Concert Programme Notes


These were written by me (Chris Anthony)
I am not a music scholar so much of these were put together from other sources such as Wikipedia, Groves, and some programme notes provided by Making Music

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Jean Sibelius (1865 – 1957) En Saga (Op. 9) (1982)           Download as WORD document
Jean Sibelius is widely regarded as Finland’s greatest composer, and his music is often credited with having helped Finland develop a national identity during its struggle for independence from Russia.  After a couple of years studying music in Vienna and Berlin Sibelius returned to continue his studies in Helsinki and fell in love with his future wife, Aino. They married in June 1892, spending their honeymoon in Karelia, the home of the Kalevala, the national epic of Finland which inspired his En saga (a saga or legend), and his Karelia Suite, two of his earliest published works. En Saga, completed in 1892, is a relatively short single-movement tone poem for conventional orchestral forces and was his first to have a distinctively Finnish character. It has many of the features that will appear in so much of his compositions – the plaintive woodwinds, the scurrying scales and arpeggios  of tremolo strings , the long Finnish-sounding tunes, all moving together toward magnificent orchestral climaxes.
Although it might seem obvious to relate the parts of En Saga to particular ‘stories’ from the Kalevala, Sibelius wrote that “En Saga is psychologically one of my most profound works. I could almost say that the whole of my youth is contained within it. It is an expression of a state of mind and in no other work have I revealed myself so completely. It is for this reason that I find all literary explanations completely foreign to my way of thinking”. He is also credited with an appropriate response to critics – “Pay no attention to what critics say. No statue has ever been put up to a critic."
The single-movement tone poem opens in an expectant atmosphere, with a dreamy theme and swirling misty “sound effects” from the strings which evolve into the contrasting tones of the woodwinds and horns. A melancholy but noble melody inspired by, but not borrowed from, Finnish folk music soon appears in the bassoons, cellos and basses. This melody carries the music forwards with passion, growing to a climax dominated by the French horns. The next theme is a simple but rhythmically-charged song on the violas, alternating with a rather martial string tune. A violently rhythmic passage for full orchestra then announces the triumphant return of the first main idea in the horns, gradually building to a sustained climax dominated by the brass. After a reflective melody shared between the two oboes, it is left to a lonely clarinet followed by a dull,  bass throbbing to bring the work towards its tranquil close.J

Alexander Glazunov (1865 –1936) Concerto in E flat major for alto saxophone and string orchestra, Op. 109 (1934)
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Gllazunov was a relatively conventional composer compared with other well-known Russian composers of the period (Rachmaninov, Scriabin, Stravinsky, Prokofiev, Shostakovich), strong influences being Borodin, Tchaikovsky and Rimsky-Korsakov, his first teacher.  Younger composers such as Prokofiev and Shostakovich considered his music old-fashioned, while accepting his stabilizing influence in a time of transition and turmoil. He was born in St Petersburg and lived in Russia most of his life, being appointed director of the St. Petersburg Conservatory, navigating the institution through the tumultuous times of the 1917 revolution. It is said that he was categorically opposed to government interference in cultural and musical matters and felt compelled to leave the Soviet Union in 1928, eventually settling in Paris. He always claimed that the reason for his continued absence from Russia was "ill health", enabling him to remain a respected composer in the Soviet Union, unlike Stravinsky and Rachmaninov, who had left for other reasons.
Glazunov seemed entirely immune to the well-established role of the saxophone in Jazz. He particularly enjoyed the tone of the instrument against a rich string section, explaining why the concerto is written specifically for a string orchestra. His exploration of the sonorous possibilities of the saxophone has significantly contributed to establishing this Concerto, his final and one of his best compositions, as the most famous ‘classical’ work for saxophone ever written.

Sergei Vasilyevich Rachmaninov  (1873 – 1943) Symphony No. 3  in A minor, Op. 44
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1. Lento – Allegro moderato – Allegro (A Minor)
2. Adagio ma non troppo – Allegro vivace (C-Sharp Minor)
3. Allegro – Allegro vivace – Allegro (Tempo primo) – Allegretto – Allegro vivace (A Major)
Rachmaninov was born in 1873 into a Russian aristocratic family. Following the 1917 revolution he left with his family from Saint Petersburg, going by train to the Finnish border, then travelling through Finland on an open sled to Helsinki, carrying what they could pack into their small suitcases. In 1918 they settled in New York City. Rachmaninov’s final symphony was composed between 1935 and 1936, much of it in his Villa Senar on Lake Lucerne in Switzerland. After the first performance he wrote “ Both audiences and critics responded sourly. Personally I'm firmly convinced that this is a good work. But - sometimes the author is wrong, too! However I maintain my opinion". The public is now more inclined to accept his evaluation and the symphony is frequently played and recorded.
        Rachmaninov devised a novel structure for the symphony in which the long 1st movement is followed by a combined slow movement and scherzo, finishing with an energetic finale.  In its tunes and rythms it is his most ‘Russian’ symphony. particularly in the dance rhythms of the finale. Its ‘sparer’ style Is more like his tuneful Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini than his two earlier symphonies.

The first movement opens with a motto theme, underlying much of the symphony, orchestrated for solo clarinet, muted horn and high solo cello. An outburst for full orchestra, leads into the main Allegro theme, given to oboes and bassoons. The cellos typically introduce the second theme, a big-tune, warm, loving and capable of almost infinite variations typical of the old Rachmaninov. The development reveals his exploitation of the full palette of orchestral sounds, as well as his ability to combine various themes in simultaneous development. The motto theme makes a reappearance in the trumpets which gives way to an unusual bit of scoring, with the melody provided by piccolo, bassoon and xylophone above the supporting horns, bass clarinet, contrabassoon, and lower strings. The motto theme appears again in trumpets and trombones, before the recapitulation begins with the cello's big tune leading into a coda, the movement ending with two restatements of the motto theme, one quietly in the brass and one even more quietly in the strings.

The second, Adagio, movement starts with a long solo horn melody followed by two new themes, the first for solo violin then given to all the violins, and the second theme for solo flute, over tremolo strings and harp. Both themes are taken up by the woodwind and are developed up to an expressive climax. Nervous quavers then take over the orchestra and the scherzo emerges. This is urgent, quicksilver music, full of wonderful touches of orchestration, with sudden solo moments for celesta, percussion and harp. The music is swept up to a huge climax and then dies away. A series of trills floats mistily across the orchestra, as the pace gradually slows down, and out of this haze an oboe reintroduces the opening theme of the Adagio. The violins expand this theme and a solo violin echoes it wistfully over mysterious, stalking bass pizzicatos, the movement ending with another quiet restatement of the motto theme.
 
The energy and vigour of the Finale sweeps all before it, in a great rush of strings and woodwind. The violins take up a broad melody which leads to a long bassoon solo. The orchestra is then launched into a virtuoso fugue based on the main theme of the movement. A relative of the initial motto theme from the start of the first movement appears – in the form of a Rachmaninov favourite, the Dies Irae (The Day of Wrath), which weaves itself into the remainder of the piece. A full orchestral declamation of the Dies Irae leads to the return of the first theme. This is not a straightforward recapitulation, the development continuing into the coda. where the motto is transformed into a string accompaniment for the 'hornpipe' flute solo. The virtuoso writing that characterizes the entire symphony now all meet in the final pages to produce one of the most exciting and colourful endings in symphonic music.

Carl Nielsen (1865 - 1931) Helios Overture Op. 17        Download as WORD document
Carl Nielsen is the most honoured Danish composer. He composed this short work in 1903, placing it between his 2nd and 3rd symphonies.  During a winter spent in Greece he was inspired by the myth of Helios, the Greek god who drove the chariot of the sun across the sky each day.  When it was published, Nielsen attached this description: “Stillness and darkness — Then the sun rises to joyous songs of praise — Wanders its golden way —quietly sinks in the sea.”  The work begins with strings, divided horns and woodwind sounding a melody as the sun ascends out of the darkness over the Aegean Sea. The trumpets then fanfare across the full orchestra, in a theme, which returns later in the piece. From there woodwinds begin a graceful tune, joined by strings and full orchestra, leading to a reprise of the fanfare theme. In the final measures, the music subsides as the sun sinks beneath the horizon.  

Jean Sibelius  (1865 –1957) Violin concerto in D minor, Op. 47      Download as WORD document
1. Allegro moderato
2. Adagio di molto
3. Allegro, ma non tanto

Jean Sibelius (1865 –1957) is widely regarded as Finland’s greatest composer, and his music is often credited with having helped his country to develop a national identity during its struggle for independence from Russia. He was, himself, a violinist and this concerto, first performed in 1905, is considered by many to be the greatest violin concerto in the repertoire. In its scope it is more like a symphony than a typical concerto. The first movement, as long in duration as the other two put together, takes in a wide variety of moods, from the cool opening to the stormy end and includes an extended cadenza for the soloist instead of a development in the first movement. It begins with brooding muted strings, above which the soloist plays a haunting melody echoed by a lone clarinet. This theme gives way to virtuoso passages for the violinist above an increasingly stormy orchestral accompaniment which leads to a mini-cadenza, Then the orchestra joins in, eventually subsiding from furious march music to peaceful darkness. out of which the main cadenza erupts, an occasion for staggering virtuosity. An extended, orchestral passage leads back to the expressive second theme, later joined by the violin. Eventually an intense cascade of octaves from the violin leads to a dramatic conclusion to the first movement. The second movement starts with a brief introduction from the woodwind, the soloist entering with a long melody whose character has been compared to that of many of Sibelius’ songs for voice and piano. This melody gives way to a brooding central section, which builds to the return of the main theme in the orchestra as the soloist overlays it with virtuoso ornamentation. The movement fades away as the soloist climbs to a serene high note. Of the last movement, Sibelius remarked, “It must be played with absolute mastery ”. Those seeking a thrilling finale full of violin pyrotechnics will not be disappointed; the movement ranks among the most challenging and exciting written for the violin. It appears that all writers of programme notes must quote Donald Tovey who described the final movement as a "polonaise for polar bears" which is, presumably, not what the composer had in mind. The movement opens with excited lower strings playing difficult semiquaver figures. The violin boldly enters with the first theme on the lowest (G) string followed by a brilliant display of violin gymnastics that leads into the first full orchestral contribution which includes the second theme, taken up enthusiastically by the violin. Clarinet and low brass introduce the final section which include more violin heroic feats which become more and more astonishing as the music builds to the concerto’s vibrant, life-affirming conclusion.

Gustav Holst (1874 – 1934) A Fugal Overture                 Download as WORD document
Gustav Holst was born in Cheltenham, Gloucestershire, the elder of the two children of Clara who was of mostly British descent, and Adolph von Holst, a professional musician whose side of the family was of mixed European ancestry. Gustav was taught to play the piano, which he enjoyed, and  the violin which he hated. At the age of twelve he took up the trombone at his father's suggestion, thinking that playing a brass instrument might improve his asthma. He started to attend Cheltenham Grammar Schook in 1886 where he began composing, his main influences at this stage being Mendelssohn, Chopin, Grieg and above all Arthur Sullivan.
                He left Cheltenham in 1895 to study under Stanford at the Royal College of Music, where, money being tight he became a vegetarian and teetotaller. To support himself he played the trombone professionally, at seaside resorts and London theatres. Wagner supplanted Sullivan as the main influence on his music, and for some time, as his daughter put it, "ill-assimilated wisps of Tristan inserted themselves on nearly every page of his own songs and overtures”. He wanted to devote himself to composing and thought that playing in light orchestras was a waste of time. His friend Ralph Vaughan Williams disagreed, saying that that the sure touch which distinguishes Holst’s orchestral writing is due largely to the fact that he has been an orchestral player. From 1898 he made his living as a trombone player in various orchestras including the Carl Rosa Opera Company. He married Isobel Harrison in 1901. He became music master at St. Paul’s Girls’ School in 1905 and director of music at Morley College in 1907 retaining both of these teaching posts until the end of his life. In 1917 his Oratorio  the Hymn of Jesus was a success and The Planets, premiered  by the New Queen’s Hall Orchestra in 1918 brought Holst widespread recognition for the first time.
   A Fugal Overture was published as his Opus 40 in 1922. It provides a good demonstration of what a great composer can achieve with a large orchestra playing for only about five minutes. It starts with the full orchestra introducing a tricky rhythm with which it rarely loses touch.

Ruth Gipps MBE (1921 –1999) Horn Concerto Op. 58    Download as WORD document
I. Con moto
II. Allegretto
III. Allegro ritmico
Ruth Gipps was an English composer, oboist, pianist, conductor, and educator. She composed a wide range of music, including five symphonies, seven concertos, and many chamber and choral works. Gipps’s music is unashamedly Romantic, rejecting trends in avant-garde modern music such as serialism and twelve-tone music. She saw her work as ‘a follow-on’ from composers including Vaughan Williams (her tutor at the College), Bliss, Walton, Bax and Bridge. She claimed that her music was ‘obviously and incurably English,’ a quality that to her was extremely important and, like George Butterworth, she was heavily influenced by the English pastoralist school of the early 20th century, drawing on English folk tunes and historical English composers such as Byrd, and taking inspiration from the English countryside. Her style was well-suited to music for the cinema and In her early career, she wrote a substantial number of incidental scores for BBC radio, although she took a dim view of this work. Gipps’s refusal to embrace modernism impacted on her reception as a composer both during and beyond her lifetime and her compositions are only now starting to be more fully appreciated.
Ruth was born in Bexhill-on-Sea in 1921 to Bryan Gipps, a businessman, an English teacher in Germany, and eventually an official at the Board of Trade; he was also a trained violinist. Ruth’s mother, Hélène, was born in Switzerland; she was a piano teacher and the family home was the Bexhill School of Music, of which Hélène was principal. Ruth had two elder siblings, both musicians. Ruth was a child prodigy; after she performed her first composition at the age of 8 in a music festival, the work was bought by a publishing house. In 1937, she entered the Royal College of Music where she studied oboe, piano, and composition with Gordon Jacob, and Vaughan Williams and where several of her works were first performed. She continued her studies at Durham University where she met her future husband, clarinettist Robert Baker and where, at the age of 26, she became the youngest British woman to receive a doctorate in music. In 1945, she performed Glazunov's Piano Concerto No. 1 with the City of Birmingham Orchestra as the piano soloist while, in the same program, playing the cor anglais in her own First Symphony. However, when she was 33 a shoulder injury ended her performance career, and she concentrated on conducting and composition.

Her early career was affected strongly by discrimination against women in the male-dominated ranks of music by professors, judges and critics, leading to a fierce determination to prove herself through her work. She founded the London Repertoire Orchestra in 1955 to provide opportunities for young professional musicians to become exposed to a wide range of music. She later founded the Chanticleer Orchestra which included a work by a living composer in each of its programs. Among these was the first London performance in 1972 of Bliss’s Cello Concerto in which Julian Lloyd Webber made his professional debut. She later took faculty posts at Trinity College London, the Royal College of Music, and Kingston Polytechnic.  In 1967 she was appointed chairwoman of the Composers' Guild of Great Britain.
Gipps’s wrote six concertos - for clarinet, oboe, violin, piano, and violin plus viola, and horn, all of which were dedicated to family members or close friends. Her Horn Concerto, composed in 1968, was dedicated to her son, Lance Baker, and was premiered by him, with Gipps herself conducting the London Repertoire Orchestra. The piece is known for being a very difficult work for the horn, with its technical difficultes together with the stamina required to perform it. Gipps uses a colorful orchestration with prominent woodwind interacting with the solo horn, perhaps revealing the influence of Ravel, whilet the Brass section is almost exclusively used for climaxes. Gipps’s concerto lacks a heroic first movement as as was usual in the well-known concertos by Richard Strauss, Paul Hindemith or Gordon Jacob. The horn is not dominant, either blending or contrasting with the orchestral sound and its restless energy alternating between melancholy and joy.
The first movement is opened by the horn with a quiet sighing syncopated theme, the orchestral accompaniment providing stability through its steady beat. The long tuneful lines are paired with spectacular jumps in range coupled with swirling orchestral sounds, the woodwind and soloist intertwining around each other. During the central section the horn part becomes more challenging, requiring a virtuoso player. The movement concludes with a brief cadenza that brings together all the themes of the movement into one concise statement before a tranquil ending.
The second movement Scherzo provides a distinct contrast to the first movement
through its infectious energy and forward motion. The main theme is played by all the members of a traditional woodwind quintet and much of the movement is orchestrated solely for woodwinds. The Scherzo often feels like a genuine joke with time signatures swapping between 7/8 and more traditional 6/8. Gipps use of dynamic changes creates light and shade within the music, which is sometimes accentuated by the use of percussion. A lyrical middle section shows the beauty of the horn as it soars above the orchestra. The movement concludes with some very high and very low quiet notes from the soloist.

The third movement Finale, marked Allegro ritmico—giocoso is, as it is labelled, rhythmical and playful, alternating between an energetic rhythmic theme and a rather dreamlike theme. It finally delivers the heroism that is found in better-known horn concertos. The orchestration contributes to this heroic effect, the percussion section becoming more pervasive, highlighting key moments throughout. The finale starts quickly with the woodwind leading the theme. The horn takes this up and immediately develops it with great virtuosity. The mystical theme from the opening movement reappears near the end of the movement accompanied by the tuned percussion. The final part of the concerto is bold and leads to a big climax led by the soloist’s last top note before the orchestral flourish which finishes this rare and exciting concerto.

Edward Elgar, the fourth of seven children, was born in a small village, outside Worcester where his father, William,  had a shop selling sheet music and musical instruments. Edward’s mother, Ann, had recently converted to Roman Catholicism and he was baptised and brought up as a Roman Catholic. William Elgar was a violinist of professional standard and was organist at St. George's Church, Worcester, from 1846 to 1885. By the age of eight, Elgar was taking piano and violin lessons, and his father, who tuned the pianos at many grand houses in Worcestershire, would sometimes take him along, giving him the chance to display his skill to important local figures. He left school at the age of fifteen to work in a solicitors office but soon abandoned this and set off on his musical career, giving piano and violin lessons and working in his father’s shop. His only advanced musical training involved violin studies in London with Adolf Pollitzer who said that he felt Elgar could become a great violinist; Elgar himself doubted this and chose to concentrate on composition
For five years from the age of 22 he was the conductor and instrumental coach of a small local Worcester orchestra and during this time he played bassoon in his brother’s wind quintet for which he made arrangements of the great classical composers. For seven years, from the age of 25, he played violin in every concert in a professional orchestra which also gave the first professional performance of one of his compositions – Serenade mauresque.
In 1989 he married Alice Roberts, who for the rest of her life was a warm companion and business and social secretary as well as a valued music critic.  

During the 1890s, Elgar gradually built up a reputation as a composer, chiefly of works for the great choral festivals of the English Midlands but also of works such as Salut d’Amour, Chanson de Matin, the Froissart Overture, The Serenade for Strings and the Bavarian Dances. Critic’s reviews were polite rather than enthuisastic until In 1899, at the age of forty-two, Elgar published the Enigma Variations and, soon after, the oratorio The Dream of Gerontius. Both were well-received at home and abroad, especially in Germany, and they  remain popular in concerts throughout the world. Although Elgar is today regarded as a characteristically English composer most of his musical influences were from continental Europe, and his orchestral music shares much with the Central European tradition typified at the time by the work of Richard Strauss, a leading composer of his day, who was so impressed that he proposed a toast to the success of "the first English progressive musician, Meister Elgar” who was knighted at Buckingham Palace in 1904.
As Sir Edward Elgar approached his fiftieth birthday, he began work on his First Symphony, a project that had been in his mind for nearly ten years. After its first performance in 1908 it became a national and international triumph; the critics and the public were equally enthusiastic  and there were a hundred performances in Britain, continental Europe and America within just over a year of its première.

