King Edward VI School in concert with
Southbank Sinfonia Thursday 9th October 2014 Turner Sims | 7.30pm
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welcome Welcome to Turner Sims for this evening’s concert, which is the culmination of an action-packed, challenging and truly inspiring day of music making with the Southbank Sinfonia, musicians from our feeder Prep Schools, singers from the KES Adult Choir and musicians from KES Chamber Orchestra and Chamber Choir. This morning our visiting Prep School musicians took passenger seats in the full orchestral rehearsal and composed pieces for the pre-concert performance, while KES Chamber Orchestra played side-by-side with the Southbank Sinfonia, gaining a real insight into the stamina and skill required to be an orchestral musician today. This afternoon the Chamber Choir enjoyed rehearsing Mozart with a professional orchestral accompaniment and throughout the day Lower School artists have been sketching the orchestra as part of their Cubist art project. I know I speak for everyone involved when I offer our most sincere thanks to all the players and staff of Southbank Sinfonia for their inspiring work with us today. I would also like to extend my thanks to our visiting Prep School musicians and their teachers for sharing the day with us. Finally, thank you very much for attending the concert and I hope you enjoy the evening.
Heather Freemantle Director of Music and Head of Creative Arts
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Programme • Symphony no. 40 in G minor, KV. 550 (first movement) Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756–1791) Performed by Southbank Sinfonia • Serenade for Strings in C major, Op. 48 (Valse) Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky (1840–1893) Performed by Southbank Sinfonia • P ictures at an Exhibition (‘Promenade’, ‘Hut on Fowl’s Legs’, and ‘Great Gate of Kiev’) Modest Mussorgsky (1839–1881), arr. by Joachim Linckelmann Performed by members of Southbank Sinfonia with Luke Roberts • String Quartet Op. 17 no. 2 in F major (first movement) Franz Joseph Haydn (1732–1809) Performed by members of Southbank Sinfonia with Mike Huang • Requiem (‘Dies Irae’, ‘Confutatis’, and ‘Lacrimosa’) Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756–1791) Performed by Southbank Sinfonia with KES Chamber Choir
Short Interval of 10 minutes
• ‘Paris Overture’ in B-flat major, K. 311a Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756–1791) Performed by KES Chamber Orchestra and Southbank Sinfonia •
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Symphony no. 9 in E minor, Op. 95, “From the New World” (Last Movement) Antonín Dvořák (1841–1904) Performed by KES Chamber Orchestra and Southbank Sinfonia
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Southbank Sinfonia is an orchestra of young professionals described by The Times as ‘a dashing ensemble who play with exhilarating fizz, exactness and stamina’. It is internationally recognised as a leading orchestral academy, providing graduate musicians from all over the world with a much-needed springboard into the profession. Every year its players, each supported by a bursary, undertake an intensive and wideranging nine month programme of performance and professional development. This comprises performances across Britain and Europe involving orchestral repertoire, chamber music, opera, dance and theatre, alongside development sessions embracing leadership and teamwork, and opportunities to be role-models, inspiring many younger musicians on London’s Southbank and beyond. A distinctive and integral part of the programme is the orchestra’s creative partnerships with leading performing arts organisations including the Royal Opera, National Theatre, BBC Concert Orchestra, Academy of St Martin in the Fields, and acclaimed artists such as patrons Vladimir Ashkenazy and Edward Gardner. The orchestra is proud to be based at St John’s Waterloo, in the heart of London, where its regular free Rush Hour concerts give many people their first ever experience of live orchestral music. Southbank Sinfonia receives no public funding and is indebted to its many individual donors, trusts and foundations, and corporate supporters who believe in the potential of its young musicians. If you are inspired by what you hear tonight, you too can make a difference to the journey these young artists will take this year. To find out how you can support the orchestra and discover more about its next exciting performances, visit www.southbanksinfonia.co.uk
