What's On in May by Melbourne Symphony Orchestra

CONCERT PROGRAM

M AY 2 0 1 9 ROMEO AND JULIET M OZ A R T SY M P H O N Y N O.2 9

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A N I G H T AT S E A

R O M A N C E A N D R H A P S O DY

Mozart's Requiem 20 J U N E , 7.30 P M | 2 2 J U N E , 2 P M

Arts Centre Melbourne HAMER HALL

Jaime MartÃn C O N D U C TO R

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B O O K N OW M S O.C O M . AU white

CONTENTS

05 10 18

THE MELBOURNE SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA Your MSO Guest musicians ROMEO AND JULIET Friday 10 May | 7.30pm Saturday 11 May | 7.30pm Monday 13 May | 6.30pm Arts Centre Melbourne, Hamer Hall

LUDOVIC MORLOT: A NIGHT AT SEA Thursday 16 May | 7.30pm Arts Centre Melbourne, Hamer Hall Friday 17 May | 7.30pm Costa Hall, Geelong

MOZART SYMPHONY NO.29 Wednesday 29 May | 7.30pm Melbourne Recital Centre Friday 31 May | 7.30pm Robert Blackwood Hall, Monash University

ROMANCE AND RHAPSODY Sunday 2 June | 11am Iwaki Auditorium, ABC Southbank Centre

In consideration of your fellow patrons, the MSO thanks you for silencing and dimming the light on your phone. Cover image: Christopher Moore. Credit: Ivan Kemp

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Our Artistic Family

Melbourne Symphony Orchestra Established in 1906, the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra (MSO) is an arts leader and Australiaâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s oldest professional orchestra. Chief Conductor Sir Andrew Davis has been at the helm of the MSO since 2013. Engaging more than four million people each year, the MSO reaches a variety of audiences through live performances, recordings, TV and radio broadcasts and live streaming.

The MSO performs a variety of concerts ranging from core classical performances at its home, Hamer Hall at Arts Centre Melbourne, to its annual free concerts at Melbourneâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s largest outdoor venue, the Sidney Myer Music Bowl. The MSO also delivers innovative and engaging programs and digital tools to audiences of all ages through its Education and Outreach initiatives.

As a truly global orchestra, the MSO collaborates with guest artists and arts organisations from across the world. Its international audiences include the USA, where the MSO will tour in October 2019, China (2012, 2016 & 2018), Europe (2014 & 2020) and Indonesia, where in 2017 it performed at the UNESCO World Heritage Site, Prambanan Temple.

The Melbourne Symphony Orchestra acknowledges the Traditional Owners of the Land on which we perform and would like to pay our respects to their Elders and Community both past and present.

Your MSO

Sir Andrew Davis Chief Conductor

Benjamin Northey Associate Conductor

Tianyi Lu

Cybec Assistant Conductor

Hiroyuki Iwaki

Conductor Laureate (1974–2006)

FIRST VIOLINS Dale Barltrop Concertmaster

Sophie Rowell

Concertmaster The Ullmer Family Foundation#

Peter Edwards

Assistant Principal

Kirsty Bremner Sarah Curro

Michael Aquilina#

Peter Fellin Deborah Goodall Lorraine Hook Anne-Marie Johnson* Kirstin Kenny Ji Won Kim Eleanor Mancini Chisholm & Gamon#

Mark Mogilevski Michelle Ruffolo Kathryn Taylor Michael Aquilina

SECOND VIOLINS

CELLOS

Matthew Tomkins

David Berlin

Robert Macindoe

Rachael Tobin

Monica Curro

Nicholas Bochner

Principal The Gross Foundation# Associate Principal

Assistant Principal Danny Gorog and Lindy Susskind#

Mary Allison Isin Cakmakcioglu Tiffany Cheng Freya Franzen Cong Gu Andrew Hall Isy Wasserman Philippa West Patrick Wong Roger Young VIOLAS Christopher Moore

