Programme notes

Programme note

John Adams (b.1947)
Shaker Loops (1978)

Shaker Loops began as a string quartet with the title Wavemaker. At the time, like many a young composer, I was essentially unaware of the nature of those musical materials I had chosen for my tools. Having experienced a few of the seminal pieces of American Minimalism during the early 1970's, I thought their combination of stripped-down harmonic and rhythmic discourse might be just the ticket for my own unformed yearnings. I gradually developed a scheme for composing that was partly indebted to the repetitive procedures of Minimalism and partly an outgrowth of my interest in waveforms. The 'waves' of Wavemaker were to be long sequences of oscillating melodic cells that created a rippling, shimmering complex of patterns like the surface of a slightly agitated pond or lake. But my technique lagged behind my inspiration, and this rippling pond very quickly went dry. Wavemaker crashed and burned at its first performance. The need for a larger, thicker ensemble and for a more flexible, less theory-bound means of composing became very apparent.

Fortunately I had in my students at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music an ensemble willing to tryout new ideas, and with the original Wavemaker scrapped I worked over the next four months to pick up the pieces and start over. I held on to the idea of the oscillating patterns and made an overall structure that could embrace much more variety and emotional range. Most importantly the quartet became a septet, thereby adding a sonic mass and the potential for more acoustical power. The 'loops' idea was a technique from the era of tape music where small lengths of prerecorded tape attached end to end could repeat melodic or rhythmic figures ad infinitum. (Steve Reich's It's Gonna Rain is the paradigm of this technique.) The 'Shakers' got into the act partly as a pun on the musical term 'to shake', meaning either to make a tremolo with the bow across the string or else to trill rapidly from one note to another. The flip side of the pun was suggested by my own childhood memories of growing up not far from a defunct Shaker colony near Canterbury, New Hampshire. Although, as has since been pointed out to me, the term 'Shaker' itself is derogatory, it nevertheless summons up the vision of these otherwise pious and industrious souls caught up in the ecstatic frenzy of a dance that culminated in an epiphany of physical and spiritual transcendence. This dynamic, almost electrically charged element, so out of place in the orderly mechanistic universe of Minimalism, gave the music its raison d'etre and ultimately led to the full realization of the piece. Shaker Loops continues to be one of my most performed pieces. There are partisans who favor the clarity and individualism of the solo septet version, and there are those who prefer the orchestral version for its added density and power. The piece has several times been choreographed and even enjoyed a moment of cult status in the movie Barfly, an autobiographical account of the poet Charles Bukowsky's down and out days on LA's Skid Row. In a famous scene Bukowsky (Mickey Rourke), having been battered and bloodied by his drunken girlfriend (Faye Dunaway) holes up in a flophouse room, writing poems in a fit of inspiration to the accompaniment of the insistent buzz of 'Shaking and Trembling'.

- John Adams
Reproduced by permission of G. Schirmer Inc.

Programme note

John Adams (b. 1947)
The Wound-Dresser (1988)

Walt Whitman spent the better part of the Civil War years in Washington, DC, living in a series of small, unfurnished rooms, all the time supported by the meagre salary of a federal clerkship. His sole, consuming passion was his self-appointed task of ministering to the tens of thousands of sick and maimed soldiers who crowded the hospitals in the surrounding area, many of them little more than unheated and unventilated canvas tents hurriedly constructed by the unprepared Army of the Potomac. Virtually every day, barring his own illness or ever-increasing exhaustion, Whitman rose early and went to the hospitals, going from ward to ward to visit with the sick and wounded young men. For those who were unable to do so, he wrote letters home. For others he provided small gifts of fruit, candy or tobacco. He dressed the wounds of the maimed and the amputees and often sat up throughout the night with the most agonising cases, almost all of whom he knew on a first-name basis. It was surely no poetic exaggeration when he later said that during these years many a young soldier had died in his, Walt Whitman’s, arms.

Because the scope of his work is so grand and inclusive, and because he yearned throughout his life to embrace the entire universe in his poems, it has been tempting for succeeding generations to appropriate Whitman for any number of causes or points of view. For instance, one would easily assume the poet’s sentiments to be fervently anti-war. In face this was not the case, as the poems in Drum-Taps reveal. This slim volume, the only literary work he allowed himself to compose during the war years, is remarkable honest in that it expresses not just the horror and degradation of war, but also the thrill of battle and the almost manic exhilaration of one caught up in a righteous cause. Whitman hated war – this particular war and all wars – but he was no pacifist. Like his ideal, Lincoln, he never ceased to believe in the Union’s cause and in the dreadful necessity of victory.

The Wound-Dresser is a setting for baritone voice and orchestra of a fragment from the poem of the same name. As always with Whitman, it is in the first person, and it is the most intimate, most graphic and most profoundly affecting evocation of the act of nursing the sick and the dying that I know of. It is also astonishingly free of any kind of hyperbole or amplified emotion, yet the detail of the imagery is of a precision that could only be attained by one who had been there.

The Wound-Dresser is not just about the Civil War; nor is it just about young men dying (although it is locally about both). It strikes me as a statement about human compassion of the kind that is acted out on a daily basis, quietly and unobtrusively and unselfishly and unfailingly. Another poem in the same volume states its theme in other words: “Those who love each other shall become invincible…”.

John Adams
22 December 1988

Programme note

Juan Crisostomo Arriaga (1806-1826)
Overture, Los esclavos felices (1820) 

Juan Crisostomo Jacobo Antonio de Arriaga y Balzola, a composer whose life was as short as his name was long, was one of the great might-have-beens of early nineteenth-century music. Born in Bilbao on what would have been Mozart’s fiftieth birthday, he was dubbed “the Spanish Mozart” on the strength of his similar precocity. He was doomed, however, to die even younger, before the floodgates of his inspiration had fully opened.

But if his output was much more sparse, it was of the choicest quality. A symphony, three string quartets, a one-act opera seria and a spot of sacred music were about all it amounted to, whereas Mozart by the same age had already produced more than two hundred catalogued works, including his five violin concertos, his first 29 symphonies and nine operas. As for Mendelssohn, hailed by Charles Rosen as “the greatest child prodigy the history of Western music has ever known,” his teenage Octet and Midsummer Night’s Dream overture surely surpass anything even Mozart produced in his brilliant adolescence.

Yet Arriaga’s achievement, in its smaller way, was also something special. Encouraged (like Mozart) by his father, who promoted him as a violinist, he started composing when he was eleven. At fifteen he went to Paris where he became a pupil of Fetis, the distinguished Belgian pedagogue, and was championed by Cherubini. His symphony and quartets were filled with Schubertian promise, their ideas pregnant, their structure strong, their technique polished to perfection. Who could fail to recognise them as works of early genius? But by nineteen, by which time he had become tubercular, he was dead.

His overture to Los esclavos felices (The Felicitous Slaves) shows Rossinian leanings, the charm of its slow introduction leading to the wittiest of allegros, packed with piquant woodwind prattle and even, at the end, a Rossini crescendo. Yet the music, for all its exuberance, prefaces an opera as serious in intent as the description 'opera seria' gives reason to expect. The story concerns a Spanish aristocrat and his wife who are captured by Moors and threatened with death before being released by the magnanimous King of Algeria. But the overture - in the manner of Schubert’s overtures in the Italian style (music Arriaga could never have known) - urges us not to treat the opera too seriously. Out of potential tragedy, it seems, comedy can come.

© Conrad Wilson

Programme note

Johann Sebastian Bach (1685–1750)
Suite No 3 in D major, BWV 1068

Ouverture: Lentement – Vite – Lentement
Air
Gavottes I and II
Bourrées I and II
Gigue

This is an orchestral suite in the French style – though we should really call it the Franco-German style, since the form of the suite consisting of an overture and a set of dances, originally an imitation of the suites drawn from the operas of Lully and his successors, was one which was taken up enthusiastically by a whole string of composers at the German courts. Bach’s prolific friend Georg Philipp Telemann composed well over two hundred of them; Bach himself, as far as we know from the surviving copies, wrote only four. This one was probably composed for the Leipzig Collegium Musicum, the student musical society (founded by Telemann) which met at Zimmerman’s coffee house, and which Bach directed (with one short break) from 1729 to about 1741. In the form in which it has come down to us it must have been intended for some special occasion, since it is scored for, by Bach’s standards, a large orchestra: two oboes, three trumpets, timpani, strings and keyboard continuo. But the musicologist Joshua Rifkin has pointed out that the wind section is never given any essential material on its own, and suggested that the work may originally have been conceived for strings alone.

Baroque suites were often called Ouvertures, after the first and longest movement. This one is in the standard form of a slow introduction in crisply dotted (long-short) rhythms, an extended quick section which begins like a fugue and continues in a contrapuntal vein (though with episodes in which the first violin line seems to turn temporarily into a concerto-like solo part), and a slow conclusion in the same style as the opening. A huge repeat is marked which would take the players back through the whole of the quick section and this conclusion: but very few performances these days include this repeat, and it is hard to imagine that Bach’s players would have had the stamina for it either! After the Overture comes the famous Air for strings alone (though not on the violins’ G strings), and three dance movements for the full orchestra: a pair of Gavottes, with the second acting as a trio for the first; a similar pair of Bourrées; and a Gigue. All these movements are in the standard format of two sections, the second equal to or longer than the first, and each repeated; and this layout, together with the regular phrasing imposed by the dances, channels Bach’s music into very different patterns from those found in his more open-ended concerto movements or cantata arias. All the same, his musical personality is never obscured: it shows through, for example, in the ornate top line of the Air (not so different from those in the slow movements of his harpsichord concertos); and, throughout the Suite, in the little touches of contrapuntal interest in the inner parts which always keep Bach’s textures so full and rich and alive.

© Anthony Burton

Programme note

Samuel Barber (1910-1981)
Canzonetta for oboe and strings (1978)

Samuel Barber’s Adagio for Strings is the great American threnody. Originally written as the slow movement of a string quartet, it established itself as a full-blown statement of public grief after Toscanini, during the Second World War, had championed it in a very slow version for large string orchestra. But the Canzonetta for oboe and strings - the slow movement of an oboe concerto left unfinished at the time of the composer’s death - is elegiac also, though in a quieter, more private way, with fewer overtones of Elgar’s Nimrod, of which the Adagio for Strings has come to seem the American equivalent.

The music - Barber’s last composition - was written in short score in 1978 before being put into full score by his pupil Charles Turner and given the posthumous title of Canzonetta, a word for a brief lyrical song of Italian origin. Standing on its own feet, it exploits a vein of pastoral melancholy of a sort which an English critic, reviewing a work by Vaughan Williams, once categorised as that of “the sound of an oboe with strings in the background.”

