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Adams
THE CHAIRMAN DANCES JOHN ADAMS John Adams was born in Worcester, Massachusetts and, growing up in Vermont and New Hampshire, he was strongly influenced by the intellectual and cultural institutions of New England. He received both his BA and MA degrees from Harvard University, where he was active as a conductor, clarinettist, and composer. Anderson Leroy
Sandpaper Ballet and Chicken Reel Leroy Anderson was born in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and studied at Harvard. When he didn’t win a fellowship for further study in Europe, Anderson found the most direct route into a musical career closed off. So he went on to Graduate School, where he cultivated his Danish, French, German, Icelandic, Italian, Norwegian, Portuguese and Swedish! This accomplishment subsequently made him invaluable to military intelligence during World War II. In 1936, Arthur Fiedler, the radical young conductor of the Boston Pops, heard Anderson’s arrangements of some school songs at a Harvard Night Pops concert, and instantly recognised and valued qualities that the Harvard music department had not. He asked Anderson to submit some pieces to the Pops. Two years later, Anderson obliged with Jazz Pizzicato and, at Fiedler’s request, its complement, Jazz Legato, and both immediately became encore favourites. Sandpaper Ballet was written during five days before its first recording in 1954. Anderson said, “Many years ago while the soft shoe dance was still popular in vaudeville, sometimes dancers would sprinkle sand on the stage to create a crackling sound while performing. The drummers imitated this sound by attaching sandpaper on wooden blocks which they rubbed rhythmically against each other. This was the background for my piece Sandpaper Ballet. The sandpaper covered blocks are in this case imitated by two drummers. They use sand-paper in three different strengths, coarse, medium and fine, to create different effects.” Of Chicken Reel (1946), the composer said, “When I got out of the Army, I went back to Fiedler and asked if he needed any new arrangements. I said I had an idea for one called Chicken Reel, and he tried it out. Oh, he really liked that one. He had only one suggestion: ‘Let’s put in a punch at the end,’ he said. ‘Why don't you throw in the sound of a rooster crowing?’ We worked out the ending like that. We had the clarinetist blow into the mouthpiece without the instrument to achieve the effect, and it proved to be just what was needed to make the piece right!” Arutiunian
Trumpet Concerto ARUTIUNIAN Alexander Arutiunian was born in Yerevan, Armenia, and graduated from the Conservatory there in 1941, and then, in 1946, studied composition for two years at the House of Armenian Culture in Moscow. On his return to Armenia he claimed the position of Musical Director of the Royal Philharmonic Society and, in 1954, was appointed Musical Director of the Armenian Philharmonic Orchestra. The Concerto for Trumpet in A flat was Arutiunian’s sixth major composition and is his most famous work. Although not commissioned to write the concerto, he had intended to write one in 1943 and was inspired by his friend and native trumpeter, Tsolak Vartazarian, Principal Trumpet of the Armenian Philharmonic, but unfortunately Vartazarian was killed in military action during the war and the work got sidelined until its first performance in 1950. It did, however, became much better-known through performances by Timofei Dokshizer who introduced it to a wider audience when he emigrated to the United States, and was also the first to record it. The Trumpet Concerto was written as a concert piece that could be enjoyed by all audiences alike. As with much of his music, it is strongly influenced by his nationality, incorporating melodic and rhythmic flavours of Armenian folk music, but avoiding using any actual folk tunes themselves. Although written in three parts, the concerto was not conceived to have separate ‘movements’, and these parts should be considered more as sections within a one-movement work, and are joined together without pause. After the brief declamatory opening the work gets underway with a lively, dancing and lyrical theme. This is contrasted in the Meno mosso with a reflective interlude featuring beautiful slow melodic and sometimes haunting lines sung by the muted trumpet. The Tempo I sees the return of the spirited opening theme, and is now usually performed with a cadenza written in 1977 by Dokshizer, described by Arutiunian himself as ‘Wonderful’! Barber
Adagio for Strings, Op 11 BARBER Samuel Barber was born in West Chester, Pennsylvania, in 1910, and studied piano and composition at the Curtis Institute. Among his many awards were the Prix de Rome (1935) and the Pulitzer Prize (1935 and 1936). His works show a respect for romantic tradition as well as an original mind. Few twentieth century pieces have caught the public imagination more than the Adagio for Strings. Barber’s original score dates from 1936, when it formed the central movement of his String Quartet in B minor, Op 11. In 1937, Toscanini heard Barber’s Symphony No.1 at the Salzburg Festival and asked the composer to supply a piece for his first season with the newly-formed NBC Symphony Orchestra. Barber offered the First Essay and the Adagio, which were both broadcast on NBC radio on November 5, 1938. The inward nature of the latter probably helped reinforce its public significance, with performances at the funerals of such luminaries as President Roosevelt and Albert Einstein. The hushed but expressive theme, its modal flavour imparting an evocative timelessness, unfolds in a series of dynamic terraces; intensity increasing as the rapt mood is effortlessly sustained. Cellos take up the theme, and the music reaches an impassioned climax. A heartfelt pause, and the melody resumes its elegiac course, resolving as if with a benediction, on an imperfect cadence. The extent to which the Adagio overshadowed his other works understandably caused Barber frustration in later years. Yet it is difficult to gainsay Aaron Copland’s description: ‘The sense of continuity, the steadiness of the flow, the satisfaction of the arch that it creates from beginning to end... makes you believe in the sincerity which he obviously put into it’. Bax
Tintagel Sir Arnold Trevor Bax was born in London in 1883 and entered the Royal Academy of Music at seventeen, studying piano with Tobias Matthay and composition with Frederick Corder. Whilst still a student, he began composing and, by the time he graduated in 1909, he had achieved a certain measure of recognition. With Tintagel in 1917 and his first symphony in 1922, his fame was secure, a fact established on November 13, 1922, with a successful all-Bax concert in London. Financially independent, he did not have to earn a living from music and, consequently, could devote his entire energies to composition. He was named Master of the King’s Musick in 1941, and died in Ireland in 1953.Tintagel is Bax’s most famous tone poem, and contains the breath and heartbeat of Celtic lore and poetry. There are, in fact, various musical scores associated with the town on the North Cornish coast, including Elgar’s Second Symphony, completed there, and a tone poem by Rutland Boughton. In the late summer of 1917, Bax spent six weeks at Tintagel, where his companion was the pianist, Harriet Cohen, with whom he was having a passionate love affair, an affair which had reached the point where he was faced with choosing between her or his wife and children, and the orchestral full score is dedicated to ‘Darling Tania’, i.e. Harriet Cohen – with love from Arnold. Bax wrote an extended programme note to this work, though how far it celebrates his own passionate concerns for the moment, the listener must decide. But the vision of the sea, notable for its sense of sheer physical elation, underlined by the difficult and often exultant horn parts, give the music a personal impact that may well be driven by more than watching the breakers in an admittedly evocative and romantic setting.
The composer explains: “Though detailing no definite programme, this work is intended to evoke a tone picture of the castle-drowned cliff of Tintagel, and more particularly the wide distances of the Atlantic as seen from the cliffs of Cornwall on a sunny but not windless summer day. In the middle section of the piece it may be imagined that with the increasing tumult of the sea arise memories of the historical and legendary associations of the place, especially those connected with King Arthur, King Mark, and Tristram and Iseult. Regarding the last named, it will be noticed that at the climax of the more literary division of the work, there is a brief reference to one of the subjects in the first act of Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde. Beethoven
Symphony no 6 in F (Pastoral), Op 68 BEETHOVEN ‘Pastoral symphony, or Recollections of country life: an expression of feeling rather than tone-painting’ – this was Beethoven’s own heading for his work. But since the titles he gave to the movements do suggest scenic tone-painting, and since the end of the second movement enshrines three named bird-calls, Beethoven’s disclaimer is more intended to warn the listener against too much seeking for descriptive detail. The orchestral depiction of birdsong, thunder and other sounds had long been common (chiefly in opera), and the 6/8 ‘rocking’ rhythm was an accepted symbol for pastoral peace. But to incorporate a whole series of such things on a narrative basis into a fully worked-out Viennese symphony, this was something new. Beethoven departs from his norm here and writes five rather than four movements, the last three played without a break. It is in the key of F major, which the composer often used for his more cheerful music. The symphony was first given on the same occasion as the Fifth Symphony. The basic classical orchestra is used for the first three movements, but because the prevailing mood is gentle, no trumpets are called for until the third movement and no drums until the fourth. In that fourth movement Beethoven bursts out of the classical frame: the storm calls for the extra excitement of a piccolo (in addition to the two flutes) and for the extra weight of two trombones (an exception to the general orchestral rule that trombones go in threes). The trombones then remain for the finale. The ‘happy feelings’ make the first movement more serene, less assertive than Beethoven’s first movements generally are. Its opening effervescent theme for strings, over a sustained pedal point in violas and cellos, might very well reflect Beethoven’s own joy in the presence of nature. This theme is repeated continuously throughout the movement, though often in altered form. There is no second subject as such, nor even a formal development, but only a further repetition of fragments of this theme. After the exposition (repeated), a little falling phrase is passed with particular charm from instrument to instrument. The first fortissimo for all participating instruments does not arrive until the recapitulation. A coda makes a brief visit to another key before a quiet ending. The second movement (in B flat) depicts the murmuring brook by a close-moving, undulating motion in the strings. Two cellos join in this effect while the others align themselves with the double-basses. Above the murmur, a smooth melody unfolds. Eventually, after an enriched return of the opening, Beethoven briefly lets the birds sing (overlappingly): a nightingale (flute), quail (oboe) and cuckoo (clarinet). The third movement (returning to F major) shows the expected lively 3/4 rhythm of a scherzo but applies it to a humorous evocation of clumsy, countrified music making. An oboe tune is accompanied by a seemingly inept bassoonist who appears to be restricted to three ‘safe’ notes. A central section changes to a rough dance-rhythm, before the scherzo returns, but there is a quickening and then an interruption . . . . . . A trembling single note on cellos and double-basses indicates distant thunder and the full tempest eventually arrives. The key is F minor, but as the storm abates there is a return to a happier F major, confirmed by a simple rising-scale on a solo flute . . . . . . which passes straight into the ‘thanksgiving’ of the final movement. It begins with warmly held chords over which the shepherd’s call, or ranz des vaches is heard from a solo clarinet, then a solo horn, anticipating the ‘true’ principal theme of the movement which now rises from the violins. Beethoven dwells on the theme, expanding it with florid melody and hardly leaving it for a single bar. A muted horn gives a last echo of it as the symphony quietly closes. Symphony No7 in A, Op 92 With his Russian campaign in ruins, Napoleon’s power was sinking in 1812-13, but Europe still felt the ravages of war. A benefit concert held in the hall of Vienna University in aid of wounded Austrian and Bavarian soldiers was the occasion of the first performance of the seventh symphony on 8 December, 1813, which Beethoven himself directed. Highly successful from the first, it is a work which conveys great energy, particularly in its first and last movements. It is equally famous for the stillness and inwardness of its slow movement, with its ‘melody’ dwelling for so long on one repeated note. A classical orchestra is used: two each of flutes, oboes, clarinets, bassoons, horns and trumpets, with timpani and strings. A long, slow introduction in 4/4 time rises to a climax, and the main faster section in 6/8 begins quietly with a repeated rhythmical figure on the woodwind, from which a confident, cheerful melody develops. The rhythm persists even when the music turns to E major to close the exposition with a heavy ascent on the strings, followed by two empty bars like a question-mark. The exposition is repeated, and the development puts a new urgency into the music without losing its onward flow, leading to the recapitulation. When that ends (again with the ascent and question-mark), the cellos and double-basses begin a quieter diversion which soon switches to full-orchestral vigour again for the conclusion of the movement. A new key of A minor is announced by a chord on woodwind and horns. The lower strings now set up a kind of solemn dance, subdued at first but then gathering force and richness. A contrasting section in A major brings an easeful melody on clarinets and bassoons. The A-minor dance melody returns, varied, and the contrasting melody also makes a second appearance. But it is the ‘solemn dance’ which concludes the movement in a stripped-down bleakness, with a woodwind chord of A minor (like that of the opening) to seal the final bars. The third movement, in A major, is a scherzo which begins in the usual vigorous 3/4 (in two parts, each repeated) but with a surprise in store! The central contrasting section, or trio, turns out to be in 2/4 and is marked ‘much less fast’ (Assai meno presto). Its smooth tune in D major on clarinets, bassoons and horns is worked up to a forceful climax. The main section (Presto) returns. The trio is also heard again in full, and the main section again. A snatch of the trio is again heard (now not in D major, however), suggesting that there might even be a third statement. But this is not to be, as the faster music dismisses it and the movement ends. A brief call to attention, with trumpets and drums prominent, launches the finale on its whirlwind of a dance, where the trumpet-and-drum rhythm is a conspicuous feature. A quieter strain moves into C sharp minor, and then there is an emphatic close in E major. A repetition of all the previous material is marked. Beethoven is in fact using the framework of a traditional sonata-form movement, but the effect of the formal divisions is less striking than the succession of whirling or indeed stamping figures, interrupted by silent bars of expectation. Cumulative repetition keeps up the drive as the symphony rushes headlong to a close. Berlioz
Symphonie fantastique, Op 14 Rêveries (Largo) – Passions (Allegro agitato e appassionato assai) Unveiled in Paris on 6 December 1830, this was by no means the first French symphony – but it was the first to show Beethoven’s revolutionary impact, and remains the most often played of French symphonies. Its conception is unique: five ‘episodes in the life of an artist’, all based on a recurring musical theme meant to denote a lover’s obsession. It reflects Berlioz’s own stormy relationship with the Irish actress Harriet Smithson, but the episodes cannot claim to be literally autobiographical. Seeking the maximum force, expression and variety of tone-colour, the composer hoped for an orchestra of 220 players (the first performance had about 150). Among his demands were: high E flat clarinet as well as the usual clarinets; two cornets as well as two trumpets (in those days the trumpets still lacked valves, so could not play melodies as readily as the valved cornets); two tubas instead of one, and either piano or tubular bells to suggest the church bells in the finale. In the ‘Scene in the fields’, a distant thunderstorm is evoked by four-note rolled chords on the timpani. The first movement is the only one that can be regarded as traditionally symphonic. A slow section (Rêveries) leads to the main faster section (Passions), which has an exposition clearly marked to be repeated, and then what corresponds to a development followed by a recapitulation. But the impact is much more strongly of mood than of structure. The theme heard at the beginning of Passions on a solo clarinet, drawn out, first-rising and then falling, is the so-called idée fixe, an obsessional phrase which will take various guises. The second movement is in waltz-time: at a ball, the loved one is seen amid brilliance and festivity. The scene in the countryside presents a dialogue between the pipes of two shepherds (one oboe, one cor anglais). Rural tranquillity cannot console the distressed lover, for her theme rises in his imagination. Finally the lack of an answer from the second shepherd signifies desolation in the thundery landscape. The fourth movement is a nightmare march. The lover is being taken to the scaffold! The terrible moment arrives – the drums roll – the fatal theme is shrieked out by the high clarinet. Finally, another nightmare – a witches’ Sabbath in which the beloved participates. The grotesque dance in 6-8 time is succeeded by the measured tread of the Dies irae, a church chant from the Mass for the dead, before both these themes are heard together. Bernstein
Symphonic Dances from West Side Story BERNSTEIN Although Leonard Bernstein is not generally thought of as an orchestral composer, his compositions include three symphonies, several works for solo instrument and orchestra, and a number of suites derived from his theatre and stage works. It would be more accurate to say that Bernstein never tackled a work the same way twice, giving rise to a number of hybrid compositions, the ambiguity of which shows a composer caught between the European classical tradition and the American vernacular of jazz and musical. Opening at Broadway’s Winter Gardens Theatre on September 26, 1957, West Side Story notched up a total of 1,025 performances either side of its first American tour. With a book by Arthur Laurents and lyrics by Stephen Sondheim, this urban update of the Romeo and Juliet story broke new ground for music theatre, not least through the extensive and virtuosic choreography of Jerome Robbins. Lukas Foss and the New York Philharmonic gave the first performance of the Symphonic Dances on February 13, 1961, Bernstein dedicating the score to Sid Ramin, who, with Irwin Kostal, prepared the orchestration under the composer’s supervision. Rather than take matters in chronological order, the Symphonic Dances freely re-order a selection of numbers from the musical, making for a coherent and satisfying suite. The Prologue graphically depicts the violence between two street gangs, the Sharks, Puerto Rican immigrants, and the Jets, native Bronx Teenagers. Somewhere recalls the aspirations of the lovers, Maria and Tony, for a future of peaceful co-existence. A Copland-like Scherzo leads into the testosterone-fuelled high-school dance of Mambo. It is here that Maria and Tony first meet, join together cautiously in a Cha-Cha, and realise their mutual attraction in the Meeting Scene. The antagonism of the rival gangs, however, barely suppressed in a tense fugue on the song Cool, erupts in the Rumble, during which the gang leaders are killed. After a pensive flute cadenza, Maria’s I Have a Love looks forward to the musical’s tragic yet cathartic outcome, a brief reminiscence of Somewhere providing a questioning conclusion. Bliss
