Saturday 2 June 7.30pm Federation Concert Hall Hobart

Transcription

1 WINE PARTNER Saturday 2 June 7.30pm Federation Concert Hall Hobart Sir Andrew Davis conductor VAUGHAN WILLIAMS Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis Duration 15 mins BRITTEN Four Sea Interludes and Passacaglia, from Peter Grimes Dawn Sunday Morning Moonlight Passacaglia Storm Duration 23 mins Duration 20 mins INTERVAL WALTON Two Pieces for Strings, from Henry V Passacaglia (The Death of Falstaff) Touch Her Soft Lips and Part Duration 4 mins ELGAR Variations on an Original Theme, Enigma I (CAE) II (HDS-P) III (RBT) IV (WMB) V (RPA) VI (Ysobel) VII (Troyte) VIII (WN) IX (Nimrod) X (Dorabella) Intermezzo XI (GRS) XII (BGN) XIII (***) Romanza XIV (EDU) Finale Duration 30 mins This concert will end at approximately 9.30 pm. MASTER 6 Tasmanian Symphony Orchestra concerts are broadcast and streamed throughout Australia and around the world by ABC Classic FM. We would appreciate your cooperation in keeping coughing to a minimum. Please ensure that your mobile phone is switched off. 3

2 Ralph Vaughan Williams ( ) Chief Conductor of the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra since 2012, Sir Andrew Davis is also music director and principal conductor of the Lyric Opera of Chicago. He is conductor laureate of both the BBC Symphony Orchestra and the Toronto Symphony, where he has also been named interim artistic director until He was music director of the Glyndebourne Festival Opera from 1988 to 2000 and holds the honorary title of conductor emeritus from the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra. In a career spanning more than 40 years, he has conducted virtually all the world s major orchestras and opera companies, and at the major festivals. Recent highlights have included Die Walküre in a new production at Lyric Opera of Chicago. In the Lyric s season he conducts Idomeneo, Siegfried, and Cendrillon. In the concert hall, 2018 has seen Sir Andrew conduct the Toronto Symphony Orchestra in programs including soloist Ray Chen in Bruch s Violin Concerto, and harpist Heidi Van Hoesen Gorton in Glière s Harp Concerto (a program that also included Sir Andrew Davis s own suite from Prokofiev s Romeo and Juliet), and the BBC Symphony Orchestra in Finzi s Cello Concerto (with Paul Watkins) and Shostakovich s Tenth Symphony. In January he conducted the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra in a program that included the seldom-heard Second Symphony of former Cincinnati Symphony music director, Eugene Goossens (who also played a major role in the development of Australian music). In December 2017, Sir Andrew conducted both Puccini s Turandot and Bizet s The Pearl Fishers at the Lyric Opera of Chicago. In August 2017, he conducted the Philharmonia at the Edinburgh Festival in Elgar s cantata, King Olaf. Sir Andrew s many CDs include a Messiah nominated for a 2018 Grammy, Berlioz s Roméo et Juliette, Ives Orchestral Works, vol 2 with the Melbourne Symphony, British Violin Concertos with Tamsin Little and the BBC Symphony (Coleridge-Taylor and Wood, plus Delius s Suite), a recently-released recording of Bliss s The Beatitudes, music of York Bowen (nominated for a 2012 Grammy for Best Orchestral Performance) and a recording with the Bergen Philharmonic of Vaughan Williams Job/Symphony No 9 nominated for a 2018 BBC Music Magazine Award. Sir Andrew Davis was born in Hertfordshire and was an organ scholar at King s College, Cambridge, before studying in Rome with Franco Ferrara. He became associate conductor of the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra and made his debut with the BBC Symphony Orchestra in In 1992, he was created a Commander of the British Empire, and in 1999 was designated a Knight Bachelor in the New Year Honours List. He has an honorary doctorate from Knox College in Galesburg, Illinois. Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis Vaughan Williams decided at an early age that the prevailing state of English music was not his ideal. Like his nearcontemporaries Bela Bartók and Zoltan Kodály, he reasoned that a new yet truly national music must derive from tradition and the past. He looked for these origins not only in folksongs (of which he collected and arranged a great many), but in other places where communal music-making occurred, such as churches. He also turned to previous Golden Ages of British composition, notably the Elizabethan and Jacobean times. Thomas Tallis (c ) was one such Golden composer. He served four monarchs: Henry VIII, Edward VI, Mary I and Elizabeth I. Presumably, he adapted to the various religious requirements of all of these, serving as a Gentleman of the Chapel Royal for many years. Tallis worked within the musical customs of his day including using the eight Ecclesiastical or Church modes. Around 1567, Tallis wrote a series of eight hymn tunes, one in each of the church modes, for a psalter commissioned by Matthew Parker, the