Principal MS Newman Family# Associate Principal Assistant Principal Anonymous*

Miranda Brockman

Geelong Friends of the MSO#

Rohan de Korte

Andrew Dudgeon#

Keith Johnson Sarah Morse Angela Sargeant Maria Solà#

Michelle Wood

Michael Aquilina# Andrew and Theresa Dyer#

DOUBLE BASSES Steve Reeves Principal

Principal Di Jameson#

Andrew Moon

Lauren Brigden Katharine Brockman Christopher Cartlidge

Sylvia Hosking

Michael Aquilina#

Anthony Chataway

Dr Elizabeth E Lewis AM#

Gabrielle Halloran Maria Solà#

Trevor Jones Fiona Sargeant Cindy Watkin Elizabeth Woolnough

Associate Principal Assistant Principal

Damien Eckersley Benjamin Hanlon Suzanne Lee Stephen Newton Sophie Galaise and Clarence Fraser#

FLUTES Prudence Davis Principal Anonymous#

Wendy Clarke

Associate Principal

Sarah Beggs

Sophia Yong-Tang#

Your MSO

PICCOLO Andrew Macleod

HORNS

PERCUSSION

Nicolas Fleury

Robert Clarke

Saul Lewis

John Arcaro

Abbey Edlin

Robert Cossom

Trinette McClimont Rachel Shaw

HARP

Principal John McKay and Lois McKay#

Principal

OBOES

Principal Third

Jeffrey Crellin

Nereda Hanlon and Michael Hanlon AM#

Principal

Thomas Hutchinson Associate Principal

Ann Blackburn

The Rosemary Norman Foundation#

COR ANGLAIS

TRUMPETS

CLARINETS

William Evans Rosie Turner

David Thomas

Philip Arkinstall

Associate Principal

TROMBONES Brett Kelly

BASS CLARINET

Tim and Lyn Edward#

Richard Shirley

Jon Craven

Mike Szabo

Principal

Principal Bass Trombone

BASSOONS

TUBA

Elise Millman

Associate Principal

Natasha Thomas CONTRABASSOON

Principal

John and Diana Frew#

Principal

Jack Schiller

Yinuo Mu

Associate Principal

Craig Hill

Principal

Drs Clem Gruen and Rhyl Wade#

Principal

Shane Hooton

Principal

Tim and Lyn Edward#

Owen Morris

Michael Pisani

Principal

Timothy Buzbee

Principal

TIMPANI** Christopher Lane

Principal

Brock Imison Principal

# Position supported by ** Timpani Chair position supported by Lady Potter AC CMRI * Acting Assistant Concertmaster, Romeo and Juliet | 10â&#x20AC;&#x201C;13 May

