16.9. FRIDAY SERIES 1

Transcription

1 16.9. FRIDAY SERIES 1 Helsinki Music Centre at Esa-Pekka Salonen, conductor Igor Stravinsky: Fanfare for three trumpets Igor Stravinsky: Symphonies of Wind Instruments Igor Stravinsky: Agon 1. Pas de quatre 2. Double pas de quatre 3. Triple pas de quatre 4. Prelude 5. Sarabande-Step 6. Gaillarde 7. Coda 8. Interlude 9. Bransle simple 10. Bransle gay 11. Bransle double 12. Interlude 13. Pas de deux 14. Coda 15. Quatre Duos 16. Quatre Trios Coda 1 min 12 min 20 min INTERVAL 20 min Igor Stravinsky: Rite of Spring I L adoration de la terre (The Adoration of the Earth) II Le sacrifice (The Sacrifice) 33 min 1

2 The LATE-NIGHT CHAMBER-MUSIC will follow in the Concert Hall after an interval of about 10 minutes. Those attending are asked to take (unnumbered) seats in the stalls. Giuseppe Gentile, clarinet Jouko Laivuori, piano Hannu Vasara, violin Maria Puusaari, violin Riitta-Liisa Ristiluoma, viola Tuomas Lehto, cello Esa-Pekka Salonen: Meeting Esa-Pekka Salonen: Homunculus 6 min 12 min Interval at about The concert ends at about 20.50, the late-night chamber music at about Broadcast live on the French Mezzo channel, Yle Teema and Yle Radio 1, and online at yle.fi/rso. 2

3 A THIEVING CHAMELEON The music of Igor Stravinsky is customarily divided into roughly three stylistic periods: a Russian one up to the end of the First World War, a Neoclassical one until the mid-1950s, and one lasting a decade-and-a-half during which he went on to apply dodecaphony and even serialism though not while Schönberg was still around to hear it. This division is, however, very approximate, and the Neoclassical period, in particular, encompassed such a variety of styles that really and truly it could simply be called just Stravinskian. He spent the Russian period living in France, and the Neoclassical in Switzerland and the United States, settling permanently in the USA in the 1930s. If ever there was a polyglot and a cosmopolitan, it was Stravinsky. For his music, Stravinsky gathered ingredients in countless directions, changing colour like a chameleon. Folk music, Baroque, even medieval music, ragtime and jazz, Orthodox liturgical singing and serialism his idiom was a seamless blend of them all. He was, one could say, a musical kleptomaniac, but as he once quipped in a legendary retort: Good composers borrow, great composers steal. But did he actually steal anything? He did admittedly build his ballet Pulcinella on the music of numerous little-known 18th-century Italian composers, but a true thief would not lay out his loot like he did for all the world to see. And regardless of its style and period, all his musical material, both his own and borrowed, always sounds like genuine Stravinsky. 3 Though speaking in others tongues, he told his own stories. This concert does not proceed in chronological order. The ten-bar (!) Fanfare for Three Trumpets was originally intended for trombones and as an opening fanfare for the ballet Agon. Stravinsky wrote it in 1953 but later deleted it, and it was not performed until 1981, by which time he had been slumbering in his Venetian grave for 10 years already. The Fanfare nevertheless serves as a neat bridge to the Symphonies of Wind Instruments. During his mature period, Stravinsky wrote four works bearing titles alluding to a symphony, but not one of them is in the old symphonic tradition. The earliest is the Symphonies of Wind Instruments of Through it, and the ballet Pulcinella he was composing at the same time, he shook himself free from his Russian period, though many of its melodies could be straight from The Rite of Spring. The word Symphonies does not allude here to the symphonies of Haydn, Beethoven and co., but to the original meaning of the word: bringing sounds together. Dedicated to the memory of Claude Debussy (who had died in 1918), Symphonies of Wind Instruments is scored for the wind instruments normally found in a symphony orchestra. It is in one movement, and the instruments mostly play in pairs or small groups until all come together round the same table in the devout, organ-like chorale at the end. Virtually nothing remains of the ornamental Russian period. The version to be performed at this concert is the one revised by Stravinsky in 1947.

