Concerts & Tickets
- 2009
- 2010
- 2011
- 2012
- 2013
- 2014
CL@SIX - Drum Roll
- Mozart
Programme note
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756-1791)
Overture, The Impresario K486 (1786)It wasn’t as if Mozart had time on his hands. He was in the middle of composing The Marriage of Figaro, and had just completed his Piano Concerto No 22 in E-flat, and the six string quartets dedicated to Haydn. But an Imperial command could hardly be ignored. Emperor Joseph II planned festivities in the Orangery at his palace at Schönbrunn as part of the 1786 state visit by the joint rulers of the Austrian Netherlands, the Duke and Archduchess (who was the Emperor’s sister) von Sachsen-Teschen. Emperor Joseph wanted a German Singspiel with which to entertain his guests.
He turned to Mozart and Gottlieb Stephanie, who had worked so successfully together on The Abduction from the Seraglio in 1782, even if he had let it be known that it contained “too many notes”! The result was The Impresario – a much lighter squib than The Abduction. It is based on a well-used plot of an impresario with trouble backstage – in this case, two feuding sopranos! They get an aria each to ‘display’ their wares, there is a tenor who attempts to intercede and a buffo bass. The plot was soon out-dated as Stephanie had made liberal reference in his libretto to local theatrical goings-on. And there wasn’t a great deal of music either (just five items in all), but what there was found Mozart in the full flood of his genius. The Overture, at least, has never left the concert platform – it is simply too vibrant to park on a dusty library shelf.
© David Gardner
- Mozart
Programme note
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756-1791)
Violin Concerto No. 2 in D major, K 211 (1775)There are a couple of minor mysteries associated with the five violin concertos of Mozart. We are not entirely certain when he wrote them as someone, possibly Mozart himself, changed the date on the manuscript to give the impression they were written at a later date, namely 1780, and then it was changed back to 1775. It is more likely (based on handwriting and watermark evidence) that Concertos Nos 2 to 5 were actually written in 1775 in Salzburg. Concerto No 1 seems to have been written even earlier, perhaps in 1773. Also, we don’t know why Mozart wrote these lovely concertos. There is little evidence that he performed them himself even though he was a virtuoso violinist as well as a dazzling keyboard performer. Even Antonio Brunetti, the leader of the Salzburg orchestra, was unlikely to have been the intended soloist as he didn’t join the band until 1776. However, Mozart rarely wrote anything without an anticipated performance in mind, so, in the absence of any other evidence, I’d lay my money on the notion that Mozart wrote his violin concertos for himself to perform.
Mozart’s Violin Concerto No 2 is not as well known as the later ones and therefore you are likely to have the pleasure of listening to some unfamiliar Mozart. He was only nineteen when he wrote this concerto so he hadn’t yet reached the mature voice of his late symphonies or Don Giovanni or the Requiem. Instead, this is Mozart still pursuing the galant style that he had so much admired when he visited Johann Christian Bach in London a decade earlier. The concerto has three movements: Allegro moderato, Andante, and Rondeau – Allegro. There is a serenade-like quality to this music – something by which to relax and let the furrows fade from your mind after a hectic day.
© David Gardner
- Haydn
- violin/director
Youthful Mozart and venerable Haydn – but without knowing which is which, it would be hard to guess the age of the composers. Youthful fire dances in Haydn’s symphony; while a mellow beauty raises Mozart’s slow movement to lofty heights. Janiczek – as soloist and director – has a native gift for this music and lends a distinctly Austrian accent to the Orchestra for a delightful hour.
The Voice of City - A Family Concert
- Blake
- Harper
Programme note
Edward Harper (1941-2009)
The Voice of a CityOf the commissions I have received The Voice of a City was in many ways the most challenging. To design a half hour piece using primary school choirs, an adult community choir, the Scottish Chamber Orchestra and organ required a great deal of thought. My experience in writing Music for King Arthur, which similarly combined amateur and professional forces, stood me in good stead. Indeed, writing what had to be simple, direct vocal music but colouring it with more elaborate instrumental music proved again to be very stimulating. For the texts, I thought it appropriate to choose contemporary Edinburgh ‘voices’ and took poems from an anthology of work by children from Craigmillar and from Edinburgh, An Intimate City - an anthology of contemporary poetry about Edinburgh, published by The City of Edinburgh Council. The Craigmillar anthology was published in 2000 by the Craigmillar Literacy Trust, in part as a tribute to the work done with the children by Ron Butlin, Craigmillar Writer in Residence at the time. Ron has an instinctive gift for writing texts which work naturally in musical settings and seemed the ideal person to supply the cameos I wanted for the final section. He provided a number of images which proved musically stimulating.
I planned the work using the combined choirs in three sections, gave the second section to the adult choir and the third and fourth sections (which use the Craigmillar poems) to the school choirs. The Voice of the Wind has great atmospheric exuberance and The Way I Feel is a simple ballad I find very moving. Whilst the poems don’t specifically refer to Edinburgh, the weather conditions described were presumably observed in the City and are familiar to us all. Walk an Edinburgh Street also attracted me by its atmospheric qualities, evoking Edinburgh’s historic past. My heart leaped up when I saw The One o’ Clock Gun - absolutely perfect for a kind of music hall setting with interaction between the choirs. I couldn’t prevent Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture from getting in on the act.
These songs are enclosed by an Introduction and Finale. The Introduction, building from a quiet, low clarinet solo, aims to evoke a sense of earlier times using Edinburgh’s ancient British name, Din Eidyn. In the central section I use the modern version and try to capture something of the nineteenth century romantic appeal - reinforced with a brief quote from Mendelssohn’s ‘Scottish’ Symphony. The Finale starts with the organ, taking the form of short reflections on each of the four songs, and is followed by a reworking of the ‘romantic’ section of the Introduction. Then come the cameos of notable Edinburgh people (and animals), and a final crescendo of names concludes the homage to “this unique city”.
© Edward Harper, October 2003
- conductor
- Organ
Pupils from The Erskine Stewart's Melville Schools Choirs (The Land of Counterpane).
A chorus of almost 300 voices from schools and communities across the City of Edinburgh (The Voice of a City).
Edinburgh composer Edward Harper called on school choirs, adult choirs and the full SCO for his affectionate portrait of his home city. The One o’Clock Gun goes off with a bang, as he brings the streets alive, populating them with many of the city’s most celebrated residents: John Knox, Miss Jean Brodie, Robert Louis Stevenson and Sean Connery. This is a heartwarming concert opening with The Land of Counterpane, Howard Blake’s setting of poems from Stevenson’s collection A Child’s Garden of Verses.
Lord Provost's People's Concert
This concert is The Lord Provost's People's Concert and is supported by:
Illustration © Zoe Sadler
Melodies and Miracles
- Haydn
Programme note
Joseph Haydn (1732–1809)
Scena di Berenice (H.XVIIa:10)Haydn’s compositions for his two triumphant visits to London included not only his last twelve symphonies, but also an opera and a number of smaller pieces both for instruments and for voice. Among them is this Scena, one of his finest vocal works, which was first performed at his final benefit concert on 4 May 1795. (The so-called 'London' Symphony, No 104, had its premiere in the same programme.) The piece was written for the celebrated prima donna Brigida Giorgi Banti, and her performance at the concert was generally admired – though Haydn wrote in his diary, in his delightful English (or perhaps recording a London witticism), that Signora Banti had sung "very scanty".
The text of Scena di Berenice is from Antigono, by the great librettist of baroque opera, Pietro Metastasio. The heroine, Berenice, has fallen in love with Demetrius, the son (by a previous marriage) of her husband Antigonus. Demetrius has decided to abandon Berenice and commit suicide, rather than dishonour the family name. Berenice struggles with her conflicting emotions, imagines her lover departing for the underworld, and calls on the gods to bring her life to an end.
Haydn set this text as a large-scale operatic scene, with a brilliant solo part, and a prominent role for the wind section of flute, oboes, clarinets, bassoons and horns in the accompanying orchestra. A striking and forward-looking feature of the work is its lack of a consistent key-centre, reflecting the heroine’s increasingly distracted state of mind. The opening recitative roves restlessly from key to key, though at Aspetta, anima bella it settles for a moment in C major for an oboe and bassoon melody of Gluck-like calm. The slow first aria, Non partir, bell’idol mio, in E major, breaks off for a further passage of recitative, leading to the fiery concluding aria, Perchè, se tanti siete, in F minor.
© Anthony Burton
- Stravinsky
Programme note
Igor Stravinsky (1882-1971)
Apollon musagète (1927-8)One of Stravinsky’s earliest so-called ‘neoclassical’ works written in the aftermath of the First World War was the ballet Pulcinella, commissioned by the impresario Sergey Diaghilev for the Ballets Russes, the company that had first brought Stravinsky to international fame with Firebird. Pulcinella was Stravinsky’s discovery of the past, as he later described it, "the epiphany through which the whole of my late work became possible. It was a backward look, of course – the first of many love affairs in that direction – but it was a look in the mirror, too." Despite its dependence on the music of the past, Pulcinella represents an important turning point in Stravinsky’s artistic development. It revealed to him the possibilities of an engagement with all kinds of earlier music in order to renew his own musical language. Crucial, though, for his neoclassical music was not the material he borrowed (which could come from anywhere) but his attitude to it. Everything he touched he made his own.
