Richard Tognetti & Polina Leschenko In Recital

Richard Tognetti AO Artistic Director Richard Evans Managing Director Opera Quays, 2 East Circular Quay Sydney NSW 2000 PO Box R21 Royal Exchange NSW 1225 Administration 02 8274 3800 (Mon–Fri, 9am–5pm) Email aco@aco.com.au Web aco.com.au /AustralianChamber Orchestra

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PROGRAM Richard Tognetti Violin Polina Leschenko Piano ARVO PÄRT

FRATRES FOR VIOLIN AND PIANO

BEETHOVEN

VIOLIN SONATA NO.5 IN F MAJOR, OP.24 ‘SPRING’

I. Allegro II. Adagio molto espressivo III. Scherzo (Allegro molto) IV. Rondo (Allegro ma non troppo)

INTERVAL

We are delighted to welcome back to Australia the brilliant, and vivacious Russian pianist Polina Leschenko for two very special performances with our Artistic Director, Richard Tognetti.

Later this year in November, Richard becomes the first Artist in Residence at the Barbican Centre’s Milton Court Concert Hall in London. As part of his residency he will perform this recital with Polina, as well as work with students from the Guildhall School of Music to present an experimental electronic music collaboration. The residency will conclude with performances from the full ACO in March 2017.

Polina comes from an impeccable music background – both of her parents were professional musicians – and made her debut with the Leningrad Symphony Orchestra when she was just eight years old. A protégée of the famed Argentinian pianist, Martha Argerich, Polina travels the world performing in celebrated halls including Carnegie Hall, Wigmore Hall, Amsterdam’s Concertgebouw, the Konzerthaus in Vienna.

Following their last collaboration in 2012 (where Polina performed Chopin, Górecki and Mendelssohn with the ACO) the works these two exceptional performers have chosen to perform reflect their interest in both the classical canon and contemporary repertoire, including the late Peter Sculthorpe’s evocative Irkanda I.

SCULTHORPE

IRKANDA I

BRAHMS

VIOLIN SONATA NO.3 IN D MINOR, OP.108

I. Allegro II. Adagio III. Un poco presto e con sentimento IV. Presto agitato

Approximate durations (minutes) 11 – 24 – INTERVAL – 10 – 21 This concert will last approximately one and a half hours, including a 20-minute interval.

SYDNEY City Recital Hall Monday 12 September, 7pm

CANBERRA Llewellyn Hall Tuesday 13 September, 8pm

Tickets are selling fast for our 2017 National Subscription Season. If you haven’t already received your brochure in the mail, please call and request one, or visit our website.

I hope you enjoy tonight’s very special recital.

Richard Evans

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ABOUT THE MUSIC ARVO PÄRT Born Paide 1935.

engineer for Estonian Radio, a role which saw him not only exposed to the widest possible variety of musical genres, but which keenly attuned his ears to the nuances of music as ‘sound’. His development of a musical style now known as tintinnabuli, in which melodies move step by step over an arpeggio, as if in imitation of ringing bells, typifies the way in which his music combines expressiveness with a glistening surface, hypnotic and compelling, and used not just in Fratres but also in his other ‘hit’ work Spiegel im Spiegel.

FRATRES FOR VIOLIN AND PIANO Composed 1977/80.

There can be few composers whose musical origins and influences are as diverse as those of the Estonian Arvo Pärt. As a student, Pärt’s teacher Heino Eller was himself a former pupil of Glazunov and the great Russian 19thcentury masters. Pärt began his career as a drummer in the Soviet military, before discovering the great Russian masters Shostakovich and Prokofiev, and then later embarking on experiments in serialism. But none of that left a longlasting influence on his music.

Arvo Pärt

Not that you hear it so prominently in the violin and piano version of Fratres, although it’s undoubtedly there. Rather, the work emerges as a series of variations separated by contemplative interludes. But always there is a sense of the silence that attends upon the dying of a note. As Pärt himself has said, ‘My music was always written after I had long been silent in the most literal sense of the word. When I speak of silence, I mean the “nothingness” out of which God created the world. That is why, ideally, musical silence is sacred.’

And perhaps it’s that connection with, and striving toward pure silence that has made Pärt such a cult figure, and Fratres such a deeply communicative work, in our ever so-noisy, frantic and obsessively-material modern world.

