Concerts & Tickets

Programme note

Gustav Mahler (1860-1911)
Songs from Des Knaben Wunderhorn (1899)

Rheinlegendchen
Verlorne Müh
Das irdische Leben
Wer hat dies Liedlien erdacht?
Wo die schönen Trompeten blasen
Lob des hohen Verstandes

Mahler’s discovery in 1887 of Des Knaben Wunderhorn – Achim von Arnim and Clemens Brentano’s anthology of German folk poetry published in two volumes in 1805 and 1808 respectively – was a turning point in his development. It didn’t mean a complete change of direction, since he had long favoured the folk idiom in the texts he chose (or even wrote) for song-setting. But in Des Knaben Wunderhorn he found a collection of such breadth, depth and variety that it took him thirteen years or more, not only in his songs but also in his symphonies, to realise its creative potential.

Rheinlegendchen – written originally for voice and piano in 1893 but first published, like the other songs in this group, among the ten Wunderhorn settings for voice and orchestra in 1899 – is a particularly delightful example in its naive sentiment and its playful Ländler rhythms combined with teasingly but not incongruously sophisticated harmonies. The melodic material was actually in Mahler’s mind before he discovered the words to go with it. What pleased him about his setting was, he said, its “childish, mischievous and heartfelt” qualities and the “gentle and sunny”colouring of the accompaniment. The slightly earlier Verlorne Müh’ is another Ländler but one concerned not so much with rhythmic and harmonic wit as with characterisation: it is a meeting of the unaware with the ungracious in a decidedly one-sided conversation.

Das irdische Leben was written at much the same time as Rheinlegendchen and is as starkly realistic as the other is fanciful. With its tragic outcome implicit from the start in its Lydian minor harmonies, it sets what the composer described as “the tortured and anguished cries of the child” and “the slow monotonous replies of the mother” against an accompaniment that “roars and whistles like a storm” (so memorably in fact that it found its way into the Purgatorio third movement of the Tenth Symphony seventeen years later).

Perhaps the most attractive and certainly the shortest of the six songs in the present selection, Wer hat dies Liedlein erdacht? runs with irresistible charm on the whistling tune that so cheerfully pervades the accompaniment and so effectively joins the vocal part at the end of the first and last stanzas. The longest and musically the most ambitious is Wo die schönen Trompeten blasen. Mahler himself apparently felt that it is not a ghost that knocks on the door in the middle of the night but the lover in reality anticipating his early death on the battlefield. Either way, it is an appropriately eerie setting illuminated by brass scoring which, though the fanfares sound from beyond the grave, are magically seductive in effect. 

Lob des hohen Verstandes – a clear reference to which introduces the high-flown counterpoint of the Finale of the Fifth Symphony – is directed at the composer’s uncomprehending critics. The allusion to Die Meistersinger on the words “Täten ein Wett’ anschlagen,” discreetly ironic as it is, probably  escaped even the biggest ears of the objects of Mahler’s wickedly satirical caricature.

© Gerald Larner

Programme note

Francis Poulenc (1899-1963)
Flute Sonata (1957) [orch. Berkeley]

Allegretto malincolico
Cantilena - Assez lent
Presto giocoso

Poulenc always felt more at home writing for solo wind instruments than for strings. He appreciated them for what he regarded as their vocal qualities, echoing Stravinsky’s comment that they “breathe most attractively”. All but two of his published chamber works feature wind instruments.

He first drafted his Flute Sonata in 1952, possibly intending it for Julius Baker, then Principal Flautist with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. Other projects intervened, particularly the opera Les dialogues des Carmélites, and it was not until 1956 that he was able to return to it. Earlier that year he had received a request for a new chamber piece from the Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge Foundation which had been set up in 1925 by the great American patron Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge (1864-1953) to encourage composition and performance of chamber music. He first declined the invitation, then changed his mind and offered the sonata, which he completed in March 1957 and dedicated to Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge’s memory. He gave the first performance with the French flautist Jean-Pierrre Rampal at the Strasbourg Festival that summer.

The first movement opens with a plaintively smiling theme for the flute heard three times, each repeat given a subtle new twist, and with a perky new idea for contrast. At the centre of the movement is a more expansively florid theme, before the opening theme returns once more.

The air of wistfulness is intensified in the slow movement. The music’s melodic character confirms the suggestion of the movement’s title, that it springs from the same impulse as the composer’s many songs.

The finale begins in a mood of knockabout fun: Poulenc never entirely lost touch with the iconoclastic impudence of the 1920s. But the energy gradually winds down to reveal the florid central theme from the first movement, with both the flute and piano part marked ‘mélancholique’. Momentum gradually returns, and with it the mood and theme of the opening. A hint that the first movement theme might follow in its turn is shrugged off with a final, almost defiant, flourish.

Berkeley made his orchestral transcription at the request of James Galway, and it was first performed in 1977. He was ideally suited to the task in many ways. Of the British composers of his generation he was the most obviously French in his musical sympathies. He was partly of French descent himself, and studied in Paris with Nadia Boulanger in the 1920s; his long-standing friendship with Poulenc dates from this period. The skill with which he re-creates Poulenc’s essentially pianistic textures in orchestral terms makes this version a genuine alternative to the original.

© Mike Wheeler

Programme note

Gabriel Faure (1845-1924)
Pavane, Op 50 (1887)

Gabriel Faure lived through a long and important period in French musical history. When he was born, Berlioz had not yet completed The Damnation of Faust. When he died, The Rite of Spring was already a decade old and Stravinsky had entered a fresh phase of his career. But if the milestones of European music appeared to pass him by  - and Debussy, we should remember, was born seventeen years after Faure but died six years before him - he was nevertheless a gloriously gifted composer who happened to be neither flamboyant nor progressive.  What he undoubtedly was, as one authority has put it, "musically sensitive and energetic."  He was one of the most inspired, as well as most private, figures of French romantic music.

