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Early Evening Concerts 2012/13 - October
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 concert season at the Younger Hall. One such collaboration is featuring SCO players and associates in the Early Evening Concert Series.
For details visit www.st-andrews.ac.uk/music, call 01334 462226 or drop in to the University Music Centre at the Younger Hall.
Ticciati conducts Così fan tutte
- Mozart
Programme note
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756-1791)
Così fan tutte (1790)Nothing shows more dramatically the rise in Mozart’s standing that took place during the 20th century – what Misha Donat has called ‘the recognition of the depth of Mozart’s emotional world’ – than the change in the reputation of Così fan tutte, the third of the comic operas written in collaboration with Lorenzo Da Ponte. From being – as it once was – reviled as a tragic case of a divinely gifted composer squandering his gifts on a frivolous and immoral libretto, it has become in some ways the Mozart opera par excellence – the one that, with its ironies and ambiguities, its searching examination of human frailty, speaks most urgently to our anxious, uncertain times.
Before its reputation sank, Così was admired in its own day. Dramas which involved the testing of fidelity were fashionable. To take one example among many, La dispute, by the French playwright Marivaux, asked the question: which sex is more inconstant in love? For Da Ponte, whose libretto is devised as a kind of laboratory experiment, the answer – women – is so obvious that the question doesn’t need asking. The two young officers are hardly out of the house before the sisters have succumbed to the charms of the ‘Albanians’ – in fact their fiancés in disguise. Da Ponte’s brilliantly artificial text, read without the music in mind, is unreservedly misogynistic. Così fan tutte – ‘That is what all women do’. It’s their nature. If men are deluded about them, it’s their own fault. Hence the elaborate game that has to be set up to educate them in the realities of life. Not for nothing is the work subtitled ‘The School for (male) Lovers’.
No wonder feminists have found the opera obnoxious. They might not be if they listened more closely to the score. For the first time in the collaboration, a gap opens up between composer and librettist. Mozart the compassionate anatomist of the human heart seizes on what Da Ponte has given him to give it a twist that Da Ponte can hardly have intended. A persistent and dominant feature of Mozart’s operas is, in Daniel Heartz’s phrase, his ‘infinite care to create strong and deeply moving female characters’. In Idomeneo, in Die Entführung, in Figaro, in The Magic Flute, it is the women who are generally wiser and more civilised, and who feel more deeply, than the men. So it is in Così fan tutte.
Even Despina, the sisters’ worldly-wise, hard-bitten maid, is shocked when she discovers the full extent of male deceitfulness. The way Mozart depicts Fiordiligi’s growing love for Ferrando (her sister Dorabella’s disguised fiancé), and her empathy with him, practically turns the drama on its head. It forces us to ask questions Da Ponte can never have envisaged. Is Ferrando’s response to her passion mere play-acting, in obedience to the oath the two officers swore to Don Alfonso to keep the pretence up to the very end? Or is it, perhaps, genuine? Do the lovers revert to their original pairing when all has been revealed? How can they, we can’t help asking? Modern productions frequently refuse to follow the libretto and, instead, show them bewildered, utterly disoriented.
The beauty of a concert performance of Così fan tutte is that we don’t have to make up our minds and draw conclusions. We can concentrate on the magic of the score, on what Mozart does with the drama and how his endlessly inventive music uses its conventions not only as a vehicle for comedy – and Così is an extremely funny opera – but also as a means of exploring profound issues of appearance and reality, disguise, identity, role-playing, truth. His portrayal of the six characters and their interactions is as subtle and masterly as anything in the Mozartian canon.
A concert also allows us to focus on and savour Mozart’s orchestra - as always, an active participant in the drama and now no longer half-hidden but in full view: to register the changes of colour and texture that occur as the four lovers – the men as well, not just the women – begin to discover their true natures; to realise, for instance, how the instrumental sound alters radically between the Act 1 and Act 2 arias of both Fiordiligi and Dorabella.
In Mozart’s hands Così fan tutte becomes at once a clinical experiment and an Arcadian vision ‘full of sounds and sweet airs’.This duality is reflected in two sharply differentiated sound-worlds. One is the smooth, mellifluous sonority of clarinets, horns, muted violins, and women’s voices entwined in long, lingering phrases. Nothing in music, Mozart’s or anyone else’s, is more meltingly, sensuously beautiful than the two quintets, the farewell trio, or Ferrando’s ‘Una aura amorosa’ (Act 1) or, in Act 2, the duet in which the sisters choose their men, the serenade, and the duet where Dorabella surrenders to Guglielmo.
The other is the lean, astringent, keen-edged sound heard when exaggerated expressions of feeling are being mocked or when the machinations of deception are in operation – a sound in which, most unusually, trumpets replace horns as the normal brass members of the orchestral ensemble: for example, Fiordiligi’s first aria, the Act 1 sextet, the scene where the officers pretend to take poison, and the quartet in Act 2 where Don Alfonso and Despina formally introduce the new lovers to each other. Even by Mozart’s standards such sophisticated treatment of instrumental colour is remarkable. It sums up the fascination, the fathomless ambiguity, of this disturbing, enchanting score.
© David Cairns
- conductor
- soprano
- Despina
- Dorabella
- Ferrando
- Guglielmo
- Don Alfonso
- -
Opening the 2010 SCO season with a thrilling Don Giovanni, Robin Ticciati set some kind of a precedent!
Now he follows it with Mozart’s sharp, dark, sexy comedy of young love betrayed: two men are tempted to test their lovers through a cruel deception, then pay the price in heartache and sorrow when the women fall into the trap. It’s a heart-wrenching tale which inspired great operatic writing from Mozart; sublime moments such as the trio, Soave sia il vento, and great arias including Un aura amoroso. Ticciati is joined by a brilliant cast of singers: just what you would expect from a conductor who is the toast of the operatic as well as the orchestral world.
Ticciati conducts Così fan tutte
- Mozart
Programme note
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756-1791)
Così fan tutte (1790)Nothing shows more dramatically the rise in Mozart’s standing that took place during the 20th century – what Misha Donat has called ‘the recognition of the depth of Mozart’s emotional world’ – than the change in the reputation of Così fan tutte, the third of the comic operas written in collaboration with Lorenzo Da Ponte. From being – as it once was – reviled as a tragic case of a divinely gifted composer squandering his gifts on a frivolous and immoral libretto, it has become in some ways the Mozart opera par excellence – the one that, with its ironies and ambiguities, its searching examination of human frailty, speaks most urgently to our anxious, uncertain times.
Before its reputation sank, Così was admired in its own day. Dramas which involved the testing of fidelity were fashionable. To take one example among many, La dispute, by the French playwright Marivaux, asked the question: which sex is more inconstant in love? For Da Ponte, whose libretto is devised as a kind of laboratory experiment, the answer – women – is so obvious that the question doesn’t need asking. The two young officers are hardly out of the house before the sisters have succumbed to the charms of the ‘Albanians’ – in fact their fiancés in disguise. Da Ponte’s brilliantly artificial text, read without the music in mind, is unreservedly misogynistic. Così fan tutte – ‘That is what all women do’. It’s their nature. If men are deluded about them, it’s their own fault. Hence the elaborate game that has to be set up to educate them in the realities of life. Not for nothing is the work subtitled ‘The School for (male) Lovers’.
No wonder feminists have found the opera obnoxious. They might not be if they listened more closely to the score. For the first time in the collaboration, a gap opens up between composer and librettist. Mozart the compassionate anatomist of the human heart seizes on what Da Ponte has given him to give it a twist that Da Ponte can hardly have intended. A persistent and dominant feature of Mozart’s operas is, in Daniel Heartz’s phrase, his ‘infinite care to create strong and deeply moving female characters’. In Idomeneo, in Die Entführung, in Figaro, in The Magic Flute, it is the women who are generally wiser and more civilised, and who feel more deeply, than the men. So it is in Così fan tutte.
Even Despina, the sisters’ worldly-wise, hard-bitten maid, is shocked when she discovers the full extent of male deceitfulness. The way Mozart depicts Fiordiligi’s growing love for Ferrando (her sister Dorabella’s disguised fiancé), and her empathy with him, practically turns the drama on its head. It forces us to ask questions Da Ponte can never have envisaged. Is Ferrando’s response to her passion mere play-acting, in obedience to the oath the two officers swore to Don Alfonso to keep the pretence up to the very end? Or is it, perhaps, genuine? Do the lovers revert to their original pairing when all has been revealed? How can they, we can’t help asking? Modern productions frequently refuse to follow the libretto and, instead, show them bewildered, utterly disoriented.
The beauty of a concert performance of Così fan tutte is that we don’t have to make up our minds and draw conclusions. We can concentrate on the magic of the score, on what Mozart does with the drama and how his endlessly inventive music uses its conventions not only as a vehicle for comedy – and Così is an extremely funny opera – but also as a means of exploring profound issues of appearance and reality, disguise, identity, role-playing, truth. His portrayal of the six characters and their interactions is as subtle and masterly as anything in the Mozartian canon.
A concert also allows us to focus on and savour Mozart’s orchestra - as always, an active participant in the drama and now no longer half-hidden but in full view: to register the changes of colour and texture that occur as the four lovers – the men as well, not just the women – begin to discover their true natures; to realise, for instance, how the instrumental sound alters radically between the Act 1 and Act 2 arias of both Fiordiligi and Dorabella.
In Mozart’s hands Così fan tutte becomes at once a clinical experiment and an Arcadian vision ‘full of sounds and sweet airs’.This duality is reflected in two sharply differentiated sound-worlds. One is the smooth, mellifluous sonority of clarinets, horns, muted violins, and women’s voices entwined in long, lingering phrases. Nothing in music, Mozart’s or anyone else’s, is more meltingly, sensuously beautiful than the two quintets, the farewell trio, or Ferrando’s ‘Una aura amorosa’ (Act 1) or, in Act 2, the duet in which the sisters choose their men, the serenade, and the duet where Dorabella surrenders to Guglielmo.
The other is the lean, astringent, keen-edged sound heard when exaggerated expressions of feeling are being mocked or when the machinations of deception are in operation – a sound in which, most unusually, trumpets replace horns as the normal brass members of the orchestral ensemble: for example, Fiordiligi’s first aria, the Act 1 sextet, the scene where the officers pretend to take poison, and the quartet in Act 2 where Don Alfonso and Despina formally introduce the new lovers to each other. Even by Mozart’s standards such sophisticated treatment of instrumental colour is remarkable. It sums up the fascination, the fathomless ambiguity, of this disturbing, enchanting score.
© David Cairns
- conductor
- soprano
- Despina
- Dorabella
- Ferrando
- Guglielmo
- Don Alfonso
- -
Opening the 2010 SCO season with a thrilling Don Giovanni, Robin Ticciati set some kind of a precedent!
Now he follows it with Mozart’s sharp, dark, sexy comedy of young love betrayed: two men are tempted to test their lovers through a cruel deception, then pay the price in heartache and sorrow when the women fall into the trap. It’s a heart-wrenching tale which inspired great operatic writing from Mozart; sublime moments such as the trio, Soave sia il vento, and great arias including Un aura amoroso. Ticciati is joined by a brilliant cast of singers: just what you would expect from a conductor who is the toast of the operatic as well as the orchestral world.
The Romantic Age
- Berlioz
Programme note
Hector Berlioz (1803-1869)
Overture, King LearAlthough King Lear was in the repertory of the English company which visited Paris in 1827-28 and from which Berlioz first received his life-changing experience of Shakespeare’s genius, it wasn’t till several years later that he got to know the play, during his time in Italy as winner of the 1830 Prix de Rome. While waiting in Florence, in a state of intense anxiety, for news of his fiancée Camille Moke, he read King Lear in the woods outside the city. It filled him with a kind of appalled enthusiasm. Back in his hotel room he inscribed some lines from it on the title page of the manuscript score of the Symphonie Fantastique: ‘As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods – they kill us for their sport’.
