Unless otherwise stated, all concerts take place at St. John's, Smith Square and are conducted by Russell Keable.
Monday 17 October 2011
Stephen Goss:
The Shard (World Première)
Peter Maxwell Davies:
Symphony No. 5
Rachmaninoff:
Symphony No. 2
Monday 28 November 2011
Arvo Pärt:
Cantus in memoriam Benjamin Britten
Shostakovich:
Symphony No. 9
Vaughan Williams:
Symphony No. 6
Tuesday 24 January 2012 at Cadogan Hall
Hindemith:
Concert Music for Strings and Brass
Brahms:
Variations on a Theme of Haydn
Dvořák:
Cello Concerto
Cello: Philip Higham
Saturday 10 March 2012, with guest conductor William Carslake
Elgar:
In The South
Walton:
Symphony No. 2
Janáček:
Sinfonietta
Monday 14 May 2012
Puccini:
Tosca
Tosca: Naomi Harvey
Cavaradossi: Geraint Dodd
Scarpia: Nicholas Folwell
Sacrestan: William Robert Allenby
Angelotti: Matthew Hargreaves
Monday 11 June 2012
Peter Nagle:
Until I die there will be sounds (World première)
Sibelius:
Symphony No. 7
Brahms:
Symphony No. 1
Saturday 16 June 2012 at Edwardes Square
Coates:
March: The Dambusters
Elgar:
Pomp and Circumstance March No. 1
Tchaikovsky:
Overture: 1812
Dvořák: Symphony No.9 in E minor, Op.95 “From the New World”
Symphony No.9 in E minor, Op.95 “From the New World”
- Adagio – Allegro molto
- Largo
- Scherzo: Molto vivace
- Allegro con fuoco
Duration: 41'
Publisher: Public Domain
KSO performed: 2011, 2003
A.C.
Grayling’s plans to open a private university may be a current
controversy, but the idea is far from new. In 1884 the wealthy American
socialite Jeannette Thurber opened her National Conservatory of Music
of America in New York. Thurber was the daughter of Henry Meyers, a
Danish immigrant violinist. She studied at the Paris Conservatory and
later married into money; thereafter she became one of the first
important patrons of classical music in the United States. Her ambition
that the Conservatory should be the first of a nationwide franchise of
educational institutions never came to pass. Its founder’s declining
energy meant that its activity declined rapidly after the First World
War. The stock market crash of 1929 effectively killed the institution,
although it was not declared officially defunct until 1952.
However,
for a brief period at the turn of the century the Conservatory was a
beacon for music education in the United States. Its aim was to make a
musical education available to all, and Thurber made a particular point
of encouraging disabled and African-American students; among the latter
was the composer Harry T. Burleigh, now best remembered for his
collections of spirituals. To raise the profile of the institution, Mrs
Thurber sought out the services of distinguished musicians.
Undoubtedly her biggest coup in this regard was appointing Antonín
Dvořák as Director in 1892.
By
the early 1890s Dvořák’s international reputation was secure, and his
music was attracting increasing attention in the U.S.A. So when the
first director of the National Conservatory resigned in 1889, it was
natural that Thurber should put a proposal to the famous Czech composer
(although she apparently also considered a young Finnish composer called
Jan Sibelius for the post). Dvořák was excited by the prospects of
taking on the job. “The Americans expect great things of me,” he wrote
to a friend, “and the main thing is, so they say, to show them to the
promised land and kingdom of a new and independent art, in short, to
create a national music. If the small Czech nation can have such
musicians, they say, why could they not too, when their country and
people are so immense?”
His
ideas about the possibility of a national American music were swayed
quickly by one of his new pupils. As well as studying at the
Conservatory, Harry Burleigh was supplementing his income by working as a
handyman there. Dvořák’s first encounter with him was when he heard
Burleigh singing spirituals as he cleaned the halls. Dvořák was
fascinated by what he heard, and insisted that Burleigh sing more to him
and tell him about this music. For Burleigh, such interest in music
that most white society dismissed as barbaric was inspiring. The two
men established a close friendship that lasted until Dvořák’s death in
1904.