Guest Musicians

Guest Musicians ROMEO AND JULIET | 10–13 May Aaron Barnden

Mee Na Lojewski

William Tanner

Jose Luis Tochon Quintero

Rohan Dasika

Tristan Rebien

Oksana Thompson

Vivian Qu Siyuan

Liam O’Malley*

Nicholas Waters

Esther Toh

Timothy Hook

William Clark

Taryn Clarke

Leah Scholes

Ceridwen Davies

Rachel Bullen

Melina van Leeuwen

Helen Ireland

Rachel Curkpatrick

Louisa Breen

Isabel Morse

Christopher Haycroft

Luke Carbon

Zoe Knighton

Ian Wildsmith

violin violin violin violin viola viola viola viola cello

cello

double bass double bass double bass

associate principal flute associate principal oboe oboe

bassoon

horn

associate principal trumpet principal trombone percussion percussion harp

piano/celeste

tenor saxophone

principal third horn

LUDOVIC MORLOT: A NIGHT AT SEA | 16–17 May Aaron Barnden

Isabel Morse

Ian Wildsmith

Zoe Black

Rebecca Proietto

Tristan Rebien

Madeleine Jevons

Rohan Dasika

Sophie Spencer

Oksana Thompson

Vivian Qu Siyuan

Don Immel

Nicholas Waters

Paula Rae

Bronwyn Wallis

William Clark

Huw Jones^

Leigh Harrold

Ceridwen Davies

Emmanuel Cassimatis

violin violin violin violin violin viola viola

viola cello

double bass double bass

associate principal flute principal oboe

principal third horn associate principal trumpet trumpet

associate principal trombone harp

celeste

oboe

MOZART SYMPHONY NO.29 | 29–31 May Harry Bennetts

Nicholas Waters

Vivian Qu Siyuan

Zoe Black

Aaron Barnden

Emmanuel Cassimatis

Madeleine Jevons

Isabel Morse

Michael Loftus-Hills

Katie Yap

assistant concertmaster violin violin violin

violin violin viola viola

Information correct as of 1 May 2019 ^ Appears courtesy of Queensland Symphony Orchestra * Appears courtesy of West Australian Orchestra

double bass oboe

Romeo & Juliet 10 May 2019 | 7.30pm 11 May 2019 | 7.30pm 13 May 2019 | 6.30pm Arts Centre Melbourne, Hamer Hall Melbourne Symphony Orchestra Stanislav Kochanovsky conductor Yulianna Avdeeva piano MUSSORGSKY Night on Bald Mountain [12'] CHOPIN Piano Concerto No.1

[39']

â&#x20AC;&#x201D; INTERVAL â&#x20AC;&#x201D; PROKOFIEV Romeo and Juliet: excerpts

[52']

Running time: approximately 2 hours and 30 minutes including a 20 minute interval. Timings listed are approximate. Pre-concert talk: 10 & 11 May at 6.15pm, Hamer Hall. Learn more about the performance at a pre-concert presentation with MSO Artistic Coordinator, Michael Williamson. Post-concert conversation: 13 May following performance, Hamer Hall Stalls Foyer. Join composer and ABC Classic producer, Andrew Aronowicz, for a conversation about the performance.

ROMEO & JULIET | 10–13 May

Stanislav Kochanovsky

Yulianna Avdeeva

Stanislav Kochanovsky was born in St. Petersburg and graduated with honours from the Rimsky-Korsakov Conservatoire. From 2010 to 2015 he was Principal Conductor of the State Safonov Philharmonic Orchestra, and since 2012 has worked in close partnership with Moscow’s State Academic Symphony Orchestra Yevgeny Svetlanov.

Yulianna Avdeeva gained international recognition when she won First Prize in the Chopin Competition in 2010. She has since performed at the Salzburg Festival, Lucerne Festival, toured Germany with the Academy of St Martin in the Fields, and appeared with the Berlin Radio Symphony Orchestra, Royal Stockholm Philharmonic, Finnish Radio Symphony Orchestra, London Philharmonic, Tchaikovsky Symphony Orchestra of Moscow Radio, Orchestra dell’Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia, Orchestre symphonique de Montréal and Orchestre National de Lyon.

conductor

Stanislav Kochanovsky has recently conducted the Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia, made his London debut with the Philharmonia, and conducted the Moscow Philharmonic, Netherlands Radio Philharmonic, and Malaysian Philharmonic among others. Following his debut at the Verbier Festival in 2017, he returned in 2018 and will again return in 2019 to conduct The Magic Flute in concert. Recent opera engagements have included The Queen of Spades and Eugene Onegin (Zurich), Prince Igor (Dutch National Opera) and Boris Godunov (Korean National Opera). Stanislav Kochanovsky has a strong interest in rarely-performed works, such as Ligeti’s Requiem, and works by living composers such as Rolf Martinsson, heard here in 2017.

piano

She is a regular performer throughout the Asia-Pacific region, having performed with the Hong Kong Philharmonic Orchestra, New Japan Philharmonic, Tokyo’s NHK Symphony Orchestra, and toured Japan with both the Bamberger Symphoniker and Deutsches SymphonieOrchester. After her concerts in Australia she performs the Tchaikovsky Piano Concerto No.1 with the Los Angeles Philharmonic, gives a Chopin recital in St. Petersburg and appears at the Istanbul Music Festival, among other appearances. Recordings include a Bach recital in 2017.