A few days later a letter came announcing that Camille was marrying the piano manufacturer Pleyel. Berlioz promptly set off for Paris with the intention of killing both of them, and the perfidious Madame Moke, before turning the last bullet on himself. By the time he reached Nice his rage had ebbed, and he stayed, drinking in the beauty of the place and profiting by the advice of Horace Vernet, director of the French Academy in Rome, who wrote to tell him that the sovereign remedies for a mind in turmoil were love of one’s art and hard work. In a fortnight of concentrated composition he produced a concert overture on the play, composing in his head as he walked by the sea and writing it down in his room high above the waves.
The resulting work has a closer connection both with the play and with the events of Berlioz’s life than were apparent to Donald Tovey, who in a celebrated analysis described it as ‘a magnificent piece of orchestral rhetoric in tragic style’ which we should be content to call ‘the Tragedy of the Speaking Basses, of the Plea of the Oboe, and of the Fury of the Orchestra’.
The ‘noble and indignant’ phrases for the lower strings which begin the long introduction, starting in proud strength but dying away to an abstracted mutter, clearly portray the stubborn, once masterful king (as well as being influenced by the instrumental recitatives in Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony). So does the angry, obsessive first theme of the allegro, just as the introduction’s pure, artless oboe melody represents Cordelia. Berlioz’s letters and Memoirs speak of Lear and Cordelia as the protagonists of the work; they also mention the king’s entrance into the council chamber (introduction), the storm (allegro) and Lear’s madness (the reappearance of the introduction’s opening phrases in the midst of the storm).
Even though Berlioz’s desire for revenge had abated, the wound was still raw. The vibrations of his recent traumatic experiences are heard, unmistakably, in the extraordinary tension and dry, electric sonority of the string writing, and also in certain textures and colours reminiscent of the Tempest Fantasy (composed the previous autumn to celebrate his ‘Ariel’, Camille), and in the allegro’s long-drawn, lyrical second theme – its character, and what happens to it. The theme breathes regret, conscious or not, for lost happiness. It runs to more than fifty bars; even then, Berlioz cannot let it go: it keeps putting forth fresh, more poignantly expressive tendrils of melody. A short way into the development section its second strain is heard again, in the minor. And in the coda it is the subject of a violent and sustained conflict, in which the opening phrase is whirled round and round and finally sucked into the orchestral vortex. This can stand for the tragic destruction of Cordelia, but it is surely an echo of something more personal and painfully real – the loss of Camille and the annihilation of their love.
© David Cairns
- Mendelssohn
Programme note
Felix Mendelssohn (1809-1847)
Violin Concerto in E minor, Op 64 (1844)Allegro molto appassionato -
Andante -
Allegretto non troppo - Allegro molto vivaceNever has a violin concerto had a happier send-off than Mendelssohn’s, or has seemed to spring more perfectly from the pen of its creator. Lucky Ferdinand David who, in Leipzig, gave the work its premiere in 1845. Lucky Joseph Joachim who, at the age of fourteen, later played it in Dresden, with Schumann as conductor. The abundant melodies sound totally spontaneous and instantly memorable. But superficial – which is something they have been said to be - they are certainly not.
Even their apparent ease did not come easily to the composer, and we should rejoice that the machinery of the music - the way one splendid tune works up to a climax before leading to another, the poise of the accompaniments, the beauty of the transition passages, the control of tension and relaxation - operates so discreetly and naturally, as if the concerto were composed in a single sweep. Yet this was not the case. As Mendelssohn himself reported, the opening notes in E minor kept spinning in his head, giving him no peace, and impeding the progress of the rest of the work. Such is the mystery of genius.
The first movement, in a manner typical of its composer, manages to be both passionate and delicate, but its smooth flow does not conceal some incomparable strokes of inspiration, such as the soloist’s sustaining of a long, low G while the woodwind announce the tranquil second subject. The placing of the cadenza, before instead of after the recapitulation of the principal themes, is a startling moment of surprise. Who could ever describe Mendelssohn as unoriginal? Yet the surprise has been scrupulously prepared. The music is deliberately allowed to lose momentum, as if to suggest that the recapitulation is pending. Instead, it is the cadenza that sidles in.
No less surprising is the way the first movement’s fast, impulsive coda is propelled straight into the slow movement via a note suspended on the bassoon, followed by the gentlest of modulations on the strings until the concerto settles iridescently in the key of simple C major. Though given no more than the one-word marking, andante, the music has no lack of sweet expressiveness, either in the serenity of its main theme or what sounds like the quiet anguish of the middle section before the theme returns.
Recognising that a straight move to the scurrying wit of the finale might seem too abrupt, the ever-thoughtful Mendelssohn inserted a little interlude, poetically recalling the start of the first movement. It is another moment of Mendelssohn magic, in which the soloist prepares us for the new mood and new key of E major. Then the music dashes off in a new array of mercurial melodies, redolent of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. One of the best of them, on the cellos, is held back until fairly late in the movement, but serves to assert, once again, the tirelessness of Mendelssohn’s spinning invention.
© Conrad Wilson
- Beethoven
Programme note
Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827)
Symphony No 3 in E flat, 'Eroica' (1806)Allegro con brio
Marcia funebre: Adagio assai
Scherzo – Allegro vivace
Finale – Allegro molto"I live only in my notes, and with one work barely finished, the other is already started; the way I write now I often find myself working on three, four things at the same time."
— Ludwig van Beethoven
While still writing the Second Symphony, Beethoven started on his Third, another work from that dark Heiligenstadt Testament year (though any connection to Beethoven’s personal struggle with deafness has been utterly eclipsed by the story of its dedication).
For Beethoven, this symphony was Revolutionary as well as revolutionary. The original title page simply read 'Buonaparte' at the top and 'Luigi van Beethoven' at the foot. Beethoven’s admiration for the Corsican was no secret, which must have been a little risky. After all, he lived in the heart of the Hapsburg Empire, whose dominions were deeply threatened by all that Napoleon represented. And, in spite of his 'republican' passions, he was highly dependent on the goodwill of aristocrats. This very symphony had its earliest try-out performances at a private concert in a grand ballroom of a grand palace, in the heart of reactionary Vienna.
Beethoven’s respect for Bonaparte was famously dashed when the Corsican proclaimed himself emperor. Ferdinand Ries, Beethoven’s friend, reports:
"...[Beethoven] flew into a rage and cried out: 'Is he too, then, nothing more than an ordinary human being? Now he, too, will trample on all the rights of man and indulge only his ambition. He will exalt himself above all others, become a tyrant!' "
Ries goes on to say that Beethoven then ripped the title page of this piece in two and threw it on the floor. Ries, like many of Beethoven’s friends, was apt to dramatise his recollections, but we have further evidence of Beethoven’s disappointment. Writing to the publisher Hoffmeister in 1802, he responded indignantly to a suggestion that he write a "Revolutionary" sonata:
Well, perhaps at the time of the revolutionary fever such a thing might have been possible, but now, when everything is trying to slip back into the old rut, now that Bonaparte has concluded his Concordat with the Pope – to write a sonata of that kind?
Yet Beethoven did not definitively change the symphony’s dedication until 1806, when orchestral parts were finally published. Perhaps a lingering nostalgia for what Bonaparte had once represented stayed his hand.
‘Eroica’ undoubtedly is the most apt title for the piece. It encapsulates not only the spirit of the times and Napoleonic Europe, but also the extent of Beethoven’s musical achievement. The scale and ambition of this piece set it apart from anything he (or anyone else) had previously written. The form of the classical symphony he had inherited from Haydn and Mozart is easily recognisable, but with a drama and sense of conflict that go far beyond their work. He freely embraces ugliness as well as beauty, coarseness as well as great refinement, violence as well as concord, brute force as well as masterly craftsmanship. His instrumental palate – enriched by three horns instead of the usual two – is astounding, full of martial effects and the generous use of timpani and brass. With this work, Beethoven paved the way for Romantic-era composers Schumann, Bruckner and Mahler, and redefined what 'symphony' meant.
Igor Stravinsky, of all people, was flattered to note that some listeners had drawn a parallel between the opening notes of his pivotal 20th-century work, Rite of Spring, and the ‘Eroica’. Few works in the history of music are considered more significant and revolutionary than these two.
© Svend Brown
- conductor
- violin
Musically, the 19th century was a golden era. To this day, its music brings the age of Romanticism alive: that time of sweeping change, tumult, war, revolution and passion is celebrated in this concert. Berlioz wrote King Lear a year after his Symphonie Fantastique: it is easily as vivid and dramatic, full of grand-guignol tumult, but pathos and tragedy too. It makes a powerful complement to Beethoven’s ‘Eroica’ Symphony, which Ticciati conducts for the first time in Scotland. Don’t miss the SCO Season debut of the young German violinist Veronika Eberle: currently a BBC Radio 3 New Generation Artist, she inspires reviews extolling her ‘star quality’ and ‘electrifying’ performance’.
The Romantic Age
- Berlioz
Programme note
Hector Berlioz (1803-1869)
Overture, King LearAlthough King Lear was in the repertory of the English company which visited Paris in 1827-28 and from which Berlioz first received his life-changing experience of Shakespeare’s genius, it wasn’t till several years later that he got to know the play, during his time in Italy as winner of the 1830 Prix de Rome. While waiting in Florence, in a state of intense anxiety, for news of his fiancée Camille Moke, he read King Lear in the woods outside the city. It filled him with a kind of appalled enthusiasm. Back in his hotel room he inscribed some lines from it on the title page of the manuscript score of the Symphonie Fantastique: ‘As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods – they kill us for their sport’.
A few days later a letter came announcing that Camille was marrying the piano manufacturer Pleyel. Berlioz promptly set off for Paris with the intention of killing both of them, and the perfidious Madame Moke, before turning the last bullet on himself. By the time he reached Nice his rage had ebbed, and he stayed, drinking in the beauty of the place and profiting by the advice of Horace Vernet, director of the French Academy in Rome, who wrote to tell him that the sovereign remedies for a mind in turmoil were love of one’s art and hard work. In a fortnight of concentrated composition he produced a concert overture on the play, composing in his head as he walked by the sea and writing it down in his room high above the waves.
The resulting work has a closer connection both with the play and with the events of Berlioz’s life than were apparent to Donald Tovey, who in a celebrated analysis described it as ‘a magnificent piece of orchestral rhetoric in tragic style’ which we should be content to call ‘the Tragedy of the Speaking Basses, of the Plea of the Oboe, and of the Fury of the Orchestra’.
The ‘noble and indignant’ phrases for the lower strings which begin the long introduction, starting in proud strength but dying away to an abstracted mutter, clearly portray the stubborn, once masterful king (as well as being influenced by the instrumental recitatives in Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony). So does the angry, obsessive first theme of the allegro, just as the introduction’s pure, artless oboe melody represents Cordelia. Berlioz’s letters and Memoirs speak of Lear and Cordelia as the protagonists of the work; they also mention the king’s entrance into the council chamber (introduction), the storm (allegro) and Lear’s madness (the reappearance of the introduction’s opening phrases in the midst of the storm).
Even though Berlioz’s desire for revenge had abated, the wound was still raw. The vibrations of his recent traumatic experiences are heard, unmistakably, in the extraordinary tension and dry, electric sonority of the string writing, and also in certain textures and colours reminiscent of the Tempest Fantasy (composed the previous autumn to celebrate his ‘Ariel’, Camille), and in the allegro’s long-drawn, lyrical second theme – its character, and what happens to it. The theme breathes regret, conscious or not, for lost happiness. It runs to more than fifty bars; even then, Berlioz cannot let it go: it keeps putting forth fresh, more poignantly expressive tendrils of melody. A short way into the development section its second strain is heard again, in the minor. And in the coda it is the subject of a violent and sustained conflict, in which the opening phrase is whirled round and round and finally sucked into the orchestral vortex. This can stand for the tragic destruction of Cordelia, but it is surely an echo of something more personal and painfully real – the loss of Camille and the annihilation of their love.
