Download Richard Tognetti

Richard Tognetti
Tuesday 15 November 2016 7.30pm
Milton Court Concert Hall
Arvo Pärt Fratres
Beethoven Violin Sonata in F major, Op 24
‘Spring’
interval 20 minutes
Sculthorpe Irkanda I
Brahms Violin Sonata No 3 in D minor, Op 108
Mick Bruzzese
Richard Tognetti violin
Polina Leschenko piano
Part of Barbican Presents 2016–17
Programme produced by Harriet Smith;
printed by Mandatum Ink; advertising by Cabbell
(tel. 020 3603 7930)
Confectionery and merchandise including organic
ice cream, quality chocolate, nuts and nibbles are
available from the sales points in our foyers.
Please turn off watch alarms, phones, pagers etc
during the performance. Taking photographs,
capturing images or using recording devices during
a performance is strictly prohibited.
The City of London
Corporation
is the founder and
principal funder of
the Barbican Centre
If anything limits your enjoyment please let us know
during your visit. Additional feedback can be given
online, as well as via feedback forms or the pods
located around the foyers.
Welcome
Tonight is the first concert given by Richard
Tognetti, this season’s Artist-in-Residence
at Milton Court Concert Hall. He is a
musician who refuses to be pigeonholed,
equally at home directing the Australian
Chamber Orchestra (with which he has been
associated since 1989), creating large-scale
multi-media projects or performing as a
soloist on period, modern or electric violin.
This evening we hear him as a recitalist,
joined by Polina Leschenko at the piano.
They offer a strikingly wide-ranging
programme, which takes us from
Beethoven’s mellifluous ‘Spring’ Sonata
and Brahms’s Third Violin Sonata to the
20th century. Arvo Pärt’s Fratres may need
little introduction, having become one of
his most frequently performed pieces, but
Irkanda I by Richard’s compatriot Peter
Sculthorpe is distinctly less familiar.
We look forward to welcoming Richard back
on 24 November for a collaboration with
electronic artists from the Guildhall School,
in which he is also joined by fellow violinist
Satu Vänskä to reimagine a range of music
from Kaija Saariaho to Aphex Twin. For the
second part of his residency in March next
year, he brings the wonderful Australian
Chamber Orchestra to Milton Court for
three concerts featuring music by Pe-teris
Vasks, Shostakovich and Mozart, and The
Reef: a live music and filmic exploration
of Australia’s rich natural coastline.
I hope you enjoy tonight’s concert.
Huw Humphreys, Head of Music, Barbican
Barbican Classical Music Podcasts
2
Stream or download our Barbican Classical Music podcasts
for exclusive interviews from some of the finest artists in
classical music. Recent podcasts include Jonathan Biss,
John Adams, Gerald Barry, Barbara Hannigan, Sir James
MacMillan, George Benjamin, Andrew Norman, Iestyn
Davies, Joyce DiDonato and Nico Muhly.
Available on the Acast app, iTunes, Soundcloud and
the Barbican website
Fratres (1977, rev 1980)
Instead, as he entered his maturity as a composer,
Pärt began to find inspiration in more obscure,
more distant musical traditions – in Gregorian
chant, medieval and Renaissance composers,
the early Dutch school and Josquin, and perhaps
most dangerously for a composer brought up
in a Soviet state, in music deriving from religious
exaltation. A whole new genre, sometimes
labelled ‘holy minimalism’, began to emerge
around him and other composers such as Tavener
and Górecki. With works such as Spiegel im
Spiegel and Cantus in memoriam Benjamin
Britten Pärt began to put Estonia on the map as
an important modern musical nation – a status it
still maintains today despite the composer himself
having left in 1980, moving first to Vienna and
then to Berlin.
Pärt’s Fratres is not so much a composition as a
musical franchise, a catch-all title that has been
applied to a work originally composed in 1977
for string quintet, wind quintet and percussion but
which has subsequently been re-composed for
various ensembles ranging from string quartet
to solo violin, strings and percussion, cello and
piano, 12 cellos, an early-music ensemble, and
this celebrated version for violin and piano, made
in 1980.