“In such lively bands as Southbank Sinfonia, bright, open-minded young players are redefining everything about classical music concerts, from where they take place, to what you hear and how you behave. If you haven’t been to an orchestral concert for a while – or ever – give this brilliant new breed of bands a try. You may be watching a revolution.” Richard Morrison, The Times, 2012
Jennifer House – Creative Leadership Manager Sam Le Roux – Assistant Orchestra Manager 7•
VIOLIN Emily Bouwhuis Marc Charles-Montesinos Stefano D’Ermenegildo Avril Freemantle Douglas Harrison Joana Ly Joan Martinez Maria Fiore Mazzarini Tam Mott Heloisa Gaspar Ribeiro
VIOLA Cameron Campbell Charley Lake Jennifer MacCallum Victoria Stephenson
CELLO Guðný Jónasdóttir Svetlana Mochalova Thomas Wraith
DOUBLE BASS David Cousins Mark Lipski
FLUTE Nicola Crowe Holly Melia
OBOE Julia Hantschel Clara Pérez Sedano
CLARINET Daniel Broncano Som Howie
BASSOON Kylie Nesbit Holly Reardon
HORN Kirsty Howe Jonathan Maloney
TRUMPET Richard Blake Rebecca Crawshaw
TIMPANI & PERCUSSION Oliver Patrick
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King Edward VI Chamber Orchestra Violin I
Violin II
Viola
Zoe Carter Tai Sophie Arthur Jin Ho Yim Emily Huang Seungyeon Oh Shona Carson Ben Atherton Maya Garside
Bi Jia Wu Natalya Evans Iman Elsheikh Toby Hill Alice Booth Alex Diaper Alla Garside
Joanna Seaby Erica Tsang Kelvin Xie
Flute
Oboe
Bass
Tom Edwards Rhianna Jones
Luke Roberts
Jonny Brown Alice Ridley
Clarinet
Bassoon
Trumpet
Nick Francis Curtis Crowley Kieran Bassi
Harry Uglow
Mhairi Carson Philip Normand Toby Saer Ellie MacLeod
Trombone
Tuba
Horn
Guy Ripper Edward Fletcher Richard Lyon
Chris Lotery
Tom Salmon Nick White
Percussion Joe Winter Sam Routledge
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Cello Mike Huang Catherine Whitby Issie Elliott
King Edward VI Chamber CHOIR Soprano
Alto
Tenor
Zoe Carter Tai Sue Chamberlain Miriam Chapman-Rosenfeld Anna Cooke Julia Hardwick Emer Healy Diana Hulbert Rhianna Jones Lorraine Morgan Luka Peart Tabby Piggott Keeya Saund Rosa Sparks Patricia Stroud Diana Threlfall
Angus Armstrong Sophie Armstrong Emily Besley Emma Blackman Sue Blunsden Christine Brashaw Eleanor Dunlop Meg Dunlop Beth Gaunt Jane Holt Sarah Hughes Collette Lane Lucia Laverty Darra McCarthy-Paul Holly Smart Niamh Phelan Emma Taylor Emily Thompson Gabbi Walker Bi Jia Wu
Richard Chamberlain Edward Fletcher Julian Poppleton David Rees Jim Sampson Ollie Uglow
Bass Stuart Ayres Charlie Callaghan Tom Edwards Alan Morgan Andy Morgan Philip Normand Guy Ripper Luke Roberts
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Conductor Dinis Sousa started his music studies at the age of six, in Porto, where he studied piano under Vasco Abreu until 2006. Since moving to London, Dinis studied with Yekaterina Lebedeva for three years and graduated with distinction from the Guildhall School, where he currently holds the Conducting Fellowship. At the Guildhall School, he studied piano with Philip Jenkins and Martin Roscoe and conducting with Sian Edwards and Timothy Redmond, with support from the Guildhall School, Leverhulme and Craxton Memorial Trusts, the Countess of Munster and Musician’s Benevolent Funds. Dinis has taken part in several masterclasses, and worked with musicians such as Sequeira Costa, Angela Hewitt, Richard Egarr, Ronan O’Hora, Jean-Sébastien Béreau. He has performed in major international venues such as Casa da Musica, Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, Barbican, Queen Elizabeth and Snape Maltings Concert Halls and recorded for BBC Radio 3 and RDP Antena 2. As a conductor, he has worked with several groups at the Guildhall School and is Music Director of Orquestra XXI, an orchestra he founded in Portugal that brings together Portuguese musicians who live all over Europe. In London, he recently conducted a staging of Birtwistle’s ‘Down by the Greenwood Side’ at the Silk Street Theatre and Bach’s St John Passion at Milton Court Concert Hall. Dinis is regularly involved in educational work, having been conductor in residence with the Southampton Youth Concert Orchestra as well as recently conducting a project for the London Symphony Orchestra’s On-Track project. He has assisted Nicholas Collon for concerts at Aldeburgh Festival and BBC Proms.