© David Cairns
- Mendelssohn
Programme note
Felix Mendelssohn (1809-1847)
Violin Concerto in E minor, Op 64 (1844)Allegro molto appassionato -
Andante -
Allegretto non troppo - Allegro molto vivaceNever has a violin concerto had a happier send-off than Mendelssohn’s, or has seemed to spring more perfectly from the pen of its creator. Lucky Ferdinand David who, in Leipzig, gave the work its premiere in 1845. Lucky Joseph Joachim who, at the age of fourteen, later played it in Dresden, with Schumann as conductor. The abundant melodies sound totally spontaneous and instantly memorable. But superficial – which is something they have been said to be - they are certainly not.
Even their apparent ease did not come easily to the composer, and we should rejoice that the machinery of the music - the way one splendid tune works up to a climax before leading to another, the poise of the accompaniments, the beauty of the transition passages, the control of tension and relaxation - operates so discreetly and naturally, as if the concerto were composed in a single sweep. Yet this was not the case. As Mendelssohn himself reported, the opening notes in E minor kept spinning in his head, giving him no peace, and impeding the progress of the rest of the work. Such is the mystery of genius.
The first movement, in a manner typical of its composer, manages to be both passionate and delicate, but its smooth flow does not conceal some incomparable strokes of inspiration, such as the soloist’s sustaining of a long, low G while the woodwind announce the tranquil second subject. The placing of the cadenza, before instead of after the recapitulation of the principal themes, is a startling moment of surprise. Who could ever describe Mendelssohn as unoriginal? Yet the surprise has been scrupulously prepared. The music is deliberately allowed to lose momentum, as if to suggest that the recapitulation is pending. Instead, it is the cadenza that sidles in.
No less surprising is the way the first movement’s fast, impulsive coda is propelled straight into the slow movement via a note suspended on the bassoon, followed by the gentlest of modulations on the strings until the concerto settles iridescently in the key of simple C major. Though given no more than the one-word marking, andante, the music has no lack of sweet expressiveness, either in the serenity of its main theme or what sounds like the quiet anguish of the middle section before the theme returns.
Recognising that a straight move to the scurrying wit of the finale might seem too abrupt, the ever-thoughtful Mendelssohn inserted a little interlude, poetically recalling the start of the first movement. It is another moment of Mendelssohn magic, in which the soloist prepares us for the new mood and new key of E major. Then the music dashes off in a new array of mercurial melodies, redolent of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. One of the best of them, on the cellos, is held back until fairly late in the movement, but serves to assert, once again, the tirelessness of Mendelssohn’s spinning invention.
© Conrad Wilson
- Beethoven
Programme note
Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827)
Symphony No 3 in E flat, 'Eroica' (1806)Allegro con brio
Marcia funebre: Adagio assai
Scherzo – Allegro vivace
Finale – Allegro molto"I live only in my notes, and with one work barely finished, the other is already started; the way I write now I often find myself working on three, four things at the same time."
— Ludwig van Beethoven
While still writing the Second Symphony, Beethoven started on his Third, another work from that dark Heiligenstadt Testament year (though any connection to Beethoven’s personal struggle with deafness has been utterly eclipsed by the story of its dedication).
For Beethoven, this symphony was Revolutionary as well as revolutionary. The original title page simply read 'Buonaparte' at the top and 'Luigi van Beethoven' at the foot. Beethoven’s admiration for the Corsican was no secret, which must have been a little risky. After all, he lived in the heart of the Hapsburg Empire, whose dominions were deeply threatened by all that Napoleon represented. And, in spite of his 'republican' passions, he was highly dependent on the goodwill of aristocrats. This very symphony had its earliest try-out performances at a private concert in a grand ballroom of a grand palace, in the heart of reactionary Vienna.
Beethoven’s respect for Bonaparte was famously dashed when the Corsican proclaimed himself emperor. Ferdinand Ries, Beethoven’s friend, reports:
"...[Beethoven] flew into a rage and cried out: 'Is he too, then, nothing more than an ordinary human being? Now he, too, will trample on all the rights of man and indulge only his ambition. He will exalt himself above all others, become a tyrant!' "
Ries goes on to say that Beethoven then ripped the title page of this piece in two and threw it on the floor. Ries, like many of Beethoven’s friends, was apt to dramatise his recollections, but we have further evidence of Beethoven’s disappointment. Writing to the publisher Hoffmeister in 1802, he responded indignantly to a suggestion that he write a "Revolutionary" sonata:
Well, perhaps at the time of the revolutionary fever such a thing might have been possible, but now, when everything is trying to slip back into the old rut, now that Bonaparte has concluded his Concordat with the Pope – to write a sonata of that kind?
Yet Beethoven did not definitively change the symphony’s dedication until 1806, when orchestral parts were finally published. Perhaps a lingering nostalgia for what Bonaparte had once represented stayed his hand.
‘Eroica’ undoubtedly is the most apt title for the piece. It encapsulates not only the spirit of the times and Napoleonic Europe, but also the extent of Beethoven’s musical achievement. The scale and ambition of this piece set it apart from anything he (or anyone else) had previously written. The form of the classical symphony he had inherited from Haydn and Mozart is easily recognisable, but with a drama and sense of conflict that go far beyond their work. He freely embraces ugliness as well as beauty, coarseness as well as great refinement, violence as well as concord, brute force as well as masterly craftsmanship. His instrumental palate – enriched by three horns instead of the usual two – is astounding, full of martial effects and the generous use of timpani and brass. With this work, Beethoven paved the way for Romantic-era composers Schumann, Bruckner and Mahler, and redefined what 'symphony' meant.
Igor Stravinsky, of all people, was flattered to note that some listeners had drawn a parallel between the opening notes of his pivotal 20th-century work, Rite of Spring, and the ‘Eroica’. Few works in the history of music are considered more significant and revolutionary than these two.
© Svend Brown
- conductor
- violin
Musically, the 19th century was a golden era. To this day, its music brings the age of Romanticism alive: that time of sweeping change, tumult, war, revolution and passion is celebrated in this concert. Berlioz wrote King Lear a year after his Symphonie Fantastique: it is easily as vivid and dramatic, full of grand-guignol tumult, but pathos and tragedy too. It makes a powerful complement to Beethoven’s ‘Eroica’ Symphony, which Ticciati conducts for the first time in Scotland. Don’t miss the SCO Season debut of the young German violinist Veronika Eberle: currently a BBC Radio 3 New Generation Artist, she inspires reviews extolling her ‘star quality’ and ‘electrifying’ performance’.
The Romantic Age
- Berlioz
Programme note
Hector Berlioz (1803-1869)
Overture, King LearAlthough King Lear was in the repertory of the English company which visited Paris in 1827-28 and from which Berlioz first received his life-changing experience of Shakespeare’s genius, it wasn’t till several years later that he got to know the play, during his time in Italy as winner of the 1830 Prix de Rome. While waiting in Florence, in a state of intense anxiety, for news of his fiancée Camille Moke, he read King Lear in the woods outside the city. It filled him with a kind of appalled enthusiasm. Back in his hotel room he inscribed some lines from it on the title page of the manuscript score of the Symphonie Fantastique: ‘As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods – they kill us for their sport’.
A few days later a letter came announcing that Camille was marrying the piano manufacturer Pleyel. Berlioz promptly set off for Paris with the intention of killing both of them, and the perfidious Madame Moke, before turning the last bullet on himself. By the time he reached Nice his rage had ebbed, and he stayed, drinking in the beauty of the place and profiting by the advice of Horace Vernet, director of the French Academy in Rome, who wrote to tell him that the sovereign remedies for a mind in turmoil were love of one’s art and hard work. In a fortnight of concentrated composition he produced a concert overture on the play, composing in his head as he walked by the sea and writing it down in his room high above the waves.
The resulting work has a closer connection both with the play and with the events of Berlioz’s life than were apparent to Donald Tovey, who in a celebrated analysis described it as ‘a magnificent piece of orchestral rhetoric in tragic style’ which we should be content to call ‘the Tragedy of the Speaking Basses, of the Plea of the Oboe, and of the Fury of the Orchestra’.
The ‘noble and indignant’ phrases for the lower strings which begin the long introduction, starting in proud strength but dying away to an abstracted mutter, clearly portray the stubborn, once masterful king (as well as being influenced by the instrumental recitatives in Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony). So does the angry, obsessive first theme of the allegro, just as the introduction’s pure, artless oboe melody represents Cordelia. Berlioz’s letters and Memoirs speak of Lear and Cordelia as the protagonists of the work; they also mention the king’s entrance into the council chamber (introduction), the storm (allegro) and Lear’s madness (the reappearance of the introduction’s opening phrases in the midst of the storm).
Even though Berlioz’s desire for revenge had abated, the wound was still raw. The vibrations of his recent traumatic experiences are heard, unmistakably, in the extraordinary tension and dry, electric sonority of the string writing, and also in certain textures and colours reminiscent of the Tempest Fantasy (composed the previous autumn to celebrate his ‘Ariel’, Camille), and in the allegro’s long-drawn, lyrical second theme – its character, and what happens to it. The theme breathes regret, conscious or not, for lost happiness. It runs to more than fifty bars; even then, Berlioz cannot let it go: it keeps putting forth fresh, more poignantly expressive tendrils of melody. A short way into the development section its second strain is heard again, in the minor. And in the coda it is the subject of a violent and sustained conflict, in which the opening phrase is whirled round and round and finally sucked into the orchestral vortex. This can stand for the tragic destruction of Cordelia, but it is surely an echo of something more personal and painfully real – the loss of Camille and the annihilation of their love.
© David Cairns
- Mendelssohn
Programme note
Felix Mendelssohn (1809-1847)
Violin Concerto in E minor, Op 64 (1844)Allegro molto appassionato -
Andante -
Allegretto non troppo - Allegro molto vivaceNever has a violin concerto had a happier send-off than Mendelssohn’s, or has seemed to spring more perfectly from the pen of its creator. Lucky Ferdinand David who, in Leipzig, gave the work its premiere in 1845. Lucky Joseph Joachim who, at the age of fourteen, later played it in Dresden, with Schumann as conductor. The abundant melodies sound totally spontaneous and instantly memorable. But superficial – which is something they have been said to be - they are certainly not.
Even their apparent ease did not come easily to the composer, and we should rejoice that the machinery of the music - the way one splendid tune works up to a climax before leading to another, the poise of the accompaniments, the beauty of the transition passages, the control of tension and relaxation - operates so discreetly and naturally, as if the concerto were composed in a single sweep. Yet this was not the case. As Mendelssohn himself reported, the opening notes in E minor kept spinning in his head, giving him no peace, and impeding the progress of the rest of the work. Such is the mystery of genius.
The first movement, in a manner typical of its composer, manages to be both passionate and delicate, but its smooth flow does not conceal some incomparable strokes of inspiration, such as the soloist’s sustaining of a long, low G while the woodwind announce the tranquil second subject. The placing of the cadenza, before instead of after the recapitulation of the principal themes, is a startling moment of surprise. Who could ever describe Mendelssohn as unoriginal? Yet the surprise has been scrupulously prepared. The music is deliberately allowed to lose momentum, as if to suggest that the recapitulation is pending. Instead, it is the cadenza that sidles in.