He paid, alas, a price for his privacy, and for the very undemonstrative qualities that made him the composer he became. Though his Requiem is accepted as one of the greatest and least sensational works of its kind, and though Janet Baker championed his songs with a comprehensiveness that few other modern singers have brought to them, pianists seldom include his nocturnes and barcarolles in their programmes, and his chamber music, for all its beauty, remains an acquired taste. Yet it is in such poetic, inward-turning music that the essence of his style is to be found.

And the essence of that essence can be said above all to lie in the exquisite Pavane, one of the shortest and most popular of his works, whether performed in its purely orchestral version or as a choral piece - or, for that matter, as a ballet, in which form Diaghilev saw its possibilities. In whatever way it is done, it is all atmosphere. Like Ravel’s subsequent Pavane for a Dead Infanta, it progresses as a sad, subdued meditation on the ancient Anglo-French dance-form to which it owes its name.  Its strength - as well as its secret - lies in a sublime simplicity that wholly avoids sentimentality. Or, as Faure’s pupil Charles Koechlin remarked in a different context, it "mingles a hidden melancholy with a certain serenity."  Although, in the middle of the piece, things seem on the brink of flaring into something more passionate, the temptation is resisted and the slow, brooding, drooping, haunting pulse of the dance is restored.

© Conrad Wilson

Programme note

Hector Berlioz (1803-1869)
La Mort de Cléopâtre (1849)

Although the Prix de Rome was something that every young French composer seriously coveted - for the prestige, the money and the privilege of two years residence at the Villa Medici in Rome - very few of the winning entries have become part of the standard repertoire. This is not so much because the outstanding students of their day like Charles Gounod, Georges Bizet and Jules Massenet were incapable of producing anything of lasting interest as because the rules of the competition and the conservatism of the jurors virtually precluded any display of originality or individuality.

Berlioz went in for the Prix de Rome four times in four successive years and finally won it in 1830 with La Mort de Sardanaple, which was not the best of his Prix de Rome cantatas but the most obedient. The most inspired of the four is La Mort de Cléopâtre, which so offended the jury in 1829 that rather than give their approval to such an unruly score they chose not to award a first prize at all that year. Up to a point, one can sympathise with those "grave and reverend signors" who, listening to the piano transcription (as the rules required) of an essentially orchestral conception and hearing harmonic transgressions not even the dreaded Beethoven would have perpetrated, must have been severely baffled by the work.

Interestingly, however, the notoriously severe Director of the Paris Conservatoire, Luigi Cherubini, was one of the small minority who voted for it. As a not unprogressive opera composer himself, he no doubt had to acknowledge the dramatic intensity in the swirling figuration and urgent syncopations of the instrumental introduction, the eloquence of Cleopatra's opening recitative and the pathos of the following near-aria. It is difficult to imagine, on the other hand what even the most liberal academic could have made of the central 'Méditation' (which was to be recycled in Lélio two years later) with its ominously strummed rhythms, its macabre trombone colours and its weird harmonic progressions. As for the naturalistic rather than conventionally emphatic ending - after the fatal snake-bite the music just dies away on an erratic and failing pulse - that demonstration of Berlioz's genius was the ultimate offence as far as most of the jurors were concerned.

© Gerald Larner

Programme note

Hector Berlioz (1803-1869)
The Flight into Egypt, overture (1850-4)

Berlioz, famed above all for his brassy brilliance, was a composer no less notable for his restraint. Even some of his grandest works make their most memorable effects by stealth. Thus, though his Requiem demands six pairs of cymbals in the Sanctus, their soft swishing is as important, and memorable, as the outburst of the four brass bands in the Dies Irae. Yet not until he reached The Childhood of Christ, one of his last major works, did the French public recognise the chaste beauty and austerity of his writing as a special element of  his music. The shock was so great that they thought he had mended his ways and renovated his style - to which Berlioz long-sufferingly replied that it was only his subject he had changed. 

Though it has its exclamatory moments, The Childhood of Christ is certainly one of the loveliest and most subdued of all his works. The music grew, almost by accident, from an organ piece entitled The Shepherds’ Farewell which he wrote in 1850. “I thought it had a certain pastoral, naive mysticism about it,” he remarked, “so I decided to put appropriate words to it. The organ piece disappeared and became the chorus of shepherds in Bethlehem bidding farewell to the baby Jesus as the Holy Family depart for Egypt.” 

Gradually the music was enlarged and elaborated as a cantata entitled The Flight into Egypt - 'Fragments of a Mystery in ancient style' -  which in turn became the central movement of The Childhood of Christ, his exquisite, almost Fauré-like oratorio completed in 1854. The short overture in F sharp minor, scored for a small orchestra of woodwind and strings, sets the tone.  For all its gentleness, and for all its reliance on the art of fugue (first on the strings, then on the woodwind), there is nothing at all unBerliozian about the result. Berlioz knew about fugue, but the music’s softness is what matters, and he was a master of softness.  Yet with its flattened modal notes, deliberately employed to create a sense of archaism, the overture in its quiet way is also extraordinarily forward-looking and, with its  touches of oboe tone, filled with curious, unexpected, unpredictable foretastes of the English pastoral school and its practitioners, such as Vaughan Williams, who flourished more than half a century later. 

© Conrad Wilson