On a personal note, it is worth mentioning that our orchestra members have found this work has many technical challenges, but working on these has been a very rewarding experience. It is a huge privilege to be participating in, and sharing with you, our audience,  this performance of one of the greatest works of 20th century civilisation. 
The first movement starts with a theme which Elgar said is intended to be simple and noble, elevating us above every day and sordid things. After this motto theme has been played twice, Elgar plunges into a turbulent stream of music in the remote key, D minor, a stream that continues almost unchecked until the subdued end of the movement. According to the conductor Sir Adrian Boult, the clashing keys arose because someone made a bet with Elgar that he could not compose a symphony in two keys at once. It has also been speculated that the contrast was intended to represent two sides of Elgar's own personality - the successful and popular composer of Pomp and Circumstance contrasting with the inner worries that continually troubled him. Towards the end of the movement the "nobilmente" motto theme returns in the back desks of the strings, an effect Elgar deliberately asked for to obtain a "soft, diffused sound".

The second movement is a brisk allegro which some critics have found restless and even sinister. It is essentially a scherzo, with its rushing violin semiquavers, and a march followed by a trio, this section being softer and more delicate, with flute, harp and solo violin representing what Elgar's wife called "the wind in the rushes". 

The third movement  Adagio flows directly from the second movement with a long- melody of breathtaking beauty, which actually consists of the same notes that began the rushing semiquavers of the scherzo. A friend of Elgar described this as one of the greatest slow movements since Beethoven, a beautiful and perfect message of peace.

The fourth movement Finale starts with a slow introduction, showing Elgar in one of his most dreamy and mysterious moods, featuring an echo of the First movement motto theme in the back desks of the strings. This is followed by a restless Allegro, with a succession of themes including one with a restless march-rhythm, later heard at half speed with a gentle string melody accompanied by harp arpeggios. The movement builds to a triumphant climax, ending with the noble opening theme of the symphony, orchestrated with glittering splendour and with  a dissonant brass fanfare surging up against it to bring the work to a gloriously confident conclusion.

Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky (1840 - 1893 ) Symphony No. 5 in E minor, Op. 64    Download as WORD document
Andante – Allegro con anima
Andante cantabile, con alcuna licenza – Moderato con anima
Valse (allegro moderato)
Andante maestoso – Allegro vivace

Tchaikovsky is the most popular Russian composer of all time because of his tuneful, open-hearted melodies, impressive harmonies, and colourful, picturesque orchestration, all of which evoke a profound emotional response. He was born in Kamsko-Votkinsk, a small industrial town about 450 miles East of Moscow. He was the second of six surviving children of Ilya Tchaikovsky, a manager of the local metal works, and Alexandra Assier, a descendant of French émigrés. He manifested a clear interest in music from childhood; at the age of five he began taking piano lessons with a local tutor. Because music education was not available in Russian institutions at that time, his parents chose to prepare the gentle, sensitive boy  for a career in the civil service. In 1850, with this is mind, he entered the prestigious Imperial School of Jurisprudence in St. Petersburg, a boarding institution for young boys, where he spent nine years, proving a successful and popular student. During his time at the school he he was able to conitinue his piano lessons and other musical studies. In 1861 he visited Germany, France, and England, and when St. Petersburg Conservatory opened Tchaikovsky was among its first students, resigning from the Ministry of Justice, where he had been employed as a clerk. After graduating in 1865, Tchaikovsky moved to Moscow to teach music theory at the Moscow Conservatory. Within five years he had produced his First Symphony (Winter Daydreams), and his overture Romeo and Juliet which became the first of his compositions eventually to enter the standard international classical repertoire.
         In 1871 he produced his successful first string quartet and in the next few years he composed a number of operas  but these did not convince the critics with whom Tchaikovsky ultimately agreed. However, his instrumental works began to earn him his reputation, and in 1874, he wrote his First Piano Concerto, a work destined for fame. Soon after, Tchaikovsky left Russia to travel in Europe where he was greatly impressed by Bizet’s opera Carmen in Paris, but left cold by Richard Wagner’s Ring cycle, which he attended in Bayreuth, Germany. In the next two years he produced his symphonic fantasia Francesca da Rimini and the first of his famous ballets, Swan Lake.
The growing popularity of Tchaikovsky’s music inevitably resulted in public interest in his personal life. Although homosexuality was officially illegal in Russia, the authorities tolerated it among the upper classes. Social and family pressures, led to Tchaikovsky’s hasty decision in 1877 to marry but, perhaps predictably, the marriage lasted only a few weeks.
          The year 1876 saw the beginning of an extraordinary 14-year relationship between Tchaikovsky and Nadezhda von Meck, the widow of a wealthy railroad tycoon. Although they never met she became his patroness, providing him with a regular monthly allowance that enabled him to resign from the conservatory and devote himself to writing music. Thereafter he could afford to spend the winters in Europe and return to Russia each summer. The period after Tchaikovsky’s departure from Moscow proved very productive, when he composed several of his most famous compositions—the opera Eugene Onegin, the Fourth Symphony and the Violin Concerto.  Over the next ten years Tchaikovsky produced his operas Mazepa and The Enchantress, as well as the Manfred Symphony and, in 1888, his Symphony No. 5. His other major achievements of this period include Serenade for Strings, Capriccio Italien  and the 1812 Overture.
At the beginning of 1885, Tchaikovsky settled down in a rented country house near Klin, outside Moscow, and he finally overcame his longstanding fear of conducting. He embarked upon his first European concert tour as a conductor, which included Leipzig, Berlin, Prague, Hamburg, Paris, and London. It was a great success and he made a second tour in 1889. In the next four years he composed his second ballet, The Sleeping Beauty, his opera The Queen of Spades and his ballet Nutcracker.
          In 1893 his world stature was confirmed by triumphant European and American tours and by the award of an honorary doctorate from the University of Cambridge. In October of that year he conducted the premiere of his great Sixth Symphony (the Pathetique), dying nine days later from cholera. It is probable that this was suicide driven by problems associated with his sexual orientation but there is insufficient documentary evisence to be certain. 
          The Fifth Symphony is one of the most straightforward of all Tchaikovsky’s symphonies, while containing elements of intensity that look forward to the emotionally draining Sixth Symphony.
         The first movement opens with a solemn and forbidding theme, presented by bassoons and clarinets in their low registers. Tchaikovsky described this slow introduction as "complete resignation before Fate…”, and this Fate motif crops up in several guises throughout the piece. After the fateful opening a lively allegro contains four distinctive themes. The first starts out as a kind of intense danse macabre. The second blossoms into a pessimistic, yearning melody. The third theme, prefaced by a playful pizzicato arpeggio, is a rustic  passage for woodwinds and strings, forming a natural link into the fourth theme, a luscious, passionate, sunny melody. These four themes undergo extended development, followed by a long coda based on the first theme, descending into the bass section of the orchestra as the strains of the danse macabre die away.
          The slow movement is remarkable for its constant changes of time. It opens with a series of chords in the low strings, followed by one of Tchaikovsky's most familiar tunes, given to the principal horn. A second light melody, on the oboe is then echoed by the horn. The lower strings soon take up the horn's first theme, followed by the violins, and the haunting sound of clarinet and bassoon, building to an emotionally intense climax.  This is interrupted by a brass passage based on the Fate motif from the first movement. This passage ends with a pizzicato figure that generates the accompaniment for a return of the original horn theme, heard this time in the violins. Once more the emotion builds up  before the brass crash in with their statement of the Fate motif. The movement subsides with a final reference to the horn theme after which the movement closes calmly.
          In place of a scherzo, Tchaikovsky gives us one of his most beautiful waltzes; the graceful tune is launched immediately by the first violins, then is passed around the orchestra and developed. The trio section, more texture than melody, is made up of a delicate tracery of semiquavers. The first waltz theme returns, but the movement closes with a reminder of the Fate motif.
           The nationalstic finale of the Fifth Symphony opens in the manner of a march with a statement of the Fate motif transformed into the less doom-laden major key by the lower strings. Out of this emerges a brisk, Russian dance, the music of which presents four main melodic ideas to be developed during the course of the movement. The Fate motif makes two returns, the first time played by the brass section supported by a swirling string accompaniment, the second in the form of a triumphant march heard in brass and wind over strings playing in triplets. In a final fast and furious passage, a reminder of the start of the Russian dance provides a magnificent finish to this magnificent symphony.

Johannes Brahms    (1833 - 1897)    Tragic overture Opus 81    Download as WORD document

Brahms's father, Johann Jakob Brahms, lived in Holstein in northern Germany where he worked as a jobbing musician. He was appointed as a horn player in the Hamburg militia and then a double-bass player in the Stadttheater Hamburg and the Hamburg Philharmonic Society. In 1830, he married Johanna Henrika Christiane Nissen, a seamstress and Johannes was born three years later. Johannes learnt to play the violin and the cello from his father but from the age of seven concentrated on the piano. Even at this early age, his teacher complained that "could be such a good player, but he will not stop his never-ending composing"; his parents also disapproved of his early efforts as a composer, feeling that he had better career prospects as a performer. Although he is now known as a great composer Brahms continued to be a very skilled pianist, and gave the first performances of many of his own works.

Brahms' works were labelled old-fashioned by the 'New German School' whose principal figures included Liszt and Wagner, both admired, however, by Brahms. Many of his own admirers (though not necessarily Brahms himself) saw him as the champion of traditional forms and 'pure music', as opposed to the 'New German' enthusiasm for programme music.His music is rooted in the structures and composing techniques of the Classical masters. While some contemporaries found his music to be too academic, his contribution and craftsmanship were much admired and the detailed construction of his works was a starting point and an inspiration for a generation of composers. For three seasons he directed the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra, often choosing less conservative music than might have been expected, and encouraging composers such as Dvorak, Mahler and Nielsen .

In the summer of 1880 Brahms was given an honorary doctorate by Breslau University. He was 46 years old and had already produced hundreds of songs, two symphonies, a piano concerto, his violin concerto, and the German Requiem. To say thank you he produced the Academic Festival Overture and the Tragic Overture, both being premièred in Vienna that year where he spent most of his professional life..
The two pieces could hardly be more different. Referring to his work on the Academic Festival Overture, he wrote "While I was at it, I could not resist giving the satisfaction to my melancholy temperament of also writing a tragedy overture". He could not think of an appropriate title and wrote to the conductor of the first performance that “You may include a ‘dramatic’ or ‘tragic’ or ‘Tragedy Overture’ in your concert program; I cannot find a proper title to fit it.” The Academic Festival Overture is an extrovert work, appropriately quoting student songs. In stark contrast, the Tragic Overture is seriously solemn. Although Brahms never disclosed what tragedy he had in mind, the music conjures up an image of the struggles of a hero against fate, and the nature of the music strongly suggests a conflict.

In its structure the Tragic Overture is essentially like the first movement of a symphony. Two powerful chords lead to a restless, brooding string theme, with ominous timpani. A simple march theme, beginning with a dotted figure, immediately answers the strings, and all this is elaborately developed throughout the orchestra, suggesting an intense  imaginary struggle. After a slightly altered version of the opening music a second theme is announced by a plaintive oboe with even beats of stalking trombones giving a feeling of resignation. The music now alternates between struggle and resignation as both main ideas are enlarged and varied. A third theme is introduced by horn calls and is taken over by flowing violins over a busy bass line. We can now sit back and let the complex development of these ideas, assertive, energetic, myserious and romantic, flood over us until the ‘tragic’ opening music reappears and crashes on to the tragic end.   

Camille Saint-Saens    (1835 – 1921 )   Piano Concerto No. 2 Opus 22      Download as WORD document
Andante sostenuto
Allegretto scherzando
Presto

Charles-Camille Saint-Saëns was a French composer, organist, conductor and pianist of the Romantic era, best known for this piano concerto, the First Cello Concerto, Danse Macabre,  The Carnival of the Animals and his great "Organ Symphony”. He was a musical prodigy, making his concert debut at the age of ten. After studying at the Paris Conservatoire he followed a conventional career as a church organist, from 1858 at La Madeleine, the official church of the French Empire. After leaving this post twenty years later, he was a successful freelance pianist and composer, in demand in Europe and the Americas. A nice story about this time: although he was already having an established reputation he entered the competion for the Prix de Rome leading one of the judges, Berliox, to say: "He knows everything, but lacks inexperience".  Although his own compositions were generally within a conventional classical tradition, as a young man, Saint-Saëns was enthusiastic for the most modern music of the day, particularly that of Schumann, Liszt and Wagner. He was a scholar of musical history, and remained committed to the structures worked out by earlier French composers bringing him into conflict with ‘more advanced’ composers and often regarded by them as a reactionary in the decades around the time of his death. Nevertheless, his five year period as a teacher in the École de Musique Classique et Religieuse in Paris, was important in the development of French music; Gabriel Fauré and Maurice Ravel were strongly influenced by Saint-Saëns, whom they revered as a genius.
         In my 1908 edition Grove's Dictionary of Music and Musicians the writer says “Saint-Saëns is a consummate master of composition, and no one possesses a more profound knowledge than he does of the secrets and resources of the art; but the creative faculty does not keep pace with the technical skill of the workman. His incomparable talent for orchestration enables him to give relief to ideas which would otherwise be crude and mediocre in themselves “. A kinder summary was provided ten years later in his Obituary in The Times: “ The death of M. Saint-Saëns not only deprives France of one of her most distinguished composers; it removes from the world the last representative of the great movements in music which were typical of the 19th century. He had maintained so vigorous a vitality and kept in such close touch with present-day activities that, though it had become customary to speak of him as the doyen of French composers, it was easy to forget the place he actually took in musical chronology. He was only two years younger than Brahms, was five years older than Tchaikovsky, six years older than Dvořák, and seven years older than Sullivan. He held a position in his own country's music certain aspects of which may be fitly compared with each of those masters in their own spheres.

The Second Piano Concerto was premiered in 1868 with Saint-Saens at the keyboard and his friend Anton Rubinstein conducting. Its novelty and high spirits soon made it a popular favourite. He starts with brief homage to Bach, then a light scherzo and a final fast dance movement, leading to the comment that the work "begins like Bach and ends like Offenbach". One can hear the skill of Saint-Saens the pianist throughout this concerto, with its difficult scalar passages and arpeggios, ultimately leading to the finale’s pyrotechnics. 

The first movement begins with a solo cadenza that sounds like Liszt improvising on one of J.S. Bach’s preludes. After the orchestra’s entrance the soloist introduces a rather melancholy theme said to be taken from an exercise by Gabriel Fauré, one of Saint-Saëns’ pupils. This theme is developed brilliantly, with glittering crashing keyboard cascades, the virtuosity required being a challenge to Saint-Saëns himself at the first performance. The movement ends with another cadenza, into which the orchestra creeps as the soloist returns to the mystery of the opening introduction, with its homage to Bach.

The second movement Scherzo turns away from all of this drama, being marked leggiermente (“lightly, delicate”). It begins with a surprising pizzicato chord in the strings and a little timpani riff. The pianist comes in with a tune derived from the main theme of the first movement. A  second theme, first heard in bassoon and low strings – is central to this movement which bubbles along cheerfully, its humour making it favourite of the audience at the first performance

The final movement (Presto) is a furious saltarello (or tarantella) dance - derived from the verb saltare (“to jump”). The movement starts with four bars of introductory rumble by the soloist which comes back many times, punctuating the athletically leaping dance. Later, the ominous power of the first movement’s introduction returns in the form of monumental columns of sound  in the piano’s bass line. The final bars end in a fiery, virtuosic flash.

Carl Nielsen    (1865 - 1931)    2nd Symphony Opus. 16 The Four Temperaments     Download as WORD document
Allegro colerico
Allegro comodo e flemmatico
Andante melancolico
Allegro sanguineo — Marziale

Carl Nielsen is indisputably the most influential figure in Danish musical history. He was the seventh of twelve children in a poor peasant family, born in 1865 on the island of Funen in Denmark. His father was a house painter and also a fiddler and cornet player, in strong demand for local celebrations. From the age of six Carl studied violin and piano and wrote his first compositions at the age of eight. When he was 14 he learned to play brass instruments and became a bugler and alto trombonist in an army band, while continuing to play his violin at home to perform at dances with his father. He later began to take his violin playing more seriously, obtaining his release from the military band to study at the Royal Academy in Copenhagen, graduating in 1886 with good but not outstanding marks in all subjects. Two years later his Suite for Strings, designated by Nielsen as his Opus 1 was performed at the Tivoli Gardens in Copenhagen. By September 1889 he had progressed well enough on the violin to gain a position with the second violins in the prestigious Royal Danish Orchestra. From 1906 Nielsen increasingly served as conductor, being officially appointed assistant conductor in 1910. At first, Nielsen's compositions did not gain sufficient recognition for him to be able to support himself; during the concert which saw the premiere of his First Symphony in 1894 Nielsen played in the second violin section. The premiere of his Second Symphony in 1902, though enthusiastically received by the audience, was overshadowed by the first performance of his opera Saul and David three days earlier. Nielsen had begun writing the symphony the previous year and had worked on it in parallel with completing the opera, almost as light relief.The symphony was a great success when played in Berlin in 1896, contributing significantly to his reputation.

Nielsen’s 2nd symphony is very different from the 4th and 5th Symphonies which are well known for their depictions of violent fights between good and evil. Written in 1901–1902, it still belongs to the tradition of Brahms and Dvořák, but is more compact and concentrated. As indicated in the subtitle, each of its four movements is a musical sketch of the four temperaments (or medieval humours) thought to determine character and behaviour: choleric, phlegmatic, melancholic, and sanguine. Despite this apparent programme, the work is a fully integrated symphony with a traditional symphonic structure. Nielsen himself describes the background to the symphony in a programme note, summarised here: “I had the idea for ‘The Four Temperaments’ many years ago at a country inn. On the wall were comical coloured pictures, representing the Temperaments: Choleric’ (angry or impetuous), ‘Phlegmatic’ (laid-back, or simply lazy), ‘Melancholic’ (self-explanatory) and ‘Sanguine’ (cheerful).  For example Choleric was on horseback with a long sword in his hand, his eyes bulging and his face distorted by rage and diabolical hate. We were amused by the naivety of the pictures, their exaggerated expressions and their comic earnestness. But I later realized that these shoddy pictures still contained a kind of core or idea and I began to work out the first movement of a symphony, hoping of course that my listeners would not laugh at my interpretation”. Nielsen doesn’t present us with any value judgments here: the fact that the Sanguine character has the last word doesn’t mean that the composer sees him as in any way superior to the others. The range of human character is his subject here, portrayed sometimes ironically and sometimes with stirring emotional directness.

Nielsen provided substantial programme notes for the Second Symphony, which are quoted below, although in later years he was cautious about giving his audiences too many clues.

The first movement, marked Allegro colerico is the longest and most complex. Nielsen tells us that “it is at first dominated by furious energy. There are lyrical moments, but these are soon interrupted by violently shifting figures and rhythmic jerks … This material is worked over, now wildly and impetuously, like one who is beside himself, now in a softer mood, like one who regrets his irascibility”.

In the second, ‘Phlegmatic’ movement, the composer visualized “a fair young teenager who is loved by all: His expression was rather happy, but not self-complacent, rather with a hint of quiet melancholy, so that one felt impelled to be good to him... I have never seen him dance; he wasn't active enough for that, though he swung himself in a gentle slow waltz rhythm, so I have used that for the movement, Allegro comodo e flemmatico, and tried to stick to one mood, as far away as possible from energy, emotionalism, and such things. Nothing disturbs this character’s peaceful reveries—not even the loud drum tap and momentarily squawking woodwind near the end”.

“The ‘Melancholic’ third movement (Andante melancolico) may be at the other end of the scale, emotionally speaking, but the nobly tragic theme that begins it is based on the same musical interval that dominated the Phlegmatic’s daydreams—a reminder that we are all brothers and sisters under the skin.

