Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra Programme Notes Online

Transcription

1 Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra Programme Notes Online Thursday Series Elgar Cello Concerto Thursday 8 November pm Sponsored by Investec GARY CARPENTER Willie Stock Gary Carpenter studied composition at the Royal College of Music with John Lambert. He has lived in Holland and Germany and has written operas, musicals (including Goodnight Mister Tom with Michelle Magorian), ballets, a radio music-drama (The One Alone with Iris Murdoch) and much concert music. Musical director and/or arranger-orchestrator on many stage shows and films (including The Wicker Man,1972), his Azaleas for harp trio received a 2006 British Composer Award in the chamber category and Van Assendelft s Vermeer for clavichord (premiered by Pamela Nash) won the British Clavichord Society s Composition Competition in Gary is Professor of Composition at the Royal Northern College of Music and a professor of composition at the Royal Academy of Music. A portrait CD, Die Flimmerkiste, is available on NMC. Recent works include The Listening Project Symphony (Radio 4, Prix Europa 2013 nominee), Fred and Ginger (London Symphony, Daniel Harding), SET (Iain Ballamy tenor sax, BBC Philharmonic, HK Gruber), The Food Of Love, twelve Shakespeare songs commissioned by the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust, and Dadaville (BBC Symphony, Sakari Oramo) for the First Night of the 2015 Proms. Recent works and current projects include: Johnny Spielt Aus for soprano saxophone and piano (commissioned by John Harle, 2017) and Latchford Locks for wind orchestra (North Cheshire Wind Orchestra and Tracy

2 Woods commission, 2018). A CD of his orchestral music with the RLPO is in preparation for recording and release Willie Stock was co-commissioned by Aldeburgh Music and NOW: WW1 Centenary Art Commissions. It was first performed at the Snape Maltings Concert Hall on 17 June 2016 by the BBC Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Oliver Knussen. The composer writes: Willie Stock is an arch structure marked by three superscriptions:...the ghost legions (D.H. Lawrence)...oh death where is thy sting-a-ling-a-ling? (The Bells of Hell, anon., quoting from 1 Corinthians 15:55)...nothing but the mist and the snow and the silence of death (Helen Thomas) It opens with an 8-note motif. In musical set theory terms (where C=0, C#=1, D=2 and so on up the chromatic scale) the opening C#-A-C#-F# spells the year 1916; the answering phrase C#-A- C#-G#, The motif recurs at key moments whilst the resultant F# minor tonality vaguely recalls Haydn s Farewell Symphony. The crux of the piece however is an extended oboe melody which is based on the rising sixth interval found in many recruitment songs of the time; Good-bye-ee! being a particularly apposite example. This wends its way through the rest of the woodwind section but is eventually supplanted by an increasingly agitated sound world and disappears, only to be returned like a memory to the oboe at the very end of the piece. Other contemporaneous popular songs are dotted around the score; found objects that lie like the war dead, splintered and mutilated across the aural landscape. The orchestra is slightly smaller than that deployed by Berg in his Drei Orchesterstücke Op.6 but large never the less: 17 woodwinds including a contrabass clarinet, 13 brass, 4

3 percussion, timpani, 2 harps, piano/celesta and strings. Berg is acknowledged in two other ways: his obsession with the number 23 is reflected in my piece s being 184 (23x23) bars long and in my decision only to use those instruments (and mutes) that would have been familiar to Berg (which thankfully includes the vibraphone!). Rifleman Joseph William Stock, known as Willie (12th Battalion, King s Royal Rifle Corps) died aged 25 on 2 April 1918 after being shot by a sniper during the 2nd Battle of The Somme. He had enlisted three years earlier and had made it through the 1st Battle of The Somme (1916). His war diaries reveal a highly literate, conscientious, teetotal soldier with beautiful handwriting. The sole surviving photo shows a fresh faced, good looking young man, full of life and promise. Like hundreds of thousands of others then (and since), his life was summarily snuffed out. He is the unknown soldier I ve chosen to memorialise because he was my uncle. Gary Carpenter 2018 EDWARD ELGAR ( ) Cello Concerto in E minor, Op.85 Adagio moderato / Slow at a moderate speed Allegro molto / Very fast Adagio / Slow Allegro moderato allegro non troppo / Fast at a moderate speed fast, but not too fast Elgar wrote his Cello Concerto in the summer of It was to be his last major orchestral work and without Elgar s wife, Alice, even this concerto would have remained unwritten. He was shaken by the War, and sensed that the times were against him. Alice Elgar realized that he needed peace and seclusion if he was to write music again, so in May 1917 found him in Brinkwells,

4 West Sussex a woodland cottage deep amongst the South Downs. Sure enough, he composed once more, but a very different kind of music. In 1918 he wrote his Violin Sonata, String Quartet, and Piano Quintet. Alice called them wood magic, and the same could go for the Cello Concerto written the following summer, and in its own way, just as much a piece of chamber music. It was premiered on 27 October Elgar was not given sufficient rehearsal time, and the audience didn t want to hear new music; the hall was half-empty. A week later, Alice Elgar fell into her final illness. With her death the following April, Elgar s composing career effectively ended. For many years after that premiere, the Cello Concerto was widely regarded as understated even uninspired. Now it s a different story it s seen almost as a musical equivalent of Wilfred Owen s war poetry. Neither view is quite right. The Concerto isn t a public lament, but a private meditation, full of sweetness, moments of hope and even (in the second and fourth movements) humour. Throughout his life, Elgar was always most himself when lost in the countryside with his own thoughts. This concerto s emotions came from deep within him. How else to account for the impact of this haunted music? So much of it is quiet Michael Kennedy called the long, singing theme of the first movement (after the cello s impassioned opening cry) music of falling leaves and autumn smoke. There s something mysterious, too, about the second movement, which, after a few pauses for thought, speeds away as a fantastic scherzo, finally vanishing like a bursting bubble. There s laughter as well as tears in this Concerto even if the short Adagio runs too deep for either. So the gruff opening of the finale comes as something of shock as does the good humour that begins to surface in the least likely places. But at the peak of the movement, the sky darkens, and

