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L'Enfance du Christ
- Berlioz
Programme note
Hector Berlioz (1803–1869)
L'Enfance du Christ
(The Childhood of Christ) (1853-54)After the failure of The Damnation of Faust and the heavy debts it left him with, Berlioz had vowed never to risk putting on a big composition in Paris again. The Childhood of Christ was not something he planned. It was as if the work could come into the world only by stealth, almost unawares – beginning with the little chorus of the shepherds’ farewell, jotted down in a friend’s album at the corner of a card-table while his companions played whist, then, a few days later, an overture – the shepherds' gathering at the Bethlehem stable – and a tenor solo describing the Holy Family resting at an oasis during the journey to Egypt, after which the score was put on one side and seemingly forgotten.
Not till three years later, in 1853, did The Flight into Egypt get a performance, conducted by the composer, in Leipzig. It was such a success that he was urged to enlarge it, and The Arrival at Saïs was soon written, followed by the first part of the triptych, Herod’s Dream.
Berlioz knew he could be sure of a sympathetic reception in Germany. But it was in Paris after all that his "sacred trilogy" had its enormously successful first performances. Paris could hardly believe its ears. Here was the apostle of noise, the master of the macabre and the grotesque, writing for a handful of instruments and a small chorus to the manner born: in Part 2 a chamber orchestra of strings and six wind, without bassoons or horns; Part 3 using only slightly larger forces; and even Part 1, in which trombones appeared, sparingly scored, and drums heard only twice, very briefly. Berlioz had obviously changed.
In fact he hadn’t. All that had changed was the subject – which, in his words, "naturally prompted a naïve and gentle kind of music". His ideal was still what he called "passionate expression, that is, expression bent on reproducing the essence of its subject, even when it is the opposite of 'passion', and tender feelings are being expressed or the most profound calm".
In The Childhood of Christ, Berlioz remains the dramatist he always was. The work is conceived as a series of tableaux in which we are shown the human elements of the story: the uneasy might of Rome, the world-weariness of Herod, the fanaticism of the soothsayers, the joys and fears of Jesus’ parents, the shepherds’ friendliness and the busy welcome of the Ishmaelite household. They are juxtaposed in a way that anticipates the cinema. An example is the transition from Herod’s rage to the peace of the stable. We see in angry close-up the fear-distorted faces of Herod and the soothsayers, like faces in a Bosch or
Brueghel crucifixion. Then the nightmare fades, the picture dwindles and the manger comes into focus. In the epilogue it is as though the glowing family circle were growing faint and blurring before our eyes. The moment has come to close the book and draw the timeless moral; and the composer, having shown the loving kindness of his good Samaritans, tracks away from the scene, causes the picture to fade by means of a series of quiet, still unisons, surrounded by silence. Its purpose is to separate us from what we have been witnessing, to make it recede across the centuries and return to the ancient past from which it has been evoked, and achieve the necessary transition to the final meditation on the meaning of the Christmas drama.
Everything is visualised. When the Holy Family reach Egypt hungry and exhausted and beg in vain for shelter, the musical imagery brings the scene before us. The plaintive viola motif, the wailing oboe and cor anglais, the fragmentary violin phrases, the tremor of cellos and basses, Mary’s panting utterances, Joseph’s swaying melody constantly returning, Gluck-like, on itself, the tap of the drums as he timidly knocks, the shouts of "Get away, dirty Jews" which brusquely interrupt the prevailing triple metre – all this makes a vivid and poignant ‘expression of the subject’. Nor is it only the refugees’ sufferings that arouse the composer’s compassion. He illuminates the loneliness of the tormented Herod and the forlornness of the soothsayers, whose gloomy choruses and weird cabbalistic dance express the sense that superstition is at once sinister and ridiculous, to be pitied.
By the time he composed the work Berlioz had long ceased to be a Christian. But in recalling his childhood for the memoirs he was writing he relived the beliefs that had once been central to his life. Composing the work also took him back to the sources of his artistic being, to the folk music and noels on which his style had been founded. The archaic flavour that permeates much of the score came quite naturally to him. And the intensity of recollected emotion was such that he could re-enter a world where the events and characters of the Christmas story, as they stamped themselves on a hyper-sensitive child, were once again vibrantly alive.
No sentimental recovery of belief is involved. His mind remains sceptical. But his imagination believes. He remembers what it was like to have faith. And at the end, having re-enacted the age-old myth, and stepped out of the magic circle again, he can only pay tribute to the power of the Christian message and, unbeliever as he is, bow before the mystery of Christ’s birth and death.
Synopsis
Part 1: Herod’s Dream
The narrator sets the scene: Palestine shortly after Christ’s birth, and the hopes and fears already in the air. A Roman detachment patrols the empty streets of Jerusalem. Their night march is briefly interrupted as two soldiers discuss the strange terrors of King Herod. Alone, unable to sleep, Herod reflects on the solitariness of his life and on the dream that haunts him, of a child who will overthrow his power. He learns from his soothsayers that his throne will be safe only if all the children lately born in his kingdom are put to death. The scene moves to the stable in Bethlehem. Mary and Joseph are warned by angels of the danger to Jesus, and are told to leave at once and travel across the desert to Egypt.Part 2: The Flight into Egypt
Shepherds gather at the stable. They say goodbye to the Holy Family. The narrator describes Mary, Joseph, the baby and the donkey resting at an oasis, watched over by angels.Part 3: The Arrival at Saïs
The narrator tells how, after great hardships, the travellers reach the city of Saïs. They knock at many doors but are driven away. At last, half fainting with hunger, they are hospitably received by an Ishmaelite. Like Joseph he is a carpenter, and he invites them to stay and live with him and his family. The grateful pilgrims take their rest, entertained with music by the children, and then retire to bed. In an epilogue the narrator tells of their long sojourn in Egypt, their return to Palestine, and the child’s fulfilment of his redeeming mission. Narrator and chorus pray for humanity’s pride to be abased before such a mystery and its heart to be filled with Christ’s love.© David Cairns
- conductor
- mezzo-soprano
- tenor
- baritone
- bass baritone
- -
You might think this an odd time for the nativity story, but Berlioz’s dramatic telling goes well beyond the events of Christmas itself to follow the Holy Family as they flee from Herod to safety in Egypt. His story-telling is like a series of magical illustrations and includes such highlights as the lovely ‘Shepherd’s Farewell’.
L'Enfance du Christ
- Berlioz
Programme note
Hector Berlioz (1803–1869)
L'Enfance du Christ
(The Childhood of Christ) (1853-54)After the failure of The Damnation of Faust and the heavy debts it left him with, Berlioz had vowed never to risk putting on a big composition in Paris again. The Childhood of Christ was not something he planned. It was as if the work could come into the world only by stealth, almost unawares – beginning with the little chorus of the shepherds’ farewell, jotted down in a friend’s album at the corner of a card-table while his companions played whist, then, a few days later, an overture – the shepherds' gathering at the Bethlehem stable – and a tenor solo describing the Holy Family resting at an oasis during the journey to Egypt, after which the score was put on one side and seemingly forgotten.
Not till three years later, in 1853, did The Flight into Egypt get a performance, conducted by the composer, in Leipzig. It was such a success that he was urged to enlarge it, and The Arrival at Saïs was soon written, followed by the first part of the triptych, Herod’s Dream.
Berlioz knew he could be sure of a sympathetic reception in Germany. But it was in Paris after all that his "sacred trilogy" had its enormously successful first performances. Paris could hardly believe its ears. Here was the apostle of noise, the master of the macabre and the grotesque, writing for a handful of instruments and a small chorus to the manner born: in Part 2 a chamber orchestra of strings and six wind, without bassoons or horns; Part 3 using only slightly larger forces; and even Part 1, in which trombones appeared, sparingly scored, and drums heard only twice, very briefly. Berlioz had obviously changed.
In fact he hadn’t. All that had changed was the subject – which, in his words, "naturally prompted a naïve and gentle kind of music". His ideal was still what he called "passionate expression, that is, expression bent on reproducing the essence of its subject, even when it is the opposite of 'passion', and tender feelings are being expressed or the most profound calm".
In The Childhood of Christ, Berlioz remains the dramatist he always was. The work is conceived as a series of tableaux in which we are shown the human elements of the story: the uneasy might of Rome, the world-weariness of Herod, the fanaticism of the soothsayers, the joys and fears of Jesus’ parents, the shepherds’ friendliness and the busy welcome of the Ishmaelite household. They are juxtaposed in a way that anticipates the cinema. An example is the transition from Herod’s rage to the peace of the stable. We see in angry close-up the fear-distorted faces of Herod and the soothsayers, like faces in a Bosch or
Brueghel crucifixion. Then the nightmare fades, the picture dwindles and the manger comes into focus. In the epilogue it is as though the glowing family circle were growing faint and blurring before our eyes. The moment has come to close the book and draw the timeless moral; and the composer, having shown the loving kindness of his good Samaritans, tracks away from the scene, causes the picture to fade by means of a series of quiet, still unisons, surrounded by silence. Its purpose is to separate us from what we have been witnessing, to make it recede across the centuries and return to the ancient past from which it has been evoked, and achieve the necessary transition to the final meditation on the meaning of the Christmas drama.
Everything is visualised. When the Holy Family reach Egypt hungry and exhausted and beg in vain for shelter, the musical imagery brings the scene before us. The plaintive viola motif, the wailing oboe and cor anglais, the fragmentary violin phrases, the tremor of cellos and basses, Mary’s panting utterances, Joseph’s swaying melody constantly returning, Gluck-like, on itself, the tap of the drums as he timidly knocks, the shouts of "Get away, dirty Jews" which brusquely interrupt the prevailing triple metre – all this makes a vivid and poignant ‘expression of the subject’. Nor is it only the refugees’ sufferings that arouse the composer’s compassion. He illuminates the loneliness of the tormented Herod and the forlornness of the soothsayers, whose gloomy choruses and weird cabbalistic dance express the sense that superstition is at once sinister and ridiculous, to be pitied.