Suite from Things to Come Bliss studied with Stanford, Vaughan Williams and Holst, and served in the army during World War I. During the immediately ensuing years his output suggested that a daringly experimental talent had been born in Britain. His Colour Symphony (1922), based on the heraldic symbolism of primary colours, was also striking, but Bliss's later works revealed a change of direction. The independence and vigour of expression were still there, but were now related rather to the English romantic tradition. His knighthood in 1950 and his appointment as Master of the Queen’s Music in 1953 seemed to consolidate his conservatism. The music from which this suite of six movements is formed was written in 1935 for H. G. Wells’s film, ‘Things to Come’. In the film the author envisaged our present civilisation destroyed by a world war, and showed a saner and finer world built on the ashes of the old. Bliss skilfully composes music which both enhances the visual effect of the film, whilst successfully evoking these same pictures when heard alone in the concert-hall, for example at the opening of Pestilence, or in the incessant drive of Machines. The film opens with a children's party at Christmas time; among the toys are tin soldiers, trumpets and drums (Ballet for Children). The enemy attack from the air without warning (Attack). After years of fighting, disease ravages mankind (Pestilence). A new hope is born (Reconstruction). New and powerful machines build the new world (Machines). The final movement is simply entitled March. Borodin
In the Steppes of Central Asia BORODIN The Five, the so-called Mighty Handful, so named by the Russian critic and librarian, Vladimir Stasov, were the principal nationalist composers in later nineteenth-century Russia, following the example of Glinka, their forerunner. Borodin, like some others of the group, followed another profession than music, winning distinction as a professor of chemistry. His work as a composer was limited by his other duties and preoccupations, and at his death he left a number of compositions unfinished, to be completed by his friend Rimsky-Korsakov and others. The ‘musical picture’ In the Steppes of Central Asia was completed in 1880 and published two years later. Intended as a contribution to a series of illustrations from episodes in Russian history to mark the silver jubilee of Tsar Alexander II, it depicts the progress of a caravan across the steppes, escorted by Russian troops. Borodin makes use of a Russian melody and a contrasting oriental theme, which he later combines, winning wide contemporary popularity for its composer. Brahms
Symphony No 4 in E minor, Op 98 Brahms’s final symphony, which reasserts the commanding mood of the first, yet with even a hint of tragedy, was the only one to receive its first performance under the composer’s baton, at Meiningen on October 25, 1885. The form of the last movement is unique in the symphony up to that time – a passacaglia, a set of variations built over a short recurring theme in the bass. The achievement of that structure was already forecast in his St Anthony Variations. The first movement observes the usual sonata-form construction, but opens with a captivating and unusual ‘singing’ melody. The exposition is repeated, and the development starts as if once again the music has returned to the opening. But the recapitulation, with subtlety, presents the opening theme, not in singing form, but in slow, solemn notes. The end comes in the minor key and with full orchestra, except for the trombones, which are reserved for the finale. The second movement presents a gentle summons on the horns which turns the music to E major, with its remarkable juxtapositions with the Phrygian mode, and thence to one of the composer’s most fetching lyrical melodies as a second subject on the cellos, growing thematically out of strongly marked semiquaver triplets. The third movement, opening with a rollicking tune in C major, has all the energy and exhilaration expected of a scherzo, but in 2/4, rather than ¾ time. Moreover it is not in scherzo form, but in a taut, small-scale sonata-form, where the second subject, in G on the violins, is almost as jolly as the first. The finale starkly unleashes the trombones, together with brass and woodwind, to deliver the sequence of eight chords in the home key, remarkably harmonised, which is its theme. It is founded on a chaconne bass which Bach used for the last chorus of his 150th church cantata. In all, thirty variations follow, merging one into the next so that the effect is of large symphonic periods, and not small piling of bricks. The first twelve are in the home key, with the first nine rugged in character and greatly varied in all that Brahms adds above or below the theme itself. With the next two (10 and 11) tension grows less as they prepare the way for the moving flute solo (Var. 12). Here in placid style and in a broader 3/2 time this instrument cloaks the theme in a disguise hard to penetrate. Variations 13, 14 and 15, still in 3/2 time, are set in the major key, each of them enveloped in a kind of mist. And when, after being silent for ten variations, the trombones re-enter at the fourteenth with solemn pp chords, remote and impressive, the mood is that of some far-removed spirit world. Then at the sixteenth variation, the minor key and ¾ tempo return. From here, ten further variations are hammered out remorselessly by full orchestra. The omission of trombones from the remaining five variations reduces the tension to a degree, though the underlying mood of agitation is far from relieved. A Più allegro coda of no less than fifty-nine bars follows. In a great outburst of wintry sounds, defiant in their opposition to the major key, Brahms takes the notes of the adapted chaconne theme and, in partly canonic form, drives them through a extraordinary series of modulations which stand out like an epitome of all the many chromatic harmonies heard not only in this movement, but throughout the symphony. As the end approaches, there is a turn towards a more positive E major, but this in term is rejected, and the tragic E minor leaves its mark of destiny. Academic Festival Overture, Op 80 BRAHMS Brahms pretended to belittle the work as a pot-pourri, that is, merely a stringing together, but the music can be analysed in the usual symphonic first-movement form, and is kept under his habitually restraining hand. The tunes, including an initiation song, The Foxes’ Ride, as a duet for two bassoons, make their appearance and reappearance, with the climax reserved for the most famous of the songs, presented once only, as a coda at the end, Gaudeamus igitur, the words of which run: So let us rejoice while we are young … Symphony No 2 in D, Op 73 BRAHMS Brahms’s symphonies, a series which he delayed launching until he was over forty, are ‘classical’ in the context of his time. They inherit the structures and melody-types bequeathed by Beethoven, and they move cautiously forward from Beethoven’s and Schubert’s harmonies, not making the big jump into chromatic language with Liszt and Wagner. The Beethoven legacy may not have been without its burden. When challenged on the resemblance of the main theme of the finale of his first symphony to the ‘Joy’ theme of the finale of Beethoven’s Ninth, Brahms is said to have replied: ‘Any ass can see that!’ Brahms’s symphonies do, however, avoid the Viennese minuet or its successor, the scherzo in 3/4 time, seeking some other light contrast to set between the slow second movement and weighty finale. After delaying until his mid-career to launch his first symphony, Brahms was sufficiently confident to begin writing his second immediately after. On 30 December 1877 it received, under Hans Richter’s baton in Vienna, its successful first performance. Away from the gravity and portentousness of his First Symphony, this is a sunny work and there has even been the suggestion that it represents ‘Brahms’s Pastoral symphony’. A tuba is added to the orchestral force required in the previous symphony. The first movement opens with a three-note phrase on cellos and double-basses, D-C sharp-D, which appears merely introductory but in fact gives a pointer to much of what happens later in this close-packed music. A ‘Romantic’ horn-call follows as the principal theme, and later a tune emerges in F sharp minor for violas and cellos in thirds, a special warmth of tone being felt from the fact that the cellos take the upper line. Density of texture and continuity of flow are achieved within a sonata-form frame, with an unmistakable feeling of repose at the coda in the smooth singing of horns and strings. A subtle first movement is followed by an equally subtle second (in B major), begun by a slow, outpouring theme on the cellos. A later theme in lighter vein with syncopated accents moves on into a more stormy section, and finally a variant of the first part returns. Not called a scherzo, the third movement in G major is nevertheless light, melodious and rhythmically engaging. A graceful section in 3/4 time (oboe solo, with a notable pizzicato accompaniment for the cellos) is succeeded by a contrasting section (trio) in 2/4. The first section, varied, returns and is followed by a different trio in 3/8 and then by yet another return. But in all these sections a permutation of the same musical germ may be found. A sonata-form structure makes a powerful finale for the symphony, starting sotto voce on strings alone with a theme which uncurls towards mighty deeds, followed by a broader second subject. In the development Brahms indulges in the most dextrous contrapuntal tricks: themes are inverted, combined, or shaped anew. All these feats of inspired craftsmanship, never artificially contrived, lead to the recapitulation and to the intensely dramatic and wonderfully effective coda. Brahms wrote to Eduard Hanslick, the famous critic: ‘So many melodies fly about, one must be careful not to tread on them’. Bruch
Concerto No 1 in G minor The first (and the only famous one) of Bruch’s three violin concertos had its first hearing on 24 April 1866 at Koblenz, with the composer conducting and with a soloist not destined for historical celebrity, Otto von Königslöw. But in revising it, Bruch sought the assistance of Joachim, the famous associate of Brahms, who two years later gave the first performance of the work in the form now known. The composer was again the conductor. Not to be found here is the spirit of mighty effort which goes into Brahms’s concerto. Instead, there is brilliance with a tinge of melancholy, as in Mendelssohn’s concerto: like that work, Bruch’s is in a minor key with a major-key finale and, between them, a smoothly intense middle movement linked to the first without a break. Like Mendelssohn, Bruch hastens to introduce the soloist, without a prolonged orchestral tutti. True to tradition, it has three movements, but in terms of sheer musical material there is as much in the finale as in the other two movements put together and although the conventional fast-slow-fast sequence is retained, the surprising fact is that sonata form is used for all three movements, while tradition calls for ternary song form for the slow movement and (usually) a rondo for the finale. Bruch was naturally aware of this and, not without reason, first chose the title Fantasy for the work. However, he allowed Joachim to persuade him that Concerto was a more effective title. The additional title Vorspiel (Prelude) was retained for the opening Allegro. The absence of any marked division between the movements emphasises the Fantasy character, as do the recapitulations in the first and second movements, which are clearly abbreviated and turned into transitions. The Hungarian-style theme of the finale, which has a close affinity with that of Brahms’s Violin concerto, may have been provided by Joachim, who was Hungarian born. The first movement avoids ‘strict’ form altogether, and is not complete in itself, but is a kind of large-scale, ruminating prelude to what is to come, comparable in many ways to the Vorspiel of a Romantic opera. Like many operatic preludes, it has a structural significance, to be discovered when the rest of the music is heard. The linked slow movement comes to a full close; the finale is self-contained in its own pattern. Unusually, the material of the orchestral introduction bears no relation to the main body, and is not heard again. Preceded by a little repeated phrase on the woodwind which acts as a motto for the prelude, the violin embarks on a long delivery, rhapsodic at first and then with an assertive theme. After a high trill, the soloist eventually yields to the orchestra, where the rhythm in the bass is important in the design. The first main subject has some grandeur, whilst a second more romantic subject completes the material. The discussion is close and fairly equally divided, and partly for this reason no disappointment is felt by the absence of a formal reprise. The themes seem to coalesce and melt into the violin’s final cadenza. The orchestra then breaks out in E flat (allegro moderato), and so leads into the Adagio. The peaceful but intense main subject, reinforced by the use of the solo violin’s lower strings, has an important continuing phrase, and there is a separate ‘second subject’, first to be heard in the bass under the soloist’s passage-work. An interesting point is the version in G flat major; the later recapitulation is not precise, but the effective coda is allusive. An energetic orchestral introduction leads from E flat to G major, which the solo violin establishes with a strong bravura main theme, making effective use of double-stopping. A good deal is made of this in various guises; then after a bridge subject comes a broader second main theme. The development is clear to follow; there is a tutti climax, before an important coda, again allusive. An abbreviated version of the opening theme serves as the closing statement. Burgon Geoffrey
The Chronicles of Narnia Suite Geoffrey Burgon came relatively late to music. As an adolescent he became interested in jazz and taught himself the trumpet in order to join a jazz band at school. He began composing when he entered the Guildhall School of Music and Drama although he was still intent on becoming a trumpet player. Composition, however, began to absorb him more and more and when he asked his teacher Peter Wishart whether he thought he would make a composer, Wishart’s reply was, “Well, you don’t seem to be able to stop, do you?” Burgon published his Chronicles of Narnia Suite in 1991, from music he had written for the highly-successful BBC TV dramatization of C S Lewis’s series of seven books written in the 1950s. In the first book, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe’, we are introduced to four sibling children, Peter, Susan, Edmund and Lucy, who are sent to a large house during World War two to live with a kind old Professor. There they find a giant wardrobe in an empty room. The wardrobe leads to the land of Narnia, a fictional setting for all seven books, controlled by the White Witch, and where it is always winter, without Christmas, no less! They learn that the true ruler of Narnia, Aslan the lion, will return to rescue Narnia from its eternal winter…and so the story unfolds. The other books contain many more characters and places. Butterworth
A Shropshire Lad (Orchestral Rhapsody) BUTTERWORTH George Butterworth was born in 1885 and was killed in action in 1916 during the Battle of the Somme. His response to the poetry of Houseman was intense, and he composed a strikingly beautiful cycle of songs from that poet’s series A Shropshire Lad. One of these, Loveliest of trees, the cherry now, became the theme for A Shropshire Lad, an orchestral rhapsody, scored with economy but great subtlety of colouring. The main subject is deftly hinted at in the evocative opening phrases for violas and clarinets, and the interplay between woodwind and strings as the first climax is prepared is proof of this composer’s high technical skill – a mastery which always lets the music’s ideas come through with maximum effect. The tender passage which follows this climax, marked by quiet string work and some lovely oboe phrases, is lit with poetic radiance. Soon another climax emerges, with brass carrying the melodic line for a spell. But stillness returns and the work fades into the mists of the countryside with some violin writing which shares the same lineage as that in Vaughan Williams’s The Lark Ascending.
Britten
Courtly Dances from ‘Gloriana’ BRITTEN In February 1952, Queen Elizabeth II came to the throne. During March of that year, Britten went skiing in Austria with George and Marion Harewood. Lord Harewood suggested to Britten that he should write a ‘big national opera’ to mark the Queen’s Coronation in June 1953. Permission was obtained from the Queen and the project went ahead, based on Lytton Strachey's book ‘Elizabeth and Essex’. The opera, entitled Gloriana, was first performed on June 8 at a Royal Gala at Covent Garden in the presence of the Queen, who had been crowned six days earlier. That first performance is already a legend; the audience, stiff with diplomats, civil servants, and others to whom Merrie England would have represented a musical experience of the most adventurous and intellectual kind, had no idea what to make of Gloriana. Many were bored, many openly showed their disrelish, and many regarded the choice of subject as an outrage against good taste. But the audiences in the 1953-4 Covent Garden season liked the work and it was toured by Covent Garden to the Rhodes centennial exhibition in Bulawayo, formerly Southern Rhodesia, in August and in the then British provinces in 1954. It was, however, to wait another twelve years for its next staging. Realising, perhaps, that the music’s stage future was dim, Britten extracted a concert suite of four movements (with optional tenor solo), which was first performed in Birmingham in September 1954, published the choral dances for unaccompanied chorus, and combined the five courtly dances which occur during different parts of the action. The dances are played without a break, beginning with a lively March, followed by a quick Coranto. A slow and majestic Pavane is contrasted with a traditional Morris Dance, quick and with many dotted rhythms. The final dance, La Volta, is fast and rhythmic in 6/4 time, culminating in a return of the opening March. Canteloube
Chants d’ Auvergne Joseph Canteloube (1879-1957) studied at the Schola Cantorum in Paris. His compositions include instrumental works, songs, and the operas Le Mas and Vercingétorix. Today he is best known for his delightful collection of Songs from the Auvergne. The first two books, containing eleven songs, came out in 1924. Book I included perhaps the best-known, Bailèro, which Canteloube heard in 1900, sung by a shepherdess on a mountainside overlooking Vic-sur-Cère, in Cantal, her song was accompanied by a distant shepherd singing the refrain. The first book also contains three examples of the bourée, the characteristic dance of the Auvergne, but they bear little resemblance Chabrier
Rhapsody, España Having first earned his living as a French government official, Chabrier became a composer of repute without venturing into symphony or concerto. Back from a journey to Spain in 1882, he is said to have played to the French conductor Charles Lamoureux, a brilliant piano fantasia on Spanish themes which the conductor encouraged him to score for orchestra. The result, España, features some sumptuous and sparkling orchestration, with two harps helping to simulate the sound of guitars and prominently used extra percussion, especially the tambourine. After an opening that sets the atmosphere, a solo muted trumpet in a low register delivers a pattering tune, taken over by solo horn. Later the whole horn section peals out a joyous descending theme, leading to a climax. A change of mood then brings a softer melody Coates
