Concerts & Tickets
Gran Partita - East Neuk Festival 2010
- MozartGran Partita
Programme note
Michael Collins - director/clarinet
There are few more delightful hours of music than Mozart's Gran Partita for thirteen wind instruments; and to spend that hour in Kilrenny Church, with light falling through lovely Georgian windows into this harmonious and tranquil interior can only add ot the pleasure.
Collosus - East Neuk Festival 2010
- Pärt
- Vaughan Williams
- Strauss
- Tallis
- violin/director
- -
Belcea Quartet
The Tallis Scholars
East Neuk Singers
No one should use words like 'cosmic', 'epic' and 'awe-inspiring' about music without great care - but here we have assembled an evening of truly astounding and unique pieces which deserve all of those adjectives - especially when performed by performers as impressive as these. Spem in alium for 40 solo voices, Strauss' Metamorphosen for 23 solo strings; these are special works from remarkable times. Their profound beauty and immense scale will resonate all the more powerfully in the beautiful setting of Holy Trinity St Andrews with its blazing stained glass and lofty interior.
Highlands Tour 2010
- Beethoven
Programme note
Overture
Introduction: La Tempesta (Allegro non troppo)
Pastorale (Allegro)
Solo della Signora Casentini (Andantino - Adagio - Allegro)
Finale (Allegretto - Allegro molto)Though his Seventh Symphony was nicknamed by Wagner “The Apotheosis of the Dance,” Beethoven and ballet seem like a contradiction in terms. Yet by the age of 31 he had composed two such scores. The first, his early Ritterballet, was merely hackwork, ghost-written for his friend Count Waldstein; but Prometheus, a few years later, was altogether more ambitious, and one of his first big Viennese successes.
Its full title, Die Geschopfe des Prometheus, has been variously translated as the Creatures, or the Creations, or the Children of Prometheus, but the story has little to do with the mythical hero who was chained to a rock, where an eagle tore at his liver until Hercules rescued him. Beethoven’s Prometheus suffers no such hardship. A more idealistic figure, he seemed something of a classical Lord Reith, who “drove ignorance from the people, and gave them manners, customs, and morals.” In Act One of the ballet, he brings two statues to life. In Act Two, he delivers them to Parnassus to be instructed by Apollo and the Muses and endowed with the blessings of culture.
Sir Donald Tovey, Edinburgh University’s famous musical essayist, considered large tracts of the score to be “monotonously frivolous,” but he was being too severe. Haydn, meeting Beethoven in the street, supposedly praised the music, to which Beethoven replied: “Oh, dear Papa, you are too good, but mine is no Creation by a long shot.” The words may sound improbable, but Maynard Solomon, best of Beethoven’s modern biographers, has quoted them without reservation. The ballet in our own time has had a new lease of life, and several of the eighteen movements - not least the striking adagio for the ballerina Maria Casentini, with its solo cello and plashing harp - have regained a small place in the orchestral repertoire.
The overture, moreover, has separately enjoyed a long-established existence as a concert piece. .It is similar in style to Mozart’s Cosi fan tutte overture, and to the first movement of Beethoven’s own First Symphony, which he wrote around the same time. Each has a slow introduction, starting provocatively on a discord and continuing with a flowing, tender melody; and each then unleashes a racy, sparkling allegro, exhilarating in its momentum. The storm scene, intended to follow the overture without a break, anticipates the equivalent movement in the Pastoral Symphony, just as the sweet little Pastorale anticipates the glow of that symphony’s finale. But what the finale of Prometheus more startlingly anticipates is nothing less than the famous Eroica, or Bonaparte, theme with which Beethoven became so obsessed that he employed it in several of his works before bringing it to a state of perfection in the finale of the Eroica Symphony.
© Conrad Wilson
- Hartmann
Programme note
Introduction: Largo
Adagio
Allegro di molto
Chorale: Langsamer MarschTen years younger than the Munich-born Carl Orff, who worked publicly, productively and popularly in Germany throughout the Nazi era, Karl Amadeus Hartmann was another Münchener who stuck to the fatherland during the Second World War but chose to compose secretly in the more progressive manner to be expected of a pupil of Anton Webern. No doubt his survival depended on his ability to keep his head down and on his willingness to forfeit the public performances of his music which would, in any case, have been denied him. Not everyone, after all, was an Orff, all too ready to replace Mendelssohn’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream pieces with music of his own. Even Hartmann’s orchestral work, Miserae, written in tribute to those who were dying in the nearby Dachau concentration camp, had its passionate raison d’être suppressed when it received its premiere in Prague in 1935. If Hartmann’s anti-fascist music failed to provoke reprisal, it was because he kept much of it hidden and destroyed the rest. But as soon as the war ended, he was ready to seize his moment. In the autumn of 1945 he founded a Musica Viva festival in what was left of Munich, championing Schoenberg as well as himself and showing where his beliefs really lay.