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Programme NOTES Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756–1791) Symphony no. 40 in G minor, KV. 550 (first movement) Mozart entered the fortieth symphony into his catalogue of compositions on 25 July 1788. It’s one of only two that he wrote in a minor key (the other of which is also in G), and it was the second of three he finished that year. The third of the batch was to be his last. Not least because of its dark and brooding atmosphere, some commentators have suggested that the fortieth offers a glimpse into the kind of music that Mozart may have written had he survived into the eighteenth century. Such speculation isn’t without foundation. His innovation of beginning with a purely accompanimental figuration made a lasting impression on composers in future generations. Mendelssohn’s Violin Concerto and even Rachmaninoff’s Third Piano Concerto employ much the same technique. Beethoven also knew this symphony well, and copied out twenty-nine bars of it into one of his sketchbooks. Until relatively recently, scholars and historians believed that Mozart had never heard his final three symphonies in performance. Throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, it was often supposed that he’d written them for posterity itself. This is almost certainly untrue, however. Like much of his output, not least the famous Requiem (which also features in today’s concert), they attracted a great deal of myth-making after his death.
Modest Mussorgsky (1839–1881), arr. by Joachim Linckelmann Pictures at an Exhibition (‘Promenade’, ‘Hut on Fowl’s Legs’, and ‘Great Gate of Kiev’) Pictures at an Exhibition has long held a place in the concert repertoire as one of the most popular and iconic pieces of nineteenth-century Russian music. It began life as a virtuosic suite for solo piano, but has since become known to audiences in many other forms. As early as 1886, the now-obscure composer Mikhail Tushmalov orchestrated a selection of the movements; others to have tackled it include Henry Wood, Leopold Stokowski, and Vladimir Ashkenazy. The orchestral version by Maurice Ravel, which he wrote in 1922, is certainly the most famous. The overall structure of the work is highly original. It consists of ten movements, each of which is inspired by a different painting. Many of them are interspersed with versions of the ‘Promenade’ theme. The paintings in question were by the artist and architect Viktor Hartmann. Only a few of Hartmann’s originals on which Mussorgsky based his music have survived.
The first movement is principally characterised by its stark dynamic contrasts and fast changes of harmony.
In today’s performance, we will hear the opening ‘Promenade’, as well as the concluding two movements, ‘Hut on Fowl’s Legs’ and the ‘Great Gate of Kiev’. In Slavic folklore, the figure of Baba Yaga, a deformed and ferocious supernatural woman, was supposed to reside deep in the woods in a hut which had the legs of a chicken. Meanwhile, the golden gates of Kiev originally served as an entrance to an ancient fortress in the capital of Ukraine. They still stand today, and are host to one of the most popular museums in the country.
Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky (1840–1893) Serenade for Strings in C major, Op. 48 (Valse)
The ‘Hut on Fowl’s Legs’ is probably the most virtuosic movement in the suite, with scampering and scurrying figurations throughout, while the ‘Great Gate’ is an incomparable portrait of the majesty of Tsarist Russia.