4 Agon (1957) belongs to Stravinsky s late dodecaphonic (meaning 12-note ) period and in places comes close to serial music. It was one of his many collaborations with George Balanchine the choreographer and is in practice totally devoid of any narrative plot. The word agon is Greek and means contest or competition. This abstract suite for 12 dancers is divided into short numbers modelled directly on the dances favoured at the courts of Louis XIII and the Sun King. The music is also an amusing cross between simple, clear, Classical harmonies and 12-tone melodies not grounded on any specific key. The striking feature of the sequence beginning with Sarabande-Step is the virtuoso solo violin. The few recurring melodic motifs and the return of the exposition section at the end make Agon viable concert repertoire even without the dancers. By the early 20th century, the Romantic symphony orchestra had reached its peak any subsequent modifications have mostly been slight, as instrumental techniques have developed and percussion instruments have been added. The reason for this is obvious: orchestras mostly play music that had been composed by the year Stravinsky s timing was fortunate: all the big music machine needed now was a composer capable of exploiting it to the full. While assembling his Russian Ballet, Sergei Diaghilev had been present at the premiere of Stravinsky s Fireworks in St. Petersburg and knew at once that he had found the composer he was looking for. He therefore carried him off to Paris. The ballets The Firebird (1910) and Petrushka (1911) were all he could hope for. Diaghilev took Paris by storm and Stravinsky was his victorious general. Expectations reached fever pitch when, in spring 1913, Diaghilev advertised a third Stravinsky ballet, The Rite of Spring. Thirty-year-od Stravinsky was by no means the only lionised name in the production: the costume designer was Nicolas Roerich, the choreographer Vaslav Nijinsky, and taking the leading role was Tamara Karsavina all dazzling celebrities in their day. The music was shocking, and the premiere resulted in a furore well documented in the history of music, opposing factions even coming to blows. Those who sought to sabotage the premiere lost the battle. The dissonant harmonies, the wild rhythms and, for the times, brash orchestration of The Rite may not startle the present-day listener, but the music has lost none of its primitive drive, and it is this that makes The Rite so highly valued; its essence lies within the music itself, not its ability to shock. Naturally the timbres and rhythms of The Rite were imitated by many composers throughout the 20th century. It can, therefore, be justifiably claimed that ever since it was first performed, The Rite has been the most significant individual work in classical music, so it was a natural choice for the inaugural concert of the Helsinki Music Centre in late summer The Rite of Spring describes the celebration of spring in pre-christian Russia. The village elders congregate to choose a young girl to sacrifice to the spring. The power of the music lies not in its melodies, though there are some memorable ones. The 4

5 opening, abstract-sounding bassoon theme, for example, is borrowed from Lithuanian folk music. It is the wildly erratic rhythms, the tremendous, sudden changes in dynamics that make the music of The Rite so unprecedentedly abrasive. No wonder it sounded nothing short of barbaric to the ears of Stravinsky s contemporaries. The Rite of Spring is in two parts. The first, The Adoration of the Earth, is in eight episodes played without a break. The ritual dances of the celebration of spring culminate in the Dance of the Earth. Part II (The Sacrifice) consists of an introduction and five episodes, again played without a break. At first, the tone of the music becomes more mysterious. In her dance, the young girl chosen as the sacrifice engages in dialogue with the ancestors and finally dances herself to death in the Sacrificial Dance that brings the work to a frantic end. Abridged programme notes by Osmo Tapio Räihälä translated (abridged) by Susan Sinisalo ESA-PEKKA SALONEN Described by The Boston Globe as displaying a kind of complete musicianship rarely encountered today, Esa- Pekka Salonen is one of the world s most celebrated conductors. He has been Principal Conductor of London s Philharmonia Orchestra since 2008, embarked on a three-year period as Composer-in-Residence of the New York Philharmonic in 2015 and has just begun as Artist in Association of the Finnish National Opera and Ballet. He is 5 also Artistic Director of the Stockholmbased Baltic Sea Festival. From 1992 to 2009 he was Music Director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic, having previously been Principal Conductor of the Swedish Radio Symphony Orchestra Among the items in his extensive discography is a CD of his own compositions recorded by the FRSO. The Sibelius-Schönberg disc he made with violinist Hilary Hahn and the Swedish Radio Symphony Orchestra in 2009 was awarded a Grammy. In 2012 Deutsche Grammophon released a disc of Shostakovich s Orango made by the Los Angeles Philharmonic with Salonen conducting. Together with the Philharmonia Orchestra, Esa-Pekka Salonen has launched ground-breaking music projects exploiting digital technology, such as RE-RITE and Universe of Sound installations. In these projects, the audience itself conducts the orchestra or plays in it by means of audio and video projections. Salonen has also developed an Orchestra app for ipad giving the user a thorough insight into the way a symphony orchestra works. Esa-Pekka Salonen has been awarded many prestigious distinctions in the course of his career. He won the UNESCO Rostrum Prize for his composition Floof in 1992, and was the first conductor to receive the Accademia Chigiana Prize in He has been the recipient of the Royal Philharmonic Society's Opera Award in the UK, and in 1998 the French government awarded him the rank of Officier de l ordre des Arts et des Lettres. He has been awarded an Honorary Doctorate in Music by the Royal College of Music in London.