The London Suite (London Everyday) COATES It seemed that the Knightsbridge March had touched a chord in the nation’s soul as no other work had done since Elgar’s Land of Hope and Glory. Covent Garden, described as a ‘tarantella’, is a lively movement, totally descriptive of the bustle associated with that part of London, but it’s a ‘tarantella’ only in that it employs that dance’s 6/8 rhythm, as the main theme has a Cockney exuberance about it! Quite why Coates decided to feature the popular tune, ‘Cherry Ripe’, is not clear. Perhaps the reference to cherries was natural in describing Covent Garden with its fruit and vegetable market! Or maybe he just happened to spot a similarity in the interval between the first two notes of his tune and the older melody. Westminster carries the subheading of ‘Meditation’. The lovely opening chord-sequence played by strings and woodwind traces the outline of the main theme that soon emerges on a solo cello. This lyrical outpouring eventually gives way to a slightly more pressing idea presented by violins and horns which builds to an imposing climax before subsiding to allow the first tune to return, now played by all the strings. In this full orchestral guise, the quasi-religioso flavour, albeit somewhat ‘à la Ketèlbey’, is more in evidence, intended, perhaps, to portray the great Abbey at Westminster. There will, however, be no doubt as to the source of inspiration of the final bars. As for the finale, the composer himself said: ‘It is extraordinary the way in which the Knightsbridge March never fails to rouse the dullest of audiences. I cannot understand the reason for it, but over and over again, when I have been conducting it in public, both in this country and abroad, the moment the double-basses begin the reiterated quaver beats at the opening I can feel a sensation of excited anticipation coming from the audience and striking me in the back of the head’. Pages have been written attempting to explain the remarkable appeal of this fine piece, but no words can even begin to account for its magic. In bald terms, it contains two splendid principal themes, a riveting fanfare figure and truly masterly orchestration. But the end result is much, much more than that! Coates wrote a sequel in 1936, the London Again Suite. Copland
Appalachian Spring Suite COPLAND (1900 – 1990) The score carries the inscription 'Ballet for Martha'. Appalachian Spring was composed for Martha Graham's company, and with her choreography was given its first performance on 30 October 1944 in Washington, DC. Deliberate Americanism, equally characteristic both of Graham and Copland, achieved artistic success in this work. The original scoring was for only thirteen instruments but Copland, in 1945, arranged the music for symphony orchestra though still using modest resources. A piano (a 'normal' orchestral instrument with the composer) is required, as well as assorted percussion including tabor, a rustic drum without snares.' The music is continuous but with frequent changes of tempo. A beginning in A major gives a typical Copland sound (suggesting stillness and openness), which will be recalled at the close of he work, when the vigorous action is over. In a programme note, the composer himself divided the music structurally as follows: Very slowly: Introduction of the characters, one by one, in a diffused light. Fast: A sudden burst of unison strings in A Major arpeggios starts the action. A sentiment both exalted and religious gives the keynote to this scene. Moderate: Duo for the bride and her intended - scene of tenderness and passion. Quite fast: The revivalist and his flock. Folksy feelings - suggestions of square dances and country fiddlers. Still faster: Solo dance of the bride - presentiment of motherhood. Extremes of joy and fear and wonder. Very slowly (as at first): Transition scenes reminiscent of the introduction. Calm and flowing: Scenes of daily activity for the bride and her husband-farmer. [This section presents five variations on a theme which is first given out by a solo clarinet - a tune called Simple gifts, which the composer borrowed from a collection of melodies from the rural American 'Shaker' community.] Moderate (coda): The bride takes her place among the neighbours . . . Finally the couple are left 'quiet and strong in their new house'. Rodeo, ballet-suite for orchestra COPLAND Aaron Copland occupies an unassailable position in American music. The son of Jewish emigrants from Poland and Lithuania, he was born in Brooklyn in 1900, into circumstances comfortable enough to allow him to study music. He took lessons from Goldmark, a distinguished emigrant from Vienna, and in 1920 went to Paris, where he studied with Nadia Boulanger, the first of her American pupils. In Europe he was able to meet a number of the leading young composers of the day and to see performances by Diaghilev’s Ballets russes. At the same time he was feeling his way towards a characteristically American style of composition that should be as clearly recognisable as the national style of the late nineteenth-century Russian composers. In 1924 Copland returned to America, where his compositions began to attract interest. At the same time he continued to maintain contact with musical trends in Europe and with expatriate American composers. Rodeo was commissioned by the Ballet russe de Monte Carlo, as a cowboy ballet for its own repertory, having first been impressed by Billy the Kid. It proved an enormous success, receiving twenty-two curtain calls on opening night, as the audience was plainly delighted with the ‘cowgirl-gets-her-cowboy’ plot. The ballet scenario, as described in the programme, deals ‘with the problem that has confronted every American woman, from earliest pioneer times, and which has never ceased to occupy them throughout the history of the building of our country; how to get a suitable man!’ The plot traces the adventures of a cowgirl at Burnt Ranch, who competes with the city girls for the attention of local cowboys. The story carries her to a rodeo, then to a Saturday night dance at the ranch house. A roper and a wrangler fight for her. The girl then realises she is in love with the roper and goes off with him, whilst the wrangler finds consolation with the rancher’s daughter! In the autumn of 1942, Copland adapted four dance episodes from the ballet score into an orchestral suite which received its first performance at a concert by the Boston Pops Orchestra, under the baton of Arthur Fiedler, on May 28, 1943. The first movement (Buckaroo Holiday) uses motives from two American folk-songs, ‘Sis Joe’ and ‘If He’d Be a Buckaroo by His Trade’, which the composer found in Our Singing Country. In the ever-popular finale (Hoe Down), he quotes two square-dance tunes, ‘Bonyparte’ and ‘McLeod’s Reel’. The intervening movements are entitled Corral Nocturne and Saturday Night Waltz respectively. Corigliano
A Promenade Overture JOHN CORIGLIANO New-Yorker, John Corigliano, wrote hisPromenade Overture in 1981 for the centenary of the Boston Symphony, but with the specification that the work would be played by the Boston Pops, who gave the first performance, under the direction of John Williams, on July 10, 1981. Corigliano grew up in the world of symphony orchestras. His father, also named John, was the first American‑born-and‑trained concertmaster of the New York Philharmonic. It is only natural, then, that the younger Corigliano, when he became a composer, should write a great deal of music for orchestra. Corigliano’s best-known works include his sensuous music for the Francois Girard film ‘The Red Violin’ (1997), his touching tribute to AIDS victims, Symphony No. 1 (1991), and his heady Pulitzer Prize winner, Symphony No. 2 (2001). His output, in a consciously accessible style, ranges from concertos to film scores and includes much vocal and dramatic music. Debussy
Prélude à l'après-midi d'un faune 'Impressionism' is the label that clings to the music of Claude Debussy, though it was not one he liked. It was a term first attached in the 1870s to the work of painters such as Monet, whose concern with the effects of light and colour made their images fleeting rather than firm. In outdoor paintings Monet would allow night and fog, for example, to obscure the outline of objects seen. Thus Debussy's music often avoids regular, sharply outlined phrases; likewise its chords seem to pass meltingly from one to the next. With its delicate, suggestive orchestral colours, and with a time-span much briefer than that of most 'descriptive' orchestral works, this prelude was seen as a revolutionary work. But, so far from having to battle with a puzzled public, it was an immediate success and won an encore at its first performance in Paris in 1894. The poet Stéphane Mallarmé, known personally to the composer, published in 1876 his L'après-midi d'un faune: a faun (the mythical creature, half-man, half-goat), resting in a warm afternoon, speaks of his remembered love-ecstacies. In an early programme-note, written or at least approved by Debussy, the piece is called 'a very free illustration of the poem'. In the final section the faun, 'tired of pursuing the timorous flight of the nymphs and naiads, succumbs to intoxicating sleep'. A flute, the traditional instrument associated with such scenes of rustic love-making, has a prominent part, with three flutes required. Also heard are two 'ancient cymbals' or crotales, whose delicate chime is used only towards the end. The air of haziness and languor is conveyed by the flute's opening tune, suggesting an initial ambiguity of key. A contrast of sound comes with a smoother, rather heavier section, before the return of the original theme as the music fades into sleep. Danses sacrées et profanes DEBUSSY In 1903 Pleyel commissioned Debussy to compose a work to demonstrate the musical potential of his company’s new design of harp, a ‘chromatic harp’ with a string for each semitone, which they had devised in 1897. Not to be outdone, the rival Érard firm, principal manufacturer of the conventional pedal harp, hired Ravel to write a piece to display the expressive range of their instrument. Érard’s design eventually proved the more successful, but like Ravel’s Introduction and Allegro, Debussy’s Danses (1904) are now equally well-established in the conventional pedal-harp repertoire. The Danse sacrée begins with strummed chords over a misty background, and showcases increasingly complex and rapid figurations and harmonies, all amid reticent shadows of the orchestral support: it has an antique character, coloured by modal rather than tonal harmony, influenced perhaps by the style of Satie’s Gymnopédies for piano (two of which Debussy orchestrated), but far more sophisticated. In the composer’s own words: ‘It’s not possible to write down the exact form of a rhythm, any more than it is to explain the different effects of a single phrase’. The contrasting Danse profane introduces a gentle waltz theme in D major, with a definite hint of virtuosity, which is developed with exquisite grace and increasingly elaborate harp ornamentation, and builds to an impassioned climax and deliberately understated, almost tongue-in-cheek finish. Interestingly, both works initially provoked criticism in Paris for a lack of formal structure and, strangely enough, for perceived dissonance. Later, the Swiss conductor, Ernest Ansermet, pointed out that the Danse sacrée wasbased on a piano piece by his teacher, Francisco de Lacerda, whilst composer, Manuel de Falla, claimed the Danse profane as one of Debussy’s ‘Spanish’ pieces. Delius
Summer Night on the River DELIUS The baptismal names Fritz Theodor Albert reveal Delius’s German descent, but he was born in Bradford, calling himself Frederick Delius. He was in his mid-twenties before enrolling for study at the Leipzig conservatory. There he met Grieg, who was to influence him both in harmonic style, and in a belief in folk-music as a composer’s raw material. He made his home in France but his appearance at a Delius Festival in London in 1929 (by which time he had become blind) was the moment of his most significant recognition. The tone poem Summer Night on the River is a companion piece to On Hearing the First Cuckoo in Spring, and was introduced at the same concert, in Leipzig on the 2nd October, 1913. However, it was not intended to be the kind of impressionistic setting that The First Cuckoo is. The pictorial description is direct rather than suggestive, the vague harmonies bring up a picture of mists settling over the river, with the rhythms suggest the rocking of small boats. A cello solo is the main melodic idea – a beautiful song, creating an atmosphere of peace and mystery that embraces the river on a summer night. Dvorak
Symphony No 8 in G major, Op 88 DVOŘÁK Dvořák’s nine symphonies span a period of nearly thirty years. The first two were written in 1865, and the last in 1893. In 1884 Dvořák bought a small property at Vysoka and it was there that, in the autumn of 1889, he wrote his Eighth Symphony, commemorating his admission as a member of the Emperor Franz Josef’s Czech Academy of Science, Literature and the Arts on the score’s title page. The first performance was in Prague in February 1890, followed by a performance in London under the composer’s direction in April, and in June in Cambridge, where he received an honorary doctorate from the University. The symphony was published in London by Novello, strong supporters of the composer, whose Vienna publisher, Simrock, had proved keener to buy shorter pieces, for which there was always a ready market. A performance under Richter in Vienna had to wait until January 1891. Apart from its hint of birdsong, the relaxed and happy feelings of this symphony suggest the nickname of Dvořák’s ‘Pastoral’, showing the composer’s desire to bring freshness to symphonic form. The symphony, scored for an orchestra that includes piccolo, cor anglais and tuba, in addition to the pairs of other woodwind instruments, four horns, trumpets, three trombones and tuba, timpani and strings, is imbued with the spirit of Bohemia. Trombones and tuba are, however, absent from the two middle movements, thereby rendering the outer ones more emphatic. The opening is deceptive – a sustained tune in G minor, sung by the cellos, conceals the point that the movement is to be anchored to G major, which emerges with a solo flute in a high, chirruping tune. After a brief climax, another pair of themes arrives, a soft, introspective theme on the strings in E major, and a lively, march-like tune on the flutes in B minor, which is then expanded by the full orchestra. A short, vigorous development quietens over a long, subdued timpani roll, when the recapitulation begins, the first theme now softly breathed by horns and cellos. After another climax, the cor anglais recalls the flute’s chirruping theme in a lower register, and the music then sets off again, taking in the march theme on its way to a confident finish. The slow movement brings a similar ambivalence, with its two contrasted moods. One section in C minor is pensive, even wistful, with lingering, repetitive phrases on paired woodwind, whilst the other, in C major, is more vigorous, incorporating a happy melody for flute and oboe, as well as a high violin solo. Both sections are, in turn, brought back in varied guise. The third movement, in the form of a scherzo, but without the usual suggestion of humour or abruptness, begins with a swinging song-like theme in G minor on the strings. No less attractive is the contrasting central section (trio) in the tonic major, with its tune on flute and oboe, originally heard in the composer’s opera, The Stubborn Lovers. After a literal repeat of the first part, a coda merrily turns the melody-line of the trio from 3/4 into a quick 2/4 time. A trumpet fanfare begins the finale, ushering in a gently-lilting cello theme, the subject of a series of variations. The theme, reminiscent of the ‘chirruping’ theme from the first movement, comprises two short sections, each repeated. After the fourth variation, the music changes to a march with a mock-grumpy theme in C minor. The fanfare returns in varied form, and four other variations follow, the last one extended and quickened to provide for a joyful finish. In Nature’s Realm, Op 91 DVORAK Dvorak must be considered the greatest of the Czech nationalist composers of the nineteenth and early twentieth century, and he certainly enjoys the widest international popularity. His achievement was to bring together music that derived its inspiration from Bohemia’s woods and fields with the classical traditions continued by Brahms in Vienna. His three overtures In Nature’s Realm, Carnival and Othello were originally given the titles ‘Nature’, ‘Life’ and ‘Love’, and were intended as a trilogy of symphonic poems, the first of them dedicated to Cambridge University, where Dvorak received an honorary doctorate in 1891, and the second to the University of Prague, where he had received a similar honour a year earlier, the period of their composition. The three overtures are united thematically, by a recurrent pastoral theme, which makes its first appearance, appropriately in In Nature’s Realm. In Nature’s Realm, according to the composer, presents ‘the emotions awakened in a solitary walk through meadows and woods on a quiet summer afternoon, when the shadows grow longer until they lose themselves in the dusk and gradually turn into the early shades of night’. A tranquil melody in bassoons and violas, with answering statements in the flute, comprise the first subject. After a loud repetition of this theme in full orchestra, the strings present a new sensitive subject. A climax, and a forceful restatement of the first theme, precede a fantasia section where the two melodies are developed freely. The coda is brought in with a loud recall of the first theme in horns and trumpets, but ends serenely. Rusalka’s Song To The Moon DVORÁK Elgar
Overture, Cockaigne The composer's subtitle for the work is 'In London Town', and its main title is a pun - cockaigne as a literary term for a land of make-believe, and cockney as the nickname for a Londoner. It celebrates the pomp and high spirits of London life, and was born at a time when patriotism found satisfaction in the successful military campaign which was bringing the South African War to an end. The first performance, in London on 20 June 1901, was conducted by the composer. Celebration is conveyed not only in the themes but also by the exuberant orchestral writing, culminating in the addition of an organ. In a section imitating a marching band, the printed score suggests the reinforcement of the three standard trombones by another two. A combination of small bells and triangle presumably represents the jingles of a horse's harness. Although a pattern of sonata-form (exposition - development - recapitulation) can be traced in the work, the overall feeling is one of continuous development, with reappearances of principal themes and an enormous climax at the end. Given the 'scenic' character of the whole, the commonly accepted labelling of principal themes makes sense. The animated opening section produces a broad 'citizens' theme for full orchestra; a quieter section yields a smooth and gentle 'lovers' theme for strings; later there is a military-band march and the hint of a Salvation Army presence in the beat of tambourine and bass drum. The citizens' and lovers' themes and the marching-band themes, with subsidiary material, all recur. Finally, as the organ enters, the citizens' theme gets its apotheosis, not in the home but shifting quickly home to C major for the final few bars, clinched by the kettledrums. Overture, Froissart Far removed from London musical institutions and Continental conservatories was an intense, poetic, entirely self-taught aspiring composer in Worcester who in today’s parlance would be described as a peripatetic violin teacher. In a letter dated 1 January 1890, Edward Elgar (1857-1934) was invited to write an orchestral work for that year’s Three Choirs Festival in Worcester. This had undoubtedly been provoked by the rapidly growing local reputation he was gaining as player, composer and conductor, yet even so it was a bold choice. Elgar decided on the form of a descriptive overture and, fired by references in Scott’s Old Mortality to the medieval chronicler Froissart, he started work in April, prefacing the score with a quotation from Keats: ‘When Chivalry lifted up her lance on high’.