Of his eight symphonies, the second, completed in 1946, was a substantial Mahlerish adagio, and the fifth, in 1950, was a homage to Stravinsky, quoting the opening bassoon solo from The Rite of Spring. Tonight’s Concerto Funebre, on the other hand, had managed to receive its premiere ten years earlier at St Gallen in Switzerland, after being smuggled across the border, but it made no headway until the German violinist Wolfgang Schneiderhan took up its cause in 1959. As with the earlier Miserae, the music delivered an anti-Nazi message, conveying Hartmann’s despair over the occupation of Czechoslovakia along with his deeply-held – though in this work somewhat ambiguous – feelings that light in the end must follow darkness.
The music, lasting about twenty minutes, opens with a short introduction quoting the Hussite chorale 'Ye Who Are God’s Warriors', previously employed by Smetana in his patriotic cycle of symphonic poems Ma Vlast (My Homeland). The four-movement structure, said the composer, was designed to reflect the “intellectual and spiritual hopelessness of the period, contrasted with an expression of hope”. The desolate Adagio, placing piercing strands of solo violin tone in a bed of sombre strings, ultimately fades into the work’s one quick movement, an explosion of Bartókian devices in which torrents of notes and hammering rhythms bring the work to an abrasive climax. This in turn dies out, leaving the way clear for the final funeral march, or elegy, with its chorale-like atmosphere (hints of Alban Berg) and eloquent seam of violin tone, towards which the entire work has clearly been heading. This song of death murmurs onward until the orchestra cuts it off with a stern final chord.
© Conrad Wilson - Mozart
Programme note
Allegro vivace
Andante cantabile
Menuetto: Allegro
Molto allegro
C major is Mozart’s Olympian key, nowhere more so than in the last and most dazzling of his symphonies, K551, traditionally known as the ‘Jupiter’. Though the title was not Mozart’s – the astute Johann Salomon, Haydn’s London impresario, is said to have thought of it – it is thoroughly in keeping with a work which progresses from a seemingly simple, symmetrically classical starting point to a finale which is an unsurpassed example of sustained polyphonic panache.
During the summer of 1788, when it was written, all was not well with Mozart. For financial reasons, he had moved house to the Viennese suburbs, though he could still, as he said, afford a cab into town. However, in spite of what he called "black thoughts", inspiration was running high. The superb symphonic triptych of which the ‘Jupiter’ forms the completion was written between June and August, though some of the music was probably already in his head, along with the great C minor Adagio and Fugue and two of his best piano trios.
But if the use of conventional eighteenth century odds and ends in the ‘Jupiter’ symphony – the first movement’s opening call to attention; the four notes which launch the finale – suggest it was written in haste, what Mozart does with them sounds anything but. Everything is fashioned with the utmost poise, and with the most precise sense of timing. The way the first movement’s opening phrase returns, after a mere twenty bars, in counterpoint with a chirpy woodwind overlay and a glowing horn part is an example of how classical formality in this symphony becomes witty and sublime. Even the addition of a captivating melody, written earlier that year for a baritone friend (the original Don Giovanni) to insert into another composer’s opera, is transformed into a stroke of genius.
The nocturnal slow movement, with its atmospherically muted strings and exquisite wind parts, maintains the inspiration, as does the idiosyncratic minuet, in whose central trio section the four-note motif of the finale makes a preliminary appearance. But it is in the finale itself – a contrapuntal juggling act in which more and more balls are tossed into the air and effortlessly rotated – that the symphony conspicuously reaches its exhilaratingly relentless apotheosis.
