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Programme NotesWe are fortunate to have original programme notes researched and written for our concerts by Joanna Lavender. They are posted here for general interest and may be used by other amateur orchestras if credited © Joanna Lavender/www.crowthorneorchestra.com (we’d be interested to know if you use them – please drop us an email). Click on a title to jump to the notes. We’ll add to the list after each concert and hope to build up a useful library.
Arnold Brahms Britten Bruch Chabrier Hummel Sullivan Tchaikovsky Little Suite No 1 Programme NotesLittle Suite for Orchestra Opus 53 (1955) Arnold was a prolific and popular English tonal composer. He acknowledged Hector Berlioz as an influence, and several commentators have drawn a comparison with Jean Sibelius. Malcolm began playing the trumpet at the age of 12 after hearing Louis Armstrong play. Five years later he won a scholarship to the Royal College of Music. Here he studied composition with Gordon Jacob and the trumpet with Ernest Hall. In 1941 he joined the London Philharmonic Orchestra as second trumpet and became principal trumpet in 1943. He became a full-time composer in 1948. His works are particularly popular with youth and amateur orchestras because of their ease, and because of the accessibility of his unique style, which combines the musical elements of classical, jazz, popular and folk. He wrote a huge body of music, including a large quantity of music for less popular instruments, and nine symphonies, seven ballets, two operas, one musical, over twenty concertos, two string quartets, and music for brass-band and wind-band. He also wrote 132 film scores. In October of each year there is an annual Malcolm Arnold Festival in his birthplace Northampton. His awards are impressive: Bard of the Cornish Gorseth, seven Honorary Doctorates of Music, Fellow of the Royal College of Music, the Ivor Novello Award, the Wavendon Award, a knighthood, Fellow of the British Academy of Composers and Songwriters, Incorporated Society of Musicians’ Distinguished Musician Award, Freedom of Northampton award. He said that music is “a social act of communication among people, a gesture of friendship, the strongest there is”. Other British composers writing in 1955 were Bliss (Violin Concerto), Tippet (Sonata for Four Horns), Vaughan Williams (Symphony no.8), Walton (Johannesburg Festival Overture); meanwhile Europe was overwhelmed by the modern atonal music movement (Lutoslawski, Milhaud, Nono, Stockhausen, Xenakis CSO Spring Concert 2010 Brahms Hungarian Dances Programme NotesHungarian Dances 1, 6 and 5 (1869) The Hungarian people, the Magyars, emerged from the intermingling of Finno-Ugric and Eastern Turkish peoples during the fifth to eighth centuries and so the origins of their traditional music are unique in Europe. Some of their songs possibly date back 2,500 years. Brahms became interested in specific folk songs, and he mixed the folk tunes with his own unique style to yield a sort of hybrid. The dances are recognisably Brahms, while still obviously folk. He refused to take credit for the melodies, referring to the pieces as ‘arrangements’. Almost all the pieces show sudden contrasts between restraint and explosive energy although either may come first. Like the Hungarian language, which invariably is stressed on the first syllable, there is usually a strong accent on the first beat of each bar of music. Hungarian folk music is characterised by pentatonic scales made of major seconds and minor thirds and the transposition of a melody several times, usually up or down a fifth. Brahms may have first become exposed to Hungarian gypsy music as early as 1850 through his friend, the Hungarian violinist Ede Reményi. He originally published his 21 Hungarian Dances as two batches of piano duets in 1869 (numbers 1-10) and 1880 (the remainder). He later arranged the first 10 dances for solo piano, and numbers 1, 3, and 10 for orchestra, while other composers, including Dvořák, orchestrated some of the other dances. Of the set, numbers 11, 14 and 16 are entirely original compositions. Number 5 was based on the csárdás by Kéler Béla entitled “Bártfai emlék”. Csardas were originally used as a recruiting dance by the Hungarian army, and are only just over two hundred years old. At the time, these modern tavern songs were denounced by the church and condemned by the aristocracy. The first set of dances were first performed by Brahms and Clara Schumann (top concert pianist and widow of Robert Schumann) at a private concert in 1869. The remaining two books were completed the following year but not published until 1880, being again first performed the same year by Brahms and Clara. In 1889, Theo Wangemann, a representative of the American inventor Thomas Edison, visited the composer in Vienna and invited him to make an experimental recording. Brahms played an abbreviated version of his first Hungarian dance on the piano. The recording was later issued on an LP. Although the spoken introduction to the short piece of music is quite clear, the piano playing is largely inaudible due to heavy surface noise. Nevertheless, this remains the earliest recording made by a major composer. Adolf Schmid is thought to have taught orchestration at The Julliard School in the 1930s after moving to New