By the time he composed the work Berlioz had long ceased to be a Christian. But in recalling his childhood for the memoirs he was writing he relived the beliefs that had once been central to his life. Composing the work also took him back to the sources of his artistic being, to the folk music and noels on which his style had been founded. The archaic flavour that permeates much of the score came quite naturally to him. And the intensity of recollected emotion was such that he could re-enter a world where the events and characters of the Christmas story, as they stamped themselves on a hyper-sensitive child, were once again vibrantly alive.
No sentimental recovery of belief is involved. His mind remains sceptical. But his imagination believes. He remembers what it was like to have faith. And at the end, having re-enacted the age-old myth, and stepped out of the magic circle again, he can only pay tribute to the power of the Christian message and, unbeliever as he is, bow before the mystery of Christ’s birth and death.
Synopsis
Part 1: Herod’s Dream
The narrator sets the scene: Palestine shortly after Christ’s birth, and the hopes and fears already in the air. A Roman detachment patrols the empty streets of Jerusalem. Their night march is briefly interrupted as two soldiers discuss the strange terrors of King Herod. Alone, unable to sleep, Herod reflects on the solitariness of his life and on the dream that haunts him, of a child who will overthrow his power. He learns from his soothsayers that his throne will be safe only if all the children lately born in his kingdom are put to death. The scene moves to the stable in Bethlehem. Mary and Joseph are warned by angels of the danger to Jesus, and are told to leave at once and travel across the desert to Egypt.Part 2: The Flight into Egypt
Shepherds gather at the stable. They say goodbye to the Holy Family. The narrator describes Mary, Joseph, the baby and the donkey resting at an oasis, watched over by angels.Part 3: The Arrival at Saïs
The narrator tells how, after great hardships, the travellers reach the city of Saïs. They knock at many doors but are driven away. At last, half fainting with hunger, they are hospitably received by an Ishmaelite. Like Joseph he is a carpenter, and he invites them to stay and live with him and his family. The grateful pilgrims take their rest, entertained with music by the children, and then retire to bed. In an epilogue the narrator tells of their long sojourn in Egypt, their return to Palestine, and the child’s fulfilment of his redeeming mission. Narrator and chorus pray for humanity’s pride to be abased before such a mystery and its heart to be filled with Christ’s love.© David Cairns
- conductor
- mezzo-soprano
- tenor
- baritone
- bass baritone
- -
You might think this an odd time for the nativity story, but Berlioz’s dramatic telling goes well beyond the events of Christmas itself to follow the Holy Family as they flee from Herod to safety in Egypt. His story-telling is like a series of magical illustrations and includes such highlights as the lovely ‘Shepherd’s Farewell’.
L'Enfance du Christ
- Berlioz
Programme note
Hector Berlioz (1803–1869)
L'Enfance du Christ
(The Childhood of Christ) (1853-54)After the failure of The Damnation of Faust and the heavy debts it left him with, Berlioz had vowed never to risk putting on a big composition in Paris again. The Childhood of Christ was not something he planned. It was as if the work could come into the world only by stealth, almost unawares – beginning with the little chorus of the shepherds’ farewell, jotted down in a friend’s album at the corner of a card-table while his companions played whist, then, a few days later, an overture – the shepherds' gathering at the Bethlehem stable – and a tenor solo describing the Holy Family resting at an oasis during the journey to Egypt, after which the score was put on one side and seemingly forgotten.
Not till three years later, in 1853, did The Flight into Egypt get a performance, conducted by the composer, in Leipzig. It was such a success that he was urged to enlarge it, and The Arrival at Saïs was soon written, followed by the first part of the triptych, Herod’s Dream.
Berlioz knew he could be sure of a sympathetic reception in Germany. But it was in Paris after all that his "sacred trilogy" had its enormously successful first performances. Paris could hardly believe its ears. Here was the apostle of noise, the master of the macabre and the grotesque, writing for a handful of instruments and a small chorus to the manner born: in Part 2 a chamber orchestra of strings and six wind, without bassoons or horns; Part 3 using only slightly larger forces; and even Part 1, in which trombones appeared, sparingly scored, and drums heard only twice, very briefly. Berlioz had obviously changed.
In fact he hadn’t. All that had changed was the subject – which, in his words, "naturally prompted a naïve and gentle kind of music". His ideal was still what he called "passionate expression, that is, expression bent on reproducing the essence of its subject, even when it is the opposite of 'passion', and tender feelings are being expressed or the most profound calm".
In The Childhood of Christ, Berlioz remains the dramatist he always was. The work is conceived as a series of tableaux in which we are shown the human elements of the story: the uneasy might of Rome, the world-weariness of Herod, the fanaticism of the soothsayers, the joys and fears of Jesus’ parents, the shepherds’ friendliness and the busy welcome of the Ishmaelite household. They are juxtaposed in a way that anticipates the cinema. An example is the transition from Herod’s rage to the peace of the stable. We see in angry close-up the fear-distorted faces of Herod and the soothsayers, like faces in a Bosch or
Brueghel crucifixion. Then the nightmare fades, the picture dwindles and the manger comes into focus. In the epilogue it is as though the glowing family circle were growing faint and blurring before our eyes. The moment has come to close the book and draw the timeless moral; and the composer, having shown the loving kindness of his good Samaritans, tracks away from the scene, causes the picture to fade by means of a series of quiet, still unisons, surrounded by silence. Its purpose is to separate us from what we have been witnessing, to make it recede across the centuries and return to the ancient past from which it has been evoked, and achieve the necessary transition to the final meditation on the meaning of the Christmas drama.
Everything is visualised. When the Holy Family reach Egypt hungry and exhausted and beg in vain for shelter, the musical imagery brings the scene before us. The plaintive viola motif, the wailing oboe and cor anglais, the fragmentary violin phrases, the tremor of cellos and basses, Mary’s panting utterances, Joseph’s swaying melody constantly returning, Gluck-like, on itself, the tap of the drums as he timidly knocks, the shouts of "Get away, dirty Jews" which brusquely interrupt the prevailing triple metre – all this makes a vivid and poignant ‘expression of the subject’. Nor is it only the refugees’ sufferings that arouse the composer’s compassion. He illuminates the loneliness of the tormented Herod and the forlornness of the soothsayers, whose gloomy choruses and weird cabbalistic dance express the sense that superstition is at once sinister and ridiculous, to be pitied.
By the time he composed the work Berlioz had long ceased to be a Christian. But in recalling his childhood for the memoirs he was writing he relived the beliefs that had once been central to his life. Composing the work also took him back to the sources of his artistic being, to the folk music and noels on which his style had been founded. The archaic flavour that permeates much of the score came quite naturally to him. And the intensity of recollected emotion was such that he could re-enter a world where the events and characters of the Christmas story, as they stamped themselves on a hyper-sensitive child, were once again vibrantly alive.
No sentimental recovery of belief is involved. His mind remains sceptical. But his imagination believes. He remembers what it was like to have faith. And at the end, having re-enacted the age-old myth, and stepped out of the magic circle again, he can only pay tribute to the power of the Christian message and, unbeliever as he is, bow before the mystery of Christ’s birth and death.
Synopsis
Part 1: Herod’s Dream
The narrator sets the scene: Palestine shortly after Christ’s birth, and the hopes and fears already in the air. A Roman detachment patrols the empty streets of Jerusalem. Their night march is briefly interrupted as two soldiers discuss the strange terrors of King Herod. Alone, unable to sleep, Herod reflects on the solitariness of his life and on the dream that haunts him, of a child who will overthrow his power. He learns from his soothsayers that his throne will be safe only if all the children lately born in his kingdom are put to death. The scene moves to the stable in Bethlehem. Mary and Joseph are warned by angels of the danger to Jesus, and are told to leave at once and travel across the desert to Egypt.Part 2: The Flight into Egypt
Shepherds gather at the stable. They say goodbye to the Holy Family. The narrator describes Mary, Joseph, the baby and the donkey resting at an oasis, watched over by angels.Part 3: The Arrival at Saïs
The narrator tells how, after great hardships, the travellers reach the city of Saïs. They knock at many doors but are driven away. At last, half fainting with hunger, they are hospitably received by an Ishmaelite. Like Joseph he is a carpenter, and he invites them to stay and live with him and his family. The grateful pilgrims take their rest, entertained with music by the children, and then retire to bed. In an epilogue the narrator tells of their long sojourn in Egypt, their return to Palestine, and the child’s fulfilment of his redeeming mission. Narrator and chorus pray for humanity’s pride to be abased before such a mystery and its heart to be filled with Christ’s love.© David Cairns
- conductor
- mezzo-soprano
- tenor
- baritone
- bass baritone
- -
You might think this an odd time for the nativity story, but Berlioz’s dramatic telling goes well beyond the events of Christmas itself to follow the Holy Family as they flee from Herod to safety in Egypt. His story-telling is like a series of magical illustrations and includes such highlights as the lovely ‘Shepherd’s Farewell’.
Leschenko Plays Chopin
- Schumann, Clara
Programme note
Clara Schumann (1819-1896)
Romance in A minor, Op 21, No 1 (1891)
[Transcribed by Joseph Swensen for woodwind and double basses]Making her public solo debut at the age of eleven, Clara Wieck went on to became one of the most prominent pianists of her day, in solo, chamber and concerto repertoire. Her father, Friedrich Wieck, was a renowned piano teacher, and carefully groomed his daughter for the life of a concert soloist. She made several tours of Europe as a child, and was admired by musicians as prominent as Mendelssohn and Liszt.
Robert Schumann came to study with Wieck in 1828, and Wieck viewed the growing affection between him and Clara with increasing alarm. His doubts about Robert’s character and career prospects, combined with his belief that domestic responsibilities would ruin Clara’s own career, led him to put every obstacle in their way that he could think of. They were finally able to marry in 1840, after a prolonged legal battle to proceed without Wieck’s consent.
Her concert appearances became more sporadic after their marriage, but following Robert’s death she abandoned composition, and devoted more time to performing, including several visits to London, and teaching, both privately and at the Leipzig and Frankfurt Conservatories; she became head of the piano department at Frankfurt in 1878. As well a championing her husband’s music, she was one of the first leading pianists to bring Chopin’s work to a wider audience. She also played Brahms’s music extensively when he was still establishing his reputation, and the two remained close friends until her death.