© Conrad Wilson
- violin/director
Virtuoso Alexander Janiczek, directing from the violin, opens with music from Beethoven’s only ballet, telling the tale of Prometheus bringing civilisation to humanity through music and dance. He then contrasts the work of two very different composers, who happen to share a middle name. Karl Amadeus Hartmann’s sublime and darkly passionate Violin Concerto has a particularly memorable, and life-affirming, final movement. It’s followed by the last and most dazzling of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s symphonies, the ‘Jupiter’.
Tickets are available from:
Strathpeffer Pavilion, The Square, Strathpeffer - 01997 420124
Online at The Booth www.thebooth.co.uk
Highlands Tour 2010
- Beethoven
Programme note
Overture
Introduction: La Tempesta (Allegro non troppo)
Pastorale (Allegro)
Solo della Signora Casentini (Andantino - Adagio - Allegro)
Finale (Allegretto - Allegro molto)Though his Seventh Symphony was nicknamed by Wagner “The Apotheosis of the Dance,” Beethoven and ballet seem like a contradiction in terms. Yet by the age of 31 he had composed two such scores. The first, his early Ritterballet, was merely hackwork, ghost-written for his friend Count Waldstein; but Prometheus, a few years later, was altogether more ambitious, and one of his first big Viennese successes.
Its full title, Die Geschopfe des Prometheus, has been variously translated as the Creatures, or the Creations, or the Children of Prometheus, but the story has little to do with the mythical hero who was chained to a rock, where an eagle tore at his liver until Hercules rescued him. Beethoven’s Prometheus suffers no such hardship. A more idealistic figure, he seemed something of a classical Lord Reith, who “drove ignorance from the people, and gave them manners, customs, and morals.” In Act One of the ballet, he brings two statues to life. In Act Two, he delivers them to Parnassus to be instructed by Apollo and the Muses and endowed with the blessings of culture.
Sir Donald Tovey, Edinburgh University’s famous musical essayist, considered large tracts of the score to be “monotonously frivolous,” but he was being too severe. Haydn, meeting Beethoven in the street, supposedly praised the music, to which Beethoven replied: “Oh, dear Papa, you are too good, but mine is no Creation by a long shot.” The words may sound improbable, but Maynard Solomon, best of Beethoven’s modern biographers, has quoted them without reservation. The ballet in our own time has had a new lease of life, and several of the eighteen movements - not least the striking adagio for the ballerina Maria Casentini, with its solo cello and plashing harp - have regained a small place in the orchestral repertoire.
The overture, moreover, has separately enjoyed a long-established existence as a concert piece. .It is similar in style to Mozart’s Cosi fan tutte overture, and to the first movement of Beethoven’s own First Symphony, which he wrote around the same time. Each has a slow introduction, starting provocatively on a discord and continuing with a flowing, tender melody; and each then unleashes a racy, sparkling allegro, exhilarating in its momentum. The storm scene, intended to follow the overture without a break, anticipates the equivalent movement in the Pastoral Symphony, just as the sweet little Pastorale anticipates the glow of that symphony’s finale. But what the finale of Prometheus more startlingly anticipates is nothing less than the famous Eroica, or Bonaparte, theme with which Beethoven became so obsessed that he employed it in several of his works before bringing it to a state of perfection in the finale of the Eroica Symphony.
© Conrad Wilson
- Hartmann
Programme note
Introduction: Largo
Adagio
Allegro di molto
Chorale: Langsamer MarschTen years younger than the Munich-born Carl Orff, who worked publicly, productively and popularly in Germany throughout the Nazi era, Karl Amadeus Hartmann was another Münchener who stuck to the fatherland during the Second World War but chose to compose secretly in the more progressive manner to be expected of a pupil of Anton Webern. No doubt his survival depended on his ability to keep his head down and on his willingness to forfeit the public performances of his music which would, in any case, have been denied him. Not everyone, after all, was an Orff, all too ready to replace Mendelssohn’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream pieces with music of his own. Even Hartmann’s orchestral work, Miserae, written in tribute to those who were dying in the nearby Dachau concentration camp, had its passionate raison d’être suppressed when it received its premiere in Prague in 1935. If Hartmann’s anti-fascist music failed to provoke reprisal, it was because he kept much of it hidden and destroyed the rest. But as soon as the war ended, he was ready to seize his moment. In the autumn of 1945 he founded a Musica Viva festival in what was left of Munich, championing Schoenberg as well as himself and showing where his beliefs really lay.
