Programme notes
For every piece of music featured in the SCO 2009-10 Season there are programme notes available. Some concert-goers find that reading the programme notes before the performance enhances their enjoyment of the music. Just click on the links to find out more!
Programme note
Johann Sebastian Bach (1685-1751)
Brandenburg Concerto No 3, BWV 1048 (1721)
Allegro
Adagio
Allegro
In 1721, Bach was looking for a new job, and remembered that the Margrave of Brandenburg had once asked him got some compositions. He had six of his finest concertos copied and expensively bound and sent them off, by way of a job application. He may as well have saved his efforts. His gift lay untouched in the Brandenburg library until, some time after the Margrave’s death, it was sold as part of a job lot. Bach probably did not write the six concertos especially for the Margrave. Every piece is strikingly different from its fellows. This concerto, with its groups of three players, is a special tour de force: nine instruments weaving in and out of each other’s paths in close proximity. In less skillful hands it could have turned out muddy, dense and horribly turgid, but Bach’s writing is lucidity itself. Uniquely, in his concertos, he doesn’t write out all three movements. Aside from a few notes, the Adagio is left as a tantalizing question for the players to respond to in their own way — or simply treat as a short pause between movements.
© Svend Brown
Programme note
Bela Bartók (1881-1945)
Rumanian Folk Dances (1917)
Jocul cu bâta (Stick Dance)
Brâul (Sash Dance)
Pe loc (In One Spot)
Buciumeana (Horn Dance)
Poarga Româneasca ( Rumanian Polka)
Mâruntel (Fast Dance)
Mâruntel (Fast Dance)
In the early 1900s, Bartók came to realise that what had until then generally passed as Hungarian folk music was actually the rather romanticised collection of gypsy melodies that Brahms, Liszt and others had altered and arranged. The real folk music of Hungary, he discovered, had a harder texture, was cruder in technique, more severe in line and more austere in spirit. These melodies, generally written in modal scales, had an exotic character and irregular rhythms. Together with Zoltán Kodáy, he set about systematically collecting and analysing the folk music of Hungary in expeditions that took them from the Carpathian mountains to the Adriatic, and from western Slovakia to the Black Sea. This collaboration resulted in the unearthing of several thousand folk songs and dances eventually published in twelve monumental volumes. Initially, they jotted down melodies by hand, but later began to use Edison cylinders to record songs and dances. Bartók was particularly drawn to Rumanian folk traditions because he felt that these had been more isolated from outside influences and were therefore more authentic. He also attracted the variety and colours of instruments used in Rumanian music: violins, peasant flutes (panpipes), guitars, and bagpipes.
Bartók later acknowledged how deeply he was influenced by the folk material he had collected: “The outcome of these studies was of decisive influence upon my work because it freed me from the tyrannical rule of the major and minor keys. The greater part of the collected treasure, and the more valuable part, was in old ecclesiastical or old Greek modes, or based on more primitive (pentatonic) scales, and the melodies were full of the freest and most varied rhythmic phrases and changes of tempi. It became clear to me that the old modes, which had been forgotten in our music, had lost nothing of their vigour. Their new employment made new rhythmic combinations possible.”
Although the outbreak of war restricted his travels, it was during this time that Bartók began to make various settings of some of the folk songs and dances he had collected. He originally wrote the Rumanian Folk Dances for piano, but in 1917 he arranged them for a small orchestra. Their popularity is evident in the numerous other arrangements that have been made, notably for string orchestra (by Arthur Willner), salon orchestra, and violin and piano.
Bartók was convinced that the folk art that he had helped to discover could, as he said, “serve as the foundations for a renaissance of Hungarian art music.” These seven dances, which vary greatly in character and tempo, are played without a break, the last three forming a coda of increasing energy and excitement.
© Stephen Strugnell
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)
Overture, The Creatures of Prometheus, Op 43
The reputation Beethoven enjoyed by his 30th birthday can be measured by the fact that he was invited to write The Creatures of Prometheus. The ballet was to be performed before Maria Teresa of Naples and Sicily, the most powerful woman in Vienna. Holy Roman Empress, Queen of Germany, Archduchess Consort of Austria, Queen Consort of Hungary, Bohemia, Croatia, Slavonia and Dalmatia… Need I go on? We live in an age when what remains of empires are breaking down so it is harder for us to imagine a Europe so utterly dominated by the Hapsburg family as it was in 1801. To be commissioned to write music for ears as important as Maria Teresa’s was an honour for any young composer, even a hot-head republican like Beethoven.
The plot of the ballet was drafted by Neapolitan choreographer Salvatore Viganò, - a major Viennese celebrity in his own right. It tells the tale of Prometheus bringing civilization to humanity in the shape of two statues that come to life. As well as enlightening them himself, he recruits many of the Olympian gods and the muses of Parnassus to teach them the arts, especially music and dance. The ballet is said to have opened with Prometheus stealing fire from the Gods and then fleeing – hence the jarring discord at the start of this overture, and the subsequent energetic scurrying.
© Svend Brown
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. The description seemed just right for a masterpiece which, compared with its predecessors in C major and B flat major, was nothing if not epoch-making. As we now know, however, this powerful work in Beethoven’s 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 1999, the American authority Leon Plantinga has convincingly endorsed the later date, which means that the work followed, rather than preceded, the sweep of the Tempest sonata, the dynamic idiosyncrasy of the Second Symphony, and the heart-rending confession, in his Heiligenstadt Testament, that he was going deaf.
Yet 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 the Edinburgh musical authority Sir Donald 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 sombreness for long, but there is balm in the slow movement, radiantly suspended in the unrelated key of E major until its restless middle section brings fresh tension. 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)
Piano Concerto No 4 in G major, Op 58 (1806)
Allegro moderato
Andante con moto
Rondo: Vivace
Between his third and fourth piano concertos, Beethoven wrestled with his increasing deafness and the intractable first version of Fidelio. The slow movement of the Piano Concerto No 4 symbolises both his patience and impatience at the time, but the entire work is a study in opposites, the gentle opening of the first movement transforming itself, at the start of the recapitulation, into a grand and triumphant statement, the finale serenely vivacious on the one hand, loud and bludgeoning on the other. Too many commentators, in calling this the most feminine of Beethoven’s piano concertos, ignore its more macho side. Beethoven himself was said to play it impulsively, even "roguishly," and at terrific speed, perhaps to the disadvantage of its poetry, though not necessarily to the concerto as a whole, which can all too easily be allowed to lose momentum.
Yet the poetry of the opening bars is not to be gainsaid, even if the rhythm - if not the mood - is reminiscent of the start of the fifth symphony, as must have been noticeable when the two works were paired in a famous concert, packed with premieres, in Vienna on 22 December 1808. The symphony greatly startled its first listeners but the concerto also had its vanguard features, albeit of a less obviously sensational sort. Never before had a leading composer begun a concerto with a piano solo (though Mozart came close to it in his E flat Concerto, K271). The orchestra’s entry in an audibly alien key is no less surprising. Within a few quiet bars, Beethoven destroyed all his audience’s preconceptions about concerto form. The piano’s recently extended keyboard is exploited in music of ethereal sweetness, though the music is also energised by much use of sparkling triplet figures.
The short Andante, an enigmatically baroque dialogue between soloist and stark strings, may represent no more than a soft answer turning away wrath. The music, at any rate, is curiously pictorial, and Orpheus taming the Furies has often been cited as its secret message. The strings start with a scowl, the piano responds with balm. But gradually the strings relent and the piano, with a final eloquent plea, wins the debate. Then, via one of Beethoven’s seemingly perverse modulations, from E minor to C major in the context of a G major concerto, the finale begins without a break. In structure it is one of Beethoven's characteristically idiosyncratic rondos. The main theme starts in one key and ends in another. The humour is sometimes mellow, sometimes pungent, the closing surge of energy sunlit and exhilarating. Yet there is an irascible quality which lies just below the surface of this music, ever ready to erupt and remind you who the composer is.
© Conrad Wilson
Programme note
Overture
Introduction: La Tempesta (Allegro non troppo)
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 the 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 eighteen movements - not least the striking adagio for the ballerina Maria Casentini, with its solo cello and plashing harp - have regained a small place in the orchestral repertoire.
