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Early Evening Concert
- Second Violin
- piano
The Scottish Chamber Orchestra is Orchestra in Residence at the University of St Andrews. As part of this partnership, the two organisations are collaborating on a number of projects to complement the Orchestra’s
five-concert season at the Younger Hall. One such collaboration is featuring SCO players and associates in this new Early Evening Concert Series.
SCO violinist David Chadwick and pianist Laura Baxter perform sonatas by Schumann and Debussy and Kodály's Adagio.
Tickets are available on the door, or by calling 01334 462226.
For more information about the SCO's Orchestra in Residence click here.
Symphonie Fantastique - Ticciati Conducts
- Schumann
Programme note
Robert Schumann (1810-1856)
Overture to Genoveva, Op 81Like Schubert before him, Schumann had great hopes of establishing himself as an opera composer, and of furthering the cause of German Romantic opera in particular. During his career he considered a number of possible operatic projects, including Hamlet, Romeo and Juliet, Faust and, in an intriguing anticipation of Wagner, the Niebelungen Lied and Tristan and Isolde.
In the end Genoveva, written between 1847 and 1848, was the only opera he completed. The libretto is largely by Schumann himself, after disagreement with his original librettist. The eighth-century legend on which it is based concerns Genoveva, the wife of Count Siegfried of Brabant. While he is away fighting the Saracens, she resists the lecherous advances of his steward Golo, who, in revenge, falsely accuses her of adultery. She is condemned to death, but Siegfried learns the truth just in time to save her from execution.
Unlike many opera composers, who left the overture till last, Schumann sketched his - in a matter of three days in April 1847 - before he had even begun detailed work on the libretto. It was successfully performed during a concert tour to Bremen and Hamburg which Schumann and his wife, Clara, undertook in February and March 1850. After a series of delays the opera was eventually staged in Leipzig in June of that year. Schumann conducted three performances, but though it was generally well received by the audience, it was not the success he had been hoping for. And though it was staged in a number of other German cities (Liszt conducted a performance in Weimar in 1855) as well as St Petersburg, Paris and London, it has never established more than a marginal place in the operatic repertory.
The overture, though, is a fine work in its own right. The tense introduction, suggesting both Genoveva’s anguish and Golo’s malevolence, leads to an agitated Allegro with a heroic secondary theme for the horns, and a triumphant ending anticipating the drama’s eventual outcome.
© Mike Wheeler
- Berlioz
Programme note
Berlioz (1803-1869)
Tristia (1852)1. Méditation religieuse
2. La mort d’Ophélie
3. Marche funèbre pour la dernière scène d’HamletTristia (‘sad things’) was the title under which Berlioz published these three separately composed pieces of tragic or elegiac character – Nos. 1 and 2 first with piano accompaniment, all three in full score in 1852. No.3, the Hamlet march, was written in 1844 for a Paris production of the play which was then cancelled. Four years later, when Berlioz was in London, there was talk of a musical Shakespeare night at Covent Garden, but that too failed to materialise. He never heard any of them.
The Thomas Moore-inspired Religious Meditation was composed in Rome in August 1831 for mixed chorus and seven wind instruments. Much later, strings were added. They play mostly in octaves, their sighing phrases punctuating the gently pulsating chords of woodwind and horns. The downward curve of the melodic lines evokes nostalgia and regret, intensified in the final bars as the solo horn’s melancholy E flat sounds across the just-audible G major of muted strings – image of the poem’s ‘fading light on Glory’s plumes’.
In its original voice-and-piano form The Death of Ophelia, a setting of Ernest Legouvé’s paraphrase of the Queen’s speech in Act 4 of Hamlet, dates from May 1842, about a year after the completion of the song-cycle Les nuits d’été. By then Berlioz’s marriage to the Shakespearean actress Harriet Smithson, the Ophelia he had fallen in love with fifteen years before, was in ruins. The song, with its reminiscence of the Symphonie Fantastique’s motto theme – Harriet’s theme – in the opening bars, is surely a lament for that love. In 1848, for the projected Shakespeare evening at Covent Garden, he scored it for a small orchestra of muted strings, horns, and soft-grained woodwind sonorities – flutes, clarinets and cor anglais, but no oboes or bassoons – and rewrote the solo vocal line as a two-part women’s chorus, transposing it down a tone to A flat major. The musical outline is based on the poem’s four-verse structure, but the strophic shape is constantly modified to create a single flowing continuum, in which the melody and its sad, swaying refrain (on ‘Ah’) are never exactly the same. A subdued dynamic level is established by the strings’ murmuring semiquavers, suggesting the brook along which the mad Ophelia wanders. Only twice does it rise to forte: once when the branch of the willow breaks and she falls into the stream, and again when the weight of her dress ‘pulls the poor wretch to muddy death’, leaving her song to sink down after her in a long diminuendo.
The sombre Hamlet march must also have had echoes in Berlioz’s life. At the prospect of seeing the play again he wept in the street, ‘thinking of Hamlet, of Ophelia, of all that is no more, of all that has become like poor Yorick’. By the time he wrote out the revised full score in 1848, the death of his father had added another layer of meaning to what Hugh Macdonald describes as the composer’s ‘ultimate funeral utterance’ – Berlioz’s response (in his own words) to the play’s tragic sense of ‘the nothingness of life, the vanity of human designs, the tyranny of chance, the indifference of fate or God to what we call virtue, vice, beauty, ugliness, love, hate, genius, stupidity’. The March, in a bleak, harsh A minor and scored for large orchestra and wordless chorus, is dominated by an implacable rhythm (the same as in the A minor second movement of Beethoven’s seventh symphony and in many works of Schubert). The last few lines of the play are reproduced at the head of the score, ending with ‘Go, bid the soldiers shoot’, and at the climax of the march there is a rattle of percussion suggestive of a volley of musketry (to which the score, following Shakespeare’s stage directions, adds ‘a peal of ordnance’). The music then breaks off, and in the silence we hear isolated double-bass notes, violin phrases groping in the void, bare woodwind octaves, falling and intertwining chromatic lines (a feature of the piece), soft gong strokes and, finally, above a kind of groan in the orchestra, the tap of muffled side-drums as the cortege moves away, leaving the voices’ wordless cry imprinted on the empty air.
© David Cairns
- Berlioz
Programme note
Hector Berlioz (1803–69)
Symphonie fantastique (1830–32)1 Daydreams – Passions: Largo – Allegro agitato e appassionato assai
2 A Ball. Waltz: Allegro non troppo
3 Scene in the fields: Adagio
4 March to the Scaffold: Allegretto non troppo
5 Dream of a Witches’ Sabbath: Larghetto – AllegroWith all its innovations – including the introduction of instruments, textures and rhythms new to symphonic music – the Symphonie Fantastique has its roots in other music, past and present: not least the music of Gluck and Spontini, which was for several years Berlioz’s main diet and whose melodic style he absorbed into his innermost being when he first came to Paris in 1821, a boy of 17 who had never heard an orchestra. A few years later, the discovery of Weber, and still more of Beethoven at the Conservatoire concerts in 1828 (paralleling that of Goethe and Shakespeare) had an even more profound effect on the young musician till then reared on French classical opera. The Fantastique is unthinkable without Beethoven’s Pastoral and Fifth, and without Der Fresichütz. Above all, the revelation of the symphony as a dramatic form par excellence, and of the orchestra as an expressive instrument of undreamed of richness and flexibility, opened before him a new world which he must at all costs enter and inhabit.
It became the springboard for a leap into unknown territory. The influence of Beethoven could only be general, not specific; it was a matter of inspiration, not imitation. So, though Berlioz is deeply concerned with issues of musical architecture, he works out his own salvation. Though he will learn from Beethoven’s technique of thematic transformation, he will not use him as a model. He composes in melodic spans rather than in motifs. The work’s recurring melody – the idée fixe – is forty bars long; and its repetition two thirds of the way through the first movement represents not a sonata reprise but a stage in the theme’s evolution from monody to full orchestral statement.
No one had composed symphonic music or used the orchestra like this before. As Michael Steinberg says, ‘no disrespect to Mahler or Shostakovich, but this is the most remarkable First Symphony ever written’. It was typical of Berlioz’s boldness and freedom of spirit that his first major orchestral work comprised a mixture of genres analogous to what the Romantic dramatists were attempting after the example of Shakespeare – bringing the theatre into the concert hall - and that in doing so he should override the normal categories of symphonic discourse and create his own idiosyncratic version of classical form in response to the demands of the musical drama: the ‘Episode in the Life of an Artist’ that is the work’s subtitle.
Yet the score given at the Conservatoire Hall in December 1830 was, to him, a logical consequence of the Beethovenian epiphany that he had had two years earlier in the same hall. It was addressed to the same eager young public and performed by many of the same players, under the same conductor, François Antoine Habeneck.
It might embody autobiographical elements: not just his much publicised passion for the Shakespearean actress Harriet Smithson, but his whole emotional and spiritual existence up till then – as he wrote at the front of the manuscript, quoting a poem by Victor Hugo, ‘All I have suffered, all I have attempted … The loves, the labours, the bereavements of my youth… my heart’s book inscribed on every page’. For Berlioz, however, all this was not essentially different from what Beethoven had done in his Fifth and Sixth symphonies. Carrying on from him, he could use intense personal experience, and movement titles, to bring music’s inherent expressivity still further into the open and at the same time extend its frame of reference and blur still more the distinction between so-called ‘pure music’ and music associated with an identifiable human situation. All sorts of extra-musical ideas could go into the composition, yet music remained sovereign. It could describe the course of one man’s hopeless passion for a distant beloved and still be - as Beethoven said of the ’Pastoral’ - ‘expression of feeling rather than painting’, the whole contained within a disciplined musical structure.
The literary ‘programme’ offered to the Conservatoire audience gave the context of the work; it introduced the ‘instrumental drama’ (to quote Berlioz’s prefatory note) whose ‘outline, lacking the assistance of speech, needs to be explained in advance’. It is not this that holds the symphony together and makes it a timeless record of the ardours and torments of the young imagination. The music does that.
The five movements may be summed up as follows:
1 Slow introduction; sadness and imagined happiness, creating out of a state of yearning an image of the ideal woman, represented (Allegro) by the idée fixe – a long, asymmetrically phrased melodic span, first heard virtually unaccompanied, then gradually integrated into the full orchestra. The melody, in its alternate exaltation and dejection, its fevers and momentary calms, forms the main argument. At the end, like a storm that has blown itself out, it comes to rest on a series of solemn chords.
2 A ball, at which the beloved is present. Waltz, at first dreamlike, then glittering, finally garish. Middle section with the idée fixe assimilated to the rhythm of the dance.
3 A shepherd pipes a melancholy song, answered from afar by another. Pastoral scene: a long, serene melody, with similarities of outline to the idée fixe and, like it, presented as monody, by flute and first violins, then in progressively fuller textures. Agitated climax, precipitated by the idée fixe, which later takes on a more tranquil air (without its characteristic sighing fourth). Dusk, distant storm. The first shepherd now pipes alone. Drums and solo horn prepare for:
4 March to the Scaffold. The artist imagines he has killed the beloved and is being marched through the streets to execution. The dreams of the first three movements are now intensified into nightmare and the full orchestral forces deployed: massive brass and percussion, prominent and grotesque bassoons. The idée fixe reappears pianissimo on solo clarinet, but is cut off by the guillotine stroke of the whole orchestra.
5 Strange mewings, muffled explosions, distant cries. The executed lover witnesses his own funeral. The beloved melody, now a lewd distortion of itself, joins the revels. ‘Dies irae’, parody of the church’s ritual of the dead. Witches’ round dance. The climax, after a long crescendo, combines round dance and ‘Dies irae’ in a tour de force of rhythmic and orchestral virtuosity.
© David Cairns
- conductor
- -
Principal Conductor Robin Ticciati opens the Season. In his own words: “Berlioz’s masterwork Symphonie Fantastique is most commonly associated with the symphony orchestra, but I am extremely excited by the prospect of playing it with the SCO as our opening concert of this new Season. It represents a natural continuation of our Berlioz journey which began with La Mort de Cléopâtre and L’Enfance du Christ. I am hoping that with a rigorous attention to phrasing, articulation, the colour of dissonance and classical and early romantic style, we will enter into this world of goblins, frenzied passion and loneliness and offer you a thought-provoking and new way of listening to the piece. Join us for the next leg of the journey!”
Sponsored by:
Symphonie Fantastique - Ticciati Conducts
- Schumann
Programme note
Robert Schumann (1810-1856)
Overture to Genoveva, Op 81Like Schubert before him, Schumann had great hopes of establishing himself as an opera composer, and of furthering the cause of German Romantic opera in particular. During his career he considered a number of possible operatic projects, including Hamlet, Romeo and Juliet, Faust and, in an intriguing anticipation of Wagner, the Niebelungen Lied and Tristan and Isolde.
In the end Genoveva, written between 1847 and 1848, was the only opera he completed. The libretto is largely by Schumann himself, after disagreement with his original librettist. The eighth-century legend on which it is based concerns Genoveva, the wife of Count Siegfried of Brabant. While he is away fighting the Saracens, she resists the lecherous advances of his steward Golo, who, in revenge, falsely accuses her of adultery. She is condemned to death, but Siegfried learns the truth just in time to save her from execution.
Unlike many opera composers, who left the overture till last, Schumann sketched his - in a matter of three days in April 1847 - before he had even begun detailed work on the libretto. It was successfully performed during a concert tour to Bremen and Hamburg which Schumann and his wife, Clara, undertook in February and March 1850. After a series of delays the opera was eventually staged in Leipzig in June of that year. Schumann conducted three performances, but though it was generally well received by the audience, it was not the success he had been hoping for. And though it was staged in a number of other German cities (Liszt conducted a performance in Weimar in 1855) as well as St Petersburg, Paris and London, it has never established more than a marginal place in the operatic repertory.
The overture, though, is a fine work in its own right. The tense introduction, suggesting both Genoveva’s anguish and Golo’s malevolence, leads to an agitated Allegro with a heroic secondary theme for the horns, and a triumphant ending anticipating the drama’s eventual outcome.