The fourth movement – ‘Sanguine’ finale (Allegro sanguineo) brusquley brushes aside the peace of the third movement. “I have tried to sketch a man who storms thoughtlessly forward in the belief that the whole world belongs to him”, Nielsen tells us. “There is a point, again towards the end, where ‘something scares him’—more sharp timpani strokes (four this time), followed by a moment’s quiet reflection. But it’s only a moment. Irrepressible cheerfulness bounces back in the end”.

Felix Mendelssohn (1809 –1847)
The Hebrides

Felix Mendelssohn was a German composer, pianist, organist and conductor of the early Romantic period whose compositions include symphonies, concertos, piano music, organ music and chamber music.

His father, the banker Abraham Mendelssohn, was the son of the German Jewish philosopher Moses Mendelssohn, whose family was prominent in the German Jewish community. Felix was baptised at the age of seven as a Lutheran Christian, but was brought up largely without religion. He was recognised early as a musical prodigy, as was his sister Fanny who was a talented composer and pianist in her own right. They grew up in an intellectual environment. Frequent visitors to the salons organised by his parents at their Berlin home included artists, musicians and scientists, among them Alexander von Humboldt, renowned explorer, geologist and ecologist. The musician Sarah Rothenburg wrote of the household that "Europe came to their living room".

At the age of fifteen, Felix composed his first symphony and conducted a private orchestra which played many of his early compositions. A year later he wrote his String Octet, a work marking the beginning of his maturity as a composer. This was soon followed by the Midsummer Night’s Dream Overture, which still ranks as a masterpiece. His later works include the Italian Symphony, the Scottish Symphony, the oratorios St. Paul, and Elijah, and the Violin Concerto, He enjoyed early success in Germany, and revived interest in the music of Johann Sebastian Bach, notably with his performance of the St Matthew Passion in 1829. He was deluged by offers of music from rising and would-be composers; these included Richard Wagner, who submitted his early Symphony, the score of which, to Wagner's disgust, Mendelssohn lost or mislaid. He also revived interest in the music of Franz Schubert, giving the premiere of his Ninth Symphony in 1839, more than a decade after Schubert's death. Sadly, Mendelssohn died when only age 38, almost the same age as Mozart,  another young genius.

Mendelssohn’s conservative musical tastes set him apart from more adventurous musical contemporaries such as Franz Liszt, and Hector Berlioz. He was generally on friendly terms with them but in his letters expresses his disapproval of their works, for example writing of Berlioz's overture Les Francs-juges "The orchestration is such a frightful muddle that one ought to wash one's hands after handling one of his scores".

Mendelssohn came from a well-off family, and so was able to travel regularly. During ten visits to Britain, he made a deep impression on British musical life as a composer, conductor and soloist, many of his major works being premièred here.

The Hebrides is perhaps the earliest example of a concert overture –a piece not written to accompany a staged performance - but to explore a usually romantic theme in performance on a concert platform. An indication of the esteem in which it is held by musicians is given by a comment by  Johannes Brahms "I would gladly give all I have written, to have composed something like the Hebrides Overture”. Mendelssohn found his inspiration for this work during a holiday in Scotland in 1829 during which he went to the Hebridean island of Staffa. Here he watched the relentless battering of the Atlantic waves upon the seashore, and experienced the grandeur of the basalt Fingal's Cave. He wrote to his sister "In order to make you understand how extraordinarily the Hebrides affected me, the following came into my mind there", and he quoted the opening theme of the overture. On the orchestral parts he labelled the music The Hebrides, but on the score he wrote Fingal's Cave.

The overture starts with a short, restless, haunting opening theme played initially by the violas, cellos, and bassoons. It does not feel like the start of something; it is as if we are coming across something that has been going on forever. It portrays the roll of the waves through the mouth of the cave and runs through the entire composition, sometimes peaceful, sometimes violent. The peaceful grandeur of the scene is portrayed in the second theme, first heard in the cellos and bassoons, but the pounding waves always return. A staccato section perhaps depicts rain drops with the increasing intensity suggesting a storm gathering momentum. The overture closes with the second subject played slowly by a solo clarinet A blissful ending to this beautiful reminder of the beauty and power of nature.

Edvard Grieg  (1843–1907)

Peer Gynt Suite No. 1 Op 46

Morning Mood (Morgenstemning)
The Death of Åse (Åses død)
Anitra's Dance (Anitras dans)
In the Hall of the Mountain King (I Dovregubbens hall)

Edvard Grieg was a Norwegian composer and pianist whose use of his country’s folk music brought the music of Norway to fame, helping to develop a national identity, much as Sibelius did with Finlandia in Finland and Dvorak in Bohemia. He was born in Bergen; his father was a merchant and the British Vice-Consul in Bergen and his mother was a music teacher who taught him piano from the age of six. The family (name Greig) came originally from Scotland. After the Battle of Culloden in 1746, Grieg's great-grandfather left Scotland, eventually settling in Norway in 1770 and establishing business interests in Bergen. At the age of fifteen Edvard went to study piano at the Leipzig Conservatory. Although he enjoyed the many concerts and recitals given in Leipzig he disliked the discipline of the conservatory. About his study there, he wrote to his biographer "I must admit that I left Leipzig Conservatory just as stupid as I entered it. Naturally, I did learn something there, but my individuality was still a closed book to me."

Grieg eventually established himself in Bergen where he taught, gave piano concerts and performed his own compositions. He was director of the Philharmonic concerts at Christiana (now Oslo). His compositions included many songs, sonatas for piano and violin and, of course his popular piano concerto which helped make him famous. Despite the fame Grieg eventually did achieve, it is worth noting that most of his attention was given to his piano music, giving him the status of a miniaturist. Consequently, some of his chamber and orchestral music remains a 'hidden jewel' deserving of exploration. A nice indication of his fame is that when, for health reasons, he declined to conduct in Atlanta for a fee of $25,000, Richard Strauss was appointed instead for $6,000.

In 1874, Grieg was invited by Henrik Ibsen to compose incidental music for a forthcoming production of his drama Peer Gynt. It was an immediate success, running for 37 performances before the theatre was accidentally burned down. He later selected some of the original incidental music to form his Peer Gynt Suites, two of his best and most popular works.

Morning: Peer Gynt is in North Africa watching the sunrise over the Sahara Desert, reflected in the music by a gradual build-up of orchestral texture and dynamic levels. The cool freshness of morning is conjured up in the first movement by a pastoral melody on the flute, which is taken up by the oboe and eventually by the whole orchestra.

           Åse's Death: Peer Gynt sits beside his mother, Åse, who is on her deathbed, recalling their happy and sad times together. The music is a short, sad elegy for strings alone. A single four-bar tune is repeated six times, gradually increasing in intensity. As Åse fades away, the theme is inverted and the music gradually decreases to nothing.

         Anitra's Dance: In a tent in a desert oasis, Peer Gynt is welcomed by an Arab Sheik who provides coffee, a hookah pipe, and dancing girls. Anitra dances a solo mazurka, aiming to attract Peer Gynt and his money. She succeeds in fascinating him but perhaps also making him wonder where she learnt to dance a Polish dance in the Arabian desert. The music is in strong contrast to the previous sad section, being in mazurka rhythm, built around alternating bowed and pizzicato strings.

        In the Hall of the Mountain King: In a cave in the Norwegian mountains, Peer Gynt flirts with the mysterious daughter of the Troll King. In his journey through the cave to meet the king he becomes increasingly terrified as he is accompanied by menacing, unearthly creatures, who, realising that he is mortal, end the movement with shrieking death threats. Starting slowly in the very lowest part of the orchestra, its single theme is repeated faster and louder until it is finally played by the full orchestra. This was not Grieg's favourite composition: he is said to have described it as "Cow pats full of self-satisfied ultra-Norwegianism", and explained that it was intended as an ironic jibe directed at certain other nationalist composers.  Nonetheless, it makes a dramatic and entertaining end to the Suite.

Jean Sibelius (1865 –1957)

Finlandia Op. 26

Jean Sibelius was a composer of the late Romantic and early-modern periods, widely regarded as Finland’s greatest composer, and his music is often credited with having helped Finland develop a stronger national identity when his country was struggling from several attempts of Russification in the late 19th century.

Jean’s father died when he was three years old and he was brought up by his mother and widowed grandmother. An aunt gave him piano lessons from the age of  seven but when he was ten years old he was given a violin which he preferred. In 1881, he started to take violin lessons from the local bandmaster, soon becoming very accomplished and setting his heart on a career as a great violin virtuoso. However, despite considerable success as an instrumentalist, he ultimately chose to become a composer. He later wrote that “My tragedy was that I wanted to be a celebrated violinist at any price. Since the age of fifteen I played my violin practically from morning to night. I hated pen and ink—unfortunately I preferred an elegant violin bow. My love for the violin lasted quite long and it was a very painful awakening when I had to admit that I had begun my training for the exacting career of a virtuoso too late”. His love for the violin led later to his composing one of the greatest of all violin concertos.

The first reference he made to his compositions was in 1883, writing "They are rather poor, but it is nice to have something to do on rainy days." After graduating from high school in 1885, Sibelius began to study law but, showing far more interest in music, soon moved to the Helsinki Music Institute (now the Sibelius Academy) where he studied from 1885 to 1889. He also studied in Berlin and Vienna. After returning home he became a Professor at the Academy of Helsingfors and established himself as the prominent national composer of Finland. In 1897 a government stipend provided a regular income for his lifetime, enabling him to devote himself entirely to composition.

The tone-poem Finlandia is one of Sibelius’s earliest works, composed for the Press Celebrations of 1899, a covert protest against increasing censorship from the Russian Empire. It soon became a musical expression of Finnish patriotism, known throughout the world. Finlandia does not necessarily represent the composer's greatest work but it is especially important because of the national pride that these few minutes of music inspired.The success of Finlandia came to irritate Sibelius, particularly when it overshadowed greater and more substantial works. With added Finnish words this has become an unofficial Finnish national anthem. For many people the tune is best known from the hymn Be still my soul. Sibelius said that “it is written for orchestra, but if the world wants to sing it, it can’t be helped” and in 1948 he himself arranged a choral version. However even without the great ‘Finlandia theme’ this is wonderfully tuneful and exciting music.. 

Antonín Leopold Dvorak  (1841 –1904)

Symphony No. 9    From the New World

Adagio Allegro molto
Largo
Molto vivace
Allegro con fuoco

Dvorak was a Czech composer, frequently using aspects of the folk music of Moravia and his native Bohemia, and was perhaps the most versatile  composer of his time. He was the eldest son of an innkeeper and butcher who rented an inn in Nelehorzeves, a village on the Vltava River north of Prague. Construction of a railway line through the village formed the basis for Dvorak’s lifelong passion for trains. His father who played the zither encouraged his son’s musical talent. When he was about 12 years old, he went to live in Zlonice fifteen miles away with an aunt and uncle and began studying harmony, piano, and organ. He wrote his earliest works, polkas, during the three years he spent there. In 1857 a perceptive music teacher, persuaded his father to enroll him at the Institute for Church Music in Prague where Dvorak completed a two-year course and played the viola in various inns and theatre bands, augmenting his small salary with a few private pupils. He graduated from the Organ School, ranking second in his class.

The nexr few years were difficult for Dvorak, who was hard-pressed for time to compose. He played viola in an orchestra that performed in Prague's restaurants but its high standard led to it being engaged as the Bohemian Provisional Theater Orchestra. In 1863, he played in a programme conducted by Wagner for whom he said he had "unbounded admiration". By about 1865 he had written many (mainly unperformed) pieces but  they included his first string quartet and his first symphony. These compositions indicated that he was becoming increasingly influenced by of Wagner and Liszt. In 1871, Dvořák left the orchestra to have more time for composing and a year later his Piano Quintet was performed in Prague. The constant need to supplement his income pushed him to give the piano lessons through which he met his future wife.

In 1874, after his marriage, Dvorak secured the job of organist at St. Adalbert's Church in Prague and a year later he was awarded the Austrian State Prize for composition, by a jury including the famous critic Eduard Hanslick and Johannes Brahms with whom he formed a close and fruitful friendship. The jury had received a massive submission from Dvorak, including two symphonies, several overtures and a song cycle. Brahms was said to be visibly overcome by the mastery and talent of Dvorak. The two symphonies were Dvorak’s   third and fourth, both of which had been premiered in Prague in the spring of 1874. He won the State Prize again in 1876 and finally felt free to resign his position as an organist. In the next four years he composed his second String Quintet, 5th Symphony, first Piano Trio, Serenade for Strings, String Sextet Violin Concerto and the Symphonic Variations.

The admiration of the leading critics, instrumentalists, and conductors of the day continued to spread his fame abroad. In 1884 he made the first of 10 visits to England and, in 1890, he enjoyed a personal triumph in Moscow, where two concerts were arranged for him by his friend Tchaikovsky. The following year he was made an honorary doctor of music of the University of Cambridge.
A new National Conservatory of Music in New York was founded by Mrs. Jeannette Thurber, the wife of a wealthy New York grocer, who had decided that America should have a Conservatory of Music based on the European pattern and that it should have a European director. Two names were suggested to her, Dvorák, then aged 50 and with a considerable international reputation, and Sibelius, who was 32 and less well-known. She chose Dvorák, and in September 1892 he and his family arrived in New York where he composed his ninth symphony and his Cello Concerto. However in 1895, due to homesickness, his partially unpaid salaryand increasing recognition in Europe he decided to return to Bohemia

One of the founding aims of the New York Conservatory was to create an American style of music, but based on the European musical tradition. Dvorak took the challenge seriously, studying Afro-American music, especially Negro spirituals and plantation songs, saying  that “they are the folk music of America and your composers must turn to them”. With hindsight it appears that American composers were more influenced by European music or by jazz, which had no European roots at all. However, Dvorak’s teaching must have had some second hand influence because three essential American composers, Duke Ellington, George Gershwin and Aaron Copland, all studied with pupils of Dvorak..

Dvorak’s New World Symphony, composed in 1893, was the first of Dvorak's compositions to be written wholly in America. This symphony, one of the greatest in the romantic repertoire, caused discord among America's music critics as many thought it should have a European perspective. Instead, Dvorak chose the rhythms and tonalities of the music of indigenous peoples and of African-Americans which was thought by many white Americans to be primitive. He said that "In the negro melodies of America I discover all that is needed for a great and noble school of music". However, it was only the musical structures that he used, the many beautiful tunes being entirely Dvorak’s own creation. As regards Native American influences, he once more stated that the melodies were original, using only the "peculiarities of the Indian music", but how he acquired this uderstanding is a matter of doubt.  He had little opportunity to hear this music until after his symphony was completed and he acknowledged being inspired by Longfellow’s oratorio Hiawatha. It has often been suggested that much of this symphony is firmly based in his homeland and reflects the home-sickness which he felt throughout his stay in New York

The first movement of the symphony (Adagio Allegro molto) begins with a mysterious introduction by the cellos, repeated by the woodwind and soon to be followed by the first main allegro molto theme which is one of those melodies that have suggested a black American origin; it reappears in various forms in each of the subsequent movements. A later theme, contrasting strongly with this vigorous opening, played first by the flute, bears a distinct likeness to the familiar spiritual Swing Low Sweet Chariot; this and other themes are developed at length, in a vigorous, exciting and often dramatic slavonic fashion. The movement ends with a brilliant coda, built mainly on the principal theme.

The solemn brass chords that introduce the largo movement are soon followed by a beautiful, serene cor anglais melody accompanied by muted strings, inspired by the verses in Longfellow's poem The Song of Hiawatha describing Minnehaha's death and her burial in the forest. This melody, sounding like a spiritual itself, in fact became the basis of one, entitled Goin' home. It has, of course been used in many contexts whenever its essence of nostalgia is needed. It is developed lovingly by woodwinds and strings. A contrasting central section follows - opened by a solo flute, underpinned by a gentle walking pizzicato from the basses. The energetic first theme from the first movement makes a brief appearance before the beauty and pathos of the beautiful Largo theme makes its reappearance to close the movement when we also hear the same brass chords as we heard in the introduction.

Dvorak is said to have returned to Longfellow again for the molto vivace scherzo, and found inspiration from the scene in Hiawatha's Wedding Feast where the Indians dance. A gentler section with predominating woodwind follows, interrupted by the rather aggressive principal theme from the first movement, leading back to the intitial ‘Indian dancing’. Whatever we think about the ‘Indian’ influence, it is also evident that both sections of this movement use the rhythms and energy of Czech folk-dances, as in Dvoraks’s previous eight symphonies.

The mainly dramatic and fiery finale (Allegro con fuoco)  opens fortissimo with a majestic subject given to the French horns and trumpets. A second theme is first heard on the clarinet over tremolo strings. The development section uses both these main themes and recalls several subjects from all three earlier movements. The brief appearance of the nursery rhyme ‘Three blind mice’ is presumably an accident. In the recapitulation, the themes of the finale are restated. The coda recalls earlier ideas once more and the movement builds to a powerful climax, ending in a blaze of orchestral colour that slowly fades away to silence.

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Gustav Holst (1874 – 1934)
Ballet Suite The Perfect Fool

Andante (invocation)
Dance of Spirits of Earth (Moderato – Andante)
Dance of Spirits of Water (Allegro)
Dance of Spirits of Fire (Allegro moderato – Andante)

Gustav Holst was born in Cheltenham, Gloucestershire, the elder of the two children of Clara who was of mostly British descent, and Adolph von Holst, a professional musician whose side of the family was of mixed European ancestry. Gustav was taught to play the piano, which he enjoyed, and  the violin which he hated. At the age of twelve he took up the trombone at his father's suggestion, thinking that playing a brass instrument might improve his asthma. In 1886 he started to attend Cheltenham Grammar Schook where he began composing, his main influences at this stage being Mendelssohn, Chopin, Grieg and Arthur Sullivan.
            He left Cheltenham in 1895 to study under Stanford at the Royal College of Music where, money being tight, he became a vegetarian and teetotaller. To support himself he played the trombone at seaside resorts and London theatres. He wanted to devote himself to composing and thought that playing in light orchestras was a waste of time. His friend Ralph Vaughan Williams disagreed, saying that the sure touch which distinguishes Holst’s orchestral writing is due largely to the fact that he had been an orchestral player. From 1898 he made his living as a trombone player in various orchestras including the Carl Rosa Opera Company. He married Isobel Harrison in 1901. He became music master at St. Paul’s Girls’ School in 1905 and director of music at Morley College in 1907, retaining both of these teaching posts until the end of his life. In 1919, Holst became professor of music at University College, Reading, and joined the teaching staff of the Royal College of Music. In 1917 his Oratorio the Hymn of Jesus was a success, and in 1918 The Planets brought him widespread recognition for the first time.

Holst composed his one-act comic opera The Perfect Fool between the years 1918 and 1922. It has been described as a satire on Wagner's opera Parsifal, in which a pure-hearted innocent overcomes a wicked magician and resists the charms of a beautiful witch in order to win back a holy relic. In The Perfect Fool, the ‘hero’ wins the hand of a princess and beats off a lecherous wizard, whose own hopes of marrying the princess are frustrated. Unlike Wagner's Parsifal, though, Holst's Fool really is a fool. One interpretation of the possible symbolism of the opera is that the Princess symbolizes the world of opera and the Fool represents the British public.

The opera began with a ballet in three parts and it is this music, escaping from its failed opera, which we hear tonight. The wizard, who is obviously related to 'Uranus the Magician' in The Planets, summons the Earth Spirits with a furiously energetic short fanfare from the trombones. After a bit of scurrying about, the double basses set off in a rather clumsy dance  in 7/8 time. This is taken up by the rest of the orchestra, building to a noisy climax before dying down to leave the solo viola to call up the Spirits of the Water; a calm passage in which woodwind, harp and celeste lead to the second dance, where, with the help of the flute, the Spirits of the Water bring 'the essence of love’. Abruptly the Spirits of Fire arrive and blaze on their way, the vitality of the leaping flames clearly heard in the brilliant orchestration.