If Pulcinella was the epiphany, then Apollon musagète must surely be the apogee of Stravinsky’s neoclassicism. Commissioned by the American patron Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge in 1927, Stravinsky chose, as he explains in his autobiography, "to compose a ballet founded on moments or episodes in Greek mythology plastically interpreted by dancing of the so-called classical school". He wanted to create what he termed a 'ballet blanc’, a score of great purity and unity, in which violent contrasts were avoided and all elements were pared down to their simplest. Hence it is scored for strings alone and makes almost exclusive use of diatonic harmony (the equivalent of the ‘white notes’ on the piano keyboard). For George Balanchine, choreographer of the 1928 European premiere, the work was a revelation: "In its discipline and restraint, in its sustained oneness of tone and feeling… [Apollon] seemed to tell me that I could dare not to use everything, that I, too, could eliminate". The result was the perfect union of music and dance in the expression of pure, classical beauty.
In order to achieve this sense of order as symbolized by the Greek god Apollo, Stravinsky turned to poetry. Each dance explores a basic iambic (short–long) pattern, while the ‘Variation of Calliope’ (the muse of poetry) is headed by two lines from Boileau and takes the twelve-syllable lines of the alexandrine as its rhythmic model. Another means of order was achieved by alluding to the stateliness of French Baroque dances, such as the ouverture style of the opening ‘Birth of Apollo’ or the pavane-like second ‘Variation of Apollo’. The closing ‘Apotheosis’, in which Apollo leads the three Muses towards Parnassus, brings together the various rhythmic elements of the work in music that is not just serenely beautiful but also seems to speak of something deeper and darker, something beyond reason and order. Stravinsky looks back to ancient Greece but is ultimately, perhaps, only able to see the reflection of his own tragic age.
© Jonathan Cross
- Fauré
Programme note
Gabriel Fauré (1845-1924)
Seven Songs arranged for voice and orchestra by Colin Matthews (b 1946)
first performance
Fleur jetée Op.39 No.2 (1884)
Nocturne Op.43 No.2 (1886)
Mandoline Op.58 No.1 (1891)
Clair de lune (Menuet) Op.46 No.2 (1887)
Notre amour Op.23 No.2 (1879)
Green Op.58 No.3 (1891)
Les berceaux Op.23 No.1 (1879) –
Postlude
Colin Matthews’s extraordinay accomplishment as a composer derives in no small way from the active interest he has always taken in the music of others – from his early collaboration with Deryck Cooke in completing a performing version of Mahler’s unfinished Tenth Symphony and his work as assistant to Benjamin Britten to his recent masterly orchestration of Debussy’s 24 piano Preludes. Even so, in spite of the experience he has in this area, including a version for mezzo-soprano and chamber orchestra of Debussy’s Trois Poèmes de Stéphane Mallarmé, creating orchestral arrangements of Fauré songs cannot have been easy. The peculiarly intimate relationship between voice and piano characteristic of most of the best of Fauré’s mélodies is a quality that, as far as we know, the composer himself never attempted to translate into another medium.
Fleur jetée, the opening item in the selection made by Colin Matthews and Robin Ticciati, is peculiar among Fauré’s hundred or so songs for the violence of its expression, the insistently repeated semiquavers and the surging bass calling Schubert’s Erlkönig to mind. The trumpet crescendo and the rumbling of bassoons and lower strings at the beginning of the first and third stanzas of the Matthews version and the occasional doubling of the vocal line by solo woodwind reflect the intensity of the poet’s bitterness without exaggerating it. Nocturne is a more characteristic inspiration, a dialogue between the voice and the right hand of the piano, the latter sensitively represented here by, in turn, solo oboe, horn, flute and piccolo in each of the three stanzas.
As Matthews himself has observed, the plucked strings of the third song, Mandoline, are implicit in Verlaine’s text, just as it is immediately clear, he says “that wooodwind should carry all the melody” in the setting of the same poet’s Clair de lune. It is worth noting, however, the delicacy of the woodwind reactions to the decorative element in the vocal line of Mandoline and the part played by the harp in echoing the sound of the lute carried by the masquers and bergamaskers in Clair de lune.
The triplet rhythms that sustain the momentum of Notre amour are confined in the original to the central register of the piano. In this version they are entrusted to the two clarinets until, at the climax of the song, they are transferred with a decisive change of colour to the harp. The eloquent left-hand counterpoint to the voice is carried by the cellos with occasional support from the bassoons, while the tiny interlude between the fourth and fifth stanzas is presented by unison flutes and oboes over bassoon arpeggios. Fascinated by Fauré’s paradoxical remarks on Green – which should be “slow moving” and yet “lively, passionate, almost out of breath” – Matthews prescribes Fauré’s Allegretto con moto tempo direction but steadies it by taking a three-note figure scarcely noticeable in the piano part of the original and presenting it on its several appearances as a tender exchange between clarinet and horn.
One of the more remarkable aspects of the original version of Les berceaux is its economical, basically two-line accompaniment shared between left hand and right, each with its own rhythmic pattern. Feeling perhaps that literally translated it would seem thin in orchestral terms, Matthews has enriched the texture in several ways: he consigns Fauré’s accompaniment mainly to clarinet and bass clarinet but varies its colouring and at the same time discreetly adds new material, like that of the flute line anticipating in the opening bars a phrase to come later in the work. He also doubles the voice in every line except the last, where it is left poignantly to itself. A berceuse and at the same time a barcarolle, Les berceaux is linked directly in the present version to a Postlude in F major based on Fauré’s late piano Barcarolle in E flat.
Gerald Larner © 2011
- Haydn
Programme note
Joseph Haydn (1732 - 1809)
Symphony No 96 'Miracle' (1791)Adagio
Andante
Menuetto and Trio
VivaceBefore electricity or gaslight, grand candle chandeliers were a glorious hazard of public places. They could look magnificent, sent sparks of light glinting off cleverly cut crystals and gave rooms a magical amber light which - so they say - could enhance even the most gruesome complexion better than powders and ointments. They could also drip candle-grease, or be blown out, or, worst of all, come tumbling to the floor in a crash of deadly, glittering, shards of flying glass. That is what happened when one of Haydn’s audiences was listening to his latest symphony. Miraculously, no one was hurt, hence the nickname. Sadly, though, there was some kind of mix up: the crash actually happened during Symphony No 102 - not this piece at all. It is a blessing in disguise, though, as pieces with nicknames tend to get performed more, and this very special piece deserves all the exposure it can get.
The special delight of this piece – like so many of Haydn’s symphonies – is sharing Haydn’s love of showcasing the gifts of individual musicians in his orchestra. He did this throughout his career by writing exquisitely tailored and brief solos for them. These often make for exceptionally difficult and fine music, as though he were throwing down a gauntlet to the player in question: ‘ show us what you can do with that!” At the same time, the solos capture on paper the techniques of some of the most remarkable instrumentalists he ever came across. One of the ways that Salomon (his entrepreneur) had tempted him to Britain was with the promise of a fine orchestra – and he was as good as his word. As this particular symphony was not one of Haydn’s first pieces for London, he had had time to get to know the band rather well. A dazzling violinist led: Viotti. The later symphonies hold many fleeting solos for him, and there is a lovely example here in the slow movement. Above all, the orchestra had fine wind players. It is hard to stress enough how rare this was in Europe at the time. Mozart’s work reveals that he was lucky to know some of the finest virtuosi of the age in Vienna, and in London Haydn was delighted to find more. Even so, few composers would trust a wind section enough to feature them as prominently as Haydn does in the second and third movements. They are often soloists in their own rights rather than supporting acts to the more dependable string section. In the later London pieces, he comes to trust them more and more - it is one of the things that gives these pieces their distinctive sound and something which Beethoven was to build on.
© Svend Brown
- conductor
- soprano
A heart-warming richness gives Sally Matthews’ voice the special star quality that makes her the soprano of choice for maestros the world over. With Ticciati, she brings Haydn’s scena – a touch of operatic high drama to match Stravinsky’s dance – then follows it with Fauré’s heartbreaking, melancholy songs in new orchestrations from Colin Matthews commissioned by the SCO. As for the Haydn… the name says it all: truly, this symphony is a miracle – one of his very finest.
Stravinsky: The Chamber Ballets II
- Haydn
Programme note
Joseph Haydn (1732–1809)
Scena di Berenice (H.XVIIa:10)Haydn’s compositions for his two triumphant visits to London included not only his last twelve symphonies, but also an opera and a number of smaller pieces both for instruments and for voice. Among them is this Scena, one of his finest vocal works, which was first performed at his final benefit concert on 4 May 1795. (The so-called 'London' Symphony, No 104, had its premiere in the same programme.) The piece was written for the celebrated prima donna Brigida Giorgi Banti, and her performance at the concert was generally admired – though Haydn wrote in his diary, in his delightful English (or perhaps recording a London witticism), that Signora Banti had sung "very scanty".