Essentially, the main thematic material of Fratres is
a hymn played over a drone, growing ever richer
in texture and developing into a state of profound
peace and beauty. At once simple and intricate,
it has the character of an internal meditation yet
at the same time, almost miraculously, possesses
an innate popular appeal. An explanation for
the apparent contradiction may lie in Pärt’s early
career, when for a decade or more he worked as
a sound engineer for Estonian Radio, a role which
not only saw him exposed to the widest possible
variety of musical genres, but keenly attuned
his ears to the nuances of music as ‘sound’. His
development of a musical style now known as
tintinnabuli – in which melodies move step by
step over an arpeggio, as if in imitation of ringing
bells – combines expressiveness with a glistening
surface, hypnotic and compelling. Fratres and
that other huge hit, Spiegel im Spiegel, are early
examples of the technique.
Interestingly, the tintinnabuli style is less obvious
in the violin and piano version of Fratres than in
some other incarnations of the piece. Rather, the
work emerges as a series of variations separated
by contemplative interludes. But always there
is a sense of the silence that attends upon the
dying of a note. As Pärt himself has said, ‘My
music was always written after I had long been
silent in the most literal sense of the word. When
I speak of silence, I mean the “nothingness” out
of which God created the world. That is why,
ideally, musical silence is sacred.’ And perhaps it’s
that connection with, and striving towards, pure
silence that has made Pärt such a cult figure, and
Fratres such a deeply communicative work, in our
ceaselessly noisy and frantic modern world.
3
There can be few composers whose musical
origins and influences are as diverse as those
of the Estonian Arvo Pärt. His teacher Heino
Eller was himself a former pupil of Glazunov
and the great Russian 19th-century masters. Pärt
actually began his career as a drummer in the
Soviet military, before discovering the music of
Shostakovich and Prokofiev, and later embarking
on experiments in serialism. But none of that left a
long-lasting influence on his music.
Programme notes
Arvo Pärt (born 1935)
Ludwig van Beethoven (1770–1827)
Violin Sonata No 5 in F major, Op 24
‘Spring’ (1800–1)
1 Allegro . 2 Adagio molto espressivo
3 Scherzo: Allegro molto – Trio . 4 Rondo: Allegro ma non troppo
The fifth of Beethoven’s sonatas for piano and
violin was published in 1801, the same year as
its predecessor, Op 23 in A minor. Whereas
that work was troubled, agitated and difficult,
the F major Sonata is sunny, equable and
fresh; though its ‘Spring’ nickname was not
Beethoven’s own, it fits better than many others
applied by third parties to his music. Among nearcontemporary works, the Piano Sonata, Op 28 is
somewhat similar in mood, while Beethoven later
revisited the key of F major for the development
of similar sentiments on a far greater scale in the
Sixth Symphony.
This is not to say that the ‘Spring’ Sonata
is a small-scale work. Not only is it the first
of Beethoven’s violin sonatas to have four
movements, but each except the Scherzo is
developed with considerable breadth. The very
opening idea combines breadth and flowing
lyricism, belying the fact that it took Beethoven
some effort to fashion its final form, which
combines spontaneity and inevitability. The
character of the movement is thus set from the
outset – though there is some agitation and
drama later, particularly when the recapitulation
turns towards the second subject group. The
basic contrast is between the essentially melodic
first idea and a more broken up, dramatically
exchanged second subject. The main theme
returns in the coda where its first bar is developed,
setting its seal even more firmly on the movement.
The slow movement, in B flat major, is again
distinguished by breadth of phrase and warm
feeling, though the mood is more serious. Its
exposition is exceptionally closely shared by the
instruments, each doing what it does best; the
violin detaching itself to present the first theme
cantabile, the piano heightening the intensity by
varying it with repeated notes. In concluding the
dialogue with trills on both instruments Beethoven
provides an early example of his ability to raise a
decorative device to an expressive function.
The Scherzo is one of breathtaking concision,
abruptly contrasting a syncopated exchange
(the violin following the piano a beat behind)
with a Trio in rapidly running notes. In the last
movement there’s a return to the lyricism and flow
of the first. Formally this is a rondo, and because
of the subtlety with which the refrain is altered
and variously shaped, the effect is of almost
uninterrupted development and variation. The
contrast comes when, in the second couplet of
the rondo, the music shifts into D minor. When the
refrain returns some remote keys are explored
before the effervescent coda brings the sonata to
a fitting end.
4
interval 20 minutes
Irkanda I (1955)
Born and schooled in Launceston, Tasmania, he
undertook further studies at Melbourne University,
under Bernard Heinze, and at Oxford, where
in 1958 his tutor, composer Edmund Rubbra,
prophetically dubbed him ‘Australia’s Bartók’.