© Mike Wheeler
- Berlioz
Programme note
Berlioz (1803-1869)
Tristia (1852)1. Méditation religieuse
2. La mort d’Ophélie
3. Marche funèbre pour la dernière scène d’HamletTristia (‘sad things’) was the title under which Berlioz published these three separately composed pieces of tragic or elegiac character – Nos. 1 and 2 first with piano accompaniment, all three in full score in 1852. No.3, the Hamlet march, was written in 1844 for a Paris production of the play which was then cancelled. Four years later, when Berlioz was in London, there was talk of a musical Shakespeare night at Covent Garden, but that too failed to materialise. He never heard any of them.
The Thomas Moore-inspired Religious Meditation was composed in Rome in August 1831 for mixed chorus and seven wind instruments. Much later, strings were added. They play mostly in octaves, their sighing phrases punctuating the gently pulsating chords of woodwind and horns. The downward curve of the melodic lines evokes nostalgia and regret, intensified in the final bars as the solo horn’s melancholy E flat sounds across the just-audible G major of muted strings – image of the poem’s ‘fading light on Glory’s plumes’.
In its original voice-and-piano form The Death of Ophelia, a setting of Ernest Legouvé’s paraphrase of the Queen’s speech in Act 4 of Hamlet, dates from May 1842, about a year after the completion of the song-cycle Les nuits d’été. By then Berlioz’s marriage to the Shakespearean actress Harriet Smithson, the Ophelia he had fallen in love with fifteen years before, was in ruins. The song, with its reminiscence of the Symphonie Fantastique’s motto theme – Harriet’s theme – in the opening bars, is surely a lament for that love. In 1848, for the projected Shakespeare evening at Covent Garden, he scored it for a small orchestra of muted strings, horns, and soft-grained woodwind sonorities – flutes, clarinets and cor anglais, but no oboes or bassoons – and rewrote the solo vocal line as a two-part women’s chorus, transposing it down a tone to A flat major. The musical outline is based on the poem’s four-verse structure, but the strophic shape is constantly modified to create a single flowing continuum, in which the melody and its sad, swaying refrain (on ‘Ah’) are never exactly the same. A subdued dynamic level is established by the strings’ murmuring semiquavers, suggesting the brook along which the mad Ophelia wanders. Only twice does it rise to forte: once when the branch of the willow breaks and she falls into the stream, and again when the weight of her dress ‘pulls the poor wretch to muddy death’, leaving her song to sink down after her in a long diminuendo.
The sombre Hamlet march must also have had echoes in Berlioz’s life. At the prospect of seeing the play again he wept in the street, ‘thinking of Hamlet, of Ophelia, of all that is no more, of all that has become like poor Yorick’. By the time he wrote out the revised full score in 1848, the death of his father had added another layer of meaning to what Hugh Macdonald describes as the composer’s ‘ultimate funeral utterance’ – Berlioz’s response (in his own words) to the play’s tragic sense of ‘the nothingness of life, the vanity of human designs, the tyranny of chance, the indifference of fate or God to what we call virtue, vice, beauty, ugliness, love, hate, genius, stupidity’. The March, in a bleak, harsh A minor and scored for large orchestra and wordless chorus, is dominated by an implacable rhythm (the same as in the A minor second movement of Beethoven’s seventh symphony and in many works of Schubert). The last few lines of the play are reproduced at the head of the score, ending with ‘Go, bid the soldiers shoot’, and at the climax of the march there is a rattle of percussion suggestive of a volley of musketry (to which the score, following Shakespeare’s stage directions, adds ‘a peal of ordnance’). The music then breaks off, and in the silence we hear isolated double-bass notes, violin phrases groping in the void, bare woodwind octaves, falling and intertwining chromatic lines (a feature of the piece), soft gong strokes and, finally, above a kind of groan in the orchestra, the tap of muffled side-drums as the cortege moves away, leaving the voices’ wordless cry imprinted on the empty air.
© David Cairns
- Berlioz
Programme note
Hector Berlioz (1803–69)
Symphonie fantastique (1830–32)1 Daydreams – Passions: Largo – Allegro agitato e appassionato assai
2 A Ball. Waltz: Allegro non troppo
3 Scene in the fields: Adagio
4 March to the Scaffold: Allegretto non troppo
5 Dream of a Witches’ Sabbath: Larghetto – AllegroWith all its innovations – including the introduction of instruments, textures and rhythms new to symphonic music – the Symphonie Fantastique has its roots in other music, past and present: not least the music of Gluck and Spontini, which was for several years Berlioz’s main diet and whose melodic style he absorbed into his innermost being when he first came to Paris in 1821, a boy of 17 who had never heard an orchestra. A few years later, the discovery of Weber, and still more of Beethoven at the Conservatoire concerts in 1828 (paralleling that of Goethe and Shakespeare) had an even more profound effect on the young musician till then reared on French classical opera. The Fantastique is unthinkable without Beethoven’s Pastoral and Fifth, and without Der Fresichütz. Above all, the revelation of the symphony as a dramatic form par excellence, and of the orchestra as an expressive instrument of undreamed of richness and flexibility, opened before him a new world which he must at all costs enter and inhabit.
It became the springboard for a leap into unknown territory. The influence of Beethoven could only be general, not specific; it was a matter of inspiration, not imitation. So, though Berlioz is deeply concerned with issues of musical architecture, he works out his own salvation. Though he will learn from Beethoven’s technique of thematic transformation, he will not use him as a model. He composes in melodic spans rather than in motifs. The work’s recurring melody – the idée fixe – is forty bars long; and its repetition two thirds of the way through the first movement represents not a sonata reprise but a stage in the theme’s evolution from monody to full orchestral statement.
No one had composed symphonic music or used the orchestra like this before. As Michael Steinberg says, ‘no disrespect to Mahler or Shostakovich, but this is the most remarkable First Symphony ever written’. It was typical of Berlioz’s boldness and freedom of spirit that his first major orchestral work comprised a mixture of genres analogous to what the Romantic dramatists were attempting after the example of Shakespeare – bringing the theatre into the concert hall - and that in doing so he should override the normal categories of symphonic discourse and create his own idiosyncratic version of classical form in response to the demands of the musical drama: the ‘Episode in the Life of an Artist’ that is the work’s subtitle.
Yet the score given at the Conservatoire Hall in December 1830 was, to him, a logical consequence of the Beethovenian epiphany that he had had two years earlier in the same hall. It was addressed to the same eager young public and performed by many of the same players, under the same conductor, François Antoine Habeneck.
It might embody autobiographical elements: not just his much publicised passion for the Shakespearean actress Harriet Smithson, but his whole emotional and spiritual existence up till then – as he wrote at the front of the manuscript, quoting a poem by Victor Hugo, ‘All I have suffered, all I have attempted … The loves, the labours, the bereavements of my youth… my heart’s book inscribed on every page’. For Berlioz, however, all this was not essentially different from what Beethoven had done in his Fifth and Sixth symphonies. Carrying on from him, he could use intense personal experience, and movement titles, to bring music’s inherent expressivity still further into the open and at the same time extend its frame of reference and blur still more the distinction between so-called ‘pure music’ and music associated with an identifiable human situation. All sorts of extra-musical ideas could go into the composition, yet music remained sovereign. It could describe the course of one man’s hopeless passion for a distant beloved and still be - as Beethoven said of the ’Pastoral’ - ‘expression of feeling rather than painting’, the whole contained within a disciplined musical structure.
The literary ‘programme’ offered to the Conservatoire audience gave the context of the work; it introduced the ‘instrumental drama’ (to quote Berlioz’s prefatory note) whose ‘outline, lacking the assistance of speech, needs to be explained in advance’. It is not this that holds the symphony together and makes it a timeless record of the ardours and torments of the young imagination. The music does that.
The five movements may be summed up as follows:
1 Slow introduction; sadness and imagined happiness, creating out of a state of yearning an image of the ideal woman, represented (Allegro) by the idée fixe – a long, asymmetrically phrased melodic span, first heard virtually unaccompanied, then gradually integrated into the full orchestra. The melody, in its alternate exaltation and dejection, its fevers and momentary calms, forms the main argument. At the end, like a storm that has blown itself out, it comes to rest on a series of solemn chords.
2 A ball, at which the beloved is present. Waltz, at first dreamlike, then glittering, finally garish. Middle section with the idée fixe assimilated to the rhythm of the dance.
3 A shepherd pipes a melancholy song, answered from afar by another. Pastoral scene: a long, serene melody, with similarities of outline to the idée fixe and, like it, presented as monody, by flute and first violins, then in progressively fuller textures. Agitated climax, precipitated by the idée fixe, which later takes on a more tranquil air (without its characteristic sighing fourth). Dusk, distant storm. The first shepherd now pipes alone. Drums and solo horn prepare for:
4 March to the Scaffold. The artist imagines he has killed the beloved and is being marched through the streets to execution. The dreams of the first three movements are now intensified into nightmare and the full orchestral forces deployed: massive brass and percussion, prominent and grotesque bassoons. The idée fixe reappears pianissimo on solo clarinet, but is cut off by the guillotine stroke of the whole orchestra.
5 Strange mewings, muffled explosions, distant cries. The executed lover witnesses his own funeral. The beloved melody, now a lewd distortion of itself, joins the revels. ‘Dies irae’, parody of the church’s ritual of the dead. Witches’ round dance. The climax, after a long crescendo, combines round dance and ‘Dies irae’ in a tour de force of rhythmic and orchestral virtuosity.
© David Cairns
- conductor
- -
Principal Conductor Robin Ticciati opens the Season. In his own words: “Berlioz’s masterwork Symphonie Fantastique is most commonly associated with the symphony orchestra, but I am extremely excited by the prospect of playing it with the SCO as our opening concert of this new Season. It represents a natural continuation of our Berlioz journey which began with La Mort de Cléopâtre and L’Enfance du Christ. I am hoping that with a rigorous attention to phrasing, articulation, the colour of dissonance and classical and early romantic style, we will enter into this world of goblins, frenzied passion and loneliness and offer you a thought-provoking and new way of listening to the piece. Join us for the next leg of the journey!”
Mullova Plays Beethoven
- Suckling
Programme note
Martin Suckling (b.1981)
storm, rose, tiger (2011)The title is adapted from a phrase in Borges’ short story The Circular Ruins. Amongst many other things, this story is an allegory of the creative process, narrating a magician’s attempts to dream a human being in minute detail, dedicating himself to the task with such fervent passion that the dream-creature becomes a living man. It is a strange and compelling story, with a great deal of resonance for me as a composer: the magician’s struggles as he strives to bring his creation into focus, his commitment, his bouts of self-doubt, his decision to destroy what he has made and start again, the bittersweetness with which he sends his work out into the world; all these are familiar waypoints on the creative journey.
Rather than a programmatic mirroring of the story through music, there were two features in particular which seemed to relate to musical processes I was interested in exploring and so provided the starting point for work on the piece. The first feature is the idea of bringing something in and out of focus, of ‘seeing’ musical material more or less clearly, perhaps like the sort of transformations we experience in dreams. The second is the fundamentally repetitive nature of the magician’s task, its incremental nature, night after night. The musical analogue I planned was to explore three types of material in sequence (storm; rose; tiger - though these are to an extent arbitrary labels rather than descriptions), repeating the succession several times and transforming each component through expansion or compression, whilst playing with ideas of ’focus’ within each section.
Such was the plan, but music often has a mind of its own. While this was my starting point and many of the above elements will be readily audible, the finished piece follows its own logic.
I have made extensive use of so-called ’microtones’, particularly in the latter sections of the piece.
These are notes that lie outside our familiar Western 12-note scale, and in my music are derived from quarter-tone approximations of the harmonic series. These unusual pitches serve two roles: to blur on the one hand, and to evoke a new musical landscape on the other. The blurring occurs as bending and glissandos around standard pitch-units, an offshoot of my initial thoughts on types of focus. The ‘new musical landscape’ comes from using harmony where notes outside a piano keyboard are an integral feature. Here the term ‘microtone’ is something of a misnomer, as I never use an interval smaller than a standard semitone; rather I am interested in those larger intervals that fall in the gaps - a semitone and a half, for example, or the interval between a major third and a minor third - that give the harmony a special and often (to my mind) glowing, radiant quality. In short (and perhaps opening myself up to easy criticism!) I am aiming for a special type of beauty that the microtonal resource enables. storm, rose, tiger falls into a number of distinct sections. A turbulent opening gives way on its repeat to a long melody in the winds. The strings shadow this wind line and gradually overwhelm it with ornamentation. There follows a grotesque dance, after which there is a return to the opening material presented in greatly expanded form: intensely expressive string polyphonies eventually freeze into simple harmonies, while sotto voce winds create increasingly elaborate patterns. The final section is a passacaglia, circling around a repeating modal (microtonal) pattern, beginning with the violins alone and eventually incorporating the entire orchestra.
© Martin Suckling, August 2011
- Schumann
Programme note
Robert Schumann (1810-1856)
Symphony no 4 in D minor, Op 120 (Original version, 1841)Andante con moto – Allegro di molto
Romanza: Andante
Scherzo: Prest
Largo – Finale: Allegro vivace.In 1838, during a visit to Vienna, Schumann discovered the autograph score of Schubert’s Symphony No 9, the so-called ‘Great’ C major Symphony, neglected and still unperformed. The discovery had made him “tingle to be at work on a symphony”. Up until 1840 he composed little but solo piano music, but his long-delayed marriage to Clara Wieck that year coincided with a torrent of song-writing, and 1841 saw him devote himself, with equal single-mindedness, to orchestral music. He composed his First Symphony in January and February 1841. It was followed over the next few months by the Overture, Scherzo and Finale, and the first version of his Symphony in D minor, together with sketches for a symphony in C minor, which he never completed, and the Phantasie for Piano and Orchestra which became, a few years later, the first movement of his Piano Concerto.
The D minor Symphony was intended as a present for Clara’s birthday on 13 September. In his diary in March he noted his intention to write a ‘Clara’ symphony: “in it I will paint her picture with flutes and oboes and harps”. Together with the Overture, Scherzo and Finale, the D minor Symphony was first performed in Leipzig in December, but it was given a cool reception, prompting Schumann to withdraw the work.
Ten years later he revised and re-scored it. At first he called the new version Symphonic Fantasy, but changed the title back to Symphony before the first performance in March 1853, giving it the number by which we know it today. He also replaced the original Italian movement headings with German ones.