first Anglican Archbishop of Canterbury. The theme taken up by Vaughan Williams was the third of these, based on the Phrygian mode (corresponding to the white notes of the piano beginning on E: e f g a b c d e). Most folksongs are also based on modes rather than chromatic scales, so it s small wonder that much of Vaughan Williams work sounds modal. Tallis original setting of his Third Tune was for Psalm 2, one version of which is now best known as Why do the nations so furiously rage together. Vaughan Williams instead seized on the unusual beauty of Tallis harmony and well-balanced melodic form to create a far smoother work. He was probably also inspired by the fantasias for string ensembles popular in Tallis time (such as the In nomines of John Taverner). The form is somewhat similar to such works, being a series of related themes developed in relatively independent sections. Other references to the period are manifest in this fantasia. It is scored for three groups: a string quartet, a large string orchestra and a small string orchestra. This allows for antiphonal effects such as Tallis regularly used with choirs. It also promotes the echo effects achieved in the acoustic of a great cathedral, including Gloucester, where the work was premièred, in Tallis original setting places the melody in the tenor part, a common practice. Vaughan Williams, himself a violist, frequently assigns the tune to the violas or the inner parts. His famously distinctive parallel chords recall the fauxbourdon technique as used by Tudor composers. Despite these references to past times, here the composer gives Tallis theme a thoroughly 20th-century treatment. Vaughan Williams clearly enjoyed assisting his compositional alter ego, and not just in the solo passages that suggest the forthcoming The Lark Ascending. The love of strings shows even in simple things like the final chord, whose already rich resonances would be amplified by a cathedral acoustic, reminding listeners of the Fantasia s historical as well as literal echoes. Adapted from Katherine Kemp, Symphony Australia 1998 performed this work with conductor Thomas Matthews in Hobart on 23 November 1967 and, most recently, with Howard Shelley in Hobart and Launceston on 23 and 24 May

3 Benjamin Britten ( ) Four Sea Interludes (Op 33a) and Passacaglia (Op 33b), from Peter Grimes Dawn Sunday Morning Moonlight Passacaglia Storm It was Peter Grimes which first made Britten s name as a musical dramatist of the highest order. In this, his first fullscale opera, the composer in his late 20s turned out a masterpiece. Britten was fascinated by the sea, particularly the coast of his native East Anglia. He once wrote: My parents house in Lowestoft directly faced the sea, and my life as a child was coloured by the fierce storms that sometimes drove ships on our coast and ate away whole stretches of neighbouring cliffs. Peter Pears, Britten s partner, bought a copy of the works of poet George Crabbe ( ) to Britten s attention in 1941, and the pair were immediately drawn to Crabbe s poem The Borough, which forms the basis of Peter Grimes, the story of an outsider fisherman in conflict with a small-minded seaside community. Britten began composing the opera, to a libretto Montagu Slater, in early 1944, and the work was unveiled to acclaim in London on 7 June Peter Grimes provided Britten with opportunities for the musical portrayal of the forces of nature in addition to the tortured inner life of the title character. Indeed, there was an autobiographical element in the struggle between the central character s desire to be accepted by his highly judgemental fishing community and his own determination to be accepted for who he is. In Grimes, Britten and Pears found someone to sympathise with. The Four Sea Interludes and Passacaglia are drawn from various episodes in the opera. Dawn appears in Act I, after the Prologue s coronial inquest, which has established that Peter Grimes cannot be held culpable for the death by drowning of his young apprentice. The music links this interior scene to a street by the sea where townspeople and fisherman begin their daily work. The high flutes and violins suggest, almost uncannily, the cold glassy greyness of the sea, or of a deserted beach; the swirl of harp, clarinets and violas an encroaching wave, while a brass chorale suggests, perhaps, the swell, with even, at one point, a note of menace. The tolling of Sunday morning church bells is rendered most effectively by the overlapping clashing pairs of French horns in Sunday Morning. Violas and cellos sing the melody which accompanies the words of Peter s friend Ellen Orford ( Glitter of waves and glitter of sunlight... ) as the curtain rises, and the interlude extends into what is the beginning of Act II in the opera. Moonlight is from the start of Act III. Another of Grimes apprentices has died by misadventure, and already the audience senses that Grimes is steering unavoidably towards tragedy. As a