Another English mentor, musicologist Wilfred
Mellers, saw that it was paradoxically at Oxford
that the homesick young Antipodean ‘discovered
his true identity, becoming the first composer to
make a music distinctively Australian’.
Indeed, Sculthorpe established the connection
between music and his native country as one of
his artistic goals. Many of his works were given
Aboriginal titles or were nourished by Aboriginal
legends.
This is particularly true of many of his early works,
including Irkanda I, dating from 1955. The title
means a distant and secluded place. It was the
first part of a larger cycle written over a period of
six years that was dedicated to Wilfred Lehmann,
who first performed it at the Lisbon Mozart
Festival in 1956.
Irkanda I reflects many of Sculthorpe’s
characteristics: the formal conception of the work
is that of a free fantasy; an elegiac tone prevails;
the melodic lines are very expansive; and the
numerous sliding notes recall birdsong, creating a
close connection with nature.
Peter Sculthorpe wrote of the work:
‘Irkanda I is in one movement, and in it, long,
melodic lines and bird-sounds are contrasted with
brittle, rhythmic sections. The opening melody
follows a 360-degree contour of the hills around
Canberra, where most of the work was written. It
might be added that my use of bird-song stems
from suggestions in the writings of Henry Tate.’
5
Peter Sculthorpe was Australia’s foremost classical
composer, and one of the country’s most original
and distinctive creative voices in any medium.
Programme notes
Peter Sculthorpe (1929–2014)
Johannes Brahms (1833–97)
Violin Sonata No 3 in D minor, Op 108
(1886–8)
1 Allegro . 2 Adagio
3 Un poco presto e con sentimento . 4 Presto agitato
In the summer of 1886 Brahms rented the top floor
of a farmhouse near Hofstetten in Switzerland, on
the shore of the picturesque Lake Thun. It seems
to have been a peaceful, productive time, and he
returned there the following two summers. Works
begun in his first visit include the Second Cello
Sonata, the Piano Trio in C minor, Op 101 and the
Violin Sonatas Nos 2 and 3.
His stay in 1887 brought forth the Ziegeunerlieder
and the Double Concerto. The next year
unfortunately saw very little new music: Brahms
was unsettled and felt the area had become
too touristy. However, he did complete the Third
Violin Sonata, which is a striking work, on a larger
and more passionate scale than its two more
intimate companions. Unlike Brahms’s other violin
sonatas it is in four movements rather than three.
There is an interesting (though unsubstantiated)
story that it was meant to be a character study
of its dedicatee, the conductor and pianist Hans
von Bülow. If so, we can perhaps glimpse in the
music the contemporary descriptions of von
Bülow – the ‘passionate intellectuality’ of his
playing, ‘his restless, brilliant mind and his reckless
energy [which] blow like a north wind, brisk and
refreshing, through the stagnant complacency of
our everyday musical life’.
6
A more obvious link to von Bülow is the virtuosity
and outspoken nature of the piano part. Of all
Brahms’s duo sonatas, this is arguably the one
where the two players form the most gracious
partnership. There is however an overriding
sense of melancholy to the sonata – D minor is
traditionally regarded as one of the saddest keys.
It is a work that seems to seek to persuade rather
than command.
The opening Allegro movement is a case in point.
Rather than a dashing display piece, ‘it starts with
a great sigh and ends with an even greater one’,
as Peter Latham put it. The terrific main theme is
counterbalanced by a more sombre little motif
of repeated notes. The use of syncopation adds
tension.
The expansive nobility of the Adagio makes an
immediate contrast. It offers fine opportunities for
the kind of sweet expression for which Brahms’s
friend the great violinist Joseph Joachim was
noted. The scherzo is remarkable for being in
duple rather than triple metre, and also for its
rather anxious character. The sentimentality called
for in the movement heading allows the players
to indulge themselves in the harmonies. It was
apparently Brahms’s friend and correspondent
Elisabeth von Herzogenberg who suggested the
judicious use of pizzicato.
The final Presto agitato has a distinctly Gypsy-ish
flavour, with syncopations emphasising its rhythmic
strength. Some question-and-answer moments
between the piano and violin contrast with
chorale-like passages which allow the violin space
in which to bloom before the tragic climax.
The sonata’s official premiere was given in
Budapest on 22 December 1888. The pianist
was Brahms, and his partner was Jeno Hubay,
a former student of Joachim who would himself
teach Szigeti and d’Arányi.