Of his eight symphonies, the second, completed in 1946, was a substantial Mahlerish adagio, and the fifth, in 1950, was a homage to Stravinsky, quoting the opening bassoon solo from The Rite of Spring. Tonight’s Concerto Funebre, on the other hand, had managed to receive its premiere ten years earlier at St Gallen in Switzerland, after being smuggled across the border, but it made no headway until the German violinist Wolfgang Schneiderhan took up its cause in 1959. As with the earlier Miserae, the music delivered an anti-Nazi message, conveying Hartmann’s despair over the occupation of Czechoslovakia along with his deeply-held – though in this work somewhat ambiguous – feelings that light in the end must follow darkness.
The music, lasting about twenty minutes, opens with a short introduction quoting the Hussite chorale 'Ye Who Are God’s Warriors', previously employed by Smetana in his patriotic cycle of symphonic poems Ma Vlast (My Homeland). The four-movement structure, said the composer, was designed to reflect the “intellectual and spiritual hopelessness of the period, contrasted with an expression of hope”. The desolate Adagio, placing piercing strands of solo violin tone in a bed of sombre strings, ultimately fades into the work’s one quick movement, an explosion of Bartókian devices in which torrents of notes and hammering rhythms bring the work to an abrasive climax. This in turn dies out, leaving the way clear for the final funeral march, or elegy, with its chorale-like atmosphere (hints of Alban Berg) and eloquent seam of violin tone, towards which the entire work has clearly been heading. This song of death murmurs onward until the orchestra cuts it off with a stern final chord.
© Conrad Wilson - Mozart
Programme note
Allegro vivace
Andante cantabile
Menuetto: Allegro
Molto allegro
C major is Mozart’s Olympian key, nowhere more so than in the last and most dazzling of his symphonies, K551, traditionally known as the ‘Jupiter’. Though the title was not Mozart’s – the astute Johann Salomon, Haydn’s London impresario, is said to have thought of it – it is thoroughly in keeping with a work which progresses from a seemingly simple, symmetrically classical starting point to a finale which is an unsurpassed example of sustained polyphonic panache.
During the summer of 1788, when it was written, all was not well with Mozart. For financial reasons, he had moved house to the Viennese suburbs, though he could still, as he said, afford a cab into town. However, in spite of what he called "black thoughts", inspiration was running high. The superb symphonic triptych of which the ‘Jupiter’ forms the completion was written between June and August, though some of the music was probably already in his head, along with the great C minor Adagio and Fugue and two of his best piano trios.
But if the use of conventional eighteenth century odds and ends in the ‘Jupiter’ symphony – the first movement’s opening call to attention; the four notes which launch the finale – suggest it was written in haste, what Mozart does with them sounds anything but. Everything is fashioned with the utmost poise, and with the most precise sense of timing. The way the first movement’s opening phrase returns, after a mere twenty bars, in counterpoint with a chirpy woodwind overlay and a glowing horn part is an example of how classical formality in this symphony becomes witty and sublime. Even the addition of a captivating melody, written earlier that year for a baritone friend (the original Don Giovanni) to insert into another composer’s opera, is transformed into a stroke of genius.
The nocturnal slow movement, with its atmospherically muted strings and exquisite wind parts, maintains the inspiration, as does the idiosyncratic minuet, in whose central trio section the four-note motif of the finale makes a preliminary appearance. But it is in the finale itself – a contrapuntal juggling act in which more and more balls are tossed into the air and effortlessly rotated – that the symphony conspicuously reaches its exhilaratingly relentless apotheosis.
© Conrad Wilson
- violin/director
Virtuoso Alexander Janiczek, directing from the violin, opens with music from Beethoven’s only ballet, telling the tale of Prometheus bringing civilisation to humanity through music and dance. He then contrasts the work of two very different composers, who happen to share a middle name. Karl Amadeus Hartmann’s sublime and darkly passionate Violin Concerto has a particularly memorable, and life-affirming, final movement.. It’s followed by the last and most dazzling of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s symphonies, the ‘Jupiter’.