The overture, moreover, has separately enjoyed a long-established 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 storm scene, intended to follow the overture without a break, anticipates the equivalent movement in the Pastoral Symphony, just as the sweet little Pastorale anticipates the glow of that symphony’s finale. But what the finale of Prometheus more startlingly anticipates is nothing less than the famous Eroica, or Bonaparte, theme with which Beethoven became so obsessed that he employed it in several of his works before bringing it to a state of perfection in the finale of the Eroica Symphony.
© Conrad Wilson
Programme note
Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827)
Symphony No 2 in D major, Op 36 (1802)
Adagio - Allegro con brio
Larghetto
Scherzo: Allegro
Allegro molto
Few pieces of music can more directly disprove the notion that the emotional character of a composition reflects the inner moods of the composer while he was writing it than Beethoven’s second symphony. In 1802, Beethoven was facing a personal and artistic crisis brought on by his impending deafness. On the advice of his doctor, who suggested that the rural quiet of a village might improve his hearing, he went to live for several months in Heiligenstadt, northwest of Vienna. But when no improvement was forthcoming, Beethoven fell into a suicidal despair and, in October 1802, gave vent to his emotions by writing what is now known as the Heiligenstadt Testament – a passionate outburst expressing his unhappiness. “What a humiliation when someone standing next to me heard a flute in the distance and I heard nothing. Such occurrences brought me to the verge of despair. As the leaves of Autumn fall and are withered, so too, my hope has dried up. Oh, Providence, let a single day of untroubled joy be granted to me!”
Despite Beethoven’s mental torment, the works sketched and completed at Heiligenstadt that summer – especially the second symphony – remained vigorous and energetic in an unmistakable early Beethoven manner. The second symphony is in the traditionally sunny key of D major and follows classical symphonic form – even beginning with an extended Haydn-like Adagio. And yet for all its harking back to classical models, the music abounds in abrupt dynamic contrasts, unexpected harmonic modulations and propulsive rhythms.
Symphony No 2 was premiered in April 1803, along with Piano Concerto No 3 and the oratorio Christ on the Mount of Olives, at a concert in the Theater an der Wein where Beethoven had recently been appointed as one of the resident composers. He made a substantial profit of 1800 florins on the concert, but the critics were somewhat equivocal. The sheer size of the last movement and its extended coda clearly unsettled one critic who wrote: “Beethoven’s second symphony is a crass monster, a hideously writhing wounded dragon that refuses to expire, and though bleeding in the Finale, furiously beats about with its tail erect.”
© Stephen Strugnell
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 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, though 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-conflicting 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 work 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 6 in F, Op 68, 'Pastoral' (1807-08)
Allegro ma non troppo - The awakening of happy feelings on arriving in the country
Andante molto moto - By the brook
Allegro - The joyful gathering of country folk
Allegro - Thunderstorm
Allegretto - Shepherds' thanksgiving after the storm
Composers have been evoking nature in music as long as they have been writing it down — and probably well before that. Birds, storms, streams and sunrises are a common feature of many 18th-century works, most famously (now, at least) in Vivaldi’s Four Seasons. So this piece, written in 1807-08 looked back to a grand tradition, but at the same time was one of the most original and influential works of the 19th century. It is hard to imagine the nature pictures of Berlioz, Mendelssohn, Wagner, and Strauss without it.
The debate about how important it is too know the ‘story’ behind the music will never end. Beethoven himself was conflicted. This is the only one of his symphonies that follows an explicit program. "Pastoral Symphony, or Recollections of Country Life," he wrote at the head of the score, and each movement has its own tale to tell. Yet, in the sketches for the piece he wrote, "All painting in instrumental music is lost if it is pushed too far” and “Anyone with a notion of country life can discern for himself the composer’s intentions without many titles. . . . The whole will be recognized as a matter more of feeling than of painting in sounds." But it is hard not to think he is protesting too much. He clearly enjoyed imitating birdsong in the second movement (nightingale, cuckoo and quail). And his buffoonish village band is affectionately portrayed in the third movement: who knows which band inspired this hilarious vignette, or how much they drank before they played!
Tchaikovsky used to insist that Beethoven’s Fifth has just as obvious a story as the Pastoral though it is not put into words. Certainly, there are striking similarities between the two pieces. Both were first heard in the same enormously long concert in 1808. The audience who endured the many hours in a cold theatre could have been forgiven for believing Beethoven had created an altogether new form, so dramatically do these pieces differ from any symphony that they may have heard previously. Notably, both symphonies close with a linked sequence of movements, huge expanses of sound in which Beethoven explores startling transitions and expressive effects. He also asks for an unusually large orchestra in both symphonies, including trombones, piccolo and contrabassoon – none of which were standard for the time. Yet, in both pieces he holds these extra instruments in reserve until dramatic points late in the piece. The differences between the works are equally striking. The kinetic energy that crackles through the opening bars of the Fifth does not let up until the close; the question posed in its opening bars is not truly answered until the finale, some 20 minutes later. In the Sixth, by contrast, there is hardly a straight line. Harmony is soft, its arguments deceptively discursive. Beethoven dwells on picturesque details and allows lovely moments to flower, seemingly without concern for the overall picture. At least that is the illusion Beethoven creates. More than any other symphony of his, this offers repose.
© Svend Brown
Programme note
Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827)
Symphony No 8 in F Op 93 (1812)
Allegro vivace e con brio
Allegretto scherzando
Tempo di Menuetto
Allegro vivace
To call Symphony No 8 “the little one”, as Beethoven himself once did, is to ignore the fact that it is also the most explosive of the nine. In no other Beethoven symphony is a movement so peppered with abrupt chords and rip-roaring outbursts than the first movement of this work. In fact, Beethoven’s Symphony No 8 is “little” only in the sense that it is compact. Completed in 1812, along with Symphony No 7, it possesses the same furiously creative drive in even more concentrated form. Beethoven himself said he preferred the Eighth Symphony to the Seventh. When told that its brevity had disappointed its first audience, he replied that that was because the shorter work was “so much better”.
The first movement’s well-clinched opening theme gives an immediate idea of the tautness of the music. Yet its sublime jollity seems constantly threatened by the volatile quality of so much of the rest of the movement. When – after a central development section that is essentially one huge crescendo – it returns on the cellos and basses at the start of the recapitulation, it has to struggle to make itself heard through the noise of the rest of the orchestra.
The slow movement is a tease, in that it is not a slow movement at all, any more than it is a scherzo, despite its scherzando marking. The origin of its ticking rhythm lay in a canon Beethoven wrote for Johann Maelzel, inventor of one of the metronomes of the period. Here Beethoven’s touch is at its lightest and wittiest, even when small explosions interrupt the ticking.
Something similar happens in the minuet – the opening bars are so syncopated that the dance-like nature of the music is intentionally concealed. Beethoven obviously had no cause to write anything as retrogressive as a minuet at this stage in his career, and the music has little to do with minuets of the sort he produced in his youth. In a sense, it is an anti-minuet, written in reaction to the huge, circling scherzo of the Symphony No 7. The trio section, with its genial horns and grunting cellos, is as charming as it is humorous.
The exhilaratingly swerving finale does not avoid an occasional deliberate collision between one key and another. Yet its increasingly marchlike momentum hardly relaxes even for the lyrical second subject on the woodwind, or for the profound impulse of what is one of Beethoven’s biggest and greatest codas, culminating in thundering kettledrums.
© Conrad Wilson
Programme note
Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827)
Violin Concerto in D major, Op 61 (1806)
Allegro ma non troppo
Larghetto
Rondo: Allegro
The piano was Beethoven’s instrument, the one upon which he proved himself a brilliant soloist and improviser, and for which he composed the bulk of his sonatas, concertos, and sets of variations. But like Haydn and Mozart before him, he also studied the violin and learned enough about it to produce what posterity has decreed to be perhaps the greatest of all violin concertos. Insufficiently adept to play it himself, he entrusted its first performance to the leader of the orchestra, Franz Clement, a Viennese virtuoso whose musical versatility included such feats of showmanship as improvising a sonata on one string with his violin turned upside down. It was doubtless the latter trick that prompted Beethoven to inscribe on his manuscript the pun, "Concerto per Clemenza pour Clement"; but, as things turned out at the Theater an der Wien in December 1806, Clement did not give Beethoven the clemency he sought. After playing the first movement without incident, he inserted one of his own freakish sonatas before proceeding to the sublime larghetto.