No less surprising is the way the first movement’s fast, impulsive coda is propelled straight into the slow movement via a note suspended on the bassoon, followed by the gentlest of modulations on the strings until the concerto settles iridescently in the key of simple C major. Though given no more than the one-word marking, andante, the music has no lack of sweet expressiveness, either in the serenity of its main theme or what sounds like the quiet anguish of the middle section before the theme returns.
Recognising that a straight move to the scurrying wit of the finale might seem too abrupt, the ever-thoughtful Mendelssohn inserted a little interlude, poetically recalling the start of the first movement. It is another moment of Mendelssohn magic, in which the soloist prepares us for the new mood and new key of E major. Then the music dashes off in a new array of mercurial melodies, redolent of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. One of the best of them, on the cellos, is held back until fairly late in the movement, but serves to assert, once again, the tirelessness of Mendelssohn’s spinning invention.
© Conrad Wilson
- Beethoven
Programme note
Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827)
Symphony No 3 in E flat, 'Eroica' (1806)Allegro con brio
Marcia funebre: Adagio assai
Scherzo – Allegro vivace
Finale – Allegro molto"I live only in my notes, and with one work barely finished, the other is already started; the way I write now I often find myself working on three, four things at the same time."
— Ludwig van Beethoven
While still writing the Second Symphony, Beethoven started on his Third, another work from that dark Heiligenstadt Testament year (though any connection to Beethoven’s personal struggle with deafness has been utterly eclipsed by the story of its dedication).
For Beethoven, this symphony was Revolutionary as well as revolutionary. The original title page simply read 'Buonaparte' at the top and 'Luigi van Beethoven' at the foot. Beethoven’s admiration for the Corsican was no secret, which must have been a little risky. After all, he lived in the heart of the Hapsburg Empire, whose dominions were deeply threatened by all that Napoleon represented. And, in spite of his 'republican' passions, he was highly dependent on the goodwill of aristocrats. This very symphony had its earliest try-out performances at a private concert in a grand ballroom of a grand palace, in the heart of reactionary Vienna.
Beethoven’s respect for Bonaparte was famously dashed when the Corsican proclaimed himself emperor. Ferdinand Ries, Beethoven’s friend, reports:
"...[Beethoven] flew into a rage and cried out: 'Is he too, then, nothing more than an ordinary human being? Now he, too, will trample on all the rights of man and indulge only his ambition. He will exalt himself above all others, become a tyrant!' "
Ries goes on to say that Beethoven then ripped the title page of this piece in two and threw it on the floor. Ries, like many of Beethoven’s friends, was apt to dramatise his recollections, but we have further evidence of Beethoven’s disappointment. Writing to the publisher Hoffmeister in 1802, he responded indignantly to a suggestion that he write a "Revolutionary" sonata:
Well, perhaps at the time of the revolutionary fever such a thing might have been possible, but now, when everything is trying to slip back into the old rut, now that Bonaparte has concluded his Concordat with the Pope – to write a sonata of that kind?
Yet Beethoven did not definitively change the symphony’s dedication until 1806, when orchestral parts were finally published. Perhaps a lingering nostalgia for what Bonaparte had once represented stayed his hand.
‘Eroica’ undoubtedly is the most apt title for the piece. It encapsulates not only the spirit of the times and Napoleonic Europe, but also the extent of Beethoven’s musical achievement. The scale and ambition of this piece set it apart from anything he (or anyone else) had previously written. The form of the classical symphony he had inherited from Haydn and Mozart is easily recognisable, but with a drama and sense of conflict that go far beyond their work. He freely embraces ugliness as well as beauty, coarseness as well as great refinement, violence as well as concord, brute force as well as masterly craftsmanship. His instrumental palate – enriched by three horns instead of the usual two – is astounding, full of martial effects and the generous use of timpani and brass. With this work, Beethoven paved the way for Romantic-era composers Schumann, Bruckner and Mahler, and redefined what 'symphony' meant.
Igor Stravinsky, of all people, was flattered to note that some listeners had drawn a parallel between the opening notes of his pivotal 20th-century work, Rite of Spring, and the ‘Eroica’. Few works in the history of music are considered more significant and revolutionary than these two.
© Svend Brown
- conductor
- violin
Musically, the 19th century was a golden era. To this day, its music brings the age of Romanticism alive: that time of sweeping change, tumult, war, revolution and passion is celebrated in this concert. Berlioz wrote King Lear a year after his Symphonie Fantastique: it is easily as vivid and dramatic, full of grand-guignol tumult, but pathos and tragedy too. It makes a powerful complement to Beethoven’s ‘Eroica’ Symphony, which Ticciati conducts for the first time in Scotland. Don’t miss the SCO Season debut of the young German violinist Veronika Eberle: currently a BBC Radio 3 New Generation Artist, she inspires reviews extolling her ‘star quality’ and ‘electrifying’ performance’.
Musical Magicians
- Debussy (arr. Zender)
Programme note
Claude Debussy (1862-1918)
Five Preludes (1910-13), arr. Zender (1991)I: Voiles
II: Le danse de Puck
III: Général Lavine – eccentric
IV: Les collines d’Anacapri
V: Des pas sur le neigeDebussy’s talent as a young composer was confirmed when he was admitted to the Paris Conservatoire aged just 10 years old. In instrumental classes he proved to be an exceptional pupil, showing particular skill at the piano, but he was more problematic as a student of composition. Debussy was argumentative and single-minded, refusing to obey the rigid teaching rules of the Conservatoire, instead favouring a more experimental approach to his writing. When Debussy presented his works to his professor of composition he was met with the words: ‘I am not saying that what you do isn't beautiful, but it is theoretically absurd.’ His response was simple: ‘My foremost ambition, in music, is to produce something that represents as closely as possible life itself. It is a free art... boundless as the elements, the wind, sky, and sea.’
Often described as impressionistic, although he disliked the term himself, Debussy’s sensory approach to music redefined the traditional concepts of consonance and dissonance, combining areas of tonality – whole-tone, pentatonic, modal – in ways that had previously been frowned upon. At the forefront of Debussy’s mind was a desire to create colours – new colours – using textures, harmonies and forms in fresh and often surprising ways. Debussy claimed, ‘There is no theory. You merely have to listen. Pleasure is the law.’
It is little surprise, then, that Debussy’s two books of preludes for piano are nothing like the collections of those who established the format before him. While similar collections by J.S. Bach and Chopin explore each of the 24 keys in turn, Debussy’s collection has no particular unifying pattern, instead comprising a series of character pieces along disparate themes. Their titles, if they can be referred to as such, are printed not as the header but as the footer to the page, suggesting that their subjects might have been dreamed up almost as an afterthought, inspired by the music itself. Their evocative subject matter – the sunken cathedral, the girl with the flaxen hair, footsteps in the snow – and rich, colourful textures have proved ripe for orchestration, with a number of arrangers choosing to adapt the works for different ensembles over the years.
Among the most successful are Hans Zender’s arrangements of five of the preludes for orchestra, made in 1991, which sensitively capture the delicate part-writing of Debussy’s piano versions. The gentle cascading lines of Voiles may suggest the wind caressing the waves of the sea but its title is deliberately ambiguous, translating either as ‘sails’ or ‘veils’. For Debussy, this is intentional, as he insists it is ‘not a photograph of the beach or a postcard.’ Other works are less obscure, with Le danse de Puck capturing the playful dance of the nymph, Puck, from A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and the cake-walk style of Général Lavine – eccentric depicting one of the most celebrated figures in international vaudeville, Ed Lavine. Les collines d’Anacapri alludes to the hills of Anacapri in southern Italy and exudes the sunny, exotic flavours of the Mediterranean, while in stark contrast, Des pas sur le neige, evokes a barren landscape and the sombre solitude of a single set of footsteps in the snow.
© Jo Kirkbride
- Cresswell
Programme note
Lyell Cresswell (b. 1944)
Triple Concerto (2012) world premiereThe triple concerto is made up of eight short interlocking movements. They are played without a break. The music is based on a set of four and five note chords, which are most clearly stated by the piano at the beginning of the fourth movement.
The movements are:
I Intrada - an announcement to begin the concerto. The soloists introduce short sharp chords, which are held quietly by the orchestra to give unruffled continuity.
II Giocoso-tranquillo - playful-tranquil. There is contrast between light pizzicato in the first part and slow moving chords in the second. Both parts stem from the same sequence of chords.
III Corrente - stream, or running. Constant rapid flowing semiquaver movement, extracted largely from the ubiquitous chords, passes from instrument to instrument
IV Calmo - a serene movement contrasting the chord sequence in the piano and orchestra with long lines for the solo violin and cello.
V Scherzo - grows from a pattern of repeated notes that recurs in various ways from time to time throughout the concerto.
VI …quasi una siciliana… - the siciliana is a gentle pastoral dance of Sicilian origin with rocking dotted rhythms. This is a dislocated siciliana.
VII Vivace - a continuation of III, corrente. It takes up the rapid repeated notes and constant semiquavers of the earlier movement, with pauses for breath only towards the end.
VIII Adagio - everything is reduced to the bare essentials for the finale. It simply builds to a climax and then falls away
This concerto was commissioned by the Scottish Chamber Orchestra and the Association Les Amis du Schweizer Klaviertrio.
© Lyell Cresswell
- Takemitsu
Programme note
Tōru Takemitsu (1930-1996)
How Slow the Wind (1991)"In music I found my raison d'être as a man. After the war, music was the only thing. Choosing to be in music clarified my identity." So began Tōru Takemitsu’s career as a composer and with it his own exploration of the meaning of nationality. Takemitsu was born in Tokyo, Japan, but his relationship with Japanese music was complicated by the onset of war during his teenage years. Western classical music was banned in Japan during this time, and Takemitsu’s only experience of non-Japanese musical traditions came from the illicit gramophone sessions he shared with his colleagues while serving the term of his military service. The ban on Western music only intrigued Takemitsu all the more, and when the war was over he took every opportunity to listen to the music broadcast on the US Armed Forces radio service. But as his love for Western music grew, so too did his regard for Japanese music diminish, becoming tainted by ‘the bitter memories of war’.
As Takemitsu’s career developed, however, and he began to receive the attention and admiration of his contemporaries, his thoughts turned towards his homeland. Looking back at the end of his career he declared: "I must express my deep and sincere gratitude to John Cage… For a long period I struggled to avoid being 'Japanese', to avoid 'Japanese' qualities. It was largely through my contact with John Cage that I came to recognize the value of my own tradition." As his renewed interest in Japanese music took hold, Takemitsu became increasingly interested in exploring the similarities between the two musical cultures, integrating Japanese instruments into the traditional orchestra and combining the tonal language of both traditions. Takemitsu also drew inspiration from the natural world around him and likened the process of listening to music to walking through a Japanese garden: "A garden is composed of various different elements and sophisticated details that converge to form a harmonious whole. Each element does not exert its individuality, but achieves a state of anonymity - and that is the kind of music that I would like to create."
How Slow the Wind was written during the final years of his life and is inspired by a short three-line poem by Emily Dickinson of the same name: "How slow the wind, how slow the sea, how late their feathers be!" The poem’s elegant simplicity is echoed in the musical structure, with the basic melodic material taken up by each of the instruments in mini-variations. The careful placement of these lines creates an organic growth of sound that eventually transforms effortlessly into a simple D-flat major chord. This represents for the composer: "a milk white light in the midst of darkness".
