Download Programme Notes - Sage Gateshead

friday 17 february 2012
Northern sinfonia
Hall one, The Sage Gateshead
Programme Notes
ARVO PÄRT
SPIEGEL IM SPIEGEL
VAUGHAN WILLIAMS THE LARK ASCENDING
TCHAIKOVSKY VARIATIONS ON A ROCOCO THEME
INTERVAL
BRAHMS SYMPHONY NO.2 IN D MAJOR, OP.73
ARVO PÄRT B.1935
SPIEGEL IM SPIEGEL
uncompromising works
Pärt’s Symphony no.2, composed in
1966, is an anarchic and rather grim
work which tears apart extracts from
Tchaikovsky’s music and introduces a
squeaky toy into the orchestral ranks.
including
There are other arrangements that
involve the horn, flute, double bass and
percussion.
Arvo Pärt, widely regarded as Estonia’s greatest living composer, was massively influential
on the development of classical music in the latter decades of the twentieth century.
The Baltic republic was annexed by the Soviet Union in 1940, but had effectively been
under the Communist thumb for many years previously. The cultural strait-jacket Stalin’s
stooges were so eager to use at home to restrain progressive composers such as
Shostakovich was not unfamiliar in Russia’s other dominions.
Pärt studied at the Conservatory in Estonia’s capital, Tallinn, from 1958 while working as a
sound director for Estonian Radio and, after leaving that post ten years later, made a living
by writing more than fifty film scores.
In his other compositions of this period, Pärt rebelled against his nation’s inherited
repression and throughout the 1960s embraced the officially despised serialism
movement in music, creating some very uncompromising works.
But from the early years of the following decade Pärt took a very different direction as
a composer – partly influenced by an intensive study of medieval Franco-Flemish choral
music and Gregorian chant – and this was given impressive expression in his Symphony
no.3 of 1971 which, because of its religious overtones, also provoked official displeasure.
Pärt was now placing more emphasis on the tonal colour of his compositions rather than
on any outwardly evident dramatic or emotional expression, and it was this development,
often dubbed ‘religious minimalism’, which enabled composers such as Poland’s Henryk
Górecki, whose ‘Symphony of Sorrowful Songs’ became such a massive hit, and Britain’s
own John Tavener, inspired by the rituals of the Russian Orthodox Church, unexpectedly to
win over concert audiences and CD buyers in the 1990s with their deeply felt and, above
all, approachable music.
Pärt’s pared-down style of what he termed ‘tintinnabulation’ – music derived from the
sound of bells and sometimes reflecting on the simple purity of a single note as much
as its surrounding silence – was first fully demonstrated in such works as ‘ Cantus in
Memoriam Benjamin Britten’ of 1976 and in the following year the ‘Fratres’ series for
various instrumental combinations which takes a monastic chant as its basis.
In 1978, just before he left Estonia for Vienna and Berlin, Pärt refined his tintinnabular
style even further through ‘Spiegel im Spiegel’ – meaning either ‘Mirror in Mirror’ or
‘Mirrors in Mirror’ – for just two instruments; a piano and violin.
Pärt later arranged this serene ten-minute meditation to enable other instruments to
accompany the piano as a duo, including the cello (as in this evening’s performance),
viola and clarinet.
The pianist’s right hand presents a broken chord pattern, while the left yields bass and
treble bell tones. Against this, the string soloist holds sustained notes at various intervals,
alternately rising and falling. The pace does not vary and, as the ‘Spiegel im Spiegel’ title
implies, this hypnotic music is suspended and reflected back on itself, like the infinity of
an image held within facing mirrors.
© Richard C. Yates
VAUGHAN WILLIAMS 1872-1958
THE LARK ASCENDING
PREMIERE
‘The Lark Ascending’ was first performed
in this version by the Newcastle-born
violin virtuoso Marie Hall, and Vaughan
Williams dedicated the work to her.
MEREDITH
George Meredith (1828-1909) was a
poet and novelist, who earned his daily
crust as a journalist and publisher’s
reader. His works – hardly read these
days – often satirised contemporary
society. But his lasting place in history is
deserved through his work for publisher
Chapman and Hall in promoting the
causes of young authors such as
Thomas Hardy and George Gissing.