Tickets available from:
George McBeath Jewellers, 6 Traill Street, Thurso - 01847 892364
Thurso Tourist Information Centre, Riverside, Thurso
Online from The Booth
Highlands Tour 2010
- Beethoven
Programme note
Overture
Introduction: La Tempesta (Allegro non troppo)
Pastorale (Allegro)
Solo della Signora Casentini (Andantino - Adagio - Allegro)
Finale (Allegretto - Allegro molto)Though his Seventh Symphony was nicknamed by Wagner “The Apotheosis of the Dance,” Beethoven and ballet seem like a contradiction in terms. Yet by the age of 31 he had composed two such scores. The first, his early Ritterballet, was merely hackwork, ghost-written for his friend Count Waldstein; but Prometheus, a few years later, was altogether more ambitious, and one of his first big Viennese successes.
Its full title, Die Geschopfe des Prometheus, has been variously translated as the Creatures, or the Creations, or the Children of Prometheus, but the story has little to do with the mythical hero who was chained to a rock, where an eagle tore at his liver until Hercules rescued him. Beethoven’s Prometheus suffers no such hardship. A more idealistic figure, he seemed something of a classical Lord Reith, who “drove ignorance from the people, and gave them manners, customs, and morals.” In Act One of the ballet, he brings two statues to life. In Act Two, he delivers them to Parnassus to be instructed by Apollo and the Muses and endowed with the blessings of culture.
Sir Donald Tovey, Edinburgh University’s famous musical essayist, considered large tracts of the score to be “monotonously frivolous,” but he was being too severe. Haydn, meeting Beethoven in the street, supposedly praised the music, to which Beethoven replied: “Oh, dear Papa, you are too good, but mine is no Creation by a long shot.” The words may sound improbable, but Maynard Solomon, best of Beethoven’s modern biographers, has quoted them without reservation. The ballet in our own time has had a new lease of life, and several of the eighteen movements - not least the striking adagio for the ballerina Maria Casentini, with its solo cello and plashing harp - have regained a small place in the orchestral repertoire.
The overture, moreover, has separately enjoyed a long-established existence as a concert piece. .It is similar in style to Mozart’s Cosi fan tutte overture, and to the first movement of Beethoven’s own First Symphony, which he wrote around the same time. Each has a slow introduction, starting provocatively on a discord and continuing with a flowing, tender melody; and each then unleashes a racy, sparkling allegro, exhilarating in its momentum. The storm scene, intended to follow the overture without a break, anticipates the equivalent movement in the Pastoral Symphony, just as the sweet little Pastorale anticipates the glow of that symphony’s finale. But what the finale of Prometheus more startlingly anticipates is nothing less than the famous Eroica, or Bonaparte, theme with which Beethoven became so obsessed that he employed it in several of his works before bringing it to a state of perfection in the finale of the Eroica Symphony.
© Conrad Wilson
- Hartmann
Programme note
Introduction: Largo
Adagio
Allegro di molto
Chorale: Langsamer MarschTen years younger than the Munich-born Carl Orff, who worked publicly, productively and popularly in Germany throughout the Nazi era, Karl Amadeus Hartmann was another Münchener who stuck to the fatherland during the Second World War but chose to compose secretly in the more progressive manner to be expected of a pupil of Anton Webern. No doubt his survival depended on his ability to keep his head down and on his willingness to forfeit the public performances of his music which would, in any case, have been denied him. Not everyone, after all, was an Orff, all too ready to replace Mendelssohn’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream pieces with music of his own. Even Hartmann’s orchestral work, Miserae, written in tribute to those who were dying in the nearby Dachau concentration camp, had its passionate raison d’être suppressed when it received its premiere in Prague in 1935. If Hartmann’s anti-fascist music failed to provoke reprisal, it was because he kept much of it hidden and destroyed the rest. But as soon as the war ended, he was ready to seize his moment. In the autumn of 1945 he founded a Musica Viva festival in what was left of Munich, championing Schoenberg as well as himself and showing where his beliefs really lay.
Of his eight symphonies, the second, completed in 1946, was a substantial Mahlerish adagio, and the fifth, in 1950, was a homage to Stravinsky, quoting the opening bassoon solo from The Rite of Spring. Tonight’s Concerto Funebre, on the other hand, had managed to receive its premiere ten years earlier at St Gallen in Switzerland, after being smuggled across the border, but it made no headway until the German violinist Wolfgang Schneiderhan took up its cause in 1959. As with the earlier Miserae, the music delivered an anti-Nazi message, conveying Hartmann’s despair over the occupation of Czechoslovakia along with his deeply-held – though in this work somewhat ambiguous – feelings that light in the end must follow darkness.