William Walton 1902 - 1983
Violin Concerto in B minor

Andante tranquillo
Presto capriccioso alla Napolitana
Vivace

William Walton was an English composer who wrote  music in several classical genres and styles, from film scores to opera. His best-known works include Façade, Belshazzar's Feast, concertos for violin, viola and cello, the First Symphony, Portsmoth Point and the Crown Imperial and Orb and Sceptre marches.
He was born in Oldham, Bolton, Lancashire, the son of a musician. Walton was a chorister and then an undergraduate at Christ Church, Oxford. On leaving the university, he was taken up by the Sitwell family, who provided him with a home and a cultural education. His earliest work of any importance was Façade, a collaboration with Edith Sitwell, which at first brought him notoriety as a modernist. In middle age, Walton left Britain and set up home with his young wife Susanna on the Italian island of Ischia. By this time, he had ceased to be regarded as a modernist, and some of his compositions were criticised as old-fashioned. Walton was sensitive at the time when he was composing the concerto that musical fashion seemed to turning against him. In 1939 (aged 37), the year in which he composed the the violin concerto, he stated that “ Today's white hope is tomorrow's black sheep. These days it is very sad for a composer to grow old – unless, that is, he grows old enough to witness a revival of his work. I seriously advise all sensitive composers to die at the age of 37”. The Violin Concerto was commissioned by Jascha Heifetz and in May 1939 Walton made a short visited to the USA to work with him on the solo part. But by the time of the premiere, Britain was at war and Walton was unable to risk the crossing to the USA to hear it. He started work on the concerto in Italy which he had loved since he first visited the country as an 18-year-old. The concerto expresses this love, full of warmth and a singing quality, reflecting the influence of bel canto opera and also Italian popular song. Temperamentally, too, it has some latin character, with its capricious sudden changes of mood.
The concerto is relatively short, lasting about thirty minutes, but presenting us with a display of Walton’s extraordinary technical dexterity. The violin part is prodigiously difficult, and conductor and orchestra share in the challenges of the piece. Sir Adrian Boult once said at a rehearsal, "Gentlemen, it gets a little complicated here. I'll keep a steady two; you'll have to fish about for yourselves."
 
 The first movement,  Andante tranquillo, is is the slowest of the three. The soloist immediately presents us with one of Walton’s greatest melodies. The expression Tranquillo is somewhat misleading as there is a remarkable  variety of moods displayed in this movement. Having established a decidedly peaceful atmosphere (the main tune is marked sognando – ‘dreaming’), this is shattered by a vicious orchestral outburst, full of snarling brass and aggressive cross-rhythms. It is left to the solo violin gradually to calm the mood and to restore a measure of tranquillity, although a second aggressive assault later on sees the soloist taking no part in proceedings. The final phase of the movement involves a cadenza and recapitulation of the opening themes.

The second movement, labelled Presto capriccioso alla Napolitana, is the most obviously ‘Italian’ of the three movements. Walton had been bitten by a tarantula shortly before composing the movement, so perhaps the opening Neopolitan tarantella was composed to mark the event. The opening presto requires extreme virtuosity from the soloist, with mixed harmonics and pizzicati in a fast-moving two-in-a-bar. The course of the movement suddenly switches to a slow, rather ironic, waltz. A brief return to the tarantella leads into a Canzonetta – a reference to a type of light-hearted madrigal, popular in 16th-century Italy. Introduced by a solo horn, this slow section continues for some time before the tarantella bursts in again with an extended display of virtuoso fiddling, a final brief reference to the ironic waltz and a sudden dying away.  

The final vivace movement starts with a march-like theme  played by the lower strings, joined by the bassoons and clarinets, in which the soloist joins. It appears a number of times through the movement. In between, beautiful interludes, led by the soloist and often supported by harp and shimmering strings, remind us of themes heard earlier in the concerto. The solo violin plays a variant of the opening theme of the first movement, accompanied by the first theme of the finale. The final cadenza is discreetly accompanied by the orchestra which then ingeniously draws the concerto’s thematic threads together, returning briefly to the movement’s opening  before hurtling to an exciting final flourish.

Ralph Vaughan Williams (1872 – 1958)
 A London Symphony (Symphony No. 2)

Lento – Allegro risoluto
Lento
Scherzo (Nocturne)
Finale – Andante con moto – Maestoso alla marcia – Allegro – Lento – Epilogue

Ralph Vaughan Williams was an English composer whose works include operas, ballets, chamber music, secular and religious vocal pieces and orchestral compositions, including nine symphonies. Written over sixty years his output marked a decisive break in British music from its German-dominated style of the 19th century.

He was born at Down Ampney, Gloucestershire, son of the local vicar and his wife, Margaret. When he was three years old his father died and Margaret took the children to live in her family home in Surrey. She was a niece of Charles Darwin and when young Ralph asked his mother about Darwin's controversial book On the Origin of Species, she answered, "The Bible says that God made the world in six days. Great Uncle Charles thinks it took longer: but we need not worry about it, for it is equally wonderful either way".

At the age of five, Vaughan Williams began receiving piano lessons but he was happier when he began  violin lessons the following year; when he was eight, he took a correspondence course in music from Edinburgh University and passed the associated examinations. After attending a  preparatory school in Rottingdean as a boarder he went to the public school, Charterhouse, where his musical development was encouraged. At the age of eighteen he enrolled as a student at the Royal College of Music (RCM), London where he studied composition with Hubert Parry whom he idolised. However,  a university education was expected of him by his family who felt that he was not talented enough to pursue a musical career, and so in 1892 he temporarily left the RCM and entered Trinity College, Cambridge, where he spent three years, studying music and history and where he met his future wife  Adeline Fisher.

After leaving the university he returned to complete his training at the RCM where his new professor of composition was Charles Villiers Stanford with whom relations were stormy but affectionate. Stanford, who had been adventurous in his younger days, had grown deeply conservative and he clashed vigorously with his modern-minded pupil. Vaughan Williams had no wish to follow in the traditions of Stanford's idols, Brahms and Wagner, and he stood up to his teacher as few students dared to do. In this second spell at the RCM Vaughan Williams  became friends with a fellow student, Gustav Holst;  he became a lifelong friend and they remained, one another's most valued critic, each playing his latest composition to the other while still working on it.

Vaughan Williams had a modest private income, and the only post he ever held for an annual salary was as a church organist and choirmaster. In addition to composition he wrote articles for musical journals and for the second edition of Grove's Dictionary of Music and Musicians. From 1904 to 1906 he was music editor of a new hymn-book, The English Hymnal, of which he later said, "I now know that two years of close association with some of the best (as well as some of the worst) tunes in the world was a better musical education than any amount of sonatas and fugues".

In 1903 Vaughan Williams started collecting folk-songs, following the example of enthusiasts such as Cecil Sharp in going into the English countryside noting down, transcribing and publishing songs. This, together with his love of Tudor and Stuart music, helped shape his compositional style for the rest of his career. During this period he composed songs, choral music, chamber works and orchestral pieces, acquiring the beginnings of his mature style. However he was unsatisfied with his technique as a composer. So, after unsuccessfully seeking lessons from Sir Edward Elgar he moved to Paris  for three months to study with Maurice Ravel. Vaughan Williams said that Ravel had helped him escape from "the heavy contrapuntal Teutonic manner" as was evident in the String Quartet in G minor, On Wenlock Edge, the Overture to The Wasps and A Sea Symphony.

Between his return from Paris in 1908 and the outbreak of the First World War in 1914, Vaughan Williams increasingly established himself as a significant figure in British music. In 1910 his music featured at two of the largest and most prestigious festivals, with the premieres of the Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis and A Sea Symphony. A leading British music critic of the time wrote of the Fantasia, that "one is never sure whether one is listening to something very old or very new”, and this can often be our reaction when listening to his music. It was between these successes and the start of war that Vaughan Williams's wrote The Lark Ascending and A London Symphony.

Vaughan Williams continued for more than forty years developing as a highly prolific composer of all sorts of music, including a further seven symphonies. The second  perfomace of his Ninth Symphony was in a Promenade concert, in his presence (and mine) just a few weeks before his death in 1958.

 A London Symphony (1911–1913), which the composer later said is better called a "symphony by a Londoner", rarely depicts London in any obvious way. Many of his themes are influenced by his long absorption in folk music and often sound, as though they belong more to the countryside than the city. Vaughan Williams insisted that the symphony " must stand or fall as 'absolute' music" and he said in his later years that this symphony was his own favourite..

The first movement opens with cellos and basses creeping slowly from the depths; very gradually light dawns and harps and clarinet sound the Westminster chimes. After a pause a discordant crash introduces the vigorous but slightly sinister Allegro; It culminates in a brassy outburst before the woodwind introduce a new, animated tune, which is taken up by the strings. The main Allegro tune re-appears briefly, followed by a peaceful mysterious episode involving a flute, then pairs of solo violins and cellos. A clarinet solo over accompanying strings leads to a lengthy recapitulation of all the themes heard earlier, building gradually to a violent climax, with brilliant fanfares, then speeding excitedly to a final decisive crash..

The second movement opens with muted strings playing as quietly as possible. Vaughan Williams was, for once, more specific:  "Bloomsbury Square on a November afternoon". Over muted strings, a cor anglais weaves a long mysterious tune, joined by trumpet and flute over a throbbing string accompaniment before passing the yearning melody to the strings accompanied by harp. This fades away leaving a solo viola (Vaughan Williams’s own instrument) in a dialogue with a clarinet, which plays a Lavender-Seller's cry which V.W. noted down in Chelsea in 1911. The jingle of a hansom cab's harness is heard before the music rises to a passionate climax and a slow disappearance into the London mist. Horn and bass clarinet have parting solos and the last word is left to the viola.

The third movement is marked Scherzo (Nocturne). The mood of this movement, according to the composer, will be captured if the listener imagines himself standing on Westminster Embankment at night, with the hotels of the Strand on one side, and the lights and the traffic on the other. Scurrying strings and woodwind exchange short musical fragments, with different instruments having brief solo passages. This merry opening  section is repeated and then the cellos lead into a brisk animated episode, followed by lengthy hurrying about by all sections of the orchestra until it all slows down, leading to almost silent muted strings as darkness falls on a gently sleeping city.

The final movement  movement provides no happy ending but creates a scene of conflict and even tragedy. The violent introduction leads to a grave march theme, followed by an almost chirpy allegro section. But this soon leads back to more violent music with three successive climaxes of which the last, underpinned by a great stroke on the gong is the loudest. This calls forth an agitated repeat of the main Allegro of the first movement, which is hushed for the Westminster chimes on the harp. The Epilogue opens with flutes, violins and violas rippling gently; cellos and basses once more rise from the depths, echoed by horns and other brass, and the music gradually sinks down, leaving cellos and basses softly fading into silence.

Andante - Allegro ma non troppo
Andante con moto
Scherzo (Allegro vivace) and trio
Finale: Allegro vivace

Franz Schubert was an Austrian composer of the late Classical and early Romantic eras. Despite his short life, he left us a huge musical legacy. His most famous works include many art songs (Lieder); the Trout Quintet; the Unfinished Symphony (No. 8); the 9th Symphony (The Great); the Death and the Maiden String Quartet; the String Quintet; the Impromptus for solo piano; the last three piano sonatas; the incidental music to the play Rosamunde; and the song cycles Die schöne Müllerin, Winterreise and Schwanengesang.
            Born in a suburb of Vienna, Franz Schubert showed remarkable gifts for music from an early age. His father gave him his first violin lessons and his elder brother gave him piano lessons, but he soon exceeded their abilities. He was given his first lessons in piano and organ outside the family by Michael Holzer, organist and choirmaster of the local parish church in Lichtental. According to Holzer, however, he did not give him any real instruction as “Schubert would already know anything that I tried to teach him”. The boy seemed to gain more from a friendly apprentice joiner who took him to a neighbouring piano warehouse where Schubert could practise on better instruments. He also played viola in the family string quartet, with his brothers on first and second violin and his father on the cello. Schubert wrote his earliest string quartets for this ensemble.
            In November 1808 at the age of eleven he became a pupil, through a choir scholarship, at the Stadtkonvikt (Imperial Seminary),  where he was occasionally permitted to lead the orchestra. He was introduced to the music of Mozart, Haydn and Beethoven, a composer whom he greatly admired, and this experience, combined with occasional visits to the opera, laid the foundation for a broader musical education. Here the impoverished Schubert came to rely on a financially well-off friend to provide  much of his manuscript paper. As Schubert's talent began to show in his compositions Antonio Salieri decided to start training him privately in music theory and composition and Schubert
            At the end of 1813, Schubert returned home for teacher training and in 1814, he entered his father's school as the teacher of the youngest pupils, earning enough money for his basic needs, and he was still able to continue his private lessons with Salieri. That year Schubert met the young soprano Therese Grob for whom he wrote several of his works; he wanted to marry her, but was prevented by the law requiring an aspiring bridegroom to show that he had the means to support a family. One of Schubert's most prolific years was 1815 when he composed nine church works, a symphony, and about 140 Lieder. In late 1817 Schubert's father gained a new position at a school in Rossau, and Schubert reluctantly joined him and took up teaching duties there. Fortunately, his compositions began to gain more notice in the press, and the first public performance of an overture in February 1818, received praise from the press in Vienna and abroad.
             During the early 1820s, Schubert was part of a social group of artists and students who became known as the Schubertiads. The group was dealt a blow when Schubert and four of his friends were arrested by the Austrian police who, in the aftermath of the French Revolution and Napoleonic Wars, were on their guard against revolutionary activities and suspicious of any gathering of youth or students. One of Schubert's friends, was imprisoned for over a year, while the other four, including Schubert, were "severely reprimanded for inveighing against officials with insulting and opprobrious language". At this time Schubert, who was only a little more than five feet tall, was nicknamed "Schwammerl - Little Mushroom".
            Schubert's compositions of 1819 and 1820 show a marked advance in development and maturity of style and his reputation grew steadily. In 1821, the Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde in Wien (Society of Friends of Music in Vienna )accepted him as a performing member, and the number of performances of his music grew remarkably and established his name.  
            In 1822, he embarked on a work which, more decisively than almost any other in those years, showed his maturing personal vision, the Symphony in B minor, known as the Unfinished Symphony. In that year he also made the acquaintance of both Weber and Beethoven. On his deathbed, Beethoven is said to have looked into some of the younger man's works and exclaimed: "Truly, the spark of divine genius resides in this Schubert!" He also  predicted that Schubert "would make a great sensation in the world”.
In 1824, he wrote several string quartets, the Sonata for arpeggione and piano at the time when there was a minor craze over that instrument, and his famous Octet. From 1826 to 1828, Schubert resided in Vienna. During this time he wrote the song cycle Winterreise, the ‘Death and the Maiden’ String Quartet, the two piano trios, the String Quintet,  the three final piano sonatas and the collection of 13 songs known as Schwanengesang (Swan-song). During this time the death of Beethoven (in 1827) affected Schubert deeply, and may have motivated him to reach new artistic peaks during this period.
            In 1828, he finished the symphony that later came to be known as the Great C major (to be performed tonight). The orchestra of the Gesellschaft reportedly read through the symphony at a rehearsal, but never scheduled a public performance of it, probably because of its technical difficulty. In the midst of all this creative activity, Schubert's health was failing and, at the age of 31, he died on the 19th November 1828. Five days before his death, his violinist friend Karl Holz and his string quartet visited to play for him. The last musical work he wished to hear was Beethoven's String Quartet No. 14, Op. 131; Holz commented that "The King of Harmony has sent the King of Song a friendly bidding to the crossing". 
            Appreciation of Schubert's music while he was alive was limited to a relatively small circle of admirers in Vienna, but interest in his work increased greatly in the decades following his death.
In 1839 Schumann visited Schubert's brother Ferdinand and discovered the manuscript of the 9th Symphony; It was sent to the Leipzig Gewandhaus where it was performed under Mendelssohn. Thus the last symphony he completed was the first to be premièred.  The rest received their premières over the next fifty years in almost the reverse of the order they were written.  Felix Mendelssohn, Robert Schumann, Franz Liszt, Johannes Brahms and other 19th-century composers discovered and championed his works. Today, Schubert is considered to be one of the greatest composers in the history of Western classical music and his music continues to be widely performed.

            It is difficult to write useful notes for The Great 9th Symphony that we play tonight because it is so long and complex, and the notes are full of references to the great number of  ‘themes’ upon which the whole structure depends. But of course we are grateful for this abundance of great themes, tunes, melodies - whatever we like to call them – from the greatest of ‘classical tunesmiths’. We can be sure they will remain lodged in our heads long after the end of tonight’s concert.
The first movement of the symphony, Andante – Allegro ma non troppo, opens with a noble theme, first played by the horns, introducing us to the grand scale of the work. A lyrical solo woodwind passage follows, before a beautiful variant is passed to violas and cellos. The themes are treated to a range of instrumental colours, gathering momentum, then exploding without a break into a dance-like allegro. Schumann wrote that “in the brilliantly novel transition to the Allegro we are aware of no change of tempo, but suddenly without knowing how, we have arrived.” 
            Strings, trumpets and timpani introduce the Allegro’s first theme in full. Its dotted rhythm (dotted crotchet-quaver) continues in a modified form in the second theme introduced only seventeen bars later, with the woodwind and horns giving their support with a triplet configuration. This pattern continues, with the full orchestra, up to a climax. The movement’s third theme is introduced by oboes and bassoons, accompanied by delicate arpeggios in the strings, soon leading to a passage of alternating staccato and legato phrasing. The mood now becomes slightly melancholy as three trombones take over, with passages derived from the introductory horn theme. After a short section using the rhythmic patterns of the first and second themes the whole of this long Allegro section is now repeated. The second half of this movement then continues with extensive develpments of the themes from the first half, moving in a slowly-forming crescendo, but without acceleration, to an orchestral “tour de force” leading to the Coda. This is marked Piu Moto (more movement). It is quietly initiated by the second theme in the strings, with accompanying triplet figures enhancing the pulse. With great confidence the movement’s introductory horn theme is played out with the glory of the full orchestra.
            The second movement, Andante con moto, is the symphony’s slow movement, but the Con Moto instruction, coupled with the 2/4 time, gives it a somewhat march-like character. It has been suggested that Schubert was influenced by the Allegretto movement of Beethoven’s 7th Symphony. In the first seven bars the lower strings hint at the first jaunty theme entrusted to the oboes, soon to be joined by clarinets, violins and violas, moving to an orchestral climax. The orchestral forces thin down as the second theme approaches. Again, this is entrusted to the oboes with clarinets, but within six bars the strings break in with a third theme, a brisk one with a military air. These themes are developed until the lower strings lead down to the fourth rather sonorous theme given to the bassoons, second violins and basses, with a syncopated counterpoint from the cellos.
The movement ends on a hushed chord, enhanced by the warm harmony of three trombones.
            The third movement, Scherzo (Allegro vivace), opens with the first theme given to staccato strings generating a remarkable dynamic rhythmic pulse. A waltz provides the second theme which is enhanced by the cellos imitating it at a two-bar distance. A rising and falling arpeggio figure in the strings then moves persistently through various keys, leading to the second section which is initiated by chords from the woodwind and brass, with staccato string accompaniment. A rather plaintive third theme tune played first by flutes, then by oboes follows but this is soon shattered by eight sforzando chords, on the third beat of each bar. Calm is restored when the movement’s opening theme returns on clarinets and bassoons, accompanied by the rising and falling motif in the strings, leading to a return of the waltz theme in the first violins, with a most beautiful counter-melody from the lower strings. This waltz is short-lived, giving way to the dynamic opening music and two sforzando chords to finish this section. The following Trio section in 3/4 time starts with horns, clarinets, bassoons and trumpets playing in octaves leading into the movement’s fourth theme, given to the woodwind choir. The second section has a broader more rustic version of this theme but the opening theme soon leads back to the traditional repeat of the Scherzo.
The powerful final Allegro vivace movement goes beyond the limits of all of Schubert’s previous compositions. The listener’s attention is immediately grabbed by fortissimo fanfare chords over three octaves from all three instrumental groups. The strings, in a triplet motive that recurs throughout the movement, lead to the full orchestral playing the dotted rhythms we heard in the first movement. Suddenly, a flowing theme is introduced quietly by oboes and bassoons, singing its way along accompanied by triplets from the violins and supported by horns and lower strings. A full orchestral chord follwed by some silent bars precedes the introduction of a second theme by the horns, taken up by clarinets and bassoons, supported by horns and trombones, with triplet figures in the strings marking the pulse. Schubert now pursues the second theme over a considerable distance, until the dynamic is wound down and the cellos play four bars of quiet tremolo leading down to a development that starts with  a new theme in the clarinets supported by rhythmic figures in the strings. This theme, is a quotation from the last movement of Beethoven’s Choral Symphony but it is not known whether Schubert wrote these four bars into his work by accident or design. The sense of swift movement refuses to relax. Themes are tossed hither and thither between woodwind and brass including the trombones, the strings eventually taking over with tremolo bowings. Everything continues to surge along, driven by a theme starting with four long minim notes which is shared amongst all sections of the orchestra. The music gradually falls to near silence before a lengthy glorious recapitulation arrives, heralded by the movement’s introductory fanfares, fortissimo from the full orchestra. Everything then winds down to a point where a few bars of tremolos take us into the immense exhilarating Coda in which all previous music coalesces. Rising from a “triple piano”, we are taken through the first theme, the Beethoven “quotation” and the second theme. These are subsequently dynamically developed until  in a blaze of glory the movement’s introductory rhythmic theme appears for the last time and the final triumphant chord sinks to a peaceful close.