ROMEO & JULIET | 10–13 May

Program Notes MODEST MUSSORGSKY

(1839–1881)

Night on Bald Mountain (1867 original version) Spoiler alert. Be prepared for an audible gasp of surprise at the end of Night on Bald Mountain. Chances are, you know Mussorgsky’s music in the more familiar reworking by Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, your memory enhanced by powerful imagery from Disney’s Fantasia. In the last few minutes of that version, church bells interrupt the demonic orgy, dispersing the spirits of darkness (Disney’s Chernabog flinches atop his mountain peak), and serene clarinet and flute solos welcome the dawn. But Mussorgsky’s original version rushes to its conclusion, the tumult abruptly silenced by a thud from the bass drum. No church bells, no sunrise.1 Yet Mussorgsky’s original Night on Bald Mountain (strictly speaking, St John’s Night on Bald Mountain) is in no way unfinished. His annotation at the end of the manuscript is clear: ‘Began to write for orchestra 12 June 1867, finished the work on St John’s Day, 23 June 1867…’ And his dramatic outline at the beginning matches what you’ll hear: 1. Assembly of the witches, their chatter and gossip 2. Cortège of Satan 3. Black mass 4. Sabbat

Furthermore, Mussorgsky was delighted with the result. It was ‘Russian and original’ – true to his vision of ‘artistic verity’ and ‘free from German profundity and academic routine’. It was his first major orchestral work and a technical achievement, despite his jokes about ‘sinful pranks’ that would see him ‘sentenced to the conservatorium’.

When his teacher and mentor Mily Balakirev rejected it as ‘rubbish’ and refused to program it without significant amendments, Mussorgsky replied: ‘Whether or not you agree, my friend, to put on my “witches”, that is, whether or not I ever hear them, I will change nothing in the general plan or in my treatment of the material…’ Mussorgsky never did get to hear his witches and he left the original tone picture as it stood, but the subject matter and musical ideas continued to stir his imagination. Two operatic versions followed, the second intended for inclusion in The Fair at Sorochintsy, after Gogol. No matter that the witches scenario occurs nowhere in Gogol’s story – Mussorgsky simply has a peasant boy, Gritzko, dream the whole thing. And Gritzko wakes from his nightmare to the sound of bells, for which Mussorgsky wrote a new ending. This last version survives in draft form (written out for chorus, bass and piano duet) and, significantly, as the principal source for Rimsky-Korsakov’s radical recomposition. The original orchestral Night on Bald Mountain was subsequently lost until 1933 and remained unpublished until 1968. (The first performance by an ABC orchestra had to wait until 1985.) Only in this century have conductors taken up Mussorgsky’s version with the enthusiasm it deserves, partly because his musical legacy has long been coloured by his lingering reputation as an idiosyncratic and ‘unschooled’ composer. Everyone thought they could improve on him. Rimsky-Korsakov’s intentions were good: he wanted his friend’s music – so original and ‘alive’ – not to gather dust but to be performed. In reworking Bald Mountain from the two extant sources, he took everything he ‘considered the best and most appropriate out of the late composer’s remaining materials to