The music, lasting about twenty minutes, opens with a short introduction quoting the Hussite chorale 'Ye Who Are God’s Warriors', previously employed by Smetana in his patriotic cycle of symphonic poems Ma Vlast (My Homeland). The four-movement structure, said the composer, was designed to reflect the “intellectual and spiritual hopelessness of the period, contrasted with an expression of hope”. The desolate Adagio, placing piercing strands of solo violin tone in a bed of sombre strings, ultimately fades into the work’s one quick movement, an explosion of Bartókian devices in which torrents of notes and hammering rhythms bring the work to an abrasive climax. This in turn dies out, leaving the way clear for the final funeral march, or elegy, with its chorale-like atmosphere (hints of Alban Berg) and eloquent seam of violin tone, towards which the entire work has clearly been heading. This song of death murmurs onward until the orchestra cuts it off with a stern final chord.
© Conrad Wilson - Mozart
Programme note
Allegro vivace
Andante cantabile
Menuetto: Allegro
Molto allegro
C major is Mozart’s Olympian key, nowhere more so than in the last and most dazzling of his symphonies, K551, traditionally known as the ‘Jupiter’. Though the title was not Mozart’s – the astute Johann Salomon, Haydn’s London impresario, is said to have thought of it – it is thoroughly in keeping with a work which progresses from a seemingly simple, symmetrically classical starting point to a finale which is an unsurpassed example of sustained polyphonic panache.
During the summer of 1788, when it was written, all was not well with Mozart. For financial reasons, he had moved house to the Viennese suburbs, though he could still, as he said, afford a cab into town. However, in spite of what he called "black thoughts", inspiration was running high. The superb symphonic triptych of which the ‘Jupiter’ forms the completion was written between June and August, though some of the music was probably already in his head, along with the great C minor Adagio and Fugue and two of his best piano trios.
But if the use of conventional eighteenth century odds and ends in the ‘Jupiter’ symphony – the first movement’s opening call to attention; the four notes which launch the finale – suggest it was written in haste, what Mozart does with them sounds anything but. Everything is fashioned with the utmost poise, and with the most precise sense of timing. The way the first movement’s opening phrase returns, after a mere twenty bars, in counterpoint with a chirpy woodwind overlay and a glowing horn part is an example of how classical formality in this symphony becomes witty and sublime. Even the addition of a captivating melody, written earlier that year for a baritone friend (the original Don Giovanni) to insert into another composer’s opera, is transformed into a stroke of genius.
The nocturnal slow movement, with its atmospherically muted strings and exquisite wind parts, maintains the inspiration, as does the idiosyncratic minuet, in whose central trio section the four-note motif of the finale makes a preliminary appearance. But it is in the finale itself – a contrapuntal juggling act in which more and more balls are tossed into the air and effortlessly rotated – that the symphony conspicuously reaches its exhilaratingly relentless apotheosis.
© Conrad Wilson
- violin/director
Virtuoso Alexander Janiczek, directing from the violin, opens with music from Beethoven’s only ballet, telling the tale of Prometheus bringing civilisation to humanity through music and dance. He then contrasts the work of two very different composers, who happen to share a middle name. Karl Amadeus Hartmann’s sublime and darkly passionate Violin Concerto has a particularly memorable – and life-affirming - final movement. It’s followed by the last and most dazzling of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s symphonies, the ‘Jupiter’.
Tickets available in person from:
The Badenoch Centre, Spey Street, Kingussie and Kingussie Post Office, High Street
And online from The Booth
“Beautiful music, beautifully played… wind playing at its finest.” Dundee Courier
“the elan, poise, and virtuosity of the woodwind section’s playing… were breathtaking… sheer class” The Herald
SCO at Festspiele Herrenchiemsee
- Stravinsky
- Hartmann
Programme note
Introduction: Largo
Adagio
Allegro di molto
Chorale: Langsamer MarschTen years younger than the Munich-born Carl Orff, who worked publicly, productively and popularly in Germany throughout the Nazi era, Karl Amadeus Hartmann was another Münchener who stuck to the fatherland during the Second World War but chose to compose secretly in the more progressive manner to be expected of a pupil of Anton Webern. No doubt his survival depended on his ability to keep his head down and on his willingness to forfeit the public performances of his music which would, in any case, have been denied him. Not everyone, after all, was an Orff, all too ready to replace Mendelssohn’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream pieces with music of his own. Even Hartmann’s orchestral work, Miserae, written in tribute to those who were dying in the nearby Dachau concentration camp, had its passionate raison d’être suppressed when it received its premiere in Prague in 1935. If Hartmann’s anti-fascist music failed to provoke reprisal, it was because he kept much of it hidden and destroyed the rest. But as soon as the war ended, he was ready to seize his moment. In the autumn of 1945 he founded a Musica Viva festival in what was left of Munich, championing Schoenberg as well as himself and showing where his beliefs really lay.