York, although he was English. He also orchestrated works by Elgar and Strauss, and worked for a ballet company in New York for some time. Other musical events of 1869: Grieg’s Piano Concerto was premiered at Copenhagen; Wagner’s opera Das Rheingold was debuted in Munich; Brahms was also writing the final movements of his German Requiem, and the French composer Berlioz died. CSO Summer Concert 2010 Soirées Musicales Programme NotesOp.9 Soirées Musicales Rossini had taken on self–imposed retirement after writing 39 operas. However, between 1830 and 1835 he wrote a collection of 12 songs with piano accompaniment which he named Soirees Musicales. Some of the suite by Britten is taken from this collection, although the March is from Rossini’s last opera William Tell. The second, third and fourth pieces are La Promessa, La Pastorella Delle Alpi, and L’invito. The Tarantella is from No.3 of Trois Choeurs Religieux, ‘La Charite’ of 1844, and is transformed from a slow serious choral piece to a fast and lively dance. When Britten was only 23, he scored them for a large orchestra. Here we have a combination of the Italian master’s outstanding gift as a melodist combined with the English composer’s great skill as an orchestrator. CSO Summer Concert 2010 Kol Nidrei Programme NotesAdagio on Hebrew Melodies for Violoncello and Orchestra (1883) Kol Nidrei is an Aramaic declaration recited in the synagogue before the beginning of the evening service on Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement. From the Hebrew melody in this incantation Bruch’s first theme is taken. In Bruch’s setting of the melody, the cello imitates the voice of the hazzan that chants the liturgy in the synagogue. The second subject of the piece is quoted from the middle section of a Jewish melody used by Isaac Nathan in his collection called Hebrew Melodies (1815). Bruch was born in Cologne, where he received his early musical training under the composer and pianist Ferdinand Hiller (to whom Robert Schumann dedicated his piano concerto). He had a long career as a teacher, conductor and composer, moving among musical posts in Germany. At the height of his reputation he spent three seasons as conductor of the Liverpool Philharmonic Society (1880-83). He taught composition in Berlin for twenty years. Bruch completed the composition in Liverpool before it was first published in Berlin in 1881. It is entitled ‘Adagio on Two Hebrew Melodies for Cello and Orchestra with Harp’ and consists of a series of variations on two main themes. His conservatively structured works, in the German romantic musical tradition, placed him in the camp of Romantic classicism exemplified by Brahms, rather than the opposing “New Music” of Liszt and Wagner. In his day, he was known primarily as a choral composer. “ I got to know both melodies in Berlin, where I had much to do with the children of Israel in the Choral Society. The success of ‘Kol Nidrei’ is assured, because all the Jews in the world are for it eo ipso.” (1882, letter to Emil Kamphausen; trans: Fifield). The prominent musicologist Idelsohn remarked the following on Bruch’s Kol Nidrei: “In his presentation, the melody entirely lost its original character. Bruch displayed a fine art, masterly technique and fantasy, but not Jewish sentiments. It is not a Jewish Kol-Nidre which Bruch composed.” This melody is also thought to have been used by Beethoven in his C# minor quartet. Bruch is now probably best known for his Violin Concerto Op. 26. CSO Spring Concert 2010 España Programme NotesThe España Rhapsody (1883) Chabrier was a Frenchman. He originally worked at the Ministry of the Interior. After discovering Wagner’s masterpiece Tristan und Isolde he realised his true passion for composition and quit the Ministry of Interior in 1880. He travelled to London (1882) and Brussels (1883) to hear the Ring cycle. However, the strength of Chabrier’s musical personality and his essential ‘Frenchness’ of temperament meant that he could only experiment with Wagner’s more superficial technical procedures. In 1882 Chabrier and his wife visited Spain, going on a tour from July to December taking in San Sebastian, Burgos, Toledo, Seville, Granada, Malaga, Cadiz, Cordoba, Valencia, Saragossa and Barcelona. In 1883 he wrote what became his most famous work, España, a mixture of popular airs he had heard and his own imagination. It was dedicated to the conductor Charles Lamoureaux, who conducted the first public performance in November 1883, in Paris. His letters written during his travels are full of good humour, keen observation and reactions to the music and dance he came across. In a letter to Edouard Moullé the composer details his researches into regional dance forms, giving notated musical examples. In a later letter to Lamoureux, Chabrier writes that on his return to Paris he would compose an ‘extraordinary fantasia’ which would incite the audience to a pitch of excitement, and that even Lamoureux would be obliged to hug the orchestral leader in his arms, so voluptuous would be his melodies. Although known primarily for two of his orchestral works, España (1883) and Joyeuse Marche, he left an important corpus of operas, songs, and piano music. He was admired by composers as diverse as Debussy, Ravel, Richard Strauss, Satie, Stravinsky, and the group of composers known as Les Six. Chabrier