But the sound, in this case, also possesses some of the universal ruefulness of Mahler, whose famous Adagietto is inevitably evoked by the slow unfurling of Barber’s instrumental strands. The first performance, by Zubin Mehta and the New York Philharmonic with Harold Gomberg as soloist, was hailed by the New Yorker magazine as “graceful, passionate, poetic.” Though it is a slight piece, the words are apt. Barber, one of the leading American composers of his time, produced works in all the established musical forms, marked by a continuous sense of lyricism that permeates the calm melodic interplay of this valedictory canzonetta.

© Conrad Wilson

Programme note

EIF commission funded by Donald & Louise MacDonald.

Giorgio Battistelli (b. 1953)
Fair is foul, foul is fair

“Fair is foul, and foul is fair,” murmur the three Fateful Sisters (the Weird Sisters of Nordic origin) meeting on the deserted heath. Out of the alliteration rises a sound that infuses the Scottish drama with the sinister sense of an oxymoron in which the ugly and the beautiful become one within the same terror. Terror is destined to be the dominant emotion in the consciousness of the usurper Macbeth – he who will never become king, but merely a regicide and a tyrant.

The same sound flows from the lips of the witches to the lips of Macbeth as soon as he enters the scene. This is the overriding theme of the drama. The alternating voices form an instrument, and run right through the orchestra from the strings to the woodwinds, investing the composition with a dynamism that captures all the echoes of the Shakespearean tragedy – though faster, more compact and more nocturnal. Iniquitous intrigues, conspiratorial obsessions and an imposed violence are transformed into a sound that unveils before the listener an unexplored landscape of symphonic theatre.

- Giorgio Battistelli

Programme note

Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827)
Overture, Fidelio (1814)

Beethoven’s Fidelio, his only completed opera, was a triumph of personal will. He composed three versions of it, four overtures to it, and no fewer than eighteen variants of Florestan’s melody before he was satisfied that he had got it as right as it was ever going to be. The four overtures symbolised his struggle. Each of them contained masterly music. Yet, as one authority has put it, they were written by a composer who was worried either that he had not attained his object or that he had been mistaken as to what that object should be.

The three Leonora overtures, named after the opera’s plucky heroine, were inspired examples of trial and error. Only then, a decade after he had first written the opera, was Beethoven confident enough to produce an overture which would become known as Fidelio rather than Leonora No 4. The name carried an air of finality, though the overture was shorter and lighter than its predecessors and was written in haste – just in time, in fact, for the second performance of the perfected opera in Vienna’s Karntnertortheater in May 1814.

The lightness of touch was deliberate. By the time he recognised the need for it, Beethoven had become aware that Leonora No 3, for all its greatness, was too hefty a masterpiece for an opera whose heroic message was delivered through music which, at least in the opening numbers, had the pace and style of operatic comedy. The Fidelio Overture’s horn calls, clarinet extensions, cloudy modulations, and changes of pace may anticipate the romanticism of Weber, but the crackling energy of much of the music possesses an almost classical concision, to which Beethoven added his own characteristic pungency.

To say that the result is less great than Leonora No 3 is perfectly true but beside the point. The Fidelio overture was not meant to be great, but it was certainly meant to fit its context and to make the audience sit up. In both these aims it succeeds admirably.

© Conrad Wilson

Programme note

Ludwig van Beethoven )1770-1827)
Piano Concerto No 3 in C minor, Op 37 (1803)

Allegro con brio
Largo
Rondo: Allegro

With his Third Piano Concerto, it used to be said, Beethoven greeted the birth of the nineteenth century. Among other things, his handwritten “1800” on the manuscript supplied proof of the work’s date of composition. This basic evidence was accepted as ample for a masterpiece which, compared with the two preceding piano concertos, in C major and B flat major, seemed nothing if not epoch-making. As we now know, however, the impressive Piano Concerto No 3 in Beethoven’s famously dramatic key of C minor was not written in 1800 at all, but three years later. The music with which he hailed the new century was his vivacious but rather less vanguard Symphony No 1 in C major.

In his meticulous study of Beethoven’s concertos, published in time for the millennium in 2000, the American scholar Leon Plantinga convincingly endorsed the later date, explaining how Beethoven’s written “1800” was actually “1803” and saying why the concerto fits the later date far better than the earlier one. Although, to the casual reader, three years in Beethoven’s seething career may not seem a long time, it is upon small details of this sort that our understanding of classical music is often founded. In this case, it seems clear that the C minor Piano Concerto came after, and not before, the dynamic idiosyncracy of the Second Symphony, the sweep of the "Tempest" Piano Sonata in D minor, the 'Eroica' Variations and the heart-rending confession, in his Heiligenstadt Testament of 1802, that he was going deaf.

But he was not yet so deaf that he was unable to play his own music in public, or was in danger of losing his status as the greatest pianist-composer in Europe. This was a work definitely written for himself to play, which he first did in April 1803 as part of the famous Viennese concert in which, after a seven-hour rehearsal, his oratorio Christ on the Mount of Olives and his Second Symphony also had their premieres. The music was no mere “comedy of manners”, as Edinburgh University’s distinguished musical authority Donald Francis Tovey once described the C major concerto. Here, as a more recent Beethoven scholar Maynard Solomon has proclaimed, was the composer’s first concerto to move away from exterior wit and refinement into a world of dramatic oratory. 

The starkly stalking theme which launches the first movement unmistakably makes this point, as do the three explosive scales with which the soloist enters. Not even the warmth of the secondary theme in E flat major can dispel the prevailing tension of the music for long, but there is balm in the slow movement, whose opening theme, said Beethoven’s pupil Czerny, should sound like a “holy, distant, and celestial harmony.” The music remains radiantly suspended in the unrelated key of E major until its restless middle section brings fresh drama. If the closing rondo does contain comedy, it is comedy of a sardonic sort, resolved when, in the coda, the pace quickens, the metre changes, and C minor swings gleefully into C major.

© Conrad Wilson

Programme note

Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827)
Quintet in E flat, Op 16, for piano, oboe, clarinet, horn and bassoon

Grave: Allegro ma non troppo
Andante cantabile
Rondo: Allegro, ma non troppo

Dating from the mid-1790s, when Beethoven was still working in the shadow of Mozart and Haydn, the Quintet for Piano and Winds shows the undeniable influence of the two elder composers, as do the six Op 18 String Quartets he was composing at about the same time. Yet, for all this, Beethoven was already beginning to assert his own personality, not least through the occasional violent contrasts in dynamics. Although the wind writing in particular strongly recalls Mozart’s wind serenades, the ever-forceful piano style anticipates Beethoven’s later keyboard works.

Attending an early performance of Beethoven’s Quintet was the composer’s friend, the violinist Franz Anton Ries. That evening, Beethoven both played the piano and frayed the nerves of the accompanying wind quintet, as Ries later recounted: “At a pause just before a return to the main theme in the finale Beethoven suddenly began to improvise, took the rondo as a theme and entertained himself and the others; but not his associates. They were displeased and Friedrich Ramm (the oboist) enraged. It really was comical to see these gentlemen waiting expectantly every moment to go on, continually lifting their instruments to their lips, then quietly putting them down again. At last Beethoven was satisfied and dropped again into the rondo. The entire audience was delighted.”

Although there are echoes of Haydn in the more light-hearted aspects of the work, particularly in the brilliance of the finale – whether or not the pianist is tempted to improvise – it is Mozart’s Quintet, for the same combination of instruments and in the same key, that provided the inspiration of the structure of Beethoven’s work: a slow introduction to a sonata-form first movement; a slow second movement; and a rondo finale. That, though, is about as far as the similarities go. Where Mozart treated the five voices as equals, Beethoven wrote for piano with wind accompaniment. Mozart subtly interweaves the piano and wind quartet. Beethoven, working on a more expansive scale, characteristically sets them in opposition, so that the outer movements especially resemble a chamber concerto for piano and wind. Typical of the whole Quintet is the way the suave cantabile themes of the opening Allegro are first announced by the piano alone and then taken up by the wind. The piano may dominate the outer movements, but in the central larghetto, it is the winds that are highlighted, as they present increasingly florid versions of the main theme. The mood of the Rondo – one of Beethoven’s memorable “hunting” rondos – is of unbridled exuberance, whose teasing wit recalls not so much Mozart as Beethoven’s former teacher Haydn.

© Stephen Strugnell

Programme note

Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827)
Scenes from Prometheus (1801)

Overture
Pastorale (Allegro)
Solo della Signora Casentini (Andantino - Adagio - Allegro)
Finale (Allegretto - Allegro molto)

Though his Seventh Symphony was nicknamed by Wagner “The Apotheosis of the Dance,” Beethoven and ballet seem like a contradiction in terms. Yet by the age of 31 he had composed two such scores. The first, his early Ritterballet, was merely hackwork, ghost-written for his friend Count Waldstein; but Prometheus, a few years later, was altogether more ambitious, and one of his first big Viennese successes.

Its full title, Die Geschopfe des Prometheus, has been variously translated as the Creatures, or the Creations, or the Children of Prometheus, but the story has little to do with the mythical hero who was chained to a rock, where an eagle tore at his liver until Hercules rescued him. Beethoven’s Prometheus suffers no such hardship. A more idealistic figure, he seemed something of a classical Lord Reith, who “drove ignorance from the people, and gave them manners, customs, and morals.” In Act One of this full-length ballet, he brings two statues to life. In Act Two, he delivers them to Parnassus to be instructed by Apollo and the Muses and endowed with the blessings of culture.

Sir Donald Tovey, Edinburgh University’s famous musical essayist, considered large tracts of the score to be “monotonously frivolous,” but he was being too severe. Haydn, meeting Beethoven in the street, supposedly praised the music, to which Beethoven replied: “Oh, dear Papa, you are too good, but mine is no Creation by a long shot.” The words may sound improbable, but Maynard Solomon, best of Beethoven’s modern biographers, has quoted them without reservation. The ballet in our own time has had a new lease of life, and several of the sixteen dances - not least the striking interlude for the ballerina Maria Casentini, with its solo cello and plashing harp - have regained a small place in the orchestral repertoire.

As for the overture, it has long enjoyed a separate existence as a concert piece. It is similar in style to Mozart’s Cosi fan tutte overture, and to the first movement of Beethoven’s own First Symphony, which he wrote around the same time. Each has a slow introduction, starting provocatively on a discord and continuing with a flowing, tender melody; and each then unleashes a racy, sparkling allegro, exhilarating in its momentum.