Chanson de matin Without formal conservatory training, Edward Elgar rose from modest provincial origins to become his country's leading composer, and the first native-born Englishman to establish a firm place in the international repertory of symphony, overture and concerto. He grumbled on occasions at the need to earn money by writing a number of shorter pieces, instead of giving his time to larger works, but from his earliest days he kept sketch-books of ideas and, as a good craftsman, he would never waste any that were left over from other compositions if he could make something else from them! Thus in 1899 Elgar orchestrated an earlier sketch for violin and piano which suggested itself as a companion-piece to Chanson de nuit: he called it Chanson de matin and foresaw, correctly again, that it would attain immense popularity. Chanson de nuit During a visit to London in late October 1897, to conduct three of the Bavarian Highland Scenes at a Crystal Palace Promenade Concert, Elgar left with Novellos a new violin piece - another slow G major melody with a contrasted episode of darkly descending steps. Provisionally he called it Evensong, which the publishers persuaded him to change to Chanson de nuit, offering 10 guineas for the copyright. Elgar replied: "I wish you could arrange terms for it which would leave me some interest in it: the last Violin piece I wrote [Salut d'amour], which unfortunately I sold some years ago for a nominal sum, now sells well - I understand 3000 copies were sold in the month of January alone. An orchestral arrangement of this piece no doubt materially helped the sale, and the piece you now have would arrange satisfactorily for a small orchestra. In any case I accept the terms you offer." When published, the new piece approached the popularity of Salut d'amour. Wand of Youth Suites I & II(extracts) Like most children, Edward and his brothers and sisters engaged in fantasy games, but theirs were more ambitious and purposeful than most. At tender ages (Edward was eleven at the time), they staged a play based on their fantasy world from which adults, lacking an understanding and appreciation of children, were banned. Elgar composed a few simple tunes to be played as incidental music by an improvised band using whatever instruments the Elgar children could lay their hands on. A few years later, Elgar committed the tunes to one of his sketchbooks. We do not know what sort of reception the play or its music received but it clearly made a lasting impression on Elgar. Some 40 years later, having passed his fiftieth birthday, he dug out his sketchbooks and set to work turning the incidental music into these two charming suites. The pieces may be melodically and structurally simple but the orchestration is delightful, far in advance of what the youthful Elgar could have achieved with the limited resources and skills then available to him. Curiously, Elgar chose to disregard the chronology and gave the suites the opus number 1, demonstrating to the world his wish that they should be regarded as no more than a new arrangement of his earliest surviving work. The first suite begins with a vigorous Overture, where even in such an early work, Elgar’s fondness for the falling 7th interval is already evident. Sun Dance is a tour de force from every point of view, where the flashes of reflected sunlight are presented in especially graphic fashion. Fairies and Giants concludes the first suite, where the Fairies’ fleetness of foot is heard, contrasted with the more ponderous movement of the Giant. Moths and Butterflies is an essay in woodwind virtuosity. The middle section features an expressive melody passed between violins and flute. Nothing more exhilarating as a Finale can be imagined than the Wild Bears movement. Rhythmic impulse and a rich fund of orchestral resources combine to leave the impression of a fully-matured style. It is as if the elder composer had decided to give the boy whose work this is, the benefit of his experience, and to round off his play-music with a brilliant flourish saying, “There you are! That’s what you were really after, isn’t it?” Sea Pictures, Op 37 Written immediately after the Enigma Variations, Elgar’s Sea Pictures have had a curious performance history. Whilst they were well accepted by the public from the outset, when the striking contralto, Clara Butt, appeared at the Norwich Festival in October 1899 dressed in a mermaid outfit and not in a corset (“guiltless of all confinement” was the contemporary description), the songs have suffered from rather stuffy academic and critical commentary centering on the lack of profundity of their poems. Actually, however, in the era when Mahler was integrating the banal and the sublime in his Second and Third symphonies, and not too long before Berg would be setting lyrics from picture postcards in his Altenberg Lieder, these exquisite miniatures of Elgar are quite cutting-edge, ushering in a new aesthetic more inclusive of popular culture. Certainly in the age of Gilbert and Sullivan, the line between the opera house and the music hall was unclear. Additionally, looking at the creation of these five lyrics, it is enlightening to note that the first composed was penned by Elgar's wife. Perhaps her husband did not want to upstage her work with excerpts from Milton or Shakespeare! March, Pomp and Circumstance No 1 in D ELGAR “I’ve got a tune that will knock ‘em - knock ‘em flat,” Elgar announced to his friend Dora Penny, Dorabella of the Enigma Variations, in May 1901, referring to the tune from the trio section from his March in D major. The march was given its first performance, along with a second march in A minor on 19 October 1901 at Philharmonic Hall, Liverpool with the Liverpool Orchestral Society Orchestra conducted by the composer. The great acclaim afforded the work there was surpassed at the London première three days later. The conductor, Henry Wood, recorded: “The people simply rose and yelled. I had to play it again - with the same result; in fact, they refused to let me go on with the programme. After considerable delay [and] merely to restore order I played the march a third time. And that, I may say, was the one and only time in the history of the Promenade concerts that such an orchestral item was accorded a double encore.” This was, of course, even without the subsequent association with A.C. Benson's words Land of Hope and Glory, which were added to the tune in Elgar’s Coronation Ode of 1902. Cello Concerto in E minor, Op 85 ELGAR The ‘autumnal’ period of Edward Elgar (1857-1934) after the First World War is marked by this concerto, his last major work, which was given its first performance under the composer’s baton on October 27, 1919 with Felix Salmond as soloist. It is unusual in being in four movements rather than three, and in its nominally ‘heavy’ (but lightly used) brass section - 4 horns, 2 trumpets, 3 trombones and optional tuba - besides double woodwind, timpani and strings. The first movement opens with a further unusual touch, the slow introduction declaimed ff and nobilmente by the soloist before the orchestral violas present the flowing main theme, which the cello soon takes over. A contrasting theme with a distinctive lilt is heard from clarinets and bassoons. The music takes on a new warmth in moving from E minor to E major, but dies away in the minor key. Orchestral cellos and basses hold a single low note as a link into the second movement. After an echo of the slow introduction to the first movement the soloist launches into a kind of scherzo, basically in the relative major key of G. Rapid articulations of repeated notes for the solo instrument contrast with a particular rhetorical phrase which has a gap like an intake of breath. The impetus is continuous to the end. The third movement, in B flat, is short and, in its brevity and eloquence, perhaps the most remarkable of all. The orchestral accompaniment is reduced to clarinet, bassoons and two horns. It starts with an introductory, questioning phrase in the orchestra. The ‘answer’ is supplied by a sweeping, elegiac melody for the solo instrument passing to remote keys and then returning to the tonic. The original questioning phrase needing an answer returns, but the movement ends there, unfulfilled. The orchestra begins the finale softly but almost gruffly. After a few bars the cello intervenes with the original introductory music from the first movement and passes to an eloquent cadenza. Now, in a more resolute vein than anything previously in the concerto, the main part of the finale begins. It is built on a rhythmic transformation of that introductory material to the first movement. The soloist’s skills both of expression and of agility are tested and at length a new intensity envelops the music. There is a change to the triple time of the slow movement and a passionate recall of the opening bars of the concerto in their original key. The time for tender recollection is now over, as a brisk coda in E minor ends the work. Enigma Variations, Op 36ELGAR Elgar’s title was simply Variations on an original theme, with the dedication ‘to my friends pictured within’. Over the theme itself he placed the word ‘Enigma’, about which he wrote elsewhere as follows: The enigma I will not explain – its ‘dark saying’ must be left unguessed, and I warn you that the apparent connection between the variations and the theme is often of the slightest texture; further through and over the whole set another and larger theme ‘goes’, but is not played. It has been conjectured that this ‘hidden’ tune is Auld Lang Syne, but the work is self-sufficient, and straightforward in construction. The theme is in three-part design, (minor – major – minor), and some variations come to a complete stop, others simply flow into the next. Equally, it may be seen that the work has its larger dimensions or ‘movements’ in the symphonic sense. An opening ‘movement’ in forthright vein spans the first four variations and pivots on the keynote G (minor and major). A new movement now begins (Variations V-VII) – two ‘serious’ variations sealed by a jocular one. A third movement has two further variations in the home key (VIII, X) enclosing the centre-piece of Nimrod. A finale begins with Variation XI, which reasserts the home key, culminating in XII (representing the composer himself) which, with its midway plunge into E flat (the key of Nimrod), is like a distillation of all that has gone before. Theme:Begins in the minor key; after a few bars there is a new tune (clarinet solo) in the major; then strings lead back to the first tune. Strings and clarinets hold a chord which leads without a break into… Gershwin
Symphonic Picture from 'Porgy and Bess' GERSHWIN (1898 – 1937) Having successfully tackled the forms of the rhapsody, concerto, overture, prelude and variations, Gershwin began thinking of writing an opera, but the problem of a suitable libretto had to be resolved. He remembered a Theatre Guild production he had seen some years earlier, a play called Porgy by DuBose Heyward. The American flavour, and the poignant story of the love of Bess for the crippled Porgy, impressed themselves strongly on Gershwin's consciousness. The more he thought of it, the more he felt that this was an ideal subject for an opera, a native American opera, possibly a folk opera. The libretto was prepared by Heyward in collaboration with Ira Gershwin. Then George Gershwin set to work on the music, going to Charleston, South Carolina, for several weeks and living in a shack on the waterfront, in order to absorb the music of the Gullah Negroes. It took him eleven months to put his opera down on paper, and an additional nine months for the orchestration. Though the music makes use of certain Negro idioms, the songs are genuine Gershwin. Several of them, including Summertime and I Got Plenty of Nuthin', are famous outside their operatic context. Its première took place in Boston on 30 September 1935, but it was not immediately successful. The critics felt that, though there were lovely songs in it, the work was neither opera nor musical comedy, but a sort of hybrid product. However, it did not have to wait indefinitely for full recognition and in 1955 it was the first American opera ever to be performed at La Scala, Milan. The story, set in a Negro tenement in Catfish Row, Charleston, tells how Porgy falls in love with Bess, who is lured away from him by a character called Sportin' Life. The score is most memorable for its succession of wonderful songs, choral chants, folk tunes and street melodies - many strongly ethnic in character and idiom. The recitatives are moulded after the inflexions of Negro speech, whilst the songs are grounded either in Negro folk music or in those American popular idioms that sprang out of Negro backgrounds. Gershwin's street cries emulate those of Negro vendors in Charleston, and his choral pages are deeply rooted in spirituals and 'shouts'. An excellent orchestral tone poem was made from the opera's basic melodies by Robert Russell Bennett. Entitled Symphonic Picture, the work was written at the request of conductor, Fritz Reiner, who introduced it with the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra on 5 February 1942. The various sections of Bennett's tone poem are: Scene of Catfish Row with the peddlers' calls; Opening of Act II; Summertime and Opening of Act I; I Got Plenty of Nuthin'; Storm Music; Bess, You Is My Woman Now; It Ain't Necessarily So; and the finale, Oh, Lawd I'm on My Way. RHAPSODY IN BLUE GERSHWIN (1898 – 1937) George Gershwin, born Jacob Gershvitz to Russian immigrant parents in Brooklyn, was deflected from street games in down-town Manhattan into music by the family purchase of a piano in 1910. Four years later he had left school to earn a living as a pianist and ‘song-plugger’ in Tin Pan Alley, before long contributing his own songs with growing success. With some tuition in the techniques of composition he turned his attention, at the same time, to music of a less immediate commercial appeal. His principal contemporary reputation, however, rested largely on the songs he wrote for Broadway with his brother Ira Gershwin, both aspects of his career coming together in his opera Porgy and Bess, which he started writing when he was at the height of his commercial fame, in 1934. It was ten years earlier, in 1924, that Gershwin had responded to a commission from Paul Whiteman, an exponent of symphonic jazz, for a concerto for piano and jazz band. The result was Rhapsody in Blue, a work that represents a step in the American search for a musical identity. It was orchestrated for Gershwin by Whiteman’s arranger Ferde Grofé. Whiteman himself had enjoyed an earlier career as a viola-player in major American orchestras in Denver and San Francisco, before becoming one of the best known of the post-War band-leaders. The imitations of vocalized ‘blue’ notes, the use of added-note harmonies favoured by dance-bands of the time, and a profusion of appealing melodies gained an immediate following for the piece. The term rhapsody seems to allude to Liszt’s Hungarian Rhapsodies and Gershwin emulates their succulent tunes with, this time with an American flavour. The design has no complications. A famous low trill on the clarinet and a skyward ascent lead to the first theme, which eventually leads to a more sentimental melody which becomes the main and most memorable theme of the work. Although Gershwin did receive some formal musical training, his abiding weakness was structure. Thus, notwithstanding a great love for the piece, Leonard Bernstein disparaged the Rhapsody in Blue as ‘not a composition at all [but] a string of … terrific tunes … stuck together with a thin paste of flour and water’. Glazunov
Symphony No 5 in B flat major, Op 55 GLAZUNOV (1865 – 1936) Glazunov’s Fifth Symphony is composed in the form of a four-part cycle, with traditional contrasting of the movements. However, its contents are distinctive, and typical of the composer. Like his other compositions, it abounds with Russian musical fingerprints, though more frequently than in earlier works, rendering its melodies particularly flexible and diverse in expression. Glinka
Overture, ‘A Life for the Tsar’ Mikhail Glinka, sometimes affectionately known as the ‘father of Russian music’, was born on his family’s estate near Smolensk. His schooling in St Petersburg brought him into wider contact with Western music and his later career, initially with a government sinecure in the Ministry of Communications, allowed him to pursue a somewhat irregular course of musical activity as a composer and as a drawing-room performer. Travel to Italy and later to Germany gave him an opportunity to broaden his experience still further, and to acquire, through lessons with Siegfried Dehn in Berlin, some technical competence as a composer. In 1834, on the death of his father, Glinka returned to Russia, dreaming about writing a national Russian opera. ‘My most earnest desire’, he wrote to a friend, ‘is to compose music which would make all my beloved fellow countrymen feel quite at home, and lead no one to allege that I strutted about in borrowed plumes!.’ By 1836 he had completed an opera that he had at first called Ivan Susanin, later to be known as A Life for the Tsar, and based on historical events of 1612, when the Russian, Susanin, was instrumental in saving the new Romanov Tsar from the Polish army. The overture’s dignified introduction highlights a theme for oboe, whilst, in the main part, a vigorous theme undergoes transformation and elaboration before the second main subject appears on the clarinet. Grieg
Concerto for piano and orchestra in A minor GRIEG The concerto was completed in the summer of 1868, while Grieg was on holiday in Denmark. The twenty-five-year-old composer was staying near Copenhagen, and had deliberately set time aside for composition. By now he had become interested in the folk music of Norway, and his music was beginning to show a more nationalist romanticism, and fewer traces of Schumann. Nonetheless, when he came to plan the concerto, it was Schumann’s A minor Piano Concerto of 1841-5 that provided the structural basis for his own lyrical masterpiece, though the orchestration reflects the later nineteenth-century preference for larger resources. Nevertheless, this had led critics to deride the work as a weak imitation of the earlier concerto. However, generations of pianists and music-lovers have decided otherwise and, in a letter to his parents, Grieg described the effect the closing bars had on Liszt, who played through the concerto when Grieg visited him in Rome: ‘He suddenly stopped, rose to his full height, left the piano and walked with stalwart, theatrical step through the great hall of the monastery, while he fairly bellowed the theme. At the G natural, he stretched out his arm commandingly like an emperor and shouted “G, G, not G sharp!”’ Grieg gave the first performance in Copenhagen in 1869, with himself at the piano. The first movement begins with the famous timpani roll and the piano’s cascading octaves. But then, instead of an orchestral exposition, followed later by a conventional solo entry, piano and orchestra share the exposition between them. The pace then slows for the arrival of the warmly romantic second subject in C major, on the cellos. After an animated development, the opening material return, with the second subject again stated by the cellos, now in the tonic major, and more warmly accompanied. A long, exciting cadenza (fully written-out by the composer, of course) is followed by a brisk coda. The key shifts to the remote one of D flat for the softly-breathed melody on muted strings which opens the second movement, itself a wonder in terms of orchestration, with solo horn adding its plaintive ‘blue’ notes to the filigree of the texture. The opening tune is finally glorified by the soloist, with great power and strength, before the sound dies away. But there is no pause, as the finale follows on immediately, a rhythmic utterance of clarinets and bassoons and a flourish on the piano, which lead to the main theme given out by the soloist in a Norwegian folk-dance rhythm. In the next main theme, the piano also takes the initiative with three strong detached chords. Later, in starker contrast, the strenuous pace is relaxed as a solo flute meditates in an episode of pastoral stillness. After further presentation of previous material, a cadenza leaves the listener with an expectancy which is resolved by a makeover of the opening theme now in a light, triple measure. The concerto ends with a majestically-transformed version of the earlier solo flute melody, where the soloist takes up the tune in massive chords (in the passage with the altered G sharp that so excited Liszt), and the concerto ends with a fortissimo flourish. Holst
Suite The Planets The new, enlarged orchestras with which Richard Strauss and Stravinsky had transported their listeners to new excitement were not readily available to British composers under the concert conditions which were then current. In staking his conception of The Planets on just such a large orchestra, Holst was venturesome, particularly because this was the time of the First World War with its increased economic difficulties. By the private generosity of a wealthy fellow-composer, H. Balfour Gardiner, Holst was lucky enough to have a private performance of this work in London, conducted by Adrian (not yet Sir Adrian) Boult, on 29 September 1918. Presented to the public, under the baton of Albert Coates in London on 15 November 1920, it became Holst’s most successful work. The significance which the composer attached to each of the seven planets is mostly unusual but serves to characterize the movements sharply. All of them end in normal, self-contained fashion except the last, where the sound vanishes in the wordless voices of a female choir, which takes part only in this final movement. Mars menaces in an unrelenting 5/4 time. The originality of scoring is immediate – timpani struck with wooden-headed sticks, the strings col legno (with the back of the bow), a gong keeping up a continuous rumble, and the two harps reinforcing the rhythm with low sonorities. Chords clash unresolved as the full brass brings a climax. Later, a tenor tuba solo delivers a new threat, backed by trumpet fanfares. Where the sound of Mars was dense, that of Venus is airy – a slow tune rising on solo horn, answered by flutes and oboe. A change of mood brings a violin solo; the celesta enters, its faint tracery of sound tapering off in the final bars. Mercury brings ‘flying’ sound, with woodwind dominating at first. A theme in stronger rhythm carries authority, and a solo violin intervenes. Finally the full woodwind flies upwards, and the messenger has gone! Jupiter begins with a jovial tune in irregular rhythm on the horns, followed later by a characteristic trumpet interjection. Eventually the well-known ‘hymn tune’ arrives on the strings, later to return in unexpected form, penetrating through a swirl of musical clouds, both to be blown away by a final, brief presto. Saturn symbolizes old age in an endlessly repetitive, dragging theme, given to low-sounding flutes. Trombones introduce an upward theme, and the flute tune grows in new urgency, summoning the full orchestra, complete with tubular bells. The end is soft but uneasy. Uranus opens disturbingly on long, loud notes from brass and timpani, joined by bassoons and then the combined woodwind in a theme not unlike that of the magician’s from The Sorcerer’s Apprentice. Eventually there is a huge climax, suddenly cut off, leaving only a faint sound of seven string players. But the magician has another tricky reappearance to make. In Neptune, the Mystic the orchestra is instructed to play with ‘dead tone’, very softly throughout. Sequences of chords ascend or oscillate, an eerie theme rises high on muted violins, a misty effect is set up by harps, and celesta. Imperceptibly, wordless female voices enter; they arrive at an alternation of strange chords which they repeat, with the instruments falling silent, ‘until the sound is lost in the distance’. Humperdinck
Overture to Hansel and Gretel The overture is based on material from the opera. The opening religious theme in horns and bassoons is the children’s prayer from Act II. A dramatic change of mood describes the children’s fright in the presence of the Witch. The overture then moves to the Dewman’s song from Act III and the children’s dance after they destroy the Witch, before closing with a recall of the prayer melody. Ives
The Unanswered Question CHARLES IVES That all of Ive’s music was written before 1928, and most of it in the first decade of the twentieth century, presents an interesting, and possibly inexplicable phenomenon. Before Stravinsky, Ives worked with polyrhythms; before Bartók, he utilized agonizing discords; before Stravinsky and Milhaud, he employed polytonality; before Schönberg, he ventured into atonality; before Alois Hába, he experimented with quarter-tones; before Henry Cowell, he exploited tone-clusters; and long before Boulez, he introduced music of chance! The Unanswered Question was composed for chamber orchestra in 1906 and was entitled by the composer as A Contemplation of a Serious Matter or The Unanswered Perennial Question. Like its sister piece, Central Park in the Dark, the work employs a device by which different musical textures, moving at different speeds, are juxtaposed. There are three spatially-separated elements: a slow-moving, virtually pulseless diatonic string backdrop, against which sounds a trumpet statement, played seven times. This alternates with a series of contrapuntal, chromatic woodwind phrases that become steadily faster, louder, and more dissonant. In 1935-6, Ives revised the score substantially, adding a number of details and altering the woodwind and trumpet phrases. Khachaturian
Sabre Dance from Gayaneh KHACHATURIAN The ballet, Gayaneh was first produced in 1942 by the ballet company of the former Leningrad Kirov Theatre, when it was in war-time evacuation in the city of Molotov. It has a patriotic plot: a villainous husband, a traitor to the erstwhile Soviet Union, joins a group of smugglers and attempts to murder his wife, Gayaneh. Animated by Armenian folk-dance elements, the score is optimistic in tone and the story does have a happy ending. Several suites have been extracted for concert performance, and the Sabre Dance is probably the best-known individual movement. Marked presto, it is characterized by the percussive, athletic rhythms set out at the opening. Over these a quick theme, starting with the same note some fifteen times over, is launched, with the xylophone very much to the fore. The 4/4 beat changes to 3/4, with a more sustained tune from saxophone and cellos, before the former headlong drive is resumed. Ligeti