was especially friendly with the painters Monet and Manet, and collected Impressionist paintings before Impressionism became fashionable. Chabrier's friends from the artistic avant-garde in Paris included Faure and d'Indy, as well as painters Degas and Manet whose Thursday soirées Chabrier attended. In the view of his friend Duparc, this composition for orchestra demonstrated an individual style that seemed to come from nowhere; other contemporary musicians were more condescending. Although at first Chabrier formed this piece for piano duet, it evolved into a work for full orchestra. Encored at its first performance, and received well by the critics, it sealed Chabrier's fame overnight. Duparc, de Falla, and Mahler declared it to be “the start of modern music” and praised the work. Chabrier more than once described it as “a piece in F and nothing more”. Chabrier’s España inaugurated the vogue for hispanically-flavoured music, which found further expression in Debussy’s Iberia and Ravel’s Rapsodie Espagnole. CSO Spring Concert 2010 Hummel Trumpet Concerto Programme NotesTrumpet Concerto (1803) Most concertos have three movements: fast, slow, fast. They are designed to show off the virtuosic skills of the performer. Hummel would have heard and probably admired the previously written trumpet concertos by Leopold Mozart and Haydn (first performed in1800). However, he was undaunted and, like Haydn, wrote his concerto for the top trumpet player of the day, Weidinger. Based on earlier examples, he had developed an ‘organised trumpet’ with keys. Previously, trumpet players had only been able to play most notes by changing the position of their lips on the mouthpiece and producing harmonics. Reportedly, Weidinger’s improvements meant that more notes could be played in the lower register than before. Hummel wrote his concerto in December and it was performed on New Year’s Day to mark his succession to Haydn as Kapellmeister to the Esterhazy court orchestra. There are places in the second movement where Weidinger is believed to have changed Hummel’s music because of the execution of the instrument. By 1830 the keyed trumpet had been replaced by the early versions of valved trumpets. However it was still retained by some orchestras because it sounded better. The concerto was written in E major, but today people play it in E-flat major because it suits the modern trumpet construction better. Hummel gave no indication of the tempo (speed) of the movements and some markings are open to interpretation, for instance a 'wavy-line' in the second movement, which can be played as either a trill or vibrato. As a boy, Hummel was so talented at the piano that he was housed and tutored by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart for two years free of charge. He then took part in one of Mozart’s concerts, followed by a performing tour through Europe with his father ending in London. Clementi took him on for four years, and Haydn wrote a sonata for him. After he had played it Haydn walked up to the boy, thanked him and gave him a guinea. Later, he and Ludwig van Beethoven were taught by Haydn and Albrechtsburger becoming rivals and lifelong friends. At Beethoven’s request, Hummel improvised at his memorial concert where he met Schubert who later dedicated his last three piano sonatas to Hummel. After becoming Kapellmeister in Weimar, Hummel became close friends with Goethe and Schiller (literary giants). While in Germany, Hummel published a book on pianoforte instruction (1828), which sold thousands of copies within days. Through his teaching and writing he had a lasting affect on piano technique. His pupils included Czerny and Mendelssohn. Czerny had first studied with Beethoven, but upon hearing Hummel one evening, decided to give up Beethoven for Hummel. Was Hummel a ‘better’ pianist than Beethoven or just a nicer teacher? Schumann also applied to be a pupil of Hummel’s but was rejected owing to his unsteady temperament. Liszt wanted to study with Hummel, but his father refused to pay the high tuition fees. He went to study with Czerny instead. Notably, Chopin kept Hummel’s piano concerti in his active repertoire. Hummel was progressive in his ideas and started a pension program for retired musicians, giving benefit concert tours for them, and he was one of the first to fight for musical copyrights. CSO Summer Concert 2010 The Gondoliers Programme NotesMusic from The Gondoliers (1889) The Gondoliers or, The King of Barataria (1889) had an initial run of 554 performances. The songs are presented in this order: For the merriest fellows are we, tra la, There lived a king, as I've been told, Buon giorno signorine: A right down regular royal queen: Take a pair of sparkling eyes I am a courtier grave and serious Here we are, at the risk of our lives, No possible doubt whatever Ah me, you men will never understand Dance a cachucha, fandango, bolero, Gilbert and Sullivan collaborated on fourteen comic operas between 1871 and 1896; The Gondoliers was the twelfth. Producer Richard D'Oyly Carte brought Gilbert and Sullivan together and nurtured their collaboration. He built the Savoy Theatre in 1881 to present their joint works—which came to be known as the Savoy Operas—and he founded the D'Oyly Carte Opera Company, which performed and promoted their works for over a century. The story: Two