© Jo Kirkbride
- Ravel
Programme note
Maurice Ravel (1875–1937)
Ballet: Mother Goose (1912)Prelude
Dance of the Spinning Wheel and Scene
Pavane of the Sleeping Beauty
Conversations of Beauty and the Beast
Tom Thumb
Laideronnette, Empress of the Pagodas
The Enchanted GardenRavel created his fairy tale ballet in 1912 – the third incarnation of this music. It all began with a piano duet for two children, Mimi and Jean Godebski. Ravel wrote the Pavane of Sleeping Beauty for them, and when his publisher heard it he encouraged him to write more. A full suite of pieces followed, though regrettably, it turned out to be too difficult for the youngsters to play – this was child-like (a word that was used to describe Ravel himself) rather than childish music. Subsequently, Ravel orchestrated his suite, and then finally elaborated it further to create a ballet to his own scenario: on the eve of her wedding, Princess Florine (Sleeping Beauty) pricks her finger on a poisoned spinning wheel and falls asleep. The good fairy enchants the whole castle to sleep with her until she is re-awoken by her prince; as she slumbers, she dreams fairy tales which come to life in the foreground.
Many of the tales that feature in the ballet have been told in many languages and ways, but Ravel’s specific inspiration was the 18th century fantasies of Perrault. Like Ravel’s music these were not strictly intended for children. For all their charm they have a bloody and macabre side, and Ravel responded with music that is charming without sentimentality. There is nothing ‘Disneyfied’ about it. The Beast serenades his Beauty with exquisite grace. The image of Beauty and the Beast has been used more than once to describe music (not least Beethoven’s piano sonatas) in which delicacy is juxtaposed with harsher sounds. Ravel is different: his Beast is an altogether courteous creature and Belle a delicate, fragile princess. Tom Thumb walks in the woods, and leaves a trail of crumbs so he can find his way home, but the birds (you can hear them in the orchestration) swoop down and eat them all up. Laideronnette is a lovely princess cursed with ugliness by a wicked fairy. The usual prince has yet to come along and break the spell, so Ravel depicts her bathing while musicians attend − apparently playing a small gamelan. Ravel’s closing section originally evoked a magical garden, but in the ballet it also serves to accompany the awakening of Sleeping Beauty and the transformation of the Beast back into a man.
© Svend Brown
- conductor
- -
Many have attempted to translate Debussy’s Preludes from piano to orchestra, but none succeeds better than Zender. With an intuitive way of getting under the skin of the music, he is a magician in the same class as Ravel, whose timeless Mother Goose completes the evening. Lyell Cresswell knows the SCO well and has written a stream of dramatic, high-impact pieces for the Orchestra. His new work is unusual: a concerto for trio and orchestra.
Musical Magicians
- Debussy (arr. Zender)
Programme note
Claude Debussy (1862-1918)
Five Preludes (1910-13), arr. Zender (1991)I: Voiles
II: Le danse de Puck
III: Général Lavine – eccentric
IV: Les collines d’Anacapri
V: Des pas sur le neigeDebussy’s talent as a young composer was confirmed when he was admitted to the Paris Conservatoire aged just 10 years old. In instrumental classes he proved to be an exceptional pupil, showing particular skill at the piano, but he was more problematic as a student of composition. Debussy was argumentative and single-minded, refusing to obey the rigid teaching rules of the Conservatoire, instead favouring a more experimental approach to his writing. When Debussy presented his works to his professor of composition he was met with the words: ‘I am not saying that what you do isn't beautiful, but it is theoretically absurd.’ His response was simple: ‘My foremost ambition, in music, is to produce something that represents as closely as possible life itself. It is a free art... boundless as the elements, the wind, sky, and sea.’
Often described as impressionistic, although he disliked the term himself, Debussy’s sensory approach to music redefined the traditional concepts of consonance and dissonance, combining areas of tonality – whole-tone, pentatonic, modal – in ways that had previously been frowned upon. At the forefront of Debussy’s mind was a desire to create colours – new colours – using textures, harmonies and forms in fresh and often surprising ways. Debussy claimed, ‘There is no theory. You merely have to listen. Pleasure is the law.’
It is little surprise, then, that Debussy’s two books of preludes for piano are nothing like the collections of those who established the format before him. While similar collections by J.S. Bach and Chopin explore each of the 24 keys in turn, Debussy’s collection has no particular unifying pattern, instead comprising a series of character pieces along disparate themes. Their titles, if they can be referred to as such, are printed not as the header but as the footer to the page, suggesting that their subjects might have been dreamed up almost as an afterthought, inspired by the music itself. Their evocative subject matter – the sunken cathedral, the girl with the flaxen hair, footsteps in the snow – and rich, colourful textures have proved ripe for orchestration, with a number of arrangers choosing to adapt the works for different ensembles over the years.
Among the most successful are Hans Zender’s arrangements of five of the preludes for orchestra, made in 1991, which sensitively capture the delicate part-writing of Debussy’s piano versions. The gentle cascading lines of Voiles may suggest the wind caressing the waves of the sea but its title is deliberately ambiguous, translating either as ‘sails’ or ‘veils’. For Debussy, this is intentional, as he insists it is ‘not a photograph of the beach or a postcard.’ Other works are less obscure, with Le danse de Puck capturing the playful dance of the nymph, Puck, from A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and the cake-walk style of Général Lavine – eccentric depicting one of the most celebrated figures in international vaudeville, Ed Lavine. Les collines d’Anacapri alludes to the hills of Anacapri in southern Italy and exudes the sunny, exotic flavours of the Mediterranean, while in stark contrast, Des pas sur le neige, evokes a barren landscape and the sombre solitude of a single set of footsteps in the snow.
© Jo Kirkbride
- Cresswell
Programme note
Lyell Cresswell (b. 1944)
Triple Concerto (2012) world premiereThe triple concerto is made up of eight short interlocking movements. They are played without a break. The music is based on a set of four and five note chords, which are most clearly stated by the piano at the beginning of the fourth movement.
The movements are:
I Intrada - an announcement to begin the concerto. The soloists introduce short sharp chords, which are held quietly by the orchestra to give unruffled continuity.
II Giocoso-tranquillo - playful-tranquil. There is contrast between light pizzicato in the first part and slow moving chords in the second. Both parts stem from the same sequence of chords.
III Corrente - stream, or running. Constant rapid flowing semiquaver movement, extracted largely from the ubiquitous chords, passes from instrument to instrument
IV Calmo - a serene movement contrasting the chord sequence in the piano and orchestra with long lines for the solo violin and cello.
V Scherzo - grows from a pattern of repeated notes that recurs in various ways from time to time throughout the concerto.
VI …quasi una siciliana… - the siciliana is a gentle pastoral dance of Sicilian origin with rocking dotted rhythms. This is a dislocated siciliana.
VII Vivace - a continuation of III, corrente. It takes up the rapid repeated notes and constant semiquavers of the earlier movement, with pauses for breath only towards the end.
VIII Adagio - everything is reduced to the bare essentials for the finale. It simply builds to a climax and then falls away
This concerto was commissioned by the Scottish Chamber Orchestra and the Association Les Amis du Schweizer Klaviertrio.
© Lyell Cresswell
- Takemitsu
Programme note
Tōru Takemitsu (1930-1996)
How Slow the Wind (1991)"In music I found my raison d'être as a man. After the war, music was the only thing. Choosing to be in music clarified my identity." So began Tōru Takemitsu’s career as a composer and with it his own exploration of the meaning of nationality. Takemitsu was born in Tokyo, Japan, but his relationship with Japanese music was complicated by the onset of war during his teenage years. Western classical music was banned in Japan during this time, and Takemitsu’s only experience of non-Japanese musical traditions came from the illicit gramophone sessions he shared with his colleagues while serving the term of his military service. The ban on Western music only intrigued Takemitsu all the more, and when the war was over he took every opportunity to listen to the music broadcast on the US Armed Forces radio service. But as his love for Western music grew, so too did his regard for Japanese music diminish, becoming tainted by ‘the bitter memories of war’.
As Takemitsu’s career developed, however, and he began to receive the attention and admiration of his contemporaries, his thoughts turned towards his homeland. Looking back at the end of his career he declared: "I must express my deep and sincere gratitude to John Cage… For a long period I struggled to avoid being 'Japanese', to avoid 'Japanese' qualities. It was largely through my contact with John Cage that I came to recognize the value of my own tradition." As his renewed interest in Japanese music took hold, Takemitsu became increasingly interested in exploring the similarities between the two musical cultures, integrating Japanese instruments into the traditional orchestra and combining the tonal language of both traditions. Takemitsu also drew inspiration from the natural world around him and likened the process of listening to music to walking through a Japanese garden: "A garden is composed of various different elements and sophisticated details that converge to form a harmonious whole. Each element does not exert its individuality, but achieves a state of anonymity - and that is the kind of music that I would like to create."
How Slow the Wind was written during the final years of his life and is inspired by a short three-line poem by Emily Dickinson of the same name: "How slow the wind, how slow the sea, how late their feathers be!" The poem’s elegant simplicity is echoed in the musical structure, with the basic melodic material taken up by each of the instruments in mini-variations. The careful placement of these lines creates an organic growth of sound that eventually transforms effortlessly into a simple D-flat major chord. This represents for the composer: "a milk white light in the midst of darkness".
© Jo Kirkbride
- Ravel
Programme note
Maurice Ravel (1875–1937)
Ballet: Mother Goose (1912)Prelude
Dance of the Spinning Wheel and Scene
Pavane of the Sleeping Beauty
Conversations of Beauty and the Beast
Tom Thumb
Laideronnette, Empress of the Pagodas
The Enchanted GardenRavel created his fairy tale ballet in 1912 – the third incarnation of this music. It all began with a piano duet for two children, Mimi and Jean Godebski. Ravel wrote the Pavane of Sleeping Beauty for them, and when his publisher heard it he encouraged him to write more. A full suite of pieces followed, though regrettably, it turned out to be too difficult for the youngsters to play – this was child-like (a word that was used to describe Ravel himself) rather than childish music. Subsequently, Ravel orchestrated his suite, and then finally elaborated it further to create a ballet to his own scenario: on the eve of her wedding, Princess Florine (Sleeping Beauty) pricks her finger on a poisoned spinning wheel and falls asleep. The good fairy enchants the whole castle to sleep with her until she is re-awoken by her prince; as she slumbers, she dreams fairy tales which come to life in the foreground.
Many of the tales that feature in the ballet have been told in many languages and ways, but Ravel’s specific inspiration was the 18th century fantasies of Perrault. Like Ravel’s music these were not strictly intended for children. For all their charm they have a bloody and macabre side, and Ravel responded with music that is charming without sentimentality. There is nothing ‘Disneyfied’ about it. The Beast serenades his Beauty with exquisite grace. The image of Beauty and the Beast has been used more than once to describe music (not least Beethoven’s piano sonatas) in which delicacy is juxtaposed with harsher sounds. Ravel is different: his Beast is an altogether courteous creature and Belle a delicate, fragile princess. Tom Thumb walks in the woods, and leaves a trail of crumbs so he can find his way home, but the birds (you can hear them in the orchestration) swoop down and eat them all up. Laideronnette is a lovely princess cursed with ugliness by a wicked fairy. The usual prince has yet to come along and break the spell, so Ravel depicts her bathing while musicians attend − apparently playing a small gamelan. Ravel’s closing section originally evoked a magical garden, but in the ballet it also serves to accompany the awakening of Sleeping Beauty and the transformation of the Beast back into a man.
© Svend Brown
- conductor
- -
Many have attempted to translate Debussy’s Preludes from piano to orchestra, but none succeeds better than Zender. With an intuitive way of getting under the skin of the music, he is a magician in the same class as Ravel, whose timeless Mother Goose completes the evening. Lyell Cresswell knows the SCO well and has written a stream of dramatic, high-impact pieces for the Orchestra. His new work is unusual: a concerto for trio and orchestra.