Instead, as he entered his maturity as a composer, Pärt began to find inspiration in more obscure, more distant musical traditions – in Gregorian chant, medieval and Renaissance composers, the ancient Dutch school and Josquin, and perhaps most dangerously for a composer brought up in a Soviet state, in music deriving from religious exaltation. A whole new genre, sometimes labelled ‘holy minimalism’, began to emerge around him and other composers like John Tavener and Henryk Górecki, while Pärt himself, with works like Spiegel im Spiegel and Cantus in Memoriam Benjamin Britten began to put Estonia on the map as an important modern musical nation – a status it still maintains today despite Pärt himself leaving his home country for Vienna in 1980.

LUDWIG VAN BEETHOVEN Born Bonn 1770. Died Vienna 1827.

VIOLIN SONATA NO.5 IN F MAJOR, OP.24 ‘SPRING’ Composed 1800–01 I. Allegro II. Adagio molto espressivo III. Scherzo (Allegro molto) IV. Rondo (Allegro ma non troppo)

Pärt’s Fratres is not so much a composition as a musical franchise, a catch-all title that has been applied to a work originally composed in 1977 for string quintet, wind quintet and percussion but which has subsequently been re-composed for various ensembles ranging from string quartet to solo violin, strings and percussion, cello and piano, 12 cellos, an early-music ensemble, and this celebrated version for violin and piano (1980).

Essentially, the main thematic material of Fratres is a hymn played over a drone, growing ever richer in texture and developing into a state of profound peace and beauty. At once both simple and intricate, it has both the character of an internal meditation yet at the same time, almost miraculously, it possesses an innate popular appeal. An explanation for the apparent contradiction may lie in Pärt’s early career, where for a decade or more he worked as a sound

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Ludwig van Beethoven

The fifth of Beethoven’s sonatas for piano and violin was published in 1801, the same year as its predecessor, Op.23 in A minor. Whereas that work was troubled, agitated and difficult, the F major sonata is sunny, equable, and fresh, so that the nickname someone has given it seems less objectionable than some other such arbitrary titles. Among near-contemporary works of the composer, one somewhat similar in mood is the Op.28 piano sonata, the Pastoral, while the key of F major was later to seem suitable to Beethoven for the development of similar sentiments on a far greater scale than in the Sixth Symphony.

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PETER SCULTHORPE Born Launceston 1929. Died Sydney 2014.

This is not to say that the Spring Sonata is a small-scale work. Not only is it the first of its genre in Beethoven to have four movements, but each except the scherzo is developed with considerable breadth. Breadth and flowing lyricism immediately strike the attention in the memorable first subject. In fact, as with other memorable themes of his, it took Beethoven some effort to fashion its final form, which combines spontaneity and inevitability. The character of the movement is thus set from the outset – though there is some agitation and drama later, particularly when the recapitulation turns towards the second subject group. The basic contrast is between the essentially melodic first idea and a more broken up, dramatically exchanged second subject. The main theme returns in the coda where its first measure is developed, setting its seal even more firmly on the movement.

The slow movement, in B-flat, is again distinguished by breadth of phrase and warm feeling, while the mood is more serious. Exposition is exceptionally closely shared by the instruments, each doing what it can best; the violin detaching itself to present the first theme cantabile, the piano heightening the intensity by varying it with repeated notes. In concluding the dialogue with trills on both instruments Beethoven provides an early example of his ability to raise a decorative device to an expressive function.

Breathtaking concision marks the scherzo which abruptly contrasts a syncopated exchange (the violin follows the piano a beat behind) with a trio in rapidly running notes. This prepares the listener by way of contrast for a return in the last movement to the lyricism and flow of the first. Formally this is a rondo, and because of the subtlety with which the refrain is altered and variously shaped, the effect is of almost uninterrupted development and variation. The contrast comes when, in the second couplet of the rondo, the music shifts into D minor. When the refrain returns some remote keys are explored before the coda uses a little virtuosity to provide an effective concert conclusion.

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IRKANDA I Composed 1955 Peter Sculthorpe was Australia’s foremost classical composer, and one of the country’s most original and distinctive creative voices in any medium.

Born and schooled in Launceston, he undertook university studies at Melbourne University, under Bernard Heinze, and at Oxford, where in 1958 his tutor, composer Edmund Rubbra, prophetically dubbed him ‘Australia’s Bartók’. Another English mentor, musicologist Wilfred Mellers, saw that it was paradoxically at Oxford that the homesick young Antipodean ‘discovered his true identity, becoming the first composer to make a music distinctively Australian’.