Such
music struck a chord with Dvořák because of his fierce pride in his own
Czech folk heritage. “Nothing must be to low or too insignificant for
the musician,” he wrote in an article in 1895. “The music of the people
is like a rare and lovely flower growing amidst encroaching weeds.
Thousands pass it, while others trample it under foot, and thus the
chances are that it will perish before it is seen by the one
discriminating spirit who will prize it above all else.” Soon after his
arrival in America and his encounter with Burleigh, he declared, “I am
convinced that the future music of this country must be founded on what
are called Negro melodies. These can be the foundation of a serious and
original school of composition, to be developed in the United States...
They are the folk songs of America and your composers must turn to
them.” Dvořák’s prediction was in a sense accurate, though in the
detail he was wildly wrong. He assumed that African-American music
would be absorbed into the old European forms and techniques. In fact
what happened was the opposite: African-Americans imported elements of
European harmony and form into their own tradition to create the
definitive American music, jazz.
Another
important influence on Dvořák as he began to write his Ninth Symphony
was Jeannette Thurber’s determination that Dvořák should write an opera
based on Longfellow’s Hiawatha.
She even took him to see “Buffalo” Bill Cody’s Wild West show to
stoke his enthusiasm. This may explain why, when the new symphony was
performed, Dvořák declared that” the work was written under the direct
influence of a serious study of the national music of the North American
Indians,” although he qualified this by admitting, “I have not actually
used any of the [Native American] melodies.” He also declared in an
interview that “I found that the music of the Negroes and of the Indians
was practically identical.” This extraordinary statement can only
really be explained by the fact that Dvořák had not actually studied
Native American music in any great detail (although he had been given
access to a limited number of transcriptions of dubious merit).
Whatever the true extent of the local influences on the New World Symphony (a title bestowed by Thurber), it is evident that the composer’s own Bohemian roots exert at least as great, if not greater an influence. The critic Henry Krehbiel observed that “Dr. Dvořák can no more divest himself of his nationality than the leopard change his spots.” The slow movement may be inspired by Indians on the plains at night, and the Scherzo a portrait of Hiawatha’s wedding feast as he claimed, but Dvořák’s view of the New World is that of someone longing to return to the old one. Homesickness eventually led him to resign in 1895 and return to Prague. But regardless of the true extent of the American influence on his symphony, it has a vital legacy: what mattered was that Dvořák stood up and declared the value of these often dismissed traditions.
Note © 2011 by Peter Nagle
Richard Ayres: No. 37b
Richard Ayres (b. 1965)
No.37b for orchestra
- Alfred Wallis (in Paradise) Observes Saint Joseph (the carpenter) at Work and at Leisure
- Sjonnie Kurzak (a broken soul) Ascends
- When Gippy Dizon opened his eyes, the heavenly procession was still there…
- Exit
Duration: 25'
Publisher: Schott Music
KSO perfomed: 2011
Of No.37b,
Richard Ayres says, “This piece is about death and various forms of
afterlife. Many of my pieces are about death (and life)... it is
probably a way to dispose of my childhood woes.” Lest this sound too
grim, he qualifies: “Although my music is generally tragic, I do try to
include humor, and all other emotions, in the same way that I experience
them in life. Perhaps the longer films of Charlie Chaplin are the
closest to my creative ideal.”
Like
Chaplin, Ayres’s music has a rare ability to be simultaneously
genuinely funny and poignant. ‘ I often feel that I am making films
without pictures,’ he says. ‘Music is rarely thought of as more than
pitches and sounds, but the act of playing a note on the horn has a
theatrical and a narrative power, and the violin section is fulfilling a
narrative function as well as making sounds, I feel this is something
to be aware of when writing music - a musical performance is in every
way a three dimensional event.’
All
Ayres’ works are given numbers instead of titles. He gives three
reasons for this. Two are prosaic: ‘I don’t have a lot of imagination
for titles, and the ones I have made up were pretty awful; I find it
easier to remember which piece is which (although this is no longer
true. As I get older and the number of pieces increases, I find I can’t
remember which is which).’ The third suggets a deeper impulse at work:
‘A title determines, or colors the listeners perception of a piece of
music. I don’t want to pollute a listener’s experience unless it is
absolutely necessary.’ In his more recent music the utilitarian numbers
are increasingly contradicted, however, by extravagant subtitles that
‘either concur with, or contradict how we experience the music’s
emotional world.’