Swensen conducts the 'Rhenish'
- Walton
Programme note
William Walton (1902-1983)
Two Pieces from Henry V (1944)A slow worker and by no means a prolific composer, Walton enjoyed a great deal of success as a film composer, often leading critics to dismiss his music as too ‘lightweight’ and ‘populist’ to be considered alongside other luminaries of the twentieth century. Unlike many of his contemporaries, Walton worked in relative isolation: largely self-taught, he had no pupils, held no posts at conservatoires and gave no public lectures. Walton himself was only too aware of the critical disapproval that lurked behind him, once declaring: ‘I seriously advise all sensitive composers to die at the age of 37. I know: I've gone through the first halcyon period and am just about ripe for my critical damnation.’
But criticism of his film music overlooks the remarkable assimilation of styles elsewhere within his music, and ignores works such as Façade, which, although it stirred up controversy at its first performance, is now celebrated as a turning point in twentieth-century composition. It says something of Walton’s popularity among the masses that he was commissioned to write coronation anthems for the crowning of two twentieth-century monarchs: Crown Imperial for the coronation of George IV in 1937, and Orb and Sceptre (1953) for the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II seventeen years later.
By the time Walton wrote the music for Laurence Olivier’s film adaptation of Shakespeare’s Henry V, the two had already collaborated on nine other films. Directed by and starring Olivier himself, the cinematic stylisation of the original Globe Theatre production was released in 1944, intended as a morale booster for the British public as the First World War wore on. The first of three Shakespeare adaptations, it would prove to be one of the pair’s most successful collaborations to date, earning a number of Academy Award nominations, including the award for Best Score. Although the music for the film was popular in its own right, Walton felt strongly that film music made little sense when divorced from its context. It was 29 years before he finally allowed an arrangement of his score to be made, permitting Muir Matheson – a close colleague and the conductor of the original film score – to produce a suite comprising five movements for chorus and orchestra. The second and fourth movements are scored for strings alone. Passacaglia: The Death of Falstaff, depicts the slow and sombre lament of Sir John Falstaff, Henry’s youthful companion who dies from a broken heart after being cast aside when Henry takes the throne. In Touch her soft lips and part, we see the wayward ruffian Pistol bid goodbye to his sweetheart as he heads for France, in one of Walton’s most tender and expressive pieces of music.
© Jo Kirkbride
- Barber
Programme note
Samuel Barber (1910-1981)
Cello Concerto (1945)I: Allegro moderato
II: Andante sostenuto
III: Molto allegro e appassionatoConsidering the success he enjoyed during his career, it is surprising that Barber has become celebrated above all for just one work – his Adagio for Strings (1938). His catalogue of music, though not as extensive as some of his contemporaries, extends from solo piano music and instrumental chamber works to symphonies, concertos and operas. He was twice awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Music, in addition to the American Prix de Rome, and in 1966 he was commissioned to write a new opera to mark the opening of the Metropolitan Opera’s new home at the Lincoln Centre (the production was a flop, but this was largely due to Zeffirelli’s direction, rather than Barber’s music).
Barber’s relative neglect from the twentieth century canon probably owes much to his musical style. While Schoenberg and the Second Viennese School forged new harmonic paths through atonality and serialism, and Stravinsky explored bold new levels of dissonance, rhythmic vitality and texture, Barber seemed to content to follow his own path, one which owed more to the dying strains of Romanticism than to the radical new soundworld of the twentieth century. That is not to say that Barber’s music is not innovative and dramatic, nor that his often complex and dissonant harmonies can be considered ordinary, but the rich, full textures of his works with their predilection for sweeping, generous melodies sets them apart from many of the more experimental trends of his age.
It is precisely this gift for lyricism that won him many of his commissions. When Serge Koussevitsky, one of the twentieth century’s most powerful impresarios and conductor of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, commissioned Barber to write a new cello concerto for the Russian virtuoso Raya Garbousova, he promised that its impact would be as important as Brahms’ Violin Concerto was for the previous generation. Barber spent weeks listening to Garbousova play everything in her repertoire, seeking out the distinctive features of her playing style, so that he could write a concerto that was truly personal to her. The result is a characteristically lyrical – but fiendishly difficult – work in the conventional three-movement format, which won him the New York Music Critics' Circle Award in 1947.
The work’s poetic heart rests in the soft Siciliana that forms the concerto’s centrepiece, but elsewhere there is much more to the music than soaring melodies and heartfelt expression. The acerbic, defiant stance of the opening Allegro moderato sets up a dialogue between cello and orchestra, with the woodwinds echoing the soloist’s melodic fragments and punchy brass chords reinforcing the movement’s vibrant contrasts. This sense of drama is carried over into the finale, where the sense of interplay is heightened by the stark relief between the jagged principal theme and the soft, contrasting second melody. When they finally combine and reach a heady climax in the coda, the sense of culmination is one of the most powerful moments in Barber’s oeuvre.
© Jo Kirkbride
- Schumann
Programme note
Robert Schumann (1810-1856)
Symphony No 3 in E flat major, Op 97, ‘Rhenish’ (1850)Lebhaft (Lively)
Scherzo: Sehr massig (Very moderate)
Nicht schnell (Not fast)
Feierlich (Solemn)
Lebhaft (Lively)Schumann’s symphonies, like Schubert’s, are faultily numbered, but attempts to correct their running-order seem eternally doomed to failure. Perhaps only pedants care that his Third Symphony is really his Fourth. What matters, as an identification tag, is that it is known as the 'Rhenish', a name reflected in various aspects of the music. The first movement is, in its way, as vivid a representation of the river Rhine as the prelude to Wagner’s Das Rheingold; the fourth movement grandly portrays an archbishop’s enthronement in Cologne Cathedral; and the work was the first major product of Schumann’s aspirational but ill-fated move from Dresden to the Rhineland city of Dusseldorf, where in 1850 he accepted the post of music director.
Yet only Cologne Cathedral, at this point in his career, really satisfied him. By 1852, when he was 42, his mental health had begun its heart-breaking decline. His erratic conducting of the Dusseldorf orchestra caused increasing concern. And the river Rhine, initially an inspiration, lured him in 1854 to attempt suicide in its depths. Though he was rescued by fishermen, his career as one of the nineteenth century’s finest, most progressive composers was over.
But the 'Rhenish' symphony, at least, was a masterpiece - and by no means his last. The verve and swing of its opening movement, its main theme a choice example of Schumannesque syncopation, sets the music in marvellous motion. The five-movement structure, with Beethoven's 'Pastoral' and Berlioz's Fantastique as precedents, incorporates not only a scherzo (which Schumann thought of calling ‘Morning on the Rhine’) but two succeeding slow movements. Of these the first is a characteristically songlike Schumann intermezzo, marked ‘not fast’ rather than slow, the second a monumental tribute to the composer’s trip (by train instead of riverboat) to Cologne for the installation of Archbishop Geissel. The movement’s architecture is underlined by the use of trombones, for the first time in the work. To this splendour the finale serves as a sort of flying buttress, bringing the symphony to its exhilarating close.
© Conrad Wilson
- conductor
- cello
Swensen and Kirshbaum – two long-time SCO favourites – return for a delightful evening of music-making. Kirshbaum first recorded the Barber concerto with the SCO back in the 1980s, and it is still one of the top recommended recordings. It has plenty of Barber’s warm mellow lyricism about it, but a good bit of spark and punch too. Schumann’s ‘Rhenish’ was actually his last symphony. It is often mentioned in the same breath as Beethoven’s Fifth, and Berlioz’s Symphonie Fantastique. Come expecting heroics and full-blooded Romanticism, delivered with Swensen’s signature passion and sweep.
Tickets are available from April 2012 from Ayr Citadel and Leisure Centre, South Harbour Street, Ayr or 01292 269793
Swensen conducts the 'Rhenish'
- Walton
Programme note
William Walton (1902-1983)
Two Pieces from Henry V (1944)A slow worker and by no means a prolific composer, Walton enjoyed a great deal of success as a film composer, often leading critics to dismiss his music as too ‘lightweight’ and ‘populist’ to be considered alongside other luminaries of the twentieth century. Unlike many of his contemporaries, Walton worked in relative isolation: largely self-taught, he had no pupils, held no posts at conservatoires and gave no public lectures. Walton himself was only too aware of the critical disapproval that lurked behind him, once declaring: ‘I seriously advise all sensitive composers to die at the age of 37. I know: I've gone through the first halcyon period and am just about ripe for my critical damnation.’
But criticism of his film music overlooks the remarkable assimilation of styles elsewhere within his music, and ignores works such as Façade, which, although it stirred up controversy at its first performance, is now celebrated as a turning point in twentieth-century composition. It says something of Walton’s popularity among the masses that he was commissioned to write coronation anthems for the crowning of two twentieth-century monarchs: Crown Imperial for the coronation of George IV in 1937, and Orb and Sceptre (1953) for the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II seventeen years later.
By the time Walton wrote the music for Laurence Olivier’s film adaptation of Shakespeare’s Henry V, the two had already collaborated on nine other films. Directed by and starring Olivier himself, the cinematic stylisation of the original Globe Theatre production was released in 1944, intended as a morale booster for the British public as the First World War wore on. The first of three Shakespeare adaptations, it would prove to be one of the pair’s most successful collaborations to date, earning a number of Academy Award nominations, including the award for Best Score. Although the music for the film was popular in its own right, Walton felt strongly that film music made little sense when divorced from its context. It was 29 years before he finally allowed an arrangement of his score to be made, permitting Muir Matheson – a close colleague and the conductor of the original film score – to produce a suite comprising five movements for chorus and orchestra. The second and fourth movements are scored for strings alone. Passacaglia: The Death of Falstaff, depicts the slow and sombre lament of Sir John Falstaff, Henry’s youthful companion who dies from a broken heart after being cast aside when Henry takes the throne. In Touch her soft lips and part, we see the wayward ruffian Pistol bid goodbye to his sweetheart as he heads for France, in one of Walton’s most tender and expressive pieces of music.
© Jo Kirkbride
- Barber
Programme note
Samuel Barber (1910-1981)
Cello Concerto (1945)I: Allegro moderato
II: Andante sostenuto
III: Molto allegro e appassionatoConsidering the success he enjoyed during his career, it is surprising that Barber has become celebrated above all for just one work – his Adagio for Strings (1938). His catalogue of music, though not as extensive as some of his contemporaries, extends from solo piano music and instrumental chamber works to symphonies, concertos and operas. He was twice awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Music, in addition to the American Prix de Rome, and in 1966 he was commissioned to write a new opera to mark the opening of the Metropolitan Opera’s new home at the Lincoln Centre (the production was a flop, but this was largely due to Zeffirelli’s direction, rather than Barber’s music).
Barber’s relative neglect from the twentieth century canon probably owes much to his musical style. While Schoenberg and the Second Viennese School forged new harmonic paths through atonality and serialism, and Stravinsky explored bold new levels of dissonance, rhythmic vitality and texture, Barber seemed to content to follow his own path, one which owed more to the dying strains of Romanticism than to the radical new soundworld of the twentieth century. That is not to say that Barber’s music is not innovative and dramatic, nor that his often complex and dissonant harmonies can be considered ordinary, but the rich, full textures of his works with their predilection for sweeping, generous melodies sets them apart from many of the more experimental trends of his age.
It is precisely this gift for lyricism that won him many of his commissions. When Serge Koussevitsky, one of the twentieth century’s most powerful impresarios and conductor of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, commissioned Barber to write a new cello concerto for the Russian virtuoso Raya Garbousova, he promised that its impact would be as important as Brahms’ Violin Concerto was for the previous generation. Barber spent weeks listening to Garbousova play everything in her repertoire, seeking out the distinctive features of her playing style, so that he could write a concerto that was truly personal to her. The result is a characteristically lyrical – but fiendishly difficult – work in the conventional three-movement format, which won him the New York Music Critics' Circle Award in 1947.