just-married Venetian gondoliers are informed by the Grand Inquisitor that one of them has just become the King of “Barataria”, but only their foster mother knows which one. As Barataria needs a king to put down unrest in the country, they travel there to reign jointly, leaving their wives behind in Venice until the foster mother can be interviewed. It turns out that the king was wed in infancy to the beautiful daughter of the Spanish Duke of Plaza Toro, and so it seems he is an unintentional bigamist. But his daughter is in love the Duke’s common servant! The true identity of the king is revealed and all turns out well. For the first time, there was a command performance of The Gondoliers for Queen Victoria and the royal family, at Windsor Castle in 1891. Gilbert and Sullivan introduced innovations in content and form that directly influenced the development of musical theatre through the 20th century. This is an arrangement by Lieutenant Charles Godfrey MVO (1839-1919) who was bandmaster of the Scots Fusilier Guards from 1859. His subsequent commission in the Royal Horse Guards in 1898 was the result of a direct intervention by Queen Victoria ‘On account of his long service and being Master of a very fine Band in one of the Household Cavalry regiments’. He was one of three sons of Charles Godfrey who were all band masters. CSO Summer Concert 2010 Symphony No. 5 Programme NotesSymphony No. 5 (1888) Tchaikovsky wrote six symphonies, the last three presenting as a trilogy expressing his bitter struggle with “Fate”. The Fourth is panic-stricken, the Fifth is the most calm, and the Sixth portrays defeat. In each of these three symphonies a distinctive motto-theme portrays “Fate”. The Fifth Symphony moves through a progression from a melancholic key to a happier key – E minor to E major. I feel this expresses some optimism. Tchaikovsky said of this symphony that “it has a mountain of padding; an experienced eye can detect the thread in my seams and I can do nothing about it”. He evidently thought it was far from perfect. Unusually, he uses the same theme in all four movements (disguised and developed) – derived from a passage in Glinka’s opera ‘A Life for the Tsar’, significantly a passage using the words ‘turn not into sorrow’. ‘A Life for the Tsar’, was the first Russian opera to be continually performed at music theatres where it was the obligatory season opener. The opera is about a patriotic hero of the 17th century who gave his life in the expulsion of the invading Polish army for the newly elected Tsar. Tchaikovsky at numerous times in his career separated himself from the influence of certain composers. He wanted his music to be palatable to the whole of Europe, so he used Western harmonies and orchestrations. He shared many of the ideals of The Five such as an emphasis on nationalism. He was probably the first Russian composer to seriously work towards establishing a place for Russian music in European musical culture. He was the first Russian composer to conduct his own works to foreign audiences, an experience he initially found frightening because he had no confidence as a conductor. He was careful to maintain strong musical ties with a number of popular composers and performers including Hans von Bulow (pianist) and Nikolai Rubinstein (pianist). Tchaikovsky’s name was placed alongside that of the Russian novelist Dostoevsky by Russian commentators. Like Dostoyevsky’s characters, they felt the musical hero in Tchaikovsky’s music persisted in exploring the meaning of life whilst trapped in a fatal love-death struggle. Tchaikovsky was still considered a renegade, too dependent upon the good opinion of the West (Europe). In 1880 this assessment changed, practically overnight. During commemoration ceremonies for the Pushkin Monument in Moscow, Dostoyevsky charged that Pushkin had given a prophetic call to Russia for “universal unity” with the West. Dostoyevsky’s message spread throughout Russia, and disdain for Tchaikovsky’s music dissipated. It is not agreed how much these symphonies may be an open expression of homosexual longing (possibly for his nephew Bob Davydov). If openly expressed such feelings would have led to his exile or imprisonment and made life difficult for his children. Soviet censors suppressed letters openly expressing his homosexuality. Some attribute his death to suicide rather than the given cause of complications from cholera. In 1888 the earliest known recording of classical music was put on to a wax cylinder (Handel’s Israel in Egypt). Van Gogh cut off part of his ear and was painting his Sunflower series; Jack the Ripper murdered five women; an act in English parliament was passed to permit bicycles on the road; the Football League was formed; Brazil abolished the last remnants of slavery. Pop music in England at the time was ‘Drill, Ye Tarriers Drill’, ‘ Over the Waves’, ‘Where did you get that Hat?’ (Sullivan). During this year were also written: Brahms – violin sonata in D minor, Chaminade – Scarf Dance, Debussy – Arabesque, Delius – Hiawatha, Franck – Symphony in D minor, Grieg – Peer Gynt Suite, Mahler – Symphony no 1, Rimsky Korsakov – Russian Easter Festival Overture, Satie – 3 Gymnopedies, Strauss – Don Juan, Tchaikovsky also wrote his Sleeping Beauty ballet suite. CSO Spring Concert 2010 |
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