Clara’s compositions are mostly for solo piano, but also include a piano concerto, a piano trio, some smaller pieces of chamber music, and several songs. The Three Romances, Op 21, were composed between 1853 and 1855, and were to be among her last works. An additional piece, written in 1853, was originally intended as the first of the three. In A minor, like the one that replaced it, was not published until 1891.
No 1, marked Andante, is one of Clara pieces that Brahms performed in public. It is said to have been composed the day Brahms visited Robert in the asylum to which he had been transferred following his mental breakdown (Clara herself had been forbidden to visit by Robert’s doctors). It begins in a sad, resigned mood, with the kind of harmonic intensity found in some of Brahms’s late piano pieces. The middle section, in which Clara’s biographer, Joan Chissell, detected Robert’s influence, is consolatory at first, but becomes more agitated. The sad opening music returns, this time rising to a defiant climax, before dying away.
© Mike Wheeler
- Chopin
Programme note
Frédèric Chopin (1810-1849)
Piano Concerto No 2 in F minor, Op 21Maestoso
Larghetto
Allegro vivace“Mozart encompasses the entire domain of musical creation, but I’ve only got the keyboard in my poor head.” The young Chopin lamented to a friend. “I know my limitations, and I know I’d make a fool of myself if I tried to climb too high without having the ability to do it. They plague me to death urging me to write symphonies and operas, and they want me to be everything in one – a Polish Rossini and a Mozart and a Beethoven. But I just laugh under my breath and think to myself that one must start from small things. I’m only a pianist.” Despite these protestations, Chopin knew that performing his own concerto was the accepted route to stardom for young virtuosos, and that his growing public fully expected him to follow the path established by Mozart and Beethoven.
The summer of 1829 found the 19-year-old Chopin at Prince Radziwill’s estate at Antonin, recovering from an ill-fated attachment to the young singer Constantia Gladkowska. Whilst there, he sketched out the F minor concerto and returned to Warsaw for the winter season, where his new concerto was given at the National Theatre the following March. “The first Allegro of my concerto, unintelligible to most, received the award of a single ‘Bravo’”, Chopin wrote after the premiere, “but I believe that this was given because people wanted to show that they understood and appreciated serious music. The slow movement and the Rondo produced a very great effect, after these, the applause and ‘Bravos’ really came from the heart.” The concerto had the desired effect and gained him the public exposure and audience adoration that no number of private salon performances could. It was such a triumph, and so many people had to be turned away, that a second concert was given five days later. As a contemporary account records; “How beautifully he plays. What fluency! What evenness! – impossible that there should exist a more perfect concord between two hands. He plays with such certainty, so cleanly that his Concerto might be compared to the life of a just man: no ambiguity, nothing false. His music is full of expressive feeling and song, and puts the listener into a state of subtle rapture, bringing back to his memory all the happy moments that he has had.”
© Stephen Strugnell
- Mendelssohn
Programme note
Felix Mendelssohn (1809-1847)
Symphony No 3 in A minor 'Scottish' (1842)Andante con moto - Allegro un poco agitato
Vivace non troppo
Adagio
Allegro vivacissimo - Allegro maestoso assaiGreat composers who visited Britain in the nineteenth century seldom ventured as far north as Scotland. Chopin made it in 1848, though the journey nearly killed him; and so, before that, did Mendelssohn, whose Scottish tour in 1839 was the most productive of its kind ever undertaken by a great composer from abroad. Holyrood Palace inspired the opening of his Symphony No 3 and he himself described the moment of conception. It was, he said, on an evening visit to where Mary Queen of Scots had “lived and loved”. The chapel, he noted, had lost its roof and was overgrown with grass and ivy. The altar at which Mary was crowned Queen of Scotland was broken. “Everything in ruins, decayed, and open to the skies. I believe I found there today the beginning of my ‘Scottish’ Symphony" - though he himself preferred to call it his Scotch, unfashionably by today's standards, whereby that word is reserved exclusively for whisky.
The actual writing of the work, however, did not begin until two years later in Rome, by which time he was also in the process of composing his ‘Italian’ Symphony. Since both works are in the same key — the Scottish in A minor moving into A major, the Italian in A major moving into A minor — it seems likely that Mendelssohn sometimes found it hard to differentiate between them. Certainly there are moments when the marching finale of the Scottish Symphony seems about to transform itself into the final saltarello of the Italian. Schumann, too, seems to have got the music confused in his mind. In his review of the Scottish Symphony in the Neue Zeitschrift für Musik he paid special tribute to the “old tunes of lovely Italy” contained therein. Folk tunes, in fact, are just what both symphonies tend to lack. True, in the scherzo of the Scottish, the clarinet and strings create a wonderfully poetic evocation and extension of the kind of music Mendelssohn might have heard during his tour. But, though "Charlie is my darling’" is often cited as its source, the composer more probably arrived at the peculiarly Scottish melody of this movement entirely by himself.
So what is actually Scottish about the Scottish Symphony? The slow introduction to the first movement may seem to Scottish listeners—if not to Schumann—to have a characteristic dourness, and it seems apt that Mendelssohn subsequently used an amended version of this theme, under the title 'Bad Weather', as part of his Erste Walpurgisnacht. This theme casts its shadow over much of the symphony, inspiring the two main subjects of the first movement’s Allegro, being hinted at in the "Charlie is my darling" theme of the scherzo (which uses the same rising fourths) and being heard in a glowing A major version ("Good Weather"?) at the end of the finale. There was a time when this coda was thought to have been arbitrarily tacked on, in order to bring the symphony to a triumphant close in a way that would please Queen Victoria. In fact, this coda - likened by Mendelssohn to the sound of a male-voice chorus – is one of the symphony’s many unifying features which prompted Schumann (rightly this time) to speak of the “homogeneity of all four movements”. The placid main theme of the Adagio may seem to belong to a different world, but the second subject of this movement harks back, at least in mood, to the unifying theme of the start of the work.
© Conrad Wilson
- conductor
- piano
Chopin and Mendelssohn both visited Scotland in the 1830s and ’40s, and this programme unites them in performances by the sparkling team of Leschenko and Swensen. Leschenko’s Chopin is especially fine, and the slow movement of this concerto holds some of the most bewitching music the great composer ever wrote. Swensen rounds off the evening with the Mendelssohn symphony he has made his own with the SCO.
Related audio clip
Mendelssohn Symphony No 3 in A minor 'Scottish' - Allegro vivacissimo - Allegro maestoso assai - excerpt
Conductor Emeritus Joseph Swensen conducts Symphony No 3 in A minor 'Scottish'
Leschenko Plays Chopin
- Schumann, Clara
Programme note
Clara Schumann (1819-1896)
Romance in A minor, Op 21, No 1 (1891)
[Transcribed by Joseph Swensen for woodwind and double basses]Making her public solo debut at the age of eleven, Clara Wieck went on to became one of the most prominent pianists of her day, in solo, chamber and concerto repertoire. Her father, Friedrich Wieck, was a renowned piano teacher, and carefully groomed his daughter for the life of a concert soloist. She made several tours of Europe as a child, and was admired by musicians as prominent as Mendelssohn and Liszt.
Robert Schumann came to study with Wieck in 1828, and Wieck viewed the growing affection between him and Clara with increasing alarm. His doubts about Robert’s character and career prospects, combined with his belief that domestic responsibilities would ruin Clara’s own career, led him to put every obstacle in their way that he could think of. They were finally able to marry in 1840, after a prolonged legal battle to proceed without Wieck’s consent.
Her concert appearances became more sporadic after their marriage, but following Robert’s death she abandoned composition, and devoted more time to performing, including several visits to London, and teaching, both privately and at the Leipzig and Frankfurt Conservatories; she became head of the piano department at Frankfurt in 1878. As well a championing her husband’s music, she was one of the first leading pianists to bring Chopin’s work to a wider audience. She also played Brahms’s music extensively when he was still establishing his reputation, and the two remained close friends until her death.
Clara’s compositions are mostly for solo piano, but also include a piano concerto, a piano trio, some smaller pieces of chamber music, and several songs. The Three Romances, Op 21, were composed between 1853 and 1855, and were to be among her last works. An additional piece, written in 1853, was originally intended as the first of the three. In A minor, like the one that replaced it, was not published until 1891.
No 1, marked Andante, is one of Clara pieces that Brahms performed in public. It is said to have been composed the day Brahms visited Robert in the asylum to which he had been transferred following his mental breakdown (Clara herself had been forbidden to visit by Robert’s doctors). It begins in a sad, resigned mood, with the kind of harmonic intensity found in some of Brahms’s late piano pieces. The middle section, in which Clara’s biographer, Joan Chissell, detected Robert’s influence, is consolatory at first, but becomes more agitated. The sad opening music returns, this time rising to a defiant climax, before dying away.
© Mike Wheeler
- Chopin
Programme note
Frédèric Chopin (1810-1849)
Piano Concerto No 2 in F minor, Op 21Maestoso
Larghetto
Allegro vivace“Mozart encompasses the entire domain of musical creation, but I’ve only got the keyboard in my poor head.” The young Chopin lamented to a friend. “I know my limitations, and I know I’d make a fool of myself if I tried to climb too high without having the ability to do it. They plague me to death urging me to write symphonies and operas, and they want me to be everything in one – a Polish Rossini and a Mozart and a Beethoven. But I just laugh under my breath and think to myself that one must start from small things. I’m only a pianist.” Despite these protestations, Chopin knew that performing his own concerto was the accepted route to stardom for young virtuosos, and that his growing public fully expected him to follow the path established by Mozart and Beethoven.