The work’s poetic heart rests in the soft Siciliana that forms the concerto’s centrepiece, but elsewhere there is much more to the music than soaring melodies and heartfelt expression. The acerbic, defiant stance of the opening Allegro moderato sets up a dialogue between cello and orchestra, with the woodwinds echoing the soloist’s melodic fragments and punchy brass chords reinforcing the movement’s vibrant contrasts. This sense of drama is carried over into the finale, where the sense of interplay is heightened by the stark relief between the jagged principal theme and the soft, contrasting second melody. When they finally combine and reach a heady climax in the coda, the sense of culmination is one of the most powerful moments in Barber’s oeuvre.
© Jo Kirkbride
- Schumann
Programme note
Robert Schumann (1810-1856)
Symphony No 3 in E flat major, Op 97, ‘Rhenish’ (1850)Lebhaft (Lively)
Scherzo: Sehr massig (Very moderate)
Nicht schnell (Not fast)
Feierlich (Solemn)
Lebhaft (Lively)Schumann’s symphonies, like Schubert’s, are faultily numbered, but attempts to correct their running-order seem eternally doomed to failure. Perhaps only pedants care that his Third Symphony is really his Fourth. What matters, as an identification tag, is that it is known as the 'Rhenish', a name reflected in various aspects of the music. The first movement is, in its way, as vivid a representation of the river Rhine as the prelude to Wagner’s Das Rheingold; the fourth movement grandly portrays an archbishop’s enthronement in Cologne Cathedral; and the work was the first major product of Schumann’s aspirational but ill-fated move from Dresden to the Rhineland city of Dusseldorf, where in 1850 he accepted the post of music director.
Yet only Cologne Cathedral, at this point in his career, really satisfied him. By 1852, when he was 42, his mental health had begun its heart-breaking decline. His erratic conducting of the Dusseldorf orchestra caused increasing concern. And the river Rhine, initially an inspiration, lured him in 1854 to attempt suicide in its depths. Though he was rescued by fishermen, his career as one of the nineteenth century’s finest, most progressive composers was over.
But the 'Rhenish' symphony, at least, was a masterpiece - and by no means his last. The verve and swing of its opening movement, its main theme a choice example of Schumannesque syncopation, sets the music in marvellous motion. The five-movement structure, with Beethoven's 'Pastoral' and Berlioz's Fantastique as precedents, incorporates not only a scherzo (which Schumann thought of calling ‘Morning on the Rhine’) but two succeeding slow movements. Of these the first is a characteristically songlike Schumann intermezzo, marked ‘not fast’ rather than slow, the second a monumental tribute to the composer’s trip (by train instead of riverboat) to Cologne for the installation of Archbishop Geissel. The movement’s architecture is underlined by the use of trombones, for the first time in the work. To this splendour the finale serves as a sort of flying buttress, bringing the symphony to its exhilarating close.
© Conrad Wilson
- conductor
- cello
Swensen and Kirshbaum – two long-time SCO favourites – return for a delightful evening of music-making. Kirshbaum first recorded the Barber concerto with the SCO back in the 1980s, and it is still one of the top recommended recordings. It has plenty of Barber’s warm mellow lyricism about it, but a good bit of spark and punch too. Schumann’s ‘Rhenish’ was actually his last symphony. It is often mentioned in the same breath as Beethoven’s Fifth, and Berlioz’s Symphonie Fantastique. Come expecting heroics and full-blooded Romanticism, delivered with Swensen’s signature passion and sweep.
Swensen conducts the 'Rhenish'
- Walton
Programme note
William Walton (1902-1983)
Two Pieces from Henry V (1944)A slow worker and by no means a prolific composer, Walton enjoyed a great deal of success as a film composer, often leading critics to dismiss his music as too ‘lightweight’ and ‘populist’ to be considered alongside other luminaries of the twentieth century. Unlike many of his contemporaries, Walton worked in relative isolation: largely self-taught, he had no pupils, held no posts at conservatoires and gave no public lectures. Walton himself was only too aware of the critical disapproval that lurked behind him, once declaring: ‘I seriously advise all sensitive composers to die at the age of 37. I know: I've gone through the first halcyon period and am just about ripe for my critical damnation.’
But criticism of his film music overlooks the remarkable assimilation of styles elsewhere within his music, and ignores works such as Façade, which, although it stirred up controversy at its first performance, is now celebrated as a turning point in twentieth-century composition. It says something of Walton’s popularity among the masses that he was commissioned to write coronation anthems for the crowning of two twentieth-century monarchs: Crown Imperial for the coronation of George IV in 1937, and Orb and Sceptre (1953) for the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II seventeen years later.
By the time Walton wrote the music for Laurence Olivier’s film adaptation of Shakespeare’s Henry V, the two had already collaborated on nine other films. Directed by and starring Olivier himself, the cinematic stylisation of the original Globe Theatre production was released in 1944, intended as a morale booster for the British public as the First World War wore on. The first of three Shakespeare adaptations, it would prove to be one of the pair’s most successful collaborations to date, earning a number of Academy Award nominations, including the award for Best Score. Although the music for the film was popular in its own right, Walton felt strongly that film music made little sense when divorced from its context. It was 29 years before he finally allowed an arrangement of his score to be made, permitting Muir Matheson – a close colleague and the conductor of the original film score – to produce a suite comprising five movements for chorus and orchestra. The second and fourth movements are scored for strings alone. Passacaglia: The Death of Falstaff, depicts the slow and sombre lament of Sir John Falstaff, Henry’s youthful companion who dies from a broken heart after being cast aside when Henry takes the throne. In Touch her soft lips and part, we see the wayward ruffian Pistol bid goodbye to his sweetheart as he heads for France, in one of Walton’s most tender and expressive pieces of music.
© Jo Kirkbride
- Barber
Programme note
Samuel Barber (1910-1981)
Cello Concerto (1945)I: Allegro moderato
II: Andante sostenuto
III: Molto allegro e appassionatoConsidering the success he enjoyed during his career, it is surprising that Barber has become celebrated above all for just one work – his Adagio for Strings (1938). His catalogue of music, though not as extensive as some of his contemporaries, extends from solo piano music and instrumental chamber works to symphonies, concertos and operas. He was twice awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Music, in addition to the American Prix de Rome, and in 1966 he was commissioned to write a new opera to mark the opening of the Metropolitan Opera’s new home at the Lincoln Centre (the production was a flop, but this was largely due to Zeffirelli’s direction, rather than Barber’s music).
Barber’s relative neglect from the twentieth century canon probably owes much to his musical style. While Schoenberg and the Second Viennese School forged new harmonic paths through atonality and serialism, and Stravinsky explored bold new levels of dissonance, rhythmic vitality and texture, Barber seemed to content to follow his own path, one which owed more to the dying strains of Romanticism than to the radical new soundworld of the twentieth century. That is not to say that Barber’s music is not innovative and dramatic, nor that his often complex and dissonant harmonies can be considered ordinary, but the rich, full textures of his works with their predilection for sweeping, generous melodies sets them apart from many of the more experimental trends of his age.
It is precisely this gift for lyricism that won him many of his commissions. When Serge Koussevitsky, one of the twentieth century’s most powerful impresarios and conductor of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, commissioned Barber to write a new cello concerto for the Russian virtuoso Raya Garbousova, he promised that its impact would be as important as Brahms’ Violin Concerto was for the previous generation. Barber spent weeks listening to Garbousova play everything in her repertoire, seeking out the distinctive features of her playing style, so that he could write a concerto that was truly personal to her. The result is a characteristically lyrical – but fiendishly difficult – work in the conventional three-movement format, which won him the New York Music Critics' Circle Award in 1947.
The work’s poetic heart rests in the soft Siciliana that forms the concerto’s centrepiece, but elsewhere there is much more to the music than soaring melodies and heartfelt expression. The acerbic, defiant stance of the opening Allegro moderato sets up a dialogue between cello and orchestra, with the woodwinds echoing the soloist’s melodic fragments and punchy brass chords reinforcing the movement’s vibrant contrasts. This sense of drama is carried over into the finale, where the sense of interplay is heightened by the stark relief between the jagged principal theme and the soft, contrasting second melody. When they finally combine and reach a heady climax in the coda, the sense of culmination is one of the most powerful moments in Barber’s oeuvre.
© Jo Kirkbride
- Schumann
Programme note
Robert Schumann (1810-1856)
Symphony No 3 in E flat major, Op 97, ‘Rhenish’ (1850)Lebhaft (Lively)
Scherzo: Sehr massig (Very moderate)
Nicht schnell (Not fast)
Feierlich (Solemn)
Lebhaft (Lively)Schumann’s symphonies, like Schubert’s, are faultily numbered, but attempts to correct their running-order seem eternally doomed to failure. Perhaps only pedants care that his Third Symphony is really his Fourth. What matters, as an identification tag, is that it is known as the 'Rhenish', a name reflected in various aspects of the music. The first movement is, in its way, as vivid a representation of the river Rhine as the prelude to Wagner’s Das Rheingold; the fourth movement grandly portrays an archbishop’s enthronement in Cologne Cathedral; and the work was the first major product of Schumann’s aspirational but ill-fated move from Dresden to the Rhineland city of Dusseldorf, where in 1850 he accepted the post of music director.
Yet only Cologne Cathedral, at this point in his career, really satisfied him. By 1852, when he was 42, his mental health had begun its heart-breaking decline. His erratic conducting of the Dusseldorf orchestra caused increasing concern. And the river Rhine, initially an inspiration, lured him in 1854 to attempt suicide in its depths. Though he was rescued by fishermen, his career as one of the nineteenth century’s finest, most progressive composers was over.
But the 'Rhenish' symphony, at least, was a masterpiece - and by no means his last. The verve and swing of its opening movement, its main theme a choice example of Schumannesque syncopation, sets the music in marvellous motion. The five-movement structure, with Beethoven's 'Pastoral' and Berlioz's Fantastique as precedents, incorporates not only a scherzo (which Schumann thought of calling ‘Morning on the Rhine’) but two succeeding slow movements. Of these the first is a characteristically songlike Schumann intermezzo, marked ‘not fast’ rather than slow, the second a monumental tribute to the composer’s trip (by train instead of riverboat) to Cologne for the installation of Archbishop Geissel. The movement’s architecture is underlined by the use of trombones, for the first time in the work. To this splendour the finale serves as a sort of flying buttress, bringing the symphony to its exhilarating close.
© Conrad Wilson
- conductor
- cello
Swensen and Kirshbaum – two long-time SCO favourites – return for a delightful evening of music-making. Kirshbaum first recorded the Barber concerto with the SCO back in the 1980s, and it is still one of the top recommended recordings. It has plenty of Barber’s warm mellow lyricism about it, but a good bit of spark and punch too. Schumann’s ‘Rhenish’ was actually his last symphony. It is often mentioned in the same breath as Beethoven’s Fifth, and Berlioz’s Symphonie Fantastique. Come expecting heroics and full-blooded Romanticism, delivered with Swensen’s signature passion and sweep.
Swensen conducts the 'Rhenish'
- Walton
Programme note
William Walton (1902-1983)
Two Pieces from Henry V (1944)A slow worker and by no means a prolific composer, Walton enjoyed a great deal of success as a film composer, often leading critics to dismiss his music as too ‘lightweight’ and ‘populist’ to be considered alongside other luminaries of the twentieth century. Unlike many of his contemporaries, Walton worked in relative isolation: largely self-taught, he had no pupils, held no posts at conservatoires and gave no public lectures. Walton himself was only too aware of the critical disapproval that lurked behind him, once declaring: ‘I seriously advise all sensitive composers to die at the age of 37. I know: I've gone through the first halcyon period and am just about ripe for my critical damnation.’
