ENGLISH CHAMBER ORCHESTRA PA T R O N H R H T H E P R I N C E O F WA L E S
Leader Stephanie Gonley
London Concert Series 2018/19
Stephanie Gonley violin/director
Cadogan Hall - Tuesday 16 April 2019, 7.30pm
KIRKER MUSIC FE ST IVAL S FOR DISCERNING TRAVELLERS Kirker Holidays offers an extensive range of independent and escorted music holidays. These include tours to leading festivals in Europe such as the Puccini Festival in Torre del Lago and the Verdi Festival in Parma, as well as Glyndebourne, Buxton and opera weekends in Vienna, Milan and Venice. We also host our own exclusive music festivals on land and at sea featuring internationally acclaimed musicians. For those who prefer to travel independently we arrange short breaks with opera, ballet or concert tickets, to all the great classical cities in Europe.
THE KIRKER MUSIC FESTIVAL ON LAKE COMO A SEVEN NIGHT HOLIDAY | 23 SEPTEMBER 2019 The destination for our autumn Music Festival is one of the most beautiful corners of Italy. Lined with villas, cypress trees and low-arching mountains, Lake Como has a peaceful timelessness like no other. The lake has inspired many composers, and we will enjoy performances by a renowned group of international soloists, including pianists Melvyn Tan and Iain Burnside, tenor Luis Gomes, baritone Sergio Vitaleis, violinist Elisabeth Perry and violist Simon Rowland-Jones. There will be an optional performance of L’elisir d’amore by Donizetti at La Scala in Milan. We stay at the 4* Imperiale in the village of Moltrasio, the hotel has a lakeside restaurant and a spa with an indoor pool. Price from £2,947 per person (single supp. £580) for seven nights including flights, transfers, accommodation with breakfast, five dinners, one lunch, five concerts, all sightseeing, entrance fees and gratuities, and the services of the Kirker Tour Leader.
THE KIRKER ISCHIA MUSIC FESTIVAL A SEVEN NIGHT HOLIDAY | 11 OCTOBER 2019 For our fourteenth exclusive Kirker Music Festival in the Bay of Naples we will be joined by the Carducci Quartet; James Gilchrist, tenor; Tim Horton, piano and Simon Rowland-Jones, viola. We shall enjoy six exclusive concerts in the lovely concert hall overlooking the garden at La Mortella, the former home of Sir William & Lady Walton. Our base for the duration will be the 4* Albergo San Montano in the small resort of Lacco Ameno, with spectacular views of the Bay of Naples. We include a guided tour of the garden at La Mortella and a half-day sightseeing tour of Ischia. There are three optional tours; one to Herculaneum and the Villa Oplontis, one to Naples; and the third is a half-day exploration of the Ischia countryside.
Cadogan Hall 16 April 2019, 7.30pm
English Chamber Orchestra Bartók Divertimento for Strings
Mendelssohn Concerto for Violin in D minor
Interval Schubert Rondo in A for Violin and String Orchestra
Suk Serenade for String Orchestra in E flat
Stephanie Gonley Violin/Director
Price from £2,489 (single supp. £350) for seven nights including flights, transfers, accommodation with breakfast, seven dinners, seven concerts, all sightseeing, entrance fees and gratuities and the services of the Kirker Tour Leader.
Speak to an expert or request a brochure:
020 7593 2284 quote code GEC www.kirkerholidays.com
The ECO is grateful to the English Chamber Orchestra Charitable Trust for its generous support of this concert. The ECO would also like to thank the family of the late Mr Robert Gurton for their kind gift in his memory. English Chamber Orchestra reserves the right to substitute artists and to vary programmes if necessary.
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ECO London Series 2018/19 Cadogan Hall
ENGLISH CHAMBER ORCHESTRA LEADER STEPHANIE GONLEY
PA T R O N H R H T H E P R I N C E O F WA L E S
Welcome
It is my great pleasure to welcome you to tonight’s concert. The ECO sound is world famous, with its string playing characterised by its special lightness and beauty which stems from the fact that the players are all soloists in their own right. This demands a special leader and since 1991 this role has been filled by Stephanie Gonley, with great distinction. This is not only because of her superb virtuosity but also because of the tremendous sense of communication she has established with the orchestra. Tonight we pay tribute to her undoubted abilities both as soloist and director. We begin with Bartók's Divertimento which does not betray that it was written almost in haste in troubled times. The early D minor Mendelssohn Concerto follows, a work which many may not be familiar with. I last heard it played by our late, much-loved leader José-Luis Garcia over thirty years ago and I look forward to hearing it played and directed by his distinguished successor. Stephanie continues with the A major Schubert Rondo, a masterpiece by any standard. String serenades have been a feature of our 2018/19 London Season and the evening ends with the Suk Serenade for Strings which I know you will all enjoy. Thank you for your continued support and we look forward to seeing you again on 22 May when we will be joined by the phenomenal Uzbek pianist Behzod Abduraimov.