piece of orchestral writing, considered on its own, it is, in the words of Arnold Whittall, one of Britten s most subtle nature scenes, a night-piece shot through with luminous shafts of moonlight. The Passacaglia forms the interlude between the two scenes of Act II: the suspicious townsfolk have formed themselves into a band of vigilantes and marched off to confront Grimes in his hut. The Passacaglia is essentially a portrait of Grimes himself: his loneliness, his desperate need for affection, and his violence. The highly effective Storm, from Act I, is both a natural tempest and a mental storm a musical postscript to Peter s outpouring of anguish and lonely confusion to a sympathetic interlocutor. A minute or so of respite is granted by the violins recollection of the melody which in the opera accompanied Peter s words: What harbour shelters peace?... What harbour can embrace terrors and tragedies? But the return of the storm snuffs out any hope of peace or happiness. Abridged from a note by GK Williams, Symphony Australia 1997 performed the Four Sea Interludes with conductor Joseph Post in Hobart on 9 June 1962 and, most recently, with Marko Letonja in Hobart on 23 March Benjamin Britten 7

4 William Walton ( ) Edward Elgar ( ) Two Pieces for Strings, from Henry V Passacaglia (The Death of Falstaff) Touch Her Soft Lips and Part Henry V was the first of three Shakespeare films made by Laurence Olivier (the others being Hamlet and Richard III) for which Walton provided the scores. Olivier s films are considered classics of Shakespeare in the cinema. He found new solutions to the problems of transferring Shakespeare s richly verbal texts to a visual medium. It was Walton s achievement in working with Olivier to create some of the first truly great film scores. Henry V was released in November In the closing months of World War II, when victory had yet to be clinched, the film fulfilled a propaganda role, just as the original play had done in Henry s speeches, rousing his troops, had always been stirring, but in the 1940s, as Christopher Palmer points out, the film s opening shot travelling upstream along the Thames from the Tower over London Bridge to the South Bank would have evoked thoughts of the defence of that city against the Luftwaffe. Olivier subsequently described Walton as one of the finest Shakespearean scholars of all time, meaning that Walton s music was rich in the warmth, nobility and splendour attained by Shakespearean English. Walton had no need to move outside his normal stylistic language for this assignment, but the score does incorporate some outside sources for purposes of period colour. In Henry V Shakespeare compressed the early events of Henry s reign ( ) and made Agincourt the climax of his structure, concluding with the marriage. The play is a presentation of the ideals of kingly virtue, with the emphasis on Henry s ability to rouse his soldiers to greater efforts in the face of danger. But the early scenes include Nym, Pistol, Bardolf and Sir John Falstaff, drinking companions of the young Henry (known then as Prince Hal) before he put away childish things. In the Passacaglia, the period song Watkin s Ale becomes a sombre passacaglia whose slow, repetitive inexorability marvellously represents the oncoming of death. Falstaff, delirious, remembers his last encounter with Prince Hal, who, on ascending to the throne, brutally repudiated him. He sinks back on his pillow, fumbling convulsively with the sheets. In Touch Her Soft Lips and Part, after Falstaff s death, Pistol and his companions bid farewell to Mistress Quickly in front of the Boar s Head tavern as they prepare to head off to war on the Continent with Henry s army. In 1944, Pistol s words before embarkation ( Touch her soft lips and part ) would have had particular poignancy, a quality captured by Walton s music for strings. Symphony Australia 2002/2010 Variations on an Original Theme, Op 36, Enigma I (CAE) Caroline Alice Elgar, the composer s wife II (HDS-P) Hew David Steuart-Powell, pianist in Elgar s trio III (RBT) Richard Baxter Townshend, author IV (WMB) William Meath Baker, nicknamed the Squire V (RPA) Richard Penrose Arnold, son of Matthew Arnold VI (Ysobel) Isabel Fitton, viola player VII (Troyte) Arthur Troyte Griffith, architect VIII (WN) Winifred Norbury IX (Nimrod) August Johannes Jaeger, reader for the publisher Novello & Co X (Dorabella) Intermezzo Dora Penny, later Mrs Richard Powell XI (GRS) Dr GR Sinclair, organist of Hereford Cathedral XII (BGN) Basil G Nevinson, cellist in Elgar s trio XIII (***) Romanza Lady Mary Lygon, later Trefusis XIV (EDU) Finale Elgar himself ( Edu being his nickname) In middle-age, Edward Elgar found himself in his native Malvern region, eking out a living as a humble rural music teacher. He took in students, made instrumental arrangements, gave an occasional performance and continually threatened to give away music altogether. Elgar s disappointment indeed downright bitterness