Beethoven’s may have been a pianist’s violin concerto - so was Brahms’s - but it is as inspired in its tiny details (such as delaying the use of pizzicato notes until the finale, and then using them in just one single bar) as in its long-spun lines. Clement, moreover, must have possessed qualities that prompted Beethoven to let him play it. As one commentator has remarked: "Tone, not display, is its secret." It dates from one of the most productive periods in Beethoven’s life, the two years in which he also composed Fidelio, the Fourth Symphony, the Fourth Piano Concerto, the three Rasumovsky string quartets, and the 32 piano variations in C minor. In mood it corresponds most closely with the Fourth Piano Concerto, but is even more lyrically spacious in design, treating its material with still greater patience. The soloist’s entry in the first movement is delayed until what seems like the last possible moment, and not until the coda is the wondrous (and sublimely simple) second theme heard in its entirety on the solo violin.
The first movement’s binding factor is the rhythm of the five soft drum taps heard at the outset. Tossed from section to section of the orchestra, this motif underpins, punctuates, and inspires the wealth of themes from which Beethoven builds the music, adding a high clarity of definition to a movement otherwise dependent principally on lyrical flow. The larghetto in G major, though only 92 bars long, has the idyllic stillness found in some of Beethoven’s other great slow movements - that of the Emperor concerto springs particularly to mind - although its dreamy beauty (based largely on a series of ethereal variations on the muted opening theme) is finally interrupted by bold orchestral chords, dramatically signalling the return of the home key. These lead without a break to the genial finale, a rondo with a rocking main theme in 6/8 time, with contrasted episodes (one of them employing a solo bassoon to droll yet curiously poignant effect) and a radiance that anticipates the equivalent movement of the Pastoral symphony, composed two years later.
© Conrad Wilson
Programme note
Hector Berlioz (1803–1869)
L'Enfance du Christ
(The Childhood of Christ) (1853-54)
After the failure of The Damnation of Faust and the heavy debts it left him with, Berlioz had vowed never to risk putting on a big composition in Paris again. The Childhood of Christ was not something he planned. It was as if the work could come into the world only by stealth, almost unawares – beginning with the little chorus of the shepherds’ farewell, jotted down in a friend’s album at the corner of a card-table while his companions played whist, then, a few days later, an overture – the shepherds' gathering at the Bethlehem stable – and a tenor solo describing the Holy Family resting at an oasis during the journey to Egypt, after which the score was put on one side and seemingly forgotten.
Not till three years later, in 1853, did The Flight into Egypt get a performance, conducted by the composer, in Leipzig. It was such a success that he was urged to enlarge it, and The Arrival at Saïs was soon written, followed by the first part of the triptych, Herod’s Dream.
Berlioz knew he could be sure of a sympathetic reception in Germany. But it was in Paris after all that his "sacred trilogy" had its enormously successful first performances. Paris could hardly believe its ears. Here was the apostle of noise, the master of the macabre and the grotesque, writing for a handful of instruments and a small chorus to the manner born: in Part 2 a chamber orchestra of strings and six wind, without bassoons or horns; Part 3 using only slightly larger forces; and even Part 1, in which trombones appeared, sparingly scored, and drums heard only twice, very briefly. Berlioz had obviously changed.
In fact he hadn’t. All that had changed was the subject – which, in his words, "naturally prompted a naïve and gentle kind of music". His ideal was still what he called "passionate expression, that is, expression bent on reproducing the essence of its subject, even when it is the opposite of 'passion', and tender feelings are being expressed or the most profound calm".
In The Childhood of Christ, Berlioz remains the dramatist he always was. The work is conceived as a series of tableaux in which we are shown the human elements of the story: the uneasy might of Rome, the world-weariness of Herod, the fanaticism of the soothsayers, the joys and fears of Jesus’ parents, the shepherds’ friendliness and the busy welcome of the Ishmaelite household. They are juxtaposed in a way that anticipates the cinema. An example is the transition from Herod’s rage to the peace of the stable. We see in angry close-up the fear-distorted faces of Herod and the soothsayers, like faces in a Bosch or
Brueghel crucifixion. Then the nightmare fades, the picture dwindles and the manger comes into focus. In the epilogue it is as though the glowing family circle were growing faint and blurring before our eyes. The moment has come to close the book and draw the timeless moral; and the composer, having shown the loving kindness of his good Samaritans, tracks away from the scene, causes the picture to fade by means of a series of quiet, still unisons, surrounded by silence. Its purpose is to separate us from what we have been witnessing, to make it recede across the centuries and return to the ancient past from which it has been evoked, and achieve the necessary transition to the final meditation on the meaning of the Christmas drama.
Everything is visualised. When the Holy Family reach Egypt hungry and exhausted and beg in vain for shelter, the musical imagery brings the scene before us. The plaintive viola motif, the wailing oboe and cor anglais, the fragmentary violin phrases, the tremor of cellos and basses, Mary’s panting utterances, Joseph’s swaying melody constantly returning, Gluck-like, on itself, the tap of the drums as he timidly knocks, the shouts of "Get away, dirty Jews" which brusquely interrupt the prevailing triple metre – all this makes a vivid and poignant ‘expression of the subject’. Nor is it only the refugees’ sufferings that arouse the composer’s compassion. He illuminates the loneliness of the tormented Herod and the forlornness of the soothsayers, whose gloomy choruses and weird cabbalistic dance express the sense that superstition is at once sinister and ridiculous, to be pitied.
By the time he composed the work Berlioz had long ceased to be a Christian. But in recalling his childhood for the memoirs he was writing he relived the beliefs that had once been central to his life. Composing the work also took him back to the sources of his artistic being, to the folk music and noels on which his style had been founded. The archaic flavour that permeates much of the score came quite naturally to him. And the intensity of recollected emotion was such that he could re-enter a world where the events and characters of the Christmas story, as they stamped themselves on a hyper-sensitive child, were once again vibrantly alive.
No sentimental recovery of belief is involved. His mind remains sceptical. But his imagination believes. He remembers what it was like to have faith. And at the end, having re-enacted the age-old myth, and stepped out of the magic circle again, he can only pay tribute to the power of the Christian message and, unbeliever as he is, bow before the mystery of Christ’s birth and death.
Synopsis
Part 1: Herod’s Dream
The narrator sets the scene: Palestine shortly after Christ’s birth, and the hopes and fears already in the air. A Roman detachment patrols the empty streets of Jerusalem. Their night march is briefly interrupted as two soldiers discuss the strange terrors of King Herod. Alone, unable to sleep, Herod reflects on the solitariness of his life and on the dream that haunts him, of a child who will overthrow his power. He learns from his soothsayers that his throne will be safe only if all the children lately born in his kingdom are put to death. The scene moves to the stable in Bethlehem. Mary and Joseph are warned by angels of the danger to Jesus, and are told to leave at once and travel across the desert to Egypt.
Part 2: The Flight into Egypt
Shepherds gather at the stable. They say goodbye to the Holy Family. The narrator describes Mary, Joseph, the baby and the donkey resting at an oasis, watched over by angels.
Part 3: The Arrival at Saïs
The narrator tells how, after great hardships, the travellers reach the city of Saïs. They knock at many doors but are driven away. At last, half fainting with hunger, they are hospitably received by an Ishmaelite. Like Joseph he is a carpenter, and he invites them to stay and live with him and his family. The grateful pilgrims take their rest, entertained with music by the children, and then retire to bed. In an epilogue the narrator tells of their long sojourn in Egypt, their return to Palestine, and the child’s fulfilment of his redeeming mission. Narrator and chorus pray for humanity’s pride to be abased before such a mystery and its heart to be filled with Christ’s love.