The text of Scena di Berenice is from Antigono, by the great librettist of baroque opera, Pietro Metastasio. The heroine, Berenice, has fallen in love with Demetrius, the son (by a previous marriage) of her husband Antigonus. Demetrius has decided to abandon Berenice and commit suicide, rather than dishonour the family name. Berenice struggles with her conflicting emotions, imagines her lover departing for the underworld, and calls on the gods to bring her life to an end.
Haydn set this text as a large-scale operatic scene, with a brilliant solo part, and a prominent role for the wind section of flute, oboes, clarinets, bassoons and horns in the accompanying orchestra. A striking and forward-looking feature of the work is its lack of a consistent key-centre, reflecting the heroine’s increasingly distracted state of mind. The opening recitative roves restlessly from key to key, though at Aspetta, anima bella it settles for a moment in C major for an oboe and bassoon melody of Gluck-like calm. The slow first aria, Non partir, bell’idol mio, in E major, breaks off for a further passage of recitative, leading to the fiery concluding aria, Perchè, se tanti siete, in F minor.
© Anthony Burton
- Stravinsky
Programme note
Igor Stravinsky (1882-1971)
Apollon musagète (1927-8)One of Stravinsky’s earliest so-called ‘neoclassical’ works written in the aftermath of the First World War was the ballet Pulcinella, commissioned by the impresario Sergey Diaghilev for the Ballets Russes, the company that had first brought Stravinsky to international fame with Firebird. Pulcinella was Stravinsky’s discovery of the past, as he later described it, "the epiphany through which the whole of my late work became possible. It was a backward look, of course – the first of many love affairs in that direction – but it was a look in the mirror, too." Despite its dependence on the music of the past, Pulcinella represents an important turning point in Stravinsky’s artistic development. It revealed to him the possibilities of an engagement with all kinds of earlier music in order to renew his own musical language. Crucial, though, for his neoclassical music was not the material he borrowed (which could come from anywhere) but his attitude to it. Everything he touched he made his own.
If Pulcinella was the epiphany, then Apollon musagète must surely be the apogee of Stravinsky’s neoclassicism. Commissioned by the American patron Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge in 1927, Stravinsky chose, as he explains in his autobiography, "to compose a ballet founded on moments or episodes in Greek mythology plastically interpreted by dancing of the so-called classical school". He wanted to create what he termed a 'ballet blanc’, a score of great purity and unity, in which violent contrasts were avoided and all elements were pared down to their simplest. Hence it is scored for strings alone and makes almost exclusive use of diatonic harmony (the equivalent of the ‘white notes’ on the piano keyboard). For George Balanchine, choreographer of the 1928 European premiere, the work was a revelation: "In its discipline and restraint, in its sustained oneness of tone and feeling… [Apollon] seemed to tell me that I could dare not to use everything, that I, too, could eliminate". The result was the perfect union of music and dance in the expression of pure, classical beauty.
In order to achieve this sense of order as symbolized by the Greek god Apollo, Stravinsky turned to poetry. Each dance explores a basic iambic (short–long) pattern, while the ‘Variation of Calliope’ (the muse of poetry) is headed by two lines from Boileau and takes the twelve-syllable lines of the alexandrine as its rhythmic model. Another means of order was achieved by alluding to the stateliness of French Baroque dances, such as the ouverture style of the opening ‘Birth of Apollo’ or the pavane-like second ‘Variation of Apollo’. The closing ‘Apotheosis’, in which Apollo leads the three Muses towards Parnassus, brings together the various rhythmic elements of the work in music that is not just serenely beautiful but also seems to speak of something deeper and darker, something beyond reason and order. Stravinsky looks back to ancient Greece but is ultimately, perhaps, only able to see the reflection of his own tragic age.
© Jonathan Cross
- Fauré
Programme note
Gabriel Fauré (1845-1924)
Seven Songs arranged for voice and orchestra by Colin Matthews (b 1946)
first performance
Fleur jetée Op.39 No.2 (1884)
Nocturne Op.43 No.2 (1886)
Mandoline Op.58 No.1 (1891)
Clair de lune (Menuet) Op.46 No.2 (1887)
Notre amour Op.23 No.2 (1879)
Green Op.58 No.3 (1891)
Les berceaux Op.23 No.1 (1879) –
Postlude
Colin Matthews’s extraordinay accomplishment as a composer derives in no small way from the active interest he has always taken in the music of others – from his early collaboration with Deryck Cooke in completing a performing version of Mahler’s unfinished Tenth Symphony and his work as assistant to Benjamin Britten to his recent masterly orchestration of Debussy’s 24 piano Preludes. Even so, in spite of the experience he has in this area, including a version for mezzo-soprano and chamber orchestra of Debussy’s Trois Poèmes de Stéphane Mallarmé, creating orchestral arrangements of Fauré songs cannot have been easy. The peculiarly intimate relationship between voice and piano characteristic of most of the best of Fauré’s mélodies is a quality that, as far as we know, the composer himself never attempted to translate into another medium.
Fleur jetée, the opening item in the selection made by Colin Matthews and Robin Ticciati, is peculiar among Fauré’s hundred or so songs for the violence of its expression, the insistently repeated semiquavers and the surging bass calling Schubert’s Erlkönig to mind. The trumpet crescendo and the rumbling of bassoons and lower strings at the beginning of the first and third stanzas of the Matthews version and the occasional doubling of the vocal line by solo woodwind reflect the intensity of the poet’s bitterness without exaggerating it. Nocturne is a more characteristic inspiration, a dialogue between the voice and the right hand of the piano, the latter sensitively represented here by, in turn, solo oboe, horn, flute and piccolo in each of the three stanzas.
As Matthews himself has observed, the plucked strings of the third song, Mandoline, are implicit in Verlaine’s text, just as it is immediately clear, he says “that wooodwind should carry all the melody” in the setting of the same poet’s Clair de lune. It is worth noting, however, the delicacy of the woodwind reactions to the decorative element in the vocal line of Mandoline and the part played by the harp in echoing the sound of the lute carried by the masquers and bergamaskers in Clair de lune.
The triplet rhythms that sustain the momentum of Notre amour are confined in the original to the central register of the piano. In this version they are entrusted to the two clarinets until, at the climax of the song, they are transferred with a decisive change of colour to the harp. The eloquent left-hand counterpoint to the voice is carried by the cellos with occasional support from the bassoons, while the tiny interlude between the fourth and fifth stanzas is presented by unison flutes and oboes over bassoon arpeggios. Fascinated by Fauré’s paradoxical remarks on Green – which should be “slow moving” and yet “lively, passionate, almost out of breath” – Matthews prescribes Fauré’s Allegretto con moto tempo direction but steadies it by taking a three-note figure scarcely noticeable in the piano part of the original and presenting it on its several appearances as a tender exchange between clarinet and horn.
One of the more remarkable aspects of the original version of Les berceaux is its economical, basically two-line accompaniment shared between left hand and right, each with its own rhythmic pattern. Feeling perhaps that literally translated it would seem thin in orchestral terms, Matthews has enriched the texture in several ways: he consigns Fauré’s accompaniment mainly to clarinet and bass clarinet but varies its colouring and at the same time discreetly adds new material, like that of the flute line anticipating in the opening bars a phrase to come later in the work. He also doubles the voice in every line except the last, where it is left poignantly to itself. A berceuse and at the same time a barcarolle, Les berceaux is linked directly in the present version to a Postlude in F major based on Fauré’s late piano Barcarolle in E flat.
Gerald Larner © 2011
- Haydn
Programme note
Joseph Haydn (1732 - 1809)
Symphony No 96 'Miracle' (1791)Adagio
Andante
Menuetto and Trio
VivaceBefore electricity or gaslight, grand candle chandeliers were a glorious hazard of public places. They could look magnificent, sent sparks of light glinting off cleverly cut crystals and gave rooms a magical amber light which - so they say - could enhance even the most gruesome complexion better than powders and ointments. They could also drip candle-grease, or be blown out, or, worst of all, come tumbling to the floor in a crash of deadly, glittering, shards of flying glass. That is what happened when one of Haydn’s audiences was listening to his latest symphony. Miraculously, no one was hurt, hence the nickname. Sadly, though, there was some kind of mix up: the crash actually happened during Symphony No 102 - not this piece at all. It is a blessing in disguise, though, as pieces with nicknames tend to get performed more, and this very special piece deserves all the exposure it can get.
The special delight of this piece – like so many of Haydn’s symphonies – is sharing Haydn’s love of showcasing the gifts of individual musicians in his orchestra. He did this throughout his career by writing exquisitely tailored and brief solos for them. These often make for exceptionally difficult and fine music, as though he were throwing down a gauntlet to the player in question: ‘ show us what you can do with that!” At the same time, the solos capture on paper the techniques of some of the most remarkable instrumentalists he ever came across. One of the ways that Salomon (his entrepreneur) had tempted him to Britain was with the promise of a fine orchestra – and he was as good as his word. As this particular symphony was not one of Haydn’s first pieces for London, he had had time to get to know the band rather well. A dazzling violinist led: Viotti. The later symphonies hold many fleeting solos for him, and there is a lovely example here in the slow movement. Above all, the orchestra had fine wind players. It is hard to stress enough how rare this was in Europe at the time. Mozart’s work reveals that he was lucky to know some of the finest virtuosi of the age in Vienna, and in London Haydn was delighted to find more. Even so, few composers would trust a wind section enough to feature them as prominently as Haydn does in the second and third movements. They are often soloists in their own rights rather than supporting acts to the more dependable string section. In the later London pieces, he comes to trust them more and more - it is one of the things that gives these pieces their distinctive sound and something which Beethoven was to build on.