during the 1890s was understandable. For serious composers England had produced no role models since the days of Purcell, and even the modest Renaissance of English music sparked by the efforts of the Brahmsians Stanford and Parry involved styles and personalities which were a world away from Elgar s Roman Catholic sentiments and pro-wagnerian aesthetics. And so by 1898, as the 41-year-old Elgar languished in the Malvern Hills, dressed in tweed and with a trademark handlebar moustache, he must have realised that time was passing him by. By the same age, his idol Mozart had already been dead for five years. Elsewhere, the glory days of the British Empire which meant more to the politically conservative Elgar than to many of his musical contemporaries were beginning to fade. But one evening in October 1898, Elgar began to doodle away at the piano. Chancing upon a brief theme that pleased him, he started imagining his friends confronting the same theme, commenting to his wife, This is how soand-so would have done it. Or he would try to catch another friend s character in a variation. This harmless bit of fun grew into one of England s greatest orchestral masterpieces, Elgar s Variations on an Original Theme. Where the word Theme should have appeared in the score, however, Elgar wrote Enigma. He stated that the theme was a variation on a well-known tune which he refused to identify. It s a conundrum which has occupied concertgoers and scholars alike ever since. Elgar himself rejected suggestions of God Save the King and Auld Lang Syne. Other suggestions have included Rule, Britannia, an extract from Wagner s Parsifal, and even Ta-ra-ra-boom-deay. Another suggestion is that it s a simple scale, while Michael Kennedy has proposed that the unheard theme could be Elgar himself, with the famous twoquaver two-crotchet motif on which the 8 9

5 entire work is based capturing the natural speech rhythm of the name Edward Elgar. Elgar went to his grave without revealing the truth and no one has come up with the definitive answer. The second enigma was the identity of the characters depicted within each variation, who were identified at first only by their initials in the score. This enigma has proved much easier to solve. Variation 1, which simply elaborates the main violin theme with prominent wind playing, depicts Elgar s wife, Caroline Alice ( Carice ). The second variation brings the first hint of actual imitation. Pianist HD Steuart-Powell was one of Elgar s chamber music collaborators, who characteristically played a diatonic run over the keyboard as a warm-up. Variation 3 depicts the ham actor RB Townshend whose drastic variation in vocal pitch is mocked here. The Cotswold squire W Meath Baker is the subject of Variation 4 while the mixture of seriousness and wit displayed by the poet Matthew Arnold s son Richard is captured in the fifth variation. The next two variations parody the technical inadequacies of Elgar s chamber music acquaintances. Violist Isabel Fitton (Variation 6) had trouble performing music where the strings had to be crossed while Arthur Troyte Griffith (Variation 7) was a pianist whose vigorous style sounded more like drumming! Poor Winifred Norbury is actually represented in Variation 8 by a musical depiction of her country house, Sherridge. The most famous variation is Nimrod (No 9). Nimrod (the mighty hunter before the Lord of Genesis, Chapter 10) was Elgar s publisher AJ Jaeger (German for hunter ). Apparently the idea for this particular variation came when Elgar was going through one of his regular slumps. Jaeger took Elgar on a long walk during which he said that whenever Beethoven was troubled by the turbulent life of a creative artist, he simply poured his frustrations into still more beautiful compositions. In memory of that conversation, Elgar made those opening bars of Nimrod quote the slow movement from Beethoven s Pathétique Sonata. Variation 10 depicts a young woman called Dora Penny, whose soubriquet Dorabella comes from Mozart s Così fan tutte. And then Variation 11 goes beyond the human species, depicting the organist GR Sinclair s bulldog, Dan, falling down the steep bank of the river Wye, paddling upstream, coming to land and then barking. The cello features prominently in Variation 12 a tribute to cellist Basil Nevinson. Mendelssohn s Calm Sea and Prosperous Voyage is quoted in Variation 13, said to depict Lady Mary Lygon s departure by ship to Australia. Finally we hear EDU where the composer depicts himself (his wife s nickname for him was Edoo) cocking a snook at all those who said he d never make it as a composer. Abridged from a note by Martin Buzacott 2000 performed this work with conductor Murison Bourn in Hobart on 11 November 1954 and, most recently, with Garry Walker in Hobart on 27 March Deepen your relationship with the TSO Come to know musicians Attend exclusive events and rehearsals Share your love of music with like-minded friends tsofriends.com.au 10 11