© David Cairns
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
Alexander Borodin (1833-1887)
In the Steppes of Central Asia (1880)
When is an amateur not an amateur? It is a tough question to answer with respect to Borodin. ‘By day’ he was an internationally respected chemist specializing in valerian aldehydes. ‘By night’ he became one of the most well-known of the St. Petersburg School of Russian nationalist composers from the latter half of the nineteenth century. In the end, Borodin’s status as an amateur (or not) is beside the point – he wrote great music which has endured. In the Steppes of Central Asia was written in 1880 as one of twelve pieces commissioned from various Russian composers to accompany a series of tableaux vivants illustrating events in the first quarter century of the reign of Tsar Alexander II.
Borodin described In the Steppes as: “In the silence of the steppes of Central Asia is heard the refrain of a peaceful Russian song. One also hears the melancholy sound of oriental song, and with it the steps of approaching horses and camels. A caravan, escorted by Russian soldiers, traverses the immense desert, and continues its long journey, trusting confidently in the protection of the Russian soldiery. The caravan steadily advances. The song of the Russians and that of the natives mingle in one and the same harmony. The refrains are heard for a long time in the desert, and at last are lost in the distance.”
In the Steppes of Central Asia is a tone-poem. There are two main themes – one Russian sounding (introduced by the clarinet, and then the horn), the other more oriental (sung by the cor anglais), all over a glittering high E in octaves from the violins (initially just two players, but eventually embracing the entire first violin section). These themes are echt-Borodin, though ‘appearing’ to be true folksongs. The themes are cleverly conceived, as Borodin hints in his note, to create interesting contrapuntal possibilities when combined. In the Steppes is in arch form, emerging quietly from nowhere and, with time (just listen to the camels padding persistently across the landscape in the pizzicato off-beat lower strings), disappearing quietly over the horizon.
The essence of the score is not about thematic development – there is none – but about orchestral colour and atmosphere; it is an evocation of an exotic, distant place. The magician Borodin succeeds brilliantly – as if, like the great English painter, Turner, who was ever-ready with his sketch book, he had ‘buzzed’ the caravan on his flying carpet and had made notes as the sun cast and eliminated shadows on the travellers below. At high noon, the Russian theme is thundered out by the full orchestra, the only tutti in the entire work.
Valerian aldehydes must be potent stirrers of the imagination!
© David Gardner
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 26th, 1896, precipitated what we now know as the Four Serious Songs. He finished them on May 7th (his 63rd and, as it transpired, final birthday). Clara died on May 20th. 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 1 in D major, Op 11 (1858)
Allegro molto
Scherzo: Allegro non troppo
Adagio non troppo
Menuet I & II
Scherzo: Allegro
Rondo: Allegro
Young Brahms originally intended the first of his two orchestral serenades to be a nonet for wind and strings in the vein of Beethoven’s Septet or Schubert’s Octet - which may explain why, even in its more symphonic final version, its fourth and fifth movements seem to retain their chamber music affinities, with prominent, often pungent, wind parts.
Yet the effect of the work can also seem curiously suggestive of a Mahler symphony, or at least the sort of symphony Mahler might have written if he had been a 25-year-old genius living in Detmold in the year 1858. The bucolic drone of its opening bars provides a foretaste of the start of Mahler’s Symphony No 1 (in the same key), and the jovial horn theme has a distinctively Mahlerish stamp. Pastoral the serenade certainly is. No other big-scale work by Brahms, other than the Second Symphony in the same key, speaks quite so refreshingly of the open air. Why he eventually chose to inflate such intimate music into an orchestral work was perhaps typical of the uncertainty from which he persistently suffered. His Piano Concerto No 1, completed in the same year, had begun as a symphony before being transformed into the work we know. But the serenade, so long as it is played by a chamber orchestra rather than something weightier, retains much of its original lightness of touch, while gaining the extra richness of string tone that justified Brahms’s revision.
What gives the work its considerable length is not only its quantity of movements but also the large-scale symphonic processes required by the first movement, slow movement, and finale, as well as the sheer size of some of the themes. In contrast, the second movement, a shadowy minor-key scherzo prophetic of the equivalent movement in the Second Piano Concerto, is more concise, as are the pair of tiny, comical minuets and the second scherzo, clearly a joke inspired by Beethoven, and all the better for coming from a composer as supposedly serious as Brahms.
The larger movements, on the other hand, give the work the Brahmsian ballast it needs. The way the introductory drone bass keeps harmonically shifting ground as the horn theme moves towards the movement's first climax defines not only the symphonic scale of the music but also its al fresco serenade-like nature. The shape of the themes, their way of melting from four beats to three beats in the bar, is unmistakably Brahmsian, even at this early stage in his career.
But if the first movement is large, the adagio, with its gently rocking rhythm, is even larger. It is laid out in grandly unshortened sonata-form, with a rich array of themes, a full-scale development section, recapitulation and coda, as if it were a symphonic first movement played in slow motion.
Sir Donald Tovey, Edinburgh’s distinguished musical essayist, famously devoted one and a half pages of a programme note to this adagio, claiming in the process that the music owed much of its quality of tone to the brook in Beethoven’s Pastoral symphony, which here "flows into a wide river, passing through a remote key into a peaceful lake."
The rondo finale, though considerably shorter, is nevertheless far from perfunctory. The remarkable length of the springy main theme and its rollicking offshoots immediately suggests that the music will last just as long as it needs to, and so it does. The coda, said Tovey, is "triumphant," though to call it radiant and exhilarating might be even more apt.
© Conrad Wilson
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 1 in C minor, Op 68 (1876)
Un poco sostenuto – Allegro
Andante sostenuto
Un poco allegretto e grazioso
Adagio – Piu andante – Allegro ma non troppo, ma con brio
"Long and not exactly amiable" was Brahms’s typically gruff description of his First Symphony, completed at the age of 43, fourteen years after he had sent a sketch of its opening bars to his friend Clara Schumann. A neurotically unwilling symphonist, he had already transformed a previous such work into his first piano concerto. Then he had produced his Alto Rhapsody, his Variations on the St Anthony Chorale, and much fine chamber music in further avoidance of the issue. Yet his would-be symphony would not go away. By the time he completed it, the teenage Mahler and Richard Strauss were heading for fame, and Beethoven (with whom he feared comparison) had been dead for half a century. Brahms was running late, but he triumphed in the end. His Symphony in C minor – Beethoven’s favourite key of conflict – rose above the gibes that musicians of the period hurled at it.
The similarities, as Brahms himself asserted, were in any case superficial. The first movement’s portentous, not exactly amiable introduction is wholly Brahmsian in texture and tension. The succeeding
Allegro, signposted by a drum thwack, is similarly sinewy and restless, its pulse increasingly like that of a grimly grinding scherzo, which is eventually stopped in its tracks. A back reference to the introduction, with a brief glimpse of the work’s C major goal, brings the movement to its close.
But C major is still a long way off. The slow movement, which Eduard Hanslick – Vienna's pro-Brahmsian, anti-Wagnerian critic – described as a "sustained, noble song," turns instead to E major and the strings sing a tender melody, extended by oboe. Towards the end, the intertwining of horn and solo violin is a radiant masterstroke by a composer sometimes dismissed as a severely functional orchestrator.
Sustaining the mood, the third movement is a clarinet intermezzo of a very Brahmsian sort. It postpones the forthcoming struggle between C minor and C major by being cast in the key of A-flat, and is characterised by the very definitely amiable melody with which it opens.
The finale, by far the biggest of the four movements, brings the music back to its C minor roots before battling its way to C major. Muttering pizzicati and fierce swirls of string tone set the stage for drama. Then, with a powerful, almost Wagnerian drum-roll, the atmosphere clears and the horns sound a bell-like theme over shimmering strings. Trombones intone a solemn chorale and the allegro section is launched with the broad melody that was to be compared (to Brahms’ discomfort) with Beethoven’s Ode to Joy. From here the music moves inexorably into sunshine.