Ralph Vaughan Williams’ ‘The Lark Ascending’ first took flight as an instrumental piece,
for violin and piano. It was brought to life in the peaceful months of 1914 before Europe
was swept into a terrible war. It received its first performance as late as 1920, following
a revision by the composer, and it was to be another year before it received its premiere
as a ‘Romance for Violin and Orchestra’.
At the time, the London music critics were struggling to get to grips with the new and
uncompromising music of Stravinsky and Schoenberg – and when ‘The Lark’ fluttered
down into their midst at a concert of contemporary works it ruffled more than a few
feathers. The baffled critic from The Times pronounced it “showed serene disregard of
fashions of today or yesterday. It dreams its way along”.
Fashions change, of course. Today this short but beautiful work, reflecting the pastoral
charm of an England now lost, is a delight for concertgoers and musicians alike. Vaughan
Williams prefaced the score with an extract from the poem by George Meredith which
gives the work its title:
He rises and begins to round,
He drops the silver chain of sound,
Of many links without a break,
In chirrup, whistle, slur and shake.
For singing till the heaven fills,
’Tis love of earth that he instils,
And ever winging up and up,
Our valley is his golden cup,
And he the wine which overflows
To lift us with him as he goes.
’Til lost on his aerial rings
In light, and then the fancy sings.
ANDANTE SOSTENUTO
Flowing and sustained.
The work begins with the soloist taking wing against muted strings in a passage which
Vaughan Williams marked Andante sostenuto before the violin is joined by the fuller
orchestra in a rich melody. Another livelier sequence, marked Quasi andante follows.
Then, as the opening theme returns, the orchestral sound ebbs away to leave the violin,
like the lark, solitary and soaring ever higher until lost in the silence.
© Richard C. Yates
TCHAIKOVSKY 1840-1893
VARIATIONS ON A ROCOCO THEME, OP.33
ROCOCO
Light or diverting music with ornate
flourishes, a term derived from the
elaborate and highly-ornamented
French ‘rocaille’ stonework typical of the
architecture fashionable during the reign
of Louis XV.
GREAT ACCLAIM
Franz Liszt, a composer Tchaikovsky
admired and respected, was in the
audience and had been deeply moved
by the work. “Here at last,” he exclaimed
to Fitzenhagen, “is music again!”
Tchaikovsky’s life was in turmoil in 1876. Two years earlier his morale had been dealt a
severe blow when his former teacher, the influential Anton Rubinstein, greeted his Piano
Concerto no.1 with contempt.
Now his growing depression was fuelled by news that his ‘Romeo and Juliet’ had been
hissed at by audiences in Vienna and Paris, and by the fact that he had to abandon plans
for a concert of his music in the French capital because of a lack of funds.
But Tchaikovsky’s greatest burden was his guilt at not being able to subdue his
homosexual nature, and control what he confided to his brother, Modest, as his
‘pernicious passions’. He was now agonising over what he considered the only possible
course – a marriage that would, at the very least, silence the gossips.
In the autumn of this year of crisis Tchaikovsky sought comfort and strength from the
much more ordered world of seventeenth and eighteenth century Baroque and Rococo
music, and the early works of his beloved Mozart. The delightful ‘Variations on a Rococo
Theme for Cello & Orchestra’ was the result.
Tchaikovsky wrote it for the cellist Wilhelm Fitzenhagen, who first performed it in Moscow
in November 1877. Tchaikovsky was said to be furious the following year, when a piano
and cello version was being prepared for publication, to discover that Fitzenhagen had
rewritten much of the solo part to suit himself, as well as rearranged the variations for
dramatic effect. Even so, Tchaikovsky let the changes stand.
There was some consolation in 1879 when Fitzenhagen performed the ‘Rococo Variations’
at the Wiesbaden Festival to great acclaim.