Tchaikovsky completed the Serenade for Strings in 1880. It was intended as a homage to Mozart, and it sits in stark contrast with the overt bombast of the famous 1812 Festival Overture, which was written at roughly the same time. The Serenade as a whole is classical in its forms, but not in its musical style. It was envisioned for a large ensemble; on the manuscript, Tchaikovsky instructed that ‘the larger the number of players in the string orchestra, the more this shall be in accordance with the composer’s wishes’. In a sense, the Serenade is best described as Mozart’s aesthetic sensibilities reimagined for the later nineteenth-century. In today’s concert we join the Serenade in the Waltz movement, which is regularly performed as a piece in its own right. It rarely strays far from the world of ballet, which was always of particularly special significance to Tchaikovsky. A melody is passed through each string section while the others play distinctive rhythmic accompanimental figures. The movement ends in a delicate, whispered pianissimo - as far as could be imagined from the cannon-fuelled finale of the 1812 Overture.
Franz Joseph Haydn (1732–1809) String Quartet Op. 17 no. 2 in F major (first movement) Haydn is popularly known as “The Father” of both the symphony and of the string quartet, such were his contributions to the genres. He’s credited with having created the ensemble of four string instruments that came to dominate eighteenth-century musical life, and with having standardised the four-movement form that became widely adopted by other composers. The Opus 17 Quartets are among the last of Haydn’s early works. They show him at an exciting junction between youthful energy and the mature sophistication of his middle years. In today’s performance, we hear the first movement of Op. 17 no. 2, which is memorable for its distinctive melodic material and the playful interactions between instruments.
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Mozart Requiem (‘Dies Irae’, ‘Confutatis’, and ‘Lacrimosa’) Mozart was still working on his Requiem when he died on 5 December 1791. The work was left unfinished, but there was enough material in his sketches for his colleagues to construct a complete version. The composition’s commission was shrouded in layers of lies and secrecy. Count Franz von Walsegg, an eccentric and wealthy amateur musician, had a penchant for privately commissioning works from notable composers which he then passed off as his own. He’d paid Mozart only half their agreed fee up front, so Mozart’s widow had to arrange for the Requiem to be finished covertly if she was to claim the rest of the money. The version with which today’s audiences are familiar was rounded off by Franz Xaver Süssmayr, although he may well have received help from other composers. One of the many persistent fairy tales about the Requiem, told most memorably in the Oscar-winning movie Amadeus (1984), involves Antonio Salieri, a composer working in Vienna around the same period as Mozart. According to legend, Salieri gradually became consumed with jealousy of his younger rival, and commissioned the Requiem anonymously before devising an elaborate murder plot – with the intention of offering the Requiem as his own work to commemorate Mozart’s funeral. This is all nonsense, of course. The surviving evidence suggests that on the few occasions they actually met, Mozart and Salieri were quite cordial with each another. One thing of which we can be certain is that the full circumstances surrounding the genesis of this piece will probably be forever unknown.
Mozart ‘Paris Overture’ in B-flat major, K. 311a This piece has a colourful history. It was first published in 1806, over a decade after Mozart’s death; and it was subsequently lost before being rediscovered in 1937. At the time, it was thought that a second ‘Paris Symphony’ – like Mozart’s thirty-first, one of his better-known symphonies – had been uncovered. However, in recent years, some Mozart scholars have pointed to stylistic anomalies in the work and suggested that it may be a forgery by an unknown musician attempting to capitalise on Mozart’s posthumous fame. Whatever the truth, it gradually became a much-loved staple of the concert repertoire after its rediscovery in the twentieth century.