Peter Sculthorpe

Indeed, Sculthorpe established the connection between music and his native country as one of his artistic goals. Many of his works were given Aboriginal titles or were nourished by Aboriginal legends.

This is particularly true of many of his early works, including Irkanda I, dating from 1955. The title means a distant and secluded place. It was the first part of a larger cycle written over a period of six years that was dedicated to Wilfred Lehmann, who first performed it at the Lisbon Mozart Festival in 1956.

Irkanda I reflects many of Sculthorpe’s characteristics: the formal conception of the work is that of a free fantasy; an elegiac tone prevails; the melodic lines are very expansive; and the numerous sliding notes recall birdsong, creating a close connection with nature.

Peter Sculthorpe wrote of the work: Irkanda I is in one movement, and in it, long, melodic lines and bird-sounds are contrasted with brittle, rhythmic sections. The opening melody follows a three hundred and sixty degree contour of the hills around Canberra, where most of the work was written. It might be added that my use of bird-song stems from suggestions in the writings of Henry Tate.

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JOHANNES BRAHMS Born Hamburg 1833. Died Vienna 1897.

Peter Latham put it. The terrific principal theme is counterbalanced by a more somber little motif of repeated notes. The use of syncopation adds tension.

VIOLIN SONATA NO.3 IN D MINOR, OP.108 Composed 1886-88.

The expansive nobility of the Adagio makes an immediate contrast. It offers good opportunities for the kind of sweet expression for which Brahms’ friend the violinist Joseph Joachim was notes. The Scherzo is remarkable for being in duple rather than triple meter, and also for its rather anxious character.

The sentimentality called for in the movement heading allows the players to indulge themselves in the harmonies. It was apparently Brahms’ friend and correspondent Elisabeth von Herzogenberg who suggested the judicious use of pizzicato.

I. Allegro II. Adagio III. Un poco presto e con sentimento IV. Presto agitato

Johannes Brahms

In the summer of 1886 Brahms rented the top floor of a farmhouse near Hofstetten, on picturesque Lake Thun in Switzerland. (Richard himself was fortunate enough to experience the crystalline beauty of Lake Thun earlier this year, as the Orchestra passed through Thun on their way to performances at the Menuhin Festival in Gstaad.) It seems to have been a peaceful, productive experience for Brahms, and he returned in the following two summers. Works begun in his first visit include the second cello sonata, the Trio in C minor Op.101 and two violin sonatas: Op.100 and the one on this program, Op.108.

His stay in 1887 brought forth the Ziegeunerlieder and the Double Concerto.

The next year unfortunately saw very little new music: Brahms was unsettled and felt the area had become too touristy. The Violin Sonata No.3 begun in 1886 and completed in 1888 is a striking work, on a larger and more passionate scale than its two more intimate companions in the genre. Unlike the other violin sonatas (but rather like the symphonies) it is in four movements not three. There is an interesting rumour that it is meant to be a character study of its dedicatee, the conductor and pianist Hans von Bülow. If so, perhaps in the music we really can glimpse those contemporary descriptions of him and the ‘passionate intellectuality’ of his playing: ‘his restless, brilliant mind and his reckless energy blow like a north wind, brisk and refreshing, through the stagnant complacency of our everyday musical life’.

The final Presto agitato is a bit gypsyish in flavour, with syncoptations emphasizing its rhythmic strength. Some question-and-answer moments between the piano and violin contrast with chorale-like passages that bring to mind Brahms’ final Preludes, and allow the violin space in which to bloom before the tragic climax.

The Sonata’s official premiere was given in Budapest on 22 December 1888.

The pianist was Brahms, and his partner was Jenö Hubay, a former student of Joachim who himself would teach Szigeti and d’Aranyi.

All notes © Australian Chamber Orchestra, except Beethoven Sonata © David Garrett.

A more obvious link to Bülow is the virtuosity and outspoken nature of the piano part. Of all Brahms’ sonatas, perhaps this is the one where the two players form the most gracious partnership. There is however an overriding sense of melancholy to the sonata – D minor is traditionally regarded as one of the saddest keys. This work seems to seek to persuade rather than command.