Atmosphères The Hungarian composer, György Ligeti (born 1923), made early use of microtonality, involving intervals of less than a semitone. Always an innovative and bold experimenter, he has made his music a complex blend of the visual and the aural. The element of chance is helped by this complexity where listeners must select only what they can concentrate on at any one time. The densely-woven, but gently shifting web of sounds Ligeti calls ‘micropolyphony’, and in the 1960s was a brand new sound world, an aural tapestry that could even include kitchen utensils and electronic blasts! Atmosphères,Ligeti’s first product of the 1960s was certainly ‘major’. Südwestfunk retrospectively commissioned it for the Darmstadt Festival, one of the primary showcases for the European avant-garde, and it was first performed on October 22 1961. Atmosphères is written for ‘large orchestra without percussion’. Even in this subtitle, there is an air of secession from avant-garde orthodoxies, since percussion sections of epic dimensions were a primary feature of the 1950s modernist orchestra. Ligeti describes the overall form of the work as something ‘to be realized as a single, broad-spanned arch, with the individual sections being fused together, subordinate to the broad arch’. In theory, there are twenty-two sections, each carefully timed by the composer in the score to reach a total of eight minutes, thirty-four seconds. At the beginning of Atmosphères the whole string section and a few woodwind instruments enter with a cluster spread overall across several octaves, but the result is by no means as abrasive as one might expect, since the players enter very quietly (pp and dolcissimo). For the first minute, the instruments just hold their notes, and gradually fade out until only violas and cellos are left. Then these remaining instruments, initially playing almost inaudibly, without vibrato, ‘senza colore’, start to throb a little – to rise and fall in level, even though their notes stay the same. Now other instruments re-enter, the strings with a tremolo that slowly speeds up and the woodwinds with the reverse process. Suddenly the pages are black with notes, but the result is still essentially static. About halfway through the piece, there is a passage which starts with a middle-register cluster in the strings, and gradually drifts higher and higher, culminating in a shrill, notoriously unrecordable passage for four piccolos – Ligeti’s first protracted use of micropolyphony. Suddenly the music plunges from top to bottom (with a cluster for eight double basses), and over this the remaining strings enter with a labyrinth of twisting melodic figures. Lloyd Webber Andrew
John 19:41 ANDREW LLOYD WEBBER Andrew Lloyd Webber was born on March 22, 1948, and was first given a violin at the age of three, followed by lessons on the piano, and later on the French horn. Even as a young boy he preferred playing his own compositions during his music lessons. Andrew also had a great interest in inspecting ancient monuments around England, and it was thought that he would subsequently study History. However, his Aunt Vi introduced him to the theatre and especially musical theatre, taking Andrew to current big musicals like My Fair Lady, and films like Gigi and South Pacific. Soon afterwards, he built a small theatre at home, and set about writing his own musicals for it. In 1956, he went to Westminster School, and started composing music for the school’s plays, before gaining a scholarship to Oxford in 1964. It was here that he first met Tim Rice in 1965, and consequently, Andrew dropped out of Oxford to pursue a musical career with Tim. The first musical, The Likes of Us, was a failure, but soon afterwards Joseph and the Amazing Technicolour Dreamcoat appeared in 1968. After that, it was more or less one success after another. Knighted in 1992, Sir Andrew was created an honorary life peer in 1997. Jesus Christ Superstar appeared in 1971 and chronicles the last seven days in the life of Jesus as seen through the eyes of his disciple, Judas Iscariot, who has become disillusioned with the movement. Despite opposition from certain religious groups, the original production became a huge box-office hit and ran for 720 performances. John 19:41 is an evocative setting of the following verse from the New Testament: There was a garden in the place where Jesus had been put to death, and in it there was a new tomb where no one had ever been buried. The Music of ... ANDREW LLOYD WEBBER The Phantom of the Opera premiered in London in 1986 with Michael Crawford as The Phantom and Sarah Brightman, Andrew’s wife at the time, as Christine. Based on the novel by Gaston Leroux, Phantom tells the story of a strange, disfigured man who lives in the bowels of the Paris Opera House. He becomes obsessed with Christine, a young singer, and takes it upon himself to further her career at any cost - even if it means murder. All I Ask Of You and Music Of The Night are two of the best-known numbers from the score. Mary Magdalene’s lovelorn ballad I Don’t Know How To Love Him is undoubtedly one of the most poignant moments in Jesus Christ Superstar, providing some essential contrast and repose, in what is as much Rock Opera as Musical. Based on Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats, a collection of poems by T.S. Eliot, Cats was first pefrormed at the New London Theatre in 1981. The plot, which has no dialogue, revolves around the antics of such feline characters as Old Deuteronomy, Mr. Mistoffelees, Skimbleshanks, and Grizabella, who sings the hit-song Memory before she ascends to cats’ heaven at the end of the play. Andrew’s Variations, written for brother, Julian, in 1978, are based upon Paganini’s A minor Violin Caprice, and has been used by a number of composers, including Brahms, Rachmaninov and Lutoslawski in similar fashion. Variations features contemporary pop and rock-music styles, and provided the musical score for the second act of the composer’s Song and Dance. Variations 1-4 are best-known as the theme tune for ITV’s South Bank Show. Lloyd Webber Julian
Jackie’s Song JULIAN LLOYD WEBBER Julian Lloyd Webber wrote Jackie’s Song in 1998. He writes: ‘I first heard Jacqueline du Pré play when I was 11 and attended most of her London concerts from 1963 until her career was tragically cut short by multiple sclerosis, ten years later. I wrote Jackie’s Song in response to A Genius In The Family, a book by her own brother and sister which later was the basis of the film ‘Hilary and Jackie'. The book upset me very much as it did not portray the radiant musician I remember so well, first as a brilliant cellist and later, after she became ill, as a friend and colleague. Jackie’s Song is my tribute to Jacqueline du Pré’. Julian includes it here, by way of a very’ special’ encore. Lloyd Webber William
Invocation William Lloyd Webber (1914-1982) was the father of two famous sons, composer Sir Andrew and cellist Julian. However, he was also a distinguished composer in his own right and wrote much attractive music, at a time when the critical consensus was powerfully in favour of the ascendancy of post-Schönbergian serialism, and hostile to his own quite different compositional stance. Indeed the situation had much to do with Lloyd Webber’s eventual decision to stop composing at that time. Equally, he may have written more than he did, but spent much of his life as an administrator, most importantly as the Director of the London College of Music. Invocation, written for strings, harp and timpani in a brooding E minor, is in the composer’s most straightforward manner. The music’s strong emotional statement is communicated in the simplest and most direct manner and, whilst sounding like an earlier work was, in fact, written in 1957. Serenade for Strings WILLIAM LLOYD WEBBER The Serenade for Strings has more complex beginnings than its relaxed title might imply. Dates, in fact say little about Lloyd Webber’s music, as these three movements were originally written in 1951, 1980 and 1960 respectively, and all for different instrumental combinations. Yet their present arrangement for strings sounds totally natural. Barcarolle, with its gently rocking rhythm, began life as a song entitled ‘Moon Silver’, telling of an enchanted boat with a cargo of ‘pearl and silver beams, to fashion the little children’s dreams’. Romance, a favourite work of the composer, was first published as ‘Justine’ in the collection Five Portraits for Home Organs, and was composed for his close friend Justine Bax. Its lyrical opening statement is repeated with small but telling shifts in melody, harmony and scoring, enabling the music to cover a deceptively wide emotional range, and one of the composer’s trademarks. The far from sombre Elegy originated as one of a number of Country Impressions for wind instruments and piano. Written for son, Andrew, who was then studying the horn, it was first published as ‘Summer Pastures’ with the impish subtitle ‘A Fresian Elegy’. Lyadov
The Enchanted Lake, Op 62 Anatoly Lyadov was born in St Petersburg into a highly musical family. His grandfather had been a professional musician, three uncles were musicians, and his father was a conductor at the Maryinsky (now Kirov) Theatre. After initial musical studies with his father, Lyadov joined Rimsky-Korsakov’s composition class at the St Petersburg Conservatory. It is suggested that he failed the class due to lack of application; be that as it may, his eventual success at the Conservatory was such that, a year after completing his course, he was appointed to the teaching staff and soon became a full professor. Lyadov’s ability was recognized in the highest circles, and he was appointed to a Commission set up by the Imperial Geographical Society to research into the folk-songs of various regions. His reputation for indolence - he completed few large-scale works - rests largely upon his involvement with Diaghilev’s plans for a ballet based on the Firebird legend. The impresario originally commissioned a score from Lyadov, but on the composer’s failure to complete the work in time, he placed the commission in the hands of another of Rimsky-Korsakov’s pupils, a certain Igor Stravinsky! It is true that Lyadov composed slowly, but with great attention to detail. His meticulous approach to his work, together with the immense amount of time taken up by his teaching and research, necessarily limited the number of compositions he was able to complete successfully. Lyadov referred to The Enchanted Lake (1908), taken from the score of an uncompleted opera, Zoriushka, as a ‘fable-tableau’, and it was one of his most notable successes, as well as his own favourite composition: ‘How picturesque it is,’ he wrote to a friend, ‘how clear, the multitude of stars hovering over the mysteries of the deep. But above all, no entreaties and no complaints [which he associates with the sounds of trumpets and trombones, which are banished!] - only nature, cold, malevolent, and fantastic as a fairy tale. One has to feel the change of the colours, the chiaroscuro, the incessantly changeable stillness and seeming immobility’. The piece is indeed a marvel of mystical serenity, the waters gently stirring under starry skies, in suggestively shifting major and minor thirds and ninth chords supported by deep pedal points, with the ‘enchanted’ sounds of harp and celesta, and delicate flute traceries, all very much ‘à la Rimsky’. Mahler
Adagietto (Symphony No 5) In 1899 Mahler bought a plot of land at Maiernigg, on the wooded south shore of the Wörthersee in Carinthia. There a lakeside house, and a composing studio further up the hill were built for him, and there, in the summer of 1901, he started work on his Fifth Symphony. The following winter in Vienna changed Mahler’s life. At a dinner-party he met the much younger Alma Schindler, whose beauty, strong personality and musical talent soon had him falling feverishly in love with her. She became pregnant, and they married in March 1902. Mahler completed the draft of the Fifth Symphony at Maiernigg that summer. The Adagietto is scored only for strings and harp. Mahler wrote it as a love-song to Alma, and its tempo marking of ‘Very slow’ surely implies sustained warmth and soulfulness, rather than the funereal dirge so often heard. The beautifully judged scoring allows moments of darkness to contrast with the music’s radiance. After the more urgent central section, the return of the main theme is a quiet masterstroke: Mahler gives it to the second violins, allowing them a rare moment in the limelight while the first violins, for once, accompany. Visconti later, of course, immortalized the Adagietto by featuring it in his film, Death in Venice. Mendelssohn
Overture, The Hebrides ‘In order to make you understand how inordinately the Hebrides have affected me, I have written down the following, which came into my mind…’ Twenty bars of music follow. So Mendelssohn wrote home to his family on August 7, 1829, after a Scottish steamer trip from Fort William to Oban and from Oban to Tobermory. He did not see the famous Fingal’s Cave (on the Isle of Staffa) till the next day. So those famous bars which open the present overture cannot be directly linked with the cave. Nevertheless, Fingal’s Cave was the title which Mendelssohn’s publishers were to attach to the first full published score of the work (1835) (the composer’s own preference was for The Hebrides – in German, Die Hebriden). The work was first performed under the twenty-three-year-old composer’s baton, in London on May 14, 1832. Mendelssohn made a few further alterations in the following month. A letter to his sister Fanny, criticizing his own work in the course of working on it, shows his wish that the music should convey not just the scenic beauty but the realities of the journey: ‘The so-called development smacks more of counterpoint than of oil and seagulls and dead fish – and it should be just the opposite!’ The listener may not find the dead fish, but the Romantic effects of seascape and storm are irresistible. The agitation and climaxes are the more remarkable because Mendelssohn did not extend the orchestra beyond its ‘classical’ size with double woodwind, horns and trumpets, but no trombones. So-called ‘hairpin’ dynamics – a swelling from soft to loud and back again – are prominent. The scene-painting is accomplished within a traditional overture form. The wave-like opening theme (B minor) rises to a climax before cellos and bassoons offer a more assuring theme in D major. In a further climax an insistent, fanfare-like figure rings out from horns and trumpets, which in turn dies down when a new sections starts (the development proper), soon bringing a fresh, challenging theme on the woodwind. The biggest climax is still to come , after which the first ‘wavy’ theme returns in its original peaceful form, and the contrasting theme follows in B major on solo clarinet. At last, all seems at peace, but an extension of the music (formally the coda) brings yet more disturbance , and alludes to the sea’s deceptive nature, by finishing not in sunny B major, but in the sombre B minor, in which key the overture began. Violin Concerto in E minor, Op 64 MENDELSSOHN Two features of the first movement, which were innovations at the time, are the immediate entry of the soloist with the main theme, without any preliminary orchestral exposition, and the placing of the cadenza just before the return of the principal subject, instead of nearer the end of the movement, just before the coda. Another novel effect is the expressive linking of the first movement to the second, and the finale then following without pause, though not this time with any melodic link. The soloist enters with the passionate main theme of the opening movement. A tutti section follows and, as the violin sinks to a long-held low G, clarinets and flutes deliver a quiet, contrasting theme in G major. In that key, too, the soloist briefly recalls the principal theme. A development leads, quite suddenly, to the cadenza, fully written-out, rather than left to the performer’s imagination, and which forms the bridge to the recapitulation of the principal theme back now in E minor, heard on the orchestra beneath the spread of the soloist’s arpeggio figures. The original clarinet and flute theme now calmly reappears in the tonic major, but an accelerated tempo ends the movement back in the original minor key, and with renewed passion. From the final chord of that movement, the single note B is sustained on bassoon, before rising and then joined is by others to effect the transition to C major, in which the violin serenely gives out the main theme of the second movement, which itself is succeeded by a more agitated section, and then a modified return of the opening. The second movement ends as it began, in C. But instead of launching straight into the expected fast finale, the violin first dreamily meditates in the subdominant key of A minor, though it’s not long before the happy finale in the tonic major is ushered in, with unmistakeable emphasis from trumpets and drums. A scampering theme for the soloist and a slightly more stately one (trumpets and drums again) provide the main material, with both vigour and delicacy required from the soloist in such rapid and totally exhilarating music. Mozart
Overture to The Magic Flute, K620 In 1791 Mozart gave to the world both the last of his serious operas, La Clemenza di Tito, and that unique blend of fun and philosophizing, The Magic Flute. Its first performance took place in Vienna on September 30. The opera uses, as a symbol of wisdom, certain references to the Freemasons’ order to which the composer, and his librettist, Schikaneder, belonged. Among these symbolic references is threefold repetition – applied to notes and chords besides physical objects on stage. Hence the overture, otherwise in regular sonata-form, is impregnated by solemn wind-chords in groups of three, with which it starts. In the opera they precede Sarastro’s aria O Isis und Osiris, and the March of the Priests, and are associated with the temple of wisdom to which the hero will be admitted by its high priest. The participation of trombones (here as in the opera) lends a special solemnity, whilst the orchestra is otherwise Mozart’s symphonic one, namely flutes, oboes, clarinets, bassoons, horns and trumpets in pairs, timpani and strings. The main section devotes itself to a sprightly melody which is given fugal treatment, before being elaborated upon. Mussorgsky
Night on the Bare Mountain The subject of a witches' revel, similar to the Walpurgis Night in Goethe's Faust, haunted Mussorgsky for many years. in 1860, he made some sketches for a musical setting of a drama called The Witch, in which witches and sorcerers performed their rites and do a dance to Satan. When Balakirev proved unenthusiastic over this project, Mussorgsky put his sketches aside. In 1867, he tried adapting them into a fantasy for piano and orchestra. Later on, in 1871, when members of the Russian 'Five' planned to collaborate on an opera, Mlada, Mussorgsky thought of using his sketches for a second-act prelude about a Witches' Sabbath; but the Mlada project never materialised. In 1877, while working on his opera, Sorochinsky Fair, Mussorgsky thought of using his Witches' Sabbath music as an intermezzo describing a nightmare of a Ukrainian peasant. But not until after Mussorgsky's death was the composer's music crystallized into its final shape and form. At that time Rimsky-Korsakov assembled the sketches, revised them, re-orchestrated them, and developed them into an integrated fantasia. In this new and definitive setting, the Night on the Bare Mountain was finally introduced in 1886. 'Bare Mountain' is Mount Triglav near Kiev where, according to folk lore, witches, sorcerers and evil spirits, presided over by the Black God, Tchernobog, gather on St John's Eve for revelry. The published score offers the following programme: "A subterranean din of unearthly voices. Appearance of the Spirits of Darkness, followed by that of Tchernobog, Glorification of the Black Gods, The Black Mass. The Revelry of Witches' Sabbath, interrupted from afar by the bells of a little church, whereupon the spirits of evil disperse. Dawn breaks." Pictures at an Exhibition MUSSORGSKY In 1874 Mussorgsky composed this set of musical images to correspond to ten paintings by his friend, Victor Hartman. The extra element of a ‘promenade’ round the exhibition is cleverly added and the music of the final ‘picture’ seems to have risen from the theme of the ‘promenade’. The painter had recently died when these paintings were shown at an exhibition which the composer visited. One title (Samuel Goldenberg and Schmuyle) in fact represents two pictures, both of which were owned by Mussorgsky and lent to the exhibition. In the original scoring for piano solo (not published until after Mussorgsky’s death), they have had relatively limited currency, but Ravel’s orchestration propelled them to popularity, a commission by Serge Koussevitsky before he established himself in Boston, the work receiving its first performance under his baton in Paris in 1920. A large orchestra is required, which includes an alto saxophone. Promenade. The spectator makes his way round the gallery, attracted by various pictures in turn. A pronounced ‘walking’ theme is heard, with the brass prominent. Gnomus (The Gnome). The painting is sometimes said to have been of a dwarfed creature walking awkwardly on deformed legs. But an apparently more authoritative source claims that it was of a nutcracker in the shape of a gnome. The abrupt, angular music has many pauses and changes of rhythm. Promenade. A new scoring, as though to suggest a new point of interest for the spectator. Il vecchio castello (The old castle). A singer is stationed outside the Italian castle. The ‘song’ is given principally to alto saxophone. Promenade. Again a new scoring. Tuileries. An impression of the famous park in Paris, with children and their nursemaids. High woodwind represent the children’s chattering, both at the beginning and at the end of the piece. Bydlo. A Polish peasant wagon with enormous wooden wheels is seen, drawn by oxen (‘bydlo’ is Polish for ‘cattle’). A solo tuba makes the point of heaviness, and the music suggest the disappearance of wagon and beast into the distance. Promenade. The theme is now more tranquil, and begins smoothly with high flutes and clarinets. It leads straight to… Ballet of the chickens in their eggshells. The painting appears to have shown a child dressed up as a chicken with its limbs poking through the shell of an egg. A clucking little scherzo movement is heard. The first part is repeated, and a central trio begins with sustained soft trills for the violins. Finally there is a shortened repeat of the opening section. Samuel Goldenberg and Schmuyle. The two Jews, one rich and the other poor, are vividly contrasted: a heavy, self-satisfied theme is followed by a whining, supplicating utterance on muted trumpet. Limoges: the market-place. The picture depicts the gossiping market women. Scurrying themes on woodwind and strings are enlivened by triangle, tambourine, and cymbals. The music passes dramatically, without interruption to… Catacombae: sepulchrum romanum. These catacombs (Roman burial chambers) are not in Rome, but in Paris, where the painter depicted himself with a friend and a guide. A sense of mystery is conveyed by solemn brass notes in long pauses. Apart from the double-basses, strings are strikingly silent. Cum mortuis in lingua mortua (with the dead in a dead language). A continuation of the preceding scene. The composer commented: ‘The creative spirit of Hartman leads me towards the skull; he addresses them and they become gradually lit from within.’ The theme of the Promenade is recalled. The hut on fowl’s legs. The artist had shown a clock in the form of a hut belonging to Baba Yaga, the Russian witch who eats human bones and rides through the sky. Her ferocity is indicated by the heavy down-strokes for the strings, reinforced by percussion and other instruments. Later, a whirling figure is set up by the flutes, before the heavy music returns. We are led directly to… The great gate of Kiev. Contrary to many listeners’ supposition, this is not an actual gate. It was one imagined by the artist and his submission for a competition for a gateway to be erected in commemoration of the escape of Tsar Alexander II from assassination in 1866. A dome took the form of an ancient Russian helmet, the horses in the picture no doubt giving the composer the idea of a processional piece. The music in fact combines procession and hymn tune. Tubular bells and tam-tam make their first entry into Ravel’s brilliant orchestration. Nicolai
Overture to The Merry Wives of Windsor NICOLAI The text is, for the most part, faithful to Shakespeare, and the overture is a true classic in salon music. A slow introduction presents a soaring tune over a high C in the violins. After various sections of the orchestra have had the opportunity to discuss this subject, and treat it in imitation, the main body of the overture unfolds. Here two principal themes are heard, both of them lively, and the second (in the violins in octaves) is intended to portray Mrs Page. In the development which, like the concluding coda is consistently sprightly, a vigorous F minor passage suggests Falstaff. Melodies from the overture recur in the opera’s concluding Herne’s Oak scene, in various choral passages and dance episodes. Parry Sir Hubert
Jerusalem Ponchielli
Dance of the Hours from La Gioconda Ponchielli wrote nine operas, but only La Gioconda survives. While it is uneven and not without blemish, it is also an opera whose best pages reveal the composer was as if on fire. It was first performed at La Scala, Milan in 1876, and it is as if its creators deliberately set out to incorporate in it all those elements that make opera grand - then they went one step better! Boïto's libretto (incidentally one of his poorer efforts) embraces infidelity, illicit love, hate, jealousy, suicide, death by strangulation, and a sleep-inducing potion. For spectacular scenes, the opera offers a feast day, a masked ball, a regatta and a ship set afire: for lavish settings, there was nothing less than the Doge's palace in Venice. If grand opera profits from a heroine, then La Gioconda had not one but three: if grand opera must have a big aria, then La Gioconda boasted six - one for each voice range!