The summer of 1829 found the 19-year-old Chopin at Prince Radziwill’s estate at Antonin, recovering from an ill-fated attachment to the young singer Constantia Gladkowska. Whilst there, he sketched out the F minor concerto and returned to Warsaw for the winter season, where his new concerto was given at the National Theatre the following March. “The first Allegro of my concerto, unintelligible to most, received the award of a single ‘Bravo’”, Chopin wrote after the premiere, “but I believe that this was given because people wanted to show that they understood and appreciated serious music. The slow movement and the Rondo produced a very great effect, after these, the applause and ‘Bravos’ really came from the heart.” The concerto had the desired effect and gained him the public exposure and audience adoration that no number of private salon performances could. It was such a triumph, and so many people had to be turned away, that a second concert was given five days later. As a contemporary account records; “How beautifully he plays. What fluency! What evenness! – impossible that there should exist a more perfect concord between two hands. He plays with such certainty, so cleanly that his Concerto might be compared to the life of a just man: no ambiguity, nothing false. His music is full of expressive feeling and song, and puts the listener into a state of subtle rapture, bringing back to his memory all the happy moments that he has had.”
© Stephen Strugnell
- Mendelssohn
Programme note
Felix Mendelssohn (1809-1847)
Symphony No 3 in A minor 'Scottish' (1842)Andante con moto - Allegro un poco agitato
Vivace non troppo
Adagio
Allegro vivacissimo - Allegro maestoso assaiGreat composers who visited Britain in the nineteenth century seldom ventured as far north as Scotland. Chopin made it in 1848, though the journey nearly killed him; and so, before that, did Mendelssohn, whose Scottish tour in 1839 was the most productive of its kind ever undertaken by a great composer from abroad. Holyrood Palace inspired the opening of his Symphony No 3 and he himself described the moment of conception. It was, he said, on an evening visit to where Mary Queen of Scots had “lived and loved”. The chapel, he noted, had lost its roof and was overgrown with grass and ivy. The altar at which Mary was crowned Queen of Scotland was broken. “Everything in ruins, decayed, and open to the skies. I believe I found there today the beginning of my ‘Scottish’ Symphony" - though he himself preferred to call it his Scotch, unfashionably by today's standards, whereby that word is reserved exclusively for whisky.
The actual writing of the work, however, did not begin until two years later in Rome, by which time he was also in the process of composing his ‘Italian’ Symphony. Since both works are in the same key — the Scottish in A minor moving into A major, the Italian in A major moving into A minor — it seems likely that Mendelssohn sometimes found it hard to differentiate between them. Certainly there are moments when the marching finale of the Scottish Symphony seems about to transform itself into the final saltarello of the Italian. Schumann, too, seems to have got the music confused in his mind. In his review of the Scottish Symphony in the Neue Zeitschrift für Musik he paid special tribute to the “old tunes of lovely Italy” contained therein. Folk tunes, in fact, are just what both symphonies tend to lack. True, in the scherzo of the Scottish, the clarinet and strings create a wonderfully poetic evocation and extension of the kind of music Mendelssohn might have heard during his tour. But, though "Charlie is my darling’" is often cited as its source, the composer more probably arrived at the peculiarly Scottish melody of this movement entirely by himself.
So what is actually Scottish about the Scottish Symphony? The slow introduction to the first movement may seem to Scottish listeners—if not to Schumann—to have a characteristic dourness, and it seems apt that Mendelssohn subsequently used an amended version of this theme, under the title 'Bad Weather', as part of his Erste Walpurgisnacht. This theme casts its shadow over much of the symphony, inspiring the two main subjects of the first movement’s Allegro, being hinted at in the "Charlie is my darling" theme of the scherzo (which uses the same rising fourths) and being heard in a glowing A major version ("Good Weather"?) at the end of the finale. There was a time when this coda was thought to have been arbitrarily tacked on, in order to bring the symphony to a triumphant close in a way that would please Queen Victoria. In fact, this coda - likened by Mendelssohn to the sound of a male-voice chorus – is one of the symphony’s many unifying features which prompted Schumann (rightly this time) to speak of the “homogeneity of all four movements”. The placid main theme of the Adagio may seem to belong to a different world, but the second subject of this movement harks back, at least in mood, to the unifying theme of the start of the work.
© Conrad Wilson
- conductor
- piano
Chopin and Mendelssohn both visited Scotland in the 1830s and ’40s, and this programme unites them in performances by the sparkling team of Leschenko and Swensen. Leschenko’s Chopin is especially fine, and the slow movement of this concerto holds some of the most bewitching music the great composer ever wrote. Swensen rounds off the evening with the Mendelssohn symphony he has made his own with the SCO.
Related audio clip
Mendelssohn Symphony No 3 in A minor 'Scottish' - Allegro vivacissimo - Allegro maestoso assai - excerpt
Conductor Emeritus Joseph Swensen conducts Symphony No 3 in A minor 'Scottish'
Leschenko Plays Chopin
- Schumann, Clara
Programme note
Clara Schumann (1819-1896)
Romance in A minor, Op 21, No 1 (1891)
[Transcribed by Joseph Swensen for woodwind and double basses]Making her public solo debut at the age of eleven, Clara Wieck went on to became one of the most prominent pianists of her day, in solo, chamber and concerto repertoire. Her father, Friedrich Wieck, was a renowned piano teacher, and carefully groomed his daughter for the life of a concert soloist. She made several tours of Europe as a child, and was admired by musicians as prominent as Mendelssohn and Liszt.
Robert Schumann came to study with Wieck in 1828, and Wieck viewed the growing affection between him and Clara with increasing alarm. His doubts about Robert’s character and career prospects, combined with his belief that domestic responsibilities would ruin Clara’s own career, led him to put every obstacle in their way that he could think of. They were finally able to marry in 1840, after a prolonged legal battle to proceed without Wieck’s consent.
Her concert appearances became more sporadic after their marriage, but following Robert’s death she abandoned composition, and devoted more time to performing, including several visits to London, and teaching, both privately and at the Leipzig and Frankfurt Conservatories; she became head of the piano department at Frankfurt in 1878. As well a championing her husband’s music, she was one of the first leading pianists to bring Chopin’s work to a wider audience. She also played Brahms’s music extensively when he was still establishing his reputation, and the two remained close friends until her death.
Clara’s compositions are mostly for solo piano, but also include a piano concerto, a piano trio, some smaller pieces of chamber music, and several songs. The Three Romances, Op 21, were composed between 1853 and 1855, and were to be among her last works. An additional piece, written in 1853, was originally intended as the first of the three. In A minor, like the one that replaced it, was not published until 1891.
No 1, marked Andante, is one of Clara pieces that Brahms performed in public. It is said to have been composed the day Brahms visited Robert in the asylum to which he had been transferred following his mental breakdown (Clara herself had been forbidden to visit by Robert’s doctors). It begins in a sad, resigned mood, with the kind of harmonic intensity found in some of Brahms’s late piano pieces. The middle section, in which Clara’s biographer, Joan Chissell, detected Robert’s influence, is consolatory at first, but becomes more agitated. The sad opening music returns, this time rising to a defiant climax, before dying away.
© Mike Wheeler
- Chopin
Programme note
Frédèric Chopin (1810-1849)
Piano Concerto No 2 in F minor, Op 21Maestoso
Larghetto
Allegro vivace“Mozart encompasses the entire domain of musical creation, but I’ve only got the keyboard in my poor head.” The young Chopin lamented to a friend. “I know my limitations, and I know I’d make a fool of myself if I tried to climb too high without having the ability to do it. They plague me to death urging me to write symphonies and operas, and they want me to be everything in one – a Polish Rossini and a Mozart and a Beethoven. But I just laugh under my breath and think to myself that one must start from small things. I’m only a pianist.” Despite these protestations, Chopin knew that performing his own concerto was the accepted route to stardom for young virtuosos, and that his growing public fully expected him to follow the path established by Mozart and Beethoven.
The summer of 1829 found the 19-year-old Chopin at Prince Radziwill’s estate at Antonin, recovering from an ill-fated attachment to the young singer Constantia Gladkowska. Whilst there, he sketched out the F minor concerto and returned to Warsaw for the winter season, where his new concerto was given at the National Theatre the following March. “The first Allegro of my concerto, unintelligible to most, received the award of a single ‘Bravo’”, Chopin wrote after the premiere, “but I believe that this was given because people wanted to show that they understood and appreciated serious music. The slow movement and the Rondo produced a very great effect, after these, the applause and ‘Bravos’ really came from the heart.” The concerto had the desired effect and gained him the public exposure and audience adoration that no number of private salon performances could. It was such a triumph, and so many people had to be turned away, that a second concert was given five days later. As a contemporary account records; “How beautifully he plays. What fluency! What evenness! – impossible that there should exist a more perfect concord between two hands. He plays with such certainty, so cleanly that his Concerto might be compared to the life of a just man: no ambiguity, nothing false. His music is full of expressive feeling and song, and puts the listener into a state of subtle rapture, bringing back to his memory all the happy moments that he has had.”
© Stephen Strugnell
- Mendelssohn
Programme note
Felix Mendelssohn (1809-1847)
Symphony No 3 in A minor 'Scottish' (1842)Andante con moto - Allegro un poco agitato
Vivace non troppo
Adagio
Allegro vivacissimo - Allegro maestoso assaiGreat composers who visited Britain in the nineteenth century seldom ventured as far north as Scotland. Chopin made it in 1848, though the journey nearly killed him; and so, before that, did Mendelssohn, whose Scottish tour in 1839 was the most productive of its kind ever undertaken by a great composer from abroad. Holyrood Palace inspired the opening of his Symphony No 3 and he himself described the moment of conception. It was, he said, on an evening visit to where Mary Queen of Scots had “lived and loved”. The chapel, he noted, had lost its roof and was overgrown with grass and ivy. The altar at which Mary was crowned Queen of Scotland was broken. “Everything in ruins, decayed, and open to the skies. I believe I found there today the beginning of my ‘Scottish’ Symphony" - though he himself preferred to call it his Scotch, unfashionably by today's standards, whereby that word is reserved exclusively for whisky.