Sincerely,
Michael Facey
Cadogan Hall Etiquette and Information Smoking: All areas of Cadogan Hall are nonsmoking areas. Food and Beverages: You are kindly requested not to bring food and other refreshments into Cadogan Hall. A small selection of sandwiches, cakes and snacks is available from the Oakley Bar. Concert goers may also enjoy a wide selection of champagnes, spirits, red and white wines, beers and soft drinks from the Culford Room bar. Customers seated in the Gallery can buy interval drinks from the Gallery Bar at some concerts. Camera and Electronic Devices: Video equipment, cameras and tape recorders are not permitted. Please ensure all pagers and mobile phones are switched off before entering the auditorium. Interval and Timings: Intervals vary with each performance. Some performances may not have an interval. Latecomers will not be admitted until a suitable break in the performance. Consideration: We aim to deliver the highest standards of service. Therefore, we would ask you to treat our staff with courtesy and in a manner in which you would expect to be treated.
Béla Bartók (1881–1945) Divertimento for Strings Allegro non troppo • Molto adagio • Allegro assai
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he Hungarian composer Béla Bartók was one of the most powerful and individual voices in music in the first half of the 20th Century; turning his back on contemporary avant-garde trends, he evolved his own idiom, influenced by the simplicity and directness of folk music. Bartók’s output includes six string quartets, concertos for piano and violin, the opera Duke Bluebeard’s Castle and his popular Concerto for Orchestra, written after he had emigrated to the USA in 1940. The Swiss conductor Paul Sacher had commissioned Bartók to write his Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta for the Basel Chamber Orchestra in 1937; two years later, he asked Bartók for another work, this time ‘something lighter’. Bartók responded with the Divertimento for Strings, which he conceived as ‘a kind of concerto grosso’ whereby soloists from each section alternate with the full body of strings in the manner of the 18th Century concerti grossi of Corelli or Handel. The result is one of Bartók’s liveliest and most outgoing works; Paul Sacher conducted the first performance on 11 June 1940. Over a sequence of chugging chords, the violins play a laid-back theme full of ‘blue notes’ which seem to suggest jazz but ultimately derive from Bartók’s beloved Hungarian folk music. This idea is expanded and developed (and occasionally turned upside down) in a movement full of wit and energy,
featuring abrupt contrasts of loud and soft, lyrical and angular, as well as solo and tutti textures. The uneasy sound of muted strings introduces a darker mood of sombre intensity reflecting Bartók’s premonitions of the impending ‘global catastrophe’ of war in Europe. Growing inexorably from its ghostly opening, the second movement culminates in a nightmare sequence of trills – a cry of pain and despair. For the finale, we are back in the world of Hungarian folk music in an energetic dance thematically related to the first movement, again with a slightly jazzy feel to it. The beginnings of a fugue give way to a solo violin cadenza with a gypsy flavour; the jazzy dance tune returns, subjected to added decoration and once again turned upside down. Bartók then progressively ratchets up the tempo, pausing for a teasing ‘pizzicato polka’ before ending in a blaze of excitement.
Trustee, English Chamber Orchestra Charitable Trust
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ECO London Series 2018/19 Cadogan Hall
Felix Mendelssohn-Bartholdy (1809–1847)
Concerto for Violin and String Orchestra in D minor
Franz Schubert (1797–1828) Rondo in A for Violin and String Orchestra, D438
(Allegro) • Andante • Allegro
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n 1822, Felix Mendelssohn was 13 years old – a bright and likeable boy, keenly interested in everything that was going on around him (he enjoyed meeting the composer Carl Maria von Weber and the ageing poet Johann Wolfgang von Goethe), lively in conversation and correspondence, an accomplished artist and, above all, a prodigiously talented musician. He had already composed at least seven symphonies for strings, two operettas, three piano sonatas, several choral works and much chamber music, including a violin sonata and a piano quartet. For his violin teacher and friend, Eduard Rietz, he wrote this Concerto in D minor for violin and string orchestra, which (as far as we know) was never performed. After the composer’s death in 1847, his widow gave the manuscript to the violinist Ferdinand David, who in 1845 had given the premiere of Mendelssohn’s mature masterpiece, the familiar Violin Concerto in E minor; nothing more was heard of the D minor Concerto for over a century, until a London rare-book dealer named Albi Rosenthal offered the manuscript for sale to the violinist Yehudi Menuhin in 1951. Menuhin was delighted to have this opportunity of owning the manuscript of a lost work; he edited the concerto for publication, gave its first performance at Carnegie Hall in New York on 4 February 1952, and went on to make three recordings of it.