In its final form Symphony No 4 is Schumann’s most concentrated attempt at welding a multi-movement work into a unified whole. Themes recur across all four movements, which follow one another without breaks. The most important of the 1851 revisions are aimed at strengthening the links between the movements, smoothing the transition from the introduction into the first movement and from the Scherzo into the Finale. The other major difference is that the 1851 orchestration is thicker and heavier. Schumann erred on the side of caution in making sure that every important instrumental entry was covered as securely as possible, but Brahms, for one, preferred the lighter scoring of the first version. There are gains and losses in both scores – the original’s clarity of orchestration against the more compelling sense of unity in the later version – and now that the original is being played more frequently it seems likely that the two will simply coexist side-by-side.
The slow introduction is based on a gently falling and rising idea which moves, by way of a brief emphatic chordal passage and a quickening of the tempo, into the main section of the movement, with its bustling main theme. This is offset by two contrasting ideas which appear a little later: a tautly rhythmic theme for woodwind, and a smoother song-like melody for violins answered by flute and clarinet.
The slow movement begins with an expressive melody for oboe and cellos. The music of the first movement’s introduction returns, leading to the central section, based on a new theme, lazily floating downwards on solo violin. The oboe and cello melody, now joined by bassoon, closes the movement.
The Scherzo is fiery and vigorous, with a central trio section which brings back the solo violin music from the second movement in a new rhythm. This comes round again at the end of the movement, settling on a gently rocking figure, out of which the finale begins to emerge. Phrases from the first movement’s main theme gradually acquire momentum until a surge of string figuration sweeps the music forward into the Finale, launched by a new version of the first movement’s energetic woodwind theme. This exultant music is Schumann at his most celebratory. It accumulates irresistible energy and drive, swept along on a rhythmically propulsive current which twice accelerates towards the end to carry the symphony to its triumphant conclusion.
© Mike Wheeler
- Beethoven
Programme note
Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827)
Violin Concerto in D major, Op 61 (1806)Allegro ma non troppo
Larghetto -
Rondo: AllegroThe piano was Beethoven’s instrument, the one upon which he proved himself a brilliant soloist and improviser, and for which he composed the bulk of his sonatas, concertos, and sets of variations. But like Haydn and Mozart before him, he also studied the violin and learned enough about it to produce what posterity has decreed to be the greatest of all violin concertos. Insufficiently adept to play the work himself, he entrusted its first performance to the leader of the orchestra, Franz Clement, a Viennese virtuoso whose musical versatility included such feats of showmanship as improvising a sonata on one string with his violin turned upside down. It was doubtless the latter trick that prompted Beethoven to inscribe on his manuscript the pun, "Concerto per Clemenza pour Clement"; but, as things turned out at the Theater an der Wien in December 1806, Clement did not give Beethoven the clemency he sought. After playing the first movement without incident, he inserted one of his own freakish sonatas before proceeding to the sublime larghetto.
Beethoven’s may have been a pianist’s violin concerto - so were Brahms’ and Mendelssohn’s - but it is as inspired in its tiny details (such as delaying the use of pizzicato notes until the finale, and then using them in just one single bar) as in its long-spun lines. Clement, moreover, must have possessed qualities that prompted Beethoven to let him play it. As one commentator has remarked: "Tone, not display, is its secret." It dates from one of the most productive periods in Beethoven’s life, the two years in which he also composed Fidelio, the Fourth Symphony, the Fourth Piano Concerto, the three Rasumovsky string quartets, and the 32 piano variations in C minor. In mood it corresponds most closely with the Fourth Piano Concerto, but is even more lyrically spacious in design, treating its material with still greater patience. The soloist’s entry in the first movement is delayed until what seems like the last possible moment, and not until the coda is the wondrous (and sublimely simple) second theme heard in its entirety on the solo violin.
The first movement’s binding factor is the rhythm of the five soft drum taps heard at the outset. Tossed from section to section of the orchestra, this motif underpins, punctuates, and inspires the wealth of themes from which Beethoven builds the music, adding a high clarity of definition to a movement otherwise dependent principally on lyrical flow. The larghetto in G major, though only 92 bars long, has the idyllic stillness found in some of Beethoven’s other great slow movements - that of the Emperor concerto springs particularly to mind - although its dreamy beauty (based largely on a series of ethereal variations on the muted opening theme) is finally interrupted by bold orchestral chords, dramatically signalling the return of the home key. These lead without a break to the genial finale, a rondo with a rocking main theme in 6/8 time, with contrasted episodes (one of them employing a solo bassoon to droll yet curiously poignant effect) and a radiance that anticipates the equivalent movement of the Pastoral symphony, composed two years later.
© Conrad Wilson
- conductor
- violin
Limpid in tone, matchless in technique, fearlessly honest in her musicality: it is easy to see why Mullova has become one of the biggest stars of the violin worldwide. Her performance launches a season-long journey through many of the concertos, symphonies and choral works of Beethoven. Schumann’s symphony was a labour of love – it took around a decade to complete and is dedicated to the great violinist Joseph Joachim, who was a child prodigy when it was begun but a mature artist (and grown man) by the time of its completion. Yet, debate still rages about whether Schumann's first or last thoughts on this piece were superior. On this occasion, Ticciati opts for the first version – the one Schumann's own friend, Brahms, preferred.
Mullova Plays Beethoven
- Suckling
Programme note
Martin Suckling (b.1981)
storm, rose, tiger (2011)The title is adapted from a phrase in Borges’ short story The Circular Ruins. Amongst many other things, this story is an allegory of the creative process, narrating a magician’s attempts to dream a human being in minute detail, dedicating himself to the task with such fervent passion that the dream-creature becomes a living man. It is a strange and compelling story, with a great deal of resonance for me as a composer: the magician’s struggles as he strives to bring his creation into focus, his commitment, his bouts of self-doubt, his decision to destroy what he has made and start again, the bittersweetness with which he sends his work out into the world; all these are familiar waypoints on the creative journey.
Rather than a programmatic mirroring of the story through music, there were two features in particular which seemed to relate to musical processes I was interested in exploring and so provided the starting point for work on the piece. The first feature is the idea of bringing something in and out of focus, of ‘seeing’ musical material more or less clearly, perhaps like the sort of transformations we experience in dreams. The second is the fundamentally repetitive nature of the magician’s task, its incremental nature, night after night. The musical analogue I planned was to explore three types of material in sequence (storm; rose; tiger - though these are to an extent arbitrary labels rather than descriptions), repeating the succession several times and transforming each component through expansion or compression, whilst playing with ideas of ’focus’ within each section.
Such was the plan, but music often has a mind of its own. While this was my starting point and many of the above elements will be readily audible, the finished piece follows its own logic.
I have made extensive use of so-called ’microtones’, particularly in the latter sections of the piece.
These are notes that lie outside our familiar Western 12-note scale, and in my music are derived from quarter-tone approximations of the harmonic series. These unusual pitches serve two roles: to blur on the one hand, and to evoke a new musical landscape on the other. The blurring occurs as bending and glissandos around standard pitch-units, an offshoot of my initial thoughts on types of focus. The ‘new musical landscape’ comes from using harmony where notes outside a piano keyboard are an integral feature. Here the term ‘microtone’ is something of a misnomer, as I never use an interval smaller than a standard semitone; rather I am interested in those larger intervals that fall in the gaps - a semitone and a half, for example, or the interval between a major third and a minor third - that give the harmony a special and often (to my mind) glowing, radiant quality. In short (and perhaps opening myself up to easy criticism!) I am aiming for a special type of beauty that the microtonal resource enables. storm, rose, tiger falls into a number of distinct sections. A turbulent opening gives way on its repeat to a long melody in the winds. The strings shadow this wind line and gradually overwhelm it with ornamentation. There follows a grotesque dance, after which there is a return to the opening material presented in greatly expanded form: intensely expressive string polyphonies eventually freeze into simple harmonies, while sotto voce winds create increasingly elaborate patterns. The final section is a passacaglia, circling around a repeating modal (microtonal) pattern, beginning with the violins alone and eventually incorporating the entire orchestra.
© Martin Suckling, August 2011
- Schumann
Programme note
Robert Schumann (1810-1856)
Symphony no 4 in D minor, Op 120 (Original version, 1841)Andante con moto – Allegro di molto
Romanza: Andante
Scherzo: Prest
Largo – Finale: Allegro vivace.In 1838, during a visit to Vienna, Schumann discovered the autograph score of Schubert’s Symphony No 9, the so-called ‘Great’ C major Symphony, neglected and still unperformed. The discovery had made him “tingle to be at work on a symphony”. Up until 1840 he composed little but solo piano music, but his long-delayed marriage to Clara Wieck that year coincided with a torrent of song-writing, and 1841 saw him devote himself, with equal single-mindedness, to orchestral music. He composed his First Symphony in January and February 1841. It was followed over the next few months by the Overture, Scherzo and Finale, and the first version of his Symphony in D minor, together with sketches for a symphony in C minor, which he never completed, and the Phantasie for Piano and Orchestra which became, a few years later, the first movement of his Piano Concerto.
The D minor Symphony was intended as a present for Clara’s birthday on 13 September. In his diary in March he noted his intention to write a ‘Clara’ symphony: “in it I will paint her picture with flutes and oboes and harps”. Together with the Overture, Scherzo and Finale, the D minor Symphony was first performed in Leipzig in December, but it was given a cool reception, prompting Schumann to withdraw the work.
Ten years later he revised and re-scored it. At first he called the new version Symphonic Fantasy, but changed the title back to Symphony before the first performance in March 1853, giving it the number by which we know it today. He also replaced the original Italian movement headings with German ones.
In its final form Symphony No 4 is Schumann’s most concentrated attempt at welding a multi-movement work into a unified whole. Themes recur across all four movements, which follow one another without breaks. The most important of the 1851 revisions are aimed at strengthening the links between the movements, smoothing the transition from the introduction into the first movement and from the Scherzo into the Finale. The other major difference is that the 1851 orchestration is thicker and heavier. Schumann erred on the side of caution in making sure that every important instrumental entry was covered as securely as possible, but Brahms, for one, preferred the lighter scoring of the first version. There are gains and losses in both scores – the original’s clarity of orchestration against the more compelling sense of unity in the later version – and now that the original is being played more frequently it seems likely that the two will simply coexist side-by-side.
The slow introduction is based on a gently falling and rising idea which moves, by way of a brief emphatic chordal passage and a quickening of the tempo, into the main section of the movement, with its bustling main theme. This is offset by two contrasting ideas which appear a little later: a tautly rhythmic theme for woodwind, and a smoother song-like melody for violins answered by flute and clarinet.
The slow movement begins with an expressive melody for oboe and cellos. The music of the first movement’s introduction returns, leading to the central section, based on a new theme, lazily floating downwards on solo violin. The oboe and cello melody, now joined by bassoon, closes the movement.
The Scherzo is fiery and vigorous, with a central trio section which brings back the solo violin music from the second movement in a new rhythm. This comes round again at the end of the movement, settling on a gently rocking figure, out of which the finale begins to emerge. Phrases from the first movement’s main theme gradually acquire momentum until a surge of string figuration sweeps the music forward into the Finale, launched by a new version of the first movement’s energetic woodwind theme. This exultant music is Schumann at his most celebratory. It accumulates irresistible energy and drive, swept along on a rhythmically propulsive current which twice accelerates towards the end to carry the symphony to its triumphant conclusion.
© Mike Wheeler
- Beethoven
Programme note
Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827)
Violin Concerto in D major, Op 61 (1806)Allegro ma non troppo
Larghetto -
Rondo: AllegroThe piano was Beethoven’s instrument, the one upon which he proved himself a brilliant soloist and improviser, and for which he composed the bulk of his sonatas, concertos, and sets of variations. But like Haydn and Mozart before him, he also studied the violin and learned enough about it to produce what posterity has decreed to be the greatest of all violin concertos. Insufficiently adept to play the work himself, he entrusted its first performance to the leader of the orchestra, Franz Clement, a Viennese virtuoso whose musical versatility included such feats of showmanship as improvising a sonata on one string with his violin turned upside down. It was doubtless the latter trick that prompted Beethoven to inscribe on his manuscript the pun, "Concerto per Clemenza pour Clement"; but, as things turned out at the Theater an der Wien in December 1806, Clement did not give Beethoven the clemency he sought. After playing the first movement without incident, he inserted one of his own freakish sonatas before proceeding to the sublime larghetto.
Beethoven’s may have been a pianist’s violin concerto - so were Brahms’ and Mendelssohn’s - but it is as inspired in its tiny details (such as delaying the use of pizzicato notes until the finale, and then using them in just one single bar) as in its long-spun lines. Clement, moreover, must have possessed qualities that prompted Beethoven to let him play it. As one commentator has remarked: "Tone, not display, is its secret." It dates from one of the most productive periods in Beethoven’s life, the two years in which he also composed Fidelio, the Fourth Symphony, the Fourth Piano Concerto, the three Rasumovsky string quartets, and the 32 piano variations in C minor. In mood it corresponds most closely with the Fourth Piano Concerto, but is even more lyrically spacious in design, treating its material with still greater patience. The soloist’s entry in the first movement is delayed until what seems like the last possible moment, and not until the coda is the wondrous (and sublimely simple) second theme heard in its entirety on the solo violin.
The first movement’s binding factor is the rhythm of the five soft drum taps heard at the outset. Tossed from section to section of the orchestra, this motif underpins, punctuates, and inspires the wealth of themes from which Beethoven builds the music, adding a high clarity of definition to a movement otherwise dependent principally on lyrical flow. The larghetto in G major, though only 92 bars long, has the idyllic stillness found in some of Beethoven’s other great slow movements - that of the Emperor concerto springs particularly to mind - although its dreamy beauty (based largely on a series of ethereal variations on the muted opening theme) is finally interrupted by bold orchestral chords, dramatically signalling the return of the home key. These lead without a break to the genial finale, a rondo with a rocking main theme in 6/8 time, with contrasted episodes (one of them employing a solo bassoon to droll yet curiously poignant effect) and a radiance that anticipates the equivalent movement of the Pastoral symphony, composed two years later.
© Conrad Wilson
- conductor
- violin
Limpid in tone, matchless in technique, fearlessly honest in her musicality: it is easy to see why Mullova has become one of the biggest stars of the violin worldwide. Her performance launches a season-long journey through many of the concertos, symphonies and choral works of Beethoven. Schumann’s symphony was a labour of love – it took around a decade to complete and is dedicated to the great violinist Joseph Joachim, who was a child prodigy when it was begun but a mature artist (and grown man) by the time of its completion. Yet, debate still rages about whether Schumann's first or last thoughts on this piece were superior. On this occasion, Ticciati opts for the first version – the one Schumann's own friend, Brahms, preferred.