© Svend Brown
- conductor
- soprano
A heart-warming richness gives Sally Matthews’ voice the special star quality that makes her the soprano of choice for maestros the world over. With Ticciati, she brings Haydn’s scena – a touch of operatic high drama to match Stravinsky’s dance – then follows it with Fauré’s heartbreaking, melancholy songs in new orchestrations from Colin Matthews commissioned by the SCO. As for the Haydn… the name says it all: truly, this symphony is a miracle – one of his very finest.
Related audio clip
Stravinsky - Apollon Musagète- excerpt
Jukka Pekka Saraste conducts the SCO in the Variation de Polymnie from Stravinsky's Apollon Musagète.
Stravinsky: The Chamber Ballets II
- Haydn
Programme note
Joseph Haydn (1732–1809)
Scena di Berenice (H.XVIIa:10)Haydn’s compositions for his two triumphant visits to London included not only his last twelve symphonies, but also an opera and a number of smaller pieces both for instruments and for voice. Among them is this Scena, one of his finest vocal works, which was first performed at his final benefit concert on 4 May 1795. (The so-called 'London' Symphony, No 104, had its premiere in the same programme.) The piece was written for the celebrated prima donna Brigida Giorgi Banti, and her performance at the concert was generally admired – though Haydn wrote in his diary, in his delightful English (or perhaps recording a London witticism), that Signora Banti had sung "very scanty".
The text of Scena di Berenice is from Antigono, by the great librettist of baroque opera, Pietro Metastasio. The heroine, Berenice, has fallen in love with Demetrius, the son (by a previous marriage) of her husband Antigonus. Demetrius has decided to abandon Berenice and commit suicide, rather than dishonour the family name. Berenice struggles with her conflicting emotions, imagines her lover departing for the underworld, and calls on the gods to bring her life to an end.
Haydn set this text as a large-scale operatic scene, with a brilliant solo part, and a prominent role for the wind section of flute, oboes, clarinets, bassoons and horns in the accompanying orchestra. A striking and forward-looking feature of the work is its lack of a consistent key-centre, reflecting the heroine’s increasingly distracted state of mind. The opening recitative roves restlessly from key to key, though at Aspetta, anima bella it settles for a moment in C major for an oboe and bassoon melody of Gluck-like calm. The slow first aria, Non partir, bell’idol mio, in E major, breaks off for a further passage of recitative, leading to the fiery concluding aria, Perchè, se tanti siete, in F minor.
© Anthony Burton
- Stravinsky
Programme note
Igor Stravinsky (1882-1971)
Apollon musagète (1927-8)One of Stravinsky’s earliest so-called ‘neoclassical’ works written in the aftermath of the First World War was the ballet Pulcinella, commissioned by the impresario Sergey Diaghilev for the Ballets Russes, the company that had first brought Stravinsky to international fame with Firebird. Pulcinella was Stravinsky’s discovery of the past, as he later described it, "the epiphany through which the whole of my late work became possible. It was a backward look, of course – the first of many love affairs in that direction – but it was a look in the mirror, too." Despite its dependence on the music of the past, Pulcinella represents an important turning point in Stravinsky’s artistic development. It revealed to him the possibilities of an engagement with all kinds of earlier music in order to renew his own musical language. Crucial, though, for his neoclassical music was not the material he borrowed (which could come from anywhere) but his attitude to it. Everything he touched he made his own.
If Pulcinella was the epiphany, then Apollon musagète must surely be the apogee of Stravinsky’s neoclassicism. Commissioned by the American patron Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge in 1927, Stravinsky chose, as he explains in his autobiography, "to compose a ballet founded on moments or episodes in Greek mythology plastically interpreted by dancing of the so-called classical school". He wanted to create what he termed a 'ballet blanc’, a score of great purity and unity, in which violent contrasts were avoided and all elements were pared down to their simplest. Hence it is scored for strings alone and makes almost exclusive use of diatonic harmony (the equivalent of the ‘white notes’ on the piano keyboard). For George Balanchine, choreographer of the 1928 European premiere, the work was a revelation: "In its discipline and restraint, in its sustained oneness of tone and feeling… [Apollon] seemed to tell me that I could dare not to use everything, that I, too, could eliminate". The result was the perfect union of music and dance in the expression of pure, classical beauty.
In order to achieve this sense of order as symbolized by the Greek god Apollo, Stravinsky turned to poetry. Each dance explores a basic iambic (short–long) pattern, while the ‘Variation of Calliope’ (the muse of poetry) is headed by two lines from Boileau and takes the twelve-syllable lines of the alexandrine as its rhythmic model. Another means of order was achieved by alluding to the stateliness of French Baroque dances, such as the ouverture style of the opening ‘Birth of Apollo’ or the pavane-like second ‘Variation of Apollo’. The closing ‘Apotheosis’, in which Apollo leads the three Muses towards Parnassus, brings together the various rhythmic elements of the work in music that is not just serenely beautiful but also seems to speak of something deeper and darker, something beyond reason and order. Stravinsky looks back to ancient Greece but is ultimately, perhaps, only able to see the reflection of his own tragic age.
© Jonathan Cross
- Fauré
Programme note
Gabriel Fauré (1845-1924)
Seven Songs arranged for voice and orchestra by Colin Matthews (b 1946)
first performance
Fleur jetée Op.39 No.2 (1884)
Nocturne Op.43 No.2 (1886)
Mandoline Op.58 No.1 (1891)
Clair de lune (Menuet) Op.46 No.2 (1887)
Notre amour Op.23 No.2 (1879)
Green Op.58 No.3 (1891)
Les berceaux Op.23 No.1 (1879) –
Postlude
Colin Matthews’s extraordinay accomplishment as a composer derives in no small way from the active interest he has always taken in the music of others – from his early collaboration with Deryck Cooke in completing a performing version of Mahler’s unfinished Tenth Symphony and his work as assistant to Benjamin Britten to his recent masterly orchestration of Debussy’s 24 piano Preludes. Even so, in spite of the experience he has in this area, including a version for mezzo-soprano and chamber orchestra of Debussy’s Trois Poèmes de Stéphane Mallarmé, creating orchestral arrangements of Fauré songs cannot have been easy. The peculiarly intimate relationship between voice and piano characteristic of most of the best of Fauré’s mélodies is a quality that, as far as we know, the composer himself never attempted to translate into another medium.
Fleur jetée, the opening item in the selection made by Colin Matthews and Robin Ticciati, is peculiar among Fauré’s hundred or so songs for the violence of its expression, the insistently repeated semiquavers and the surging bass calling Schubert’s Erlkönig to mind. The trumpet crescendo and the rumbling of bassoons and lower strings at the beginning of the first and third stanzas of the Matthews version and the occasional doubling of the vocal line by solo woodwind reflect the intensity of the poet’s bitterness without exaggerating it. Nocturne is a more characteristic inspiration, a dialogue between the voice and the right hand of the piano, the latter sensitively represented here by, in turn, solo oboe, horn, flute and piccolo in each of the three stanzas.
As Matthews himself has observed, the plucked strings of the third song, Mandoline, are implicit in Verlaine’s text, just as it is immediately clear, he says “that wooodwind should carry all the melody” in the setting of the same poet’s Clair de lune. It is worth noting, however, the delicacy of the woodwind reactions to the decorative element in the vocal line of Mandoline and the part played by the harp in echoing the sound of the lute carried by the masquers and bergamaskers in Clair de lune.
The triplet rhythms that sustain the momentum of Notre amour are confined in the original to the central register of the piano. In this version they are entrusted to the two clarinets until, at the climax of the song, they are transferred with a decisive change of colour to the harp. The eloquent left-hand counterpoint to the voice is carried by the cellos with occasional support from the bassoons, while the tiny interlude between the fourth and fifth stanzas is presented by unison flutes and oboes over bassoon arpeggios. Fascinated by Fauré’s paradoxical remarks on Green – which should be “slow moving” and yet “lively, passionate, almost out of breath” – Matthews prescribes Fauré’s Allegretto con moto tempo direction but steadies it by taking a three-note figure scarcely noticeable in the piano part of the original and presenting it on its several appearances as a tender exchange between clarinet and horn.
One of the more remarkable aspects of the original version of Les berceaux is its economical, basically two-line accompaniment shared between left hand and right, each with its own rhythmic pattern. Feeling perhaps that literally translated it would seem thin in orchestral terms, Matthews has enriched the texture in several ways: he consigns Fauré’s accompaniment mainly to clarinet and bass clarinet but varies its colouring and at the same time discreetly adds new material, like that of the flute line anticipating in the opening bars a phrase to come later in the work. He also doubles the voice in every line except the last, where it is left poignantly to itself. A berceuse and at the same time a barcarolle, Les berceaux is linked directly in the present version to a Postlude in F major based on Fauré’s late piano Barcarolle in E flat.