© 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
Frédèric Chopin (1810-1849)
Piano Concerto No 2 in F minor, Op 21
Maestoso
Larghetto
Allegro vivace
“Mozart encompasses the entire domain of musical creation, but I’ve only got the keyboard in my poor head.” The young Chopin lamented to a friend. “I know my limitations, and I know I’d make a fool of myself if I tried to climb too high without having the ability to do it. They plague me to death urging me to write symphonies and operas, and they want me to be everything in one – a Polish Rossini and a Mozart and a Beethoven. But I just laugh under my breath and think to myself that one must start from small things. I’m only a pianist.” Despite these protestations, Chopin knew that performing his own concerto was the accepted route to stardom for young virtuosos, and that his growing public fully expected him to follow the path established by Mozart and Beethoven.
The summer of 1829 found the 19-year-old Chopin at Prince Radziwill’s estate at Antonin, recovering from an ill-fated attachment to the young singer Constantia Gladkowska. Whilst there, he sketched out the F minor concerto and returned to Warsaw for the winter season, where his new concerto was given at the National Theatre the following March. “The first Allegro of my concerto, unintelligible to most, received the award of a single ‘Bravo’”, Chopin wrote after the premiere, “but I believe that this was given because people wanted to show that they understood and appreciated serious music. The slow movement and the Rondo produced a very great effect, after these, the applause and ‘Bravos’ really came from the heart.” The concerto had the desired effect and gained him the public exposure and audience adoration that no number of private salon performances could. It was such a triumph, and so many people had to be turned away, that a second concert was given five days later. As a contemporary account records; “How beautifully he plays. What fluency! What evenness! – impossible that there should exist a more perfect concord between two hands. He plays with such certainty, so cleanly that his Concerto might be compared to the life of a just man: no ambiguity, nothing false. His music is full of expressive feeling and song, and puts the listener into a state of subtle rapture, bringing back to his memory all the happy moments that he has had.”
© Stephen Strugnell
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
Antonin Dvořák (1841-1904)
Czech Suite in D major, Op 39 (1879)
Praeludium (Pastorale)
Polka and Trio
Sousedska (Minuet)
Romance
Finale (Furiant)
Having composed one delectable serenade for strings and another for wind instruments, Dvořák in 1879 planned a third for full orchestra. Progress, alas, hung fire. A preliminary march and minuet were abandoned. Other music, including his Violin Concerto and the E flat major String Quartet Op 51 began to preoccupy him. What was needed, if the serenade was ever to be completed, was fresh inspiration and Dvořák gained it through a change of approach, an altered title, and an untruthful opus number.
The result was the Czech Suite Op 39. The name, in keeping with his recent, very successful Slavonic Dances Op 46, filled him with fervour, though he delayed announcing it until just before the work’s premiere in Prague in 1879. The opus number, lower than it should have been, suggested that here lay the fountainhead of his many nationalistic dances which, as one authority put it, “acted like an injection of monkey-gland on the staid concert halls and drawing rooms of Europe”.
But if the Czech Suite is largely a dance suite, it is not wholly a rumbustious one. It begins, indeed, quite quietly, with what sounds like a gentle reminiscence of the first movement of Beethoven’s ‘Pastoral’ Symphony, complete with drone bass and other evocations of happy oboe-inflected rusticity. Nor is the succeeding Polka a dance of the foot-stamping sort. The music is dreamier than that, with soft-breathed violins, sudden brief eruptions, pauses, and little changes of pace which stop well short of full-blooded energy.
The succeeding Sousedska sustains the delightful air of reflective lyricism. Though Dvořák described it as a minuet, in tribute no doubt to his inclusion of fragments of the discarded movement of that title, its skipping rhythms make it seem much more like a mazurka. The drowsy ending is a lovely touch, leading naturally to the romance which forms the slow movement, with tender phrases for flute, cor anglais, and horn. But there is no doubt about the vitality of the final Furiant, where trumpets, drums, and more raucous horns burst into the texture and drive the music to its symphonic ending with a very Dvořákian conflict between the keys of D minor and D major.
© 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 (1841-1904)
Nocturne in B major for String Orchestra, Op 40
Dvořák was not content with the original version of this piece, for string quartet; nor the next, for string quintet; nor the next for violin and piano. But he championed this final version for orchestral strings. The earliest versions were called Andante religioso, and something of a spiritual quality surrounds the music. Dvorak relishes darker colours, which gives the music a kinship with the Wagner of Parsifal - undoubtedly one of the most discussed works of the period.
© Svend Brown
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 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)
Pelléas et Mélisande Suite, Op 80 (1898)
Prélude: quasi adagio
La Fileuse: andantino quasi allegretto
Sicilienne: allegretto molto moderato
Molto adagio
Of the four composers most prominently associated with Maurice Maeterlinck’s Pelléas et Mélisande - Debussy for his opera, Schoenberg for his symphonic poem, Fauré and Sibelius for their incidental music - Fauré was the first to have his score performed. Commissioned in a hurry by Mrs Patrick Campbell to write the music for the first production of the play in English, Fauré completed it in a month and conducted it himself at the Prince of Wales Theatre in London in 1898.
The four movements he later chose to include in a concert suite - from a total of nineteen bits and pieces, including a song for Mrs Patrick Campbell as Mélisande - present a poignant portrait of Maeterlinck’s lonely heroine. The Prélude is based on a theme which, in its restricted movement in narrow melodic intervals, reflects her introverted, essentially private personality. A second theme, introduced by a compassionate solo cello and woodwind, might be taken to represent Mélisande as Golaud sees her when, lost while out hunting, he first finds her by the well in the forest.
La Fileuse accompanies Mélisande innocently at work at her spinning wheel. A characteristically intimate theme rises gently on a solo oboe, the spinning wheel running quietly but persistently on upper strings and failing only at the climax of the movement where, perhaps, Mélisande’s mind wanders from her work and turns towards Golaud’s younger half-brother, Pelléas. The one moment of happiness shared by Pelléas and Mélisande is represented by the Sicilienne, and no less aptly because it was originally written for a quite different occasion.
The funereal implications of the Molto adagio are unmistakable. So too is the subject of the lament as the melody in the flute and clarinets rises and falls in characteristically narrow intervals. The audience at the Prince of Wales Theatre in 1898 would also have recognised the first entry of the violins as an allusion to Mélisande’s song. The first theme returns fortissimo on the strings before a last echo of the song and a sadly modal approach on solo flute to the final chord.
© Gerald Larner
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
George Frideric Handel (1685-1759)
Concerto Grosso in B-flat Op 3 No 2 (1734)
Vivace – Grave
Largo
Allegro
Menuett
Gavotte
Opus 3 was the first set of concerti to be published by Handel, and he waited until his 49th year to bring them out – a delay unimaginable to a Vivaldi or a Torelli whose published output by that age ran to hundreds of pieces. So why 1734? As with his Opus 6, the reason may have been simply financial. The 1730s were tough for Handel and he needed to find ways to stay afloat. The minute you look in detail at Op.3 you can see how expedient a publication it is. Its publisher, John Walsh, has been accused of dubious practice and cashing in on Handel’s music without worrying too much about the integrity of the composer’s intentions. Some suspect him even of concocting saleable new ’concertos’ by arranging sundry bits and pieces by Handel for the Op.3 Whoever’s work it is, this concerto deserves particularly attention for its sheer quirkiness. It has as an unusual shape: the first three movements run one into another; then they are followed by two dance movements - a minuet and gavotte. Handel’s handling of the instruments is similarly mercurial and inventive. Many players have fleeting solo opportunities; more unusually, there are lovely duets – most notably a wonderful passage for two cellos in the Largo. The winds are pitched against the strings with great gusto
© Svend Brown
Programme note
George Frideric Handel (1685-1759)
Organ Concerto No 13 in F 'The Cuckoo and the Nightingale' HWV 295 (1739)
Handel was described by one fellow composer as the greatest organist of his age. His contemporary John Hawkins wrote this of his playing:
"A fine and delicate touch, a volant finger, and a ready delivery of passages the most difficult, are the praise of inferior artists: they were not noticed in Handel, whose excellencies were of a far superior kind; and his amazing command of the instrument, the fullness of his harmony, the grandeur and dignity of his style, the copiousness of his imagination, and the fertility of his invention were qualities that absorbed every inferior attainment. When he gave a concerto, his method in general was to introduce it with a voluntary movement on the diapasons, which stole on the ear in a slow and solemn progression; the harmony close wrought, and as full as could possibly be expressed; the passages concatenated with stupendous art, the whole at the same time being perfectly intelligible, and carrying the appearance of great simplicity. This kind of prelude was succeeded by the concerto itself, which he executed with a degree of spirit and firmness that no one ever pretended to equal."