The composer and writer Christopher Fox has described No.37b
as a symphony that cannot quite remember ‘how a symphony might hold
together.’ This sense of ad-hoc construction is graphically illustrated
in the opening movement, in which the percussion section engages in
carpentry - ‘trying to nail the piece together,’ Fox suggests. The
carpentry and the divine setting have a personal resonance for Ayres,
whose father was a carpenter and is a fundamentalist Christian, neither
of which traits have been inherited: ‘I am hopeless at woodwork, and
have developed an extreme allergy to religion.’ This use of sounds that
are assorted with life outside a concert hall are a natural development
of Ayres’s eclecticism, which embraces Janáček, Richard Strauss, and
Charles Ives with equal enthusiasm: ‘I want to use consonance,
dissonance, melody, texture, elephants, clouds, snowballs, anything,
from any time and whenever it is needed.’
Ayres
offers few clues to the lives of Sjonnie Kurzak or Gippy Dixon, the
named protagonists of the middle two movements. No amount of googling
will offer any evidence that they even existed. ‘I actually don’t see
any deep difference between the invented and the remembered... I think
we are all busy rearranging what exists - playing around with cultural
building blocks. It is how we personally rearrange our vision of the
world, what choices we make or don't make, that leads to an interesting
and personal musical composition - or a personal contribution to life...
In music, something that is somehow structured in time (structured to
help us remember?), we are dealing all the time with memory - people
chose to do it in different ways.’ He does suggest that ‘Sjonnie
Kurzak was a gypsy trumpet player. When he was too old to play he was
left homeless, and died neglected, broken, and in great poverty. I
imagined his tortured soul, finally at peace, ascending to heaven.’
The
finale seems certain that it should be providing a triumphant climax
but constantly peters out. At one point the tuba attempts a sermon,
assisted by a dustbin lid. Everything grinds to a halt, and then
stutters back into life, in a way reminiscent of the magic broom in The Sorcerer’s Apprentice,
before reaching an abrupt, apparently arbitrary conclusion. Given that
the previous two movements have been set in heaven or thereabouts, the
natural conclusion to be drawn is that “Exit” is a descent to earth, or
possibly further.
These
ideas - of remembered and imagined worlds and the ways they connect and
reflect each other - find an echo in the work of Alfred Wallis, whom
Ayres evokes in the opening movement ‘sitting in heaven watching St.
Joseph (the carpenter and earthly father of Jesus Christ) who is keeping
himself occupied, for eternity, with a new (and divine) wood-working
project.’ Wallis (1855-1942) was, like Ayres, a Cornishman. He was a
fisherman by trade, and took up painting in his 70s after his wife died,
“for company.” He had no training, and painted mostly on cardboard
with the same paints used to paint boats. His subject was the sea, and
his memories of fishing. There is a strange power to his paintings,
naive in execution and built from whatever materials he had to hand,
that finds a resonance in the juxtapositions Ayres creates of familiar
ideas in unfamiliar settings, and the combination of fact and fiction
that he uses to direct (and sometimes misdirect) our ears. By the time
Wallis began to paint, steam ships had all but replaced sailed boats;
his art is thus a similar combination of memory and invention.