Antonín Dvořák (1841–1904) Symphony no. 9 in E minor, Op. 95, “From the New World” (Last Movement) Dvořák composed the “New World”, his best-known symphony, in 1893, at which point he held the director’s post at the National Conservatory of Music in America. He was well-known as a ‘nationalist’ composer. Apparently he intended this work to be a model for young American composers – something they might follow to create a nationalist music of their own. Much of the musical material was drawn from African-American spirituals, but the piece is also based on more abstract ideas about the vastness of the American landscape. Dvořák visited Iowa in the year of the symphony’s composition. The countryside there is characterised by rolling
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hills, tallgrass prairie, dense forests, and vast river networks, including the Mississippi. Nevertheless, perhaps against the composer’s own intentions, the score remains littered with Bohemianisms and Germanicisms, from the distinctive harmonies to the constant use of the Wagnerian leitmotif. Today we join the symphony in its final movement. It develops out of a march-like theme (another fingerprint of the central European symphony). Some observers have suggested that this movement demonstrates Dvořák’s skill for resolving Brahmsian conservativism with Wagnerian innovation at its clearest.
Pre Concert Performance Princes Mead School
Miss Sue Williams Millie Boyden, Grace McCauley, Ella Greenfield, Jasmine Santilhano, Rosalind Dye, Emily Beardsmore-Gray.
Sherborne House School Mrs Shelagh Lee Ivor Berr, Matthew Taylor, Piper Dickson, Phoebee Corcoran, Myah Ganjavian Connor. Stroud School
Mrs Tanya Fay Zachary Cox, Joe Rachman, Martha Kendall.
Twyford School
Mr David Hall Emma Paterson, Lola Thomson, Clemency Fisher, Lucy McCann, Tristram Waters.
West Hill Park School
Mrs Wendy Blunn Kit Hurren, Archie Saint, Charlotte Parry, Poppy Wright, Megan Lord, Edward Beardsall, Eleanor Parry, Molly Thompson.
Prep School Composition Project Irene Anderson Photography
Graham Piggott
Technical Assistance
Max White Harun Kotch
Lighting
Sam Routledge
Programme Design indigo-press.com Programme Notes
Luke Berryman
Director of Chamber Choir
Irene Anderson
Director of Chamber Orchestra
Heather Freemantle
Front of House
Hilary Smith Andy Gilbert
Music Administrator
Stacey Barnett
Music Staff
James Belassie Luke Berryman Irene Anderson Heather Freemantle
Visiting Music Teachers Michelle Allen Jane Andrews James Belassie Gill Bolton Lucy Braga Natasha Burns Graham Cleaver Caroline Clipsham Darrell Cox Andrew Daniels Elin Davis Roger Davison John Hanchett Jo Handy Harun Kotch Adam Lamprell Julie-Dawn Lloyd Richard Lyon
Simon Morgan Adrian Osman Gintaras Pamakstys Tamsin Rowlinson Sarah Salmon David Scott Claire Stocker Timothy Warren Diana Williams Paul Williams Fiona Willsher Andrew Worsfold
THANK YOU to the staff of Turner Sims for making us so welcome and finally to all KES students, staff and parents for their support this evening. 15 •
KES Forthcoming Music Events Wednesday 19th November 2014 8pm
Gala Concert trip, Turner Sims
Monday 15th December 2014 7.30pm
St Mary’s Church, Southampton Carol Service
Saturday 24th January 2015 7.30pm
KES Chamber Choir and HCYO Joint Concert Winchester Cathedral
February 2nd - 6th 2015
Open Instrumental Lesson week
Sunday 8th February 2015 10am
KES Musicians performing Education Sunday Service, Winchester Cathedral
Wednesday 11th February 2015 7.30pm Concert Dobson Theatre Monday 16th – 19 February 2015
A-Level Music and German trip to Vienna
Wednesday 18th March 2015 7.30pm
Concert Turner Sims
KING EDWARD VI SCHOOL Tel: 023 8079 9216 Wilton Road . Southampton . SO15 5UQ Email: enquiries@kes.hants.sch.uk www.kes.hants.sch.uk