This piece was premiered as part of Israel in Egypt at the Kings Theatre in the Haymarket in London in 1739. As ever, Handel also drew on his own earlier works and other people’s music in writing this concerto. The first and last movements are based on his own Trio Sonata, Op 5 No 6. The famous second movement, whose bird song gives the whole piece its nickname, lifts ideas from an aria from Giovanni Porta’s opera Numitore (which was certainly known in London as it was performed there in 1720) and a Capriccio sopra il CuCu by Johann Kaspar Kerll. Handle also marks several points in the piece where the soloist plays ‘ad libitum’ - at will.
© Svend Brown
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
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
Joseph Haydn (1732-1809)
March for the Royal Society of Musicians (1791)
With the death of his patron Prince Nikolaus Esterházy in February 1790, Haydn was freed from his increasingly onerous duties as Kapellmeister. The Prince’s successor, Prince Anton Esterházy, shared none of his father’s enthusiasm for music. He disbanded both the orchestra and choir, and granted Haydn a comfortable pension. Financially secure, and at the height of his creative powers, Haydn accepted an unexpected invitation to visit London from the impresario Johann Peter Salomon. Haydn was to receive £300 for a new opera, £300 for six new symphonies, a further £200 for their copyright, £200 for twenty other works and a guarantee of at least £200 from a benefit concert. When Mozart asked Haydn how at his advanced age (fifty-six!) he could travel to England speaking no language but German, Haydn replied, “but my language is understood everywhere.” Haydn left with Salomon almost immediately, and arrived in London on New Years Day 1791. Haydn’s visit – the first of three - was an unqualified success.
Haydn’s first London concert took place on 11 March 1791, in the Hanover Square Rooms. Haydn himself directed from the harpsichord, while Salomon led the orchestra. “Never, perhaps, was there a richer musical treat”, enthused the Morning Chronicle. “It is not wonderful that to souls capable of being touched by music, Haydn should be an object of homage and even idolatry; for like our own Shakespeare, he moves and governs the passions at his will.”
Soon after, Haydn was invited to the annual dinner of the Royal Society of Musicians. For the occasion, he composed a march for orchestra, the autograph of which is still preserved by the society. This tuneful work began life as a short piece for wind instruments - specifically, two clarinets, two bassoons, two horns, and a now-obsolete woodwind, the serpent - and timpani. Its original title was March for the Prince of Wales. For this occasion, Haydn arranged it for full orchestra, adding two flutes and strings.
The Royal Society for Musicians, whose current patron is Sir Peter Maxwell Davies, is Britain’s oldest musical charity. When it was founded, in 1738, as the “Fund for Decay’d Musicians”, 228 members signed its Declaration of Trust, including Arne, Boyce, Greene, Pepusch, Edward Purcell (son of Henry), Roseingrave, Sammartini, and, most valuably, Handel, who left £1,000 to the Society in his will. From the outset, dinners or 'Anniversary Festivals' were held, which often included performances of specially-written Marches.
© Stephen Strugnell
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
Franz Joseph Haydn (1732–1809):
Symphony No 92 in G 'Oxford'
Adagio – Allegro spiritoso
Adagio
Menuetto: Allegretto
Presto
Haydn’s relations with Oxford got off on the wrong foot. He had come to England at the invitation of the impresario Johann Peter Salomon in 1791, and arrived to find himself an A-list celebrity. Had there been paparazzi in the 1790s, they would have pursued him hotly. So just imagine how exciting it must have been for the good people of the distinguished (but musically quite provincial) city of Oxford to hear that he would appear in concert there on May 18th. A huge crowd duly assembled — only to be disappointed! Haydn was a no-show. Word of their disappointment reached the great composer, who seems to have been a genuinely humble, warm and magnanimous human being, unspoiled by his stellar reputation. One week later he apologized in print, explaining that he had been unavoidably detained by opera rehearsals in London. He ended charmingly by saying, “The University of Oxford, whose great reputation I heard abroad, is too great an object for me not to see before I leave England, and I shall take the earliest opportunity of paying it a visit.” Two months later he fulfilled his pledge, and graciously accepted an honorary degree from the university. He enjoyed that experience very much, with the exception of being expected to traipse around the streets for three days in his ceremonial garb – a scarlet robe with flouncy frills at the collar and cuffs. Clearly it did not undermine his dignity too much – and he even raised a laugh at a concert by lifting the edges of his gown in a kind of curtsey to acknowledge applause. One paper reported that the gesture got a far warmer response than the soprano soloist!
One of his symphonies was performed at the event, and naturally it came to be known as the Oxford Symphony. Strictly speaking, that is a dubious title. The piece was one of three that Haydn wrote in the late 1780s in response to simultaneous requests for new works from aristocrats in Paris and a small principality in what is now Bavaria. Realizing that neither patron would be any the wiser, Haydn sent the same three symphonies to both! For this piece to wind up being called the ‘Oxford’ merely caps the geographical shenanigans. To be fair, Haydn was on the level in Oxford. He had originally planned to play one of his newest London symphonies, but the house orchestra appears not to have been up to the job. This piece was substituted, and the local critic commented that it was “very fine, but well known.”
On of Haydn’s abiding fascinations – which grew with his age – was the challenge of developing the least amount of raw material into the widest variety of melodies and motifs for a single work. Assemble all the melodies of one of the late symphonies on a single sheet, and you can tease out the family resemblance with ease. This gives the end result and underlying unity and coherence (which should work mostly on a sub-conscious level) and great sense of purpose. In this piece, one example to follow through is the shape of the first proper theme once the slow introduction has finished. It is in the violins about one minute in. It starts on a top note, steps down 4 notes, then steps up them again to the first note then down again. Very simple indeed, simple enough to spark resemblance to the second main theme in the first movement (which inverts it), the opening theme of the second movement, and also the galloping opening of the finale which stretches that simple idea out into an eight bar melody.
© Svend Brown
Programme note
Hans Werner Henze (b. 1926)
Symphony No 1 (1947)
Now in his eighties, Hans Werner Henze (b. 1926) remains one of the giants of contemporary music today. Few 20th century composers have managed so well to combine gorgeous lyricism with a command of both traditional and serial techniques, fusing them with neoclassicism to produce a swathe of sumptuous music spanning over sixty years.
Henze studied with René Leibowitz (1913-72) a Polish-born pupil of Ravel deeply versed in Viennese serialism, whose other most famous student was Boulez. “In my world,” Henze had observed, “old forms strive to regain significance, even when the modern sound or timbres rarely permit them to surface audibly.
“It’s like a Classical ideal of beauty: no longer attainable, yet still visible from a great distance, stirring dream-like memories.”
Henze grew up in a Germany riven by Nazism and World War Two. Already a member of the Hitler Youth, he served in the Wehrmacht for the war’s dying months.
Such grisly experiences deeply affected his attitude to his music, although they scarcely show in his First Symphony, composed in 1947. Yet they clearly infused his bitter and violent Second Symphony, “utterly grey and gloomy, as though my experience of the war was responding to a demand in my music.”
By contrast, Henze’s First Symphony is almost pastorally cheerful and extrovert. Its premiere in 1948 was not an unmitigated success, but the work’s audible rapture was (unwittingly) appropriate, for “in the festival canteen, I met my first real love; and I now had eyes for nothing else. I suddenly knew where I belonged: he taught me tenderness; and for the first time in my life, I was happy.”
The originally four-movement symphony should have been heard at Darmstadt in 1947, with Hermann Scherchen conducting. But after a crisis (the watery ink faded on the orchestral parts and the 21 year old composer spent all night re-inking and re-copying), only the slow movement was played. The symphony was first heard a year later, conducted (rather unsympathetically) by Henze’s other great teacher, Wolfgang Fortner. The Lento is the only bit of the original that survives, largely unaltered, today.