Gerald Larner © 2011
- Haydn
Programme note
Joseph Haydn (1732 - 1809)
Symphony No 96 'Miracle' (1791)Adagio
Andante
Menuetto and Trio
VivaceBefore electricity or gaslight, grand candle chandeliers were a glorious hazard of public places. They could look magnificent, sent sparks of light glinting off cleverly cut crystals and gave rooms a magical amber light which - so they say - could enhance even the most gruesome complexion better than powders and ointments. They could also drip candle-grease, or be blown out, or, worst of all, come tumbling to the floor in a crash of deadly, glittering, shards of flying glass. That is what happened when one of Haydn’s audiences was listening to his latest symphony. Miraculously, no one was hurt, hence the nickname. Sadly, though, there was some kind of mix up: the crash actually happened during Symphony No 102 - not this piece at all. It is a blessing in disguise, though, as pieces with nicknames tend to get performed more, and this very special piece deserves all the exposure it can get.
The special delight of this piece – like so many of Haydn’s symphonies – is sharing Haydn’s love of showcasing the gifts of individual musicians in his orchestra. He did this throughout his career by writing exquisitely tailored and brief solos for them. These often make for exceptionally difficult and fine music, as though he were throwing down a gauntlet to the player in question: ‘ show us what you can do with that!” At the same time, the solos capture on paper the techniques of some of the most remarkable instrumentalists he ever came across. One of the ways that Salomon (his entrepreneur) had tempted him to Britain was with the promise of a fine orchestra – and he was as good as his word. As this particular symphony was not one of Haydn’s first pieces for London, he had had time to get to know the band rather well. A dazzling violinist led: Viotti. The later symphonies hold many fleeting solos for him, and there is a lovely example here in the slow movement. Above all, the orchestra had fine wind players. It is hard to stress enough how rare this was in Europe at the time. Mozart’s work reveals that he was lucky to know some of the finest virtuosi of the age in Vienna, and in London Haydn was delighted to find more. Even so, few composers would trust a wind section enough to feature them as prominently as Haydn does in the second and third movements. They are often soloists in their own rights rather than supporting acts to the more dependable string section. In the later London pieces, he comes to trust them more and more - it is one of the things that gives these pieces their distinctive sound and something which Beethoven was to build on.
© Svend Brown
- conductor
- soprano
A heart-warming richness gives Sally Matthews’ voice the special star quality that makes her the soprano of choice for maestros the world over. With Ticciati, she brings Haydn’s scena – a touch of operatic high drama to match Stravinsky’s dance – then follows it with Fauré’s heartbreaking, melancholy songs in new orchestrations from Colin Matthews commissioned by the SCO. As for the Haydn… the name says it all: truly, this symphony is a miracle – one of his very finest.
This performance will recorded for broadcast by BBC Radio 3's Performance on 3.
Related audio clip
Stravinsky - Apollon Musagète- excerpt
Jukka Pekka Saraste conducts the SCO in the Variation de Polymnie from Stravinsky's Apollon Musagète.
Prokofiev 'Classical' Symphony
- Prokofiev
Programme note
Sergei Prokofiev (1891-1953)
Symphony No 1 in D major, Op 25 'Classical' (1917)Allegro
Larghetto
Gavotte: Non troppo allegro
Finale: Molto vivace
Prokofiev claimed that his music possessed five principal manners: the classical, the lyric, the modern, the motoric, the grotesque. Though it is quite obvious to which category the first of his seven symphonies belongs, the classicism announced by its title is more a matter of witty pastiche than of anything more creatively ambitious. The work is not, despite Prokofiev’s declared aims for it, a symphony such as Haydn might have written, had he been still alive to do so. Haydn, by then, would have been writing very differently from (and probably more Mahlerishly than) the composer of the twelve superb London symphonies. Prokofiev’s own music in any case was of a sort that seethed with change. Having reached a state of ferocious grotesquerie in his Suggestion Diabolique of 1908, he anticipated the “ten days that shook the world” in 1917 with the airy lyricism of the First Violin Concerto in the summer of that year. In the dissonant context of his Scythian Suite, which in 1914 had been his answer to Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring, his Classical Symphony was just a joke, albeit an extremely good one, which today’s audiences continue to relish.If Prokofiev’s intentions in writing this were really, as he later admitted, to “tease the geese,” then he succeeded admirably. Teasing was always a Prokofiev speciality. So although the music could never be mistaken for Haydn, nor for anything other than what it was, its sense of comedy proved unmistakable and its pellucid use of a classical-sized orchestra marvellously adept. Its popularity was assured from the start, and the work soon established itself as a classic in its own right.
It begins cleverly, as Mozart or Haydn would instantly have recognised, with a fake Mannheim rocket - a call to attention pioneered by Bavaria’s brilliant eighteenth-century orchestra based in that city. The main theme, deftly unfurled, leads to a second theme involving neat grace-notes from the violins in their upper register and soft downward leaps requiring the most precise articulation. Mannheim rockets continue to explode while Prokofiev assembles (with some modern modulations) his equivalent of a classical first movement, making the most of his dapper material until the music has run its traditional course.
The machine-tooled angularity of the slow movement, with its quietly tripping rhythm, sounds very much the cool essence of Prokofiev at a time when Russia was in political tumoil. A Prokofievian gavotte is substituted, with further angularity, for the expected classical minuet, but quickly makes way for a nimble finale which fizzes along with unswerving momentum.
© Conrad Wilson
- Mozart
Programme note
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756-1791)
Piano Concerto in C major, K503 (1786)Allegro maestoso
Andante
AllegrettoOf all Mozart’s piano concertos, this is the biggest, grandest, most sonorous. Separating itself from the tragic manner of its immediate predecessor in C minor, K491, it represents the C major summit of the 30-year-old composer's Viennese style. The two piano concertos that were still to come sound in comparison more like transitional works leading who knows where. All that can be said of them is that the so-called Coronation Concerto, K537, contains ornate and glittering foretastes of Chopin and that the poignant, intimate B flat major, K595, predicts a new purification of his style.
If the great C major concerto - the last of four in that key - anticipates anybody, it is usually said to be Beethoven, particularly the Beethoven of the C major and C minor (Nos 1 and 3) piano concertos, which employ similar march rhythms, punchy chords, sharp contrasts between major and minor. Yet to perform Mozart’s concerto as if it were Beethoven would be a serious mistake. The music is Mozart through and through, in spite of its use (not for the first time) of martial trumpets and drums, and, in the first movement, blocks of chords rather than flowing lines. Perhaps the sheer scale of the music has slightly acted against its popularity. Eric Blom damaged the cause of this concerto by calling it "‘frigid and unoriginal" in his long-established Master Musician study of the composer. Donald Francis Tovey and Charles Rosen, on the other hand, deemed it worthy of the deepest, most appreciative analysis.
It is a masterpiece not only magisterial but moving – broad and splendid, yet keenly detailed, in the first movement; touchingly chaste in the operatic sweetness of the slow movement, with its huge, expressively vocal leaps in the solo part; and filled with gleams and shadows in the animated gavotte-like finale. Yet this is not, on the whole, one of Mozart's most obviously operatic concertos. Its Beethovenian anticipations are quite conspicuous. Even the predominant four-note rhythm of the first movement was to be employed by Beethoven in the first movement of his Fourth Piano Concerto and, more strenuously, in the first movement of his Fifth Symphony.
It is in the final rondo, however, that we encounter the work's most magical moment, for here, amid all the Mozartian wit, the music is suddenly filled for a page or two with a wistful sense of life's fragile beauty and transitoriness. It’s a passage which, once identified by the listener, always stands out. First, after a few brisk chords from the orchestra, the piano quite unemphatically plays a flowing phrase, answered by the woodwind. Then the piano extends the phrase, and the woodwind extend the repetition. That is all. There is no more to it than that. The phrase never returns. But Mozart wrote nothing better, lovelier, or more piercing in its combination of joy and sadness than this brief aside, confirming things - the tiny sighs amid the big declamations of the first movement, the melancholy behind the descending notes of the andante - that have been only hinted at earlier in the concerto.
© Conrad Wilson
- Lotti
Programme note
Antonio Lotti (1667 – 1740)
CrucifixusAs an instrumental prelude to Dmitri Shostakovich’s Chamber Symphony, Antonio Lotti’s Crucifixus, originally for eight voices and continuo, is performed this evening in a simple, faithful transcription for string orchestra. Composed in Dresden, during the years 1717-1719, when Lotti worked at the court of the Elector of Saxony, Friedrich Augustus I, the Crucifixus is the Venetian master’s best-known work. Tonight it is taken out of its liturgical context – it was part of a complete Credo setting – to serve as a symbol both of the majesty of baroque Dresden and of the devastation the city suffered in February 1945, when fifteen square miles of its centre were destroyed and many thousands of its citizens killed by a firestorm, the result of aerial bombing. Reconstruction was under way when Shostakovich visited the city in 1960 but its scars, visible and invisible, deeply affected the composer. Although Lotti’s music segues seamlessly into Shostakovich’s, no suggestion is intended that Shostakovich knew Lotti’s Crucifixus.