The sweet-toned Pastorale movement, which follows, anticipates the glow of the finale of the Pastoral Symphony. But - after the romantic Casentini solo - what the finale of Prometheus more startlingly anticipates is nothing less than the finale of the Eroica Symphony, with its famous Napoleon (or in this case Prometheus) theme, which for a time so obsessed Beethoven that he employed it in several of his works before bringing it to a state of symphonic perfection in the Eroica itself.

© Conrad Wilson

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

Programme note

Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827)
Symphony No 5 in C minor, Op 67 (1808)

Allegro con brio
Andante con moto
Allegro
Allegro

"Three G's and an E flat. Simple. Baby simple. Anybody could do it. Maybe." Leonard Bernstein's famously laconic comment on the first four notes of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony spotlit the astounding effect in this work of a motif the composer had already employed, to quite different effect, in his third and fourth piano concertos. Beethoven's own comment, as quoted by his unreliable friend Schindler, was that in the Fifth Symphony the notes represented Fate rapping at the door. The description went down in history, though it prompted the Austrian theorist Heinrich Schenker to ask whether the same motif in the fourth piano concerto therefore represented Fate rapping at a different door or whether someone else was doing the rapping. In fact the motif was a regular Beethoven fingerprint during a certain period in his career, though he never used it to more potent effect than in the Fifth Symphony, where it pervades the opening movement and returns in both the scherzo and finale. It is a motif which, in any case, had already been employed by Cherubini in his Hymne du Pantheon, as Beethoven surely knew.

The thematic unity of the first movement of the Fifth Symphony is nevertheless one of its strongest features, transcending not only Cherubini's but Beethoven's own previous use of it. Hurled at us at start of the work, it makes its point unequivocally and goes on making it. Not even the plaintive little oboe cadenza which quietly intrudes at the height of the action can impede its progress for long. But whether, as has often been claimed, the music's inexorably marching motion represents Austria expelling the French is hard to say. Certainly, although some listeners are unwilling to see it that way, this is a profoundly militaristic work, and the brassy fanfares in the slow movement, the screeching piccolo and braying trombones in the finale, are in themselves enough to demonstrate this. Not for nothing did a member of the Napoleonic guard, on hearing it for the first time, feel impelled to spring to his feet at the start of the finale crying: "C'est l'empereur." Though that would suggest he had got the wrong end of the stick, it was for the right reasons. The music is ceremonial, victorious, exultant, even brutal in a way that the composer did not always feel to be necessary.

Beethoven, who had once contemplated settling in Paris rather than Vienna, held famously self-contradictory views on Napoleon, as well as possessing a considerable admiration for French music. It was Berlioz, a Frenchman, who said that Beethoven's ability to sustain such a height of effect in this work was prodigious. Yet it took a long time - four years, from 1804 until 1808 - for him to shape the music to his satisfaction. The slow movement, originally conceived as a sort of lumbering minuet, eventually became a theme and variations through whose notes a hint of minuet motion remained discernible. The scherzo, originally an extended movement on the lines of those of the fourth and seventh symphonies, eventually grew shorter. The finale, linked to the scherzo by ghostly drum taps and stealthy strings, announces itself with the most famous burst of C major in musical history, but later refers back to the ghostly passage already heard.

Yet the work as a whole is not purely about progress from the darkness of C minor to the sunshine of the major key. The four notes with which it opens - those three G's and and an E flat - are not specifically in the key of C minor at all. Nor are they played by the full orchestra, though that is the effect which their initial statement on strings and clarinets manages to convey. Beethoven's Fifth may be the most often performed of all his symphonies, but it still has the power to surprise.

© Conrad Wilson

Programme note

Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827)
Symphony No 7 in A major, Op 92 (1813)

Listen to an excerpt

Poco sostenuto - Vivace
Allegretto
Presto
Allegro con brio

Wagner, in tribute to the relentless rhythmic vitality of Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony, hailed it as the "apotheosis of the dance." The same, with more justification, could be said of Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring, since it was intentionally written as dance music. Separated from each other by exactly a hundred years, each work could be called the rhythmic ne plus ultra of its time. The Rite caused a riot in Paris in 1913. The premiere of the Seventh Symphony in Vienna in 1813 convinced some listeners that Beethoven had gone mad, though its unstoppable verve, exhilarating yet awesome, prompted others to assume that it was inspired (like the Battle Symphony, included in the same programme) by the retreat of Napoleon and the promise of European peace. The concert in which it was first performed, indeed, was for the benefit of Austrian and Bavarian soldiers wounded at the battle of Hanau.

In itself, the music is never peaceful. There is scarcely a moment when the work is at rest. Even the slow movement proceeds with an inexorable tread, based on a repeated rhythm that shifts from section to section of the orchestra and is never absent. Each of the four movements, in fact, has its own dominating pulse. Unlike the Fifth Symphony, which moves steadily towards final triumph, the Seventh is a study in circling motion.

The big opening chords, followed by repeatedly rising scales for the strings that will ferociously return at top speed towards the end of the finale, create an impression of size and grandeur. Thereafter the swinging rhythm of the vivace section of the first movement acts like a dynamo that is never switched off. It even seethes softly throughout a famously extended passage for cellos and basses, before erupting with renewed force and whooping horns in the closing bars.

After the major-key brilliance of the first movement, the minor-key melancholy of its successor - audible in its very opening note - sounds funereal. Yet the pace is too fast for a funeral march, even if the structure is similar to that of the marcia funebre in the 'Eroica' symphony. There is solemnity here, rather than grief. The middle section, with its clarinet melody, is wistful, but the pulse is what matters and it underpins every change of mood and colour.

In the scherzo, the fast circling motion resumes. Since this is one of Beethoven’s extended scherzos with two separate trio sections - and, at the very end, an attempt to launch a third one - repetition is strongly emphasised. The rhythms continue to heave until five whiplash chords sever the continuity. But in the finale, described by Edinburgh's distinguished musical authority Donald Francis Tovey as a "triumph of Bacchic fury," it immediately resumes. Here, in the ceaseless interplay of short motifs and grinding repetitions, we are made more than ever aware of Beethoven’s obsessiveness, until the music finally hurtles into the abyss.

© Conrad Wilson

Programme note

Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827)
Trio in B flat major for clarinet, viola, and cello, Op 11 (1798)

Allegro con brio
Adagio
Allegretto

Haydn’s last trios were glorious products of a renowned senior composer, by then into his sixties. Beethoven’s first trios were the work of an audacious novice, in which the emancipation of the cello was high on his list of priorities within the context of a general enriching of the trio texture. These works formed, according to the Beethoven authority Joseph Kerman, part of a deliberate campaign, on his arrival in Vienna, to annex all the established musical genres and breathe new life into them. No matter whether his still acute ears turned to the sound of string trios or to that of piano ones, he had something special, and often fiery, to express in either format.

In comparison, after the dynamism of the three piano trios, Op 1, and the three string trios, Op 9, his next trio, Op 11 for clarinet and strings, sounded like an intentional backtrack, aimed at delighting his listeners rather than shocking them. “Accessible” would be the modern word for it and, presumably with this in mind, Beethoven homogenised the clarinet part by steering clear of the instrument’s deep-toned chalumeau register and making the music equally playable by a violin. In fact, when the score was published, the violin was named as an alternative, thus creating the possibility of more frequent performances.

Either way, it is an attractive piece, dedicated (non-specifically) to one of the three countesses Thun, the oldest of whom had recently gone unsuccessfully on her knees to persuade young Beethoven to play for her. Though the music tends to sound more divertimento-like than his other trios of the period, the first movement, with its characteristic “con brio” marking, has real vivacity. The cello’s songlike - indeed quite soulful - tune in the adagio shows Beethoven’s determiniation to make that instrument something more than the passenger it had traditionally been in such works, and the finale, a robustly jovial theme and variations on a hit tune of the day, was clearly aimed at audience response. The theme was from an opera by Joseph Weigl, a popular Viennese composer who had deputised for Mozart as conductor of some early performances of The Marriage of Figaro. Though Beethoven, it seems, later wished he had chosen a different tune, the variations retain their ability to captivate.

© Conrad Wilson

Programme note

Programme note to follow.

Programme note

Hector Berlioz (1803-1869)
La Mort de Cléopâtre (1849)

Although the Prix de Rome was something that every young French composer seriously coveted - for the prestige, the money and the privilege of two years residence at the Villa Medici in Rome - very few of the winning entries have become part of the standard repertoire. This is not so much because the outstanding students of their day like Charles Gounod, Georges Bizet and Jules Massenet were incapable of producing anything of lasting interest as because the rules of the competition and the conservatism of the jurors virtually precluded any display of originality or individuality.

Berlioz went in for the Prix de Rome four times in four successive years and finally won it in 1830 with La Mort de Sardanaple, which was not the best of his Prix de Rome cantatas but the most obedient. The most inspired of the four is La Mort de Cléopâtre, which so offended the jury in 1829 that rather than give their approval to such an unruly score they chose not to award a first prize at all that year. Up to a point, one can sympathise with those "grave and reverend signors" who, listening to the piano transcription (as the rules required) of an essentially orchestral conception and hearing harmonic transgressions not even the dreaded Beethoven would have perpetrated, must have been severely baffled by the work.

Interestingly, however, the notoriously severe Director of the Paris Conservatoire, Luigi Cherubini, was one of the small minority who voted for it. As a not unprogressive opera composer himself, he no doubt had to acknowledge the dramatic intensity in the swirling figuration and urgent syncopations of the instrumental introduction, the eloquence of Cleopatra's opening recitative and the pathos of the following near-aria. It is difficult to imagine, on the other hand what even the most liberal academic could have made of the central 'Méditation' (which was to be recycled in Lélio two years later) with its ominously strummed rhythms, its macabre trombone colours and its weird harmonic progressions. As for the naturalistic rather than conventionally emphatic ending - after the fatal snake-bite the music just dies away on an erratic and failing pulse - that demonstration of Berlioz's genius was the ultimate offence as far as most of the jurors were concerned.

© Gerald Larner

Programme note

Hector Berlioz (1803-1869)
The Flight into Egypt, overture (1850-4)

Berlioz, famed above all for his brassy brilliance, was a composer no less notable for his restraint. Even some of his grandest works make their most memorable effects by stealth. Thus, though his Requiem demands six pairs of cymbals in the Sanctus, their soft swishing is as important, and memorable, as the outburst of the four brass bands in the Dies Irae. Yet not until he reached The Childhood of Christ, one of his last major works, did the French public recognise the chaste beauty and austerity of his writing as a special element of  his music. The shock was so great that they thought he had mended his ways and renovated his style - to which Berlioz long-sufferingly replied that it was only his subject he had changed. 