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Though it may lack the dazzlingly precocious maturity evident in the String Octet and the Midsummer Night’s Dream Overture, which still lay a few years in the future, Mendelssohn’s youthful violin concerto is full of energy and imagination. The first movement opens with a jagged unison tune which would not have sounded out of place in one of Haydn’s stormier symphonies of the early 1770s; the solo violin enters with melodic ideas of its own, set against intricately worked out developments of the unison tune and its continuation, including some startling harmonic shifts. The slow movement is a lyrical outpouring of song, looking ahead to the effortless melodic inventions of Mendelssohn’s later years in works such as Elijah and the Songs without Words for piano. The extended opening tutti, in D major, gives way to a free recitative-like passage for the soloist which leads the music away from the home key, first to D minor and then to A major; there is a solo cadenza in the middle of the movement before the opening D major melody returns. The Finale is a ‘gypsy rondo’; the teenage Mendelssohn’s witty treatment of the infectiously bouncy theme involves more harmonic surprises, a quirky solo cadenza (again in the middle of the movement), and an explosion of youthful high spirits at the finish.
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n hs tragically short life, Schubert was extraordinarily prolific in most genres of composition, notably symphonies, chamber music, works for solo piano and some 700 songs. Strangely, however, he did not compose anything in the medium favoured by Mozart and Beethoven – the concerto for solo instrument and orchestra. He wrote only a few ‘concerted’ works in one or two movements: an Adagio and Rondo Concertante in F for piano and strings (D487), a Konzertstück (concert piece) in D for violin and chamber orchestra (D345), and this Rondo in A for violin and strings. It seems to have been composed in June 1816, for Schubert himself – or perhaps his brother Ferdinand – to play; the first ‘performance’ would have been a private play-through in a domestic setting, with a string quartet as accompaniment. The spacious Adagio introduction prepares the way for the soloist, who enters with a rising flourish and continues with a lyrical meditation and some virtuoso display. The Rondo theme,
marked Allegro giusto, has a teasing, almost coquettish, character; it alternates with a series of episodes, by turns lyrical, rustic and brilliant. Charles Osborne (in Schubert and his Vienna) describes the work as a ‘delightful essay in a late-18th Century rococo style’; unpretentious and fun, it nevertheless makes a fine showpiece for the solo violin. Schubert must have been no mean fiddler himself.
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ECO London Series 2018/19 Cadogan Hall
Josef Suk (1874–1935)
Stephanie Gonley Director
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Serenade for String Orchestra in E flat, Op.6
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he Czech composer and violinist Josef Suk studied at the Prague Conservatoire with J B Foerster, Antonin Dvorák and the cellist Hanuš Wihan. He played second violin in the Bohemian String Quartet and later became Professor of Composition at the Prague Conservatoire. In 1898 he married Dvorák’s daughter Otilie. Suk’s prolific output includes choral works, songs, piano pieces, symphonic works including Pod jabloni (Under the Apple Tree), Praga (Prague) and Zrani (Ripening), and his masterpiece, the mighty Asrael Symphony of 1905–6. His musical idiom is big hearted and Romantic, rooted in Czech folk music and understandably influenced by his father-in-law Dvorák, although his later works tend towards atonality. Instrumental serenades in several movements, sometimes for outdoor performance, had developed during the 18th Century; there is a tradition of serenades for wind instruments alone that stretches from Mozart to Richard Strauss and beyond. The concept of an easy-going ‘Serenade for strings’ appealed particularly to East European composers, including Tchaikovsky, Dvorák, Janácek and perhaps Bartók with his Divertimento; Edward Elgar would be an honoured guest in this company. Suk’s Serenade for String Orchestra is a worthy addition to the genre; composed in 1892 when he was only 18, it shows complete mastery of the medium. The work is largely gentle and light-hearted, but with hints of darker shadows on the horizon. (Dvorák had suggested that Suk should write something ‘lighter
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and more cheerful’ than his predominantly gloomy student offerings.) The first complete performance was on 25 February 1895, at the Prague Conservatoire. The first movement opens with a graceful violin theme, joined by the cellos, who soon take over the melody. The second subject is in the remote key of G major; the first theme returns on solo violin answered by a solo viola, in another remote key – B major. Eventually the music returns to the home key of E flat for a triumphant re-statement of the theme before it takes its leave in a tender coda. Then follows a lilting waltz in B flat, filled with those characteristic syncopations and dotted rhythms which derive from Czech folk dances and are familiar to us from Dvorák’s Slavonic Dances and the scherzo movements in his symphonies. There is an extensive central ‘trio’ section in the rich key of G flat, including a tiny duet for solo violin and viola. The Adagio is based on a simple and heartfelt song-like melody in G, first heard on a solo cello; a second theme in E major is developed at length before the opening theme returns. The Finale features a rising march-like tune against a background of ceaselessly busy quavers. The forward momentum is twice interrupted, first by a broad chorale melody, then by a reminiscence of the opening theme of the first movement; but the agitated quavers and the striding march theme have the last word.