I. Allegro con fuoco
II. Alla siciliana – allegro vivace
III. Lento con molto espressione
IV. Allegro di molto

The American composer and pianist, Amy Marcy Beach, is well-known as the first female composer to have a symphony performed by a major orchestra, and also one of the first American composers to have her music recognized in Europe, achieving success without the benefit of European study.
          Amy Beach was born in 1867 in Henniker, New Hampshire, to a prominent New England family, her mother being a talented amateur singer and pianist. Young Amy was a true prodigy; she played four-part hymns and composed simple waltzes at the age of four. When she was six she began studying piano with her mother and performed her first public recitals one year later, playing works by Handel, Beethoven, Chopin, and some of her own pieces. In 1875 the family moved to Boston, where Amy studied with the leading pianists. She made her public debut as a pianist in 1883, also the year of her first published compositions.  Two years later she played Chopin's Concerto in her first performance with the Boston Symphony Orchestra.
In 1885 she married Henry Harris Aubrey Beach, a physician, Harvard University lecturer, and amateur singer. Her husband requested that she limit her public performances, so she focused her musical energies on composing.  She continued, however, to perform once per year, with the proceeds donated to charity; one of these performances (in 1900) was of her own piano concerto with the Boston Symphony Orchestra.
After her marriage she undertook one year (only) of formal training in harmony and counterpoint with Junius W. Hill. She followed this with a rigorous course of self-instruction in musical theory and composition, analyzing the compositions of master composers as models and translating theoretical works such as Berlioz's treatise on orchestration.
Her first compositions were relatively small—musical settings of favourite poems and other pieces—but in February 1892 she heard the The Handel and Haydn Society chorus and orchestra, based in Boston, perform her Mass in E-flat, her first major work (numbered Opus 5); it was also the first work to be performed by a woman by an American symphony orchestra.
            The wide range of her compositions is illustrated in this list: her Mass in E-flat, Op. 5, the Gaelic Symphony, Op. 32 (1894), a Violin Sonata, Op.  34 (1896), a Piano Concerto, Op 45 (1899), a Piano Quintet, Op. 67 (1907), Theme and Variations for Flute and String Quartet, Op. 80 (1916), a String Quartet, Op. 89 (1929), the opera Cabildo, Op. 149 (1932), a Piano Trio, Op. 150 (1938), a wide range of sacred and secular choral music, many songs, and a vast amount of music for piano.
After her husband's death in 1910, Amy Beach sailed for Europe to establish her reputation there as both performer and composer. She received enthusiastic reviews for recitals in Germany and for her symphony and piano concerto, which were performed in Leipzig and Berlin. She returned to America in 1914, where she performed in concerts in the winters and composed in the summers. In 1921 she became a fellow at the MacDowell Colony in New Hampshire, where she composed most of her later works. She assumed many leadership positions; for example, In 1925, she was a founding member and first president of the Society of American Women Composers.
            At her death Amy Beach left more than 300 published works, and more of her music has been published in recent decades. 
            The Gaelic Symphony was Beach’s response to Bohemian composer Antonín Dvořák’s call for American composers to explore their musical roots. Known for his own nationalist style, Dvořák had traveled to America. in 1892 to lead the National Conservatory of Music in New York City. He suggested that a distinctly American sound might include Native American and African American elements. Beach, who lived in Boston—which had a large Irish immigrant population—instead turned to Irish melodies, attracted by what she described as “their simple, rugged, and unpretentious beauty.” Even though not every theme in the symphony is authentically Gaelic, the themes are woven into the symphony seamlessly, as if to imply that the entire work's thematic material is Gaelic in nature.
            The Gaelic Symphony was first performed in Boston in 1896 to public and journalistic acclaim. Beach drew inspiration for the large orchestral work from simple old English, Irish, and Scottish melodies; hence she subtitled the work 'Gaelic’. Composer George Chadwick, a member of the unofficial Second New England School of leading composers, wrote to Beach: saying that he had heard and liked the Gaelic Symphony, and: "...I always feel a thrill of pride myself whenever I hear a fine work by any of us, and as such you will have to be counted in, whether you will or not—one of the boys." Not long afterward Beach herself became recognized as one of the School, thereafter called the Boston Six. The Symphony was forgotten during the 1920s but made a comeback in the 1930s and 1940s, being performed by many orchestras, although not by "major" orchestras such as the New York Philharmonic or Boston Symphony.
            In keeping with tradition passing through Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Mendelssohn, Schumann, and Brahms, the symphony is divided into four contrasting movements, with a full romantic harmonic structure and  glimpses of future more modern music. Rich orchestration establishes the romantic style of the symphony and its unusual key choices mirror those in the first movement of Dvořák's New World Symphony.
            In the first movement, Allegro con fuoco, Beach uses an Irish melody taken from one of her songs, Dark is the Night, about a turbulent sea voyage, and this provides much of the first movement’s music. The turbulent sea reminds us of the journey that many Irish emigrants had to face. The fast and fiery movement begins with a low chromatic rumble in the strings which provides the basis on which this romantic gaelic melody is built. Beach's skilful orchestration uses sweeping string lines, vibrant brass fanfares, and lyrical woodwind solos. While Dark is the Night  is the most frequently used material in the first movement, she also introduces a melody from an old Irish tune, carried by the cor anglais mimicing the sound of a bagpipe’s drone. Beach’s sophisticated adaptation of these materialsis, in a sense, Mahlerian;the music alternates between moments of fiery intensity and lyrical introspection, capturing the spirit and emotions associated with the Scottish highlands. After an expansive development there is a blazing climax marked by a combination of duple- and triple rhythms. A solo clarinet then leads to the recapitulation which is followed by a driving coda.
                        The second movement, Alla siciliana – allegro vivace, the shortest of the symphony, is the movement that many critics found the most likable, probably for its clear form, singable theme, and lively nature. It comprises a pair of slow sections (marked “Alla Siciliana”)  based on a lullaby, framing a quicksilver, moto perpetuo variation on that melody. In contrast to the first movement’s two themes, the second movement has just one main musical theme, composed around the traditional Irish song that tells the story of someone dreaming of their love and wishing they could be near to them again after being separated by emigration. The initial (Italian) Alla Siciliana might seem a strange choice for a gaelic symphony. The Siciliana style is, however, associated with the pastoral aspect of Sicily, offering not only a nice respite from the turbulent first movement, but also wonderful opportunities for Beach to showcase her considerable skills as an orchestrator. In the first Alla Sicillana section a horn solo leads to an extended melody for solo oboe, discreetly accompanied by clarinets and bassoons. The second expands on this, featuring a gorgeous duet between solo oboe and English horn bracketed, at the beginning, by violins playing sotto voce tremolo patterns in their highest register and low string plucking out a gently dancing rhythm beneath. Between the two Sicilliana sections their music is cut up and juggled in a romping scherzo that calls to mind the scherzos of Mendelssohn, but here in a duple metre, instead of the usual triple metre.
            Beach wrote that the slow melodic third movement, Lento con molto espressione, conveys “the laments… romance and… dreams” of the Irish people. She aims to cast the Irish as simple and noble, to contrast with the derogatory racist images then current in Boston high society. It is in two sections, each based on an Irish melody. The first song praising Ireland's beauty is stated in its entirety, first with solo cello and then later with woodwinds and strings. The second song mourns for a dead child. The orchestration of both sections includes solos for violin, cello, oboe, and clarinet.
            The fourth movement, Allegro di molto, provides a majestic and exuberant finale, incorporating elements of Scottish folk tunes and captures the triumphant and festive spirit associated with traditional Highland gatherings. Beach writes that it is about the Celtic people, “their sturdy daily life, their passions and battles”. The entire movement, is woven out of Beach’s melodies from the first movement. It opens with a triumphant martial theme which is then developed before slowing down for the second theme, marked by expressive leaps in pitch characteristic of Irish melodies. Beach stated that the end of the fourth movement has “fanfares of trumpets, horns and trombones surrounded by rapid fortissimo figures in the strings and full chords in the wind instruments which bring the symphony to an energetic close."

Montagues and Capulets
Juliet the Young Girl
Masks
Romeo and Juliet
Death of Tybalt
Romeo and Juliet before par��ng
Romeo at Juliet’s Grave

Sergei Prokofiev was one of the major composers of the 20th century, producing seven operas, seven symphonies, eight ballets, five piano concertos, two violin concertos, a cello concerto, a symphony-concerto for cello and orchestra, and nine piano sonatas.  He was born in 1891 in a rural part the Smolensk region in Ukraine when it was an uncontested part of the Russian Empire. His father was a soil engineer from Moscow and his mother, Maria, came from a Saint Petersburg family of former serfs. By the time of Prokofiev's birth, Maria was devoting  her life to music. Sergei was inspired by hearing his mother practising the piano, and he wrote his first piano composition at the age of five. By seven, he had also learned to play chess, beating the world chess champion José Raúl Capablanca in an exhibition match in 1914.
              At the age of eleven Sergei spent the summer having lessons with the composer and pianist Reinhold Glière. Two years later he was introduced to Alexander Glazunov, a professor at the  St. Petersburg Conservatory, who was so impressed by his music that he encouraged him to enroll. Several years younger than most of his class, Prokofiev was viewed as eccentric and arrogant and annoyed a number of his classmates by keeping statistics on their errors. During that period, he studied orchestration under Rimsky-Korsakov. Prokofiev soon developed a reputation as a musical rebel, while getting praise for his original compositions, which he performed himself on the piano.
             In 1910, Prokofiev's father died and Sergei's financial support ceased but by then he had started making a name for himself. He composed his first two piano concertos around then, the second of which caused a scandal at its premiere According to one account, the audience left the hall with exclamations of "'To hell with this futuristic music! The cats on the roof make better music!'", but the modernists were in rapture.
            In 1914, Prokofiev finished his career at the Conservatory by winning the 'battle of the pianos', a competition open to the five best piano students,  by performing his own Piano Concerto No. 1. Soon afterwards, he journeyed to London where the impresario Sergei Diaghilev commissioned the ballet Chout ("The Buffoon"). Its premiere in 1921 in Paris was a huge success, Stravinsky calling it  "the single piece of modern music he could listen to with pleasure", while Ravel called it "a work of genius". It was about this time that Stravinsky described Prokofiev as the greatest Russian composer of his day, after himself!
            After the Revolution of 1917, Prokofiev left Russia and made his living as a composer, pianist and conductor in the United States, then in Germany and France. Prokofiev's greatest interest was opera, but the only operatic success during his lifetime was The Love for Three Oranges, composed for the Chicago Opera and performed there in 1921, and then  over the following decade in Europe and Russia. In the early 1930s, the Great Depression diminished opportunities for Prokofiev's music to be performed and, in 1936. he finally returned to his homeland with his family where he composed his best-known music including Lieutenant Kijé, Peter and the Wolf, Romeo and Juliet, Cinderella, Alexander Nevsky, and the Fifth and Sixth Symphonies.  
            In 1948 the Zhanov decree was published, denouncing six artists—Shostakovich, Prokofiev, Khachaturian, Shebalin, Popov, and Myaskovsky— in that order for the crime of "formalism", described as a "renunciation of the basic principles of classical music" in favor of "muddled, nerve-racking" sounds that "turned music into cacophony". Shostakovich’s famous response was his 5th symphony. Prokofiev apologized, but hoped that works such as Aleksander Nevsky, Hail to Stalin, Symphony No. 5, and Romeo and Juliet had shown he could compose works that fell in line with the party’s ideals. In 1949, Prokofiev wrote his Cello Sonata for the 22-year-old Mstislav Rostropovich. His last completed work was his Seventh Symphony. Prokofiev died at age 61 on 5 March 1953, the same day as Joseph Stalin.
             Romeo and Juliet was first staged in January 1940 and was an instant success. The ballet had been initially rejected because of the tragic ending;  “living people can dance, the dying cannot". Romeo and Juliet  is now recognised as the crowning achievement of Soviet dramatic ballet. Prokofiev rewrote parts of the music as orchestral suites, parts of which we play tonight. He was an extremely skilled orchestrater often writing for small numbers of instruments and dividing string sections into three parts. Typically we hear intricate rhythms, very frequent changes of key, quirky leaps in the melodic line and discordant harmonies.
           In Shakespeare’s story an age-old vendetta between the powerful Montagu and Capulet families erupts into bloodshed. Young Romeo Montague falls in love with Juliet Capulet. Romeo’s attempt to halt a street fight leads to the death of Juliet’s cousin, Tybalt, for which Romeo is banished. In a desperate attempt to be reunited with Romeo, Juliet fakes her own death and lies in a tomb waiting for Romeo to come so they can run away together. The message explaining the plan fails to reach Romeo and, believing Juliet dead, he takes his life in her tomb. Juliet wakes to find Romeo’s corpse beside her and kills herself. The grieving familes agree to end their feud.
                     We are perfoming seven scenes from Prokofievs’ version of the story:      
    The Montagues and Capulets. This opens with the slow, threatening music which accompanies the Duke’s order that the warring families must cease fighting on pain of death; this is soon followed by the menacing and slightly heavy, ominous     Dance of the Knights.   
    The Young Juliet.  This is a musical character portrait, brilliantly capturing the changing moods of the character’s adolescent personality. Prokofiev introduces Juliet at three different ages. In infancy, with dancing violins. Her adolescence is expresssed by a lyrical clarinet, then a flute leads in to her early doomed adulthood.  
    Masques (Masks). Romeo, Benvolio and Mercutio are disguised in order to crash the Capulets' ball in the enemy stronghold. There is an introduction of tense percussion, a cheeky clarinet, and delicate plucked strings to accompany their stealthy arrival. This is followed by an extensive march theme.   
    Romeo and Juliet. This is a sensitive musical treatment of the celebrated “balcony scene”. The harp and muted violins suggest the expectant stillness. Romeo enters gently in the strings, answered by Juliet’s graceful flute. Lengthy ecstatic sections follow before the music gently subsides into silence.
    The death of Tybalt. The music first describes the savage fight in which Tybalt slays Mercutio whose famous final words were “A plague on both your houses.” This is followed by the furious duel in which Romeo avenges Mercutio’s death, with its brutal dissonances and aggressive percussion and violins playing countless notes per second. Heavy, thuds on the timpani herald Tybalt’s funeral procession, bringing the scene to a close
    Romeo at Juliet's house before parting. The lovers awaken after their first night together. There is much sighing with references to Romeo's love theme and a lush central section. Even here the soaring music is shot through with intimations of impending misfortune.
    Romeo at Juliet’s Tomb. Romeo’s love theme pours out in his overwhelming grief.  At the very end, a contrabassoon speaks as from the depths of the tomb but is silenced by soft shimmering strings above which a piccolo intones a single high note while cellos and bass clarinet throb in deep sorrow as he takes poison and dies in music of tragic dissonance.

Mélanie Hélène Bonis gave herself the pseudonym Mel Bonis to avoid any feminine connotation in her name. "Mel" was a prolific French late-Romantic composer, writing more than 300 pieces, including works for piano, organ, chamber groups, choirs, and orchestra. She attended the Paris Conservatoire, where her teachers included César Franck, Ernest Guiraud, and Auguste Bazille.
           Bonis was born to Parisian lower-middle-class parents who initially did not encourage her music, but she taught herself to play the piano and when she was twelve they were persuaded by a professor at the Conservatoire to allow her to receive formal music lessons. When she was sixteen she began her studies at the Conservatoire, and attended classes in accompaniment, harmony, and composition, where she attended classes with Claude Debussy and received tuition from César Franck.
          At the Conservatoire, she fell in love with Amédée Landély Hettich, a student, poet, and singer, setting some of his poems to music. Her parents disapproved of the match, withdrew her from the Conservatoire and when she was twenty-five, arranged for her to marry the businessman Albert Domange. He  was twenty-two years her senior, and a widower with five children from his previous marriages. For Bonis, it was not an ideal marriage, as Domange did not like music and she immersed herself in domesticity, bearing three children with Domange. The most striking thing is the discrepancy between the moral rigidity of "Madame Domange", obsessed by her social duties and steeped in piety, and the extraordinarily bold sensuality which emerges from the musical works that she produced under her pseudonym.
           In the 1890s, Bonis re-encountered Hettich, who encouraged her to return to composition and was able to introduce her to some of the major publishers, after which her career began to succeed. Bonis and Hettich embarked on an affair, which led to the birth of an illegitimate child, Madeleine. She was fostered to a good home and after her foster parents died she was re-united with her mother.  
            Bonis then devoted all her energies to composition. Her piano quartet was performed in 1901, and when he heard it, Saint-Saens exclaimed, "I never imagined a woman could write such music!". In 1907, she became a member of the committee of the Société des compositeurs de musique and, from 1910 to 1914, its secretary, working daily with the elite of the Parisian music world, people like Massenet, Saint-Saëns, Fauré, etc.
           Bonis was too modest for self-promotion, and even her admirers at the time did not overlook her gender. After the First World War, her music fell into obscurity, but  she continued to compose through the late 1920s, until her death in 1937, aged 79.
          Our music tonight is taken from her Trois femmes de légende pour orchestra, the three legendary women being Ophelia, Salomé  and Cleopatra. These tone poems began life around 1909 as solo or four-hands piano pieces. Although she wrote many works with a similar theme these were the only three she orchestrated, but they were not published until the 21stcentury. In these tone poems  her handling of the large orchestra is both imaginative and skilful, the orchestral sound being impressionistic with lush scoring and chromatic and oriental  inspired harmonies.
           Shakespeare’s Ophélie (Ophelia) opens with gentle harp and muted upper strings It continues with alternating gentle flowing watery music, with more passionate passages expressing her doomed love for Hamlet, leading eventually to her quiet watery grave.
           Cleopatra had occupied Melanie’s imagination for a long time, as suggested by photographs taken in 1887 of her dressed as the queen of Egypt. Le Songe de Cléopâtre (The Dream of Cleopatra) does not seem to relate to any identifiable events or characters in the life of Cleopatra, her dream  only  leading us through a series of impressions with many moods, tempi and orchestral colours. Like the story of Ophelia, Cleopatra’s dream also starts with the harp and muted strings, the whole orchestral sound flowing along dreamily but with contrasting changes of mood that are sometimes threatening but also sometimes having a feeling of satisfied achievement, leading eventually back to a gentle finish with harp and muted strings.