In his Night on Bald Mountain Mussorgsky brings all his originality to the ribald subject matter, portraying the ‘stark naked, barbarous and filthy’ witches in their glorification of Satan. The music avoids conventional symphonic structures, instead following the narrative, as musical ideas are varied and regrouped in a process of continuous development. The motifs themselves imitate the witches in their chattering gossip, their procession and their orgiastic dancing. The apparent lack of a coherent plan reflects the hysteria and frenzy of the scene. Mussorgsky’s orchestral effects are bold. He’s fond of deploying contrasting blocks of sound from the orchestra: woodwinds, brass, strings. He emphasises the darker, middle registers in the ensemble, often giving preference to the violas as well as low clarinet and bassoon. Crude harmonies and startling colours convey the repulsiveness of the mountaintop ritual. The tone, he says, is ‘hot and chaotic’. The original version of Night on Bald Mountain is not only visceral and exciting in its own right, it’s Mussorgsky. Yvonne Frindle © 2019 The original Night on Bald Mountain calls for piccolo and pairs of flutes, clarinets, oboes and bassoons; four horns, pairs of cornets and trumpets, three trombones and tuba; timpani, percussion (triangle, tambourine, tenor drum, cymbals, bass drum and tam-tam) and strings. (Rimsky-Korsakov’s version omits the cornets and some of the percussion, while adding tubular bells and harp for his ‘daybreak’ conclusion.)

The MSO first performed Rimsky-Korsakov’s arrangement of Night on Bald Mountain in 1944 under conductor Lionel Lawson and most recently in June 2016 with Diego Matheuz. The only performance of the original version by the MSO was conducted by Marcus Stenz in June 1998.

FRÉDÉRIC CHOPIN

(1810–1849)

Piano Concerto No.1 in E minor, Op.11 Allegro maestoso

ROMEO & JULIET | 10–13 May

give coherence and wholeness to this work’. But he also smoothed things out, softening dramatic effects, and changed the colour and expression. He seems to have forgotten telling Mussorgsky 20 years earlier that ‘harmonic and melodic filth’ was not only permissible but fitting to the subject matter! And the familiar result is not Mussorgsky. The peculiarities and so-called technical flaws, it turns out, are essential to Mussorgsky’s style and personality.

Romanze (Larghetto) – Rondo (Vivace) The notion that Chopin’s distinctive musical style emerged only after departing his native Poland can be countered easily by an assessment of his early music. These works, mostly in the virtuosic brillant style, include the composer’s two piano concertos, both of which feature his characteristic gift for melody, premiered in his 21st year. Following delays in publishing the F minor concerto, the Concerto in E minor was designated his ‘first’ despite its slightly later date of composition. Chopin gave the premiere performance in Warsaw on 11 October 1830, and a review in the Kurier warszawski heralded it as ‘one of the most sublime of all musical works’. Unlike the earlier concerto, it became something of a warhorse for the composer as he established his concert career, and a series of notable performances in Paris, beginning in 1831, led to his great renown. Despite their enduring popularity, both concertos have been the subject of immense scholarly criticism, especially the Concerto in E minor, with its unorthodox tonal scheme. Yet with increased inquiry into the works of neglected contemporaries, such as Ferdinand Ries and Ignaz Moscheles, many features once derided have emerged as more commonplace. Even the often criticised simplicity of the orchestral accompaniment reflects

ROMEO & JULIET | 10–13 May 14

a practicality, as, in the absence of an orchestra, travelling virtuosos typically would transform their concerto into a solo, or adapt it for a smaller chamber group, as Chopin on occasion was known to do.

patterns and pizzicatos in the strings lends the music its distinctive national character. In the swirling coda, torrents of notes race headlong across the keyboard, providing the concerto (and audiences!) with a dazzling conclusion.

The first movement is a substantial structure which adheres to tradition through use of the tripartite ‘sonata’ form, albeit with the standard orchestral introduction. The soloist’s many virtuosic episodes are conventional features of the stile brillant, and the manner in which they delineate the movement leads subsequent lyrical statements to appear as tranquil oases, respites from frenetic passagework.

Scott Davie © 2017 The Melbourne Symphony Orchestra first performed this concerto on 30 August 1941 with conductor Percy Code and soloist Ignaz Friedman, and most recently in May 2005 with Christopher Seaman and Ewa Kupiec.