Photograph Chris Christodoulou
Andante con moto • Allegro ma non troppo e grazioso Adagio • Allegro giocoso, ma non troppo presto
tephanie Gonley studied with David Takeno at the Guildhall and Dorothy DeLay at the Juilliard School in New York, USA and is now a leading professor of violin at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama and at Trinity Laban Conservatoire of Music and Dance. In 1991 she was the youngest leader in London when she was appointed the leader of the English Chamber Orchestra and has since both directed and appeared as soloist with the orchestra throughout the world. Her recordings include the Sibelius Violin Concerto on BMG and works by Dvorak with the ECO and Sir Charles Mackerras. On 22 May 2019 Stephanie will once again direct the ECO at Cadogan Hall when the orchestra is joined by Uzbek pianist Behzod Abduraimov in a programme including Beethoven's First Piano Concerto and Mozart's Rondo in D major.
Sunday 21 April | 3pm Lighthouse Poole Book Now:
lighthousepoole.co.uk 01202 280 000 Programme features
Bernstein
‘Somewhere’ and ‘Mambo’ from West Side Story Programme notes by Jonathan Burton © 2019
Etienne Abelin Conductor
ECO London Series 2018/19 Cadogan Hall
First violins
ENGLISH CHAMBER ORCHESTRA LEADER STEPHANIE GONLEY
PA T R O N H R H T H E P R I N C E O F WA L E S
Photograph Chris Christodoulou
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he English Chamber Orchestra is the most recorded chamber orchestra in the world, its discography containing nearly 900 recordings of over 1,500 works by more than 400 composers. Throughout its history, the ECO has performed in numerous countries and played with many of the world’s greatest musicians; the American radio network CPRN selecting it as one of the world’s greatest ‘living’ orchestras. Its illustrious past features many major musical figures, including Benjamin Britten who was the orchestra’s first Patron and a significant musical influence. The ECO has enjoyed long relationships with such great musicians as Mstislav Rostropovich, Pinchas Zukerman, Daniel Barenboim and many others. Last Season, the ECO performed
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across the UK and enjoyed a successful London series with artists including Christian Zacharias, Tenebrae, Jennifer Pike, Tasmin Little and Howard Shelley. International highlights included a tour to Mexico with José Serebrier and a soldout European tour with Julian Rachlin culminating in a concert at the Musikverein in Vienna. In addition, the orchestra has recorded many successful film soundtracks including Dario Marianelli’s prizewinning scores for Atonement and Pride and Prejudice and several James Bond soundtracks. Last year, the ECO was honoured to participate in the ceremony for the wedding of Prince Harry and Meghan Markle and over the summer was on tour at the Lucerne Festival and in Turkey, where it worked with pianists Guher and Suher Pekinel at the Izmir and Istanbul music festivals. Earlier this year, the ECO became the Orchestra-in-Partnership at Christ’s Hospital School in West Sussex, a collaboration that will involve side-by-side and one-to-one tuition. Stay in touch with the ECO by subscribing to our monthly e-newsletter at www.englishchamberorchestra.co.uk Follow and engage with the ECO on Facebook and Instagram(@EnglishChamberOrchestra) and Twitter(@ECOrchestra).
Violas
Stephanie Gonley John Mills Andrew Harvey Lucy Jeal Richard Milone Tom Aldren Bridget O’Donnell
Clare Finnimore Tetsuumi Nagata Cara Coetzee
Cellos*
Caroline Dale Boz Vukotic Reinoud Ford
Second violins
Basses
Marcus Barcham-Stevens Natalia Bonner Matt Elston Ruth Funnell Natasha Hall
Stephen Williams Ben Russell
General Management: Lydia Brookes Jill Groom Juliette Barber
* The Chair of Principal Cello is generously supported by the Phair Family Foundation The Chair of Principal Horn is generously supported by Lynn Holmes in memory of Brian Holmes The list of players was correct at the time of going to press.
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ENGLISH CHAMBER ORCHESTRA
www.englishchamberorchestra.co.uk/concerts
Wednesday 22 May 2019, 7.30pm Cadogan Hall
‘He is the most perfectly accomplished pianist of his generation.’
Behzod Abduraimov piano
The Independent
Stephanie Gonley director
Stravinsky Concerto in D major for String Orchestra, 'Basel Concerto' Beethoven Piano Concerto No.1 in C major, Op.15 Mozart Rondo for Piano and Orchestra in D major, K382 Mozart Symphony No.38 in D major, K504, ‘Prague’
/ 19 N 8 1 20 N D O N
L OE A S S
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