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1 If you are reading these notes on a device during a concert, please adjust the brightness of your screen so that others are not distracted. Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra Programme Notes Online Henry E Rensburg Series Philip Glass: 80th Birthday Thursday 28 September pm sponsored by Investec ANTONÍN DVOŘÁK ( ) Suite in A, Op.98b American Andante con moto / At walking pace, with movement Allegro / Fast Moderato (alla polacca) / At a moderate speed (in Polonaise style) Andante / At walking pace Allegro / Fast Dvořák was never the most orderly of composers, but he was sure of one thing his Opus 100 (officially his 100th published work) had to be something personal. And so it was a lovely little Sonatina for violin and piano, inspired by Native American legend and intended for his two children Otilie and Antonín. He completed it in December 1893, while teaching at the National Conservatory of Music in New York. But in his enthusiasm he d skipped ahead. Now there was the small matter of going back and writing his Op.98 and Op.99!

2 No fear; Op.98 was already taking shape. Besides the Sonatina for violin I am just finishing a new work Suite for piano, he wrote to a friend at the end of February. A few weeks later he wrote to his publisher Simrock that I think that the Suite for piano and the Songs [his Op.99] are the best things that I have done in this field they re sure to go very well. Indeed, Dvořák was so pleased with his Suite in A major for piano that he arranged it for full orchestra soon afterwards in which form it s become known, like the String Quartet and Quintet he also wrote in the USA, as the American. And there s definitely something distinctly American about it, just as there is with the American quartet, the Sonatina and of course the New World Symphony. But it s an America seen through the eyes of a Czech visitor before Gershwin and Bernstein, before jazz or even ragtime. Dvořák knew a different America the America of quiet frontier villages (like the Czech community of Spillville, Iowa, where he d been made so welcome), of forgotten Indian burial grounds, and of homely parlour songs. The American Suite began life as music for the home and its spirit is, in part, that of American domestic music. Dvořák loved minstrel songs, like Stephen Foster s The Old Folks at Home. That s why the American Suite sounds by turns so gentle and so jaunty and perhaps why it s been so neglected. But in its way, it s a musical picture of Dvořák s America as vivid as anything in the Ninth Symphony which is to say that it s as Czech as it is American. The tender opening movement could almost be a lost minstrel song and the third has been described by one commentator as a kind of cakewalk though Dvořák s description of it as alla polacca (in Polonaise style) makes clear that it s as European as it is transatlantic. But the fourth movement, Andante, is the Suite s heart and in its lonely oboe melody, there s an echo of Dvořák s description of the Iowa prairie: Endless acres of wood and meadow it is very wild here, and sometimes sad sad to despair. But as ever, Dvořák refuses to

3 be pinned down. Is the bustling, high spirited finale a Native American dance or a Slavonic one? Both? Or just Dvořák? Richard Bratby 2017 about the composer Philip Glass (b.1937) Through his operas, symphonies, compositions for his own ensemble, and wide-ranging collaborations with artists ranging from Twyla Tharp to Allen Ginsberg, Woody Allen to David Bowie, Philip Glass has had an extraordinary impact upon the musical and intellectual life of his times. The operas Einstein on the Beach, Satyagraha, Akhnaten and The Voyage, among many others play throughout the world s leading houses, and rarely to an empty seat. Glass has written music for experimental theatre and for Academy Award-winning films such as The Hours and Martin Scorsese s Kundun, while Koyaanisqatsi, his initial filmic landscape with Godfrey Reggio and the Philip Glass Ensemble, may be the most radical and influential mating of sound and vision since Fantasia. His associations, personal and professional, with leading rock, pop and world music artists date back to the 1960s, including the beginning of his collaborative relationship with artist Robert Wilson. Indeed, Glass is the first composer to win a wide, multigenerational audience in the opera house, the concert hall, the dance world, in film and in popular music simultaneously. He was born in 1937 and grew up in Baltimore. He studied at the University of Chicago, the Juilliard School and in Aspen with Darius Milhaud. Finding himself dissatisfied with much of what then passed for modern music, he moved to Europe, where he studied with the legendary pedagogue Nadia Boulanger (who also taught Aaron Copland, Virgil Thomson and Quincy Jones) and worked closely with the sitar virtuoso and composer Ravi Shankar. He returned to New York in 1967 and formed the Philip