Wallis’s idiosyncratically spelled description of his work in a letter
to a friend could also stand for much of Ayres’s world:
“What I do mosley is what used to bee out of my own memory what we may never see again as Thing are altered all to gether Ther is nothin what ever do not look like what it was sence I can Rember”
Note © 2011 by Peter Nagle
Smetana: Overture from The Bartered Bride
Bedřich Smetata (1824-1884)
Overture from The Bartered Bride
Duration: 7'
Publisher: Public Domain
KSO performed: 2011
Until the 1850s Smetana was known mainly as a teacher and composer of salon music. This was frustrating for a man who had counted Liszt among his early supporters. In 1856, hearing that opportunities were easier to come by in Sweden, he left Prague for Gothenberg. There he worked as a teacher and choirmaster, while beginning to write large-scale music that he hoped would improve his reputation. His incentives for leaving Bohemia were not entirely musical. There was no independent Czech state at this time, Bohemia being a part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. In 1848 there had been an uprising in Prague against the conservative and repressive regime. Smetana had briefly participated in this revolt. After its failure, the political climate became even more poisonous, and so it was wise for someone with nationalist sentiments to seek a life elsewhere. In 1857 Smetana visited his old mentor Liszt in Weimar. While there he met the Austrian conductor Johann von Herbeck. Herbeck commented that in his opinion the Czech people were incapable of producing a distinct national music. This incensed Smetana, and he determined to prove Herbeck wrong: “I swore there and then that no other than I should beget a native Czech music.” This provocation was to prove the making of Smetana. By the 1860s the political climate was thawing slightly in Prague, and Smetana decided to return. He was encouraged by the news that an opera house was to be built there, and saw this as an opportunity to create an authentic Czech musical style. First he had to overcome a rather unfortunate handicap: he did not actually speak Czech very well. As a subject of Austria he had been educated almost entirely in German, and had to work hard to gain fluency in what was supposed to be his native language. Eventually he improved enough to gain a job as a music critic. Meanwhile he composed his opera The Brandenburgers in Bohemia, on the subject of the invasion of Prague by Otto of Brandenburg in the 13th century. The Brandenburgers was a hit, and the opera house readily accepted Smetana’s next opera for performance, a light comedy called The Bartered Bride. Its première in 1866 was less successful. This was partly due to the fact that Prague was under threat of invasion by the Prussian army, a tense situation that would shortly explode into war. However, after revisions The Bartered Bride was restaged in 1870. This time it was a huge success. It quickly established itself as the Czech national opera, and was a great inspiration to the nascent independence movement. The distinct rhythms and inflections of the Czech language and Czech folk dances were an important part of the style of the music, and this is heard to great effect in the bustling overture, which unusually was the first part of the opera to be written.
Note © 2011 by Peter Nagle.
Overture from The Bartered Bride
Duration: 7'
Publisher: Public Domain
KSO performed: 2011
Until the 1850s Smetana was known mainly as a teacher and composer of salon music. This was frustrating for a man who had counted Liszt among his early supporters. In 1856, hearing that opportunities were easier to come by in Sweden, he left Prague for Gothenberg. There he worked as a teacher and choirmaster, while beginning to write large-scale music that he hoped would improve his reputation. His incentives for leaving Bohemia were not entirely musical. There was no independent Czech state at this time, Bohemia being a part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. In 1848 there had been an uprising in Prague against the conservative and repressive regime. Smetana had briefly participated in this revolt. After its failure, the political climate became even more poisonous, and so it was wise for someone with nationalist sentiments to seek a life elsewhere. In 1857 Smetana visited his old mentor Liszt in Weimar. While there he met the Austrian conductor Johann von Herbeck. Herbeck commented that in his opinion the Czech people were incapable of producing a distinct national music. This incensed Smetana, and he determined to prove Herbeck wrong: “I swore there and then that no other than I should beget a native Czech music.” This provocation was to prove the making of Smetana. By the 1860s the political climate was thawing slightly in Prague, and Smetana decided to return. He was encouraged by the news that an opera house was to be built there, and saw this as an opportunity to create an authentic Czech musical style. First he had to overcome a rather unfortunate handicap: he did not actually speak Czech very well. As a subject of Austria he had been educated almost entirely in German, and had to work hard to gain fluency in what was supposed to be his native language. Eventually he improved enough to gain a job as a music critic. Meanwhile he composed his opera The Brandenburgers in Bohemia, on the subject of the invasion of Prague by Otto of Brandenburg in the 13th century. The Brandenburgers was a hit, and the opera house readily accepted Smetana’s next opera for performance, a light comedy called The Bartered Bride. Its première in 1866 was less successful. This was partly due to the fact that Prague was under threat of invasion by the Prussian army, a tense situation that would shortly explode into war. However, after revisions The Bartered Bride was restaged in 1870. This time it was a huge success. It quickly established itself as the Czech national opera, and was a great inspiration to the nascent independence movement. The distinct rhythms and inflections of the Czech language and Czech folk dances were an important part of the style of the music, and this is heard to great effect in the bustling overture, which unusually was the first part of the opera to be written.
Note © 2011 by Peter Nagle.
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