Mullova Plays Beethoven
- Suckling
Programme note
Martin Suckling (b.1981)
storm, rose, tiger (2011)The title is adapted from a phrase in Borges’ short story The Circular Ruins. Amongst many other things, this story is an allegory of the creative process, narrating a magician’s attempts to dream a human being in minute detail, dedicating himself to the task with such fervent passion that the dream-creature becomes a living man. It is a strange and compelling story, with a great deal of resonance for me as a composer: the magician’s struggles as he strives to bring his creation into focus, his commitment, his bouts of self-doubt, his decision to destroy what he has made and start again, the bittersweetness with which he sends his work out into the world; all these are familiar waypoints on the creative journey.
Rather than a programmatic mirroring of the story through music, there were two features in particular which seemed to relate to musical processes I was interested in exploring and so provided the starting point for work on the piece. The first feature is the idea of bringing something in and out of focus, of ‘seeing’ musical material more or less clearly, perhaps like the sort of transformations we experience in dreams. The second is the fundamentally repetitive nature of the magician’s task, its incremental nature, night after night. The musical analogue I planned was to explore three types of material in sequence (storm; rose; tiger - though these are to an extent arbitrary labels rather than descriptions), repeating the succession several times and transforming each component through expansion or compression, whilst playing with ideas of ’focus’ within each section.
Such was the plan, but music often has a mind of its own. While this was my starting point and many of the above elements will be readily audible, the finished piece follows its own logic.
I have made extensive use of so-called ’microtones’, particularly in the latter sections of the piece.
These are notes that lie outside our familiar Western 12-note scale, and in my music are derived from quarter-tone approximations of the harmonic series. These unusual pitches serve two roles: to blur on the one hand, and to evoke a new musical landscape on the other. The blurring occurs as bending and glissandos around standard pitch-units, an offshoot of my initial thoughts on types of focus. The ‘new musical landscape’ comes from using harmony where notes outside a piano keyboard are an integral feature. Here the term ‘microtone’ is something of a misnomer, as I never use an interval smaller than a standard semitone; rather I am interested in those larger intervals that fall in the gaps - a semitone and a half, for example, or the interval between a major third and a minor third - that give the harmony a special and often (to my mind) glowing, radiant quality. In short (and perhaps opening myself up to easy criticism!) I am aiming for a special type of beauty that the microtonal resource enables. storm, rose, tiger falls into a number of distinct sections. A turbulent opening gives way on its repeat to a long melody in the winds. The strings shadow this wind line and gradually overwhelm it with ornamentation. There follows a grotesque dance, after which there is a return to the opening material presented in greatly expanded form: intensely expressive string polyphonies eventually freeze into simple harmonies, while sotto voce winds create increasingly elaborate patterns. The final section is a passacaglia, circling around a repeating modal (microtonal) pattern, beginning with the violins alone and eventually incorporating the entire orchestra.
© Martin Suckling, August 2011
- Schumann
Programme note
Robert Schumann (1810-1856)
Symphony no 4 in D minor, Op 120 (Original version, 1841)Andante con moto – Allegro di molto
Romanza: Andante
Scherzo: Prest
Largo – Finale: Allegro vivace.In 1838, during a visit to Vienna, Schumann discovered the autograph score of Schubert’s Symphony No 9, the so-called ‘Great’ C major Symphony, neglected and still unperformed. The discovery had made him “tingle to be at work on a symphony”. Up until 1840 he composed little but solo piano music, but his long-delayed marriage to Clara Wieck that year coincided with a torrent of song-writing, and 1841 saw him devote himself, with equal single-mindedness, to orchestral music. He composed his First Symphony in January and February 1841. It was followed over the next few months by the Overture, Scherzo and Finale, and the first version of his Symphony in D minor, together with sketches for a symphony in C minor, which he never completed, and the Phantasie for Piano and Orchestra which became, a few years later, the first movement of his Piano Concerto.
The D minor Symphony was intended as a present for Clara’s birthday on 13 September. In his diary in March he noted his intention to write a ‘Clara’ symphony: “in it I will paint her picture with flutes and oboes and harps”. Together with the Overture, Scherzo and Finale, the D minor Symphony was first performed in Leipzig in December, but it was given a cool reception, prompting Schumann to withdraw the work.
Ten years later he revised and re-scored it. At first he called the new version Symphonic Fantasy, but changed the title back to Symphony before the first performance in March 1853, giving it the number by which we know it today. He also replaced the original Italian movement headings with German ones.
In its final form Symphony No 4 is Schumann’s most concentrated attempt at welding a multi-movement work into a unified whole. Themes recur across all four movements, which follow one another without breaks. The most important of the 1851 revisions are aimed at strengthening the links between the movements, smoothing the transition from the introduction into the first movement and from the Scherzo into the Finale. The other major difference is that the 1851 orchestration is thicker and heavier. Schumann erred on the side of caution in making sure that every important instrumental entry was covered as securely as possible, but Brahms, for one, preferred the lighter scoring of the first version. There are gains and losses in both scores – the original’s clarity of orchestration against the more compelling sense of unity in the later version – and now that the original is being played more frequently it seems likely that the two will simply coexist side-by-side.
The slow introduction is based on a gently falling and rising idea which moves, by way of a brief emphatic chordal passage and a quickening of the tempo, into the main section of the movement, with its bustling main theme. This is offset by two contrasting ideas which appear a little later: a tautly rhythmic theme for woodwind, and a smoother song-like melody for violins answered by flute and clarinet.
The slow movement begins with an expressive melody for oboe and cellos. The music of the first movement’s introduction returns, leading to the central section, based on a new theme, lazily floating downwards on solo violin. The oboe and cello melody, now joined by bassoon, closes the movement.
The Scherzo is fiery and vigorous, with a central trio section which brings back the solo violin music from the second movement in a new rhythm. This comes round again at the end of the movement, settling on a gently rocking figure, out of which the finale begins to emerge. Phrases from the first movement’s main theme gradually acquire momentum until a surge of string figuration sweeps the music forward into the Finale, launched by a new version of the first movement’s energetic woodwind theme. This exultant music is Schumann at his most celebratory. It accumulates irresistible energy and drive, swept along on a rhythmically propulsive current which twice accelerates towards the end to carry the symphony to its triumphant conclusion.
© Mike Wheeler
- Beethoven
Programme note
Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827)
Violin Concerto in D major, Op 61 (1806)Allegro ma non troppo
Larghetto -
Rondo: AllegroThe piano was Beethoven’s instrument, the one upon which he proved himself a brilliant soloist and improviser, and for which he composed the bulk of his sonatas, concertos, and sets of variations. But like Haydn and Mozart before him, he also studied the violin and learned enough about it to produce what posterity has decreed to be the greatest of all violin concertos. Insufficiently adept to play the work himself, he entrusted its first performance to the leader of the orchestra, Franz Clement, a Viennese virtuoso whose musical versatility included such feats of showmanship as improvising a sonata on one string with his violin turned upside down. It was doubtless the latter trick that prompted Beethoven to inscribe on his manuscript the pun, "Concerto per Clemenza pour Clement"; but, as things turned out at the Theater an der Wien in December 1806, Clement did not give Beethoven the clemency he sought. After playing the first movement without incident, he inserted one of his own freakish sonatas before proceeding to the sublime larghetto.
Beethoven’s may have been a pianist’s violin concerto - so were Brahms’ and Mendelssohn’s - but it is as inspired in its tiny details (such as delaying the use of pizzicato notes until the finale, and then using them in just one single bar) as in its long-spun lines. Clement, moreover, must have possessed qualities that prompted Beethoven to let him play it. As one commentator has remarked: "Tone, not display, is its secret." It dates from one of the most productive periods in Beethoven’s life, the two years in which he also composed Fidelio, the Fourth Symphony, the Fourth Piano Concerto, the three Rasumovsky string quartets, and the 32 piano variations in C minor. In mood it corresponds most closely with the Fourth Piano Concerto, but is even more lyrically spacious in design, treating its material with still greater patience. The soloist’s entry in the first movement is delayed until what seems like the last possible moment, and not until the coda is the wondrous (and sublimely simple) second theme heard in its entirety on the solo violin.
The first movement’s binding factor is the rhythm of the five soft drum taps heard at the outset. Tossed from section to section of the orchestra, this motif underpins, punctuates, and inspires the wealth of themes from which Beethoven builds the music, adding a high clarity of definition to a movement otherwise dependent principally on lyrical flow. The larghetto in G major, though only 92 bars long, has the idyllic stillness found in some of Beethoven’s other great slow movements - that of the Emperor concerto springs particularly to mind - although its dreamy beauty (based largely on a series of ethereal variations on the muted opening theme) is finally interrupted by bold orchestral chords, dramatically signalling the return of the home key. These lead without a break to the genial finale, a rondo with a rocking main theme in 6/8 time, with contrasted episodes (one of them employing a solo bassoon to droll yet curiously poignant effect) and a radiance that anticipates the equivalent movement of the Pastoral symphony, composed two years later.
© Conrad Wilson
- conductor
- violin
Limpid in tone, matchless in technique, fearlessly honest in her musicality: it is easy to see why Mullova has become one of the biggest stars of the violin worldwide. Her performance launches a season-long journey through many of the concertos, symphonies and choral works of Beethoven. Schumann’s symphony was a labour of love – it took around a decade to complete and is dedicated to the great violinist Joseph Joachim, who was a child prodigy when it was begun but a mature artist (and grown man) by the time of its completion. Yet, debate still rages about whether Schumann's first or last thoughts on this piece were superior. On this occasion, Ticciati opts for the first version – the one Schumann's own friend, Brahms, preferred.
Beethoven's Pastoral Symphony
- Mozart
Programme note
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756-1791)
Symphony No 1 in E flat major, K16 (1864)Allegro molto
Andante
PrestoThe thought that Mozart actually composed a Symphony No 1, employing (at the age of eight) a theme which would reappear in the Jupiter symphony, requires what can only be called suspension of disbelief. Did his influential father have a hand in it? Was it written by Mozart at all? Was he, wunderkind though he was, even capable of writing it? His second and third symphonies, as we now know, were the work of other people, but all the evidence points to the authenticity of K16. True, the music itself does not tell us as much. How could it be expected to do so? Even the reiterating and quite recognisable anticipation of the Jupiter symphony, which dominates the slow movement, is just an eighteenth-century tag, consisting of the notes do-re-fa-mi in sol-fa notation. Mozart employed it more than once in the course of his career, before bringing it to its apotheosis in the finale of his last symphony. Yet the way the horns play it, or underline it, in this boyhood work seems nothing if not significant, even though, in suggesting as much, we are merely being wise after the event.
Or are we? Mozart himself was presumably thinking along ambitious lines when, in writing the piece, he asked his sister Nannerl to remind him to give the horns "something special to do." Moreover the circumstances in which he composed it, during the famous family visit to London when he met Johann Christian Bach and performed for King George III, were curiously, indeed mysteriously, Mozartian, with his father lying in bed, seemingly dying of pneumonia but in fact suffering from no more than a cold, and with the children under orders not to make the slightest noise. Instead, said Nannerl of her brother, "he composed his first symphony for all the instruments of the orchestra – but especially for trumpets and kettledrums."
Though the absence of trumpets and drums from the score may suggest that it was a different symphony she was copying for him as she sat beside him in Leopold Mozart's sickroom, the parts for these instruments (not for the only time in a work by Mozart) may simply have been lost. Certainly the fanfares of the first movement sound ceremonial enough to imply their presence, even if it would be going too far to suggest, as one authority has done, that the stuttering rhythm is an anticipation of Papageno in The Magic Flute. The slow movement in C minor, however, is surely an early manifestation of sombre Mozartian poignancy, swept aside by the breezy concluding presto.
© Conrad Wilson
- Haydn
Programme note
Joseph Haydn (1732-1809)
Cello Concerto in D major (1783)Allegro moderato
Adagio
Rondo: AllegroConcertos did not take up so much of Haydn’s time as symphonies, though how many he actually wrote remains a mystery. In the most recent update of the New Grove, many of the listed works continue to bear the inscription “lost,” while others are categorised as “doubtful” or “spurious.” When you remember that even tonight’s concerto was once deemed inauthentic, you start wondering why Haydn’s concertos are so often thought to be by somebody else.
Most of them, it must be said, are of minor significance, which is one reason why their authenticity has sometimes been questioned. Unlike Mozart and Beethoven, Haydn was not a famed soloist. As a result, he lacked the incentive to produce masterpieces for himself to play. Indeed, for a vast portion of his career, he was confined to the privacy of a rural palace on the borders of Hungary, where he worked for the music-loving Esterhazy family, serving as staff composer, symphonist, and orchestral director. When, eventually, he achieved independence in Vienna, it was not for concertos that he was in demand, but for more symphonies.
Yet the Esterhazy years were those that shaped his musical personality, giving him a fine orchestra with a principal cellist, Anton Kraft, for whom he wrote the D major Concerto. This work was cherished as Haydn’s only surviving cello concerto (except for a period when Kraft was thought to be its composer) until in 1962 the Haydn expert, Robbins Landon, discovered another. Heavily promoted at the time by Rostropovich, with cadenzas specially written by Benjamin Britten, it gave cellists the happy choice between a racy, unfamiliar work in C major, and the serene, much loved, long established D major concerto we shall hear tonight.
Weighed down, as it once was, by the veneer of a heavy nineteenth-century arrangement, it now sounds all the better for the rediscovery of the original score – though nobody should expect the music to sound as audacious as Mozart’s Linz symphony, dating from the same year. The opening movement is in Haydn’s most elegant vein. The central adagio, with a main theme of characteristic breadth, is the movement that comes closest to Haydn’s symphonic style. Humour is reserved for the finale, in which Sir Donald Tovey, Edinburgh’s celebrated musical essayist, detected the strains of “Here we go gathering nuts in May.
© Conrad Wilson
- Beethoven
Programme note
Ludwig van Beethoven (1770–1827)
Symphony No 6 in F, Op 68, 'Pastoral' (1807-08)Allegro ma non troppo - The awakening of happy feelings on arriving in the country
Andante molto moto - By the brook
Allegro - The joyful gathering of country folk
Allegro - Thunderstorm
Allegretto - Shepherds' thanksgiving after the stormComposers have been evoking nature in music as long as they have been writing it down — and probably well before that. Birds, storms, streams and sunrises are a common feature of many 18th-century works, most famously (now, at least) in Vivaldi’s Four Seasons. So this piece, written in 1807-08 looked back to a grand tradition, but at the same time was one of the most original and influential works of the 19th century. It is hard to imagine the nature pictures of Berlioz, Mendelssohn, Wagner, and Strauss without it.