SERGEI PROKOFIEV

(1891–1953)

Romeo and Juliet: excerpts from the ballet, Op.64

The second movement, by contrast, is structurally more innovative, with the soloist initially given three exquisitely luminous themes, the third taking the form of a duet with bassoon. After a return to the opening melody, the music moves to the darker minor tonality, which prompts a new, more impassioned theme. A recapitulation of the bassoon duet calms the mood, although the music by now has reached a tonally distant point, and a series of delicate, sphinx-like arpeggiated chords is required for the soloist to navigate an expedient return to the opening theme, now assigned to the strings and accompanied by filigree arabesques.

The Duke’s Command (Act I, No.7)

The F minor concerto concludes with a mazurka, and Chopin references another Polish dance in the final movement here, the krakowiak. While entitled ‘rondo’, the movement is actually a large-scale binary structure (A-B-A-B). Yet as the main thematic area includes various restatements of the principal melody interspersed with brief orchestral tuttis, the fundamentally repetitive nature of the rondo is retained. The soloist’s melodies are stated in ornamented octaves in the contrasting secondary sections, where an accompaniment of repeated-note

Act II Finale (Act II, No.36)

Introduction to Act I (Act I, No.1) The Quarrel (Act I, No.5) The Fight (Act I, No.6) The Young Juliet (Act I, No.10) Dance of the Knights (Act I, No.13) Balcony Scene (Act I, No.19) Romeo’s Variation (Act I, No.20) Love Dance (Act I, No.21) Meeting of Tybalt and Mercutio (Act II, No.32) The Duel (Act II, No.33) Romeo decides to avenge Mercutio (Act II, No.35) Juliet’s Room (Act III, No.46) Juliet Alone (Act III, No.47) Juliet’s Funeral (Act IV, No.51) Juliet’s Death (Act IV, No.52) Between 1932 and 1936 Prokofiev spent increasingly long periods back in the USSR, which he had left to further his career abroad in 1918. By 1936 he and his family had settled again in Moscow, though on the ‘understanding’ that Prokofiev would still be at liberty to pursue his international career. Opinions

Aware that the Soviet system had created a vast new, but largely inexperienced, audience for classical music, he said in an interview with Isvestia in 1934 that what the USSR needed was ‘light serious’ – or ‘serious light’ – music; it is by no means easy to find the term which suits it. Above all, it must be tuneful, simply and comprehensively tuneful, and must not be repetitious or stamped with triviality. Sadly, many of his first attempts to write for the new Soviet man and woman were derided as ‘simplistic’ or, at the same time, ‘formalist’ (Soviet-speak for ‘nasty and modern’). Indeed, within two years he wrote in a speech (which he fortunately never delivered or published) that ‘Soviet art, despite its enormous breadth, is declining in quality [because] the official directive concerning the struggle against formalism has been carried out too zealously.’ Certain works, however, achieved the ideal of ‘lightserious’ music. Peter and the Wolf and the score for Sergei Eisenstein’s film of Alexander Nevsky ensured a precarious period of grace for the composer at