After a short orchestral introduction the cello states the simple gavotte-like theme,
and seven variations on it follow. These are rich in melody, ranging from the passionate
and yearning third, Andante sostenuto, through the darker, introspective fifth, Allegro
moderato, to the vigorous and joyful Allegro vivo which ends the work.
© Richard C. Yates
BRAHMS 1833-1897
SYMPHONY NO.2 IN D, OP.73
Allegro non troppo - Adagio non troppo - Allegretto grazioso - Allegro con spirito
SHADOW
Brahms wrote to a friend, Hermann Levi:
“You will never know how the likes of us
feel when we hear the march of a giant
like Beethoven behind us”.
WON THE HEARTS
In 1878 the Philharmonic Society
in Brahms’ home city of Hamburg
celebrated its 50th anniversary by
inviting him to conduct the Symphony
no.2. There was a brass fanfare and the
presentation of a hero’s wreath of laurels
as he came on stage and, much to his
embarrassment, he was pelted with
roses by the ecstatic audience at the
end of the concert.
It took Johannes Brahms many years to find the confidence to tackle the symphonic form,
believing himself to be in the shadow of Beethoven’s nine magnificent achievements. But
despite its long gestation period his first symphony, in C minor, won critical praise – even
being hailed by the highly influential conductor Hans von Bülow as ‘Beethoven’s Tenth’.
In contrast, his second venture into symphonic writing was not long in coming after
the first, in 1877. Whether it was simply swiftly executed work, or rather something
assembled from sketches from earlier composition exercises towards it, has not been
established; in any case, it took only four months to reach the form in which it was ready
for performance.
The rather stern expression of the first symphony had disconcerted some of its
audiences, and Brahms, notorious for his mischievous sense of humour, probably had
his tongue firmly in his cheek when he wrote to his publisher, friend and financial adviser
Fritz Simrock to declare that his latest symphony “is so melancholy that one can’t stand
it” and that he’d never written “anything so sad – so minor-ish”. Pushing the joke a little
further, Brahms urged Simrock to publish the score with a black border. Wise to such a
ruse, Simrock ignored this advice and the Symphony no.2 in D soon won the hearts
of Brahms’ audiences, a buoyant spirit being quickly realised and – much to Brahms’
irritation, still haunted by Beethoven’s spectre – the work was dubbed by some as his
‘Pastoral Symphony’, the title which had attached itself to that earlier master’s sixth
creation in that form.
No doubt Brahms had been influenced by his surroundings during the symphony’s
composition, in that 1877 walk-filled summer holiday in the southern Austrian resort
of Pörtschach, amid Carinthia’s spectacular mountains and lakes. One of his friends,
the surgeon and part-time musician Theodor Billroth, went into raptures, rejoicing that
the symphony “is like blue heavens, the murmur of springs, sunshine and cool green
shadows”.
Even so, despite the readily absorbed impression of life-affirming optimism, there are
hints – especially in the first two of the four movements – that Brahms’ glum half-joking
confidences to close ones that melancholy lay within the symphony’s heart have a ring of
truth.
At the core of the Symphony no.2 in D is a three-note motif which we hear on the lower
strings at the outset of the Allegro non troppo first movement, before a wistful horn
phrase introduces some lilting themes which banish Beethoven’s ghost and open the
door to Schubert’s dancing spirit. But the bassoon and brass, in collusion with the strings,
eventually throw their weight in, adding a more abrasive touch to this tuneful festivity –
and by the time the movement ends their sombre influence is overwhelming.
This mood is continued in the Adagio second movement with cellos to the fore, counterbalanced by a sedate accompaniment from the brass. At mid-point things become a little
stormy before the violins restore some calm with references back to the opening phrase.
The atmosphere lightens considerably in the Allegretto as woodwinds play against
plucked cellos and skittish violins before a more reflective mood prevails.
That little three-note phrase which opened the symphony is back yet again for the start
of its finale, this time in a rather subdued form before an energetic passage helps its
transformation into one of Brahms’ most exhilarating pieces of orchestral writing –
with, in the last bars, the brass that had earlier overlaid an oppressive cloud-covering
eventually letting in the shafts of sunlight that the symphony’s first audiences best
remembered.
© Richard C. Yates