Concerts & Tickets

Programme note

Programme note

Programme note

Programme note

Jean Philippe Rameau (1683-1764): Suite from ‘Dardanus’

Ouverture; Air gracieux; Tambourins (Prologue) 1 & 2; Menuet tendre en rondeau; Ritournelle (‘Isménor’); Ritournelle (‘Descente de Vénus’);Calme des sens; Gavotte vive; Chaconne; Bruit de guerre

Opera of Rameau’s time differs from the more familiar 19th century sorts in that orchestral music played a huge role – a third of any given opera might be purely instrumental. If you have never seen a complete French opera of that time, imagine something a little like a modern musical but on a grand, lavish and serious scale (almost a third of Lerner and Lowe’s Brigadoon is orchestral music ). The plot is generally a tortuous love story that ends happily having allowed the characters to demonstrate their nobility, wickedness, courage etc as required. The tale is told through singing, but also dances and incidental music which are staged with spectacular effects, scene and costume changes, battles, storms, magical transformations, huge mythic beasts to be defeated, floods… it was all very similar to your average CGI infested blockbuster film. In a good staging the effect is overwhelming, but sadly, it is hard to do that without an astonishingly lavish budget, so productions are not exactly thick on the ground. Thank heavens then for the instrumental sections that are easily extracted to form suites such as this.

Rameau clearly adored writing for the excellent musicians of the Paris Opera Orchestra. 34 string players, 10 winds and continuo – not so very different from the standard modern chamber orchestra, but the sound Rameau creates is unlike anything composed since. In particular, he cherishes the winds and gives them many, many brief solos and duos that add texture and variety to his scores. Brilliant high flutes add brilliance to tuttis; multiple oboes and bassoons enrich the middle registers. 

Few of Rameau’s works enjoyed instantaneous success, and Dardanus is no exception. It was premiered in 1739, when its failure was attributed to the weakness of the libretto - little more than a stringing together of operatic clichés of the day. Rameau went back to the drawing board and produced a second version in 1744, which was a success. The two biggest musical highlights are the Overture and the Chaconne. The overture is a classic ‘French’ overture of the time, in that it opens with broad, grand music full of dotted rhythms then sweeps off into livelier fare. The Chaconne originally closed the opera. It is a long formal dance in which a simple four bar melody is elaborated at length. The simplicity of the basic idea is also the challenge to the composer: to keep delighting his audience with yet more imaginative takes on the basic short chord sequence. Rameau wrote many chaconnes, and this is reckoned to be one of the very best, full of wonderful touches. Around these great bookends, Rameau demonstrates his great emotional range from touching sentiment to the sheer joy of the Tambourins.

© Svend Brown

Programme note

Jean Philippe Rameau (1683-1764): Suite from ‘Dardanus’

Ouverture; Air gracieux; Tambourins (Prologue) 1 & 2; Menuet tendre en rondeau; Ritournelle (‘Isménor’); Ritournelle (‘Descente de Vénus’);Calme des sens; Gavotte vive; Chaconne; Bruit de guerre

Opera of Rameau’s time differs from the more familiar 19th century sorts in that orchestral music played a huge role – a third of any given opera might be purely instrumental. If you have never seen a complete French opera of that time, imagine something a little like a modern musical but on a grand, lavish and serious scale (almost a third of Lerner and Lowe’s Brigadoon is orchestral music ). The plot is generally a tortuous love story that ends happily having allowed the characters to demonstrate their nobility, wickedness, courage etc as required. The tale is told through singing, but also dances and incidental music which are staged with spectacular effects, scene and costume changes, battles, storms, magical transformations, huge mythic beasts to be defeated, floods… it was all very similar to your average CGI infested blockbuster film. In a good staging the effect is overwhelming, but sadly, it is hard to do that without an astonishingly lavish budget, so productions are not exactly thick on the ground. Thank heavens then for the instrumental sections that are easily extracted to form suites such as this.

Rameau clearly adored writing for the excellent musicians of the Paris Opera Orchestra. 34 string players, 10 winds and continuo – not so very different from the standard modern chamber orchestra, but the sound Rameau creates is unlike anything composed since. In particular, he cherishes the winds and gives them many, many brief solos and duos that add texture and variety to his scores. Brilliant high flutes add brilliance to tuttis; multiple oboes and bassoons enrich the middle registers. 

Few of Rameau’s works enjoyed instantaneous success, and Dardanus is no exception. It was premiered in 1739, when its failure was attributed to the weakness of the libretto - little more than a stringing together of operatic clichés of the day. Rameau went back to the drawing board and produced a second version in 1744, which was a success. The two biggest musical highlights are the Overture and the Chaconne. The overture is a classic ‘French’ overture of the time, in that it opens with broad, grand music full of dotted rhythms then sweeps off into livelier fare. The Chaconne originally closed the opera. It is a long formal dance in which a simple four bar melody is elaborated at length. The simplicity of the basic idea is also the challenge to the composer: to keep delighting his audience with yet more imaginative takes on the basic short chord sequence. Rameau wrote many chaconnes, and this is reckoned to be one of the very best, full of wonderful touches. Around these great bookends, Rameau demonstrates his great emotional range from touching sentiment to the sheer joy of the Tambourins.