Though it has its exclamatory moments, The Childhood of Christ is certainly one of the loveliest and most subdued of all his works. The music grew, almost by accident, from an organ piece entitled The Shepherds’ Farewell which he wrote in 1850. “I thought it had a certain pastoral, naive mysticism about it,” he remarked, “so I decided to put appropriate words to it. The organ piece disappeared and became the chorus of shepherds in Bethlehem bidding farewell to the baby Jesus as the Holy Family depart for Egypt.” 

Gradually the music was enlarged and elaborated as a cantata entitled The Flight into Egypt - 'Fragments of a Mystery in ancient style' -  which in turn became the central movement of The Childhood of Christ, his exquisite, almost Fauré-like oratorio completed in 1854. The short overture in F sharp minor, scored for a small orchestra of woodwind and strings, sets the tone.  For all its gentleness, and for all its reliance on the art of fugue (first on the strings, then on the woodwind), there is nothing at all unBerliozian about the result. Berlioz knew about fugue, but the music’s softness is what matters, and he was a master of softness.  Yet with its flattened modal notes, deliberately employed to create a sense of archaism, the overture in its quiet way is also extraordinarily forward-looking and, with its  touches of oboe tone, filled with curious, unexpected, unpredictable foretastes of the English pastoral school and its practitioners, such as Vaughan Williams, who flourished more than half a century later. 

© Conrad Wilson

Programme note

Leonard Bernstein (1918-1990)
'Glitter and be Gay' from Candide

The original version of Candide – Leonard Bernstein’s fourth music-theatre piece, after On the Town, Trouble in Tahiti and Wonderful Town – was taken off after only short runs in Boston and New York in 1956. His next musical, West Side Story, achieved no fewer than 734 performance on its initial production on Broadway just a year later. The difference was that, in keeping with the eighteenth-century origins of the libretto, the score of Candide was basically classical, with various applications of local colour, rather than popular American in idiom. A thorough revision, which added three librettists or lyricists to the original tally of five – not including Voltaire, the author of the Candide story on which the whole thing is based – did not much improve matters. Since then, however, it has made its way into the operatic repertoire, not least successfully at Scottish Opera (in an adaptation by John Wells) in 1988.

Most prominent among the operatic elements of Candide is Glitter and be gay which awards the soprano heroine one of the most brilliant arias of its kind. Introduced by a cor anglais solo, it doesn’t sound very gay at first, as Cunegonde laments in slow waltz time the fallen-woman situation to which events have reduced her. But then, with a change of tempo she finds consolation in it – the champagne, the dresses, the jewellery – and resolves to be bright and cheerful. The slow waltz-time returns but once again she revels in her sapphires, her gold, her diamonds, this time in even more glittering and even more challenging coloratura.

Johann Strauss II
The Laughing Song from Die Fledermaus ('Mein Herr Marquis')

One way out of an embarrassing situation is to laugh it off – just as Adele does in Die Fledermaus. Adele is a parlour maid who has taken the evening off ostensibly “to visit a sick aunt” but in reality to attend a lavish ball at the villa of Prince Orlofsky, to whom she is introduced as an actress called Olga. As luck would have it, her employer Gabriel von Eisenstein, is at the ball too and recognises her in one of his wife’s best dresses. Her response is to treat the situation as a huge joke – how amusing that such a stylishly turned-out young lady should be mistaken for a parlour maid! – and sings an elegant little number that regularly breaks out in brilliant peals of laughter. She can well afford to laugh because she well knows that Eisenstein, who has presented himself at the ball as the Marquis de Renard, shouldn’t be there either.

© Gerald Larner

Programme note

Programme note to follow.

Programme note

Johannes Brahms (1833-1897)
Vier erneste Gesänge (Four Serious Songs), Op 121 (1896)                                                                    

In 1890, having completed his second String Quintet, and with his close friends beginning to die around him, Brahms declared that he was finished with composing. Then in 1891, he heard the clarinetist Richard Mühlfeld perform. The magic of his playing re-inspired Brahms, and out poured four great works (the Clarinet Trio, the Clarinet Quintet, and two Clarinet Sonatas) for which clarinetists have ever since sunk to their knees and given thanks! But the re-awakened Brahms discovered he still had further things to say. He began contemplating the composition of more songs. The stroke of the one person who mattered to him most – Clara Schumann – on March 26^th, 1896, precipitated what we now know as the Four Serious Songs. He finished them on May 7^th (his 63^rd and, as it transpired, final birthday). Clara died on May 20^th. Neither she nor Brahms had any belief in an afterlife but that did not stop him from admiring Luther’s translation of the Bible into German. By 1896 even more of Brahms’s close friends had died, so it is no surprise to discover him in valedictory mood as he contemplates life without Clara. As it turned out, he himself would be dead of liver cancer in early April the next year.

He chose biblical texts from Ecclesiastes for the first two songs (3, 19-22 & 4, 1-3); Ecclesiasticus for the third song (41, 1-2) and, for the last song, the first letter of Paul to the Corinthians (13, 1-3 & 12-13). The result is a song cycle on death that is profoundly moving, though, unlike Bach, Brahms did not come to death with any sense of joy, but with bitter regret at life’s insubstantiality. So Four Serious Songs becomes an elegy to life.

In the opening song the accompaniment is like a funeral march in D minor with a bell tolling relentlessly on the dominant. Although the middle section moves to D major with rapid triplets, it remains starkly pessimistic.

In the next song, the accompaniment descends ominously into the darkness that represents Death. Da lobte ich die Toten, die schon gestorben waren (Wherefore I praised the dead which are already dead) says it all.

The magnificent O Tod, wie bitter bist du (O death, how bitter is the remembrance of thee) sets bitterness against acceptance (just as Brahms had done in his much earlier German Requiem).

The final song, however, breaks away both biblically and musically from the first three. This is more a pæan to love, even if it is unattainable.

Brahms composed powerful ‘symphonic’ piano parts for the Four Serious Songs that just cry out to be orchestrated. The version you will hear this evening uses the orchestration by Günter Raphael.

© David Gardner

Programme note

Johannes Brahms (1833-1897)
Serenade No 2 in A, Op 16           

Allegro moderato
Scherzo: Vivace
Adagio non troppo
Quasi menuetto
Rondo: Allegro

As well as four symphonies, Brahms wrote two substantial serenades, each of them symphonic in structure, but with more movements than symphonic tradition dictated and with an open-air quality appropriate to Brahms's choice of title.  The first, in D major, was originally an instrumental nonet but was later expanded for full orchestra. The second has remained a chamber-sized work, unusually scored for a mixture of woodwind, horns and lower strings. The resultant colouring, with its conspicuous absence of violin tone, has been described as sombre, though Sir Donald Tovey, Edinburgh's distinguished essayist and Brahmsian, preferred to call it mellow.

Brahms's  serenades were written between 1858 and 1860, some sixteen years before the definitive version of the First Symphony. They are therefore early works, though Brahms always retained an affection for them, especially the second, which he referred to as his "beautiful opus" and to which he made a number of small improvements - in phrasing, expression marks and instrumental detail - as late as 1875. No composer knew better than Brahms how to give a composition an arresting opening, not necessarily loud. The A major serenade, more succinct than the D major, starts with a theme which has been considered ecclesiastical, but which, in terms of Brahmsian warmth and serenity, is no mere hymn-tune. A second theme melts into graceful triplets and, in contrast, a third, "swaying indolently over a dance-rhythm", as Tovey vividly remarked, makes use of jerky rhythms.

After this leisurely first movement, Brahms inserts a short scherzo with lively Bohemian cross-rhythms, before reaching the grand central adagio whose counterpoint reminded his friend Clara Schumann of Bach  "almost", she said, "it might be an eleison". It is certainly a species of passacaglia, beginning over a ground bass in A minor but soon flowing into other keys. Foretastes of the Fourth Symphony's finale and that of the St Anthony Variations are audible here. Melodically and contrapuntally the movement is very rich, with a climax signposted by a horn theme in A flat. To counterbalance his Bohemian scherzo, Brahms makes the fourth movement a sort of Viennese minuet, with a rocking main theme and a wistful oboe tune in the central trio section.  The finale is more robust, again with some Viennese, almost Schubertian touches. To the variety of delightful woodwind detail, a piercing piccolo here adds its exuberant voice.

© Conrad Wilson

Programme note

Johannes Brahms (1833-1897)
String Sextet No 2 in G major, Op 36 (1865)

Allegro non troppo
Scherzo: Allegro non troppo
Poco adagio
Poco allegro

Brahms’s Sextet No 2 sounds, in some ways, so like a continuation of his first that, had it been written by someone else, it could  be hailed as a further section of an ongoing narrative or one more episode in the life of an artist. But, coming from a composer who shunned programme music, who never wrote an opera, and whose Tragic Overture depicted a wholly abstract tragedy, it can hardly be expected to tell us anything very specific about what Brahms had on his mind in the year 1865, what books he was reading, what subjects he was attracted to. Brahms never composed a Verklaerte Nacht, though in the slow movement of his earlier sextet he surely came quite close to Schoenberg’s descriptive masterpiece for the same forces. In his second sextet he provided further hints of such capabilities. A narrative thread may be absent, but ciphers of the sort employed by Schumann when he wanted to convey secret messages to his wife are undeniably present. Brahms, too, wanted to convey secret messages to Clara Schumann, and what better way than to employ methods favoured by her husband?

When Brahms started work on his second sextet he was apparently in the same emotional turmoil he had been in while composing his first. Though eternally devoted to Clara Schumann, he had allowed himself to become temporarily engaged to Agathe von Siebold, a young soprano who inspired several of his songs. Enshrined in the music are his memories of Agathe as well as the state of his thoughts about Clara. The letters of Agathe’s name (AGAHE in German musical nomenclature, AGABE in British) form the passionate climax of the first movement’s second subject, though by the time he wrote it their engagement was in the past, even if the music suggests that strong feelings still existed. The composer himself put it strongly enough when he said of this passage: "Here is where I tore myself free from my last love." A work containing not only this but also self-confessed references to Clara – in the rising motif at the start of the same movement, and in the similarly rising motif (written ten years earlier) which yearningly opens the slow movement and reappears in the finale – can only be called autobiographical, however improbable this may seem in music  by Brahms.