© Andrew Manze
- Shostakovich
Programme note
Dmitri Shostakovich (1906-1976)
Chamber Symphony No 1 in C minor, Op 110a (1960) [arr. Barshai]Largo
Allegro molto
Allegretto
Largo
LargoShostakovich described his fifteen symphonies as tombstones, but he could have said the same of his fifteen string quartets. Each of these - though some of them more chillingly than others - examines mortality from a different angle, darkly, bleakly, humorously, sardonically, angrily, fearfully, with profound resignation, and by way of what may sound like morbid recollections of some of the composer’s own previous works.
Most of these elements appear or reappear in his Eighth Quartet, to be played this evening in the transcription for string orchestra by Rudolf Barshai, one of Shostakovich’s former pupils, prepared with the composer’s approval under the title of Chamber Symphony No 1 in C minor.
Written in 1960 during a visit to war-torn Dresden, the quartet was triggered - or so it seemed - by the composer’s memories of his own shattered St Petersburg. Dedicated, he said, to the Memory of Victims of Fascism, the work’s vivid portrayals of brutality and sorrow have understandably established it as the most famous of all his quartets, but repetition, not least in Barshai’s searing arrangement, has neither weakened its effect nor dimmed its message. Yet the message is not quite what it first seemed. Far from depicting the destruction of Dresden, as used to be thought, the work - like so many others of its kind by Shostakovich - is really a veiled indictment of Stalinist and post-Stalinist Russia.
Unlike Bartok’s quartets, Shostakovich’s were not intentionally vanguard works, though they explored territory previously uncharted in terms of pungent musical description and emotionally political comment. The composer’s own nervy presence at the centre of the Eighth Quartet is noted by his use of the DSCH motif - the initials of his own name in German transliteration, starkly represented by the notes D, E flat, C, B. This four-note signature, of a sort previously employed by Bach and Schumann, is first heard right at the start of the first movement as the melancholy basis of a slow fugal elegy.
Into this atmosphere of restrained mourning bursts the only really fast music in these five interlinked movements, a ferociously incisive portrait of mechanised inhumanity, incorporating various musical self-quotations alongside the DSCH motif. Then, as a sort of intermezzo, comes a satirical, spectral waltz, leading to the double slow movement that brings the work to a close.
These final nine-or-so minutes of almost static music, starting with a harsh, frequently repeated rat-tat-tat rhythm, form the work’s sombre climax. One of the quotations takes the form of a Russian convict song entitled Exhausted by the Hardship of Prison, along with a moving reference, high in the cellos, to the Siberian fourth act of Shostakovich’s opera Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk. In the end, the music recedes into eloquent silence.
© Conrad Wilson
- conductor
- piano
Few programmes this Season embrace greater emotional extremes than this. Opening with the extrovert showmanship of a youthful Prokofiev, it closes with the darkest night of the older Shostakovich’s soul. Strong stuff – sure to offer a stirring experience. Mozart’s concerto is among his grandest, and it is played here by
a brilliant young Swiss making his SCO debut.
To complete the programme, Andrew Manze’s own arrangement of a timeless lament: Lotti’s Crucifixus is one of the most beautiful pieces in all music.
Prokofiev 'Classical' Symphony
- Prokofiev
Programme note
Sergei Prokofiev (1891-1953)
Symphony No 1 in D major, Op 25 'Classical' (1917)Allegro
Larghetto
Gavotte: Non troppo allegro
Finale: Molto vivace
Prokofiev claimed that his music possessed five principal manners: the classical, the lyric, the modern, the motoric, the grotesque. Though it is quite obvious to which category the first of his seven symphonies belongs, the classicism announced by its title is more a matter of witty pastiche than of anything more creatively ambitious. The work is not, despite Prokofiev’s declared aims for it, a symphony such as Haydn might have written, had he been still alive to do so. Haydn, by then, would have been writing very differently from (and probably more Mahlerishly than) the composer of the twelve superb London symphonies. Prokofiev’s own music in any case was of a sort that seethed with change. Having reached a state of ferocious grotesquerie in his Suggestion Diabolique of 1908, he anticipated the “ten days that shook the world” in 1917 with the airy lyricism of the First Violin Concerto in the summer of that year. In the dissonant context of his Scythian Suite, which in 1914 had been his answer to Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring, his Classical Symphony was just a joke, albeit an extremely good one, which today’s audiences continue to relish.If Prokofiev’s intentions in writing this were really, as he later admitted, to “tease the geese,” then he succeeded admirably. Teasing was always a Prokofiev speciality. So although the music could never be mistaken for Haydn, nor for anything other than what it was, its sense of comedy proved unmistakable and its pellucid use of a classical-sized orchestra marvellously adept. Its popularity was assured from the start, and the work soon established itself as a classic in its own right.
It begins cleverly, as Mozart or Haydn would instantly have recognised, with a fake Mannheim rocket - a call to attention pioneered by Bavaria’s brilliant eighteenth-century orchestra based in that city. The main theme, deftly unfurled, leads to a second theme involving neat grace-notes from the violins in their upper register and soft downward leaps requiring the most precise articulation. Mannheim rockets continue to explode while Prokofiev assembles (with some modern modulations) his equivalent of a classical first movement, making the most of his dapper material until the music has run its traditional course.
The machine-tooled angularity of the slow movement, with its quietly tripping rhythm, sounds very much the cool essence of Prokofiev at a time when Russia was in political tumoil. A Prokofievian gavotte is substituted, with further angularity, for the expected classical minuet, but quickly makes way for a nimble finale which fizzes along with unswerving momentum.
© Conrad Wilson
- Mozart
Programme note
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756-1791)
Piano Concerto in C major, K503 (1786)Allegro maestoso
Andante
AllegrettoOf all Mozart’s piano concertos, this is the biggest, grandest, most sonorous. Separating itself from the tragic manner of its immediate predecessor in C minor, K491, it represents the C major summit of the 30-year-old composer's Viennese style. The two piano concertos that were still to come sound in comparison more like transitional works leading who knows where. All that can be said of them is that the so-called Coronation Concerto, K537, contains ornate and glittering foretastes of Chopin and that the poignant, intimate B flat major, K595, predicts a new purification of his style.
If the great C major concerto - the last of four in that key - anticipates anybody, it is usually said to be Beethoven, particularly the Beethoven of the C major and C minor (Nos 1 and 3) piano concertos, which employ similar march rhythms, punchy chords, sharp contrasts between major and minor. Yet to perform Mozart’s concerto as if it were Beethoven would be a serious mistake. The music is Mozart through and through, in spite of its use (not for the first time) of martial trumpets and drums, and, in the first movement, blocks of chords rather than flowing lines. Perhaps the sheer scale of the music has slightly acted against its popularity. Eric Blom damaged the cause of this concerto by calling it "‘frigid and unoriginal" in his long-established Master Musician study of the composer. Donald Francis Tovey and Charles Rosen, on the other hand, deemed it worthy of the deepest, most appreciative analysis.
It is a masterpiece not only magisterial but moving – broad and splendid, yet keenly detailed, in the first movement; touchingly chaste in the operatic sweetness of the slow movement, with its huge, expressively vocal leaps in the solo part; and filled with gleams and shadows in the animated gavotte-like finale. Yet this is not, on the whole, one of Mozart's most obviously operatic concertos. Its Beethovenian anticipations are quite conspicuous. Even the predominant four-note rhythm of the first movement was to be employed by Beethoven in the first movement of his Fourth Piano Concerto and, more strenuously, in the first movement of his Fifth Symphony.
It is in the final rondo, however, that we encounter the work's most magical moment, for here, amid all the Mozartian wit, the music is suddenly filled for a page or two with a wistful sense of life's fragile beauty and transitoriness. It’s a passage which, once identified by the listener, always stands out. First, after a few brisk chords from the orchestra, the piano quite unemphatically plays a flowing phrase, answered by the woodwind. Then the piano extends the phrase, and the woodwind extend the repetition. That is all. There is no more to it than that. The phrase never returns. But Mozart wrote nothing better, lovelier, or more piercing in its combination of joy and sadness than this brief aside, confirming things - the tiny sighs amid the big declamations of the first movement, the melancholy behind the descending notes of the andante - that have been only hinted at earlier in the concerto.
© Conrad Wilson
- Lotti
Programme note
Antonio Lotti (1667 – 1740)
CrucifixusAs an instrumental prelude to Dmitri Shostakovich’s Chamber Symphony, Antonio Lotti’s Crucifixus, originally for eight voices and continuo, is performed this evening in a simple, faithful transcription for string orchestra. Composed in Dresden, during the years 1717-1719, when Lotti worked at the court of the Elector of Saxony, Friedrich Augustus I, the Crucifixus is the Venetian master’s best-known work. Tonight it is taken out of its liturgical context – it was part of a complete Credo setting – to serve as a symbol both of the majesty of baroque Dresden and of the devastation the city suffered in February 1945, when fifteen square miles of its centre were destroyed and many thousands of its citizens killed by a firestorm, the result of aerial bombing. Reconstruction was under way when Shostakovich visited the city in 1960 but its scars, visible and invisible, deeply affected the composer. Although Lotti’s music segues seamlessly into Shostakovich’s, no suggestion is intended that Shostakovich knew Lotti’s Crucifixus.