For ballet, there was The Dance of the Hours, one of the most spectacular dance sequences in Italian opera, which occurs in the second scene of Act III and is set in a great hall in the Grand Duke Alvise's palace, where he is receiving his guests, including Enzo and Gioconda, at a large-scale party. He has devised a spectacular ballet for everyone's entertainment. It is a ballet suite which, in costume changes, light effects and choreography, represents the hours of dawn, day, evening and night. It is also intended to symbolise, in its mimic action, the eternal struggle between the powers of darkness and light. A more satirical, and extremely funny, interpretation was put on it by Walt Disney in his film Fantasia. The individual numbers are very well known, and have often been heard in different contexts. The suite concludes with a final 'gallop'. Prokofiev
March and Scherzo (Love for Three Oranges) Prokofiev was commissioned by Campanini, general director of the Chicago Opera Company, to write Love for Three Oranges who, finding the work too difficult to mount and perform, promptly shelved it. The opera, somewhat revised, was eventually given in 1921, following a change of general director. For his libretto, Prokofiev took an eighteenth-century fantastic tale by Carlo Gozzi, and converted it into a knife-edged satire on grand opera. On the stage he placed an opera audience of twenty-four, comprising Glooms, Joys, Cynics, Empty-Heads – each group with its own pet aesthetic theories – who, from time to time, interrupt the play with comments and suggestions. The stage within the stage unfolds the story of a Crown Prince, ill for a long time, who can be cured only through laughter. A sorceress comes to prevent his recovery. Attacked by the palace guards, her struggles prove so comical that the prince bursts into laughter. Though now recovered, his woes are not over, as the sorceress has stricken him with a curse of having to fall in love with three oranges! The prince now goes in quest of his love. He finds two oranges and opens them up, only to find the beautiful princess within them dead from thirst. In the third orange, the princess lies dying. The Cynics from the stage audience rush with a pail of water and revive her. The prince gets his love, while the stage audience takes the sorceress as prisoner. Six sections from the opera were assembled by the composer into an orchestral suite in 1925. The March, with its characteristic melodic leaps was, for many years, used as the theme song for the American radio programme The FBI In Peace and War. The Scherzo reflects the composer’s typical whimsy and grotesquerie. Rachmaninov
Symphony No 2 in E minor, Op. 27 Rachmaninov composed his First Symphony in 1895, and the first performance was a complete fiasco. The failure of this work, followed by that of the First Piano Concerto, brought the composer to the brink of a nervous breakdown. Out of this period of silence and morbidity, Rachmaninov emerged completely revitalized, composing his first masterpiece, the Second Piano Concerto. Then, retiring to Dresden in 1907 to devote himself to creative work entirely, he wrote his Second Symphony and The Isle of the Dead. He completed the Second Symphony in 1907 and it was given its first performance the following year in St Petersburg under the direction of the composer. An expansive work firmly in the late Romantic tradition, the symphony continues also a particularly Russian vein of Romanticism, explored already by Tchaikovsky. The long opening Largointroduction is the kind of plangent music that is reminiscent of the closing movement of the Pathétique Symphony. It is, perhaps, more introspective than Tchaikovsky, but the Russian pain is there nevertheless. Powerful chords destroy the mood, and the violins begin the Allegro moderato section with a hint of the main theme, which, when fully realized, is somewhat excitable in nature. Strings and wind bring the second subject, quieter than the first. A shattering climax, in which the solo violin quotes the principal melody of the movement, is gradually evolved before the development begins. The return of the principal ideas follows, after which comes an elaborate coda. The slow movement of the symphony, strongly Romantic in tone, is dominated by its principal theme, proposed briefly, before the clarinet announces the long-drawn melody from which it is to be devised at greater length. This is once more the mood of the opening Largo, reflective music touched with an indefinable yearning. A lively, rhythmic introduction sets the finale into motion. A march melody is played by the wind instruments, after which a beautiful thought for the violins in octaves is presented. An extended working out leads to the recapitulation and the coda. Material from earlier movements is recalled at the end of the symphony, the main thought of the Adagio being placed contrapuntally against the energetic subject of the finale. Piano Concerto No 2 in C minor, Op 18 When the fiasco of his First Symphony sent Rachmaninov into a despondency that stultified all creativity, and seemed to warn of an impending nervous breakdown, he consulted a prominent Moscow physician, Dr N Dahl, who brought about cures through the powers of autosuggestion. Dahl repeatedly told his half-asleep patient: ‘You will begin to write your concerto …you will work with great facility …the concerto will be of an excellent quality …’ The concerto was eventually dedicated to Dahl, and given complete in Moscow on November 9 1901, eleven months after a performance of just the second and third movements, with the composer as soloist. Bell-like chords, subtly changing, ring out from the piano to open the first movement. Violins announce the swaying first subject. After the first big climax, the soloist presents the rising and falling second subject, in E flat. A seamless development follows, with the piano constantly active in melody or in rippling accompaniment. The main theme’s eventual return, at full strength on the violins, is triumphantly reinforced by the march-like insistence of the piano. A softly playing horn brings back the second theme (in A flat), and the music then seems to rest in C major, but C minor is re-established, and a sudden animation on the piano ends the movement. Muted strings work a soft transition from the preceding C minor to the key of the new movement, E major, a transition similar to that which leads to the Largoof Dvořák’s New World Symphony. The piano accompanies while woodwind instruments construct a winding theme. The piano itself takes over in a ‘singing’ melody, then moving to a slightly faster tempo to present new material in partnership with solo bassoon. Later the orchestra’s motion halts for a solo cadenza, after which the ‘singing’ theme returns. Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini, Op 43 RACHMANINOV The theme of an unaccompanied Capriccio by the great violinist-composer, Paganini (1782-1840), was later made the subject of two sets of variations by Brahms, and has also been borrowed by Boris Blacher and Witold Lutoslawski in the last century. The same theme served Rachmaninov for his set of variations, to which he gave the title Rhapsody. The composer was the soloist, and Leopold Stokowski the conductor, at the first performance on November 7, 1934 in Philadelphia. Important in the work is a quotation from the Roman Catholic chant, Dies Irae, referring to the terrors of the Day of Judgement. Berlioz, in the Symphonie Fantastique quoted it parodistically, alluding to a Witches’ Sabbath; for Rachmaninov, here and in other works, it is almost a personal signature. Unusually in a set of variations, the theme does not come first. The key of A minor is set by the opening flourish in which the orchestra suggests what is to come, the piano merely punctuating. Then comes Variation 1, where the entry of the snare drum is conspicuous, followed by the theme itself on violins alone, after which immediately comes Variation 2, the theme passing to the piano, with certain notes reinforced by horns and trumpets. The Dies Irae enters in Variation 7 in slow chords on the piano, while cellos and bassoon have the theme. Soon afterwards, in Variation 10, while the clarinets in a low register deliver an angular distortion of the theme, the piano once again pronounces the Dies Irae, this time in slow, spaced-out octaves. This variation fades on two high notes on the piano, ending the first section of the work. After a slight pause the second section begins, and a dreamier mood is established. Over tremolo strings the piano reflects on the theme, and shortly launches into a cadenza to be joined by the harp. Later variations provide many rhythmic contrasts, whereas no. 16 presents a rather wistful version of the theme on solo oboe, in the distant key of B flat minor. Continued through the next variation, that key then yields to D flat major for the emotional climax and probably the best-known part of the work, Variation 18 (marked Andante cantabile), which the piano opens. Rachmaninov has merely inverted the opening phrase of Paganini’s original, slowed it down, changed minor into major, and chosen a particularly rich and opulent key for this, but the effect is nevertheless magical! Pizzicato strings snap the mood back, the key returns to A minor, and the third section (Variations 19-24) follows. A final climax arrives when the brass section thunders out the Dies Irae theme, which seems to drag Paganini’s down with it. Percussionists join in a combined orchestral exclamation, leaving the final, and almost cheeky word to the piano. Ravel
Boléro RAVEL Respighi
The Pines of Rome RESPIGHI The Pines of Rome is the second of his three tone poems on Roman subjects, and was written in 1924. Respighi asks for a large orchestra with a considerable percussion section, supplemented by harp, bells, celeste, piano and organ. He also asks for six buccine (ancient Roman war-trumpets) in the last movement. Since buccine have not existed for some 1600 years, the parts are normally taken by trumpets and trombones. And in the Janiculum movement, to confound the musical purists, he includes a recording of a real nightingale. The work is in four sections, played without a break. In a scintillating scherzo, children are at play under the trees of the Villa Borghese. The orchestration is loud and shrill, punctuated by snatches of children’s songs, one being the Italian version of ‘Ring around the Rosey’. To create this effect Respighi leaves the low pitched instruments (basses and trombones) out altogether, and writes very high parts for bassoons and cellos. A brittle edge is added by the piano, celeste and percussion. Toward the end, a blatant ‘wrong note’ in the trumpets sends the children scattering, and the scene suddenly changes… … to near the catacombs. (The catacombs of Rome were underground crypts where many early Christian martyrs were buried.) Making use of a plainchant figure, the music is low-pitched, quiet and chromatic. A lonely trumpet speaks of distant sunlight, and the psalm singing of a pilgrims’ march can be heard. This, as the composer advises, ‘rises from the depths, re-echoes silently, like a hymn, and then mysteriously dies away’. The scene changes again … … to woods on the outskirts of Rome. A piano cadenza and a sinuous clarinet line introduce The Pines of the Janiculum, a voluptuous nocturne coloured by the harp, celesta and murmuring strings. Respighi called for the playing of a specific recording of an actual nightingale’s singing at the end of this section, in the distance… … In the final section a misty dawn on the Appian Way clears to the muffled rhythm of endless footsteps, the tread of ghostly legions. Respighi summed up: ‘To the poet’s fantasy appears a vision of past glories. Trumpets blaze, and the army of the Consul advances brilliantly in the grandeur of a newly-risen sun toward the Via Sacra, mounting the Capitoline Hill in final triumph’. Rimsky-Korsakov
Capriccio Espagnol, Op 34 RIMSKY-KORSAKOV (1844 – 1908) Capriccio Espagnol began life as a projected ‘Fantasy on Spanish Themes’ for violin and orchestra, but Rimsky rapidly concluded that he could do better justice to the melodies with a purely orchestral work – ‘the Spanish themes, of dance character, furnished me with rich material for employing colourful orchestral effects’. The first violin does, however, have a prominent solo role in the finished Capriccio, as do the clarinet and harp. The five sections are played without interruption. The first movement (vivo e strepitoso) is an alborada, a morning song or morning serenade. This is not, however, a romantic song but a virile dance section, made up of the themes. Both are stated by full orchestra, and then repeated by clarinet. The movement ends pianissimo, after an orchestral cadenza and a passage for solo violin. The Variations section follows (Andante con moto), its main them presented by horns over string arpeggios. It is followed by five variations. After a flute solo, the music of the opening Alborada is recalled, but a semitone higher, and in different orchestral colours. The fourth part is the Scene and Gypsy Song (Allegro), consisting of five dramatic orchestral cadenzas. It opens with a roll on the side drum and a syncopated fanfare for horns and trumpets. In the concluding part, the principal subject of the fandango is given at once on trombones, to be followed by a related theme in the woodwind. Some interesting passages for solo violin and solo clarinet follow. The fandango is now built up with telling effect to achieve a climax with a forceful restatement of the main theme in trombones. Then, suddenly, the fandango music is supplanted by a return of the opening Alborada melody. Capriccio Espagnol is not a profound piece of music, but it is an enormously enjoyable one, and Rimsky-Korsakov knew it. ‘All in all’, he wrote, ‘the Capriccio is undoubtedly a purely external piece, but vividly brilliant for all that’. Symphonic Suite, Scheherazade RIMSKY-KORSAKOV I The Sea and Sinbad’s Ship Memorable melody and brilliant orchestration have made Scheherazade a perennial favourite. It springs from the fascination of Eastern tales for Rimsky-Korsakov and other Russian composers. The listener’s fantasy is invited to soar from the music to the fanciful scenes of the Arabian Nights. That collection of stories gave rise to the inscription on the score: The Sultan Shahriar, convinced of the faithlessness and inconstancy of all women, had sworn an oath to put to death each of his wives after the first night. But the Sultana Scheherazade saved her life by diverting him with stories which she told him during a thousand and one nights. The Sultan, conquered by his curiosity, put off from day to day the execution of his wife, and at last renounced entirely his bloody vows. Many wonders were narrated to the Sultan by the Sultana Scheherazade. For her stories, the Sultan borrowed the verses of poets and the words of folk songs, and she fitted together tales and adventures. The composer himself conducted the first performance at St Petersburg on 3 November 1888. The picturesque effects gain from the enlarged percussion section, whilst otherwise the orchestral resources are not especially large. He was consciously vague about the specific episodes in the Arabian Nights that stimulated his musical imagination and avoided a definite story-telling programme for his music. Whilst he made use of Leitmotifs, he took pains to explain that they are ‘not linked always and unvaryingly with the same poetic ideas and conceptions. On the contrary, in the majority of cases, all these seeming Leitmotifs are nothing but purely musical material or the given motives for symphonic development. These given motives thread and spread over all the movements of the suite, alternating and intertwining each with the other. Appearing as they do each time under different moods, the self-same motives and themes correspond each time to different images, actions and pictures.... In this manner, developing quite freely the musical information taken as the basis of the work, I had in view the creation of an orchestral suite in four movements, closely knit by the community of its themes and motives, yet presenting, as it were, a kaleidoscope of fairy-tale images and designs of Oriental character’. The two pervasive themes are heard immediately: fiercely threatening (trombones prominent) for the Sultan, sweetly coaxing (violin solo) for Scheherazade. In symphonic terms, the presentation of these themes makes a slow introduction in E minor. The main section of the first movement follows in E major: the Sultan’s theme becomes its first subject, with a quicker pair of themes (woodwind) as second subject. Scheherazade’s theme re-enters in the development, there is a symphonic recapitulation, and a quiet ending which shows that the Sultan is thus far appeased. The second movement in B minor is begun with Scheherazade’s cajoling violin solo. She launches on a new tale (solo bassoon), that of the Kalender Prince, an order of mendicant dervishes. At length the impatient Sultan interrupts. His theme takes on a threat as a solo trombone is answered by solo trumpet over tremolando strings. The story-telling becomes mixed with the menaces of the Sultan and the pleading of Scheherazade. Finally the Sultan’s theme is pushed down to a protesting role on the bass instruments. There is no conventional ‘slow’ movement. The third movement, in G, begins with a violin theme which is both a new ‘tale’ and an obvious emanation from Scheherazade’s own theme. An up-and-down feathery effect (in solo clarinet at first) is notable. A dance-rhythm is set up by the tambourine and the theme takes a new, swaying form, again on solo clarinet. Lightly, other percussion instruments enter with their different rhythms. Scheherazade’s own theme (violin and harp) is later heard and the tale is further developed, with the Sultan silent. The fourth movement opens to a recurrence of the Sultan’s threats and Scheherazade’s pleading. The new tale begins as, over an insistent rhythm on the strings, a whirling theme on solo flute grows in excitement. Rapid, repeated figures appear on horns and trumpets against a pattering snare drum. The ‘swaying’ theme from the previous movement re-enters. Fragments of the Sultan’s theme return on the trumpets. Finally, at a climax, the music proceeds in huge sweeps, the Sultan’s theme is presented grandly but no longer angrily, and the concluding E major is reached. One of the quieter themes from the first movement briefly appears. Scheherazade’s violin solo ascends to the instrument’s fragile, high harmonics. Her serenity ends the work.