the end of the 1930s, and these have remained in the repertoire in- and outside of Russia ever since. The greatest among these is Romeo and Juliet, yet it had a difficult and protracted birth. Leningrad’s Kirov Theatre rejected the initial proposal because of the story’s tragic ending but Prokofiev’s friend, theatre director Sergei Radlov, suggested a happy conclusion in which the lovers avoid death. This, he argued, would make it ‘a play about the struggle for the right to love by young, strong progressive people battling against feudal traditions and feudal outlooks on marriage’ and thus a perfect piece of optimistic Socialist Realism. In Radlov’s version, Friar Laurence intervenes at the crucial moment to prevent the grief-stricken Romeo committing suicide over what he takes to be the dead body of Juliet. There is general, though restrained, rejoicing. As recent research by scholar Simon Morrison in his book The People’s Artist has shown, the happy ending was also attractive to Prokofiev for religious reasons. With his wife, he had begun practising Christian Science in the 1920s, and accepted that Good ‘will necessarily triumph over the finite and temporary phenomenon of evil’; the new version of Romeo and Juliet would demonstrate that as a kind of parable. There remained people to convince, however. Moscow’s Bolshoi Theatre had taken over the commission for the work, planning to premiere it in the 1935–6 season; while the haggling over the ending went on, the premiere was rescheduled for the following year. Play-throughs of the score in Moscow had failed to enthuse bureaucrats, dancers or audiences, but according to Prokofiev, it was one comment, ‘your music doesn’t express any real joy at the end’, that led him to reconsider the tragic ending and find a way to express it in music that could be choreographed. In the meantime, however, the artistic

ROMEO & JULIET | 10–13 May

vary as to why the composer chose to return at the height of Stalin’s Great Terror: to some he was simply a political naïve who had no conception of the reality of daily life in Stalin’s Russia; to others it was evidence that Prokofiev knew that his only serious rival within Russia, Shostakovich, was under a cloud, while in Europe and the USA, Rachmaninov and Stravinsky had the Russian émigré composer market sewn up. We do know that Prokofiev had been given to understand that, should he not make his home permanently in Russia, he would be less welcome as a visitor in the future; he had also been offered a large number of very attractive commissions, one of which was to make a ballet of Romeo and Juliet.

ROMEO & JULIET | 10–13 May 16

directorate of the Bolshoi fell foul of Stalin’s purges, and the artistic director was arrested and shot. The ballet was quietly shelved. At the same time, works Prokofiev composed for the celebrations of Pushkin’s centenary and the twentieth anniversary of the Revolution failed to find favour. The premiere of Romeo and Juliet, eventually but successfully, was given in Brno, in the then Czechoslovakia in 1938, at which time the Kirov Theatre in Leningrad offered to give the Russian premiere in January 1940. There was what Morrison calls a considerable amount of ‘vandalism’ by the Kirov people – unbeknown to the composer until the actual Leningrad performance. Choreographer Leonid Lavrovsky made some unauthorised wholesale changes to the scenario and score, and then bullied Prokofiev into making further cuts and additions. Then there were the dancers, who were, as Galina Ulanova, who danced Juliet, later observed, ‘a little afraid’ of the music; its strangeness meant that they ‘couldn’t hear that love [of Romeo and Juliet] in his music then’. The composer was actually very accommodating, subtly changing orchestrations to be heard more clearly by the dancers on stage, for instance, and he reported to a friend that ‘after 15 curtain calls’ at the Leningrad premiere, some of the dancers felt the work ‘might be acceptable after all’. Fortunately, the regime felt that the work was acceptable after all, too (shortly afterwards Stalin issued a memo approving a performance in Moscow), and it ushered in a period of favour and popularity, producing works like the Flute (or Violin) Sonata in D and the Fifth Symphony. The dancers’ initial bafflement seems odd now. Musicologist Stephen Walsh calls the ballet a ‘brilliant fusion of post-Imperial romanticism and scuttling, unpredictable Prokofievism’. The score is notable for its clarity of orchestration