Prologue
Somewhere
Scherzo
Mambo
Cha cha
Meeting scene
Cool
Rumble
Finale

Leonard Bernstein  was an American conductor, composer, pianist, music educator, author, and humanitarian. Considered to be one of the most important conductors of his time, he was the first American-born conductor to receive international acclaim. He wrote symphonies, ballet  music, choral works, opera, chamber music, and pieces for the piano. Bernstein was a critical figure in the modern revival of the music of Gustav Mahler.
          Bernstein was born in Massachusetts to Russian Jewish parents, Sam and Jennie, his father emigrating from Russia and mother from Ukraine. In his early youth, his only exposure to music was the household radio and music on Friday nights at the synagogue. When he was ten years old he started to have piano lessons when his aunt deposited a piano in their home. In the summers, the Bernstein family regularly went to their vacation home in Sharon, Massachusetts, where young Leonard conscripted all the neighborhood children to put on shows ranging from Carmen to H.M.S. Pinafore. He also gave piano lessons to young people in his neighborhood, one of his students, Sid Ramin, becaming Bernstein's lifelong friend and orchestrator for West Side Story. 
          In 1932, at the age of 14 Bernstein played Brahms's Rhapsody in G minor at his first public piano performance at the New England Conservatory. Two years later, he made his solo debut with orchestra in Grieg's Piano Concerto  with the Boston Public School Orchestra.
         Bernstein's sensational conducting debut, deputising for Bruno Walter, took place in November 1943 to enormous national acclaim. At this time he was working on a New York based musical On the Town for his friend Jerome Robbins. It opened in 1945 to ecstatic reviews and was showered with awards.  
         The McCarthy era was in full swing by this time and Bernstein was among hundreds of artists who were asked to testify to the House Un-American Activities committee. He was denied a passport for some time, and his response to the mood of hysterical witch-hunting influenced his next work for the stage, based on Voltaire's satirical Candide but this ran for only seventy-three performances. As soon as Candide had opened in December 1956 Bernstein returned to West Side tory which, by contrast, two years later ran for 772 performances.
          In 1949 Robbins had suggested a modern version of Romeo & Juliet which was to be called East Side Story, staging the conflict between rival Catholic and Jewish groups. However, this project foundered until 1955, when teenage Latin gang violence in Los Angeles made the news. The writer Arthur Laurents suggested that the conflict should be changed to involve Puerto-Rican versus white gangs on the then-grungy Upper West Side of Manhattan; Stephen Sondheim joined to write the lyrics and all at once, the project took off. It is filled with jazz and Latin American rhythms and is painted in Bernstein's forceful, witty, tough, tender, joyful and tragic music. The same day that Bernstein saw his first run-through of West Side Story, he signed his contract to become the first American-born music director (and conductor) of the New York Philharmonic Orchestra.
           Inspired by  Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet, the dark theme, sophisticated music, extended dance scenes, tragic love story, and its focus on social problems marked a turning point in musical theatre. The story explores the rivalry between two teenage street gangs of different ethnic backgrounds; the Sharks who are recent migrants from Puerto Rico, and the Jets, who are white. Tony, a former member of the Jets and best friend of the gang's leader, Riff, falls in love with Maria, the sister of Bernardo, the leader of the Sharks.
          The scenes and dances flow together with no breaks.
The Prologue sets the stage with the two gangs, the Jets and Sharks eying each other menacingly.
Somewhere is the beautiful duet where, Tony and Maria imagine a place free from prejudice where they can be together.
The Scherzo shows Chino telling Maria that Tony has killed her brother.
The Mambo and Cha Cha take place in the gym while the Jets plan to drive the Sharks from the streets, and Tony first catches sight of Maria.
In The Meeting the Jets are nervous as they prepare to meet the Sharks and are told to just play it cool.
In the Rumble (gang fight) Riff and Bernardo are both knifed before a police whistle breaks the ensuing frenzy and the gangs flee.
In the Finale the stunned gangs appear in silence to carry away the body of Tony who had been shot in revenge by Chino.

Dmitri Shostakovich (1906-1976) Chamber Symphony in C minor, Op. 110a [Rudolph Barschai’s transcription of String Quartet No. 8 in C minor, Op. 110]                                              Download as WORD document

 i. Largo, attacca
 ii. Allegro molto, attacca
 iii. Allegretto, attacca
 iv. Largo, attacca
 v. Largo

Dmitri Dmitriyevich Shostakovich was a Soviet-era Russian composer and pianist who combined a variety of different musical techniques and styles in his works. His orchestral works include 15 symphonies and six concertos. His chamber works include 15 string quartets, a piano quintet, and two piano trios. His solo piano works include two sonatas, an early set of 24 preludes, and a later set of 24 preludes and fugues. Stage works include three completed operas and three ballets. Shostakovich also wrote several song cycles, and a substantial quantity of music for theatre and film.
Born into a Russian family in Saint Petersburg, Shostakovich was the second of three children. His father worked as an engineer under my hero, Dmitri Mendeleev, the great Russian chemist who introduced us to the Periodic Table of Elements.
Dmitri Shostakovich, displayed musical talent after he began piano lessons with his mother at the age of nine. In 1919, at age thirteen he was admitted to the Petrograd Conservatory, then headed by Alexander Glazunov. His musical breakthrough was his First Symphony, written as his graduation piece at the age of 19. Its premiere with the Leningrad Philharmonic Orchestra in 1926 was received enthusiastically, Bruno Walter being so impressed that he conducted its first performance outside Russia later that year.
       In 1927, Shostakovich wrote his patriotic Second Symphony (subtitled To October), but owing to its modernism, it did not meet with the same enthusiasm as his first.
     His opera Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk, first performed in 1934, was immediately successful, on both popular and official levels. It was described as "the result of the general success of Socialist construction, of the correct policy of the Party", and as “an opera that could have been written only by a Soviet composer brought up in the best tradition of Soviet culture". However, Joseph Stalin paid a visit to hear this opera and frightened everyone by leaving without speaking to anyone; Pravda then immediately published an editorial titled "Muddle Instead of Music", complaining that the opera was a "deliberately dissonant, muddled stream of sounds that quacks, hoots, pants and gasps." Even Soviet music critics who had praised the opera were forced to recant in print, saying they "failed to detect the shortcomings of Lady Macbeth as pointed out by Pravda”.
      Fearful that he was about to be arrested, Shostakovich secured an appointment with the Chairman of the USSR State Committee on Culture, who reported to Stalin that he had instructed the composer to "reject formalist errors and in his art attain something that could be understood by the broad masses", and that Shostakovich had admitted being in the wrong.  The year 1936 marked the beginning of the Great Terror, in which many of Shostakovich's friends and relatives were imprisoned or killed. The composer's famously popular response to his denunciation was his phenomenally successful Fifth Symphony; it was also at this time that Shostakovich composed the first of his string quartets. After 1936, Shostakovich's music became more conservative. Between 1937 and 1960 he wrote 5 more symphonies including his massive 7th Symphony (The Leningrad), concertos for violin, cello and piano, and a lot of great chamber music, including, in 1960, his 8th String Quartet. 
      The restrictions on Shostakovich's music were eased in 1949, when Stalin decided that the Soviets needed to send artistic representatives, including Shostakovich, to the Cultural and Scientific Congress for World Peace in New York City. At a press conferencehe was expected to read a prepared speech; the famous writer Nicolas Nabokov witnessed him starting to read "in a nervous and shaky voice" before he had to break off "and the speech was continued in English by a radio announcer". Fully aware that Shostakovich was not free to speak his mind, Nabokov publicly asked him whether he supported the recent denunciation of Stravinsky's music in the Soviet Union. Although he was a great admirer of Stravinsky who had been influenced by his music, Shostakovich had no alternative but to say yes, leading to Nabokov writing that that this demonstrated that Shostakovich was "not a free man, but an obedient tool of his government." Shostakovich never forgave Nabokov for this public humiliation.
      This version  of the Eighth string quartet for string orchestra (by Rudoph Barschai) is almost identical to the string quarted; the only obvious difference being the addition of double basses, meaning that the cellos are often pushed up to a more difficult octave. This Quartet, the most loved of all his quartets, is the only substantial work that he composed outside Russia. It was written in just three days in 1960 in Dresden, where he was  to write music for a film about the incendiary bombing of Dresden in World War II. At this time,Shostakovich was suffering a bout of deep depression. Under pressure from Khrushchev's officials, he had recently applied to join the Communist Party, which he had previously sworn he would never do, and for months he underwent periods of self-loathing for his perceived cowardice in betraying his principles. According to the score, it is dedicated "to the victims of fascism and the war". However, he wrote to a friend - “As hard as I tried to rough out the film scores which I am supposed to be doing, I still haven’t managed to get anywhere. Instead I wrote this ideologically flawed string quartet which is of no use to anybody. I started thinking that if some day I die, nobody is likely to write a work in memory of me, so I had better write one myself. The title page could carry the dedication: To the memory of the composer of this quartet”.
      The whole quartet is based on the DSCH musical motif or motto based on his name, Dmitry Shostakovich, consisting of the  the notes, D, E flat, C and B (E flat sound Es, and H represents B natural in German).
The Quartet consists of five movements played without pause, indicated by Attaca between movements – although this does not necessarily indicate a violent start to every movement.
      The first movement is essentially an elegy, a portrait of despair, beginning with the lower instruments playing the DSCH motif  which is then shared around the orchestra, often as a sort of canon. In the first few bars all twelve semitones of the octave are played, creating a feeling of uncertainty. The movement remains mostly in a gloomy minor key, quoting themes from some of his symphonies. It nearly dies away into silence before a sudden atack into the second movement. 
     This second movement is a complete contrast, with emotional, violent music which includes the Jewish music from the last movement of Shostakovich's Second Piano Trio.
      The tumultuous end of the 2nd movement leads suddenly into the third movement, a waltz that is built around the DSCH motive. Shostakovich loved waltzes – they turn up in a surprising amount of his chamber music for a 20th-century composer, this one being ironic and deathly chilling. A quote from his first cello concerto leads to a sense of respite with a quiet solo cello passage in waltz time. After a further quote from the cello concerto  the gruesome ballroom scene  ends almost silently with a long high note on a single violin.
      The fourth movement starts by interrupting this note with repeated, dissonant chords that some have said recall the sound of anti-aircraft fire in Dresden or perhaps the dreaded knock of the KGB on Shostakovich’s front door. What follows is a fascinating collage of melodies, both from Shostakovich’s own music as well as from other sources, including the Dies Irae (Day of Wrath) chant, and a beautiful quotation from a revolutionary song 'Exhausted by the hardships of prison', which was a favourite of Lenin and had been sung by the Bolshoi chorus at his funeral.
      The finale, a recapitulation and reminiscence of the first movement, starts with a quiet statement by lower strings of Shostakovich’s personal DSCH motive which also forms an emotional climax before closing in the tragic mood that pervades the entire symphony.
      This great personal and political work bears out, as powerfully as anywhere else in the whole of music, the Soviet writer Ilya Ehrenburg’s comment that, “without saying anything music can express everything”.

Andante sostenuto—Allegro vivo (C minor)
Andantino marziale, quasi moderato (E♭ major)
Scherzo. Allegro molto vivace
Finale. Moderato assai—Allegro vivo (C major)

Tchaikovsky is the most popular Russian composer of all time because of his tuneful, impressive harmonies, and colourful orchestration, which evoke a profound emotional response. He was born in a small industrial town about 450 miles East of Moscow. He was the son of the manager of the local metal works, his mother being a a descendant of French émigrés. He had a clear interest in music from childhood, beginning piano lessons at  the age of five with a local tutor. Because music education was not available in Russian institutions at that time, his parents chose to prepare the gentle, sensitive boy  for a career in the civil service and in 1850, he entered the prestigious Imperial School of Jurisprudence in St. Petersburg, a boarding institution for young boys, where he spent nine years, proving a successful and popular student, while continuing his piano lessons and other musical studies. In 1861 he visited Germany, France, and England, and when the St. Petersburg Conservatory opened Tchaikovsky was among its first students, resigning from the Ministry of Justice, where he had been employed as a clerk. After graduating in 1865, Tchaikovsky moved to Moscow to teach music theory at the Moscow Conservatory. Within five years he had produced his First Symphony (Winter Daydreams), and his overture Romeo and Juliet which became the first of his compositions to enter the standard international classical repertoire.
         Frpm about 1871 his instrumental works began to earn him his reputation; in 1871 he wrote the first version of his 2nd Symphony and in 1874, he wrote his First Piano Concerto, a work destined for fame. Soon after, Tchaikovsky left Russia to travel in Europe where he was greatly impressed by Bizet’s opera Carmen but left cold by Richard Wagner’s Ring cycle. In the next two years he produced his symphonic fantasia Francesca da Rimini and the first of his famous ballets, Swan Lake.
                The year 1876 saw the beginning of an extraordinary 14-year relationship between Tchaikovsky and Nadezhda von Meck, the widow of a wealthy railroad tycoon. Although they never met she became his patroness, enabling him to resign from the conservatory and devote himself to writing music. Thereafter he could afford to spend the winters in Europe and return to Russia each summer and between 1987 and 1893 he wrote his last three numbered symphonies, becoming  one of the few composers in the late 19th century who could impose his personality upon the symphony to give the form new life
     At the beginning of 1885, Tchaikovsky settled down in a rented country house near Klin, outside Moscow, and he finally overcame his longstanding fear of conducting. He embarked upon his first European concert tour as a conductor, which included Leipzig, Berlin, Prague, Hamburg, Paris, and London. It was a great success and he made a second tour in 1889. In the next four years he composed his second ballet, The Sleeping Beauty, his opera The Queen of Spades and his ballet Nutcracker.
          In 1893 his world stature was confirmed by further triumphant European and American tours and by the award of an honorary doctorate from the University of Cambridge. In October of that year he conducted the premiere of his great Sixth Symphony (the Pathetique), dying nine days later from cholera.
      Tchaikovsky wrote his Second Symphony in 1872 and it was a hit from its first performance. It is among the more accessible of Tchaikovsky's works and exists in two versions. Despite its initial success, he was not satisfied with the symphony and after writing his 4th symphony he revised the work extensively and this is the version of the symphony performed today. He used three Ukrainian folk songs in the Second Symphony and because of that it was nicknamed the "Little Russian". It is neither “little” nor is it Russian. For centuries Russians often referred to the Ukraine as Little Russia; it has long rankled the Ukrainians and sadly the animosity continues.
      The symphony is scored for piccolo, two flutes, two oboes, two clarinets, two bassoons, four horns, two trumpets, three trombones, tuba, timpani, cymbals, bass drum, tamtam and strings.
      The first movement is Andante sostenuto—Allegro vivo. Its  slow introduction starts with a horn solo, a melancholy Ukrainian folk song. It is taken up by various parts of the orchestra, gradually gaining in intensity. The horns return to the horns to lead into the Allegro continuation of this movement; it starts with a simple woodwind theme which soon becomes more aggressive as it is taken over by more of the orchestra. A more gentle tune competes to calm everything down but the two themes share the movement until it ends with the horn ending softly, as at the beginning.
The second movement is Andantino marziale, quasi moderato. This unusual short movement is not  a typical Tchaikovsky slow movement but is a little leftover bridal march from an unpublished opera, which diverts occasionally into another Ukrainian folk song.
         The third movement Scherzo is Allegro molto vivace. As a scherzo should, this movement scampers along with a ‘Midsummer Night’s Dream” atmosphere, its rapid three in a bar music interrupted  by a frenetic section in 2/4.
      The last movements is Finale, Moderato assai—Allegro vivo. It is introduced by a brief fanfare leading to a short brass section reminiscent of the “Promenade” or “The Great Gate of Kiev” in Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition. The following exhilarating finale incorporates a song called The Crane that his butler used to sing to him when he was a child,  subjecting it to a increasingly intricate and colorful variations for orchestra. A more graceful lyrical theme from the strings provides contrast, both themes then being used during the development section. After the recapitulation there is a pause, then a violent crash followed by a breathtaking rush to the end.

Emilie Luise Frederica Mayer was a German Romantic composer who became one of the most
prolific female composers of the 19th century often being called the "Female Beethoven". ln
addition to composing, she was a sculptor, and many of her sculptures are in collections
across Europe to this day. She composed eight symphonies and numerous chamber works,
piano sonatas, and orchestral overtures. Despite the limited opportunities for women in
professional music during her time, she achieved wide recognition and public performance of
her music across Germany. Modern performances of her symphonies and chamber works
reveal a distinctive voice, although clearly influenced by Beethoven and Mendelssohn.
Her harmonies are characterized by sudden shifts in tonality and her rhythms are often very complex, with several layers interacting at once.

Emilie Mayer was born in Friedland, in the North-East of Germany, the third of five children, and
eldest daughter, of a wealthy pharmacist. Her mother died when she was three years otd. She
started piano lessons at age five when she first started composing. ln 1840 at the age of 28, her
circumstances changed when her father committed suicide leaving her with a large
inheritance. A year later she moved to Stettin (now Szczecin), in Northern Poland where she
studied composition with Carl Loewe, a central figure in the musical life of the city. tn 1847,
after the premiere of her first two symphonies she moved to Berlin to continue her
compositional studies with Wilhelm Wieprecht. ln 1850, he led his orchestra in a concert
comprising only Mayer's compositions. lt was attended by the Queen of Prussia who shortty
afterwards awarded her the gold medal of art. With critical and popular acclaim, she
continued composing a wide range of works, travelling for their performances throughout Europe.  In 1876 Mayer settled again in Berlin where her music was frequently performed and she re-established herself as a significant figure in the city's cultural circles. She was a honorary member of the Philharmonic Society in Munich and was the co-chair of the Berlin Opera Academy.

The only contemporary hint about Emilie Mayer's personality is a Biographical Sketch written by Elisabeth Sangalli-Marr, a writer who advocated equal education for women. She says that Emilie Mayer "had renounced the binding bondage of marriage for the sake of art. She claimed music as her life's calling, and considered it her life-companion, the ideal of her loving, believing, hoping."

Emilie Mayer died in in 1883 in Berlin and was buried at the Holy Trinity Church not far from Felix and Fanny Mendelssohn. She was, by far, the most famous German woman composer during her lifetime but little of her music has been performed since her death, a situation we are helping to remedy tonight.

The publication of Goethe's Faust inspired Berlioz, Wagner, Gounod and Schumann who saw in
that complex, tragic figure an ideaI subject for musical compositions. The sixty-eight-year-old
Emilie Mayer was not discouraged from competing with such male geniuses; in 1881 she
cmposed her "Faust Overture" which, contrasting with the other pieces in today's concert,
was an instant success.

Although Mayer wrote an abstract concert overture rather than s a tone poem telling "The
story of Faust, Mephistopheles and Marguerite", the slow dark sinuous introduction might be a
portrait of the devilish Mephistopheles. This leads to a vigorous, rather grim, Allegro, perphaps
depicting Faust striving for infinite knowledge? The more gentle middle section could be
associated with Marguerite. The only clue that Mayer was thinking in this way comes in the
overture's closing pages: she wrote in the score at the moment the first Allegro theme moves
from grim minor key to hopefuI major, "She is saved", a reference to Marguerite's redemption in
Part ll of Goethe's Faust.