The debate about how important it is too know the ‘story’ behind the music will never end. Beethoven himself was conflicted. This is the only one of his symphonies that follows an explicit program. "Pastoral Symphony, or Recollections of Country Life," he wrote at the head of the score, and each movement has its own tale to tell. Yet, in the sketches for the piece he wrote, "All painting in instrumental music is lost if it is pushed too far” and “Anyone with a notion of country life can discern for himself the composer’s intentions without many titles. . . . The whole will be recognized as a matter more of feeling than of painting in sounds." But it is hard not to think he is protesting too much. He clearly enjoyed imitating birdsong in the second movement (nightingale, cuckoo and quail). And his buffoonish village band is affectionately portrayed in the third movement: who knows which band inspired this hilarious vignette, or how much they drank before they played!
Tchaikovsky used to insist that Beethoven’s Fifth has just as obvious a story as the Pastoral though it is not put into words. Certainly, there are striking similarities between the two pieces. Both were first heard in the same enormously long concert in 1808. The audience who endured the many hours in a cold theatre could have been forgiven for believing Beethoven had created an altogether new form, so dramatically do these pieces differ from any symphony that they may have heard previously. Notably, both symphonies close with a linked sequence of movements, huge expanses of sound in which Beethoven explores startling transitions and expressive effects. He also asks for an unusually large orchestra in both symphonies, including trombones, piccolo and contrabassoon – none of which were standard for the time. Yet, in both pieces he holds these extra instruments in reserve until dramatic points late in the piece. The differences between the works are equally striking. The kinetic energy that crackles through the opening bars of the Fifth does not let up until the close; the question posed in its opening bars is not truly answered until the finale, some 20 minutes later. In the Sixth, by contrast, there is hardly a straight line. Harmony is soft, its arguments deceptively discursive. Beethoven dwells on picturesque details and allows lovely moments to flower, seemingly without concern for the overall picture. At least that is the illusion Beethoven creates. More than any other symphony of his, this offers repose.
© Svend Brown
- conductor
- cello
A spry and brilliant symphony by an eight-year-old; a magnificent concerto, a symphony that has become a popular favourite the world over, though in its time it was astonishingly revolutionary. The familiar names of Beethoven, Haydn and Mozart conceal a wealth of stories in this delightful programme opening the SCO’s 2011/12 St Andrews Concert Season.
Related audio clip
Beethoven Symphony No. 6 in F Major 'Pastoral' - Thunderstorm - excerpt
The Orchestra performed Beethoven's Symphonies Nos 1-8 at the 2006 Edinburgh International Festival, under Sir Charles Mackerras. The performances were recorded by Hyperion and released as a 5-disc CD box set. The Philarmonia Orchestra perform Symphony No 9. Buy from the SCO Online Shop.
Beethoven's Pastoral Symphony - Dumfries
- Mozart
Programme note
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756-1791)
Symphony No 1 in E flat major, K16 (1864)Allegro molto
Andante
PrestoThe thought that Mozart actually composed a Symphony No 1, employing (at the age of eight) a theme which would reappear in the Jupiter symphony, requires what can only be called suspension of disbelief. Did his influential father have a hand in it? Was it written by Mozart at all? Was he, wunderkind though he was, even capable of writing it? His second and third symphonies, as we now know, were the work of other people, but all the evidence points to the authenticity of K16. True, the music itself does not tell us as much. How could it be expected to do so? Even the reiterating and quite recognisable anticipation of the Jupiter symphony, which dominates the slow movement, is just an eighteenth-century tag, consisting of the notes do-re-fa-mi in sol-fa notation. Mozart employed it more than once in the course of his career, before bringing it to its apotheosis in the finale of his last symphony. Yet the way the horns play it, or underline it, in this boyhood work seems nothing if not significant, even though, in suggesting as much, we are merely being wise after the event.
Or are we? Mozart himself was presumably thinking along ambitious lines when, in writing the piece, he asked his sister Nannerl to remind him to give the horns "something special to do." Moreover the circumstances in which he composed it, during the famous family visit to London when he met Johann Christian Bach and performed for King George III, were curiously, indeed mysteriously, Mozartian, with his father lying in bed, seemingly dying of pneumonia but in fact suffering from no more than a cold, and with the children under orders not to make the slightest noise. Instead, said Nannerl of her brother, "he composed his first symphony for all the instruments of the orchestra – but especially for trumpets and kettledrums."
Though the absence of trumpets and drums from the score may suggest that it was a different symphony she was copying for him as she sat beside him in Leopold Mozart's sickroom, the parts for these instruments (not for the only time in a work by Mozart) may simply have been lost. Certainly the fanfares of the first movement sound ceremonial enough to imply their presence, even if it would be going too far to suggest, as one authority has done, that the stuttering rhythm is an anticipation of Papageno in The Magic Flute. The slow movement in C minor, however, is surely an early manifestation of sombre Mozartian poignancy, swept aside by the breezy concluding presto.
© Conrad Wilson
- Haydn
Programme note
Joseph Haydn (1732-1809)
Cello Concerto in D major (1783)Allegro moderato
Adagio
Rondo: AllegroConcertos did not take up so much of Haydn’s time as symphonies, though how many he actually wrote remains a mystery. In the most recent update of the New Grove, many of the listed works continue to bear the inscription “lost,” while others are categorised as “doubtful” or “spurious.” When you remember that even tonight’s concerto was once deemed inauthentic, you start wondering why Haydn’s concertos are so often thought to be by somebody else.
Most of them, it must be said, are of minor significance, which is one reason why their authenticity has sometimes been questioned. Unlike Mozart and Beethoven, Haydn was not a famed soloist. As a result, he lacked the incentive to produce masterpieces for himself to play. Indeed, for a vast portion of his career, he was confined to the privacy of a rural palace on the borders of Hungary, where he worked for the music-loving Esterhazy family, serving as staff composer, symphonist, and orchestral director. When, eventually, he achieved independence in Vienna, it was not for concertos that he was in demand, but for more symphonies.
Yet the Esterhazy years were those that shaped his musical personality, giving him a fine orchestra with a principal cellist, Anton Kraft, for whom he wrote the D major Concerto. This work was cherished as Haydn’s only surviving cello concerto (except for a period when Kraft was thought to be its composer) until in 1962 the Haydn expert, Robbins Landon, discovered another. Heavily promoted at the time by Rostropovich, with cadenzas specially written by Benjamin Britten, it gave cellists the happy choice between a racy, unfamiliar work in C major, and the serene, much loved, long established D major concerto we shall hear tonight.
Weighed down, as it once was, by the veneer of a heavy nineteenth-century arrangement, it now sounds all the better for the rediscovery of the original score – though nobody should expect the music to sound as audacious as Mozart’s Linz symphony, dating from the same year. The opening movement is in Haydn’s most elegant vein. The central adagio, with a main theme of characteristic breadth, is the movement that comes closest to Haydn’s symphonic style. Humour is reserved for the finale, in which Sir Donald Tovey, Edinburgh’s celebrated musical essayist, detected the strains of “Here we go gathering nuts in May.
© Conrad Wilson
- Beethoven
Programme note
Ludwig van Beethoven (1770–1827)
Symphony No 6 in F, Op 68, 'Pastoral' (1807-08)Allegro ma non troppo - The awakening of happy feelings on arriving in the country
Andante molto moto - By the brook
Allegro - The joyful gathering of country folk
Allegro - Thunderstorm
Allegretto - Shepherds' thanksgiving after the stormComposers have been evoking nature in music as long as they have been writing it down — and probably well before that. Birds, storms, streams and sunrises are a common feature of many 18th-century works, most famously (now, at least) in Vivaldi’s Four Seasons. So this piece, written in 1807-08 looked back to a grand tradition, but at the same time was one of the most original and influential works of the 19th century. It is hard to imagine the nature pictures of Berlioz, Mendelssohn, Wagner, and Strauss without it.
The debate about how important it is too know the ‘story’ behind the music will never end. Beethoven himself was conflicted. This is the only one of his symphonies that follows an explicit program. "Pastoral Symphony, or Recollections of Country Life," he wrote at the head of the score, and each movement has its own tale to tell. Yet, in the sketches for the piece he wrote, "All painting in instrumental music is lost if it is pushed too far” and “Anyone with a notion of country life can discern for himself the composer’s intentions without many titles. . . . The whole will be recognized as a matter more of feeling than of painting in sounds." But it is hard not to think he is protesting too much. He clearly enjoyed imitating birdsong in the second movement (nightingale, cuckoo and quail). And his buffoonish village band is affectionately portrayed in the third movement: who knows which band inspired this hilarious vignette, or how much they drank before they played!
Tchaikovsky used to insist that Beethoven’s Fifth has just as obvious a story as the Pastoral though it is not put into words. Certainly, there are striking similarities between the two pieces. Both were first heard in the same enormously long concert in 1808. The audience who endured the many hours in a cold theatre could have been forgiven for believing Beethoven had created an altogether new form, so dramatically do these pieces differ from any symphony that they may have heard previously. Notably, both symphonies close with a linked sequence of movements, huge expanses of sound in which Beethoven explores startling transitions and expressive effects. He also asks for an unusually large orchestra in both symphonies, including trombones, piccolo and contrabassoon – none of which were standard for the time. Yet, in both pieces he holds these extra instruments in reserve until dramatic points late in the piece. The differences between the works are equally striking. The kinetic energy that crackles through the opening bars of the Fifth does not let up until the close; the question posed in its opening bars is not truly answered until the finale, some 20 minutes later. In the Sixth, by contrast, there is hardly a straight line. Harmony is soft, its arguments deceptively discursive. Beethoven dwells on picturesque details and allows lovely moments to flower, seemingly without concern for the overall picture. At least that is the illusion Beethoven creates. More than any other symphony of his, this offers repose.
© Svend Brown
- conductor
- cello
A spry and brilliant symphony by an eight-year-old; a magnificent concerto, a symphony that has become a popular favourite the world over, though in its time it was astonishingly revolutionary. The familiar names of Beethoven, Haydn and Mozart conceal a wealth of stories in this delightful programme.
Tickets for this performance will be available from DGArts on 01387 253383 from Monday 15 August. The SCO returns to Easterbrook Hall on Tuesday 3 January, 2012 for New Year in Vienna.
Related audio clip
Beethoven Symphony No. 6 in F Major 'Pastoral' - Thunderstorm - excerpt
The Orchestra performed Beethoven's Symphonies Nos 1-8 at the 2006 Edinburgh International Festival, under Sir Charles Mackerras. The performances were recorded by Hyperion and released as a 5-disc CD box set. The Philarmonia Orchestra perform Symphony No 9. Buy from the SCO Online Shop.
Beethoven's Pastoral Symphony
- Mozart
Programme note
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756-1791)
Symphony No 1 in E flat major, K16 (1864)Allegro molto
Andante
PrestoThe thought that Mozart actually composed a Symphony No 1, employing (at the age of eight) a theme which would reappear in the Jupiter symphony, requires what can only be called suspension of disbelief. Did his influential father have a hand in it? Was it written by Mozart at all? Was he, wunderkind though he was, even capable of writing it? His second and third symphonies, as we now know, were the work of other people, but all the evidence points to the authenticity of K16. True, the music itself does not tell us as much. How could it be expected to do so? Even the reiterating and quite recognisable anticipation of the Jupiter symphony, which dominates the slow movement, is just an eighteenth-century tag, consisting of the notes do-re-fa-mi in sol-fa notation. Mozart employed it more than once in the course of his career, before bringing it to its apotheosis in the finale of his last symphony. Yet the way the horns play it, or underline it, in this boyhood work seems nothing if not significant, even though, in suggesting as much, we are merely being wise after the event.
Or are we? Mozart himself was presumably thinking along ambitious lines when, in writing the piece, he asked his sister Nannerl to remind him to give the horns "something special to do." Moreover the circumstances in which he composed it, during the famous family visit to London when he met Johann Christian Bach and performed for King George III, were curiously, indeed mysteriously, Mozartian, with his father lying in bed, seemingly dying of pneumonia but in fact suffering from no more than a cold, and with the children under orders not to make the slightest noise. Instead, said Nannerl of her brother, "he composed his first symphony for all the instruments of the orchestra – but especially for trumpets and kettledrums."
Though the absence of trumpets and drums from the score may suggest that it was a different symphony she was copying for him as she sat beside him in Leopold Mozart's sickroom, the parts for these instruments (not for the only time in a work by Mozart) may simply have been lost. Certainly the fanfares of the first movement sound ceremonial enough to imply their presence, even if it would be going too far to suggest, as one authority has done, that the stuttering rhythm is an anticipation of Papageno in The Magic Flute. The slow movement in C minor, however, is surely an early manifestation of sombre Mozartian poignancy, swept aside by the breezy concluding presto.
© Conrad Wilson
- Haydn
Programme note
Joseph Haydn (1732-1809)
Cello Concerto in D major (1783)Allegro moderato
Adagio
Rondo: AllegroConcertos did not take up so much of Haydn’s time as symphonies, though how many he actually wrote remains a mystery. In the most recent update of the New Grove, many of the listed works continue to bear the inscription “lost,” while others are categorised as “doubtful” or “spurious.” When you remember that even tonight’s concerto was once deemed inauthentic, you start wondering why Haydn’s concertos are so often thought to be by somebody else.
Most of them, it must be said, are of minor significance, which is one reason why their authenticity has sometimes been questioned. Unlike Mozart and Beethoven, Haydn was not a famed soloist. As a result, he lacked the incentive to produce masterpieces for himself to play. Indeed, for a vast portion of his career, he was confined to the privacy of a rural palace on the borders of Hungary, where he worked for the music-loving Esterhazy family, serving as staff composer, symphonist, and orchestral director. When, eventually, he achieved independence in Vienna, it was not for concertos that he was in demand, but for more symphonies.