© Svend Brown

Programme note

György Ligeti (1923-2006)
Hamburg Concerto for horn and chamber orchestra (1999 rev. 2002) 

György Ligeti (1923-2006) is one the leading and most distinctive composers of the last century. He was born in Hungary but did not have much impact on the musical world until he escaped to the West in 1956 where he met Stockhausen. Ligeti was never part of the Darmstadt avant garde school of the 1950s and 1960s, and was more interested in finding his own solution to the problems of composing within a Modernist aesthetic. His most well-known music is that which is primarily textural, and uses what he described as ‘micropolyphony’; a highly complex and dense canonic music. This music became widely known through its use in Stanley Kubrick’s film 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) for which Ligeti did not originally get paid.

The Hamburg Concerto is from Ligeti’s late period but still shows many features from his earlier music, such as an interest in texture, timbre and micro-tunings. Ligeti’s later music, from the opera Le Grand Macabre (1974-78) onwards, shows a much more eclectic approach to compositional technique, with influences from Sub-Saharan music, the music of the American composer Conlon Nancarrow, and embracing elements of the music of the past. The result was that Ligeti’s music became much more approachable and tonal at times, but also quite unpredictable.

The most distinctive aspect of the Hamburg Concerto is its use of natural harmonics in the solo and quartet of natural horns (ones without valves). The natural harmonics are those notes that you get on any brass instrument from one length of the tubing, and the higher harmonics do not fit into the usual equal tempered tuning system. These harmonics, when combined, and with equal tempered instruments, produce ‘dirty’ harmonies which Ligeti has often used in his music. Ligeti comments that “these harmonies, which have never been used before, sound ‘weird’ in relation to harmonic spectra.”

Ligeti had written for the solo horn before in the Horn Trio (1982), in which the reflective and romantic aspect of the instrument is emphasised with echoes of Brahms’s Horn Trio. But in the Concerto there is a greater allusion to the hunting horn, for example in the second movement 'Signale, Tanz, Choral' and in the sixth movement 'Capriccio'.

Overall, the Hamburg Concerto is a bewildering array of highly characterised short, sketch-like movements exploring many of Ligeti’s styles. Although the work is apparently in seven movements, movements 2, 3, and 4 are divided into three or four clear sections – thus the work is really in 14 movements over 15 minutes. There is almost no development of the material, and the ideas are exposed very briefly before the movement ends. This approach is reminiscent of that in Ligeti’s three books of piano Études (1985-2001) in which each short étude is self-contained with one basic musical idea. The variety of styles include very static sustained music in the 'Praeludium' which hints at Ligeti’s earlier micropolyphonic works such as Lontano. 'Capriccio' starts in a very lively carefree fashion but later the movement abruptly changes mood, and Ligeti quotes his poignant ‘lament motive’ which consists of a descending chromatic line used in earlier works such as the Horn Trio. The final movement 'Hymnus' creates a shattering climax through a gradual evolution towards very loud and close microtonal harmony in the horns.

© Mike Searby

Programme note

György Ligeti (1923-2006)
Chamber Concerto for 13 instruments (1969-70) 

The Hungarian György Ligeti (1923-2006) is one the most fascinating and influential composers of the last century. What is most distinctive about his music is his ear for an original colour or texture, and also an approachability which is rare amongst most contemporary composers. His mature style did not emerge until after he escaped to the West in 1956, where he spent time working in the West German Radio Studio creating two ground-breaking electronic compositions. This impacted on his later instrumental works, which often sound electronic because of their innovative approach to texture and timbre. In the 1960s he devised a method of composition called ‘micropolyphony’ which consisted of many canonic layers superimposed on top of each other. This creates a dense web of lines producing a complex, ever-changing texture. Micropolyphony is used in most of Ligeti’s music up to the composition of his opera Le Grand Macabre (1974-78), and is the main technique used in the Chamber Concerto.

The Chamber Concerto was written for the Ensemble ‘die reihe’ and its conductor Friedrich Cerha; the first performance was May 1970 without the final fourth movement which was premiered in October of that year. Each movement has a contrasting sound world, and explores a range of different compositional techniques. One fundamental change in the Chamber Concerto, compared to Ligeti’s preceding music, is from a primarily textural and timbral approach, towards a gradual rediscovery of audible melody.

The first movement starts with a rich tapestry of lines in the woodwind which have a greater characterisation than in Ligeti’s earlier music – these are identifiably melodies although it is hard to hear them individually because of the way they intertwine with each other. The movement unfolds, like many of Ligeti’s micropolyphonic works, through the gradual expansion of the range of pitches used – he creates an expanding pitch wedge. Features in the movement to note are the way the material gradually moves from wind to strings and back; the use of sustained multi-octaves to ‘freeze’ time; and the interruption of a strident melody in the wind towards the end.

The second movement is the slowest of the four, and includes a remarkable section in which all the parts are moving independently at different speeds; a concept that can be seen much earlier in the music of Charles Ives. There are also soloists in this movement - the oboe d’amore the french horn, and the trombone - which take phrases of the surrounding texture and illuminate it into audible expressive melody.

The third movement is an example of Ligeti’s meccanico movements which are inspired by clocks and machines that gradually go ‘out-of-control’. He explores various textures created from repeated single pitches; most of these are moving at different tempi rather like the second movement.

The finale is a technical tour de force for the players (it was not attempted at the first performance in Britain) through its frantic and fast-moving material. Listen out for the incredible breathless duo between the piccolo and bass clarinet, and also for the piano where the directions are ‘hammering like a madman’. This is an uncompromising work which still sounds as fresh now as it did in 1970.

© Mike Searby