© Andrew Manze
- Shostakovich
Programme note
Dmitri Shostakovich (1906-1976)
Chamber Symphony No 1 in C minor, Op 110a (1960) [arr. Barshai]Largo
Allegro molto
Allegretto
Largo
LargoShostakovich described his fifteen symphonies as tombstones, but he could have said the same of his fifteen string quartets. Each of these - though some of them more chillingly than others - examines mortality from a different angle, darkly, bleakly, humorously, sardonically, angrily, fearfully, with profound resignation, and by way of what may sound like morbid recollections of some of the composer’s own previous works.
Most of these elements appear or reappear in his Eighth Quartet, to be played this evening in the transcription for string orchestra by Rudolf Barshai, one of Shostakovich’s former pupils, prepared with the composer’s approval under the title of Chamber Symphony No 1 in C minor.
Written in 1960 during a visit to war-torn Dresden, the quartet was triggered - or so it seemed - by the composer’s memories of his own shattered St Petersburg. Dedicated, he said, to the Memory of Victims of Fascism, the work’s vivid portrayals of brutality and sorrow have understandably established it as the most famous of all his quartets, but repetition, not least in Barshai’s searing arrangement, has neither weakened its effect nor dimmed its message. Yet the message is not quite what it first seemed. Far from depicting the destruction of Dresden, as used to be thought, the work - like so many others of its kind by Shostakovich - is really a veiled indictment of Stalinist and post-Stalinist Russia.
Unlike Bartok’s quartets, Shostakovich’s were not intentionally vanguard works, though they explored territory previously uncharted in terms of pungent musical description and emotionally political comment. The composer’s own nervy presence at the centre of the Eighth Quartet is noted by his use of the DSCH motif - the initials of his own name in German transliteration, starkly represented by the notes D, E flat, C, B. This four-note signature, of a sort previously employed by Bach and Schumann, is first heard right at the start of the first movement as the melancholy basis of a slow fugal elegy.
Into this atmosphere of restrained mourning bursts the only really fast music in these five interlinked movements, a ferociously incisive portrait of mechanised inhumanity, incorporating various musical self-quotations alongside the DSCH motif. Then, as a sort of intermezzo, comes a satirical, spectral waltz, leading to the double slow movement that brings the work to a close.
These final nine-or-so minutes of almost static music, starting with a harsh, frequently repeated rat-tat-tat rhythm, form the work’s sombre climax. One of the quotations takes the form of a Russian convict song entitled Exhausted by the Hardship of Prison, along with a moving reference, high in the cellos, to the Siberian fourth act of Shostakovich’s opera Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk. In the end, the music recedes into eloquent silence.
© Conrad Wilson
- conductor
- piano
Few programmes this Season embrace greater emotional extremes than this. Opening with the extrovert showmanship of a youthful Prokofiev, it closes with the darkest night of the older Shostakovich’s soul. Strong stuff – sure to offer a stirring experience. Mozart’s concerto is among his grandest, and it is played here by
a brilliant young Swiss making his SCO debut.
To complete the programme, Andrew Manze’s own arrangement of a timeless lament: Lotti’s Crucifixus is one of the most beautiful pieces in all music.
Prokofiev 'Classical' Symphony
- Prokofiev
Programme note
Sergei Prokofiev (1891-1953)
Symphony No 1 in D major, Op 25 'Classical' (1917)Allegro
Larghetto
Gavotte: Non troppo allegro
Finale: Molto vivace
Prokofiev claimed that his music possessed five principal manners: the classical, the lyric, the modern, the motoric, the grotesque. Though it is quite obvious to which category the first of his seven symphonies belongs, the classicism announced by its title is more a matter of witty pastiche than of anything more creatively ambitious. The work is not, despite Prokofiev’s declared aims for it, a symphony such as Haydn might have written, had he been still alive to do so. Haydn, by then, would have been writing very differently from (and probably more Mahlerishly than) the composer of the twelve superb London symphonies. Prokofiev’s own music in any case was of a sort that seethed with change. Having reached a state of ferocious grotesquerie in his Suggestion Diabolique of 1908, he anticipated the “ten days that shook the world” in 1917 with the airy lyricism of the First Violin Concerto in the summer of that year. In the dissonant context of his Scythian Suite, which in 1914 had been his answer to Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring, his Classical Symphony was just a joke, albeit an extremely good one, which today’s audiences continue to relish.If Prokofiev’s intentions in writing this were really, as he later admitted, to “tease the geese,” then he succeeded admirably. Teasing was always a Prokofiev speciality. So although the music could never be mistaken for Haydn, nor for anything other than what it was, its sense of comedy proved unmistakable and its pellucid use of a classical-sized orchestra marvellously adept. Its popularity was assured from the start, and the work soon established itself as a classic in its own right.
It begins cleverly, as Mozart or Haydn would instantly have recognised, with a fake Mannheim rocket - a call to attention pioneered by Bavaria’s brilliant eighteenth-century orchestra based in that city. The main theme, deftly unfurled, leads to a second theme involving neat grace-notes from the violins in their upper register and soft downward leaps requiring the most precise articulation. Mannheim rockets continue to explode while Prokofiev assembles (with some modern modulations) his equivalent of a classical first movement, making the most of his dapper material until the music has run its traditional course.
The machine-tooled angularity of the slow movement, with its quietly tripping rhythm, sounds very much the cool essence of Prokofiev at a time when Russia was in political tumoil. A Prokofievian gavotte is substituted, with further angularity, for the expected classical minuet, but quickly makes way for a nimble finale which fizzes along with unswerving momentum.
© Conrad Wilson
- Mozart
Programme note
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756-1791)
Piano Concerto in C major, K503 (1786)Allegro maestoso
Andante
AllegrettoOf all Mozart’s piano concertos, this is the biggest, grandest, most sonorous. Separating itself from the tragic manner of its immediate predecessor in C minor, K491, it represents the C major summit of the 30-year-old composer's Viennese style. The two piano concertos that were still to come sound in comparison more like transitional works leading who knows where. All that can be said of them is that the so-called Coronation Concerto, K537, contains ornate and glittering foretastes of Chopin and that the poignant, intimate B flat major, K595, predicts a new purification of his style.
If the great C major concerto - the last of four in that key - anticipates anybody, it is usually said to be Beethoven, particularly the Beethoven of the C major and C minor (Nos 1 and 3) piano concertos, which employ similar march rhythms, punchy chords, sharp contrasts between major and minor. Yet to perform Mozart’s concerto as if it were Beethoven would be a serious mistake. The music is Mozart through and through, in spite of its use (not for the first time) of martial trumpets and drums, and, in the first movement, blocks of chords rather than flowing lines. Perhaps the sheer scale of the music has slightly acted against its popularity. Eric Blom damaged the cause of this concerto by calling it "‘frigid and unoriginal" in his long-established Master Musician study of the composer. Donald Francis Tovey and Charles Rosen, on the other hand, deemed it worthy of the deepest, most appreciative analysis.
It is a masterpiece not only magisterial but moving – broad and splendid, yet keenly detailed, in the first movement; touchingly chaste in the operatic sweetness of the slow movement, with its huge, expressively vocal leaps in the solo part; and filled with gleams and shadows in the animated gavotte-like finale. Yet this is not, on the whole, one of Mozart's most obviously operatic concertos. Its Beethovenian anticipations are quite conspicuous. Even the predominant four-note rhythm of the first movement was to be employed by Beethoven in the first movement of his Fourth Piano Concerto and, more strenuously, in the first movement of his Fifth Symphony.
It is in the final rondo, however, that we encounter the work's most magical moment, for here, amid all the Mozartian wit, the music is suddenly filled for a page or two with a wistful sense of life's fragile beauty and transitoriness. It’s a passage which, once identified by the listener, always stands out. First, after a few brisk chords from the orchestra, the piano quite unemphatically plays a flowing phrase, answered by the woodwind. Then the piano extends the phrase, and the woodwind extend the repetition. That is all. There is no more to it than that. The phrase never returns. But Mozart wrote nothing better, lovelier, or more piercing in its combination of joy and sadness than this brief aside, confirming things - the tiny sighs amid the big declamations of the first movement, the melancholy behind the descending notes of the andante - that have been only hinted at earlier in the concerto.
© Conrad Wilson
- Lotti
Programme note
Antonio Lotti (1667 – 1740)
CrucifixusAs an instrumental prelude to Dmitri Shostakovich’s Chamber Symphony, Antonio Lotti’s Crucifixus, originally for eight voices and continuo, is performed this evening in a simple, faithful transcription for string orchestra. Composed in Dresden, during the years 1717-1719, when Lotti worked at the court of the Elector of Saxony, Friedrich Augustus I, the Crucifixus is the Venetian master’s best-known work. Tonight it is taken out of its liturgical context – it was part of a complete Credo setting – to serve as a symbol both of the majesty of baroque Dresden and of the devastation the city suffered in February 1945, when fifteen square miles of its centre were destroyed and many thousands of its citizens killed by a firestorm, the result of aerial bombing. Reconstruction was under way when Shostakovich visited the city in 1960 but its scars, visible and invisible, deeply affected the composer. Although Lotti’s music segues seamlessly into Shostakovich’s, no suggestion is intended that Shostakovich knew Lotti’s Crucifixus.