Yet the Esterhazy years were those that shaped his musical personality, giving him a fine orchestra with a principal cellist, Anton Kraft, for whom he wrote the D major Concerto. This work was cherished as Haydn’s only surviving cello concerto (except for a period when Kraft was thought to be its composer) until in 1962 the Haydn expert, Robbins Landon, discovered another. Heavily promoted at the time by Rostropovich, with cadenzas specially written by Benjamin Britten, it gave cellists the happy choice between a racy, unfamiliar work in C major, and the serene, much loved, long established D major concerto we shall hear tonight.
Weighed down, as it once was, by the veneer of a heavy nineteenth-century arrangement, it now sounds all the better for the rediscovery of the original score – though nobody should expect the music to sound as audacious as Mozart’s Linz symphony, dating from the same year. The opening movement is in Haydn’s most elegant vein. The central adagio, with a main theme of characteristic breadth, is the movement that comes closest to Haydn’s symphonic style. Humour is reserved for the finale, in which Sir Donald Tovey, Edinburgh’s celebrated musical essayist, detected the strains of “Here we go gathering nuts in May.
© Conrad Wilson
- Beethoven
Programme note
Ludwig van Beethoven (1770–1827)
Symphony No 6 in F, Op 68, 'Pastoral' (1807-08)Allegro ma non troppo - The awakening of happy feelings on arriving in the country
Andante molto moto - By the brook
Allegro - The joyful gathering of country folk
Allegro - Thunderstorm
Allegretto - Shepherds' thanksgiving after the stormComposers have been evoking nature in music as long as they have been writing it down — and probably well before that. Birds, storms, streams and sunrises are a common feature of many 18th-century works, most famously (now, at least) in Vivaldi’s Four Seasons. So this piece, written in 1807-08 looked back to a grand tradition, but at the same time was one of the most original and influential works of the 19th century. It is hard to imagine the nature pictures of Berlioz, Mendelssohn, Wagner, and Strauss without it.
The debate about how important it is too know the ‘story’ behind the music will never end. Beethoven himself was conflicted. This is the only one of his symphonies that follows an explicit program. "Pastoral Symphony, or Recollections of Country Life," he wrote at the head of the score, and each movement has its own tale to tell. Yet, in the sketches for the piece he wrote, "All painting in instrumental music is lost if it is pushed too far” and “Anyone with a notion of country life can discern for himself the composer’s intentions without many titles. . . . The whole will be recognized as a matter more of feeling than of painting in sounds." But it is hard not to think he is protesting too much. He clearly enjoyed imitating birdsong in the second movement (nightingale, cuckoo and quail). And his buffoonish village band is affectionately portrayed in the third movement: who knows which band inspired this hilarious vignette, or how much they drank before they played!
Tchaikovsky used to insist that Beethoven’s Fifth has just as obvious a story as the Pastoral though it is not put into words. Certainly, there are striking similarities between the two pieces. Both were first heard in the same enormously long concert in 1808. The audience who endured the many hours in a cold theatre could have been forgiven for believing Beethoven had created an altogether new form, so dramatically do these pieces differ from any symphony that they may have heard previously. Notably, both symphonies close with a linked sequence of movements, huge expanses of sound in which Beethoven explores startling transitions and expressive effects. He also asks for an unusually large orchestra in both symphonies, including trombones, piccolo and contrabassoon – none of which were standard for the time. Yet, in both pieces he holds these extra instruments in reserve until dramatic points late in the piece. The differences between the works are equally striking. The kinetic energy that crackles through the opening bars of the Fifth does not let up until the close; the question posed in its opening bars is not truly answered until the finale, some 20 minutes later. In the Sixth, by contrast, there is hardly a straight line. Harmony is soft, its arguments deceptively discursive. Beethoven dwells on picturesque details and allows lovely moments to flower, seemingly without concern for the overall picture. At least that is the illusion Beethoven creates. More than any other symphony of his, this offers repose.
© Svend Brown
- cello
- conductor
A spry and brilliant symphony by an eight-year-old; a magnificent concerto, a symphony that has become a popular favourite the world over, though in its time it was astonishingly revolutionary. The familiar names of Beethoven, Haydn and Mozart conceal a wealth of stories in this delightful programme.
Related audio clip
Beethoven Symphony No. 6 in F Major 'Pastoral' - Thunderstorm - excerpt
The Orchestra performed Beethoven's Symphonies Nos 1-8 at the 2006 Edinburgh International Festival, under Sir Charles Mackerras. The performances were recorded by Hyperion and released as a 5-disc CD box set. The Philarmonia Orchestra perform Symphony No 9. Buy from the SCO Online Shop.
Beethoven's Pastoral Symphony
- Mozart
Programme note
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756-1791)
Symphony No 1 in E flat major, K16 (1864)Allegro molto
Andante
PrestoThe thought that Mozart actually composed a Symphony No 1, employing (at the age of eight) a theme which would reappear in the Jupiter symphony, requires what can only be called suspension of disbelief. Did his influential father have a hand in it? Was it written by Mozart at all? Was he, wunderkind though he was, even capable of writing it? His second and third symphonies, as we now know, were the work of other people, but all the evidence points to the authenticity of K16. True, the music itself does not tell us as much. How could it be expected to do so? Even the reiterating and quite recognisable anticipation of the Jupiter symphony, which dominates the slow movement, is just an eighteenth-century tag, consisting of the notes do-re-fa-mi in sol-fa notation. Mozart employed it more than once in the course of his career, before bringing it to its apotheosis in the finale of his last symphony. Yet the way the horns play it, or underline it, in this boyhood work seems nothing if not significant, even though, in suggesting as much, we are merely being wise after the event.
Or are we? Mozart himself was presumably thinking along ambitious lines when, in writing the piece, he asked his sister Nannerl to remind him to give the horns "something special to do." Moreover the circumstances in which he composed it, during the famous family visit to London when he met Johann Christian Bach and performed for King George III, were curiously, indeed mysteriously, Mozartian, with his father lying in bed, seemingly dying of pneumonia but in fact suffering from no more than a cold, and with the children under orders not to make the slightest noise. Instead, said Nannerl of her brother, "he composed his first symphony for all the instruments of the orchestra – but especially for trumpets and kettledrums."
Though the absence of trumpets and drums from the score may suggest that it was a different symphony she was copying for him as she sat beside him in Leopold Mozart's sickroom, the parts for these instruments (not for the only time in a work by Mozart) may simply have been lost. Certainly the fanfares of the first movement sound ceremonial enough to imply their presence, even if it would be going too far to suggest, as one authority has done, that the stuttering rhythm is an anticipation of Papageno in The Magic Flute. The slow movement in C minor, however, is surely an early manifestation of sombre Mozartian poignancy, swept aside by the breezy concluding presto.
© Conrad Wilson
- Haydn
Programme note
Joseph Haydn (1732-1809)
Cello Concerto in D major (1783)Allegro moderato
Adagio
Rondo: AllegroConcertos did not take up so much of Haydn’s time as symphonies, though how many he actually wrote remains a mystery. In the most recent update of the New Grove, many of the listed works continue to bear the inscription “lost,” while others are categorised as “doubtful” or “spurious.” When you remember that even tonight’s concerto was once deemed inauthentic, you start wondering why Haydn’s concertos are so often thought to be by somebody else.
Most of them, it must be said, are of minor significance, which is one reason why their authenticity has sometimes been questioned. Unlike Mozart and Beethoven, Haydn was not a famed soloist. As a result, he lacked the incentive to produce masterpieces for himself to play. Indeed, for a vast portion of his career, he was confined to the privacy of a rural palace on the borders of Hungary, where he worked for the music-loving Esterhazy family, serving as staff composer, symphonist, and orchestral director. When, eventually, he achieved independence in Vienna, it was not for concertos that he was in demand, but for more symphonies.
Yet the Esterhazy years were those that shaped his musical personality, giving him a fine orchestra with a principal cellist, Anton Kraft, for whom he wrote the D major Concerto. This work was cherished as Haydn’s only surviving cello concerto (except for a period when Kraft was thought to be its composer) until in 1962 the Haydn expert, Robbins Landon, discovered another. Heavily promoted at the time by Rostropovich, with cadenzas specially written by Benjamin Britten, it gave cellists the happy choice between a racy, unfamiliar work in C major, and the serene, much loved, long established D major concerto we shall hear tonight.
Weighed down, as it once was, by the veneer of a heavy nineteenth-century arrangement, it now sounds all the better for the rediscovery of the original score – though nobody should expect the music to sound as audacious as Mozart’s Linz symphony, dating from the same year. The opening movement is in Haydn’s most elegant vein. The central adagio, with a main theme of characteristic breadth, is the movement that comes closest to Haydn’s symphonic style. Humour is reserved for the finale, in which Sir Donald Tovey, Edinburgh’s celebrated musical essayist, detected the strains of “Here we go gathering nuts in May.
© Conrad Wilson
- Beethoven
Programme note
Ludwig van Beethoven (1770–1827)
Symphony No 6 in F, Op 68, 'Pastoral' (1807-08)Allegro ma non troppo - The awakening of happy feelings on arriving in the country
Andante molto moto - By the brook
Allegro - The joyful gathering of country folk
Allegro - Thunderstorm
Allegretto - Shepherds' thanksgiving after the stormComposers have been evoking nature in music as long as they have been writing it down — and probably well before that. Birds, storms, streams and sunrises are a common feature of many 18th-century works, most famously (now, at least) in Vivaldi’s Four Seasons. So this piece, written in 1807-08 looked back to a grand tradition, but at the same time was one of the most original and influential works of the 19th century. It is hard to imagine the nature pictures of Berlioz, Mendelssohn, Wagner, and Strauss without it.
The debate about how important it is too know the ‘story’ behind the music will never end. Beethoven himself was conflicted. This is the only one of his symphonies that follows an explicit program. "Pastoral Symphony, or Recollections of Country Life," he wrote at the head of the score, and each movement has its own tale to tell. Yet, in the sketches for the piece he wrote, "All painting in instrumental music is lost if it is pushed too far” and “Anyone with a notion of country life can discern for himself the composer’s intentions without many titles. . . . The whole will be recognized as a matter more of feeling than of painting in sounds." But it is hard not to think he is protesting too much. He clearly enjoyed imitating birdsong in the second movement (nightingale, cuckoo and quail). And his buffoonish village band is affectionately portrayed in the third movement: who knows which band inspired this hilarious vignette, or how much they drank before they played!
Tchaikovsky used to insist that Beethoven’s Fifth has just as obvious a story as the Pastoral though it is not put into words. Certainly, there are striking similarities between the two pieces. Both were first heard in the same enormously long concert in 1808. The audience who endured the many hours in a cold theatre could have been forgiven for believing Beethoven had created an altogether new form, so dramatically do these pieces differ from any symphony that they may have heard previously. Notably, both symphonies close with a linked sequence of movements, huge expanses of sound in which Beethoven explores startling transitions and expressive effects. He also asks for an unusually large orchestra in both symphonies, including trombones, piccolo and contrabassoon – none of which were standard for the time. Yet, in both pieces he holds these extra instruments in reserve until dramatic points late in the piece. The differences between the works are equally striking. The kinetic energy that crackles through the opening bars of the Fifth does not let up until the close; the question posed in its opening bars is not truly answered until the finale, some 20 minutes later. In the Sixth, by contrast, there is hardly a straight line. Harmony is soft, its arguments deceptively discursive. Beethoven dwells on picturesque details and allows lovely moments to flower, seemingly without concern for the overall picture. At least that is the illusion Beethoven creates. More than any other symphony of his, this offers repose.
© Svend Brown
- conductor
- cello
A spry and brilliant symphony by an eight-year-old; a magnificent concerto, a symphony that has become a popular favourite the world over, though in its time it was astonishingly revolutionary. The familiar names of Beethoven, Haydn and Mozart conceal a wealth of stories in this delightful programme.
Related audio clip
Beethoven Symphony No. 6 in F Major 'Pastoral' - Thunderstorm - excerpt
The Orchestra performed Beethoven's Symphonies Nos 1-8 at the 2006 Edinburgh International Festival, under Sir Charles Mackerras. The performances were recorded by Hyperion and released as a 5-disc CD box set. The Philarmonia Orchestra perform Symphony No 9. Buy from the SCO Online Shop.
CL@SIX: Inspirational Cities
- Haydn
Programme note
Joseph Haydn (1732-1809)
March for the Royal Society of Musicians (1791)With the death of his patron Prince Nikolaus Esterházy in February 1790, Haydn was freed from his increasingly onerous duties as Kapellmeister. The Prince’s successor, Prince Anton Esterházy, shared none of his father’s enthusiasm for music. He disbanded both the orchestra and choir, and granted Haydn a comfortable pension. Financially secure, and at the height of his creative powers, Haydn accepted an unexpected invitation to visit London from the impresario Johann Peter Salomon. Haydn was to receive £300 for a new opera, £300 for six new symphonies, a further £200 for their copyright, £200 for twenty other works and a guarantee of at least £200 from a benefit concert. When Mozart asked Haydn how at his advanced age (fifty-six!) he could travel to England speaking no language but German, Haydn replied, “but my language is understood everywhere.” Haydn left with Salomon almost immediately, and arrived in London on New Years Day 1791. Haydn’s visit – the first of three - was an unqualified success.
Haydn’s first London concert took place on 11 March 1791, in the Hanover Square Rooms. Haydn himself directed from the harpsichord, while Salomon led the orchestra. “Never, perhaps, was there a richer musical treat”, enthused the Morning Chronicle. “It is not wonderful that to souls capable of being touched by music, Haydn should be an object of homage and even idolatry; for like our own Shakespeare, he moves and governs the passions at his will.”
Soon after, Haydn was invited to the annual dinner of the Royal Society of Musicians. For the occasion, he composed a march for orchestra, the autograph of which is still preserved by the society. This tuneful work began life as a short piece for wind instruments - specifically, two clarinets, two bassoons, two horns, and a now-obsolete woodwind, the serpent - and timpani. Its original title was March for the Prince of Wales. For this occasion, Haydn arranged it for full orchestra, adding two flutes and strings.
The Royal Society for Musicians, whose current patron is Sir Peter Maxwell Davies, is Britain’s oldest musical charity. When it was founded, in 1738, as the “Fund for Decay’d Musicians”, 228 members signed its Declaration of Trust, including Arne, Boyce, Greene, Pepusch, Edward Purcell (son of Henry), Roseingrave, Sammartini, and, most valuably, Handel, who left £1,000 to the Society in his will. From the outset, dinners or 'Anniversary Festivals' were held, which often included performances of specially-written Marches.