6 THE FINNISH RADIO SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA The Finnish Radio Symphony Orchestra (FRSO) is the orchestra of the Finnish Broadcasting Company (Yle). Its mission is to produce and promote Finnish musical culture and its Chief Conductor as of autumn 2013 has been Hannu Lintu. The FRSO has two Honorary Conductors: Jukka-Pekka Saraste and Sakari Oramo. The Radio Orchestra of ten players founded in 1927 grew to symphony orchestra strength in the 1960s. Hannu Lintu was preceded as Chief Conductor by Toivo Haapanen, Nils- Eric Fougstedt, Paavo Berglund, Okko Kamu, Leif Segerstam, Jukka-Pekka Saraste and Sakari Oramo. In addition to the great Classical- Romantic masterpieces, the latest contemporary music is a major item in the repertoire of the FRSO, which each year premieres a number of Yle commissions. Another of the orchestra s tasks is to record all Finnish orchestral music for the Yle archive. uring the 2016/2017 season the FRSO will premiere five Finnish works commissioned by Yle and feature such pioneers of Finnish Modernism as Väinö Raitio and Uuno Klami. The programme will also include orchestral works by Stravinsky, symphonies by Mahler and Bruckner, Haydn s The Seasons oratorio and concertos by contemporary composers. Among its guest artists will be soprano Karita Mattila and mezzo-soprano Michelle DeYoung, conductors Esa-Pekka Salonen, Teodor Currentzis and Gustavo Gimeno, and pianist Daniil Trifonov. The FRSO has recorded works by Mahler, Ligeti, Sibelius, Hakola, Lindberg, Saariaho, Sallinen, Kaipainen, Kokkonen and others, and the debut disc of the opera Aslak Hetta by Armas Launis. Its discs have reaped some prestigious distinctions, such as the BBC Music Magazine Award, the Académie Charles Cros Award and a MIDEM Classical Award. The disc of Sibelius s Lemminkäinen and Pohjola s Daughter was Gramophone magazine s Critic s Choice in December 2015 and brought the FRSO and Hannu Lintu a Finnish Emma award in the Classical Album category. Music by Sibelius, Prokofiev and Fagerlund will be among the repertoire recorded during the 2016/2017 season. The FRSO regularly tours to all parts of the world. During the 2016/2017 season its schedule will include a tour in Finland, taking in concerts conducted by Hannu Lintu in Suomussalmi, Kajaani, Mikkeli and Kuopio. The home channel of the FRSO is Yle Radio 1, which broadcasts all its concerts, usually live, both in Finland and abroad. Its concerts can also be heard and watched with excellent live stream quality on the FRSO website ( fi/rso), and the majority of them are televised live on the Yle Teema channel. 6