“Throughout the rehearsals I became grimly conscious of the weaknesses of this frivolous, infantile composition,” he recalled. Henze junked the original (though revamped some of its melodic and rhythmic material), also reducing its forces prior to conducting tonight’s 16-minute chamber version with the Berlin Philharmonic in 1963.
The aerated woodwind aubade that opens the Allegretto con grazia, with its pellucid textures and sudden climaxes, call to mind the music of Michael Tippett. Climaxes come and go, but the atmosphere is delicate, shifting and (already) rather nocturnal, with percussive interjections from piano and harp, plus alternating whispers of flute, clarinet and wafting brass.
Stravinsky presides over the Lento: the Russian, along with Hindemith, was audibly a key influence on the young Henze. A viola solo and rocking flute import an impressionistic quality that feels more like Paris than Berlin. It has often been said that the music of Henze, who soon afterwards made his main home on the Bay of Naples, suggests Southern European warmth as much as any Austro-German influence.
The Allegro con moto imports new rhythmic urgency, emphasised by demonic, syncopated brassy outbursts and skitterings of busy, nervy woodwind. Here one senses Henze the master of counterpoint, so that the movement’s underlying beauty, with its soft soli, is not compromised by such terse argumentative outbreaks. The bassoon seems to herald a new direction, but then suddenly the symphony is over.
© Roderic Dunnett
Programme note
Leoš Janáček (1854-1928)
On an Overgrown Path (1901-11) [arr. David Matthews]
1. Our evenings
2. A blown-away leaf
3. Come with us!
4. The Madonna of Frýdek
5. They chattered like swallows
6. Words fail!
7. Good night!
8. Unutterable anguish
9. In tears
10. The owl has not flown away.
The first five pieces of the two sets that Janáček called On an Overgrown Path were composed around 1900, for harmonium. The first set was completed as ten piano pieces in 1908, and Janáček then gave them their present titles. The overall title refers to a Moravian wedding song in which the bride laments that "the path to my mother's has become overgrown with clover", and the pieces, as Janáček wrote in 1908 in an explanatory letter to the musicologist Jan Branberger who was interested in publishing them, "contain distant reminiscences. Those reminiscences are so dear to me that I do not think they will ever vanish." Some of these memories are apparently happy, others intensely sad. In 1903 there occurred the central tragedy of Janáček's life: the death of his daughter Olga from typhoid fever at the age of twenty-one. The last three pieces of Set 1 certainly refer to Olga's death: in Czech folklore the owl, sýcek, is a bird of ill-omen (the English title in the published edition is 'The barn owl has not flown away' but Janáček gives a very accurate representation of the tawny owl's cry, whereas the barn owl screeches).
Janáček's own orchestration is highly individual and instantly recognizable. I have stayed more or less within his sound world, though my orchestrations are often more elaborate than his. I used an orchestra of double wind, four horns, two trumpets, three trombones (essential, and often used in their lowest register, as Janácek does, notably in the Sinfonietta), timpani (again often the high notes beloved of Janácek), percussion (including the xylophone that Janácek used so memorably at the start of Jenufa), harp and strings. I have occasionally added extra counterpoint, and in a few places an extra bar or two.
Our evenings has a theme rather similar to the 'Promenade' from Mussorgsky's Pictures at an Exhibition, appropriately enough in a piece acting as an introduction. In his letter to Branberger, Janáček describes A blown-away leaf as "a love song" and Come with us! as – enigmatically – a "letter filed away for good". The Madonna of Frýdek (a town in Moravia near Janáček's birthplace of Hukvaldy) contains solemn organ-like chords and a repeated motif "sung by a far-off procession". They chattered like swallows is precisely named inasmuch as the women's chattering referred to is also a close imitation of the song of the swallow. Words fail! expresses "the bitterness of disappointment"; Good night! (scored for woodwind, brass and xylophone, with just two notes from the double basses) is about "the mood of parting". Unutterable anguish, the strangest of all the pieces, and one where I have tried to get as close as possible to Janácek's late orchestral style, is sufficiently explained by its title. "Do you sense crying in the penultimate piece?", Janáček writes of In tears – the best-known of these pieces, which I have scored just for strings and harp. "A foreboding of certain death. An angelic being lay in deathly anguish through hot summer nights." In the last piece, The owl has not flown away, the tawny owl's relentless cry alternates with a chordal motif that Janáček calls "an intimate song of life". I was hearing our local tawny owl calling at the time I was working on this piece, and it was very hard to decide how I should score the owl's haunting sound: in the end I decided on a bassoon, partly doubled by a solo viola, with a piccolo two octaves above. The owl – fate – has the last word. As Janáček wrote: "All in all, there is suffering beyond words contained here."
© David Matthews
Programme note
Samaagam comes from a Sanskrit word meaning confluence or flowing together. In realising this work from Amjad Ali Khan’s singing and playing, and in rehearsing it with the SCO, I have aimed to preserve the essence of both Indian and Western traditions so that they can flow into each other without artistic compromise. I have used the orchestration of Indian ensemble music in the pre-Bollywood era as inspiration and have also looked back to the ancient (i.e. pre equal temperament) Western tradition incorporating elements which, because of their antiquity, do not violate the rules of Indian music. The aim is through this process to joyfully explore the common musical “DNA” of both traditions.
This kind of endeavour needs time and commitment as people need to learn new skills. We have been very fortunate to have the commitment of the wonderful musicians of the SCO Lab music project (which form the concertino group in the work) and the presence of Amjad Ali Khan himself, during a series of workshops which began back in 2006.
Amjad Ali Khan has remarked: “every raga has a soul and every musical note is the sound of God”. In tonight’s performance of Samaagam 12 different ragas will be presented. Some will make only a fleeting appearance; others will be explored for longer. (Not as long as in India however, where it is not uncommon for a musician to perform one raga for 8 to 10 hours -the duration of an all night concert- in order to bring out its full character!)
Samaagam is structured in three sections:
I. Ganesh Kalyan - Subhalakshmi - Swar Samir
II. Medley of Ragas (featuring Lab music players):
Maarva – Durga – Malkauns – Kaushik Dhwani – Kalavati – Basant - Megh
III. Khamaj – Bhupali – Bhairavi
The ragas in the first section were all conceived and developed by Amjad Ali Khan, who feels that these ragas have been invoked rather than created.
His sons Amaan and Ayaan have written:
“New faces (ragas) come to his mind and ask him their names; as they have no names Abba names them and they become new ragas. Listening to most of Abba’s ragas, one feels that they are traditional ragas which were born thousands of years ago, but for some reason, not discovered.”
Ganesh Kalyan made its first appearance at the Ganesh Festival in Pune in 1992. In Indian mythology, Ganesh, the elephant god, is the remover of obstacles and bringer of good luck. Also first presented in 1992, Subhalakshmi is a tribute to Mrs Subhalakshmi Khan, Amjad Ali Khan’s wife. Swar Samir, played here with a seven beat time cycle, made its first appearance in 1964, at the Harballabh Music Festival in the Punjab. It is inspired by two traditional ragas: Raga Rageshri and Raga Joge.
The Medley of Ragas features 7 traditional ragas in quick succession, and features the Lab musicians in solo and group improvisation. Indian Ragas are designed to be played at different times of the day, and different seasons of the year. The majority of the Ragas in Samaagam are evening or night-time ragas, however Maarva, which opens the Medley, was originally conceived to be played at sunset, and Megh, which closes the Medley during the rainy season. If performed expertly enough, it is said to induce rain!
The closing section initially explores the popular and sensual Raga Khamaj, which is said to “turn the flower red with passion”. This is followed by a glimpse of Raga Bhupali described as a woman “in expectation of her lover, nervously putting on her bracelets and moving hither and thither like a swing”. Samaagam finishes with an exploration of Raga Bhairavi. Bhairavi is perhaps the most popular raga in Indian music. It is traditionally a morning raga, played at the conclusion of an all night concert. Due to its popularity (and the contemporary lack of nocturnal musical marathons!) it is accepted that Bhairavi can be performed at any time of the day or night.