The opening Allegro movement is a case in point. Rather than a dashing display piece, ‘it starts with a great sigh and ends with an even greater one’, as

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RICHARD TOGNETTI VIOLIN

POLINA LESCHENKO PIANO Polina Leschenko was born in St Petersburg into a family of musicians and began playing the piano under her father’s guidance at the age of six.

Two years later she performed with the Leningrad Symphony Orchestra in St. Petersburg.

Australian violinist, conductor and composer Richard Tognetti was born in Canberra and raised in Wollongong. He has established an international reputation for his compelling performances and artistic individualism.

He began his studies in his home town with William Primrose, then with Alice Waten at the Sydney Conservatorium, and Igor Ozim at the Bern Conservatory, where he was awarded the Tschumi Prize as the top graduate soloist in 1989. Later that year he led several performances of the Australian Chamber Orchestra, and that November was appointed as the Orchestra’s lead violin and, subsequently, Artistic Director. He is also Artistic Director of the Festival Maribor in Slovenia.

Photo by Mick Bruzzese

Richard performs on period, modern and electric instruments and his numerous arrangements, compositions and transcriptions have expanded the chamber orchestra repertoire and been performed throughout the world.

As director or soloist, Richard has appeared with the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment, the Academy of Ancient Music, Slovene Philharmonic Orchestra, Handel & Haydn Society (Boston), Hong Kong Philharmonic, Camerata Salzburg, Tapiola Sinfonietta, Irish Chamber Orchestra, Orchestre Philharmonique du Luxembourg, Nordic Chamber Orchestra and all of the Australian symphony orchestras.

Richard was co-composer of the score for Peter Weir’s Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World, starring Russell Crowe; he co-composed the soundtrack to Tom Carroll’s surf film Horrorscopes; and created The Red Tree, inspired by Shaun Tan’s book. He co-created and starred in the 2008 documentary film Musica Surfica.

Richard was appointed an Officer of the Order of Australia in 2010. He holds honorary doctorates from three Australian universities and was made a National Living Treasure in 1999. He performs on a 1743 Guarneri del Gesù violin, lent to him by an anonymous Australian private benefactor.

He has given more than 2,500 performances with the Australian Chamber Orchestra.

Chair sponsored by Michael Ball AM & Daria Ball, Wendy Edwards, Prudence MacLeod, Andrew & Andrea Roberts.

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In 1991 Polina moved with her family to Europe to continue her studies. At the age of 12 Polina made her UK debut at the Barbican Hall in London playing Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No.5. She has gone on to perform in such venues as Vienna’s Konzerthaus, the Salzburg Mozarteum, Concertgebouw, Carnegie Hall, Lincoln Center, Philharmonie de Paris (formerly Cité de la Musique) and the Sydney Opera House.

Polina Leschenko has worked with such orchestras as the Camerata Salzburg, Hallé Orchestra, London Mozart Players, Scottish Chamber Orchestra, Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra, Britten Sinfonia, Bern Symphony Orchestra, Russian National Orchestra, I Pomeriggi Musicali, Orquesta de Euskadi and the Australian Chamber Orchestra.

Photo by Marco Borgreve

An accomplished chamber musician, Polina Leschenko performs frequently at many festivals, collaborating with such artists as Martha Argerich, Ivry Gitlis, Patricia Kopatchinskaja, Ilya Gringolts, Julian Rachlin, Heinrich Schiff, Mischa Maisky, Torleif Thedéen and the Auryn Quartet.

In 2003 Polina Leschenko recorded her debut CD for EMI Classics in the series ‘Martha Argerich presents...’ with works by Liszt, Chopin, Kreisler/Rachmaninoff, Brahms and Bach/Feinberg. She also recorded a disc of Prokofiev’s chamber music with Martha Argerich, Christian Poltéra and Roby Lakatos and her allLiszt CD, including the B minor Sonata, was released to great critical acclaim.

Polina’s most recent recordings include Forgotten Melodies, Mendelssohn’s Double Concerto with the Australian Chamber Orchestra and Richard Tognetti, and Dvorak’s Piano Quartet Op.87 as part of the Martha Argerich and Friends: Live from the Lugano Festival 2012 series.

From 2009 to 2012, she held the position of International Chair in Piano at the Royal Welsh College of Music and Drama in Cardiff. Polina is currently Professor of Piano at the Royal Conservatoire of Antwerp.

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