4 Glass Ensemble seven musicians playing keyboards and a variety of woodwinds, amplified and fed through a mixer. The new musical style that Glass was evolving was eventually dubbed minimalism. Glass himself never liked the term and preferred to speak of himself as a composer of music with repetitive structures. Much of his early work was based on the extended reiteration of brief, elegant melodic fragments that wove in and out of an aural tapestry. Or, to put it another way, it immersed a listener in a sort of sonic weather that twists, turns, surrounds, develops. There has been nothing minimalist about his output. In the past 25 years, Glass has composed more than 20 operas, large and small; 11 symphonies; two piano concertos and concertos for violin, piano, timpani, and saxophone quartet and orchestra; soundtracks to films ranging from new scores for the stylized classics of Jean Cocteau to Errol Morris s documentary about Robert McNamara; string quartets; and a growing body of work for solo piano and organ. He has collaborated with Paul Simon, Linda Ronstadt, Yo-Yo Ma, and Doris Lessing, among many others. He presents lectures, workshops, and solo keyboard performances around the world, and continues to appear regularly with the Philip Glass Ensemble. PHILIP GLASS Symphony No.11 UK premiere Movement I Movement II Movement III Long before Philip Glass completed his Symphony No.1 ( Low ) based on music by David Bowie and Brian Eno, his opera scores and major works for his electric-acoustic ensemble demonstrated

5 that this was a composer well equipped to handle extended time spans and broad swaths of sound. Glass spent much of 2016 working on this latest symphony, which is cast in three large movements. In terms of musical language, he explained in a programme note, it shares much of the same with recent symphonies No.8 and No.9 as well as operas of the last few years, such as Appomattox, The Perfect American and The Trial. Also it relates to the later parts of the Etudes for Piano. The hallmarks of Glass musical language are present from the outset of the Symphony No.11, with repeating triads and cycling rhythms undergoing subtle shifts and transformations. A metre of five beats per bar, used for much of the first movement, provides an asymmetrical pulse that helps propel the music ever forward. Structurally it is fairly free, Glass noted, and little of recent musical strategies are present no Classical or Baroque forms at all, no variations or passacaglias. Nor will modernist strategies (mathematical or structural) be found. The central movement makes a slight nod to Classical tradition by adopting a somewhat slower tempo and smoother, more slurred sound quality at first, but once again it accumulates layers of rhythmic vitality and counterpoint, moving away from the function of a stereotypical slow movement. The rhythmic layering that is such a key component of Glass sound come to the fore in the symphony s final movement, beginning with a steady buildup from one percussionist to a battery of five on a variety of unpitched instruments. The arrival of a seven-beat pattern, sometimes alternating with bars of foursquare rhythm, gives this music a dance-like quality. Glass s unassuming note suggests to the listener, Perhaps the best way as with other recent works of mine is to just go with the music, paying attention as well as you can. It was a great

6 pleasure for me to spend some serious time composing this work and I hope you enjoy it as well. Symphony No.11 was commissioned by the Bruckner Orchester Linz, Istanbul Music Festival and the Queensland Symphony Orchestra. The world premiere was on 31 January 2017 at Carnegie Hall, New York, with Dennis Russell Davies conducting the Bruckner Orchester Linz. ALEXANDER SCRIABIN ( ) Symphony No.2 in C minor, Op.29 Andante / At walking pace Allegro / Fast Andante / At walking pace Tempestoso / Tempestuous Finale: maestoso / Finale: majestic Stop, passer-by! Within these walls Scriabin lived and found his resting place. Stern stone in letters few has told you all. The seed is sown. In our primeval depths A star is lit. Now go your way. The poet Vyacheslav Ivanov, who wrote this brief memorial verse to Alexander Scriabin, was one of the dead composer s closest friends. But the images he conjured of guiding stars, primeval depths and the seed of an unspecified future would have resonated with many lovers of art in the Russia of Nicholas II. Those last, catastrophic decades of imperial Russia have become known as the Silver Age, a postlude, both melancholy and brilliant, to the 19th century s Golden Age of Tchaikovsky and Tolstoy. Its spirit came to possess Scriabin, who at the time of his death was planning Mysterium: a colossal, apocalyptic masterpiece that was to begin with the chiming of bells suspended from clouds