Programme notes © Australian Chamber Orchestra
(Pärt, Sculthorpe, Brahms);
Beethoven ‘Spring’ Sonata © David Garrett
About the performers
Jack Saltmiras
About the performers
Richard Tognetti
Richard Tognetti violin
He began his studies in his hometown of
Wollongong with William Primrose, then with
Alice Waten at the Sydney Conservatorium,
and Igor Ozim at the Bern Conservatory, where
he was awarded the Tschumi Prize as the top
graduate soloist in 1989. Later that year he led
several performances of the Australian Chamber
Orchestra, and that November was appointed
as the Orchestra’s lead violin and, subsequently,
Artistic Director. He was Artistic Director of the
Festival Maribor in Slovenia from 2008 to 2015.
He performs on period, modern and electric
instruments and his numerous arrangements,
compositions and transcriptions have expanded
the chamber orchestra repertoire and been
performed throughout the world. As director
and/or soloist, he has appeared with the
Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment, Academy
of Ancient Music, Hong Kong, Luxembourg and
Slovenian Philharmonic orchestras, Handel and
Haydn Society (Boston), Camerata Salzburg,
Tapiola Sinfonietta, Irish Chamber Orchestra
and the Nordic Chamber Orchestra, as well as
all of the Australian symphony orchestras, most
recently as soloist/director with the Melbourne
and Tasmanian Symphony orchestras. He also
gave the Australian premieres of Ligeti’s Violin
Concerto and Lutosławski’s Partita. This is the
first of five concerts he gives this season as the
Barbican Centre’s first Artist-in-Residence at
Milton Court Concert Hall.
He was co-composer of the score for Peter Weir’s
Master and Commander: The Far Side of the
World; he co-composed the soundtrack to Tom
Carroll’s surf film Storm Surfers 3D; and created
The Red Tree, inspired by Shaun Tan’s book. He
also created the documentary film Musica Surfica,
as well as The Glide, The Reef and The Crowd.
Richard Tognetti was appointed an Officer of the
Order of Australia in 2010. He holds honorary
doctorates from three Australian universities and
was made a National Living Treasure in 1999. He
performs on a 1743 Guarneri del Gesù violin, lent
to him by an anonymous Australian benefactor.
7
Richard Tognetti is Artistic Director of the
Australian Chamber Orchestra. He has
established an international reputation for
his compelling performances and artistic
individualism.
Marco Borggreve
Polina Leschenko
8
Polina Leschenko piano
Polina Leschenko was born in St Petersburg into
a family of musicians and began playing the
piano under her father’s guidance at the age
of 6. Two years later she made her solo debut
with the Leningrad Symphony Orchestra. She
studied with Sergei Leschenko, Vitali Margulis,
Pavel Gililov, Alexandre Rabinovitch-Barakovsky
and Christopher Elton. At the age of 16 she
received her Higher Diploma with distinction
from the Royal Conservatory in Brussels.
Musiktage Mondsee. She regularly collaborates
with Patricia Kopatchinskaja, Alissa Margulis,
Priya Mitchell, Daniel Rowland, Alexander
Sitkovetsky, Ivry Gitlis, Maxim Rysanov, Mark
Drobinsky, Natalie Clein, Heinrich Schiff, Torleif
Thedéen and the Auryn Quartet. She has
given solo recitals in Vienna’s Konzerthaus, the
Amsterdam Concertgebouw and Carnegie
Hall, as well as in Salzburg, Milan, London,
Paris, Brussels, Minnesota and Atlanta.
She works with orchestras around the world,
including Camerata Salzburg, the Hallé, London
Mozart Players, the Australian and Scottish
Chamber orchestras, Bern and Bournemouth
Symphony orchestras, Britten Sinfonia and
Russian National Orchestra. She is a regular
visitor to the Hallé and in 2008 performed in its
150th-birthday celebrations and toured South
America under Sir Mark Elder. She is also an
accomplished chamber musician and has
appeared at many festivals, including Aldeburgh,
Cheltenham, Risør, Stavanger, Istanbul, Progetto
Martha Argerich in Lugano, Salzburg and
In 2009 she took up a new position as
International Chair in Piano at the Royal
Welsh College of Music & Drama in Cardiff,
where she had a three-year residency.
Polina Leschenko’s award-winning discography
includes solo works by Liszt, Chopin, Kreisler/
Rachmaninov, Brahms and Bach/Feinberg;
Prokofiev chamber music with Martha Argerich,
Christian Poltéra and Roby Lakatos; and Glinka’s
Sextet as part of the ‘Martha Argerich and
Friends Live from the Lugano Festival’ series.