© David Murphy
Programme note
Oliver Knussen (b.1952)
Music for a Puppet Court, puzzle pieces for two chamber orchestras (1983)
Puzzle 1 (“Iste tenor ascendit”)
Toyshop Music (after “Tris”)
Antiphon (after “iste tenor ascendit”)
Intrada and Puzzle 2 (“Tris”)
In 1972 I arranged two puzzle-canons, attributed to the sixteenth century English composer John Lloyd, for a small ensemble, and the following year added two short variations of my own. Music for a Puppet Court, completed in August 1983, is a recomposition and expansion of this material, scored for two antiphonally placed chamber orchestras.
The Lloyd puzzle-canons were found in a court songbook dating from the early years of Henry VIII’s reign. The canti firmi (tenors) are not notated except for crossword-like clues – in one case, for example, the Greek word tris (thrice) followed by four descending notes. The missing cantus was found to consist of these four notes played 3 x 3 times in steadily accelerating note-lengths, from breves to quavers. The solutions were found and published in 1951 by John E. Stevens.
The title Music for a Puppet Court is partly a reference to the historical origin of the puzzle-canons, and partly to the fanciful nature of the present instrumental settings. Orchestra 1 (left) centres around a celesta, a guitar, and 2 flutes; Orchestra 2 (right) around a harp and 2 clarinets. Each orchestra contains an assortment of winds, percussion and strings which sustain, amplify or echo music played by the “nucleii”.
© Oliver Knussen, 1983
Programme note
Kenneth Leighton (1929-1988)
Concerto for String Orchestra Op 39
Lento sostenuto
Molto ritmico
Adagio maestoso, all marcia e largamente – Allegro precipotoso – Largo ed alla marcia
By birth and by education – he was born in Wakefield, trained as an Anglican cathedral chorister and studied at Oxford – Kenneth Leighton was an English composer. But he was also, in a real sense, an Edinburgh composer. He spent more than 30 years teaching at Edinburgh University, the last 18 as Reid Professor of Music, and played a prominent part in the musical life of the city, not only as an academic but also as a conductor and pianist. Many of his major works were written in Edinburgh and first performed there.
It would be wrong to assume from this, however, that his music is in any way provincial or parochial. His early works, like the Symphony for Strings of 1949, are certainly very English, in the Vaughan Williams tradition, but his months of study with Goffredo Petrassi in Rome in 1951 widened his horizons more than a little. By the time he came to write the Concerto for String Orchestra in 1961 he was a very much more sophisticated, even cosmopolitan composer who had absorbed the most important developments in 20th century European music. He did not, on the other hand, abandon traditional values.
The melodic line on muted violas at the beginning of the Concerto might, in its extreme chromaticism, sound like a Schoenbergian twelve-note row, but it isn’t one and doesn’t actually behave like one. While it is the source of later thematic material, it does not exclude tonality – the work gravitates towards C major –- and it does not dominate Leighton’s structural thinking, which is more spontaneous than the serial appearances would suggest. Nor does it inhibit his melodic imagination, which flows freely in a score characterised above all by a contrapuntal virtuosity comparable to that of Tippett’s Concerto for Double String Orchestra.
The most significant aspect of the viola melody that opens the Lento sostenuto is the motif formed by its first four notes. It is presented again and again, though not in the same rhythm, as second violins, cellos and basses, and then first violins make their respective entries. There are two more main themes: one is introduced quietly by second violins over a dotted-rhythm ostinato on cellos; the other appears on second violins and violas to be joined by the rest of the ensemble in imitative counterpoint that grows in intensity on approaching a central fff tutta forza climax. The apex of the arch construction having been reached in this way, the tension is gradually relaxed as, over pizzicato cellos and basses, the opening theme is lyrically recalled on violins, all but dying out on muted solo instruments just before the closing bars.
The rhythmically ingenious, brilliantly sonorous, scherzo-like second movement, which is played pizzicato throughout, might well owe something to Bartók’s Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta –- not least the 'Bartók pizzicato' resounding against the finger-board towards the end. But its material, with a prominent minor third, derives from the pizzicato episode in the middle of the Lento sostenuto.
With its heavily articulated double-dotted rhythms reminiscent of Shostakovich’s Fifth Symphony, the slow introduction to the last movement seems, to be going in a different direction. At an early stage, however, violins introduce an idea derived from the Lento sostenuto which, as the tempo changes, is taken up at twice the speed as the robustly vigorous first theme of the main Allegro precipitoso section. It retains its impetus as broader melodic lines are set against it, just as they are set against busy fugal and scherzando episodes. They lead, intermittently but with ever gathering strength, to another fff con tutta forza climax, now arresting the impetus to make way for a coda recalling both the tempo and the emphatic gestures of the Adagio maestoso introduction to the movement.
© Gerald Larner
Programme note
György Ligeti (1923-2006)
Concerto Românesc (1951)
What is so fascinating about this rip-roaring early work is that it reveals Ligeti composing in a vein that contrasts starkly with the avant garde processes he was to evolve during the late 1950s and 1960s, and which were to play such an important role in the evolution of new music in the second half of the Twentieth Century. One might compare Lutoslawski’s early Lacrymosa, which is indebted to his Polish predecessor Szymanowski in much the same way that Ligeti here honours the memory of Bela Bartók. Likewise Ligeti’s piano music of the early 1950s pays homage to Bartók's collection Mikrokosmos.
The world Ligeti so vividly evokes here is that of Romanian folk music. The western part of modern Romania (Ligeti was born in Dicsöszentmárton – Romanian Târnäveni - and educated at the Conservatoire in Cluj, or in Hungarian, Kolozsvár), was for centuries a part of the Hungarian empire, while the East (Wallachia, Moldavia and Bessarabia) enjoyed some measure of independence. Indeed, it may be slightly misleading to speak of any single type of ‘folk music’ in this region, for each different aria – Romanian Transylvania, The Hungarian Palic country, Hungary’s northern borderlands abutting Slovakia and the Ukraine, and the Hungarian Puszta (the horse-rearing plains to the south, lying between the rivers Danube and Tisza) all had their own distinctive folk melodies.
Amongst his childhood experiences in his native Transylvania (now north west Romania) Ligeti remembered a wild band of musicians wearing animal masks bursting its way into the family courtyard and playing lively, dissonant folk tunes on violin and bagpipes; and even earlier, as a small boy of three, being fascinated when he encountered, in the Carpathian Mountains, a player of the alpine horn (called a bucium, after the Latin).
Ligeti’s Concert Românesc opens with a reflective Andantino or Larghetto, launched shyly by upper then lower strings, followed by woodwind, whose sad modal harmonies and open fifths suggest a medieval underlay (although there are also surprising affinities with Copland’s treatment of Appalachian folk music!). The bustling Allegro Vivace is very much in the spirit of Bartók’s thrusting Romanian Dances: piccolo and clarinet both have their say, and there’s a cheerful echo of that folk violin Ligeti encountered as a boy. The Adagio, embracing sad horn calls and a plaintive, oriental-hued cor anglais melody, just briefly blossoms, conjuring up memories of Kodály’s full-blooded Hungarian dance suites, before dying away in eerie spirals of intertwining woodwind.
The final movement, Molto vivace, is the longest, and here we find Ligeti at last spreading his composer’s wings and scampering into the more sophisticated world of Bartók’s The Wooden Prince or The Miraculous Mandarin: the dance element is heavily syncopated, with string and woodwind soloists alternately assuming the lead, rather like expressive jazz musicians. But there’s a surprise. Near the close, the dance just won’t let go: there is an exciting and utterly unexpected coda, in which the orchestra fails to muffle the high-riding solo violin, and we hear the music (amid mysterious horn calls) wander off into the distance, almost as if it were evanescing or being reabsorbed into the atmosphere, as electricity - before it is silenced by an abrupt farewell.
© Roderic Dunnett
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Inspiring Change
Monday, 5 July, 2010 (All day)
The Inspiring Change team visit Shotts Prison to create an opera with the prisoners.
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Inspiring Change
Wednesday, 7 July, 2010 (All day)
The Inspiring Change team visit Shotts Prison to create an opera with the prisoners.
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Inspiring Change
Monday, 19 July, 2010 (All day)
The Inspiring Change team visit Shotts Prison to create an opera with the prisoners.
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