Programme notes
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SESSION 1: STRINGS WEDNESDAY 15 JULY 7.30PM Elgar Serenade for Strings in E minor, Op. 20 Corelli Concerto Grosso in D, Op. 6 No. 1 Grieg Holberg Suite, Op. 40 Tonight’s concert journeys through two centuries of music written for string ensemble. At the turn of the 18th century, the Italian composer Arcangelo Corelli wrote a set of pieces for strings that would prove pivotal. Corelli didn’t set out to dazzle; rather to allow his instruments to sing out with elegance and concision. Corelli’s ‘Concerto Grosso’ also advanced new trends in ensemble writing that encouraged instruments or instrumental groups to double as soloists, varying the music’s textures in the process. In a sense, Edward Elgar’s aims were similar to Corelli’s, even though two centuries later the language of music was very different. Elgar’s Serenade includes feelings of wistfulness and undertones of loss, but still strives for a pleasantness of sound that comes from musical construction and an understanding of string instruments themselves. And Edvard Grieg’s Holberg Suite hails from less than ten years before Elgar’s work, even if its charming neo-Baroque footing would suggest it was far older.
Edward Elgar (1857–1934) Serenade for Strings in E minor, Op. 20 1 Allegro Piacevole 2 Larghetto 3 Allegretto Edward Elgar spent much of his early career working with non-professional musicians, directing various amateur ensembles – including one formed from the staff of the local asylum. It was for the Worcester Ladies’ Orchestra that Elgar wrote his Serenade for Strings in 1892, re-working musical material from up to four years earlier that had never made it off the cutting-room floor. ‘Pleasing’ or ‘agreeable’, implies the Piacevole title of the buoyant first movement. Listen out for the sustained rhythmic figure in the violas that lasts the course of the entire movement and serves as both an accompaniment and a theme. In the second movement Elgar appears at his distinctively noble and unmistakably English best as shapely, elegiac tunes sensitively overlap one another working towards a climax. But this climax has shades of the German music of Richard Wagner (perhaps this was a musical souvenir: Elgar had recently visited Wagner’s festival at Bayreuth). Wagner crops up in the last movement, too, in which the grace of the opening Piacevole prevails before Elgar references the Monsalvat Bells from the opera Parsifal in the work’s dying bars.
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Arcangelo Corelli (1653–1713) Concerto Grosso in D, Op. 6 No. 1 1 Largo — Allegro — Largo — Allegro 2 Largo — 3 Allegro 4 Allegro Arcangelo Corelli served as a musician to wealthy aristocrats and clergymen in Bologna and Rome. While most composers of the day wrote extensively for the voice, Corelli appears to have sung only through his violin. He matured while the ‘Bologna School’ of violin playing (known for technical finesse and tunefulness) was at its height and came to prominence when instrumental music was in need of new life and a new direction. Corelli did indeed find a new direction for instrumental music, but his was no revolution. This composer didn’t seek to dazzle, rather to allow his instruments to sing and provide pleasing progressions through concise melodies and pleasing harmonies. It was these things, together with his preference for clean textures and elegant solo playing, that helped spawn Corelli’s pivotal ‘Concerto Grosso’ collection labelled his Opus 6. Corelli pioneered the concerto grosso form, in which instruments or instrumental groups step out from within a conversational ensemble texture as soloists in their own right. This emancipating treatment of instruments within an ensemble would pave the way for concerto grosso sets by Vivaldi and Handel. The first concerto of Corelli’s 12-strong set, published in 1701, is written for a solo (‘concertino’) group of two violins and a cello. Those soloists are first heard in the second of the first movement’s four unrelated sections: after the 11-bar opening Largo, the two violins play in canon (deploying the same theme at staggered intervals) at the same pitch over an elaborate cello solo, forming the first Allegro section. After that there are similar passages of virtuosity from soloists and ensemble, while the music is characterised by a natural ease of texture that established Corelli as the concerto grosso’s pioneer.
Edvard Grieg (1843–1907) Holberg Suite, Op. 40 1 2 3 4 5
Praeludium (Allegro vivace) Sarabande (Andante) Gavotte and Musette (Allegretto) Air (Andante religioso) Rigaudon (Allegro con brio)
In 1884 Norway marked the bicentenary of the birth of Ludvig Holberg, a playwright and metaphysician who founded a school of Nordic drama that would prove hugely influential throughout Europe. Composer Edvard Grieg’s contributions to the celebrations included a cantata and a set of five pieces for piano that was consciously constructed as if ‘in Holberg’s time’. Holberg’s time was pretty much the same as Corelli’s: the late 1600s and early 1700s. Grieg used a keyboard suite by Corelli’s more famous contemporary Johann Sebastian Bach as the model for his piano pieces, which became known as the Holberg Suite in the version for string orchestra that the composer made shortly after finishing the piano score. The structures and textures echo the music of the Baroque but are coloured by Grieg’s very distinctive harmonic voice – a marriage of Classical precision to the emotional (and specifically harmonic) power of Romanticism, a useful summary of Grieg’s compositional language as a whole. Grieg referred to the piece as ‘periwigged’, but his own take on French Baroque dance-forms doesn’t feel in the least aristocratic or uptight. The Suite launches with an Allegro of bubbling vitality before a reflective and moving Sarabande. After the lilting Gavotte comes the melodically inspired Air – which is a clear tribute to Bach and his most famous ‘Air’– and finally a Rigaudon, a clipped dance that has the violins playing in the style of the Hardanger fiddle, Norway’s national folk instrument. It was in the town of Hardanger, in fact, that Grieg wrote the Suite between June and August of 1884. He conducted the first performance of the orchestral version on 13 March 1885 in Bergen, the city where both he and Holberg were born. Programme notes © Andrew Mellor
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TONIGHT’S MUSICIANS FIRST VIOLINS Pieter Schoeman Leader
Chair supported by Neil Westreich
Kate Oswin Minn Majoe Martin Höhmann Katalin Varnagy
Chair supported by Sonja Drexler
Thomas Eisner
Chair supported by the Chiltern Friends of the LPO
Yang Zhang
Chair supported by Eric Tomsett
Catherine Craig
SECOND VIOLINS Helena Smart Principal Fiona Higham
Chair supported by David & Yi Buckley
Joseph Maher Eriko Nagayama Nynke Hijlkema Ashley Stevens
CELLOS Pei-Jee Ng Principal Francis Bucknall Laura Donoghue David Lale DOUBLE BASSES Kevin Rundell Principal Sebastian Pennar Co-Principal
VIOLAS Richard Waters Principal Ting-Ru Lai Susanne Martens
Chair supported by Gill & Garf Collins
Benedetto Pollani The London Philharmonic Orchestra also acknowledges the following chair supporters whose players are not present: The Candide Trust Andrew Davenport William & Alex de Winton Donors to the 2019 Gala Player Appeal Friends of the Orchestra
Irina Gofman and Mr Rodrik V. G. Cave Roger Greenwood Dr Barry Grimaldi Countess Dominique Loredan Sir Simon Robey
Victoria Robey OBE Bianca & Stuart Roden Caroline, Jamie & Zander Sharp
NEXT SUMMER SESSIONS CONCERT SESSION 2: WINDS WEDNESDAY 29 JULY 7.30PM Rossini Sonata for Wind Quartet No. 1 in F major Mozart Serenade in E flat K375 Janáček Mládí
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