It is certainly a more complex and cryptic work than the first sextet, reminding us that Karl Geiringer’s famous description of the composer as "Brahms the Ambiguous’" supplied a sharper picture of his contradictory personality than most comments of its kind. The G minor scherzo which forms the second movement is more of an anti-scherzo, rather too slow and rather too serious to justify the title, though its stamping trio section is jovial enough. In the E minor theme and variations which form the adagio the mood is initially restrained and sad, but soon erupts with what sounds almost like anger. As in the previous sextet, the music is both romantic and in manner grandly baroque. The finale goes through its paces with a sort of tremulous vitality which manages to bring the work to its close in what sounds like genuinely happy vein.

© Conrad Wilson

Programme note

Johannes Brahms (1833-1897)
Symphony No 2 in D major, Op 73 (1877)

Allegro non troppo
Adagio non troppo
Allegretto grazioso
Allegro con spirito

Though Brahms saw himself as a summer composer, who spent the rest of the year revising, perfecting and playing what he had written on his holidays from Vienna, not all his music sounds as summery as his Symphony No 2. Inspired, like his Violin Concerto (also in D major), by the beauty of Lake Wörth in southern Austria - Alban Berg, some sixty years later, would compose his own violin concerto on the opposite shore of the same lake - has a luminosity of texture, a melodic serenity, and a rhythmic impulse of a very special sort, which Brahms would never again achieve to quite such idyllic effect. To call it carefree might seem to be stretching a point, but it is a masterpiece as light-hearted as Brahms ever produced, and its closing pages possess a jubilation, a sense of banners unfurling, almost unique in his output.

The swiftness with which he completed it in 1877 - a year after the mighty labour pains of the Symphony No 1 - speaks for itself. Yet, in its first two movements, it does not lack spaciousness. The unhurried opening notes - a swaying phrase for cellos and basses, a sweet shimmer of horn tone - suggest the scope of the music to follow. A soft but not ominous roll on the kettledrums and a melody airily floated by the violins sustain the impression of a symphony at ease with itself, yet in spite of its tranquillity the first movement does have a growing intensity of expression and a very real point of climax where the opening horn call is dissonantly ground out by the trombones, which are sparingly employed in this work but always to great effect. The intensity, however, is mostly held in check by the movement’s prevailing waltz-like pulse; and the coda, when it arrives, is filled with teasing understatements, including some whimsical - and certainly unexpected - harbingers of neo-Stravinsky in the woodwind.

Brahmsian sunshine being dependent on Brahmsian shadow, the adagio begins darkly with the sound of cello and bassoon tone in stark counterpoint, the instruments unblended and proceeding in contrary motion. The key is now B major, but it sounds almost like B minor, the effect suggestive perhaps of a solitary walk in a dense forest, with sunlight gleaming through the trees. But if the slow movement has its sombre side, the third movement - a superb example of the sort of semi-scherzo, with a charming flick on the third beat and with two faster-paced trio sections - is amiably bucolic. The quietly monochrome start of the finale gives little hint of the merriment to follow. But it makes the blaze of colour, when it bursts forth, all the more resplendent.

© Conrad Wilson

Programme note

Die Mainacht, Op 43 No 2
(The May Night)

Von ewiger Liebe, Op 43 No 1
(Of love eternal)

Solo songs, from Schubert onwards, have been called the emblems of nineteenth-century music. Brahms, with folk poetry as a special focus, composed about two hundred, mostly gathered into short groups and identified simply by opus numbers and first lines. Descriptive names, such as Magelone Romances for the substantial

set of fifteen songs, Op 33, were rare − or rarer, at any rate, than in the output of Schubert or Schumann. For the most part Brahms was content to provide a generalised identity tag, with Lieder und Gesange (which he chose for five of his song sets) as his favourite. Since this, in essence, means merely “Songs and Songs,” it does not seem greatly informative, though by implication there is a shade of difference between Lieder (meaning, by common acceptance, “German art songs”) and Gesange (possibly implying something a little grander).

This afternoon’s two songs, from a group of four Gesange composed in 1868, are prime examples of their kind, powerful meditations on love, the first with its vision of moonlight, cooing doves, dark shadows and lonely tears, evoked via the footsteps of a wandering, yearning lover. The words to the first are by Ludwig Heinrich Christoph Hölty, poet also of Brahms’ An die Nachtigall (To the nightingale) of the same period. Josef Wenzig's Von ewiger Liebe, with a Slavonic folk song as its source, grows magnificently and stirringly out of a lovers’ dispute, wherein the girl declares that her love, being stronger than iron and steel, will last for ever.

© Conrad Wilson

Programme note

Benjamin Britten (1913-1976)
Nocturne, Op 60 (1958)

“It won’t be madly popular because it is the strangest & remotest thing – but then dreams are strange & remote.” Britten’s comment on his Nocturne reflects a preoccupation with the world of night, sleep and dreams which reached a pitch of intensity in his work in the late 1950s and early 60s, culminating in the opera A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Nocturne sets to music a miniature anthology on the subject, and so forms a sequel to his earlier Serenade for tenor, horn and strings. Written in 1958 and dedicated to Gustav Mahler’s widow, Alma, it is scored for tenor, strings and seven obbligato instruments, each of which, in turn, contributes its distinctive colour to the six central sections.

The work begins with words from Shelley’s Prometheus Unbound, opening the door into a world where dreams and artistic creation meet, both rooted in the unconscious mind. It is underpinned by a continuous gently rocking figure on the strings which recurs to link most of the work’s remaining sections.

The bassoon takes the role of Tennyson’s Kraken, a mythical sea-monster permanently asleep on the ocean floor until, woken by the fire of the Last Judgement, it rises to the surface and dies (the bassoon right at the top of its range). Britten’s string writing uncannily suggests occasional shafts of light penetrating the underwater gloom.

The mysterious figure of Coleridge’s 'lovely boy', alone in a forest at night, is evoked by the harp’s graceful pirouettes, while the horn impersonates the nocturnal creatures of Thomas Middleton’s seventeenth-century London.

There is no rocking figure in the next transition - Wordsworth’s nightmare recollections of Paris at the time of the French Revolution are of tension, restlessness and lack of sleep, with a timpani obbligato rising to a climax of quite terrifying power. A mournfully lyrical cor anglais solo then winds its way over a steady tread in the strings, as the ghosts of Wilfrid Owen’s slaughtered soldiers move carefully, so as not to disturb the sleeper’s dreams with unwelcome images of war.

The rocking figure returns, and the mood lightens, as Keats celebrates sleep as a world of more benign imagery. Flute and clarinet are unaccompanied in a double obbligato of extraordinary caprice and fantasy.

The strings gradually re-introduce the rocking figure, and one by one the solo instruments join to create a small chamber orchestra for the final setting of Shakespeare’s Sonnet 43, in which the sleeping and waking worlds mysteriously interpenetrate. The strings gently rock the sleeper awake, but also take us full circle, back to the Nocturne’s opening.

© Mike Wheeler

Programme note

Programme note

Ich stand' in dunklen Träumen, Op 13 No 1
(I stood in darkened daydreams)

Sie liebten sich beide, Op 13 No 2
(They once loved each other)

Liebeszauber, Op 13 No 3
(Love’s magic)

“Not without subtle nuances” is the New Grove’s assessment − delivered not without condescension − of Clara Schumann’s Six Songs, Op 13. Written soon after her husband’s famous Year of Song (1840) Clara’s own year of song yielded rather less in terms of quantity, but then, as she put it, “a woman must not desire to compose − not one has been able to do it, and why should I expect to?”

Why indeed? These were Clara’s years of childbirth, yielding Marie, Elise, Julie, and Emil in quick succession between 1841 and 1846, with four more children to follow. Moreover, she had been an inspired concert pianist − eventually the greatest in Europe − from the age of nine, with a husband who, in order to compose, had the will-power to shut himself off from family life. Yet she, too, had force of personality, nurturing her career as a pianist with tours of Denmark in 1842 and Russia in 1844 and holding (as did her husband) major academic appointments.

If women composers flourish today, it is because they have gained the scope to do so. Yet Clara herself, despite her flair for self-criticism, was no mean composer. It was something her dour, heavy, professorial father actively encouraged in her. Her A minor Piano Concerto, a work of considerable character begun at the age of thirteen, was completed three years later − almost, it seemed, in anticipation of her husband’s much more famous concerto in the same key. Her song sets, Op 12 as well as Op 13, display impeccable taste in poetry, as well as imaginative responsiveness to words.

Of the three songs from Op 13 to be performed today, the first two are based on the ironic wit and pathos of Heinrich Heine, the third on the lyricism of Emanuel Geibel. By 1853, in more spacious domestic surroundings, she had gained new freedom to compose songs and instrumental pieces. But her husband’s suicide attempt in 1854 and commitment to an asylum for the last two years of his life stopped her in her compositional tracks. What she might have achieved as a composer continues to tantalise. What she did achieve as a pianist speaks for itself.

© Conrad Wilson

Programme note

Programme note to follow

Programme note

Fredrick Delius (1862-1934)
The Walk to the Paradise Garden

A Village Romeo and Juliet was Delius’s 4th opera; it seems to have occupied him for almost a decade since early sketches date from 1898 and he was still tinkering with it in 1907 just before its German premiere in Berlin. Delius drafted his own libretto from one of the best-known stories by Gottfried Keller (1819-1890), a Swiss writer who enjoyed quite a vogue among musicians in the late 19th century. His work inspired music by composers as disparate as Schoenberg, Wolf and Sinding, and he is generally described as Poetic Realist – belonging to that branch of Romanticism that celebrated universal and eternal themes (love, immortality, life of the spirit) through earthy subjects. His tale is set among peasant farmers, vagabonds and mysterious elemental spirits. His Romeo and Juliet are called Vrenchen and Sali, and their families are in dispute over a strip of land that actually belongs not to either of them but to a shady figure called The Dark Fiddler. In the course of the drama, Sali and Vrenchen are caught kissing by Vrenchen’s father; he, in his anger, he abuses Vrenchen and Sali kills him. After this, the impossibility of their love grows ever more evident; everywhere they go they feel outcast. They originally plan to go to the Paradise Garden (a dilapidated but lovely riverside inn) to forget their woes and dance all night. But when they get there, they realise that it is truly a garden of paradise: they accept that they will never fit in anywhere now, and when finally they chose death it is as an ecstatic embrace with eternity and oblivion.

This miniature is in fact an arrangement (by Sir Thomas Beecham) of the entracte that describes Sali and Vrenchen walking to the inn. Its rhapsodic, idyllic tone has often been commented upon as odd, given that the young lovers are going to their deaths. But remembering that Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde was just over 30 years old when Delius started work on this piece explains a lot. Wagner’s drama with its passionate love-death-wish inspired countless imitators in all the arts and both Keller and Delius were touched by it. The music would have been played with the curtain down, and Delius gives no scenic directions in the libretto, but surely the riverside setting of the inn is the key to this music? It flows languorously along – and it is the river that will ultimately take the lover’s lives.

