Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra Programme Notes Online. Sunday Afternoon Classics The Planets II Sunday 22 October

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1 Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra Programme Notes Online Sunday Afternoon Classics The Planets II Sunday 22 October pm JOHN ADAMS (b.1947) Short Ride in a Fast Machine Minimalism is, more often than not, the word we reach for when trying to pin down the music of New England-born John Adams. Without doubt, the radical approach pioneered in the United States during the 1960s had a profound effect on the young composer. Nevertheless, the style emerges as just one point of reference in the eclectic whirlwind of Adams artistic imagination. His is a vocabulary in which figures such as Debussy, Mahler and Schoenberg rub shoulders with a range of genres, from blues and ballroom to Indian classical styles and children s cartoon soundtracks. Whilst the pulse-driven loops that are fired up at the outset of this orchestral fanfare present an audible nod to the layered patterns of Philip Glass and Steve Reich, it soon becomes clear that this piece is anything but minimal. Indeed, the composer squeezes as much out of four-and-a-half minutes as he possibly can, dazzling and dizzying us with footstomping rhythms, ricocheting earworms and explosive orchestration. Commissioned by conductor Michael Tilson Thomas in 1986 for the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra to launch the ensemble s Great Woods Summer Festival, Adams drew inspiration from a recent nerve-wracking experience as a passenger in a very particular, Italian fast machine. As he himself relates: You know how it is when someone asks you to ride in a terrific sports car, and then you wish you hadn t?

2 The steady tick of a woodblock maps out the tempo that will pervade the piece, woodwind flurries underpinning feverish brass heralds that grow in confidence. A gradually increasing percussion presence prompts the strings to join, propelling the ensemble onward atop bass-drum punctuations. Bustling crossrhythms in the lower registers emerge, inciting an episode of instability, with contrasting sections of the orchestra seemingly jostling to assert their pulse of preference. Things appear on course for a collision until the music opens out on an expansive sonic vista, soaring trumpet melodies urging the ensemble towards a high-octane finish. Richard Powell 2017 GEORGE GERSHWIN ( ) Piano Concerto in F Allegro / Fast Adagio / Slow Allegro agitato / Fast and agitated Jacob Gershowitz (George Gershwin) was born in New York in 1898 to Russian-Jewish parents. Together with his elder brother and lyricist Ira, he went on to write a string of vocal and theatrical works, many of which have become timeless classics. Gershwin was a superb pianist with a genius for improvisation. His songs were frequently used by jazz musicians and, in turn, he often drew on jazz for his own ideas. Gershwin, however, yearned to be taken seriously as a composer, though when he approached Maurice Ravel for lessons, the Frenchman allegedly replied, Why should you be a second-rate Ravel when you can be a firstrate Gershwin? Shortly after the first production of his opera Porgy and Bess, Gershwin began to complain of severe headaches and he died of a brain tumour in 1937, aged just 38. He left us with a rich musical legacy that continues to attract and delight, not least because it refuses easy categorisation.

3 Among the musical luminaries to be hugely impressed by the 1924 premiere of his Rhapsody and Blue was the music director of the New York Philharmonic Walter Damrosch (others included Rachmaninov and the great violinist Fritz Kreisler). Damrosch subsequently commissioned Gershwin to write a proper concerto and the composer eagerly accepted, determined to prove that his Rhapsody had been no happy accident, and that there was plenty more where that came from. As always, Gershwin achieved his aim with consummate style and invention. The first movement is characterised by an insistent Charleston rhythm and according to Gershwin is quick and pulsating, representing the young enthusiastic spirit of American life. For the slow movement Gershwin produced a bluesy urban nightscape, while he described the finale a movement that recalls earlier parts of the concerto as an orgy of rhythms. Just how American this music sounds is a matter of opinion, but for one listener, the British author Beverley Nichols, it was as if the whole of new America was blossoming out before me. Anthony Bateman 2017 GUSTAV HOLST ( ) The Planets, Suite, Op.32 Mars, the Bringer of War Venus, the Bringer of Peace Mercury, the Winged Messenger Jupiter, the Bringer of Jollity Saturn, the Bringer of Old Age Uranus, the Magician Neptune, the Mystic When Gustav Holst wrote The Planets, between 1914 and 1916, there must have been times when he wondered if he would ever hear it performed. As Europe plunged headlong into a long and devastating war, Holst was composing an ambitious work for an