The actual writing of the work, however, did not begin until two years later in Rome, by which time he was also in the process of composing his ‘Italian’ Symphony. Since both works are in the same key — the Scottish in A minor moving into A major, the Italian in A major moving into A minor — it seems likely that Mendelssohn sometimes found it hard to differentiate between them. Certainly there are moments when the marching finale of the Scottish Symphony seems about to transform itself into the final saltarello of the Italian. Schumann, too, seems to have got the music confused in his mind. In his review of the Scottish Symphony in the Neue Zeitschrift für Musik he paid special tribute to the “old tunes of lovely Italy” contained therein. Folk tunes, in fact, are just what both symphonies tend to lack. True, in the scherzo of the Scottish, the clarinet and strings create a wonderfully poetic evocation and extension of the kind of music Mendelssohn might have heard during his tour. But, though "Charlie is my darling’" is often cited as its source, the composer more probably arrived at the peculiarly Scottish melody of this movement entirely by himself.
So what is actually Scottish about the Scottish Symphony? The slow introduction to the first movement may seem to Scottish listeners—if not to Schumann—to have a characteristic dourness, and it seems apt that Mendelssohn subsequently used an amended version of this theme, under the title 'Bad Weather', as part of his Erste Walpurgisnacht. This theme casts its shadow over much of the symphony, inspiring the two main subjects of the first movement’s Allegro, being hinted at in the "Charlie is my darling" theme of the scherzo (which uses the same rising fourths) and being heard in a glowing A major version ("Good Weather"?) at the end of the finale. There was a time when this coda was thought to have been arbitrarily tacked on, in order to bring the symphony to a triumphant close in a way that would please Queen Victoria. In fact, this coda - likened by Mendelssohn to the sound of a male-voice chorus – is one of the symphony’s many unifying features which prompted Schumann (rightly this time) to speak of the “homogeneity of all four movements”. The placid main theme of the Adagio may seem to belong to a different world, but the second subject of this movement harks back, at least in mood, to the unifying theme of the start of the work.
© Conrad Wilson
- conductor
- piano
Chopin and Mendelssohn both visited Scotland in the 1830s and ’40s, and this programme unites them in performances by the sparkling team of Leschenko and Swensen. Leschenko’s Chopin is especially fine, and the slow movement of this concerto holds some of the most bewitching music the great composer ever wrote. Swensen rounds off the evening with the Mendelssohn symphony he has made his own with the SCO.
Related audio clip
Mendelssohn Symphony No 3 in A minor 'Scottish' - Allegro vivacissimo - Allegro maestoso assai - excerpt
Conductor Emeritus Joseph Swensen conducts Symphony No 3 in A minor 'Scottish'
Travels in Eastern Europe
- Ligeti
Programme note
György Ligeti (1923-2006)
Ramifications (1969)György (George) Ligeti was one of the giants of the mid-20th century avant-garde. Like his compatriot Bartók, he was born in Transylvania, now part of Romania, in 1923 in the town of Dicsőszentmárton (now Târnava-Sânmărtin, or Tîrnăveni, near Sighişoara).
He came from a Hungarian Jewish family (his surname Ligeti means ‘wood’). When György was aged six, his parents moved to Kolozsvár (Cluj), where he began studying music. Tragedy ensued: during the Second World War the family was broken up and deported to Mauthausen and Auschwitz. Both his father and his brother perished.
He himself was sent to a labour camp. After the war he moved to Hungary’s capital, Budapest, to study with the great composer/teachers Ferenc Farkas and Sándor Veress (and also with Kodály). He taught for several years (1950-56) at the Franz Liszt Academy, Budapest’s music conservatoire, until the Hungarian Revolution led to his flight in 1956 to first Austria and later Germany (Cologne, Berlin, Hamburg).
During this time Ligeti was composing, both in a more traditional Hungarian folk style (like Kodály), which yielded works such as the Concert Romanesc (also in the SCO’s programme this season) and experimentally, inspired by developments in modern music encouraged by the International Society for Contemporary Music (ISCM) and at Darmstadt, where he himself taught from 1959 to 1972.
In Vienna his interest was aroused by Serialism, and in Cologne he worked in Stockhausen’s electronic studio. Yet Ligeti never fully espoused either, or indeed any kind of dogma, but rather pursued his own path. The result was a series of major works: Apparitions and Atmosphères (for orchestra); Aventures/Nouvelles Aventures (with solo voices); and his massive choral Requiem.
Tonight’s work belongs, like Lontano, the Chamber Concerto and Second String Quartet, to the late 1960s. Ligeti thereafter somewhat purified and simplified his style, emphasising anew the traditional elements of harmony, rhythm and melody. By contrast, Ramifications, like his earlier experimental works, focuses on his fascination with dense textures and a kind of hyperactivity within them. He himself used the word ‘micropolyphony’, and in ways Ligeti’s music does indeed echo the more elaborate polyphony of medieval composers like Isaac or Josquin des Pres, or even Tallis’s 40-part motet.
Large blocks of sound are built up, often seeming to shift rapidly but in fact changing very slowly, or at other times appearing stately while in fact altering harmonically at great speed. (As with his Russian contemporary Schnittke, ‘polytonality’ might also seem appropriate, for any key allegiances in middle period Ligeti are often tangential, multifarious and varied.
It’s best not to try to ‘follow’, let alone ‘understand’, every note of Ramifications; better, rather, to let the overall effect work on you. Think of its clusterings (like a busy beehive!) as a kind of polyphony: slightly eerie, with shades of electric pylons (Ligeti’s Atmosphères was ‘borrowed’ for Stanley Kubrick’s film 2001: A Space Odyssey). The violin rockings, achings and tautness gradually subside and lower strings take over (notice the haunting wind-like sounds ands flurries in the middle strings, not just the pounding double basses). Yet despite all this activity and shifting perspectives, we are still, effectively, in the same place: where we began.
The Hitchcock-like bees return. And (as ‘what goes up must come down’!) we begin descending. Despite all the scurrying, angrier bits, it’s not a bad idea to think of Ramifications as almost prayerful: like a work by (say) Arvo Pärt. That’s certainly what the closing section suggests, with its ethereal harmonics and deep, low double bass, as the violins gradually patter out like rain.
© Roderic Dunnett
- Mozart
Programme note
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756-1791)
Bassoon Concerto in B flat major, K191 (1774)Allegro
Andante ma adagio
Rondo: Tempo di menuettoThe only surviving bassoon concerto out of at least four composed by Mozart, this droll and delightful work from his early Salzburg years has come to hold a unique place in his output. Nobody knows for whom he composed it, but it catches the moods of the instrument - chortling, morose, whimsical, spry, with an almost schizoid division between its top and bottom registers - to eighteenth-century perfection. It was by no means the first such work ever written. Vivaldi’s output of bassoon concertos (almost forty are listed in the New Grove) was cornucopian, if such a word can be applied to an instrument shaped like a faggot, and Bach, too, recognised its potential for idiosyncratic obbligato roles in his cantatas and other works.
Mozart’s, however, remains the definitive bassoon concerto, unsurpassed by any of its successors - though the Weber and Hummel concertos and Richard Strauss’s exquisite Duett-Concertino for clarinet and bassoon run it close - and characterised by a positively operatic feeling for the instrument’s voice or mixture of voices. This, indeed, is one of the special qualities of Mozart’s concerto, audible not only in its songlike melodies but in its wide solo leaps, typical of the art of opera seria, at which young Mozart (as the teenage composer of the brilliant Mitridate and Lucio Silla) was already adept.
The first movement is particularly rich in these features, and in rapid scale passages that require a sense of humour as well as a virtuoso technique. But such niceties are not achieved at the expense of classical style, and this movement’s spacious, confident opening theme, with its high, whooping horns and the succession of charming subsidiary themes, are choice examples of their kind.
The slow movement, an eloquently wordless foretaste of the Countess’s first aria in The Marriage of Figaro, filled with nocturnal melancholy and designed to be played at a pace slower than andante, sustains the operatic illusion, not least in the soft-grained accompaniment provided by oboes and muted violins. The brief finale, in contrast, is a rondo in the guise of a courtly minuet, its recurring main theme capable of transforming itself in a flash from jollity to something bordering briefly on soft Mozartian sorrow.
© Conrad Wilson
- Bartók
Programme note
Bela Bartók (1881-1945)
Rumanian Folk Dances (1917)Jocul cu bâta (Stick Dance)
Brâul (Sash Dance)
Pe loc (In One Spot)
Buciumeana (Horn Dance)
Poarga Româneasca ( Rumanian Polka)
Mâruntel (Fast Dance)
Mâruntel (Fast Dance)In the early 1900s, Bartók came to realise that what had until then generally passed as Hungarian folk music was actually the rather romanticised collection of gypsy melodies that Brahms, Liszt and others had altered and arranged. The real folk music of Hungary, he discovered, had a harder texture, was cruder in technique, more severe in line and more austere in spirit. These melodies, generally written in modal scales, had an exotic character and irregular rhythms. Together with Zoltán Kodáy, he set about systematically collecting and analysing the folk music of Hungary in expeditions that took them from the Carpathian mountains to the Adriatic, and from western Slovakia to the Black Sea. This collaboration resulted in the unearthing of several thousand folk songs and dances eventually published in twelve monumental volumes. Initially, they jotted down melodies by hand, but later began to use Edison cylinders to record songs and dances. Bartók was particularly drawn to Rumanian folk traditions because he felt that these had been more isolated from outside influences and were therefore more authentic. He also attracted the variety and colours of instruments used in Rumanian music: violins, peasant flutes (panpipes), guitars, and bagpipes.
Bartók later acknowledged how deeply he was influenced by the folk material he had collected: “The outcome of these studies was of decisive influence upon my work because it freed me from the tyrannical rule of the major and minor keys. The greater part of the collected treasure, and the more valuable part, was in old ecclesiastical or old Greek modes, or based on more primitive (pentatonic) scales, and the melodies were full of the freest and most varied rhythmic phrases and changes of tempi. It became clear to me that the old modes, which had been forgotten in our music, had lost nothing of their vigour. Their new employment made new rhythmic combinations possible.”
Although the outbreak of war restricted his travels, it was during this time that Bartók began to make various settings of some of the folk songs and dances he had collected. He originally wrote the Rumanian Folk Dances for piano, but in 1917 he arranged them for a small orchestra. Their popularity is evident in the numerous other arrangements that have been made, notably for string orchestra (by Arthur Willner), salon orchestra, and violin and piano.