Rossini
Overture, Semiramide ROSSINI Like most of Rossini’s works, Semiramide was written very quickly. His contract allowed him forty days to complete the opera, but he finished the job in thirty-three! His standard operating procedure was to wait until the last minute to write the overture. Semiramide’s overture is based almost entirely on what he considered to be the best tunes in the opera. Unlike the majority of his operas, however, Semiramide is thoroughly serious stuff, the opera having been considered almost too dramatic and long-winded by a Venetian audience that was used to lighter opere buffe. Semiramide met with moderate success in its first run, however, and is still one of the works that lurks on the outskirts of today’s standard operatic repertoire. After the initial orchestral flourishes, the overture opens with an extended slow introduction, a feature found in most Rossini overtures. In this section the horns and woodwind play a lyrical hymn-like melody, a chorus of praise for the queen, heard in the first act. The opening flourishes return, announcing the beginning of the main Allegro portion of the overture, which is set in D major. The first Allegro theme is taken from the orchestral introduction to the opera’s tragic final scene at the tomb of King Nino, a tragedy that is somewhat belied by the happy, bouncy nature of this theme! The second theme, in A major, first played by clarinet and bassoon and then by the piccolo, is similarly jovial, yet somewhat more martial than the first theme. A long crescendo passage and a string interlude lead back to a repeat of the opening Allegro material. Satie
Gymnopédies SATIE A French composer as eccentric in his way of life as in his music, Satie exercised considerable influence over some of his more distinguished contemporaries, including Debussy, Ravel and Poulenc, particularly through his tendency to extreme simplicity. A number of his compositions have become very familiar to many, largely through their use in other contexts. The three Gymnopédies are the most significant piano music of his early period. A ‘gymnopedia’ was a religious festival in ancient Sparta in which naked youths worshipped their Gods in song and dance. Satie was stimulated into writing this music by a decoration on a Greek vase. Each of the three dances is in slow 3/4 time, opens with a four-bar introduction and presents a grave and serene melody using the medieval Aeolian mode. In simplicity, economy and directness this music represents another break with the inflationary methods of Post-Romanticism, whilst there is still advanced thinking in the use of unusual harmonic progressions which have a logic all of their own. The first and third of the set were orchestrated by Debussy; the second has been transcribed by Murrill and Roland-Manuel. Shostakovich
Festival Overture, Op 96 SHOSTAKOVICH Dmitri Shostakovich, one of the greatest of twentieth-century Russian composers, had a career full of ups and downs. Living and working in former communist Russia, he composed a good deal of music celebrating the spirit of Russian nationalism and valour, in keeping with the official tenets of Socialist Realism. But there were equally satiric and modernist elements in his music that, on more than one occasion, brought him into disgrace with the official political and artistic establishments. The celebratory side of his achievements is demonstrated in the Festival Overture, written in 1954 for a concert commemorating the 37th anniversary of the 1917 October Revolution that brought the Bolsheviks to power in Russia. But listeners will find little political sentiment in this short and exuberant work. There is a brief introductory Allegretto opening with a brass fanfare, which is soon followed by the main Presto section. The first theme, consisting of woodwind scale-passages against an ostinato on strings and brass, leads to a contrasting espressivo theme, given out firstly by the horn, before being taken up by the strings. Noteworthy in the recapitulation is the way in which the composer reverses the original roles of his orchestral resources, especially for the first theme. There is a brief reference to the opening fanfare, now much grander than at the start, before the Presto returns to conclude what is a highly effervescent and joyful creation. Sibelius
Finlandia, Op. 26 The first versions of both En Saga and Finlandia were written before 1900 – En Saga in 1892, Finlandia in 1899. But these compositions are today heard in the revisions that the composer made later, En Saga in 1901, and Finlandia in 1900. Finlandia has had a dramatic career, closely tied in with Finnish history at the end of the nineteenth century. Intended by the composer as a reflection of the emotions of an exile returning to his native land, this stirring music owes its origin to the February Manifesto issued by the Russian government to abrogate the Diet and suppress free speech and press in Finland. To raise funds to fight this tyrannical move, a group of Finnish patriots inaugurated a series of entertainments, for one of which Sibelius wrote a suite, Finland Awakes. This was in 1899. The fourth movement was called ‘Suomi,’ the Finnish name for Finland. After this performance, this fourth movement was divorced from the suite, rewritten, renamed Finlandia, and reintroduced on July 2, 1900, with Robert Kajanus conducting. This is the version that has become world-famous. After that, through the years, Finlandia became the musical voice of Finland, the expression of its aspirations and its spirit. The outside world came to identify it with Finnish idealism and its struggles for independence. Within Finland it did more, at the turn of the twentieth-century, to bring about Finnish freedom than any speech, pamphlet or published propaganda.
It is a vibrantly national piece of music, so much so that for a long time many believed that some of its melodies quoted folk sources. All the ingredients, however, are Sibelius’s own. The stirring opening bars for the brass and the disturbed music that follows it immediately, all suggest the unrest of a proud people in the face of dark tyranny. There next comes a tender melody in the woodwind, almost like a supplication. A tonal storm erupts; the struggle for freedom has begun. Suddenly a melody, like a folk song, is heard in the woodwinds, sounding like a prayer for peace. This is the most famous melody in the score – indeed, probably the most famous Finnish melody ever written. The strings reply with another national theme, and the woodwinds and strings proceed to alternate in a paean to freedom and truth. The composition grows climactically into a grandiose proclamation of the triumph of the people over the forces of oppression. Symphony No5 in E flat, Op 82 It was in London that Sibelius conducted the first performance of the Fifth Symphony in a final, revised version in 1921. The original version was first heard in Helsinki in 1915. The score published in 1921 places over the correct points the tempo titles above, but does not print them as headings for separate movements. Though the second tempo takes over from the first without a break, the music of the second tempo is so fresh that the listener registers a division of the symphony into four movements rather than three. The first movement prominently uses an ascending, fanfare-like theme. In contrast comes a more pathetic, drooping theme on high woodwind. Later comes a bassoon solo marked ‘mournful’ (lugubre). As the music becomes broader, the home key is reasserted and both main themes are re-heard. The pace quickens for a transition to the second movement, a scherzo in dancing 3-4 time, started by flutes and clarinets in the new key of B major. But that proves deceptive, as the horns’ long-held B slips down to B flat, and the dancing theme has moved to E flat, the key of the opening movement. A new theme rings out confidently on a trumpet. The key is further disturbed, but settles in E flat, the harmony becoming more solid and the pace faster. Thus the first two movements together form a key-unit: E flat returning to E flat. A fresh start in G heralds the ample-seeming main tune of the third movement. It is extended in a kind of continuous variation, with a recurring ‘wrong’ note high on the flutes, in both the opening and closing sections to add a special flavour. In a slower middle passage, a prominent double-bass theme, rising and falling, anticipates the big tune of the finale. The finale returns to E flat and crowns the work. Under the fleet-fingered violins, the violas spin out the first theme. Then, as the strings continue busily, a big tune in thirds rings out on the horns, characteristically playing in pairs. The original viola them later returns with the mysterious sound of much-divided muted strings, and the symphony receives its triumphal end when the big tune, now on trumpets, peals forth against drum-rolls. Not quite the end, however, until six irregularly spaced hammer-blows finally fall in unison on the keynote. Sousa John P
March, The Liberty Bell
John Philip Sousa (1854-1932) was leader of the US Marine Corps Band in 1880, organising his own ‘Sousa's Band’ some 12 years later, with which he toured not only his own country and Europe but, on one occasion (1910-11), the world. A man of remarkable personality and musical ability, he also composed light operas and operettas, including the very successful El Capitán, orchestral suites and songs. He wrote an autobiography, Marching Along (1928), and edited National Patriotic and Typical Airs (1890).
But he is best remembered as ‘The March King’, particularly the quick-step march-form. These are characterised by their vigorous melodic line, particularly in the first two sections, and use of counter-melodies in such a way as not to detract from the driving effect, which is especially evident in the final section. The patriotic fervour of many of the marches reflected the era in which the USA emerged as a world power, and contributed much to their popularity. The Liberty Bell, well-known from its later association with the Monty Python television series, dates from 1893 and is typical in that the first section does not return later, and using the subdominant key for the trio. Strauss Richard
Sunrise from Also sprach Zarathustra Its sunrise opening, thematically simple yet massively impressive, was brilliantly commandeered by Stanley Kubrich in 2001 - an acute piece of musical criticism because the passage concerned is film music, written before such a commodity was required. Although nothing else in the work is as memorable as this in invention, Strauss retains interest by his total mastery of the episodic form in which the tone poem is cast, welding it into a convincing unity. The poetry of the sunrise features simple changes between major and minor and extreme contrasts of light and shadow, grown out of the lapidary motif of nature played by the trumpets, in fact an octave divided at the fifth. Nietzsche’s Zarathustra lived for ten years in the mountains remote from his fellow-men. At length he decided that the wisdom which he had accrued deserved to be passed on to the world; so he descended again to preach his doctrine in some eighty discourses, most of them quite short. Their message can be summed up: ‘all gods are dead: let us now will the survival of the Superman’. Strauss selected eight of Nietzsche’s chapter-headings and worked them into his score. Although he soaked himself in Nietzsche’s work, and loved to argue for hours about Zarathustra’s teachings, his tone-poem does not attempt to turn philosophy into music, but forms a symphonic structure out of such elements in the book as are susceptible to musical parallels. A prime example is Zarathustra’s address to the sun, before leaving his cave in the mountains for the world below. Strauss begins his work with a monumental sunrise for full orchestra in blazing C major, thematically simple yet massively impressive, and which was brilliantly commandeered by Stanley Kubrick’s film, 2001—A Space Odyssey, an acute piece of musical criticism because the passage concerned is film music written before such a commodity was required. Almost at once the music grovels in the depths of B minor: here is man nourishing ignorance on the comforts of religion in a sickly hymn-tune for richly divided strings. Strauss brings it to a glowing climax, even though he, like Nietzsche, did not get on well with the Christian faith and its doctrine of meekness and suffering. This is the first of four musical episodes followed each by a thematic development section. The episode headed ‘Of Joys and Passions’ is a sumptuous, fiery long melody in C minor, voluptuously ornamented, Strauss at his most enthusiastic. Zarathustra preached self-abnegation, so the melody is interrupted at its height by a loudly disapproving theme. The episode ‘Of Science’ is a highly erudite fugue in the bowels of the orchestra, on a theme which includes all twelve notes of the chromatic scale long before Schönberg’s first dodecaphonic attempts, and strongly contrasts C and B as nature versus. mankind. The ensuing development involves chains of dancing thirds, and the emergence of the Superman freed from the trammels of superstition, symbolized by the trumpet-call of cockcrow. In the episode headed ‘The Dance-Song’, the Superman performs the dance of divine grace: for Strauss (even though no relation) it had to be a Viennese waltz, and it brings forward a solo violin in bright C major. The conflicting keys of man and nature are prominent again in the last development, which leads to the tolling of the Midnight Bell and Zarathustra’s song ‘O Mensch, gib acht’. (familiar from Mahler’s Third Symphony). In the coda, Zarathustra returns to the mountains, and the work ends peacefully with B major and C in alteration. Stravinsky
Suite from the ballet, The Firebird STRAVINSKY Introduction – the Firebird – her dance The performance of the ballet The Firebird on 25 June 1910 at the Paris Opera made Stravinsky a celebrity. The story is drawn from Russian legend – the firebird being a benevolent supernatural being who assists the young Tsarevich to liberate and marry one of the princesses enslaved to the monstrous king, Kashchey. In 1911 the composer drew from his ballet score a suite of five numbers, retaining the very large orchestral forces used in the ballet itself – including the high clarinet in D, bass clarinet, two double-bassoons, and three harps. The energy and vivid colouring of the music, with its strong contrasts, were sufficient to make an immediate conquest in the concert-hall. Stravinsky’s skill also enabled him to make the music more accessible to a smaller orchestral force with not too much sacrifice, and a new suite (1919) not only reduced the orchestration but entailed some re-ordering of the numbers. In 1949 he compiled yet another suite for reduced orchestra, comprising (in a different order) the present numbers and some others. The suite begins with a nocturnal picture of Kashchey’s enchanted garden – conjured up at first by undulating figures on cellos and double-basses over a soft roll on the bass drum. There is a flutter of harmonics on the strings like flashes of light; the undulating figures return. Suddenly there is an expectant tremolo on the strings and a new presence is announced by the fluttering of the woodwind: it is the Firebird. After a moment’s pause she begins her dance – at first with clarinet, flute and piccolo above the strings. The animation and excitement increase. In the next number a gentle, swaying motion leads to a tune on the oboe, the round-dance of the captive princesses. A sudden fortissimo explodes from the whole orchestra, followed by a timpani roll and a jagged rhythmic figure on the horns, introducing the monster Kashchey himself. Trumpets in octaves hurl out a menacing theme. Kashchey’s dance (the longest number of the suite) is extended with changes of rhythm between 3/4 and 2/4 but never loses its force and athleticism. Sweeps up and down the strings of the piano and harp make their contribution, as well as the varied impact of percussion. A sustained note in the oboes and horns, suddenly soft, leads to… . . . the Lullaby (berceuse). With her magical powers, the Firebird casts the evil king into sleep. A drowsy tune is heard from a solo bassoon against the unearthly sound of harmonics on the harp. The drowsiness spreads through the strings and woodwind of the orchestra. With trembling strings, the music sinks down. Immediately . . . Tchaikovsky
Fantasy Overture, Romeo and Juliet Perhaps the most popular of all orchestral ‘narratives’, Romeo and Juliet did not immediately assume the form in which we now know it. After the first performance in 1870, the composer revised it, substituting a new opening at the urging of Balakirev, the older composer who had originally suggested the subject. In its revised version it was given in St Petersburg in 1872, and is substantially the version now known, though minor revisions were made later. Romeo and Juliet is called a ‘fantasy-overture’ – probably indicating its ‘free’ assembly of themes. It does not follow the strict form of a symphonic first movement, which so many composers had adopted for an overture. Here an introductory slow section precedes the principal fast section (from the beginning of the ‘feuding’ music) which progresses from minor to major. ‘Overture’ itself does not imply that it was intended for use in a theatrical performance of the play, but only that it is a substantial, single-movement work. The events of the play are not followed literally; the slow opening evokes Friar Laurence (Romeo’s confidant, who performs the ill-fated marriage) on the organ-like tones of clarinets and bassoons. A further calm passage suggesting benediction (with sequences of arpeggio harp chords) changes to agitation and a new, swifter tempo. Jagged, angry music represents the feud of Montagues and Capulets. At length the tumult is quietened for the love-theme – at first on solo cor anglais against sparse accompaniment, then swelling into throbbing, full-orchestral expression. A central section corresponding to symphonic development represents the conflicts and their fatal consequence. Friar Laurence’s theme is involved in the tension. When the return of the love-theme is suggested, an unrest continues beneath. But for an ecstatic moment the love-them soars forth in its passionate full-orchestral form. A further destructive outbreak leads to catastrophe: a timpani-roll thunders out, then quietens. In slower tempo over a relentless bass note the tragedy is emphasized, with the harp arpeggio figures returning to offer a consolation as violins deliver a last, sad version of the love-theme. Symphony No 4 in F minor, Op 36 TCHAIKOVSKY ‘Our symphony has a programme’, the composer wrote to his patron, Nadezhda von Meck, ‘and I will tell you, and you alone, the meaning of the entire work and its separate movements. The introduction is the germ of the symphony, without question its central idea. This is Fate, that fatal power which prevents our striving for happiness from succeeding’. Tchaikovsky proceeded to give a detailed account of the music but in a postscript called it ‘a confused and inadequate programme’. First performed in Moscow under Nikolai Rubinstein in 1878, it was slow to achieve its present firm popularity. Horns, backed by bassoons, announce the Fate theme first of all: the menace of its rhythmical summons is unmistakeable, and is reinforced when a new harmony suddenly supports it. The theme fades as the main section of the movement begins in a faster, swaying tempo (the composer actually calls it waltz-tempo). A flow of new themes is presented and developed, but ‘these are only dreams: we are awakened by Fate’ (the composer’s words). The summons sometimes interrupts the flow, sometimes mingles with it. ‘In the style of a song’ runs the direction for the Andantino, again in a minor key (B flat minor), with its principal melody in the oboe, supported by pizzicato strings. ‘The second movement,’ continues Tchaikovsky, ‘shows another phase of sadness. Here is that melancholy feeling which enwraps one when he sits at night alone in the house exhausted by work; the book which he had taken to read has slipped from his hand; a swarm of reminiscences had arisen… One mourns the past and has neither the courage nor the will to begin a new life. One is rather tired of life.’ Midway in the movement, lyricism gives way to rhythmic vitality with a lively tune for clarinets and bassoons. The third movement Scherzo presents an altogether happier scene in the tonic major (F major). It is subtitled pizzicato ostinato, the string players plucking their instruments throughout. A contrasting section for wind and drums only, a spirited Russian dance, (Tchaikovsky’s ‘street song’ and ‘military music in the distance’) is followed by a resumption of the pizzicato section, to which the other instruments now add their own themes. On this occasion there is no interruption by the summons of Fate. The soft ending of the third movement gives way to the cymbal clash, full brass chords and swirling strings and woodwind which open the finale, again in F major. Flute, clarinet and bassoon quote an innocent folk-tune, There Stands a Birch Tree (Stravinsky used the same tune in Petrouchka many years later), and a strong, joyful vigour develops. The strings give a vigorous reply, creating a disturbance that provides the proper setting for a return of the stormy opening theme. Twice the folk-tune recurs in its simple state, twice more the jollity rises. Then, suddenly, the Fate theme reappears, with the same dramatic shift of harmony as in the introduction to the first movement. But it fades, and jollity and a return of the march-like theme heard earlier help bring the symphony to its dramatic denouement. Symphony No 6 in B minor (Pathétique) TCHAIKOVSKY ‘Never in my life’ Tchaikovsky wrote to his publisher, ‘have I been so contented, so proud, so happy in the knowledge that I have written a good piece.’ The Pathétique Symphony had its first performance on October 28, 1893 in St Petersburg under the composer’s direction, but its success is held to spring from a performance on November 18 under Eduard Napravnik – twelve days after Tchaikovsky’s death. Pathos characterises the opening movement. A short introductory section opens in the sombre colour of a solo bassoon. Equally striking, where the main faster section begins, is the rich four-part harmony of the urgent theme on divided violas and cellos. The principal contrasting theme is a consoling tune in D major on muted strings. The music fades to extreme softness (marked pppppp on a solo bassoon) before an explosive bang starts the development. When the waves of strong feeling finally subside, a hymn-like solemnity is suggested by trumpets and trombones against the slow-marching tread of pizzicato strings, and the end is again subdued. Escape from the shade comes with the second movement in D major – written in 5/4 time, like nothing in any previous symphony. It starts with a lilt, like a waltz in disguise, but an ensuing section (still in the same rhythm) has a drooping theme, actually marked ‘tearful’, over a persistent slow timpani beat. The graceful strain returns, with fragmentary reminders of the other them towards the end. The third movement presents excitement and triumph. A catchy march theme carries irresistible impetus, and the various sections of the orchestra are displayed in brilliance and contrast. The third flute is exchanged for the shrill piccolo, with the cymbals adding their excited off-beat clashes. Totally original is the finale in B minor, which returns the listener to the opening mood of the symphony, one of dragging despair. The strings lament; the music achieves one throbbing climax only to fall. Another climax, another fall: the tam-tam’s stroke is followed by ‘requiem’ chords from trombones and tuba, and the throb, now darkly on the double-basses, only takes the music to its extinction. Vaughan Williams
A London Symphony The descriptive title of this symphony and of the Pastoral which followed it, does not imply that this is, in fact, ‘descriptive’ music. About the London the composer wrote: ‘A better title would perhaps be Symphony by a Londoner; that is to say, the life of London (including possibly its various sights and sounds) has suggested to the composer an attempt at musical expression; but it would be no help to the hearere to describe these in words. The music is intended to be self-impressive, and must stand or fall as “absolute” music.’ That a subjective intention should be combined with objective details, such as Westminster Chimes, a ‘Lavender’ cry, sounds of mouth-organ and the jingle of hansom bells, is natural when one remembers that the composer also said: ‘Have not we all about us forms of musical expression which can take and purify and raise to the level of great art?’ The first performance, conducted by Geoffrey Toye, took place in London on March 27, 1914; the composer later revised it three times and notably shortened it until arriving at a definitive version in 1934. The orchestration allowed for the omission of certain woodwind and brass instruments and for their parts to be ‘cued’ in by others, although this reflects the expected deficiencies of strength in British orchestras of the time, not an alternative artistic conception. It is dedicated to the ‘pastoral’ composer George Butterworth, who was killed in the First World War at the age of thirty-one. In conforming with the composer’s practice, the symphony was not given a key-label. But it is in G major: the first and last movements being in that key, the mysterious second movement starting and finishing ambiguously, the third in D minor. The first movement begins with a veiled, slow introduction and a pentatonic phrase which is a generating figure – a very characteristic one which pervades the whole work. Through the mist, the chimes of the half-hour are heard on the unexpected tones of a harp playing harmonics, before the extroverted main section begins with a noisy, discordant theme of teeming activity prominent at first. A more jaunty vein, which brings in the triangle, portrays the holiday mood traditionally associated with Hampstead Heath, as a cornet tune rings out. After some development, both these moods re-emerge in altered form, and with a happy conclusion. The second movement, with a cor anglais solo emerging from the misty sound of muted strings, is meditative in character. The composer allowed an association with the quiet of a square in bygone Bloomsbury. A new tune is heard on a solo viola and leads to an imitation of a lavender-seller’s call (initially on piccolo). An emotional climax rises and then subsides, leaving the quiet ending of the movement again to the solo viola. Most musical nocturnes are quiet and slow. This symphony’s third movement is a night-piece with a different image. First comes a scurrying section which is literally repeated. Horns enter forcibly, but the scurrying soon returns. A more lively contrast ensues, featuring a street-tune and perhaps the suggestion of a mouth-organ (from the horns). Again comes the scurrying theme, which fades whilst solo violin and bassoon continue. The finale in its passionate opening music recalls the mood of the opening of the symphony. A march follows, and a mighty climax with a tam-tam stroke. The Westminster chimes are again heard (the third quarter now), followed by a section marked ‘Epilogue’, said to symbolize the ceaseless, unhurried Thames, and which ends finally on quiet string chords. Five Variants of ‘Dives and Lazarus’ VAUGHAN WILLIAMS Vaughan Williams had begun collecting folk-songs in 1903, when he took down a version of Bushes and Briars from a certain Mr Pottipher in Essex. But this was no more than the logical outcome of something that had happened to him ten years before, in 1893. It was in that year that he discovered Dives and Lazarus for the first time in a copy of English Country Songs, and he never forgot the impact that it had made upon him: ‘I had that sense of recognition – here’s something which I have known all my life, only I didn’t know it’. Forty-six years later he commemorated that crucial event in his life in Five Variants of Dives and Lazarus, written for the New York World Fair of 1939 where it was conducted for the first time by Adrian Boult. In the intervening years he had been steadily collecting different versions of the tune, and as he himself described the work: ‘These variants are not exact replicas of traditional tunes, but rather reminiscences of various versions in my collection and those of others’. Scored for strings, with violas and cellos divided in two parts, and one, or if possible, two harps, its five subtly-interlinked and richly-expressive variants of the tune stated in full harmonies in the opening bars, not only sum up the ‘dreams and memories of a folk-song collector’, but crystallise the unifying philosophy of a composer for whom music was not something answerable only to itself, but essentially an ‘expression of the life of the community’. Verdi
Overture, The Force of Destiny Rossini and so many of his contemporaries customarily wrote overtures in an extended formal pattern, which made them satisfactorily self-contained. Verdi, some half a century later, rarely did so, preferring to equip most of his mature operas with no more than a short prelude. In composing Otello and Falstaff, he plunged into the first vocal number without even that. The overture to La Forza del Destino is an exception. It was a sign of Verdi’s world fame that La Forza del Destino was first produced in St Petersburg on 10 November 1862. The overture is a vividly exciting affair, dominated by Leonora’s aria from Act II, and the music concerned with ‘fate’, which begins it. Reference is also made to Alvaro’s cantabile con espressione tune from the fourth-act duet, and to themes from Leonora’s Act II duet. Three ‘hammer-blows’ which open the overture, and are repeated, suggest the hand of Fate which blindly takes control of the characters - a pistol-shot killing the heroine’s father unintentionally, later a strange coincidence of encounters in Spain and Italy. Those hammer-blows, on the note E, become the emphatic notes in the main melody, which follows immediately in A minor. The hammer-blows return, and other melodies from the opera are heard. The one which dominates the final part of the overture (and ends it, in E major), is sung by the heroine, Leonora as she begs Padre Guardiano (the Father Guardian of a monastery) for refuge in her sorrow. Wagner
Prelude and Love-Death, Tristan and Isolde The opera Tristan and Isolde, produced in Munich under Hans von Bülow’s baton in 1865 is a revolutionary work - not merely in the harmonies which baffled even such a contemporary as Berlioz, but in a libretto (the composer’s own, as usual) which identifies love with oblivion and even with death. Of the two ill-fated, adulterous lovers, Tristan allows himself to be killed in a sword-fight; Isolde expires on his body, singing of abandoning herself to waves or clouds: ‘Unconscious - highest joy!’ This, the end of the opera, is known as Isolde's Liebestod, for which ‘love-death’ is only an approximate English translation. The opera’s prelude is composed of surging themes to be realized in the couple’s passionate love; it is linked (not by the composer, but as a practicable concert piece) with the Love-Death, where the earlier, surging music is recalled within a context of an ecstatic fulfillment. The notes of Isolde's vocal part being almost completely doubled by various instruments of the orchestra, the music may be performed purely orchestrally with only the smallest adjustment. The orchestration includes triple woodwind (together with bass clarinet and cor anglais) and harp. The famous opening to the prelude, very quiet, presents two short phrases, the first on the cellos, the second on the woodwind; they alternate and are transformed. The music, in an indeterminate key at first, seems to settle in A major. After a stormy climax the music again becomes soft and fragmented, the prelude ending on two pizzicato notes low on cellos and double basses. The ‘Love-Death’ music begins immediately: through trembling strings, a bass clarinet and then an ordinary clarinet give out the smooth theme which corresponds to Isolde’s description of her dead lover: ‘Mild and gentle, see how he smiles!’ Isolde's thoughts recapture their passionate love. The music attains its goal in B major and fades: the harp ceases its flow and only a few seconds before the end the second (woodwind) phrase of the prelude is breathed again as a last farewell. Overture, The Flying Dutchman WAGNER Wagner was himself the conductor when The Flying Dutchman (Der fliegende Holländer) was produced at Dresden in 1843. Its story is that of the accursed sailor who can be redeemed only by love. The opening strings tremolo is a classic summoning of agitation, under which the heavy bass theme represents the Dutchman himself, and which is heard again in the opera, when his ship approaches. The storm rages, and then subsides to a moment of stillness. A slow, earnest theme in the relative major represents the heroine, Senta, and her role in redeeming the Dutchman. The mood changes: woodwind and brass deliver a light tune which is the dance of the sailors not from the Dutchman’s ship. More use of the Dutchman’s and Senta’s themes leads to a climax, a dramatic pause, and a joyful change to the tonic major, which now embraces both themes. This section either proceeds shortly and with uninterrupted lively pace to its end, or (a revision on the composer’s part, and usually adopted in concert performances) has a drawn-out cadence suggesting the opera’s final moments – Senta’s self-sacrifice, the redemption of the Dutchman, and the unity of the lovers in death. Overture, Tannhäuser WAGNER Walton
WALTON(1902 – 1983)
The pungent, parodistic and sometimes jazzy music of Façade has made it one of Walton’s best-known works, but in its original form it was not orchestral at all. A sequence of eighteen poems by Edith Sitwell, bordering on nonsense verse, was declaimed by a reciter to an accompaniment of five players – flute doubling piccolo, clarinet doubling bass clarinet, alto saxophone, trumpet, percussion and cello. In this form the work had its first public performance in 1923, before taking on its final form with twenty-one poems in 1942. The composer made two orchestral suites, with the reciter’s part omitted, using eleven of the original numbers. They are essentially for smallish orchestra with three percussionists additional to the timpani in the first suite, but only one in the second, where the original saxophone is retained, but which is now interchangeable with the cor anglais, or even both can be used. Often, as in the following selection, movements from both suites are frequently combined and played in a different order. Polka includes a quotation from the music-hall song, See me dance the polka, whilst the Valse would seem to be mocking both Tchaikovsky and Johann Strauss. The Tango-Pasodoble might well feature Spanish rhythms, but the English muse interrupts with I do like to be beside the seaside, which in the spoken version went with Sitwell’s actual word ‘seaside’. The well-known Popular Song is a lazy shuffle of a tune, with the percussion artfully marking the strings, whilst Old Sir Faulk, subtitled ‘foxtrot’, has its jazzy, bouncy tune. In Tarantella-Sevillana, the rapid 6/8 of the tarantella is contrasted by the 3/4 of the sevillana. Crown Imperial Wetherell Eric
“On Screen” (Superman – Born Free – Star Wars) ERIC WETHERELL Whitlock Judy
Star-gazing JUDY WHITLOCK This Nocturne for Soprano and Orchestra reflects Judy’s love of the night sky. A keen amateur star-gazer, she hopes this accessible new work will educate as well as entertain! She has written the words and the music and her poem guides us through the legends associated with some of our night sky’s most easily identifiable constellations. The piece opens with glittering gestures from harp and percussion and after the singer’s exhortation to ‘look up’, the flute and clarinet quietly begin a rhythmic fugal passage representing the gradual emergence of ‘night’s lanterns’. The music builds in both dynamics and texture until the full orchestra is playing and the ‘celestial roof’ is filled with stars. The trombones herald Draco and then a change of mood introduces the Pleiades (listen for seven delicate mordents in the first violins!). Next we hear the story of Cassiopeia where the shape of the melodic line replicates the W-shape of this constellation. A change to 6/8 in the woodwind begins the tale of Andromeda and Perseus accompanied by rhythmic ostinati on xylophone and harp. The name Orion is then heard clearly on the trombone and the singer tells the romantic tale of the towering Hunter and the Goddess Aurora. A gentle cor anglais solo leads us to Bootes and the Great and Little Bears (listen for ‘herding, herding, herding,’ on the French horn). Bravura writing for the brass colours this legend contrasting with the ensuing cantabile music of the steadfast Pole Star. A timpani roll announces a maestoso 5/4 section for full orchestra as the regal Corona Borealis appears. Suddenly the dynamic level drops to ppp, the instruments are stilled and the players hold a hummed chord. Soaring above this cushion of sound the singer tells of the break of a new dawn and ushers in the work’s finale. The fugal passage from the opening is reprised as is each of the constellation themes while the singer dreamily repeats, ‘I’ll be star-gazing, will you?’ An unexpected rousing coda ends the piece. Williams John
Main Theme from Star Wars Long ago, in a galaxy far, far away … good battled evil in a cliffhanging fairy tale that changed cinema for good! If it hadn’t been for Star Wars, no-one would be interested in making science fiction movies, but the massive success of George Lucas’ epic convinced studio bosses there was money in the stars, and that, in fact, remains the case today. Twenty years after the movie was originally released, a revamped version of the film, with improved effects, hit the screens in 1997, and earned even more than it did the first time round! Music from Harry Potter When screen-writer, Chris Columbus, began the process of turning Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone into a film, his one goal was to remain true and faithful to the spirit of J K Rowling’s book. This meant shooting the entire picture in England, casting all-British actors, and not straying from the original text of the novel. It also meant choosing a composer whose music could capture the richness and texture of this complex, imaginative story. He felt there was only one man who could accomplish this – John Williams. John Williams’s music for the 2001 film is a towering achievement, and works on several levels as a brilliantly constructed companion piece, integrating seamlessly with every image and emotion. But most importantly, it captures the soul of the Harry Potter world. There is a moment, for example, in the book and film, when Harry opens his letter from Hogwart’s School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, and realises that he is, in fact, a wizard. At that moment, Harry becomes free to dream and Williams’s music creates exactly the same response in the heart of each listener. Wood Sir Henry
Fantasia on British Sea Songs In 1905 Sir Henry Wood, the founder of the promenade concerts, arranged a gala concert to celebrate the centenary of the Battle of Trafalgar. In a programme of sea-faring music he included his own Fantasia on British Sea Songs which was hastily put together in the three weeks before the concert. By including it in the final night of the next season’s promenade concerts he established a tradition, the spectacular orchestration of Rule Britannia always bringing the house down. Mindful and respectful of his musicians, Wood provided several of his most distinguished players with important solos. The piece begins with authentic bugle-calls and then follow, The Saucy Arethusa (euphonium), Tom Bowling (cello), Jack’s the Lad (violin), a spirited hornpipe which always leaves the Last Night audience trailing in its wake, Farewell ye Spanish Ladies (a sonorous trombone quartet and a wonderfully enjoyable but irrelevant clarinet cadenza), Home Sweet Home (oboe), See the Conquering Hero (horn, as in the original Handel) and finally Rule Britannia, which brings the work to its rousing and triumphant conclusion.
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