But criticism of his film music overlooks the remarkable assimilation of styles elsewhere within his music, and ignores works such as Façade, which, although it stirred up controversy at its first performance, is now celebrated as a turning point in twentieth-century composition. It says something of Walton’s popularity among the masses that he was commissioned to write coronation anthems for the crowning of two twentieth-century monarchs: Crown Imperial for the coronation of George IV in 1937, and Orb and Sceptre (1953) for the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II seventeen years later.
By the time Walton wrote the music for Laurence Olivier’s film adaptation of Shakespeare’s Henry V, the two had already collaborated on nine other films. Directed by and starring Olivier himself, the cinematic stylisation of the original Globe Theatre production was released in 1944, intended as a morale booster for the British public as the First World War wore on. The first of three Shakespeare adaptations, it would prove to be one of the pair’s most successful collaborations to date, earning a number of Academy Award nominations, including the award for Best Score. Although the music for the film was popular in its own right, Walton felt strongly that film music made little sense when divorced from its context. It was 29 years before he finally allowed an arrangement of his score to be made, permitting Muir Matheson – a close colleague and the conductor of the original film score – to produce a suite comprising five movements for chorus and orchestra. The second and fourth movements are scored for strings alone. Passacaglia: The Death of Falstaff, depicts the slow and sombre lament of Sir John Falstaff, Henry’s youthful companion who dies from a broken heart after being cast aside when Henry takes the throne. In Touch her soft lips and part, we see the wayward ruffian Pistol bid goodbye to his sweetheart as he heads for France, in one of Walton’s most tender and expressive pieces of music.
© Jo Kirkbride
- Barber
Programme note
Samuel Barber (1910-1981)
Cello Concerto (1945)I: Allegro moderato
II: Andante sostenuto
III: Molto allegro e appassionatoConsidering the success he enjoyed during his career, it is surprising that Barber has become celebrated above all for just one work – his Adagio for Strings (1938). His catalogue of music, though not as extensive as some of his contemporaries, extends from solo piano music and instrumental chamber works to symphonies, concertos and operas. He was twice awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Music, in addition to the American Prix de Rome, and in 1966 he was commissioned to write a new opera to mark the opening of the Metropolitan Opera’s new home at the Lincoln Centre (the production was a flop, but this was largely due to Zeffirelli’s direction, rather than Barber’s music).
Barber’s relative neglect from the twentieth century canon probably owes much to his musical style. While Schoenberg and the Second Viennese School forged new harmonic paths through atonality and serialism, and Stravinsky explored bold new levels of dissonance, rhythmic vitality and texture, Barber seemed to content to follow his own path, one which owed more to the dying strains of Romanticism than to the radical new soundworld of the twentieth century. That is not to say that Barber’s music is not innovative and dramatic, nor that his often complex and dissonant harmonies can be considered ordinary, but the rich, full textures of his works with their predilection for sweeping, generous melodies sets them apart from many of the more experimental trends of his age.
It is precisely this gift for lyricism that won him many of his commissions. When Serge Koussevitsky, one of the twentieth century’s most powerful impresarios and conductor of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, commissioned Barber to write a new cello concerto for the Russian virtuoso Raya Garbousova, he promised that its impact would be as important as Brahms’ Violin Concerto was for the previous generation. Barber spent weeks listening to Garbousova play everything in her repertoire, seeking out the distinctive features of her playing style, so that he could write a concerto that was truly personal to her. The result is a characteristically lyrical – but fiendishly difficult – work in the conventional three-movement format, which won him the New York Music Critics' Circle Award in 1947.
The work’s poetic heart rests in the soft Siciliana that forms the concerto’s centrepiece, but elsewhere there is much more to the music than soaring melodies and heartfelt expression. The acerbic, defiant stance of the opening Allegro moderato sets up a dialogue between cello and orchestra, with the woodwinds echoing the soloist’s melodic fragments and punchy brass chords reinforcing the movement’s vibrant contrasts. This sense of drama is carried over into the finale, where the sense of interplay is heightened by the stark relief between the jagged principal theme and the soft, contrasting second melody. When they finally combine and reach a heady climax in the coda, the sense of culmination is one of the most powerful moments in Barber’s oeuvre.
© Jo Kirkbride
- Schumann
Programme note
Robert Schumann (1810-1856)
Symphony No 3 in E flat major, Op 97, ‘Rhenish’ (1850)Lebhaft (Lively)
Scherzo: Sehr massig (Very moderate)
Nicht schnell (Not fast)
Feierlich (Solemn)
Lebhaft (Lively)Schumann’s symphonies, like Schubert’s, are faultily numbered, but attempts to correct their running-order seem eternally doomed to failure. Perhaps only pedants care that his Third Symphony is really his Fourth. What matters, as an identification tag, is that it is known as the 'Rhenish', a name reflected in various aspects of the music. The first movement is, in its way, as vivid a representation of the river Rhine as the prelude to Wagner’s Das Rheingold; the fourth movement grandly portrays an archbishop’s enthronement in Cologne Cathedral; and the work was the first major product of Schumann’s aspirational but ill-fated move from Dresden to the Rhineland city of Dusseldorf, where in 1850 he accepted the post of music director.
Yet only Cologne Cathedral, at this point in his career, really satisfied him. By 1852, when he was 42, his mental health had begun its heart-breaking decline. His erratic conducting of the Dusseldorf orchestra caused increasing concern. And the river Rhine, initially an inspiration, lured him in 1854 to attempt suicide in its depths. Though he was rescued by fishermen, his career as one of the nineteenth century’s finest, most progressive composers was over.
But the 'Rhenish' symphony, at least, was a masterpiece - and by no means his last. The verve and swing of its opening movement, its main theme a choice example of Schumannesque syncopation, sets the music in marvellous motion. The five-movement structure, with Beethoven's 'Pastoral' and Berlioz's Fantastique as precedents, incorporates not only a scherzo (which Schumann thought of calling ‘Morning on the Rhine’) but two succeeding slow movements. Of these the first is a characteristically songlike Schumann intermezzo, marked ‘not fast’ rather than slow, the second a monumental tribute to the composer’s trip (by train instead of riverboat) to Cologne for the installation of Archbishop Geissel. The movement’s architecture is underlined by the use of trombones, for the first time in the work. To this splendour the finale serves as a sort of flying buttress, bringing the symphony to its exhilarating close.
© Conrad Wilson
- conductor
- cello
Swensen and Kirshbaum – two long-time SCO favourites – return for a delightful evening of music-making. Kirshbaum first recorded the Barber concerto with the SCO back in the 1980s, and it is still one of the top recommended recordings. It has plenty of Barber’s warm mellow lyricism about it, but a good bit of spark and punch too. Schumann’s ‘Rhenish’ was actually his last symphony. It is often mentioned in the same breath as Beethoven’s Fifth, and Berlioz’s Symphonie Fantastique. Come expecting heroics and full-blooded Romanticism, delivered with Swensen’s signature passion and sweep.
European Tour: Rotterdam
- Wagner
Programme note
Richard Wagner 1813-1883
Siegfried Idyll (1870)Has there ever been so beautiful a birthday present? Siegfried Idyll was Wagner’s gift to his wife, Cosima, on her birthday (Christmas Eve) in 1870.
Cosima, Liszt’s daughter, married the conductor and virtuoso pianist, Hans von Bülow, in 1857, but then fell in love with Richard Wagner in 1864. She left her husband in 1866, having already borne Wagner’s first daughter, Isolde, in 1865. Eva followed in 1868, and then came the longed-for son, Siegfried, in 1869. Cosima’s divorce was finalized in July 1870, and she married Wagner the next month. Siegfried Idyll (which uses themes from the opera Siegfried, as well as many private musical allusions) was Wagner’s thankyou offering, both for her love and for the gift of a son.
The circumstances of the first performance couldn’t have been more romantic. Wagner had secretly rehearsed thirteen musicians from nearby Lucerne. They assembled quietly that Christmas morning on the staircase of the Wagner’s home, Tribschen, on the shore of Lake Lucerne, Switzerland.
Cosima awoke to the sounds of music. Her diary entry for that day reads: “As I awoke, my ear caught a sound, which swelled fuller and fuller; no longer could I imagine myself to be dreaming: music was sounding, and such music! When it died away, Richard came into my room with the children and offered me the score of the symphonic birthday poem. I was in tears, but so was all the rest of the household.”
Obviously, Richard and Cosima were as deeply in love as it is possible to be. This very private composition was the tender expression of that love.
Siegfried Idyll is now often played in a version for orchestra rather than for the chamber ensemble that had originally assembled on Tribschen’s staircase. If anything, the richer tone of the larger string forces enhances the work’s radiant beauty.
© David Gardner
- Mozart
Programme note
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756-1791)
Piano Concerto in G major, K453 (1784)
Allegro
Andante
Allegretto – PrestoBy the time he composed this concerto, Mozart had lost interest in Paris as a possible domicile and had settled in Vienna, thus depriving himself of foretastes of the French Revolution in 1789. Writing his subversive opera The Marriage of Figaro at long range soon after this evening’s concerto, he managed to sidestep the censor, even although the revolutionary Beaumarchais play was banned in Vienna. Whether he would have been so lucky in Paris was another matter, but in 1784 he had other things on his mind. He was well into the great series of Viennese piano concertos which he had launched in 1782, and was at work on the six string quartets he dedicated to Haydn. In addition he became a Viennese Freemason, moved house twice between January and September, and was ill for three weeks with a fever suspiciously like the one which eventually killed him.
Mozart once said of his piano music that it should ‘flow like oil.’ It is a description which fits some aspects of the G major Piano Concerto, a magnificent large-scale work whose intimacy of tone can make it sound smaller, slighter, and smoother than it really is. Mozart composed it not for himself but for one of his star pupils, Barbara Ployer, known as "Babette," which is one reason why it is sometimes described as a "feminine" work. Such terms, however, should be applied to Mozart with caution. He himself called it a concerto "to make you perspire," and Arthur Hutchings was not the only Mozart authority to point out that Ployer must have had to work very hard at the triplets in the finale, "unless the piece was taken much more slowly than we take it nowadays."
Even the famous music-box analogy, applied to the supposedly "tinkling" themes of the first movement and finale, is only half true. It would require a very special music-box to deal with the subtle modulations of the first movement’s opening theme, which cause the music to sigh as well as tinkle. In fact this movement is an astounding study in thematic interplay, and one of the first great landmarks of Mozart’s mature Viennese style. Not only does it employ a multiplicity of keyboard devices, but its sound-world is distinctly operatic, with some strange, disturbing foretastes of Don Giovanni planted amid the filigree detail.
The slow movement is similarly vocal, but perhaps more chaste and churchlike than operatically emotional. Yet its calm beauty is constantly threatened, in very Mozartian fashion, by the number of troubled modulations the music undergoes and by the nocturnal shadows in which it is often cloaked. Again the world of Don Giovanni seems not far distant.
But a different opera pervades the finale, which is a theme and variations supposedly inspired by the song of a pet starling – though more probably it was Mozart who taught his starling to sing it. From starling to birdman clearly required no great stretch of his imagination, and the music anticipated here is conspicuously Papageno’s in The Magic Flute. Yet the five variations are not just decorated versions of the theme but real creative feats of the imagination, comic, touching, and true to the whole nature of the piano concerto as Mozart envisaged it.
Nor does the increase of speed from allegretto to presto in the course of the finale imply that the movement has reached its coda. What it has reached is tantamount to a second finale – Mozart actually added the inscription "finale" at this point – making the music seem like the concerto equivalent of one of his operatic multiple finales, in which the pace increases step by step, with exhilarating comic effect.
© 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
- Principal Conductor
- piano
As life-affirming and joyful a programme as you could wish, performed by some of the finest musicians in the world. Pianist Maria João Pires plays Mozart's quick-witted Piano Concerto No. 17 and the SCO opens with Wagner's magnificent Siegfried Idyll and closes with Beethoven's Symphony No 6.
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