Bartók was convinced that the folk art that he had helped to discover could, as he said, “serve as the foundations for a renaissance of Hungarian art music.” These seven dances, which vary greatly in character and tempo, are played without a break, the last three forming a coda of increasing energy and excitement.
© Stephen Strugnell
- Mozart
Programme note
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756-1791)
Symphony No 38 in D major, K504 'Prague (1786)Adagio - Allegro
Andante
Finale - PrestoThough Mozart’s European travels never brought him to Scotland, he did reach London in his childhood and during his adult years he went more than once to Prague – one of his journeys being fascinatingly chronicled by Eduard Morike in a short novel on the subject. In Prague, Mozart was more appreciated than in his native Salzburg or adopted Vienna. The Marriage of Figaro, which failed to please the Viennese in 1786, was a smash hit when it reached the Bohemian capital later that year. When Mozart arrived in Prague in January 1787 he reported that “here they talk about nothing but Figaro; nothing is played or sung or whistled but Figaro, nothing, nothing but Figaro”. It was the Prague Opera which commissioned him to write Don Giovanni, and it was for the coronation of Leopold II as King of Bohemia that he later composed La Clemenza di Tito. As for the Symphony No 38 in D, though it was written in Vienna, it had what was almost certainly its premiere at a concert during Mozart’s visit to Prague in January 1787, when his mind must already have been reaching towards Don Giovanni – the two works share the same key, and the slow dramatic introduction to the symphony contains more than a whiff of the opera to come.
Mozart’s last three symphonies (Nos 39-41) are widely held to represent the high watermark of his achievement in the form, but their immediate predecessor is equally great. It is a work of profound animation, radiance and tension, its three movements being so self-sufficient that Mozart felt able to dispense with the inclusion of a minuet. The big introduction to the first movement is balanced by an intricately wrought Allegro – “saturated with polyphony”, as Einstein eloquently put it – grand and gracious in design, with a theme that was later to appear in a different guise as the fugato of The Magic Flute overture. In the Andante the writing remains contrapuntal, and the stabbing discords and chromaticisms give the music an intensity not found in Mozart’s previous symphonic slow movements. After this the final Presto may seem disconcertingly brief, but its taut rhythms and concentrated layout make it a match for the other movements, especially if the exposition repeat is included, as Mozart wanted.
© Conrad Wilson
- conductor
- bassoon
Mozart knew Bohemia and Hungary as parts of an empire that stretched in all directions from his home in Vienna. He wrote some of his most famous music for Prague. The Hungarians, Bartók and Ligeti, were both exiled from their homeland and knew it ultimately as a land caught up in a conflict between East and West. In this programme, Ticciati leaps centuries and provokes fascinating questions of musical geography, taking in four fine masterpieces en route.
Related audio clip
Mozart Symphony No 38 in D 'Prague', K504 - Finale - Presto - excerpt
The SCO's recording of Mozart Symphonies 38-41, released earlier this year, has received a clutch of awards, including a Classical BRIT, and Disc of the Year and the Orchestral Award at the BBC Music Magazine Awards 2009. SCO Conductor Laureate, Sir Charles Mackerras, conducts. The Orchestra and Mackerras returned to the recording studio in July to record a second volume, featuring Symphonies 29, 31, 32, 35 and 36 - due for release in Spring 2010.
Travels in Eastern Europe
- Ligeti
Programme note
György Ligeti (1923-2006)
Ramifications (1969)György (George) Ligeti was one of the giants of the mid-20th century avant-garde. Like his compatriot Bartók, he was born in Transylvania, now part of Romania, in 1923 in the town of Dicsőszentmárton (now Târnava-Sânmărtin, or Tîrnăveni, near Sighişoara).
He came from a Hungarian Jewish family (his surname Ligeti means ‘wood’). When György was aged six, his parents moved to Kolozsvár (Cluj), where he began studying music. Tragedy ensued: during the Second World War the family was broken up and deported to Mauthausen and Auschwitz. Both his father and his brother perished.
He himself was sent to a labour camp. After the war he moved to Hungary’s capital, Budapest, to study with the great composer/teachers Ferenc Farkas and Sándor Veress (and also with Kodály). He taught for several years (1950-56) at the Franz Liszt Academy, Budapest’s music conservatoire, until the Hungarian Revolution led to his flight in 1956 to first Austria and later Germany (Cologne, Berlin, Hamburg).
During this time Ligeti was composing, both in a more traditional Hungarian folk style (like Kodály), which yielded works such as the Concert Romanesc (also in the SCO’s programme this season) and experimentally, inspired by developments in modern music encouraged by the International Society for Contemporary Music (ISCM) and at Darmstadt, where he himself taught from 1959 to 1972.
In Vienna his interest was aroused by Serialism, and in Cologne he worked in Stockhausen’s electronic studio. Yet Ligeti never fully espoused either, or indeed any kind of dogma, but rather pursued his own path. The result was a series of major works: Apparitions and Atmosphères (for orchestra); Aventures/Nouvelles Aventures (with solo voices); and his massive choral Requiem.
Tonight’s work belongs, like Lontano, the Chamber Concerto and Second String Quartet, to the late 1960s. Ligeti thereafter somewhat purified and simplified his style, emphasising anew the traditional elements of harmony, rhythm and melody. By contrast, Ramifications, like his earlier experimental works, focuses on his fascination with dense textures and a kind of hyperactivity within them. He himself used the word ‘micropolyphony’, and in ways Ligeti’s music does indeed echo the more elaborate polyphony of medieval composers like Isaac or Josquin des Pres, or even Tallis’s 40-part motet.
Large blocks of sound are built up, often seeming to shift rapidly but in fact changing very slowly, or at other times appearing stately while in fact altering harmonically at great speed. (As with his Russian contemporary Schnittke, ‘polytonality’ might also seem appropriate, for any key allegiances in middle period Ligeti are often tangential, multifarious and varied.
It’s best not to try to ‘follow’, let alone ‘understand’, every note of Ramifications; better, rather, to let the overall effect work on you. Think of its clusterings (like a busy beehive!) as a kind of polyphony: slightly eerie, with shades of electric pylons (Ligeti’s Atmosphères was ‘borrowed’ for Stanley Kubrick’s film 2001: A Space Odyssey). The violin rockings, achings and tautness gradually subside and lower strings take over (notice the haunting wind-like sounds ands flurries in the middle strings, not just the pounding double basses). Yet despite all this activity and shifting perspectives, we are still, effectively, in the same place: where we began.
The Hitchcock-like bees return. And (as ‘what goes up must come down’!) we begin descending. Despite all the scurrying, angrier bits, it’s not a bad idea to think of Ramifications as almost prayerful: like a work by (say) Arvo Pärt. That’s certainly what the closing section suggests, with its ethereal harmonics and deep, low double bass, as the violins gradually patter out like rain.
© Roderic Dunnett
- Mozart
Programme note
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756-1791)
Bassoon Concerto in B flat major, K191 (1774)Allegro
Andante ma adagio
Rondo: Tempo di menuettoThe only surviving bassoon concerto out of at least four composed by Mozart, this droll and delightful work from his early Salzburg years has come to hold a unique place in his output. Nobody knows for whom he composed it, but it catches the moods of the instrument - chortling, morose, whimsical, spry, with an almost schizoid division between its top and bottom registers - to eighteenth-century perfection. It was by no means the first such work ever written. Vivaldi’s output of bassoon concertos (almost forty are listed in the New Grove) was cornucopian, if such a word can be applied to an instrument shaped like a faggot, and Bach, too, recognised its potential for idiosyncratic obbligato roles in his cantatas and other works.
Mozart’s, however, remains the definitive bassoon concerto, unsurpassed by any of its successors - though the Weber and Hummel concertos and Richard Strauss’s exquisite Duett-Concertino for clarinet and bassoon run it close - and characterised by a positively operatic feeling for the instrument’s voice or mixture of voices. This, indeed, is one of the special qualities of Mozart’s concerto, audible not only in its songlike melodies but in its wide solo leaps, typical of the art of opera seria, at which young Mozart (as the teenage composer of the brilliant Mitridate and Lucio Silla) was already adept.
The first movement is particularly rich in these features, and in rapid scale passages that require a sense of humour as well as a virtuoso technique. But such niceties are not achieved at the expense of classical style, and this movement’s spacious, confident opening theme, with its high, whooping horns and the succession of charming subsidiary themes, are choice examples of their kind.
The slow movement, an eloquently wordless foretaste of the Countess’s first aria in The Marriage of Figaro, filled with nocturnal melancholy and designed to be played at a pace slower than andante, sustains the operatic illusion, not least in the soft-grained accompaniment provided by oboes and muted violins. The brief finale, in contrast, is a rondo in the guise of a courtly minuet, its recurring main theme capable of transforming itself in a flash from jollity to something bordering briefly on soft Mozartian sorrow.
© Conrad Wilson
- Bartók
Programme note
Bela Bartók (1881-1945)
Rumanian Folk Dances (1917)Jocul cu bâta (Stick Dance)
Brâul (Sash Dance)
Pe loc (In One Spot)
Buciumeana (Horn Dance)
Poarga Româneasca ( Rumanian Polka)
Mâruntel (Fast Dance)
Mâruntel (Fast Dance)In the early 1900s, Bartók came to realise that what had until then generally passed as Hungarian folk music was actually the rather romanticised collection of gypsy melodies that Brahms, Liszt and others had altered and arranged. The real folk music of Hungary, he discovered, had a harder texture, was cruder in technique, more severe in line and more austere in spirit. These melodies, generally written in modal scales, had an exotic character and irregular rhythms. Together with Zoltán Kodáy, he set about systematically collecting and analysing the folk music of Hungary in expeditions that took them from the Carpathian mountains to the Adriatic, and from western Slovakia to the Black Sea. This collaboration resulted in the unearthing of several thousand folk songs and dances eventually published in twelve monumental volumes. Initially, they jotted down melodies by hand, but later began to use Edison cylinders to record songs and dances. Bartók was particularly drawn to Rumanian folk traditions because he felt that these had been more isolated from outside influences and were therefore more authentic. He also attracted the variety and colours of instruments used in Rumanian music: violins, peasant flutes (panpipes), guitars, and bagpipes.