© Svend Brown

Programme note

Antonin Dvořák (1841-1904)
Czech Suite, Op 39 (1879)

Preludium (Pastorale): Allegro moderato
Polka: Allegretto grazioso
Sousedska (Minuetto): Allegro giusto
Romanza: Andante con moto
Finale (Furiant): Presto

Dvořák, like his father and grandfather before him, might have become a village butcher. Instead, thanks to his conspicuous musicality, he became a viola player in the orchestra of the Prague National Theatre. What he learned in the pit - with Wagner and Smetana among his conductors - served him in good stead as a composer who merged the folk idioms of his homeland with the symphonic music of Vienna and elsewhere. Music flowed from him with a fecundity soon to be rivalled by that of the young Richard Strauss, and the first of his two serenades, the E major, Op 22, for strings, brims with glowing viola tone.

After the major-key sweetness of that work and minor-key pungency of the succeeding wind serenade, Op 44, Dvořák contemplated a third serenade, scored for wind and strings, which would complete an intended triptych. Failing to make headway on it, he produced instead his Czech Suite in D major, a potpourri of orchestral dances and other movements with a misleadingly early opus number, culminating in a swinging, ambitiously symphonic Furiant.

More varied in colouring than its predecessors, the Czech Suite contains material - notably in the central minuet - from the abandoned third serenade, but otherwise goes its own leisurely and idiosyncratic way, incorporating rustic bagpipe imitations as part of the pastoralism of the prelude. The succeeding polka possesses a faintly melancholy Dvorakian charm and the minuet, which he preferred to call a sousedska, is a Czech “neighbours’ dance,” of a sort reputedly aimed at elderly villagers for whom other Czech dances were deemed too lively.

The romantic fourth movement, with its atmospheric woodwind interplay, evokes the soft moonlit radiance of Rusalka, the water-nymph opera Dvorak wrote two decades later,. Finally the suite is exhilaratingly energised by a Furiant, a type of Czech dance famed for its furious syncopations, filled with rhythmic tension, minor-key leanings, and abruptly braying horns.

Though heard less frequently than the two popular serenades, the music represents Dvořák at his most thoroughly nationalistic. The work established itself in the SCO’s repertoire in the 1970s, when it was vivaciously championed by the orchestra’s earliest conductor Roderick Brydon.

Conrad Wilson

Programme note

Antonín Dvořák (1841–1904)
From Ten Legends, Op 59:

No 1 in D minor: Allegretto
No 2 in G major: Molto moderato
No 3 in G minor: Allegretto giusto – Andante – Allegretto giusto
No 8 in F major: Un poco allegretto e grazioso
No 10 in B flat minor and major: Andante

Dvořák gained his first international success in the years 1876-78, with the Moravian Duets – recommended by Brahms to his publisher Simrock – and then with the three Slavonic Rhapsodies and the first set of Slavonic Dances. Not long afterwards, in 1881, came a follow-up in the shape of the Ten Legends, again based on melodies which, while original, are of distinctly Slavonic cast. Sometimes these pieces seems to hint at an underlying narrative, and scholars have suggested that some of the themes may have been suggested by the rhythm of key lines in KJ Erben’s collection of folk-inspired ballads. But if Dvořák did have specific Czech legends in mind, he kept the information to himself – so we are left only with a general feeling of what the composer’s biographer Jarmil Burghauser called “forgotten stories of long-past, patriarchal times”.

Like the Slavonic Dances, the Legends were first written for piano duet and then orchestrated, with all Dvořák’s habitual skill and inventiveness. The strings are as ever the foundation of the score, with sections often divided into two parts to provide extra shades of colour. The woodwind – two each of flutes, oboes, clarinets and bassoons – all have moments of prominence as carriers of the melody, singly or in pairs. Dvořák’s use of four horns rather than two offers the possibility of rich harmonic filling-in in the middle of the orchestral texture, though the first horn is also used in its higher register for some striking solos. This basic orchestra is slightly augmented in some individual numbers – in tonight’s selection by timpani in No 1 and a triangle in No 3.

The first Legend sets off with a tune characterised by sturdy dance rhythms and strong dynamic contrasts; this all but disappears from the later stages of the piece, however, and the last word goes to the smooth melody of the middle section. The second piece has a graceful opening theme in three-bar phrases, a volatile middle section with a good deal of development, and a brief reprise leading to a calm ending. The third comes closer to the model of the Slavonic Dances, not only in its initial lithe dance rhythms, but also in its clear ternary (A–B–A) construction around a slower middle section (largely in five-bar phrases). No 8 begins in a gentle pastoral 6/8 time, but soon becomes more restless; the middle section includes passages in the cross-rhythms of the Czech furiant, anticipating the scherzo of Dvořák’s Seventh Symphony of 1884-85, as well as a somewhat Beethovenian melody which returns on horn in the coda. The final Legend alternates between an expressive minor-key melody, again soon pushing forward, and a calmer major-key idea; the coda reconciles the two with a delicate new major-key version of the opening theme, and a tinge of the minor just before the quiet ending.

Anthony Burton © 2010

Programme note

Antonín Dvořák (1841-10904)
Wind Serenade in D minor, Op 44 (1878)

Moderato, quasi Marcia
Menuetto
Andante con moto
Finale: Allegro molto

Of Dvořák’s two serenades – another was started but emerged as his colourful Czech Suite – the second, in D minor, Op 44,  is the potent obverse of the first.  Sunlit string tone is transformed into pungent wind tone.  The vein is robustly outdoor rather than delicately indoor (members of the SCO played it one summer in the shade of a fountain at the Aix-en-Provence Festival).  Radiant major keys become starker minor ones.  Five movements are compressed into four.  The sound of Mozart’s wind serenades, with their marches and minuets voiced by pairs of oboes and clarinets, audibly lurks in the background, but this is music with a nineteenth-century savour and a Czech accent.  The depths of double bass and double bassoon tone may evoke Mozart’s Gran Partita for thirteen instruments (Dvořák here employs twelve, including a cello as ballast) but the strains of the music, shot through by a trio of horns, are largely Bohemian.

Completed within a fortnight in 1878, the work is exuberantly Czech in spirit, yet for all its joie de vivre there is a rigour about it that Dvořák did not display in all his works.  True to classical tradition, it opens with – and ultimately returns to – a march, one of the traits of eighteenth-century entertainment music.  But it is more succinct than its classical predecessors in that it curtails the two minuets and two slow movements – Dvořák deemed one of each to be quite sufficient – that were considered desirable in some of the more leisurely scores of an earlier era.

In fact Dvořák’s single minuet turns out in its central section to be a stampingly fast and not at all minuet-like Czech furiant, with exhilaratingly cross-accented syncopations.  The slow movement is a tenderly pulsating nocturne, warmed by clarinet and oboe on a bed of cello and bass tone.  At times exquisitely ornate, it is eventually displaced by the dapper finale, incorporating a repeat of the opening march before bubbling to its close.  John Clapham, the distinguished Edinburgh-based Dvořák authority, appreciatively called it – in one of his books on the composer – a “unique work, rewarding to both audiences and performers”

© Conrad Wilson

Programme note

Edward Elgar (1857-1934)
Serenade for strings in E minor, Op 20 (1892)

Allegro piacevole
Larghetto
Allegretto

Musical history is littered with pieces of music that for one reason or another were rejected in their own time only to become the most popular of classics later. Listening to this piece, just imagine that its original publisher deemed it ‘unsaleable’, and declined to publish it: that is how it came to pass that the Worcester Ladies’ Orchestral Class premiered it privately with Elgar conducting in 1893; then it had to wait until 1896 for its first public performance, in Antwerp. Now, it is one of Elgar’s most best known scores. It is also perhaps the earliest of his works to be heard regularly.

Late in life, Elgar singled the Serenade out as his favourite work. One thing that especially pleased him about it is that it is ‘really stringy.’ He was a very able violinist, and throughout his life wrote superb works for string instruments: celebrated concertos for both violin and cello; a sonata for violin; a piano quintet and of course the Introduction and Allegro for string quartet and string orchestra among other pieces. The way he wrote for these instruments is one of the things that gives his music its distinctive musical accent. Hard to pin down exactly what he was doing, but the minute you hear it you can tell who is speaking - even in a piece as early as this.

The Serenade as we know it was completed in 1892, but Alice Elgar left a clue that suggests that it is actually a re-working of the (now lost) Three Pieces for String Orchestra premiered by the Worcestershire Musical Union in 1888. After that performance, Alice wrote a rather intense pastoral poem inspired by its three movements. For example, the opening Allegro piacevole (‘pleasingly lively’) suggested ‘rivers fringed with wavering reeds” to her; the Larghetto is full of “…love and pain Now mingle in the strain again’. Fanciful as her images are, they do suit the music’s tone and make you wonder whether the Serenade mightn’t be a reincarnation of that earlier piece.

© Svend Brown 2008

Programme note

Gabriel Fauré (1845-1924)
Élegie

Along with the Sicilienne and Serenade, Élegie belongs to the notable group of small scale works which Fauré wrote for the cello. He had the gift of imbuing these miniature pieces with a classic beauty in which calmness and intensity are perfectly counterbalanced. This facet of his idiom alone raises his Élegie far above the fashionable and mildly sentimental vein of popular melancholy as expressed by Massenet’s work of the same name.

The music of Élegie was originally written for cello and piano in 1883, and, as often with Fauré’s pieces, was only later orchestrated. It opens in C minor with sombre throbbing chords over which the cello sings a passionate yet elegiac melody. This is immediately repeated pianissimo before an emotional outburst leads to the relaxed atmosphere of E flat major and a new haunting and bitter-sweet melody first heard on the orchestra. Gradually, this is built into a fiery climax in which the soloist abandons his cantabile role for a more virtuosic one. This passage acts as a prelude to the impassioned return of C minor and the opening melody played in the cello’s vibrant upper register. After the excitement has subsided, tranquility returns with the coda which recalls the second melody. Now its gentleness seems to give way to a feeling of resignation as the cello sinks to its lowest note for the final brooding C minor chord.

Élegie has always been a popular work, for its elegance and poise, along with its underlying passion, made an immediate appeal, and its is not surprising to find that the organist at Fauré’s funeral in 1924 chose to honour the composer’s memory by playing an improvisation on it.

