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2009
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Cargill Sings Berlioz

18th December

19:30, City Halls, Glasgow

Tickets: £11-£24 (concessions available)

Fauré
Pelléas et Mélisande

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Gabriel Fauré (1845-1924)
Pelléas et Mélisande Suite, Op 80 (1898)

Prélude: quasi adagio
La Fileuse: andantino quasi allegretto
Sicilienne: allegretto molto moderato
Molto adagio

Of the four composers most prominently associated with Maurice Maeterlinck’s Pelléas et Mélisande - Debussy for his opera, Schoenberg for his symphonic poem, Fauré and Sibelius for their incidental music - Fauré was the first to have his score performed. Commissioned in a hurry by Mrs Patrick Campbell to write the music for the first production of the play in English, Fauré completed it in a month and conducted it himself at the Prince of Wales Theatre in London in 1898.

The four movements he later chose to include in a concert suite - from a total of nineteen bits and pieces, including a song for Mrs Patrick Campbell as Mélisande - present a poignant portrait of Maeterlinck’s lonely heroine. The Prélude is based on a theme which, in its restricted movement in narrow melodic intervals, reflects her introverted, essentially private personality. A second theme, introduced by a compassionate solo cello and woodwind, might be taken to represent Mélisande as Golaud sees her when, lost while out hunting, he first finds her by the well in the forest.

La Fileuse accompanies Mélisande innocently at work at her spinning wheel. A characteristically intimate theme rises gently on a solo oboe, the spinning wheel running quietly but persistently on upper strings and failing only at the climax of the movement where, perhaps, Mélisande’s mind wanders from her work and turns towards Golaud’s younger half-brother, Pelléas. The one moment of happiness shared by Pelléas and Mélisande is represented by the Sicilienne, and no less aptly because it was originally written for a quite different occasion.

The funereal implications of the Molto adagio are unmistakable. So too is the subject of the lament as the melody in the flute and clarinets rises and falls in characteristically narrow intervals. The audience at the Prince of Wales Theatre in 1898 would also have recognised the first entry of the violins as an allusion to Mélisande’s song. The first theme returns fortissimo on the strings before a last echo of the song and a sadly modal approach on solo flute to the final chord.

© Gerald Larner
Berlioz
Le Mort de Cléopâtre

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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
Berlioz
Overture, The Flight into Egypt

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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
Haydn
Symphony No 101 'The Clock'

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Joseph Haydn (1732-1809)
Symphony No 101 in D major 'The Clock' (1794)

Adagio - Presto
Andante
Menuet: Allegretto
Finale: Vivace

Long before he left rural Esterháza, where he was musical director for 24 years, Haydn’s services were in demand. His Seven Last Words from the Cross had been commissioned by Spain, his Paris symphonies by France. His Op 50 quartets were composed for the King of Prussia, and even the fickle Viennese had their eye on him. Though he was now almost sixty, inspiration still flowed. In 1790, belatedly resident in Vienna, he was called upon in his rooms by an impresario who announced himself with famous words; “I am Salomon of England,” said the visitor, “and I have come to take you to London.” Far from showing Salomon the door, Haydn agreed to a commission for the series of masterpieces we know as the London symphonies, the performances of which he was to direct in person.

Between 1791 and 1795, Haydn travelled twice to London, taking more than a fortnight to get there and lingering a year and a half on each occasion. For a senior composer who had lived a mostly sheltered life, these journeys through Germany and France and across the Channel seemed greatly perilous. Before setting off the first time, he bade an emotional farewell to his dear friend and disciple, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, who with uncanny premonition expressed the fear that they would never meet again – though in fact it was young Mozart who would die at home in Vienna and old Haydn who would prosper.

The Clock symphony, launched during his second London visit, is a work with all the advantages – an attractive nickname, a wealth of melody, a constant sense of surprise, a Beethovenian assertiveness, and a stupendous finale, one of Haydn’s very best. The slow introduction, in the 'wrong' key, holds things in suspense until the Allegro arrives in the 'right' key. The slow movement underpins its adorable theme with ticking bassoons and pizzicato strings, later replaced by battering and by no means comic brass. The Menuet has grandeur, except in the trio section where the players emulate a rustic band. But it is the finale, complete with an audaciously sotto voce double fugue, towards which this symphony has been heading from the start. It shows what Salomon expected of Haydn, and Haydn of Salomon’s orchestra.

© Conrad Wilson

Robin Ticciati
conductor
Karen Cargill
mezzo-soprano

The touching melancholy of Fauré; Berlioz’s unbridled operatic tragedy – featuring magnificent Scottish mezzo, Karen Cargill; the sheer wit and poise of Haydn to close. Ticciati offers a world of variety in a single evening, and slips in a taster of things to come, as the complete L’Enfance du Christ follows in February 2010.

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Concerts & Tickets

Cargill Sings Berlioz

18th December

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