Bartók later acknowledged how deeply he was influenced by the folk material he had collected: “The outcome of these studies was of decisive influence upon my work because it freed me from the tyrannical rule of the major and minor keys. The greater part of the collected treasure, and the more valuable part, was in old ecclesiastical or old Greek modes, or based on more primitive (pentatonic) scales, and the melodies were full of the freest and most varied rhythmic phrases and changes of tempi. It became clear to me that the old modes, which had been forgotten in our music, had lost nothing of their vigour. Their new employment made new rhythmic combinations possible.”
Although the outbreak of war restricted his travels, it was during this time that Bartók began to make various settings of some of the folk songs and dances he had collected. He originally wrote the Rumanian Folk Dances for piano, but in 1917 he arranged them for a small orchestra. Their popularity is evident in the numerous other arrangements that have been made, notably for string orchestra (by Arthur Willner), salon orchestra, and violin and piano.
Bartók was convinced that the folk art that he had helped to discover could, as he said, “serve as the foundations for a renaissance of Hungarian art music.” These seven dances, which vary greatly in character and tempo, are played without a break, the last three forming a coda of increasing energy and excitement.
© Stephen Strugnell
- Mozart
Programme note
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756-1791)
Symphony No 38 in D major, K504 'Prague (1786)Adagio - Allegro
Andante
Finale - PrestoThough Mozart’s European travels never brought him to Scotland, he did reach London in his childhood and during his adult years he went more than once to Prague – one of his journeys being fascinatingly chronicled by Eduard Morike in a short novel on the subject. In Prague, Mozart was more appreciated than in his native Salzburg or adopted Vienna. The Marriage of Figaro, which failed to please the Viennese in 1786, was a smash hit when it reached the Bohemian capital later that year. When Mozart arrived in Prague in January 1787 he reported that “here they talk about nothing but Figaro; nothing is played or sung or whistled but Figaro, nothing, nothing but Figaro”. It was the Prague Opera which commissioned him to write Don Giovanni, and it was for the coronation of Leopold II as King of Bohemia that he later composed La Clemenza di Tito. As for the Symphony No 38 in D, though it was written in Vienna, it had what was almost certainly its premiere at a concert during Mozart’s visit to Prague in January 1787, when his mind must already have been reaching towards Don Giovanni – the two works share the same key, and the slow dramatic introduction to the symphony contains more than a whiff of the opera to come.
Mozart’s last three symphonies (Nos 39-41) are widely held to represent the high watermark of his achievement in the form, but their immediate predecessor is equally great. It is a work of profound animation, radiance and tension, its three movements being so self-sufficient that Mozart felt able to dispense with the inclusion of a minuet. The big introduction to the first movement is balanced by an intricately wrought Allegro – “saturated with polyphony”, as Einstein eloquently put it – grand and gracious in design, with a theme that was later to appear in a different guise as the fugato of The Magic Flute overture. In the Andante the writing remains contrapuntal, and the stabbing discords and chromaticisms give the music an intensity not found in Mozart’s previous symphonic slow movements. After this the final Presto may seem disconcertingly brief, but its taut rhythms and concentrated layout make it a match for the other movements, especially if the exposition repeat is included, as Mozart wanted.
© Conrad Wilson
- conductor
- bassoon
Mozart knew Bohemia and Hungary as parts of an empire that stretched in all directions from his home in Vienna. He wrote some of his most famous music for Prague. The Hungarians, Bartók and Ligeti, were both exiled from their homeland and knew it ultimately as a land caught up in a conflict between East and West. In this programme, Ticciati leaps centuries and provokes fascinating questions of musical geography, taking in four fine masterpieces en route.
Related audio clip
Mozart Symphony No 38 in D 'Prague', K504 - Finale - Presto - excerpt
The SCO's recording of Mozart Symphonies 38-41, released earlier this year, has received a clutch of awards, including a Classical BRIT, and Disc of the Year and the Orchestral Award at the BBC Music Magazine Awards 2009. SCO Conductor Laureate, Sir Charles Mackerras, conducts. The Orchestra and Mackerras returned to the recording studio in July to record a second volume, featuring Symphonies 29, 31, 32, 35 and 36 - due for release in Spring 2010.
Chamber Concert with SCO ensemble
- Schumann
Programme note
Robert Schumann (1810-1856)
Adagio and Allegro, Op 70 (1849)As music critic of the Allgemeine Musikalische Zeitung, Schumann deplored the prevailing German taste for what he regarded as superficial salon pieces. His own domestic music, of which - particularly in 1849 - he composed an abundance, was an object lesson in poetic feeling, expressed with a finesse that showed him to be far more responsive to instrumental colouring than history has given him credit for.
Though the piano was his primary instrumental voice, it shared the limelight in the first movement of his piano concerto with one of the most exquisite clarinet solos ever penned; and his enthusiasm for the still fairly new-fangled valve horn resulted in his fine Adagio and Allegro, Op 70, a pioneering and challenging work which loses none of its magic when played, as it sometimes is, by a viola, or cello, or oboe, or violin.
Indeed the music adapts itself chameleon-like to whatever instrument is playing it, its lyricism - with the piano as binding factor - emerging unimpaired. On the horn, it’s true, it sounds like concert music, on the clarinet or cello like something more private. But the contrast between dreamy adagio and vigorous allegro, and how the different instruments deal with it, is what matters. Such contrasts are fundamental to Schumann, displaying a cleavage in his personality that was as psychological as it was musical. Composed in the year of Chopin’s death, the music evokes a world of lights and half-lights which Schumann’s Franco-Polish contemporary would undoubtedly have understood.
© Conrad Wilson
- Clara Schumann
Programme note
Ich stand' in dunklen Träumen, Op 13 No 1
(I stood in darkened daydreams)Sie liebten sich beide, Op 13 No 2
(They once loved each other)Liebeszauber, Op 13 No 3
(Love’s magic)“Not without subtle nuances” is the New Grove’s assessment − delivered not without condescension − of Clara Schumann’s Six Songs, Op 13. Written soon after her husband’s famous Year of Song (1840) Clara’s own year of song yielded rather less in terms of quantity, but then, as she put it, “a woman must not desire to compose − not one has been able to do it, and why should I expect to?”
Why indeed? These were Clara’s years of childbirth, yielding Marie, Elise, Julie, and Emil in quick succession between 1841 and 1846, with four more children to follow. Moreover, she had been an inspired concert pianist − eventually the greatest in Europe − from the age of nine, with a husband who, in order to compose, had the will-power to shut himself off from family life. Yet she, too, had force of personality, nurturing her career as a pianist with tours of Denmark in 1842 and Russia in 1844 and holding (as did her husband) major academic appointments.
If women composers flourish today, it is because they have gained the scope to do so. Yet Clara herself, despite her flair for self-criticism, was no mean composer. It was something her dour, heavy, professorial father actively encouraged in her. Her A minor Piano Concerto, a work of considerable character begun at the age of thirteen, was completed three years later − almost, it seemed, in anticipation of her husband’s much more famous concerto in the same key. Her song sets, Op 12 as well as Op 13, display impeccable taste in poetry, as well as imaginative responsiveness to words.
Of the three songs from Op 13 to be performed today, the first two are based on the ironic wit and pathos of Heinrich Heine, the third on the lyricism of Emanuel Geibel. By 1853, in more spacious domestic surroundings, she had gained new freedom to compose songs and instrumental pieces. But her husband’s suicide attempt in 1854 and commitment to an asylum for the last two years of his life stopped her in her compositional tracks. What she might have achieved as a composer continues to tantalise. What she did achieve as a pianist speaks for itself.
© Conrad Wilson
- Brahms
Programme note
Die Mainacht, Op 43 No 2
(The May Night)Von ewiger Liebe, Op 43 No 1
(Of love eternal)Solo songs, from Schubert onwards, have been called the emblems of nineteenth-century music. Brahms, with folk poetry as a special focus, composed about two hundred, mostly gathered into short groups and identified simply by opus numbers and first lines. Descriptive names, such as Magelone Romances for the substantial
set of fifteen songs, Op 33, were rare − or rarer, at any rate, than in the output of Schubert or Schumann. For the most part Brahms was content to provide a generalised identity tag, with Lieder und Gesange (which he chose for five of his song sets) as his favourite. Since this, in essence, means merely “Songs and Songs,” it does not seem greatly informative, though by implication there is a shade of difference between Lieder (meaning, by common acceptance, “German art songs”) and Gesange (possibly implying something a little grander).
This afternoon’s two songs, from a group of four Gesange composed in 1868, are prime examples of their kind, powerful meditations on love, the first with its vision of moonlight, cooing doves, dark shadows and lonely tears, evoked via the footsteps of a wandering, yearning lover. The words to the first are by Ludwig Heinrich Christoph Hölty, poet also of Brahms’ An die Nachtigall (To the nightingale) of the same period. Josef Wenzig's Von ewiger Liebe, with a Slavonic folk song as its source, grows magnificently and stirringly out of a lovers’ dispute, wherein the girl declares that her love, being stronger than iron and steel, will last for ever.
© Conrad Wilson
- Schumann
- Mozart
- mezzo-soprano
- viola
- clarinet/basset clarinet
- piano
Mezzo soprano Julia Riley joins an ensemble of SCO Principals in this intimate Sunday afternoon chamber performance, featuring music by Clara and Robert Schumann, Brahms and Mozart. Riley will join viola player Jane Atkins, clarinet player Maximiliano Martín and pianist Simon Lepper.
Julia Riley replaces Karen Cargill who has withdrawn from this performance due to ill health.
Travels in Eastern Europe - Italian concert
.jpg)
- Ligeti
Programme note
György Ligeti (1923-2006)
Ramifications (1969)György (George) Ligeti was one of the giants of the mid-20th century avant-garde. Like his compatriot Bartók, he was born in Transylvania, now part of Romania, in 1923 in the town of Dicsőszentmárton (now Târnava-Sânmărtin, or Tîrnăveni, near Sighişoara).