© Janet Beat

Programme note

Gabriel Faure (1845-1924)
Pavane, Op 50 (1887)

Gabriel Faure lived through a long and important period in French musical history. When he was born, Berlioz had not yet completed The Damnation of Faust. When he died, The Rite of Spring was already a decade old and Stravinsky had entered a fresh phase of his career. But if the milestones of European music appeared to pass him by  - and Debussy, we should remember, was born seventeen years after Faure but died six years before him - he was nevertheless a gloriously gifted composer who happened to be neither flamboyant nor progressive.  What he undoubtedly was, as one authority has put it, "musically sensitive and energetic."  He was one of the most inspired, as well as most private, figures of French romantic music.

He paid, alas, a price for his privacy, and for the very undemonstrative qualities that made him the composer he became. Though his Requiem is accepted as one of the greatest and least sensational works of its kind, and though Janet Baker championed his songs with a comprehensiveness that few other modern singers have brought to them, pianists seldom include his nocturnes and barcarolles in their programmes, and his chamber music, for all its beauty, remains an acquired taste. Yet it is in such poetic, inward-turning music that the essence of his style is to be found.

And the essence of that essence can be said above all to lie in the exquisite Pavane, one of the shortest and most popular of his works, whether performed in its purely orchestral version or as a choral piece - or, for that matter, as a ballet, in which form Diaghilev saw its possibilities. In whatever way it is done, it is all atmosphere. Like Ravel’s subsequent Pavane for a Dead Infanta, it progresses as a sad, subdued meditation on the ancient Anglo-French dance-form to which it owes its name.  Its strength - as well as its secret - lies in a sublime simplicity that wholly avoids sentimentality. Or, as Faure’s pupil Charles Koechlin remarked in a different context, it "mingles a hidden melancholy with a certain serenity."  Although, in the middle of the piece, things seem on the brink of flaring into something more passionate, the temptation is resisted and the slow, brooding, drooping, haunting pulse of the dance is restored.

© Conrad Wilson

Programme note

Gabriel Fauré (1845-1924)
Requiem (1888)

I. Introït et Kyrie
II. Offertoire
III. Sanctus
IV. Pie Jesu
V. Agnus Dei et Lux aeterna
VI. Libera me
VII. In Paradisum

Considering that Fauré wrote very few pieces for large instrumental forces and is more widely recognised for his chamber music, it is quite surprising that his Requiem has become one of his most popular and well-known works. Nevertheless, it did begin its life as a considerably smaller undertaking: the first performance of the work in 1888 comprised only five movements, and the minimal orchestration called for only low strings, harp, organ and timpani. A few years later, and under pressure from his publishers, he augmented the instrumentation to include horns, trumpets and trombones, as well as adding two further movements to the score. Yet the details of this enlarged version are somewhat spurious: the amended score is littered with mistakes and many of the instrumental additions simply double lines already present in the score. Some critics have since suggested that this may indicate that one of Fauré’s pupils – and not the master himself – completed the new edition.

In an interview in 1902, Fauré commented on the work and discussed the morbidity of the subject matter: "It has been said that my Requiem does not express the fear of death and someone has called it a lullaby of death. But it is thus that I see death: as a happy deliverance, an aspiration towards happiness above, rather than as a painful experience. The music of Gounod has been criticized for its overinclination towards human tenderness. But his nature predisposed him to feel this way: religious emotion took this form inside him. Is it not necessary to accept the artist's nature? As to my Requiem, perhaps I have also instinctively sought to escape from what is thought right and proper, after all the years of accompanying burial services on the organ! I know it all by heart. I wanted to write something different."

Fauré’s quest to replace a fear of death with a ‘happy deliverance’ is evident from his choice of texts. In addition to adding the motet Pie Jesu and the texts Libera me and In Paradisum from the Order of the Burial, he also omits the Dies Irae, a central part of the Mass that describes the day of judgement and the division of souls between heaven and hell. As such, the work is characterised by peace and serenity, avoiding the dramatic potential of the more melancholic movements and exchanging theatricality for a purity and directness of expression. In the final movement of the work, the darker hues of D minor (the tonic at the opening) are exchanged for the brighter realm of D major and a chorus of heavenly sopranos sing of a vision of Heaven. Finally, Fauré recalls once more that death is not a punishment but a means of release, as the work closes with same word as it began: Requiem (Rest).

© Jo Kirkbride

Programme note

Brian Greene is a celebrated physicist as well as a best selling children’s author and he’s made it his mission to make science as fun and spectacular as he can. Here he has joined forces with another global star, Philip Glass to create a spectacular sound and vision extravaganza. Take your seats for a eye-popping trip into deep space as Glass’s spectacular musical score dances, thunders and swoops around you with a cutting edge film by Al and Al transporting you deep into space.

Discover what happens to Icarus, a young lad on an epic space voyage. He spots a black hole outside the spaceship and goes to explore – flying to a hairsbreadth above the point of no return. But that’s just the start of his adventure; when tries to return to the spaceship in what he believes to be a few minutes after leaving it, he gradually realises that many thousands of years have elapsed…

Commissioned and produced by World Science Festival (New York) with the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation and Southbank Centre (London) with the Royal Society. Co-commissioned by Associazione Festival della Scienza with the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra and Glasgow’s Concert Halls.

Programme note

Programme note

George Frideric Handel (1685-1759)
Concerto Grosso in A minor Op 6 No 4, HWV 322 (1739)

Larghetto affetuoso
Allegro
Largo e piano
Allegro

Arcangelo Corelli published little music, yet attained a Europe-wide celebrity. His Opus 6 Concerti Grossi were regarded as the pinnacle of the genre in which a smaller instrumental group (concertino) is pitched both against and within a larger group (ripieno). When Handel reached his own ‘Opus 6’ in 1739, he honoured the master with 12 new concertos. Why he undertook this project in 1739 is unclear – but he applied himself to it with some urgency, and completed the lot in just 3 months. They were published swiftly in 1740, so perhaps he was hoping to make some quick money: his financial crises were legendary.  As usual, he cleverly recycled earlier works and some of the Opus 6 pieces consist pretty well entirely of re-arrangements. The closing Allegro of this piece lifts melodic material from an aria in his opera, Imeneo but no other borrowings have been spotted yet.

© Svend Brown

Programme note

Programme note to follow.

Programme note

George Frideric Handel (1685-1759)
Messiah

The present-day standing of Messiah makes it difficult for us to realise that for Handel its composition was an offbeat venture, unsure in its reward, and probably unrepeatable. It is the only truly ‘sacred’ oratorio he ever wrote, it was the only one performed during his lifetime in a consecrated building, and yet it was intended, in Jennen’s words, as “a fine Entertainment”. Although quintessentially the work of a theatre composer, it contains no drama in the theatrical sense; there are no warring factions (no Israelites versus Philistines), no named protagonist; the text telescopes prophecy and fulfilment, and the drama is revealed obliquely, by inference and report, almost never by narrative.

The scheme was, of course, the responsibility of the librettist, and Jennens deserves more praise than he is sometimes allowed. Avoiding the choral emphasis in Israel in Egypt, he opted for the same proportion of solos to choruses as had worked so well in L’Allegro. Even so, Messiah has a higher choral element than any other of the oratorios, Israel and Egypt excepted. Old and New Testaments are skilfully blended, with some tactful adaptations and compression. Most important of all is the clarity and confidence with which Jennens displays the divine scheme, a coherent progress from Prophecy, through Nativity, Crucifixion, Resurrection and Ascension to the promise of Redemption (Part III is based largely on the Anglican Burial Service). The work thus encompasses all the major festivals of the Christian Year.

If the first triumph in Messiah is its text, what of the music? It has been argued that Messiah does not contain Handel’s greatest music: for greater arias we need look no further than Rinaldo (1711) with ‘Lascia ch’io pianga’ or ‘Cara sposa’, and greater choruses may be found in both Israel in Egypt and Dixit Dominus. What Messiah does possess is an enormous strength - its cornerstone being ‘I know that my Redeemer liveth’ - and for many it has become the musical representation of their Faith.

Handel wrote Messiah in very short time - between 22nd August and 14th September 1741. It was given its first performance not in London, where Handel’s influence had declined with the demise of Italian opera, but in Dublin in the New Music Hall on the 13 April 1742. Dublin was delighted to have England’s (formerly) most eminent musician, and made sure that the performing conditions pleased the composer. Already there had been 12 sold-out subscription concerts prior to the premiere, which was a huge triumph. The contrast between the big choral numbers and the calmer more melismatic arias delighted the audience. Because of Handel’s uncertainty with performing conditions in Dublin, the original scoring consisted of only one solo instrument - the trumpet - and accompanying strings and continuo. For later London performances Handel added oboes and bassoons to double the voices in the choruses.

A romantic notion is of Handel lying exhausted on completion of Messiah - if that is true he soon started work in earnest again, since by the 29th September 1741, he had already completed Act One of Samson and finished the whole work within a month. If Messiah failed he knew he would have a success with the far grander epic in Samson.

Recent scholarship and performance practice has shown Messiah being given with only a handful of singers just as Handel originally heard it. However, as Malcolm Sargent wrote: “I am convinced that had more singers been available, he would have rejoiced to have had a choir of several hundred for his first performance because Handel was renowned for his ‘big’ effects- he was criticised by his rivals for being a ‘noisy’ composer, for wanting twice as many voices in his chorus and twice as many instrumentalists as was usual.”

Tonight’s performance is very much a compromise between the ‘authentic’ performance and the vast Royal Choral tradition which Handel may have preferred - despite all that scholarship.

© Christopher Hogwood/Graeme Jenkins

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Programme note

Programme note

Edward Harper (1941-2009)
Symphony No 2 (2006/07)

Below is the programme note which Edward Harper wrote for his Symphony No 2 when it was first performed by the SCO in November 2006. At this time the first movement 'Overture' had still to be written. Therefore, we have added a short note on this movement by John Fallas.

Overture
The Turnen Stile
Them! Not Us!
Miracles
Epilogue

The texts for Symphony No 2 come from a wide range of sources but are linked by two themes, firstly the particular tragedy of death involving children and secondly a hope that out of such tragedy can come peace and reconciliation.

The largest movement is the third, Them! Not us! The words are from a poem by the Edinburgh-based poet Ron Butlin, commissioned for the occasion. Behind the poem lie two outstanding gestures of generosity and forgiveness which I wanted to commemorate in music. Just over three years ago [at the time of writing] a Jewish student from Britain, on a visit to Tel Aviv, was killed by a Palestinian suicide bomber. The family donated an organ from the body to save the life of a Palestinian girl. More recently, the family of a Palestinian boy shot by an Israeli soldier donated his organs to a number of people, including two Israeli children.