Adagio – Moderato
Lento – Allegro molto
Adagio
Allegro – Moderato – Allegro, ma non-troppo – Poco più lento – Adagio

 Edward Elgar, the fourth of seven children, was born in a small village, outside Worcester where his father, William, a violinist and organist had a shop selling sheet music and musical instruments. By the age of eight, Elgar was taking piano and violin lessons. He left school at the age of fifteen giving piano and violin lessons and working in his father’s shop. His only advanced musical training involved violin studies in London with Adolf Pollitzer, but Elgar chose to concentrate on composition. For five years from the age of 22 he was the conductor of a small local Worcester orchestra and during this time he played bassoon in his brother’s wind quintet for which he made arrangements of the great classical composers. For seven years, from the age of 25, he played violin in a professional orchestra which also gave the first professional performance of one of his compositions – Serenade mauresque. In 1989 he married Alice Roberts who, for the rest of her life was a warm companion and business and social secretary as well as a valued music critic.  
      During the 1890s, Elgar gradually built up a reputation as a composer, chiefly of works for the great choral festivals of the English Midlands but also of works such as Salut d’Amour, and The Serenade for Strings. Critic’s reviews were not enthuisastic until In 1899, at the age of forty-two, Elgar published the Enigma Variations and The Dream of Gerontius. Both were well-received at home and abroad, especially in Germany.  Richard Strauss was so impressed that he proposed a toast to the success of "the first English progressive musician, Meister Elgar”. At last he was recognised at home, being knighted at Buckingham Palace in 1904.
      In the next six years his Introduction and Allegro for Strings, his First Symphony and his Violin Concerto  were all national and international successes. He was, however, very disappointed in 1911 by the reception of his Second Symphony. Elgar’s biographer said that "he missed that unmistakable note perceived when an audience, even an English audience (!), is thoroughly roused or worked up, as it was after the Violin Concerto”. Elgar asked "What is the matter with them? They sit there like a lot of stuffed pigs." Perhaps he was comforted later that year to be appointed to the Order of Merit. Soon after the First World Warhe produced the Violin Sonata, the Piano Quintet, a the String Quartet and the Cello Concerto (almost his last composition).
       In 1920 Elgar’s wife Alice died. Deprived of her constant support and inspiration, Elgar allowed himself to be deflected from composition, indulging himself in his several hobbies. He was a keen amateur chemist, sometimes using a laboratory in his back garden, patenting the "Elgar Sulphuretted Hydrogen Apparatus". He supported Wolverhampton Wanderers F.C., for whom he composed an anthem. In 1923, he took a voyage to Brazil, journeying up the Amazon river. Little was recorded about this, which gave one of my favourite novelists, James Hamilton-Paterson, considerable latitude when writing Gerontius, a fictional account of the journey.  In 1924 Elgar was appointed Master of the King's Musick. He was first composer to take the gramophone seriously, he made a series of recordings on 78-rpm discs of his own works. In his final years, Elgar experienced a musical revival. The BBC celebrated his seventy-fifth birthday with a dedicated Festival, and in 1932 commissioned him to compose a Third Symphony, which was elaborated by the composer Anthony Payne into a complete score,performed by the CSO in 2004. Elgar died in1934 at the age of seventy-six and was buried next to his wife.
      Elgar’s Cello Concerto had a disastrous premiere, at the opening concert of the London Symphony Orchestra’s 1919–20 season. Apart from the Concerto, which the composer conducted, the rest of the programme was conducted by Albert Coates, who overran his rehearsal time at the expense of Elgar's. This is not perhaps surprising as he also had to cope with Scriabin’s challenging Poem of Ecstasy  and Borodin’s 2nd Symphony. The Cello concerto is probably the work of Elgar's with the most universal appeal, but, paradoxically, it is the work of his that is most rooted in a specific moment in time. Appalled and disillusioned by the suffering caused by the war, it is perhaps  Elgar's lament for a lost world, and perhaps also an expression of feeling that he was in the autumn of his own life. The following programme notes are taken with kind  permission of the archivist of the London Symphony Orchestra from the notes provided at the first performance. Another link is the presence in our orchestra tonight of a cello that played in the ‘band’ in that first performance.

 The programme notes from the first performance:
        The problem of the balance between the solo instrument and the orchestra, which in the case of the cello presents special difficulties, has been carefully considered and the solo part is on somewhat  new and unconventional lines with the object of securing the maximum of effect. As to the poetic and emotional basis of the work, one has the composer’s sanction for saying that it is perhaps appropriately expressed in the term nobilmente, which is prefixed at the beginning of the score and for the constant use of which Elgar has often been teased by his musical friends.
       The first movement starts with a short recitative in which the theme is given out by the soloist. It appears in varying forms later on in the work. The movement proper, moderato, is played by the violas. Its flottant rhythm, indefiniteness of key and the mysterious chord on which the soloist enters all help to give a romantic, almost mystical feeling, to the music. After some repetitions, by both cello and orchestra, a new section is reached, with a fresh melodic idea, with a fresh spring-like lilt, in which the soloist and orchestra are closely interwoven. The music expands into some impassioned phrases for the cello, and there are stiking dialogue passages between woodwind and cello. The first theme now reappears in the musical fabric, and the music ends softly with a shortened version of it, in which the lower strings join in unison.
       The second movement starts with a few introductory bars (in which a striking pizzicato phrase for orchestral strings may be noted) the soloist having preliminary passages, that may fancifully suggest a search for a theme. Soon the theme is found, a cheerful scherzando melody, with which the solo instrument rushes along, lightly accompanied by the orchestra. While this is in full swing there is a momentary change of mood with a tender cantabile melody given out by the cello, and replied to by the orchestra. The lively first subject is soon resumed, but from time to time the the calm beauty of the new theme interposes itself between brilliant passages constructed by the first.
      The third movement Adagio may perhaps be described as a “song without words.” Although of brief length, it is emotionally the climax of the whole work, and is practically one long lyrical line from beginning to end. Cello and orchestra begin softly, and the music, tranquil at the outset, gradually increases in intensity, with some passages of very expressive quality for the cello, and broadens out until a great climax is reached, after which the calm mood of the opening eventually returns. In the scoring of the Adagio, by the way, a small orchestra, without brass, is used.
      The last movement begins with the recitative of the first movement, which is now given a more heroic character. The fiery principal theme which has a touch of humour is then anounced; the soloist and orchestra then alternate with this for some time, until the second subject enters. This leads to a bravura for cello, with a light orchestral accompaniment, and here we have almost the only concession which the composer (himself a string player) has made to the conventional virtuosity of the instrument. A striking reappearance is made by the first theme, the whole of the orchestral cellos joining the soloist, and a few bars later the double-basses add their weight also. The full orchestra then takes it up to a brilliant climax. The second theme recurs in shortened form followed by a fanciful presentation of the principal subject, by flute, clarinet and bassoon, in octaves, accompanied by pizzicato chords from solo cello, two loud chords for strings breaking in on the somewhate delicate orchestral colouring with startling effect. For a few moments the music becomes tranquil in character, but a dramatic change is brought about by the Coda. The cello gives out a poignant phrase which gradually broadens out into some passages of almost anguished feeling. There is a return to a more restful mood wit a reminiscence of the slow movement, and eventually we hear a repetition of the opening recitative. The movement ends with a final statement of the principal subject, in broad dignified form, over a strongly accented bass, thus finally asserting the nobilmente feeling of the work.

Johannes Brahms (1833 – 1897)     Symphony No. 4 in E minor, Op. 98       Download as a WORD document     

Allegro non troppo    
Andante moderato
Allegro giocoso
Allegro energico e passionato - Più allegro

Johannes Brahms  was a German composer, virtuoso pianist, and conductor of the mid-Romantic period. He adapted the traditional structures and techniques of a wide range of earlier composers, writing  four symphonies, four concertos, a requiem, much chamber music, hundreds of folk-song arrangements and lieder, and many other works for symphony orchestra, piano, organ, and choir. Brahms saw his music become internationally important in his own lifetime. It remains a staple of the concert repertoire, continuing to influence composers into the 21st century.
      Brahms was born in Hamburg, Germany, in 1833. The family then lived in poor apartments and struggled economically. His father, Johann Jakob, played double bass, horn, and flute in the Philharmonisches Staatsorchester and, for enjoyment, played first violin in string quartets. He provided Johannes his first musical training, on violin and cello. From the age of seven he started to study piano with Otto Cossel who complained two years later that Brahms "could be such a good player, but he will not stop his never-ending composing." At the age of ten, Brahms made his debut as a performer and by 1845 he had written a piano sonata, but his parents disapproved of his early efforts as a composer, feeling that he had better career prospects as a performer.
      From 1845 to 1848 Brahms studied composition with Eduard Marxsen who had been a personal acquaintance of Beethoven and Schubert, and who admired the works of Mozart, Haydn, and J. S. Bach. He ensured that Brahms's own compositions were grounded in the tradition of these composers. In 1853 Brahms met  Robert Schumann who, greatly impressed by the 20-year-old's talent, published an article nominating Brahms as one who was "fated to give expression to the times in the highest and most ideal manner". After Schumann's death in 1856 Brahms began to feel deeply for his widow, Clara, but he  reisted their romantic association, choosing the life of a bachelor in an apparent effort to focus on his composing.
       Based in Hamburg at this time, he gained a position as musician to the tiny court of Detmold, where he spent the winters of 1857 to 1860 and for which he wrote his two Serenades and his first two Piano Quartets. However, The premiere of the First Piano Concerto in Hamburg  with the composer as soloist, was poorly received, Brahms writing that the performance was "a brilliant and decisive – failure,  the hissing being too much of a good thing ..." At this time Brahms, with others, attacked Liszt's followers, the so-called "New German School". They objected to the rejection of traditional musical forms and to the "rank, miserable weeds growing from Liszt-like fantasias". In reply a music journal published a parody which ridiculed Brahms and his associates as backward-looking.

      From 1864 to 1876 Brahms spent many of his summers working in his house on the north side of Vienna. His circle included the critic and opponent of the 'New German School', Eduard Hanslick, who was to become among his greatest advocates. He also met Richard Wagner for the first time, the meeting being cordial, although in later years Wagner was to make insulting comments about Brahms's music. Brahms however retained a keen interest in Wagner's music. In February 1865 Brahms's mother died, and he composed his widely acclaimed A German Requiem, marking effectively his arrival on the world stage. He also achieved success with his Hungarian Dances, his collections of lieder, his first two string quartets, the third piano quartet and most notably his First Symphony.

      Begun in the early 1860s, Brahms's First Symphony eventually appeared in 1876, to a warm recepton. He was typically self-deprecating about it, writing that it was "long and difficult", "not exactly charming" and, significantly, "long and in C Minor", significantly the key of Beethoven’s great Fifth Symphony. There followed a succession of well-received works: the Second Symphony, the Violin Concerto, the Tragic Overture and the Academic Festival Overture written for the occasion of the award of a degree by Breslau University. The commendation of Brahms by Breslau University as "the leader in the art of serious music in Germany today" led to a bilious comment from Wagner: "I know of some famous composers who in their concert masquerades don the disguise of a street-singer one day, the hallelujah periwig of Handel the next, the dress of a Jewish Czardas-fiddler another time, and then again the guise of a highly respectable symphony dressed up as Number Ten" (mocking Brahms's First Symphony as a tenth symphony of Beethoven). In spite of this Brahms had now become recognised as a major figure in the world of music. In 1882 he completed his Piano Concerto No. 2, premiered by Hans von Bülow who wrote, ranking Brahms as one of the 'Three Bs',  "You know what I think of Brahms: after Bach and Beethoven the greatest, the most sublime of all composers."

     The following years saw the premieres of his Third and Fourth Symphonies. Richard Strauss who had been uncertain about Brahms's music, was very enthusiastic about the Fourth: "a giant work, great in concept and invention". The critic Hanslick said that listening to its first movement (played by two pianists) was like “being given a beating by two incredibly intelligent people.” After1890 he more or less gave up composing. His last public appearance was at a performance of his Fourth Symphony; there was an ovation after each of the four movements. He died in 1897, in Vienna at the age of 63.

      Brahms said that his Fourth Symphony was his own favourite orchestral work. Most musicians agree that it is a central, titanic work in the classical repertoire. It is performed hundreds of times each year across the world. The symphony is scored for standard-sized orchestra, with the addition of a triangle; it is his only symphony to use trombones.

       The first movement (Allegro non troppo) is the most tuneful of Brahms's symphonic first-movements, although containing episodes of melancholy and of intense dramatic conflict. There is no Introduction to this movement and the first subject is heard right away -  a motif of just two notes rising and falling, played by the violins, with woodwind responses. This continues for nineteen bars and is then beautifully developed by the woodwind section. They soon introduce a transitional theme, emphasizing a dotted rhythm in anticipation of this same pattern in the second theme; this has  two parts, the first played by cellos and horns, the second by the woodwind. A soaring interlude for strings comes just before the start of a lengthy development of both subjects. After a recapitulation the emotional build-up seems unstoppable, leading to an abrupt and awesome conclusion.

     In the Andante moderato, the mood relaxes slightly. The opening is a gentle but forceful passage for horns and woodwind, soon to be joined by pizzicato strings. After a temporary change in mood the cellos provide one of Brahms's most beautiful melodies. This is followed by an outburst of fast triplets, before calm is restored. The horns finally return to close the movement as they opened it.

       The following Allegro giocoso is the only movement found in the Brahms symphonies to have a genuine joking scherzo character, a small feature being Brahms's addition to the orchestra of a piccolo and triangle. Given what comes before and after it, the scherzo perhaps seems a little out of place. The full orchestra erupts with the first lively subject, while the lighthearted second, is heard in the violins; eventually the final racing moments are more manic than light hearted.

      The finale Allegro energico e passionato - Più allegro has been considered the highest culmination of Brahms’s talent, his deepest emotional struggle, and ultimately his darkest view of the world. Unlike all of his previous symphonies, the final movement ends in a minor key and, incidentally, this is the only movement of the symphony to use trombones. The finale is cast in the form of a passacaglia or variations on a ground bass, the passacaglia theme being taken from from Bach's Church Cantata No. 150. No composer before had thought of concluding a symphony in this way, demonstrating Brahms’ creative spirit, but puzzling its early audiences. Within the variations on the eight-bar theme, Brahms makes the music flow with scarcely any interruption, the cumulative effect being one of overwhelming grandeur. The main eight bar passacaglia theme, basis of the thirty variations in this movement, is loudly proclaimed by the brass. Then the variations express every possibility of orchestral colour and mood, with the Più allegro finale, according to Leonard Bernstein, ending in  “rage and fury, with no final repose, no glorious sunburst”  but Brahms’s “brief but shattering last symphonic statement - a clenched fist raised in hot defiance to the heavens”.

Sir Arnold Edward Trevor Bax was an English composer, poet, and author. His prolific output includes songs, choral music, chamber pieces, and solo piano works, but he is best known for his orchestral music. In addition to a series of symphonic poems, he wrote seven symphonies and was for a time widely regarded as the leading British symphonist.

Bax was born in 1883 to a prosperous Victorian family in the London suburb of Streatham, the family later moving to a mansion in Hampstead. His father, Alfred Bax was a barrister but, having a private income he did not practise. During the 1890s Bax attended the Hampstead Conservatoire which, according to Bax, was run  by Cecil Sharp "with considerable personal pomp". At this time an enthusiasm for folk music and folk dancing was widespread among British composers, including Cecil Sharp, Parry, Stanford, Vaughan Williams and Holst. Sullivan and Elgar, however, stood aloof as did Bax, who spread about the saying that "You should make a point of trying every experience once, excepting incest and folk-dancing."

From 1900 to 1905 Bax attended the Royal Academy of Music, studying composition with Frederick Corder who was a devotee of the works of Wagner, whose music was Bax's principal inspiration in his early years. He later observed, "For a dozen years of my youth I wallowed in Wagner's music until I became aware of Richard Strauss".  Bax privately studied the works of Debussy, whose music, like that of Strauss, was frowned on by the conservative academy. Bax won a Scholarship for composition and other important prizes, and was known for his exceptional ability to read complex modern scores on sight. His keyboard technique was formidable, but he had no desire for a career as a soloist, and he had private means that made him free to pursue his musical career as he chose.

After leaving the Academy Bax visited Dresden, where he first heard the music of Mahler, which he found "eccentric, long-winded, muddle-headed, and yet always interesting". Musically, Bax later veered away from the influence of Wagner and Strauss, and deliberately adopted what he thought of as a Celtic idiom. His private means enabled him to travel to Russia in 1910, absorbing Russian musical influences that inspired material for the First Piano Sonata, some piano pieces, and the First Violin Sonata. In this period he was described as "a musical magpie, celebrating his latest discoveries in new compositions.

In 1911 Bax married Luise, a singer and moved to Ireland. He became known in Dublin literary circles under the pseudonym "Dermot O'Byrne", publishing stories, verses and a play. Some of his writings were regarded as subversively sympathetic to the Irish republican cause, and the government censor prohibited their publication.

At the beginning of the war Bax returned to England but a heart complaint, made him unfit for military service. So at a time when fellow composers Vaughan Williams, Arthur Bliss, George Butterworth and Ivor Gurney were serving overseas, Bax was able to produce a large body of music, finding "his technical and artistic maturity" in his early thirties. Among his better-known works from the period are the orchestral tone poems November Woods (1916) and Tintagel (1917–19).

In the post-war years Bax started writing symphonies  and was recognised for the first time as an important figure in British music. Few English composers had so far written symphonies, the best known being Elgar and Vaughan Williams. During the 1920s and into the 1930s Bax was seen by many as the leading British symphonist. Bax's First Symphony was written in 1921–22, and was a great success, being a box-office attraction at the Proms for several years. It  has been said that Bax was at his musical peak for a fairly short time, and his reputation was overtaken by those of Vaughan Williams and William Walton. His Third Symphony was completed in 1929 and remained for some time among the composer's most popular works.

In the 1930s, Bax composed the last four of his seven symphonies, other works from the decade including the popular Overture to a Picaresque Comedy (1930) and several works for chamber groups.  The Cello Concerto (1932) was commissioned by, and dedicated to, Gaspar Cassadó, who quickly dropped it from his repertoire. Although Beatrice Harrison championed the concerto, Bax said "The fact that nobody has ever taken up this work has been one of the major disappointments of my musical life".

Bax was knighted in 1937; he had neither expected nor sought the honour, and was more surprised than delighted to receive it. As the decade progressed, he became less prolific, commenting that he wanted to "retire, like a grocer". Among his compositions from the period was the Violin Concerto (1938), composed with the violin virtuoso Jascha Heifetz in mind. Heifetz never played it. In 1941, to his surprise, Bax was appointed as  Master of the King's Music. Despite his knighthood, he was not an Establishment figure, expressing a disinclination to "shuffle around in knee-breeches". Nonetheless, he wrote a handful of occasional pieces for royal events including a march for the Coronation in 1953. After the Second World War began, Bax abandoned composition and completed a book of memoirs about his early years, Farewell, My Youth.  After the war, however, he wrote music for David Lean's Oliver Twist (1948) and a a few other short pieces.

In his last years, Bax enjoyed a contented retirement. Walton commented, "an important cricket match at Lord's would bring him hurrying up to town from his pub at Storrington with much greater excitement than a performance of one of his works". Bax wrote in 1952, "I doubt whether I shall write anything else … I have said all I have to say and it is of no use to repeat myself." Celebrations were planned to celebrate Bax's seventieth birthday in November 1953 but the celebrations became memorials: while visiting Cork in October 1953 Bax died suddenly of heart failure aged 69. He was interred in St. Finbarr's Cemetery, Cork.