4 unusually large, colourful orchestra one which would stretch the techniques of the country s finest orchestral musicians to the limit. Yet these were not the kind of times in which concert-managers were likely to be taking expensive risks. Fortunately help was at hand, in the form of the wealthy composer and new music promoter Balfour Gardiner greatuncle of the conductor John Eliot Gardiner. Astonished by the boldness and imaginative power of The Planets, Gardiner arranged for a performance in London s Queen s Hall in 1918, with the young Adrian Boult conducting. Right from the outset it was clear that a new chapter in British music had begun: the merciless, martial violence of Mars, the quicksilver rhythmic vitality of Mercury, the glacial stillness of the mystical, closing Neptune nothing like this had been heard from a British composer before. There are even stories of the Queen s Hall cleaning ladies linking arms and dancing during a rehearsal for the fourth movement, Jupiter... There was much in The Planets which was innovatory even by the most advanced continental standards of the time. The terrifying 5/4 ostinato which dominates Mars is without parallel in music before 1914; and although the wordless off-stage choral writing in Neptune may owe something to Debussy s Sirènes (from Nocturnes, published in 1900), the glittering coldness of Holst s scoring is quite new, while the weirdly free-floating harmonies often seem to have more to do with Schoenberg or Scriabin. It s hard to imagine anything in music more otherworldly than the slow fade-out at the end of Neptune. Holst stipulates that the upper-voice choruses are to be placed in an adjoining room, the door of which is to be left open until the last bar of the piece, when it is to be slowly and silently closed, and that the final bar (scored for choruses alone) is to be repeated until the sound is lost in the distance, until, added his daughter Imogen Holst, the imagination knows no difference between sound and silence. There are new instrumental effects too like the two timpanists athletically pounding out the main theme soon after the start of

5 Jupiter. There are things in The Planets which show how much Holst was influenced by the spirit of his times. It s a surprise to learn that he finished Mars before the outbreak of the First World War not just because it encapsulates the horror of war so memorably (Holst was never a military combatant) but because the kind of war it seems to anticipate is the mechanised mass destruction characteristic of the 20th-century. Yet when Mars was composed, war was largely fought by men on horseback or in hand-to-hand conflict; aerial bombardment was unknown; the tank hadn t even been invented. The lyricism of Venus, the dashing brilliance of Mercury and the elemental good humour of Jupiter almost banish dark memories; but then comes Saturn with its desolate slow funeral march and grindingly dissonant climax (with pealing alarm bells), the sinister, even brutal humour of the scherzo Uranus, and finally the worldrenouncing, almost inhuman Neptune. It s hard to resist the impression that more than any other British composer at that time Holst saw the shape of things to come. In choosing the seven known planets of our solar system besides Earth as a subject, Holst was giving public expression to his fascination with astrology, an interest he had kept to himself. A remark Holst made at the time shows how his interest in astrology fitted in with his philosophy as a whole. Everything in this world... is just one big miracle. Or rather, the universe itself is one. This view of the cosmos as a miracle, in which everything is mysteriously connected, is of a piece with Holst s abiding interest in Indian religious thought. It isn t just coincidence that Neptune, the Mystic is placed last (in Holst s ordering of the first two planets Mars and Venus are out of sequence, astronomically speaking). The Mystic, it would appear, has to have the last word. And it is fascinating to find Holst s belief in the connectedness of everything reflected even in the basic elements of the music. As with the opening movement Mars, the final one,

6 Neptune, is in 5/4 time, the five beats arranged ONE-two-three ONE-two. The note on which the offstage sopranos enter thrillingly and very quietly at the heart of Neptune is the very same note (G) to which so much of Mars is obsessively tied. So the two outer movements of The Planets vastly different as they are reflect each other closely. Stephen Johnson 2017