of a Palestinian boy shot by an Israeli soldier donated his organs to a number of people, including two Israeli children.
The movement opens with music which aims to create a mood of mindless, ritualistic violence. This gives way to a section in which the father of the boy reflects on the death of his son. The movement ends with a prayer for peace and hope which is taken up again in the Epilogue. Here, after a brief, orchestral reference to the violence of the second movement, the choir sings words from the Agnus Dei of the Latin Mass while the soloist has the famous prophesy of ultimate reconciliation from the Book of Isaiah.
In between these movements comes Miracles, a setting of Walt Whitman’s expression of the wonder and mystery of everyday things. This is the scherzo of the Symphony – the ostinato pizzicato bass line is intended to have faint implications of jazz. The second movement sets part of a Dorset dialect poem by the nineteenth-century poet William Barnes. The soloist, accompanied just by solo violin, begins with a description of a family going to church, ushered on their way by stile. This sets off the main part of the movement, a purely orchestral waltz whose constant movement reflects the turning of the stile. At the climax the mood suddenly changes (marked by the tubular bell) to one of sadness and loss. The soloist sings the final lines of the poem, accompanied now by muted solo viola and bells.
The first movement, for orchestra alone, is weightier and more substantial than its heading ‘Overture’ might suggest, and serves both to introduce motifs on which the later movements will be built and to establish a dialogue between radiant stillness and a joyous propulsion which will return in the symphony’s last two movements.
© Edward Harper, 2006
© John Fallas, 2008
- conductor
- baritone
- -
The SCO believes passionately in performing work by composers based in Scotland, and the Orchestra’s concerts of contemporary music are consistently among its most rewarding. In this concert, the Orchestra celebrates the music of three great composers – Kenneth Leighton, James MacMillan and Edward Harper. We are very grateful to Alexander Robin Baker who has replaced Leigh Melrose for this concert at very short notice. Leigh Melrose has had to withdraw due to ill health.
Related audio clip
Harper Symphony No 2 - The Turnen Stile - excerpt
Garry Walker conducts the SCO and Chorus and baritone David Wilson-Johnson in Edward Harper's Symphony No 2.
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