7 above the Himalayas. (Typically, he never specified how.) In the summer of 1903 the painter Leonid Pasternak rented a dacha by the woods at Obolenskoye, southwest of Moscow. In the adjacent house was Scriabin. Leonid s 13-year-old son, the future Nobellaureate Boris, recalled in his memoirs how he wandered in the nearby woods, listening: And just as the light and shade followed upon each other in the forest and the birds sang and flew from one branch to the other, so the passages and movements of the Third Symphony, which was being composed in the country house next door, resounded and reverberated through it. Lord, what music it was! Time and again the Symphony tumbled down and was destroyed, like a town under artillery fire; time and again it grew and was rebuilt from the debris and wreckage. By that point, everything that Scriabin wrote provoked controversy. When, in St Petersburg, on 9 January 1902, Anatoly Liadov conducted the premiere of Scriabin s Second Symphony, many were sceptical. I do not have time to scrub Scriabin, Rimsky-Korsakov had commented, when asked for help with the orchestration of Scriabin s Piano Concerto in May When to general surprise Scriabin produced his First Symphony in January 1900, Liadov agreed to conduct its premiere only if the choral finale was omitted. Unabashed, Scriabin devoted the summer of 1901 to a Second Symphony: It is very long and quite complicated, he wrote to the publisher Mitrofan Belyayev. It will have only five parts, not six like the First Symphony, but it is bigger by far. The score was circulated amongst Russia s musical great and good. What a symphony, but what kind? Only the devil knows!! scribbled Liadov in the margins. The premiere was greeted with boos and catcalls, and the composer Anton Arensky wrote to his colleague Taneyev that He should have called it cacophony, not Symphony [ ] One dissonance after another piles up without a single thought behind it.

8 It s almost impossible today to hear what caused such a reaction. The first two movements are effectively a long lyrical introduction and a sonata allegro: there follows a luminous slow movement, and a shadowy Tempestoso scherzo that sweeps without break into a triumphant C major finale. The scoring, for a conventionally-sized orchestra, is rich but lucid (Scriabin was particularly affronted by comparisons to contemporary German composers: unlike Strauss, all my voices can be heard ). There are none of the extraordinary expression marks ( monstrous, with drunkenness, legendary ) that would pepper the score of his Third Symphony, Le Divin Poème, just two years later. And yet, that personality, that voice; the lush, distantly doomladen atmosphere of the Silver Age they re all somehow present in the symphony s thrusting horn calls, shimmering pianissimos, and the details that suggest that on some level, Scriabin is already thinking in terms of a grander musical narrative. The yearning violin solo of the opening Andante, the idyllic birdsong that opens and closes the third movement: we re not far from the kingdom of the Firebird, or for that matter, the music of Boris Pasternak s remembered childhood: brimming with ideas [ ] and at the same time as new as the forest, breathing life and freshness and arrayed in the spring foliage of 1903: not Scriabin was proud of his achievement: only the finale, in later years, frustrated him. I was seeking light in music, he admitted. Instead of the luminosity which I needed, I got stuck with a military march. He lived to see only the first, violent stages of Russia s brutal transformation. But for a composer who aspired to be a prophet, that an attempt at transcendence should end up ringing with war-like trumpets suggests that more than anyone in the Silver Age of Russian culture might have realised he was drawing close to the truth. Richard Bratby 2017

CHAPTER 1 ANTONIN DVORAK S SERENADE IN D MINOR, OP. 44, B.77. Czech composer, Antonin Dvořák is well known for his orchestral repertoire.

1 CHAPTER 1 ANTONIN DVORAK S SERENADE IN D MINOR, OP. 44, B.77 Czech composer, Antonin Dvořák is well known for his orchestral repertoire. His works encompass a variety of genres including, but not limited