Of his eight symphonies, the second, completed in 1946, was a substantial Mahlerish adagio, and the fifth, in 1950, was a homage to Stravinsky, quoting the opening bassoon solo from The Rite of Spring. Tonight’s Concerto Funebre, on the other hand, had managed to receive its premiere ten years earlier at St Gallen in Switzerland, after being smuggled across the border, but it made no headway until the German violinist Wolfgang Schneiderhan took up its cause in 1959. As with the earlier Miserae, the music delivered an anti-Nazi message, conveying Hartmann’s despair over the occupation of Czechoslovakia along with his deeply-held – though in this work somewhat ambiguous – feelings that light in the end must follow darkness.
The music, lasting about twenty minutes, opens with a short introduction quoting the Hussite chorale 'Ye Who Are God’s Warriors', previously employed by Smetana in his patriotic cycle of symphonic poems Ma Vlast (My Homeland). The four-movement structure, said the composer, was designed to reflect the “intellectual and spiritual hopelessness of the period, contrasted with an expression of hope”. The desolate Adagio, placing piercing strands of solo violin tone in a bed of sombre strings, ultimately fades into the work’s one quick movement, an explosion of Bartókian devices in which torrents of notes and hammering rhythms bring the work to an abrasive climax. This in turn dies out, leaving the way clear for the final funeral march, or elegy, with its chorale-like atmosphere (hints of Alban Berg) and eloquent seam of violin tone, towards which the entire work has clearly been heading. This song of death murmurs onward until the orchestra cuts it off with a stern final chord.
© Conrad Wilson - Mozart
Programme note
Allegro vivace
Andante cantabile
Menuetto: Allegro
Molto allegro
C major is Mozart’s Olympian key, nowhere more so than in the last and most dazzling of his symphonies, K551, traditionally known as the ‘Jupiter’. Though the title was not Mozart’s – the astute Johann Salomon, Haydn’s London impresario, is said to have thought of it – it is thoroughly in keeping with a work which progresses from a seemingly simple, symmetrically classical starting point to a finale which is an unsurpassed example of sustained polyphonic panache.
During the summer of 1788, when it was written, all was not well with Mozart. For financial reasons, he had moved house to the Viennese suburbs, though he could still, as he said, afford a cab into town. However, in spite of what he called "black thoughts", inspiration was running high. The superb symphonic triptych of which the ‘Jupiter’ forms the completion was written between June and August, though some of the music was probably already in his head, along with the great C minor Adagio and Fugue and two of his best piano trios.
But if the use of conventional eighteenth century odds and ends in the ‘Jupiter’ symphony – the first movement’s opening call to attention; the four notes which launch the finale – suggest it was written in haste, what Mozart does with them sounds anything but. Everything is fashioned with the utmost poise, and with the most precise sense of timing. The way the first movement’s opening phrase returns, after a mere twenty bars, in counterpoint with a chirpy woodwind overlay and a glowing horn part is an example of how classical formality in this symphony becomes witty and sublime. Even the addition of a captivating melody, written earlier that year for a baritone friend (the original Don Giovanni) to insert into another composer’s opera, is transformed into a stroke of genius.
The nocturnal slow movement, with its atmospherically muted strings and exquisite wind parts, maintains the inspiration, as does the idiosyncratic minuet, in whose central trio section the four-note motif of the finale makes a preliminary appearance. But it is in the finale itself – a contrapuntal juggling act in which more and more balls are tossed into the air and effortlessly rotated – that the symphony conspicuously reaches its exhilaratingly relentless apotheosis.
© Conrad Wilson
- violin/director
Alexander Janiczek directs the Orchestra in a programme of Stravinsky, Hartmann and Mozart in the Spiegelsaal, Herrenchiemsee - Ludwig II's splendid baroque island retreat in Bavaria.