© Stephen Strugnell
- Mozart
Programme note
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756–1791)
Symphony No 31 in D major, K297 'Paris' (1778)Allegro assai
Andante
Andante
AllegroThis Symphony dates from Mozart’s extended visit to Paris in the spring and summer of 1778. It was composed for the Concerts Spirituels, the most important of the Parisian concert-giving organisations, and is on the grand scale characteristic of orchestral music in Paris and also in Mannheim, where Mozart had spent the previous winter. The orchestra consists of strings and two each of flutes, oboes, clarinets, bassoons, horns and trumpets, with timpani. This is the largest band for which Mozart scored a symphony from the outset (the 'Haffner', No 35, has the same instrumentation, but the flute and clarinet parts are later additions). Mozart’s music is correspondingly brilliant, and we know that he consciously set out with this piece to impress and win over the Paris audience.
One way in which he did this was by adopting the convention of the 'premier coup d'archet', the opening attack or 'first stroke of the bow' which was the pride of Parisian music. Mozart’s energetic version of this simple enough device serves to introduce, and later to hold together, an exposition which is long, full of ideas, and remarkable for saying a great many things twice over. For all these reasons, presumably, it is not repeated; instead, the 'coup d'archet' theme whips the movement onwards into the development section, and soon, surprisingly, into the distant key of F major – in which key there is a passage of airy interchange between the violins only loosely based on what has gone before. The recapitulation follows shortly afterwards, and, while it does not imitate the exposition slavishly, turns out to be on every bit as large a scale.
Mozart wrote two slow movements for the 'Paris' Symphony, both in G major, but one in 6/8 time and one in 3/4. According to a letter he wrote to his father after the first performance, he was told by Legros, the director of the Concerts Spirituels, that his original Andante was too long and full of key-changes for the Paris audience. Though he disagreed with this opinion, he obliged with a replacement for a repeat performance in August; and, having written it, decided he liked it better than the first. Most writers on Mozart (with the significant exception of the scholar Alan Tyson) have concluded that the 6/8 movement now usually performed is the earlier of the two: it certainly feels the more ambitious, with its stern interjections in octaves and its telling alternations of major and minor. That means that the movement Mozart ultimately preferred is the one in 3/4, delicately scored with a woodwind section of a single flute, oboe and bassoon. In any case, tonight’s performance offers a rare chance to compare the two.
Having opened his first movement with the traditional 'coup d'archet', Mozart starts his finale softly on violins alone, and lets the full band loose only after eight bars: this reversal of the usual procedure pleased the audience mightily at the first performance, as Mozart knew it would. The movement also contains a formal upset on a larger scale, concerning the second subject, which is introduced in fugal texture. This theme is given intensive treatment in the development section, so much so that it threatens to take over the movement. But Mozart restores the balance by leaving it out of the recapitulation completely, bridging the gap with an unexpected chromatic scale, and then driving onwards to his brilliant conclusion as if nothing had failed to happen.
© Anthony Burton
- Haydn
Programme note
Joseph Haydn (1732-1809)
Symphony No 104 ‘The London’ (1795)Adagio - Allegro
Andante
Menuet: Allegro - Trio - Allegro
Finale: SpiritosoHaydn’s first and last symphonies are in the same key – D major – and contrasting the works highlights his astounding achievement. No 1 is an aristocratic diversion for small orchestra lasting little more than ten minutes, performed for a handful of guests in a palace. No 104 is a tour de force, 25 minutes of serious music written for a discriminating, large audience in a public concert hall - so requiring considerably more players. It is clear too that the public event – in this case Haydn’s last London concert - was much more lucrative than the private patronage. Haydn made enough from the performance of this symphony to more than triple the size of his entire savings after a long career in aristocratic service,
His last London concert demanded of Haydn a symphony of unsurpassed splendour, concentration and invention. From the first bar to the last there is a sense of intense and thorough musical thought. He never squanders notes and disdained composers who were spendthrift with ideas:
“Once I had seized upon an idea, my whole endeavour was to develop and sustain it in keeping with the rules of art. In this way I tried to keep going, and this is where so many of our new composers fall down. They string out one little piece after another, they break off when they have hardly begun, and nothing remains in the heart when one has listened to it.”
Haydn managed ‘to keep going’ here by deriving pretty well all the germinal ideas of all four movements from the quiet, unassuming opening melody. The Andante and Finale vary the falling opening phrase, while the Menuet opens with an echo of the second, rising motif. Tying everything together in this way could, in the wrong, uninspired hands, sound like a terribly arid, possibly academic exercise; but as with so many things, this is a case of ‘not what you do but how you do it’: Haydn’s thought is too beguiling to fall into that trap. Hearing this symphony can be like eavesdropping on a brilliant mind as it tosses ideas around.
The influence of Mozart is felt in the opening bars. The stark unison and growling timpani rolls seem to share something of the demonic monumentality of Don Giovanni. The energy and drive of the main body of the movement is wonderfully contrasted with the serenity of the slow movement. Beware though: as in other London Symphonies, Haydn explores an expansive and disparate landscape in his set of variations before coming to rest in leisurely fashion. The Menuet and Trio is a bucolic and good-natured moment of light relief before plunging into the melee of the Finale, based on a Croatian folk-tune from which Haydn creates a dazzling race to the finish.
© Svend Brown
- conductor
Two of the greatest musical cities of the 18th century celebrated by two of its greatest composers, both of them Austrian. Haydn was a huge celebrity in London, and of his twelve ‘London’ symphonies this was the last and finest. For Mozart, Paris left bitter memories of disappointment and loss as his mother died while they were there – but you could never tell that from the sheer brilliance and aplomb of this music.
New Babylon
- Takemitsu
Programme note
Toru Takemitsu (1930-1996)
Three Film ScoresMusic of Training and Rest (José Torres)
Funeral Music (Black Rain)
Waltz (The Face of Another)Takemitsu reached his widest audience not in the concert hall but in the cinema, as perhaps the greatest Japanese composer of film scores. He wrote 93 of them over forty years and collaborated extensively with many great directors, including Kurosawa and Teshigawara. This musical territory was uniquely well suited to Takemitsu’s own complex balance between East and West. Western music was banned in Japan when he first came across gramophone recordings of it. He was a 14-year old soldier at the time and His secret listening to European composers paved the way for his own adventures in orchestral and instrumental music.
Three Film Scores is a suite of selections from Takemitsu’s music to three films, spanning most of his career. José Torres was a documentary about the eponymous Puerto Rican boxer (1959) and its Music of Training and Rest juxtaposes punchy syncopated, ‘training’ music with the softer, more lyrical music of rest: tango is never far away. Black Rain (1989) is a disturbing reflection on the aftermath of the bombing of Hiroshima, and the ways the Japanese people came to terms with it. The Funeral Music fits director Imamura’s dramatic black and white photography both of the catastrophe itself and the slow death so many of his characters endure. In the choice of his last excerpt, Takemitsu offers an uncomfortable leap to the world of the waltz from The Face of Another (1966) – a bizarre tale of disfigurement, madness and murder.
© Svend Brown
- Kerry
Programme note
Commissioned by the Ian Potter Cultural Trust
Gordon Kerry (born 1961)
Captain Flinders’ Musick
Concerto for flute and small orchestraIn Australia there are streets, towns, a mountain range, another peak, an island, numerous hotels, a university and a string quartet named after Matthew Flinders, and it was Flinders who named Australia. Commissioned in the last years of the 18th century by the British Admiralty to chart the coast of the continent in which the colony of New South Wales had recently been founded – largely to forestall the ambitions of other expansionist powers like France – Flinders circumnavigated first van Diemen’s Land, proving it to be an island (now known as Tasmania) and then, in a series of appallingly ill-conditioned ships, charted the mainland. En route he, with one egregious exception, dealt respectfully with the Aboriginal communities he met, documenting regional differences of language and custom; he met and conversed with French explorers charting the forbidding southern coast, and Malay traders in the northern tropics. He noted, in fine prose, the radically different coastal landscapes, flora and fauna, that occur around the continent’s edge.
Of a modest Lincolnshire background but hugely intelligent and talented, he had married shortly before embarking for the South Seas, but was unexpectedly forbidden from taking his young wife, Ann, to Sydney. She spent the next years fearful, reasonably, that Matthew would succumb to disease or shipwreck, and while he and his crews did suffer both, fate was even more ironically unkind. On his way home to England his ship landed on Mauritius, where, owing to hostility between Britain and Napoleonic France, he was incarcerated; while this was soon changed to house arrest with French families on their plantations, he was detained from December 1803 until June 1810. He spent his time refining his charts, writing letters and a beautifully detailed diary, and enjoying the friendship of his long-time companion, a cat called Trim, until Trim’s untimely disappearance. (Flinders and Trim are both represented by statues outside the State Library of New South Wales in Sydney.)
And he played the flute, so evenings of chamber music with French families were common – one Madame de Chazal, he tells us, had a magnificent harpsichord – and he used, naturally, to play contemporary music, especially that of Ignace Pleyel, François Devienne and Anton Hoffmeister. He also wrote a poem to his wife, set to ‘an air of Haydn’ (though its actual provenance is unsure) that he used to play ‘with tears in my eyes’.
For a long time I have been fascinated by the idea of a man of the European Enlightenment, with late-classical music in his head, scanning what must have seemed the most alien landscapes imaginable – the west coast of Tasmania pounded endlessly by the Roaring Forties and Southern Ocean; the stark finality of the Nullarbor cliffs; the Great Barrier Reef and, on occasion, facing great danger at the end of the world. And then, of course, music became, in a sense, his only home for over 6 years.
My Concerto, then, plays with some of these ideas. It is framed by a classically-scored chord for winds, as if to suggest that all that we hear is a reverie. Slow-moving string textures, that allude to the distinctively ‘Australian’ sound-world of composers such as Peter Sculthorpe, follow, with a chromatic figure in the bass derived from a flute quartet of Devienne (the section is actually quoted toward the end of the work), which leads to a motif in the trumpets derived from a quartet by Hoffmeister. The flute enters, and after a texture of harmonics from it and the strings, the work’s faster material begins. Here the music might suggest rough seas and towering landforms in its frequent changes of metre, rough bowing from the strings and trumpet fanfares, while the flute charts an ornate path above the fray. A gesture recalling the sound of the Japanese shakuhachi reminds us that this is the Asian hemisphere.
Tumult and a sudden return to the slower music recalls an incident where Flinders’ eight-foot vessel was nearly dashed against cliffs just south of Sydney; providentially he and his two colleagues were washed into the only safe inlet on that stretch of coast. The flute creates arabesques over material occasionally interrupted by a falling scalar melody from Hoffmeister that dissolves into bird-song. The return of the faster music is signalled by an A major woodwind figure from a Pleyel Sonata; this section contains a brief evocation, thanks again to Pleyel, of a fife and drum band, recalling an incident where Flinders delighted the Aboriginals of King George Sound by drilling his marines on the beach. The section includes a chunk of Devienne, as Flinders might have remembered it, and produces the work’s main climax. The flute is left alone briefly, remembering and commenting on snatches of the ‘Haydn’ tune played by a string quartet, the opening ‘nature’ music, and the pathos of the Hoffmeister quotation. In the final pages of the work the orchestral flute joins the soloist in an image of Matthew and Ann’s eventual reunion.
Flinders spent his last four years gravely ill and poor, working on his final maps of Australia and his epic journal. He died in 1814 at the age of 40.
Gordon Kerry © 2011
- Saint-Saëns
Programme note
Camille Saint-Saëns (1835-1921)
The Assassination of the Duke of Guise (L’Assassinat du duc de Guise), Op 128 (1908)Saint-Saëns began his musical career with enthusiastic accolades from such avant-gardists as Berlioz and Liszt and ended it over half-a-century later as an old fogy. He once professed that “composing music was a natural function. He produced music like an apple tree produces apples”. Saint-Saëns kept his enquiring mind throughout his long life and accepted a commission (at the age of 73) to write an accompanying score for one of the very first silent films – L’Assassinat du duc de Guise, directed by André Calmettes with sets by Emile Bertin in 1908. It was based on the murder of Henri, the third duc de Guise (a powerful rival to King Henri III) at Blois in 1588. This enterprise was the brainchild of Le Film d’Art which wanted the integration of art with the new genre of cinema by bringing historical and mythological scenes to the screen. Saint-Saëns eschewed any pretense at 16th-century pastiche and wrote a vivid score to accompany the melodramatic scenes portrayed on the silver screen.
Première tableau: the Introduction accompanies the film credits. The first scene is set in the house of the Marquise de Noirmoutiers (mistress to the duc de Guise). A page hands her an anonymous letter warning her to detain the Duke as the King has a nasty surprise in store for him. The Duke, however, believes he has nothing to fear and so goes to attend the Council. Deuxième tableau: this takes place in the palace of Henri III where the King plans the assassination of the Duke. The Quarante-cinq (the King’s bodyguard) appears and rehearses the murder. The King presents them with daggers. Troisième tableau: this occurs in the Council Hall to which the Duke is summoned. Quatrième tableau: this is one of those tragi-comical scenes well known to viewers of the silent screen. The Duke turns round several times just as a murderer is about to strike so that the assassin is obliged to retreat with a deep and hypocritical bow. But then the murder is achieved and Henri III emerges from his hiding place to make sure the Duke is really dead. His body is searched and a letter is found proving the Duke is a traitor to his country. Cinquième tableau: this takes place in the guard-house. The body of the Duke is brought in and after a brief religious moment, his body is burned in the fireplace – just as the Marquise de Noirmoutiers arrives. She, appropriately, faints dead away.
Melodramatic – yes! But what is fascinating is that Saint-Saëns had an instinct for how music could support and sustain this little horror story without any previous models on which to base his ideas. With just a small chamber ensemble of solo strings and winds with piano and harmonium, Saint-Saëns creates an atmospheric and colourful score so that you will have no difficulty in imaging the film as the music flows by. That is quite an achievement for an ‘old fogy’ in an entirely new genre in 1908!