The movement opens with music which aims to create a mood of mindless, ritualistic violence. This gives way to a section in which the father of the boy reflects on the death of his son. The movement ends with a prayer for peace and hope which is taken up again in the Epilogue. Here, after a brief, orchestral reference to the violence of the second movement, the choir sings words from the Agnus Dei of the Latin Mass while the soloist has the famous prophesy of ultimate reconciliation from the Book of Isaiah.

In between these movements comes Miracles, a setting of Walt Whitman’s expression of the wonder and mystery of everyday things. This is the scherzo of the Symphony – the ostinato pizzicato bass line is intended to have faint implications of jazz. The second movement sets part of a Dorset dialect poem by the nineteenth-century poet William Barnes. The soloist, accompanied just by solo violin, begins with a description of a family going to church, ushered on their way by stile. This sets off the main part of the movement, a purely orchestral waltz whose constant movement reflects the turning of the stile. At the climax the mood suddenly changes (marked by the tubular bell) to one of sadness and loss. The soloist sings the final lines of the poem, accompanied now by muted solo viola and bells.

The first movement, for orchestra alone, is weightier and more substantial than its heading ‘Overture’ might suggest, and serves both to introduce motifs on which the later movements will be built and to establish a dialogue between radiant stillness and a joyous propulsion which will return in the symphony’s last two movements.

© Edward Harper, 2006
© John Fallas, 2008

Programme note

Karl Amadeus Hartmann (1905-1963)
Concerto Funebre for violin and strings (1940)

Introduction: Largo
Adagio
Allegro di molto
Chorale: Langsamer Marsch

Ten years younger than the Munich-born Carl Orff, who worked publicly, productively and popularly in Germany throughout the Nazi era, Karl Amadeus Hartmann was another Münchener who stuck to the fatherland during the Second World War but chose to compose secretly in the more progressive manner to be expected of a pupil of Anton Webern. No doubt his survival depended on his ability to keep his head down and on his willingness to forfeit the public performances of his music which would, in any case, have been denied him. Not everyone, after all, was an Orff, all too ready to replace Mendelssohn’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream pieces with music of his own. Even Hartmann’s orchestral work, Miserae, written in tribute to those who were dying in the nearby Dachau concentration camp, had its passionate raison d’être suppressed when it received its premiere in Prague in 1935. If Hartmann’s anti-fascist music failed to provoke reprisal, it was because he kept much of it hidden and destroyed the rest. But as soon as the war ended, he was ready to seize his moment. In the autumn of 1945 he founded a Musica Viva festival in what was left of Munich, championing Schoenberg as well as himself and showing where his beliefs really lay.

Of his eight symphonies, the second, completed in 1946, was a substantial Mahlerish adagio, and the fifth, in 1950, was a homage to Stravinsky, quoting the opening bassoon solo from The Rite of Spring. Tonight’s Concerto Funebre, on the other hand, had managed to receive its premiere ten years earlier at St Gallen in Switzerland, after being smuggled across the border, but it made no headway until the German violinist Wolfgang Schneiderhan took up its cause in 1959. As with the earlier Miserae, the music delivered an anti-Nazi message, conveying Hartmann’s despair over the occupation of Czechoslovakia along with his deeply-held – though in this work somewhat ambiguous – feelings that light in the end must follow darkness.

The music, lasting about twenty minutes, opens with a short introduction quoting the Hussite chorale 'Ye Who Are God’s Warriors', previously employed by Smetana in his patriotic cycle of symphonic poems Ma Vlast (My Homeland). The four-movement structure, said the composer, was designed to reflect the “intellectual and spiritual hopelessness of the period, contrasted with an expression of hope”. The desolate Adagio, placing piercing strands of solo violin tone in a bed of sombre strings, ultimately fades into the work’s one quick movement, an explosion of Bartókian devices in which torrents of notes and hammering rhythms bring the work to an abrasive climax. This in turn dies out, leaving the way clear for the final funeral march, or elegy, with its chorale-like atmosphere (hints of Alban Berg) and eloquent seam of violin tone, towards which the entire work has clearly been heading. This song of death murmurs onward until the orchestra cuts it off with a stern final chord.

© Conrad Wilson

Programme note

Programme note to follow

Programme note

Franz Joseph Haydn (1732-1809)
Piano Concerto in D, Hob XVIII (1784)

Vivace
Un poco Adagio
Rondo all’Ungarese - Allegro assai

Haydn’s long working life corresponded almost exactly to the period which saw the piano supersede the harpsichord as the pre-eminent keyboard instrument. Though many commentators believe that the earliest of Haydn’s surviving keyboard concertos were conceived for the organ, by the time he came to write tonight's D major Concerto (sometime in the early 1780s), pianos were increasingly being viewed as the keyboard instrument of choice. Certainly, writing in 1784, Haydn urged his friend Marianne von Genzinger to sell her harpsichord and buy a piano. Three years later he asked his publishers, Artaria, to advance him some funds so that he could buy a new piano to use while composing a set of three piano trios.

Unlike Mozart, Haydn did not compose his keyboard concertos to showcase his own abilities as a performer. His proficiency at and appreciation for the keyboard are abundantly evident from his output of wonderful keyboard sonatas and piano trios, but he was no virtuoso. Like many composers, he used the keyboard as a tool, as he explained to his friend and biographer Georg Greiseinger: “I sit down at the keyboard, and begin to improvise, sad or happy according to my mood. Once I have seized on an idea, my whole endeavour is to develop and sustain it, always in keeping with the rules of art."

The D major Concerto was almost certainly the last keyboard concerto Haydn wrote. It was first published by Artaira in 1784, and it rapidly became one of his most popular works. When, in 1787, Haydn offered it to an English publisher, he learnt that pirated editions had already appeared in London. Indeed, by the time of Haydn’s death, the Concerto was being sold by no fewer than eight different publishing houses in five different countries.

It is Haydn’s lively and original voice, rather than conspicuous virtuosity, which marks out this concerto; and the piece overflows with thematic material which Haydn manipulates with typical skill and cleverness. It culminates in a tour-de-force Gypsy Rondo Finale, based on an old Croatian dance; an exotic novelty which must have surely delighted the Esterházy court.

© Stephen Strugnell

Programme note

Joseph Haydn (1732-1809)
Symphony No 101 in D major 'The Clock' (1794)

Adagio - Presto
Andante
Menuet: Allegretto
Finale: Vivace

Long before he left rural Esterháza, where he was musical director for 24 years, Haydn’s services were in demand. His Seven Last Words from the Cross had been commissioned by Spain, his Paris symphonies by France. His Op 50 quartets were composed for the King of Prussia, and even the fickle Viennese had their eye on him. Though he was now almost sixty, inspiration still flowed. In 1790, belatedly resident in Vienna, he was called upon in his rooms by an impresario who announced himself with famous words; “I am Salomon of England,” said the visitor, “and I have come to take you to London.” Far from showing Salomon the door, Haydn agreed to a commission for the series of masterpieces we know as the London symphonies,  the performances of which he was to direct in person.

Between 1791 and 1795, Haydn travelled twice to London, taking more than a fortnight to get there and lingering a year and a half on each occasion. For a senior composer who had lived a mostly sheltered life, these journeys through Germany and France and across the Channel seemed greatly perilous. Before setting off the first time, he bade an emotional farewell to his dear friend and disciple, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, who with uncanny premonition expressed the fear that they would never meet again – though in fact it was young Mozart who would die at home in Vienna and old Haydn who would prosper.

The Clock symphony, launched during his second London visit, is a work with all the advantages – an attractive nickname, a wealth of melody, a constant sense of surprise, a Beethovenian assertiveness, and a stupendous finale, one of Haydn’s very best. The slow introduction, in the 'wrong' key, holds things in suspense until the Allegro arrives in the 'right' key. The slow movement underpins its adorable theme with ticking bassoons and pizzicato strings, later replaced by battering and by no means comic brass. The Menuet has grandeur, except in the trio section where the players emulate a rustic band. But it is the finale, complete with an audaciously sotto voce double fugue, towards which this symphony has been heading from the start. It shows what Salomon expected of Haydn, and Haydn of Salomon’s orchestra.

© Conrad Wilson

Programme note

Joseph Haydn (1732-1809)
Symphony No 104 ‘The London’ (1795)

Adagio - Allegro
Andante
Menuet: Allegro - Trio - Allegro
Finale: Spiritoso

Haydn’s first and last symphonies are in the same key – D major – and contrasting the works highlights his astounding achievement. No 1 is an aristocratic diversion for small orchestra lasting little more than ten minutes, performed for a handful of guests in a palace. No 104 is a tour de force, 25 minutes of serious music written for a discriminating, large audience in a public concert hall - so requiring considerably more players. It is clear too that the public event – in this case Haydn’s last London concert - was much more lucrative than the private patronage. Haydn made enough from the performance of this symphony to more than triple the size of his entire savings after a long career in aristocratic service,

His last London concert demanded of Haydn a symphony of unsurpassed splendour, concentration and invention. From the first bar to the last there is a sense of intense and thorough musical thought. He never squanders notes and disdained composers who were spendthrift with ideas:

“Once I had seized upon an idea, my whole endeavour was to develop and sustain it in keeping with the rules of art. In this way I tried to keep going, and this is where so many of our new composers fall down. They string out one little piece after another, they break off when they have hardly begun, and nothing remains in the heart when one has listened to it.”

Haydn managed ‘to keep going’ here by deriving pretty well all the germinal ideas of all four movements from the quiet, unassuming opening melody. The Andante and Finale vary the falling opening phrase, while the Menuet opens with an echo of the second, rising motif. Tying everything together in this way could, in the wrong, uninspired hands, sound like a terribly arid, possibly academic exercise; but as with so many things, this is a case of ‘not what you do but how you do it’: Haydn’s thought is too beguiling to fall into that trap. Hearing this symphony can be like eavesdropping on a brilliant mind as it tosses ideas around.

The influence of Mozart is felt in the opening bars. The stark unison and growling timpani rolls seem to share something of the demonic monumentality of Don Giovanni. The energy and drive of the main body of the movement is wonderfully contrasted with the serenity of the slow movement. Beware though: as in other London Symphonies, Haydn explores an expansive and disparate landscape in his set of variations before coming to rest in leisurely fashion. The Menuet and Trio is a bucolic and good-natured moment of light relief before plunging into the melee of the Finale, based on a Croatian folk-tune from which Haydn creates a dazzling race to the finish.

© Svend Brown