He came from a Hungarian Jewish family (his surname Ligeti means ‘wood’). When György was aged six, his parents moved to Kolozsvár (Cluj), where he began studying music. Tragedy ensued: during the Second World War the family was broken up and deported to Mauthausen and Auschwitz. Both his father and his brother perished.
He himself was sent to a labour camp. After the war he moved to Hungary’s capital, Budapest, to study with the great composer/teachers Ferenc Farkas and Sándor Veress (and also with Kodály). He taught for several years (1950-56) at the Franz Liszt Academy, Budapest’s music conservatoire, until the Hungarian Revolution led to his flight in 1956 to first Austria and later Germany (Cologne, Berlin, Hamburg).
During this time Ligeti was composing, both in a more traditional Hungarian folk style (like Kodály), which yielded works such as the Concert Romanesc (also in the SCO’s programme this season) and experimentally, inspired by developments in modern music encouraged by the International Society for Contemporary Music (ISCM) and at Darmstadt, where he himself taught from 1959 to 1972.
In Vienna his interest was aroused by Serialism, and in Cologne he worked in Stockhausen’s electronic studio. Yet Ligeti never fully espoused either, or indeed any kind of dogma, but rather pursued his own path. The result was a series of major works: Apparitions and Atmosphères (for orchestra); Aventures/Nouvelles Aventures (with solo voices); and his massive choral Requiem.
Tonight’s work belongs, like Lontano, the Chamber Concerto and Second String Quartet, to the late 1960s. Ligeti thereafter somewhat purified and simplified his style, emphasising anew the traditional elements of harmony, rhythm and melody. By contrast, Ramifications, like his earlier experimental works, focuses on his fascination with dense textures and a kind of hyperactivity within them. He himself used the word ‘micropolyphony’, and in ways Ligeti’s music does indeed echo the more elaborate polyphony of medieval composers like Isaac or Josquin des Pres, or even Tallis’s 40-part motet.
Large blocks of sound are built up, often seeming to shift rapidly but in fact changing very slowly, or at other times appearing stately while in fact altering harmonically at great speed. (As with his Russian contemporary Schnittke, ‘polytonality’ might also seem appropriate, for any key allegiances in middle period Ligeti are often tangential, multifarious and varied.
It’s best not to try to ‘follow’, let alone ‘understand’, every note of Ramifications; better, rather, to let the overall effect work on you. Think of its clusterings (like a busy beehive!) as a kind of polyphony: slightly eerie, with shades of electric pylons (Ligeti’s Atmosphères was ‘borrowed’ for Stanley Kubrick’s film 2001: A Space Odyssey). The violin rockings, achings and tautness gradually subside and lower strings take over (notice the haunting wind-like sounds ands flurries in the middle strings, not just the pounding double basses). Yet despite all this activity and shifting perspectives, we are still, effectively, in the same place: where we began.
The Hitchcock-like bees return. And (as ‘what goes up must come down’!) we begin descending. Despite all the scurrying, angrier bits, it’s not a bad idea to think of Ramifications as almost prayerful: like a work by (say) Arvo Pärt. That’s certainly what the closing section suggests, with its ethereal harmonics and deep, low double bass, as the violins gradually patter out like rain.
© Roderic Dunnett
- Mozart
Programme note
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756-1791)
Bassoon Concerto in B flat major, K191 (1774)Allegro
Andante ma adagio
Rondo: Tempo di menuettoThe only surviving bassoon concerto out of at least four composed by Mozart, this droll and delightful work from his early Salzburg years has come to hold a unique place in his output. Nobody knows for whom he composed it, but it catches the moods of the instrument - chortling, morose, whimsical, spry, with an almost schizoid division between its top and bottom registers - to eighteenth-century perfection. It was by no means the first such work ever written. Vivaldi’s output of bassoon concertos (almost forty are listed in the New Grove) was cornucopian, if such a word can be applied to an instrument shaped like a faggot, and Bach, too, recognised its potential for idiosyncratic obbligato roles in his cantatas and other works.
Mozart’s, however, remains the definitive bassoon concerto, unsurpassed by any of its successors - though the Weber and Hummel concertos and Richard Strauss’s exquisite Duett-Concertino for clarinet and bassoon run it close - and characterised by a positively operatic feeling for the instrument’s voice or mixture of voices. This, indeed, is one of the special qualities of Mozart’s concerto, audible not only in its songlike melodies but in its wide solo leaps, typical of the art of opera seria, at which young Mozart (as the teenage composer of the brilliant Mitridate and Lucio Silla) was already adept.
The first movement is particularly rich in these features, and in rapid scale passages that require a sense of humour as well as a virtuoso technique. But such niceties are not achieved at the expense of classical style, and this movement’s spacious, confident opening theme, with its high, whooping horns and the succession of charming subsidiary themes, are choice examples of their kind.
The slow movement, an eloquently wordless foretaste of the Countess’s first aria in The Marriage of Figaro, filled with nocturnal melancholy and designed to be played at a pace slower than andante, sustains the operatic illusion, not least in the soft-grained accompaniment provided by oboes and muted violins. The brief finale, in contrast, is a rondo in the guise of a courtly minuet, its recurring main theme capable of transforming itself in a flash from jollity to something bordering briefly on soft Mozartian sorrow.
© Conrad Wilson
- Bartók
Programme note
Bela Bartók (1881-1945)
Rumanian Folk Dances (1917)Jocul cu bâta (Stick Dance)
Brâul (Sash Dance)
Pe loc (In One Spot)
Buciumeana (Horn Dance)
Poarga Româneasca ( Rumanian Polka)
Mâruntel (Fast Dance)
Mâruntel (Fast Dance)In the early 1900s, Bartók came to realise that what had until then generally passed as Hungarian folk music was actually the rather romanticised collection of gypsy melodies that Brahms, Liszt and others had altered and arranged. The real folk music of Hungary, he discovered, had a harder texture, was cruder in technique, more severe in line and more austere in spirit. These melodies, generally written in modal scales, had an exotic character and irregular rhythms. Together with Zoltán Kodáy, he set about systematically collecting and analysing the folk music of Hungary in expeditions that took them from the Carpathian mountains to the Adriatic, and from western Slovakia to the Black Sea. This collaboration resulted in the unearthing of several thousand folk songs and dances eventually published in twelve monumental volumes. Initially, they jotted down melodies by hand, but later began to use Edison cylinders to record songs and dances. Bartók was particularly drawn to Rumanian folk traditions because he felt that these had been more isolated from outside influences and were therefore more authentic. He also attracted the variety and colours of instruments used in Rumanian music: violins, peasant flutes (panpipes), guitars, and bagpipes.
Bartók later acknowledged how deeply he was influenced by the folk material he had collected: “The outcome of these studies was of decisive influence upon my work because it freed me from the tyrannical rule of the major and minor keys. The greater part of the collected treasure, and the more valuable part, was in old ecclesiastical or old Greek modes, or based on more primitive (pentatonic) scales, and the melodies were full of the freest and most varied rhythmic phrases and changes of tempi. It became clear to me that the old modes, which had been forgotten in our music, had lost nothing of their vigour. Their new employment made new rhythmic combinations possible.”
Although the outbreak of war restricted his travels, it was during this time that Bartók began to make various settings of some of the folk songs and dances he had collected. He originally wrote the Rumanian Folk Dances for piano, but in 1917 he arranged them for a small orchestra. Their popularity is evident in the numerous other arrangements that have been made, notably for string orchestra (by Arthur Willner), salon orchestra, and violin and piano.
Bartók was convinced that the folk art that he had helped to discover could, as he said, “serve as the foundations for a renaissance of Hungarian art music.” These seven dances, which vary greatly in character and tempo, are played without a break, the last three forming a coda of increasing energy and excitement.
© Stephen Strugnell
- Mozart
Programme note
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756-1791)
Symphony No 38 in D major, K504 'Prague (1786)Adagio - Allegro
Andante
Finale - PrestoThough Mozart’s European travels never brought him to Scotland, he did reach London in his childhood and during his adult years he went more than once to Prague – one of his journeys being fascinatingly chronicled by Eduard Morike in a short novel on the subject. In Prague, Mozart was more appreciated than in his native Salzburg or adopted Vienna. The Marriage of Figaro, which failed to please the Viennese in 1786, was a smash hit when it reached the Bohemian capital later that year. When Mozart arrived in Prague in January 1787 he reported that “here they talk about nothing but Figaro; nothing is played or sung or whistled but Figaro, nothing, nothing but Figaro”. It was the Prague Opera which commissioned him to write Don Giovanni, and it was for the coronation of Leopold II as King of Bohemia that he later composed La Clemenza di Tito. As for the Symphony No 38 in D, though it was written in Vienna, it had what was almost certainly its premiere at a concert during Mozart’s visit to Prague in January 1787, when his mind must already have been reaching towards Don Giovanni – the two works share the same key, and the slow dramatic introduction to the symphony contains more than a whiff of the opera to come.
Mozart’s last three symphonies (Nos 39-41) are widely held to represent the high watermark of his achievement in the form, but their immediate predecessor is equally great. It is a work of profound animation, radiance and tension, its three movements being so self-sufficient that Mozart felt able to dispense with the inclusion of a minuet. The big introduction to the first movement is balanced by an intricately wrought Allegro – “saturated with polyphony”, as Einstein eloquently put it – grand and gracious in design, with a theme that was later to appear in a different guise as the fugato of The Magic Flute overture. In the Andante the writing remains contrapuntal, and the stabbing discords and chromaticisms give the music an intensity not found in Mozart’s previous symphonic slow movements. After this the final Presto may seem disconcertingly brief, but its taut rhythms and concentrated layout make it a match for the other movements, especially if the exposition repeat is included, as Mozart wanted.
© Conrad Wilson
- bassoon
- conductor
Principal Conductor Robin Ticciati directs a programme of Ligeti, Mozart and Bartók in the magnificent surroundings of Turin's great Lingotto concert hall. He is joined by SCO Principal Bassoon Peter Whelan for Mozart's Bassoon Concerto.
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