***Please note this performance is sold out***
SCO Wind and Brass Tour 2010
- Weber
- Haydn
- Mendelssohn
- Beethoven
- Françaix
Join the Scottish Chamber Orchestra’s virtuosic wind and brass players for a beautifully lyrical and varied programme - the perfect way to relax, and get your toes tapping, in the long summer evenings.
“Beautiful music, beautifully played… wind playing at its finest.” Dundee Courier
“...the elan, poise, and virtuosity of the woodwind section’s playing… were breathtaking… sheer class”. The Herald
***Please note this performance is sold out***
SCO Wind and Brass Tour 2010
- Weber
- Haydn
- Mendelssohn
- Beethoven
- Françaix
Join the Scottish Chamber Orchestra’s virtuosic wind and brass players for a beautifully lyrical and varied programme - the perfect way to relax, and get your toes tapping, in the long summer evenings.
“Beautiful music, beautifully played… wind playing at its finest.” Dundee Courier
“...the elan, poise, and virtuosity of the woodwind section’s playing… were breathtaking… sheer class”. The Herald
Tickets available from The Sunart Centre on 01397 709228 and online at www.thebooth.co.uk
SCO Wind and Brass Tour 2010
- Weber
- Haydn
- Mendelssohn
- Beethoven
- Françaix
Join the Scottish Chamber Orchestra’s virtuosic wind and brass players for a beautifully lyrical and varied programme - the perfect way to relax, and get your toes tapping, in the long summer evenings.
“Beautiful music, beautifully played… wind playing at its finest.” Dundee Courier
“...the elan, poise, and virtuosity of the woodwind section’s playing… were breathtaking… sheer class”. The Herald
Tickets are available from:
An Tobar, Argyll Terrace, Tobermory - 01688 302211.
SCO at the BBC Proms
- Dvořák
Programme note
Antonín Dvořák (1841-10904)
Wind Serenade in D minor, Op 44 (1878)
Moderato, quasi Marcia
Menuetto
Andante con moto
Finale: Allegro molto
Of Dvořák’s two serenades – another was started but emerged as his colourful Czech Suite – the second, in D minor, Op 44, is the potent obverse of the first. Sunlit string tone is transformed into pungent wind tone. The vein is robustly outdoor rather than delicately indoor (members of the SCO played it one summer in the shade of a fountain at the Aix-en-Provence Festival). Radiant major keys become starker minor ones. Five movements are compressed into four. The sound of Mozart’s wind serenades, with their marches and minuets voiced by pairs of oboes and clarinets, audibly lurks in the background, but this is music with a nineteenth-century savour and a Czech accent. The depths of double bass and double bassoon tone may evoke Mozart’s Gran Partita for thirteen instruments (Dvořák here employs twelve, including a cello as ballast) but the strains of the music, shot through by a trio of horns, are largely Bohemian.
Completed within a fortnight in 1878, the work is exuberantly Czech in spirit, yet for all its joie de vivre there is a rigour about it that Dvořák did not display in all his works. True to classical tradition, it opens with – and ultimately returns to – a march, one of the traits of eighteenth-century entertainment music. But it is more succinct than its classical predecessors in that it curtails the two minuets and two slow movements – Dvořák deemed one of each to be quite sufficient – that were considered desirable in some of the more leisurely scores of an earlier era.
In fact Dvořák’s single minuet turns out in its central section to be a stampingly fast and not at all minuet-like Czech furiant, with exhilaratingly cross-accented syncopations. The slow movement is a tenderly pulsating nocturne, warmed by clarinet and oboe on a bed of cello and bass tone. At times exquisitely ornate, it is eventually displaced by the dapper finale, incorporating a repeat of the opening march before bubbling to its close. John Clapham, the distinguished Edinburgh-based Dvořák authority, appreciatively called it – in one of his books on the composer – a “unique work, rewarding to both audiences and performers”
© Conrad Wilson - MozartSerenade in B flat for thirteen wind instruments, K361 Gran' Partita
Programme note
- conductor
- -
A late-night pairing of two composers who conjured luscious sounds for wind ensembles, and teases out a Dvořák thread following the symphony of this evening's earlier Prom.
***Following the death of Sir Charles Mackerras, Douglas Boyd will now conduct this concert at the BBC Proms.***
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