© David Gardner
- Shostakovich
Programme note
Dmitri Shostakovich (1906-1975)
New Babylon Suite, Op 18War
Paris
The Siege of Paris
Operetta
Paris has stood for centuries
Versailles
Early in his career as a Soviet composer, Shostakovich discovered that film scores could be a handy source of income. This was a useful point to recall when he was suddenly black-listed by the Union of Soviet Composers in 1948 at the instigation of the cultural tsar, Andrei Zhdanov, presumably at the instigation of Stalin. After that debacle, film music for Stalinist propaganda films was all Shostakovich was allowed to compose in order to earn some sort of living – until the next change in the official Soviet viewpoint regarding culture.The commission to write music for the silent film New Babylon came in late 1927. Shostakovich completed the score in February 1928. He was fortunate that the film directors, Kozintsev and Trauberg, were among the very best. Praise for the finished score was loud, but the hack orchestras assembled in the cinemas were barely capable of performing it – so the score disappeared after a few showings. After Shostakovich’s death in 1975, his film scores were resurrected by such colleagues as the conductor Gennady Rozhdestvensky who created an extensive suite from the music the composer had written for New Babylon. It is scored for medium-size orchestra of single winds and brass, strings, piano and percussion (which includes a sort of musical saw and xylophone). The film uses the abortive French Commune of 1871 as a metaphor for what had happened in the newly formed Soviet Union. Naturally the film focuses on the vast distance between the decadent bourgeoisies with their desires for “food, clothes and pornographic entertainment” and the simple, “healthy” attitude to life of the working class. Shostakovich draws on themes from French operetta with its polkas, can-cans and waltzes to depict the degenerately better off. But the Marseillaise also gets a look in, not to mention a sad Tchaikovsky piano solo to match the onscreen scene where an old communard plays an instrument on the barricades, only to get shot for his pains. The story is about the life and death of a young woman who works at a Parisian luxury goods emporium – the ‘New Babylon’. She becomes involved with the Commune and its protest against a treaty with the German army, is taken prisoner by government forces sent to deal with the barricades and sentenced to death after refusing to save her life through a false confession. Worse, her former lover, a soldier belonging to the government army, finds himself digging her grave as a member of the firing squad. She dies with her fellow prisoners with mockingly hysterical contempt for her lover and his dutiful treachery.
There are six sections to the suite: War; Paris; The Siege of Paris; Operetta; Paris has stood for centuries; & Versailles. The score begins with a bawdy burlesque led by a brazen trumpet and ends with the piano solo, a clarinet lament and then a reprise of the decadent naughtiness represented by the can-can.
‘Subtle’ was not in the job-description for this commission!
© David Gardner
- conductor
- flute
Shostakovich wrote his brilliantly witty and sophisticated film score to accompany New Babylon, a 1928 satire set in the Paris Commune in 1871. He relishes his pastiches of Parisian popular classics – especially Offenbach – treading a fine line between homage and parody. Opening the evening is a fascinating rarity: Saint-Saëns, composer of Carnival of the Animals, writing one of the first ever film scores! Gordon Kerry is a prestigious voice from Australia, where he was recently awarded the country’s top composition award, the Ian Potter Music Commissions. He used part of his prize to write this concerto for the SCO’s charismatic Principal Flute.
New Babylon
- Takemitsu
Programme note
Toru Takemitsu (1930-1996)
Three Film ScoresMusic of Training and Rest (José Torres)
Funeral Music (Black Rain)
Waltz (The Face of Another)Takemitsu reached his widest audience not in the concert hall but in the cinema, as perhaps the greatest Japanese composer of film scores. He wrote 93 of them over forty years and collaborated extensively with many great directors, including Kurosawa and Teshigawara. This musical territory was uniquely well suited to Takemitsu’s own complex balance between East and West. Western music was banned in Japan when he first came across gramophone recordings of it. He was a 14-year old soldier at the time and His secret listening to European composers paved the way for his own adventures in orchestral and instrumental music.
Three Film Scores is a suite of selections from Takemitsu’s music to three films, spanning most of his career. José Torres was a documentary about the eponymous Puerto Rican boxer (1959) and its Music of Training and Rest juxtaposes punchy syncopated, ‘training’ music with the softer, more lyrical music of rest: tango is never far away. Black Rain (1989) is a disturbing reflection on the aftermath of the bombing of Hiroshima, and the ways the Japanese people came to terms with it. The Funeral Music fits director Imamura’s dramatic black and white photography both of the catastrophe itself and the slow death so many of his characters endure. In the choice of his last excerpt, Takemitsu offers an uncomfortable leap to the world of the waltz from The Face of Another (1966) – a bizarre tale of disfigurement, madness and murder.
© Svend Brown
- Kerry
Programme note
Commissioned by the Ian Potter Cultural Trust
Gordon Kerry (born 1961)
Captain Flinders’ Musick
Concerto for flute and small orchestraIn Australia there are streets, towns, a mountain range, another peak, an island, numerous hotels, a university and a string quartet named after Matthew Flinders, and it was Flinders who named Australia. Commissioned in the last years of the 18th century by the British Admiralty to chart the coast of the continent in which the colony of New South Wales had recently been founded – largely to forestall the ambitions of other expansionist powers like France – Flinders circumnavigated first van Diemen’s Land, proving it to be an island (now known as Tasmania) and then, in a series of appallingly ill-conditioned ships, charted the mainland. En route he, with one egregious exception, dealt respectfully with the Aboriginal communities he met, documenting regional differences of language and custom; he met and conversed with French explorers charting the forbidding southern coast, and Malay traders in the northern tropics. He noted, in fine prose, the radically different coastal landscapes, flora and fauna, that occur around the continent’s edge.
Of a modest Lincolnshire background but hugely intelligent and talented, he had married shortly before embarking for the South Seas, but was unexpectedly forbidden from taking his young wife, Ann, to Sydney. She spent the next years fearful, reasonably, that Matthew would succumb to disease or shipwreck, and while he and his crews did suffer both, fate was even more ironically unkind. On his way home to England his ship landed on Mauritius, where, owing to hostility between Britain and Napoleonic France, he was incarcerated; while this was soon changed to house arrest with French families on their plantations, he was detained from December 1803 until June 1810. He spent his time refining his charts, writing letters and a beautifully detailed diary, and enjoying the friendship of his long-time companion, a cat called Trim, until Trim’s untimely disappearance. (Flinders and Trim are both represented by statues outside the State Library of New South Wales in Sydney.)
And he played the flute, so evenings of chamber music with French families were common – one Madame de Chazal, he tells us, had a magnificent harpsichord – and he used, naturally, to play contemporary music, especially that of Ignace Pleyel, François Devienne and Anton Hoffmeister. He also wrote a poem to his wife, set to ‘an air of Haydn’ (though its actual provenance is unsure) that he used to play ‘with tears in my eyes’.
For a long time I have been fascinated by the idea of a man of the European Enlightenment, with late-classical music in his head, scanning what must have seemed the most alien landscapes imaginable – the west coast of Tasmania pounded endlessly by the Roaring Forties and Southern Ocean; the stark finality of the Nullarbor cliffs; the Great Barrier Reef and, on occasion, facing great danger at the end of the world. And then, of course, music became, in a sense, his only home for over 6 years.
My Concerto, then, plays with some of these ideas. It is framed by a classically-scored chord for winds, as if to suggest that all that we hear is a reverie. Slow-moving string textures, that allude to the distinctively ‘Australian’ sound-world of composers such as Peter Sculthorpe, follow, with a chromatic figure in the bass derived from a flute quartet of Devienne (the section is actually quoted toward the end of the work), which leads to a motif in the trumpets derived from a quartet by Hoffmeister. The flute enters, and after a texture of harmonics from it and the strings, the work’s faster material begins. Here the music might suggest rough seas and towering landforms in its frequent changes of metre, rough bowing from the strings and trumpet fanfares, while the flute charts an ornate path above the fray. A gesture recalling the sound of the Japanese shakuhachi reminds us that this is the Asian hemisphere.
Tumult and a sudden return to the slower music recalls an incident where Flinders’ eight-foot vessel was nearly dashed against cliffs just south of Sydney; providentially he and his two colleagues were washed into the only safe inlet on that stretch of coast. The flute creates arabesques over material occasionally interrupted by a falling scalar melody from Hoffmeister that dissolves into bird-song. The return of the faster music is signalled by an A major woodwind figure from a Pleyel Sonata; this section contains a brief evocation, thanks again to Pleyel, of a fife and drum band, recalling an incident where Flinders delighted the Aboriginals of King George Sound by drilling his marines on the beach. The section includes a chunk of Devienne, as Flinders might have remembered it, and produces the work’s main climax. The flute is left alone briefly, remembering and commenting on snatches of the ‘Haydn’ tune played by a string quartet, the opening ‘nature’ music, and the pathos of the Hoffmeister quotation. In the final pages of the work the orchestral flute joins the soloist in an image of Matthew and Ann’s eventual reunion.
Flinders spent his last four years gravely ill and poor, working on his final maps of Australia and his epic journal. He died in 1814 at the age of 40.
Gordon Kerry © 2011
- Saint-Saëns
Programme note
Camille Saint-Saëns (1835-1921)
The Assassination of the Duke of Guise (L’Assassinat du duc de Guise), Op 128 (1908)Saint-Saëns began his musical career with enthusiastic accolades from such avant-gardists as Berlioz and Liszt and ended it over half-a-century later as an old fogy. He once professed that “composing music was a natural function. He produced music like an apple tree produces apples”. Saint-Saëns kept his enquiring mind throughout his long life and accepted a commission (at the age of 73) to write an accompanying score for one of the very first silent films – L’Assassinat du duc de Guise, directed by André Calmettes with sets by Emile Bertin in 1908. It was based on the murder of Henri, the third duc de Guise (a powerful rival to King Henri III) at Blois in 1588. This enterprise was the brainchild of Le Film d’Art which wanted the integration of art with the new genre of cinema by bringing historical and mythological scenes to the screen. Saint-Saëns eschewed any pretense at 16th-century pastiche and wrote a vivid score to accompany the melodramatic scenes portrayed on the silver screen.
Première tableau: the Introduction accompanies the film credits. The first scene is set in the house of the Marquise de Noirmoutiers (mistress to the duc de Guise). A page hands her an anonymous letter warning her to detain the Duke as the King has a nasty surprise in store for him. The Duke, however, believes he has nothing to fear and so goes to attend the Council. Deuxième tableau: this takes place in the palace of Henri III where the King plans the assassination of the Duke. The Quarante-cinq (the King’s bodyguard) appears and rehearses the murder. The King presents them with daggers. Troisième tableau: this occurs in the Council Hall to which the Duke is summoned. Quatrième tableau: this is one of those tragi-comical scenes well known to viewers of the silent screen. The Duke turns round several times just as a murderer is about to strike so that the assassin is obliged to retreat with a deep and hypocritical bow. But then the murder is achieved and Henri III emerges from his hiding place to make sure the Duke is really dead. His body is searched and a letter is found proving the Duke is a traitor to his country. Cinquième tableau: this takes place in the guard-house. The body of the Duke is brought in and after a brief religious moment, his body is burned in the fireplace – just as the Marquise de Noirmoutiers arrives. She, appropriately, faints dead away.
Melodramatic – yes! But what is fascinating is that Saint-Saëns had an instinct for how music could support and sustain this little horror story without any previous models on which to base his ideas. With just a small chamber ensemble of solo strings and winds with piano and harmonium, Saint-Saëns creates an atmospheric and colourful score so that you will have no difficulty in imaging the film as the music flows by. That is quite an achievement for an ‘old fogy’ in an entirely new genre in 1908!
© David Gardner
- Shostakovich
Programme note
Dmitri Shostakovich (1906-1975)
New Babylon Suite, Op 18War
Paris
The Siege of Paris
Operetta
Paris has stood for centuries
Versailles
Early in his career as a Soviet composer, Shostakovich discovered that film scores could be a handy source of income. This was a useful point to recall when he was suddenly black-listed by the Union of Soviet Composers in 1948 at the instigation of the cultural tsar, Andrei Zhdanov, presumably at the instigation of Stalin. After that debacle, film music for Stalinist propaganda films was all Shostakovich was allowed to compose in order to earn some sort of living – until the next change in the official Soviet viewpoint regarding culture.The commission to write music for the silent film New Babylon came in late 1927. Shostakovich completed the score in February 1928. He was fortunate that the film directors, Kozintsev and Trauberg, were among the very best. Praise for the finished score was loud, but the hack orchestras assembled in the cinemas were barely capable of performing it – so the score disappeared after a few showings. After Shostakovich’s death in 1975, his film scores were resurrected by such colleagues as the conductor Gennady Rozhdestvensky who created an extensive suite from the music the composer had written for New Babylon. It is scored for medium-size orchestra of single winds and brass, strings, piano and percussion (which includes a sort of musical saw and xylophone). The film uses the abortive French Commune of 1871 as a metaphor for what had happened in the newly formed Soviet Union. Naturally the film focuses on the vast distance between the decadent bourgeoisies with their desires for “food, clothes and pornographic entertainment” and the simple, “healthy” attitude to life of the working class. Shostakovich draws on themes from French operetta with its polkas, can-cans and waltzes to depict the degenerately better off. But the Marseillaise also gets a look in, not to mention a sad Tchaikovsky piano solo to match the onscreen scene where an old communard plays an instrument on the barricades, only to get shot for his pains. The story is about the life and death of a young woman who works at a Parisian luxury goods emporium – the ‘New Babylon’. She becomes involved with the Commune and its protest against a treaty with the German army, is taken prisoner by government forces sent to deal with the barricades and sentenced to death after refusing to save her life through a false confession. Worse, her former lover, a soldier belonging to the government army, finds himself digging her grave as a member of the firing squad. She dies with her fellow prisoners with mockingly hysterical contempt for her lover and his dutiful treachery.
There are six sections to the suite: War; Paris; The Siege of Paris; Operetta; Paris has stood for centuries; & Versailles. The score begins with a bawdy burlesque led by a brazen trumpet and ends with the piano solo, a clarinet lament and then a reprise of the decadent naughtiness represented by the can-can.
‘Subtle’ was not in the job-description for this commission!
© David Gardner
- conductor
- flute
Shostakovich wrote his brilliantly witty and sophisticated film score to accompany New Babylon, a 1928 satire set in the Paris Commune in 1871. He relishes his pastiches of Parisian popular classics – especially Offenbach – treading a fine line between homage and parody. Opening the evening is a fascinating rarity: Saint-Saëns, composer of Carnival of the Animals, writing one of the first ever film scores! Gordon Kerry is a prestigious voice from Australia, where he was recently awarded the country’s top composition award, the Ian Potter Music Commissions. He used part of his prize to write this concerto for the SCO’s charismatic Principal Flute.
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