In the decade after his death Tintagel was the only work by which Bax was known to the public.
The work was inspired by a visit Bax made to Tintagel Castle in Cornwall in 1917, and  draws on the history and mythology associated with the castle. Bax stated that he aimed to offer an impression of the cliffs and castle of Tintagel and the sea "on a sunny but not windless summer day", and to reflect some of the literary and traditional associations of the scene. It was premiered in 1921 by the Bournemouth Municipal Orchestra conducted by Dan Godfrey, the principal cellist, Ernst Slaney, playing a cello that is being played in our performance tonight. This summary is taken mainly from Bax's published analysis:

The music opens, after a few introductory bars, with a theme given out on the brass which may be taken as representing the ruined castle. This subject is worked to a broad climax, and is followed by a long melody for strings which may suggest the serene and almost limitless spaces of ocean. After a while a more restless mood begins to assert itself as though the sea were rising. At this point, Bax writes, that he sought to convey a sense of stress and to conjure up the dramatic legends of King Arthur and King Mark. "A wailing chromatic figure is heard and gradually dominates the music". At this point Bax quotes a theme from Wagner's Tristan and Isolde (a work set in and off the coast of Cornwall). There follows what Bax called "a great climax suddenly subsiding", which is followed by a passage intended to convey the impression of "immense waves slowly gathering force until they smash themselves upon the impregnable rocks". The theme of the sea is repeated, and the work ends with the return of the opening image of "the castle still proudly surviving the sun and wind of centuries".

Seascape. Allegro ben moderato

Sea-foam. Allegro vivo

Moonlight. Adagio non troppo

Storm. Allegro energico – Allegro moderato e largamente

Frank Bridge was an English composer, viola player and conductor. He was born in Brighton, the ninth child of William Bridge, a violin teacher and variety theatre conductor and his second wife, Elizabeth. His father was insistent that his son spend regular long hours practising the violin; when Frank became sufficiently skilled, he would play with his father's pit bands, conducting in his absence, arranging music and standing in for other instrumentalists. He later switched from violin to viola. He studied at the Royal College of Music in London from 1899 to 1903 under Charles Villiers Stanford, playing in a number of string quartets. He also conducted, sometimes deputising for Henry Wood, before devoting himself to composition.

Bridge had strong pacifist convictions and was deeply disturbed by the First World War. During the war and immediately afterwards, he wrote a number of pastoral and elegiac pieces; principal among these is the Lament for string orchestra, written as a memorial to the sinking of the RMS Lusitania; this was premiered at the 1915 BBC Proms, conducted by the composer, the rest of the concert being Henry Wood.

Bridge privately taught Benjamin Britten, who later championed his teacher's music and paid homage to him in the Variations on a Theme of Frank Bridge (1937) in which Britten portrays affectionately the different aspects of his revered mentor's character. However, Bridge was not widely active as a teacher of composition, and his teaching style was unconventional—he appears to have focused on aesthetic issues, idiomatic writing, and clarity, rather than technical training. Britten spoke very highly of his teaching, saying famously in 1963 that he still felt he had not "yet come up to the technical standards" that Bridge had set him. When Britten left for the United States with Peter Pears in 1939, Bridge handed Britten his Giussani viola and wished him 'bon voyage and bon retour'; but Bridge died in 1941 without ever seeing Britten again.

Frank Bridge is in danger of being remembered only for his important role as teacher of Benjamin Britten and as the source of the theme for Britten's brilliant Variations. However he was an important composer in his own right and, like his great pupil, a distinguished conductor too. He wrote many songs, four string quartets, works for piano, alone and with strings, orchestral pieces including tone poems;  while as conductor he appeared in both the concert hall and opera house, including Covent Garden. As a composer Bridge's music moved through several styles. He was taught by Stanford who passed on the Germanic influences that pervaded Bridge's romantic style down to the composition of The Sea in 1910/11. After the Great war, he wrote a series of works influenced by Berg and Bartók that alienated the conservative concert-going public. Bridge was frustrated that these later works were largely ignored while his earlier "Edwardian" works continued to receive attention.

The Sea is an orchestral suite in four movements, also described as a symphonic tone poem. Bridge completed the work while staying at the Sussex coastal town of Eastbourne where Claude Debussy had finished his own musical evocation of the sea, the symphonic poem La mer in 1905. The works differ in that Debussy is more driven by motifs whereas Bridge uses and develops themes,. 

The first section, Seascape ( Allegro ben moderato), paints the sea on a summer morning, warm breezes playing over the surface conveying something of its immensity, grandeur and movement. The harmonic structure is deliberately vague. Fragments of themes float through the orchestra, the image of waves swelling and receding until they come together in a broad melody swelling to a climax.

In Sea-foam (Allegro vivo), a scherzo, the wind is up, playful but not stormy, and the sea has become more choppy; scudding foam is visible from the shore and breakers are dashing against low-lying rocks or spending themselves as sizzling foam on the sea shore. 

Moonlight (Adagio non troppo) paints a calm sea at night as a song without words, often resembling a lullaby. A flute melody casts an air of mystery over the sea while the harp gives an impression of the water glistening in the cold moonlight. Halfway through, a brief menacing cloud darkens the scene but the moon soon reappears, leaving the sea shimmering in full moonlight.

Finally, Storm (Allegro energico – Allegro moderato e largamente) plunges us directly into a  terrifying tempest, one of the fiercer storms in music. The wind howls and the peaceful swell is transformed into mountainous seas that crash against cliffs and rocks. At its climax the main theme of the first movement is sounded on the brass. Eventually the storm is spent, and after a short pause the expansive gentler mood of the opening Seascape is restored, Bridge writing that "this may be regarded as the sea-lover's dedication to the sea."

832 words

Four sea interludes from Peter Grimes, Op. 33a

Dawn - Lento e tranquillo

Sunday morning - Allegro spiritoso

Moonlight - Andante comodo e rubato

Storm - Presto con fuoco

Benamin Britten was an English composer, conductor, and pianist. He was a central figure of 20th-century British music, with a range of works including opera, other vocal music, orchestral and chamber pieces. His best-known works include the opera Peter Grimes (1945), the War Requiem (1962) and the orchestral showpiece The Young Person's Guide to the Orchestra (1945). Recurring themes in his operas include the struggle of an outsider against a hostile society and the corruption of innocence.

Britten was born in the fishing port of Lowestoft in Suffolk, on the feast day of Saint Cecilia, the patron saint of music. He was the youngest of four children of Robert Britten and his wife Edith Rhoda.  Robert  practised as dentist, successfully but without pleasure. He was a loving but somewhat stern and remote parent. To his mother's great delight he was an outstandingly musical child, and she gave him his first lessons in piano and notation. He made his first attempts at composition when he was five. He started serious piano lessons when he was seven years old, and three years later began to play the viola. He was one of the last composers brought up on exclusively live music: his father refused to have a gramophone or, later, a radio in the house.

When he was eight  Britten started to attend South Lodge, Lowestoft School, as a day boy, where he was a star maths pupil. He was outraged at the severe corporal punishments frequently handed out, and later he said that his lifelong pacifism probably had its roots in his reaction to this. Britten continued to have private piano and viola lessons and he composed prolifically; his Simple Symphony, based on these juvenilia, was recorded in 1956,

Audrey Alston, his viola teacher, encouraged Britten to go to symphony concerts in Norwich. At one of these he was impressed and excited by Frank Bridge's orchestral poem The Sea (which we are performing this evening). Audrey Alston was a friend of Bridge and she later brought her almost 14-year-old pupil to meet him. Bridge was impressed and invited him to come to London to take lessons from him.  

Britten attended, as a boarder at Gresham's School, in Holt, Norfolk. Although unhappy there, he remained there for two years and in 1930 he won a composition scholarship at the Royal College of Music (RCM) in London; two of his examiners were the composers John Ireland and Ralph Vaughan Williams. Britten was at the RCM from 1930 to 1933, winning various important prizes. He sudied composition with John Ireland who he later praised for "nursing me very gently through a very, very difficult musical adolescence." He continued to study privately with Bridge and also used his time in London to attend concerts and become better acquainted with the music of Stravinsky, Shostakovich and, most particularly, Mahler.

The first of Britten's compositions to attract wide attention were composed while at the RCM: the Sinfonietta, Op. 1 (1932), the Oboe quartet Phantasy, Op. 2, dedicated to Léon Goossens who played the first performance in a BBC broadcast in 1933, and A Boy Was Born, written in 1933 for the BBC Singers. In 1935  Britten became a member of the GPO's film unit with W. H. Auden. Together they worked on the documentary films Coal Face and Night Mail. They also collaborated on the song cycle Our Hunting Fathers (1936), radical both in politics and musical treatment, and subsequently other works including Hymn to St Cecilia. In 1937 Britten met the tenor Peter Pears who quickly became his musical inspiration and close friend. The best known of his compositions from this period is probably Variations on a Theme of Frank Bridge for string orchestra, the first of Britten's works to become a popular classic.

In April 1939 Britten and Pears sailed to North America. From this time until Britten's death, Britten and Pears were partners in both their professional and personal lives. When the Second World War began, they turned for advice to the British embassy in Washington and were told that they should remain in the US as artistic ambassadors. Already a friend of the composer Aaron Copland, Britten's music was greatly influenced by him. His orchestral works from this period include the Violin Concerto, Sinfonia da Requiem, An American Overture and Paul Bunyan, an operetta to a libretto by Auden. In 1942 Britten read the work of the poet George Crabbe for the first time; The Borough, set on the Suffolk coast close to Britten's homeland, awakened in him such longings for England that he knew he must return. He also knew that he must write an opera based on Crabbe's poem about the fisherman Peter Grimes. Britten and Pears returned to England in 1942.  

In 1944 Pears joined Sadler's Wells Opera Company, whose artistic director, the singer Joan Cross, announced her intention to re-open the company's home base in London with Britten's opera, casting herself and Pears in the leading roles. Despite constant objections from members of the company, who disliked either the work or the composer or both, Peter Grimes opened in June 1945, conducted by Reginald Goodall. One week later Britten himself conducted the first performance of the Four Sea Interludes with the LPO at the Royal Albert Hall. The opera was hailed by public and critics alike; it was said to be "the first genuinely successful British opera since Purcell." However, dismayed by the in-fighting among the company, Cross, Britten and Pears severed their ties with Sadler's Wells going on to found what was to become the English Opera Group.

A month after the opening of Peter Grimes, Britten and Yehudi Menuhin went to Germany to give recitals to concentration camp survivors. What they saw at Belsen so shocked Britten he said  it had coloured everything he had written since. Britten recovered his joie de vivre for The Young Person's Guide to the Orchestra (1945), his most often played and popular work.

About this time Pears came up with the idea of mounting a festival in the small Suffolk seaside town of Aldeburgh, where he lived with Pears for the rest of his life. The Aldeburgh Festival was launched in June 1948; Albert Herring played at the Jubilee Hall, and Britten's new cantata Saint Nicolas, was presented in the parish church. The festival was an immediate success and became an annual event that has continued into the 21st century. New works by Britten featured in almost every festival until his death in 1976, including the premieres of his operas A Midsummer Night's Dream in 1960 and Death in Venice in 1973.

Throughout the 1950s Britten continued to write operas. Billy Budd was well received but Gloriana (1953), written to mark the coronation of Elizabeth II, had a cool reception, not overcoming what some called the "ingrained philistinism of the ruling classes". However, the Turn of the Screw the following year was an unqualified success. An increasingly important influence on Britten was the music of the East, seen and heard in The Prince of the Pagodas (1957), Curlew River (1964), The Burning Fiery Furnace (1966) and The Prodigal Son (1968).

To accomodate the increasingly successful festival a Victorian maltings building was converted into a 830-seat concert hall and opera house, in the village of Snape, opened by the Queen in 1967. It was here that Britten conducted the first performance outside Russia of Shostakovich's Fourteenth Symphony in 1970. Shostakovich, a friend since 1960, dedicated the symphony to Britten. A Russian musicians who was close to Britten was the cellist Mstislav Rostropovich for whom Britten composed  his Cello Suites, Cello Symphony and Cello Sonata which were premiered by Rostropovich at the Aldeburgh Festival.

One of the best known of Britten's works, his masterpiece, the War Requiem (1962), commemorated the dead of both World Wars in a large-scale score for soloists, chorus, chamber ensemble and orchestra. His text interspersed the traditional Requiem Mass with poems by Wilfred Owen. Shostakovich told Rostropovich that he believed it to be "the greatest work of the twentieth century".

In 1970 Britten set out to compose what became his last opera, Death in Venice, based on Thomas Mann's novella Death in Venice, a subject close to his heart that he had been considering for some time. After the completion of the opera Britten was operated on to replace a failing heart valve. The replacement was successful, but he suffered a slight stroke, affecting his right hand, bringing his career as a performer to an end. In June 1976, the last year of his life, Britten accepted a life peerage – the first composer so honoured – becoming Baron Britten, of Aldeburgh in the County of Suffolk. Britten died in December 1976. His funeral service was held at Aldeburgh Parish Church and he was buried in its churchyard. A memorial service was later held at Westminster Abbey.

Britten's great opera tells of the fisherman Peter Grimes, turned into a villain by the misunderstandings of his neighbours, and the deaths of two of his apprentices through ill-treatment. In this theme Britten saw man's struggle against a narrow society and a conflict between the individual and the unreasoning masses. Britten emphasizes Grimes' innocence, and his helplessness against the fury of the village folk and inevitable disaster. Although he is declared innocent, suspicions still remain in the minds of his neighbours and when the mob descends upon his hut he flees to sea in his boat and never returns. The Sea Interludes introduce some of the acts.

Dawn. This paints a picture of the North Sea and the grey sky seen from the little fishing village. Violins and flutes suggest the bleak early morning scene with cries of gulls, while harp and clarinet arpeggios picture the wind rippling the surface of the water, and a quiet, idyllic moment brings the rise of the sun over the water.

Sunday morning. This is a depiction of the quiet village street as church bells ring, depicted by the tolling of four horns. High octaves from the woodwind suggest the glitter of sunlight on the waves.

Moonlight. Calm summer moonlight and stillness over the sea and the Borough is an impressionistic nocturnal portrait punctuated by the sounds of revellers at a barn dance in the village hall.

Storm. The violence of the storm emphasises the isolation and vulnerability of the small community. Syncopated ferocity marks the last of these four interludes as the storm rises. Snarling trumpets and trombones, and angry horns describe the violent sea, but there is an original passage when stillness reigns in the middle of the tempest and the whole orchestra plays an agitated pianissimo ostinato, before the elements rage once more.

John Traill         A Southampton Overture                                                               Download as WORD document

It was a pleasure to compose this overture for the City of Southampton Orchestra in 2021, enabled by the legacy of Zena Howell (leader, 1986-2004). The commission celebrated the orchestras 50th anniversary and involved consultation with players about what they felt the orchestra, Southampton, and surrounding areas, meant to them.  Following several zoom sessions during the 2021 lockdowns, I had plenty of suggestions to work with.

The opening melody is made up from the first half of the notes that result from putting the words ‘City of Southampton’ through a musical cryptogram.  There is an indulgent complete statement of this, approximately halfway through the overture, that is followed by a musical cryptogram of the word ‘Orchestra’ (played three times, by the strings, wind, and brass, respectively).

Following this brief introduction, an animated passage represents the bubbling energy of the city. There is a recurring musical trigger here, involving a descending strain that is interrupted by three short blasts (as if going astern!) and subsequently then played in reverse (ascending). Brief arpeggiaic references to the opening contour of ‘When the Saints Go Marching In’ are interspersed within this, layered on top of one another to create a quartal soundworld. 

These transitional gestures eventually make way for a less active passage that might represent the stillness of Southampton Water at night, with the backdrop of large vessels inferred by short passages of brass chords.  The violin solo, here, is comprised of the melody notes of ‘When the Saints…’, although there is no attempt to draw any literal rhythmical reference.

An indulgent reprise of the opening melody precedes a bubbling transition, by way of the ‘Orchestra’ motif described earlier, back into the hustle and bustle of the city. This is rudely interrupted by a low and obtrusive chord, which is the literal sound of the three pitches of the Titanic’s whistles when heard simultaneously. The stillness of the water returns with a now extended version of the brass chorale, transitioning to the final section that begins with a piccolo playing a quasi sea shanty, derived from an embellished form of the hymn tune, by W. Croft,  ‘O God, Our Help in Ages Past’. Known as the “St Anne” hymn tune, the words were written by Isaac Watts, son of Sarah Taunton and cousin to Richard, a Southampton born composer (b.1674). The tune itself, a setting of the 90^th Psalm, can be heard on the Guildhall bells daily. 

The final section of the overture begins with a statement of the quasi shanty in low strings and wind, now revealed as the subject of a rhapsodic fugal passage that ultimately builds to a climactic peak. The combinations of sounds, all layered upon one-another, features bell-like effects in the winds (again using the hymn tune). When combined with the contrapuntal material that has accrued and overlaid by an augmented statement of ‘When the Saints’ (first played by the trumpet), the commotion is an impression of the Southampton Docks, and the merging of the many strands of life in the City.

A final blast, of a bespoke CSO ships horn, interrupts the chaos, and the final phrase ends with an exuberant statement of the closing phrases of ‘When the Saints…’ (with the CSOs horn thrown in for good measure!).

High Wind (Allegro energetico)
Sailing Song (Allegretto)
Channel Sirens (Lento misterioso)
Breakers (Presto)
Calm Sea in Summer (Andante tranquillo)

Grace Williams is generally regarded as Wales's most notable female composer. She was born in Barry, Glamorgan, the daughter of William and Rose Williams. Both of her parents were teachers and her father was also a noted musician. She learned piano and violin as a girl, playing piano trios with her father and her brother Glyn, and accompanying her father's choir. At the County School she began to develop her interest in composition under the guidance of the music teacher Miss Rhyda Jones, and in 1923 she won the Morfydd Owen scholarship to the University College of South Wales and Monmouthshire (now Cardiff University), where she studied under Professor David Evans, although she found the musical tutors were “restrictive” in their attitudes. In 1926 she began studying at the Royal College of Music, London, where she was taught by Gordon Jacob and Ralph Vaughan Williams. Other notable female composers studying with Vaughan Williams at the RCM were Elizabeth Maconchy, Dorothy Gow and Imogen Holst, the daughter of Gustav Holst. In 1930 she was awarded a travelling scholarship, and chose to study with Egon Wellesz in Vienna.

From 1932 Williams taught in London, at Camden Girls' School and the Southlands College of Education. During the Second World War, the students were evacuated to Grantham in Lincolnshire, where she composed some of her earliest works, including the Sinfonia Concertante for piano and orchestra, and her First Symphony. One of her most popular works, Fantasia on Welsh Nursery Tunes (1940) was written during this period. Sea Sketches for string orchestra, written in 1944 is the first work in her mature style. In 1945, she returned to her home town, remaining there for the rest of her life, dedicating herself more or less full-time to composition. In 1949, she became the first British woman to score a feature film, with Blue Scar. Williams' most enduringly popular work is Penillion, written for the National Youth Orchestra of Wales in 1955. In 1960–61 she wrote her only opera, The Parlour, which was not performed until 1966. In 1967, she turned down an offer of the OBE for her services to music.

Despite the tradition of choral music in Wales, Williams' portfolio of compositions were largely orchestral or instrumental pieces including her Trumpet Concerto of 1963 and Ballads for Orchestra (1968) written for the National Eisteddfod, held that year in her home town. Outstanding amongst her vocal works are her setting of the Latin hymn, Ave Maris Stella, for unaccompanied voices (1973), and Six Poems by Gerard Manley Hopkins, for contralto and string sextet (1958). Welsh-language settings include Saunders Lewis's carol Rhosyn Duw, for voices, piano and viola (1955), which she later incorporated into her large-scale choral work, Missa Cambrensis (1971). Her last completed works (1975) were settings of Kipling and Beddoes for the unusual combination of voices, harp and two horns.