© Andrew Manze
- Shostakovich
Programme note
Dmitri Shostakovich (1906-1976)
Chamber Symphony No 1 in C minor, Op 110a (1960) [arr. Barshai]Largo
Allegro molto
Allegretto
Largo
LargoShostakovich described his fifteen symphonies as tombstones, but he could have said the same of his fifteen string quartets. Each of these - though some of them more chillingly than others - examines mortality from a different angle, darkly, bleakly, humorously, sardonically, angrily, fearfully, with profound resignation, and by way of what may sound like morbid recollections of some of the composer’s own previous works.
Most of these elements appear or reappear in his Eighth Quartet, to be played this evening in the transcription for string orchestra by Rudolf Barshai, one of Shostakovich’s former pupils, prepared with the composer’s approval under the title of Chamber Symphony No 1 in C minor.
Written in 1960 during a visit to war-torn Dresden, the quartet was triggered - or so it seemed - by the composer’s memories of his own shattered St Petersburg. Dedicated, he said, to the Memory of Victims of Fascism, the work’s vivid portrayals of brutality and sorrow have understandably established it as the most famous of all his quartets, but repetition, not least in Barshai’s searing arrangement, has neither weakened its effect nor dimmed its message. Yet the message is not quite what it first seemed. Far from depicting the destruction of Dresden, as used to be thought, the work - like so many others of its kind by Shostakovich - is really a veiled indictment of Stalinist and post-Stalinist Russia.
Unlike Bartok’s quartets, Shostakovich’s were not intentionally vanguard works, though they explored territory previously uncharted in terms of pungent musical description and emotionally political comment. The composer’s own nervy presence at the centre of the Eighth Quartet is noted by his use of the DSCH motif - the initials of his own name in German transliteration, starkly represented by the notes D, E flat, C, B. This four-note signature, of a sort previously employed by Bach and Schumann, is first heard right at the start of the first movement as the melancholy basis of a slow fugal elegy.
Into this atmosphere of restrained mourning bursts the only really fast music in these five interlinked movements, a ferociously incisive portrait of mechanised inhumanity, incorporating various musical self-quotations alongside the DSCH motif. Then, as a sort of intermezzo, comes a satirical, spectral waltz, leading to the double slow movement that brings the work to a close.
These final nine-or-so minutes of almost static music, starting with a harsh, frequently repeated rat-tat-tat rhythm, form the work’s sombre climax. One of the quotations takes the form of a Russian convict song entitled Exhausted by the Hardship of Prison, along with a moving reference, high in the cellos, to the Siberian fourth act of Shostakovich’s opera Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk. In the end, the music recedes into eloquent silence.
© Conrad Wilson
- conductor
- piano
Few programmes this Season embrace greater emotional extremes than this. Opening with the extrovert showmanship of a youthful Prokofiev, it closes with the darkest night of the older Shostakovich’s soul. Strong stuff – sure to offer a stirring experience. Mozart’s concerto is among his grandest, and it is played here by
a brilliant young Swiss making his SCO debut.
To complete the programme, Andrew Manze’s own arrangement of a timeless lament: Lotti’s Crucifixus is one of the most beautiful pieces in all music.
Chamber Concert
- Schumann
Programme note
Robert Schumann (1810-1856)
Kreisleriana, Phantasien für das Pianoforte, Op 16 (1838)Ausserst bewegt (Extremely moved)
Sehr inning und nicht zu rasch (Very inwardly and not too quickly)
Sehr aufgeregt (Very agitated)
Sehr langsam (very slowly)
Sehr lebhaft (Very lively)
Sehr langsam (Very slowly)
Sehr rasch (Very fast)
Schnell und spielend (Fast and playful)In Kreisleriana, Schumann pays tribute to the novelist ETA Hoffmann and his most famous literary creation, Kapellmeister Kreisler; a musician in perpetual emotional turmoil, with an artistic soul that could never make peace with the Philistine society he had to serve. Hoffman was one of the towering figures of the German Romantic movement and his writings were enormously influential. Along with Schumann’s Kreisleriana, his fiction provided the source for Tchaikovsky’s Nutcracker; Delibes’s Coppelia and Offenbach’s Tales of Hoffmann.
Much of Schumann’s piano music was written before his marriage, in 1840, to Clara Wieck, a match that her father, once Schumann’s piano teacher, had done all he could to avert. Kreisleriana dates from 1838, when Clara was only nineteen and still two years away from the age when her father’s objections could no longer prevent her from marrying. “There is so much music in me now, and such beautiful melody!” Schumann wrote, “I have written a whole sheaf of new things, and I shall call them Kreisleriana. You and the thought of you play the principal role in them and I shall dedicate them to you – yes to you and to no one else. You will smile so sweetly when you discover yourself in them. My music now seems to be so simply and wonderfully intricate, so eloquently from the heart. That’s the way it affects everyone for whom I play it – which I enjoy doing quite frequently!”
In his diary Schumann wrote: “Three wonderful spring days spent waiting for a letter (presumably from Clara) and then did the Kreisleriana in four days. Whole new worlds are opening up to me!” Musicologists now doubt that the piece was composed in four feverish days, as Schumann relates, but one can almost believe it, given its wild and manic nature. Perhaps Kreisleriana did seem a touch too wild for Clara, and her less-than-enthusiastic reaction to it may explain why Schumann did not dedicate the work to her, as he had originally planned, but “To his friend, Frederic Chopin”. Clara may have been genuinely bewildered since any comparison between her and Kreisler could hardly be flattering, bearing in mind Hoffman’s original title 'Lucid Intervals of an Insane Musician'.
The eight short movements that constitute Kreisleriana express a dazzling variety of moods. Passionate, dreamy and impulsive; there are moments of great drama and moments of devout serenity. Songlike simplicity contrasts with sections of contrapuntal writing in the manner of Schumann’s revered JS Bach. Above all, the score is a formidable test of the pianist’s technique and musical imagination.
© Stephen Strugnell
- Rasmussen
- Beethoven
Programme note
Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827)
Quintet in E flat, Op 16, for piano, oboe, clarinet, horn and bassoonGrave: Allegro ma non troppo
Andante cantabile
Rondo: Allegro, ma non troppoDating from the mid-1790s, when Beethoven was still working in the shadow of Mozart and Haydn, the Quintet for Piano and Winds shows the undeniable influence of the two elder composers, as do the six Op 18 String Quartets he was composing at about the same time. Yet, for all this, Beethoven was already beginning to assert his own personality, not least through the occasional violent contrasts in dynamics. Although the wind writing in particular strongly recalls Mozart’s wind serenades, the ever-forceful piano style anticipates Beethoven’s later keyboard works.
Attending an early performance of Beethoven’s Quintet was the composer’s friend, the violinist Franz Anton Ries. That evening, Beethoven both played the piano and frayed the nerves of the accompanying wind quintet, as Ries later recounted: “At a pause just before a return to the main theme in the finale Beethoven suddenly began to improvise, took the rondo as a theme and entertained himself and the others; but not his associates. They were displeased and Friedrich Ramm (the oboist) enraged. It really was comical to see these gentlemen waiting expectantly every moment to go on, continually lifting their instruments to their lips, then quietly putting them down again. At last Beethoven was satisfied and dropped again into the rondo. The entire audience was delighted.”
Although there are echoes of Haydn in the more light-hearted aspects of the work, particularly in the brilliance of the finale – whether or not the pianist is tempted to improvise – it is Mozart’s Quintet, for the same combination of instruments and in the same key, that provided the inspiration of the structure of Beethoven’s work: a slow introduction to a sonata-form first movement; a slow second movement; and a rondo finale. That, though, is about as far as the similarities go. Where Mozart treated the five voices as equals, Beethoven wrote for piano with wind accompaniment. Mozart subtly interweaves the piano and wind quartet. Beethoven, working on a more expansive scale, characteristically sets them in opposition, so that the outer movements especially resemble a chamber concerto for piano and wind. Typical of the whole Quintet is the way the suave cantabile themes of the opening Allegro are first announced by the piano alone and then taken up by the wind. The piano may dominate the outer movements, but in the central larghetto, it is the winds that are highlighted, as they present increasingly florid versions of the main theme. The mood of the Rondo – one of Beethoven’s memorable “hunting” rondos – is of unbridled exuberance, whose teasing wit recalls not so much Mozart as Beethoven’s former teacher Haydn.
© Stephen Strugnell
If imitation is the sincerest form of flattery then this spring’s chamber concerts (see also 10 April) suggest that the young Beethoven was among Mozart’s keenest admirers: his quintet for piano and winds is so clearly inspired by Mozart’s original. Piemontesi and the SCO wind principals present it in a Romantic setting framed by the fantasy of Schumann and the earthy humour of Rasmussen.
Subscribe to concerts
Save money with an SCO concert subscription and get a free concert, £5 CD voucher and many other benefits.
Support Us
Become an SCO Patron, join the 250 Society, take advantage of sponsorship opportunities or our Corporate Members scheme.