5 the cello pours out a pained lament over bitter harmonies. You can t mistake this emotion and sure enough, the cello is singing over the very chords with which Elgar had accompanied the Angel of the Agony in The Dream of Gerontius, 20 years earlier, and in another life. It s too much; the mood suddenly snaps and Elgar brushes the concerto away with a few angry bars of dismissal. Richard Bratby 2018 MAURICE RAVEL ( ) Le tombeau de Couperin Prélude - in memory of First Lieutenant Jacques Charlot Fugue * - in memory of Second Lieutenant Jean Cruppi Forlane - in memory of First Lieutenant Gabriel Deluc Rigaudon - in memory of brothers Pierre and Pascal Gaudin, killed by the same shell in 1914 Menuet - in memory of Jean Dreyfus Toccata * - in memory of Captain Joseph de Marliave * orchestrated by Kenneth Hesketh (b.1968) Le tombeau de Couperin began life as a six-movement piano work. Ravel orchestrated four of the movements in 1919; we hear the full set thanks to additional orchestrations by contemporary composer Kenneth Hesketh. The word tombeau ( tomb ) was used in the 17th century to denote a piece written as a memorial, and Ravel intended the set as a tribute to the keyboard suites of French Baroque composers Couperin and Rameau, as well as a memorial to the fallen of World War One. By spring 1916, Ravel was working as a truckdriver just behind the front lines. He saw the appalling consequences of the Battle of Verdun, writing: I don t believe I will ever experience a more profound and stranger emotion than this sort of mute terror.

6 The phrase mute terror is telling; Ravel internalised his fear, a numbness that did not allow for music of emotional catharsis. Yet there is a desolate undercurrent beneath the veneer, and each movement is dedicated to a friend who died in battle. Ravel s choice of orchestration is another subtle indication of his respect for his fallen comrades. The small orchestra of strings, flutes, oboe, cor anglais, clarinets, bassoons, horns, trumpet and harp, is close to a Baroque ensemble in scale. Ravel was a master of orchestration, and relished arranging his piano works for large forces. Considered in this context, Le tombeau de Couperin is remarkable for its restraint. Hesketh has chosen the same forces, prompted by a wish to see the original suite complete in orchestral terms (and in the same orchestration as Ravel s...). Hesketh adds that Ravel s orchestrations, which focus on the dance movements only, do not have the same unity of key as the original: It had always irked me that the final E key centre return of the Toccata was omitted in the orchestral suite (the Rigaudon ends in C whilst the toccata ends in E major acting as a balance to the E minor of the opening Prélude). Finally, Hesketh wanted to explore whether it was possible to orchestrate the remaining movements in a way that was true to Ravel s own language, seeking to see if one could bring the two movements the composer did not score into a Ravelian orbit. As Roland-Manuel wrote, This metamorphosis of piano pieces into symphonic works was a game for Ravel, a game played to perfection, so that the transcription outdid the original. The game both for the original composer and orchestrator when creating orchestral versions included harmonic simplification and linear and contrapuntal adaptation. The result is perhaps as close as we will get to hearing the whole of Le tombeau de Couperin in an orchestral treatment which Ravel would have recognised. In this guise, the work becomes a tribute not only to his fallen friends, but to Ravel himself.

7 Joanna Wyld 2018 MAURICE RAVEL La Valse At the first, the scene is dimmed by a kind of swirling mist. Occasionally the clouds part, allowing glimpses of waltzing couples. The mists dissolve little by little, and the light grows brighter, revealing an immense ballroom filled with whirling dancers. The light of the chandeliers bursts forth on the fortissimo. An imperial court, about That s what Ravel wrote on the first page of La Valse, his sumptuous tribute to the Viennese waltz. But it only takes you a few minutes in. What you saw on stage was supposed to do the rest because La Valse was a choreographic poem, a ballet score, written in for (but never staged by) Diaghilev s fabled Ballets Russes. Not that Ravel needed any encouragement to swing into waltz time. He made no bones about his love of the useless occupation of social dancing, and he d sketched La Valse as early as 1906 as a grand waltz, a kind of homage to the memory of the great Strauss, not Richard, the other one Johann. You know, he added, how much I love those wonderful rhythms. He even gave those first sketches a title: Wien, or Vienna. But that was This was 1919 and that whole glittering world of grand waltzes, imperial balls and harmless luxury had just been swept from history in the most violent way imaginable. Ravel never put it into words, but he didn t need to; it s all in the music. La Valse (as Wien became) begins gorgeously enough sighing, gliding, swooning seductively into the arms of the rhythm. It s hard to put a finger on the moment when you realise that the tempo is increasing, that the distant crashes and snarls are growing louder and that things are starting to spin terrifyingly out of control. By then, it s already too late. You can only cling on

8 for dear life as Ravel s dream-waltz, and the whole world it symbolises, dances headlong into the abyss. Richard Bratby 2018