– not that this precludes moments of great opulence, such as the pile-up of sonority in The Duke’s Command which presages the tragic events about to unfold, or the multi divisi strings which give the young lovers a halo of rich sound. But quite simply, the score offers clear contrasts between the implacable march of tragic fate in those passages built on repeated ostinato figures and the more rhapsodic soaring passages associated with love, and the worlds of public life and private intimacy. Prokofiev’s chararacterisation is masterful, where he depicts the arrogance of the Capulets at their ball (Dance of the Knights) or the tenderness of Juliet herself, and his theme for each character is immediately recognisable when it appears in a new context. Tonight’s selection includes the uncompromisingly brutal music which accompanies Romeo’s furious killing of Tybalt in revenge for the death of his friend Mercutio. In one of the most dramatic moments in the ballet, brilliant rapid passages describe the antagonism of the duel; the full orchestra, with timpani, accompanies Tybalt’s funeral procession. The ballet’s final act features music of heartbreaking intensity: Juliet awakes in the tomb where she has been laid and finds Romeo’s lifeless body. In despair she takes his dagger and stabs herself, the music clearly portraying the fatal blow. Adapted from a note by Gordon Kerry © 2005/10 The Melbourne Symphony Orchestra performed Suite No.1 from Prokofiev’s Romeo and Juliet on 17 October 1940 with conductor Georg Schnéevoigt. It was the Orchestra’s first performance of any selections from the ballet. The MSO most recently performed excerpts from the three suites in June 2016 under Diego Matheuz.

THE MSO IS FOR

EVERYONE

In 2017 the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra became the first Australian orchestra to put on a relaxed performance. With elements such as adjusted lighting and sound, and a chill-out zone with sensory-friendly toys and specially trained staff, many children, their carers and families were able to enjoy a live concert for the very first time.

For many families caring for someone with autism, a disability, or a sensory sensitivity, opportunities the whole family can enjoy are limited and cost can be a barrier. The MSO strives to make these concerts as affordable as possible, but we need your help to enable us to create and put on these special performances.

The MSO is committed to offering worldclass musical experiences that are accessible to everyone. This year we will perform two relaxed concerts – Carnival of Dangerous Creatures, a sonic safari through the worlds of Matthew Hindson’s Dangerous Creatures and Saint-Saens’ Carnival of the Animals, specially designed for young people and their families; and, an MSO Relaxed Chamber Concert, exploring chamber music greats for older children and adults.

If you are enjoying today’s concert, please consider giving the gift of music to someone who might not otherwise have the chance to experience a live orchestral performance. Donate to the MSO today at mso.com.au/give. “ Your concert allowed me to bring my whole self to the show, to be as Autistic as I needed to be. It felt so good to be myself and watch a concert live.” – concert-goer at the MSO’s relaxed performance of Pixar in Concert

A Night at Sea 16 May 2019 | 7.30pm Arts Centre Melbourne, Hamer Hall

17 May 2019 | 7.30pm Costa Hall, Geelong Melbourne Symphony Orchestra Ludovic Morlot conductor LIADOV The Enchanted Lake SIBELIUS The Oceanides

[7'] [10']

BRITTEN Four Sea Interludes from Peter Grimes [16'] — INTERVAL — DALBAVIE La Source d’un regard [16'] DEBUSSY La Mer [23']

Running time: approximately one hour and 50 minutes including a 20 minute interval. Timings listed are approximate. Pre-concert talk: 16 May at 6.15pm, Hamer Hall & 17 May at 6.30pm, Costa Hall. Learn more about the performance at a pre-concert presentation with ABC Classic producer, Andrew Aronowicz.

ANATOL LIADOV

(1855–1914)

The Enchanted Lake, Op.62

Ludovic Morlot conductor

French conductor Ludovic Morlot has been Music Director of the Seattle Symphony since 2011. During his tenure the orchestra has won two Grammy Awards. Notable recordings include a boxed-set of the music of Henri Dutilleux to mark Dutilleux’s centenary and a January release of music of Berlioz, Ravel and John Adams’ orchestration of Debussy (Le Livre de Baudelaire). Morlot’s 2018-19 season includes guest engagements with the Houston, Detroit, and Bamberg Symphony Orchestras, and the Netherlands Radio, BBC and Bergen Philharmonic Orchestras. Summer 2018 engagements included the BBC Proms, Edinburgh Festival, Caramoor Festival, Hollywood Bowl and Aspen Music Festival, where he is a regular guest. Recent debuts have included the Berlin Philharmonic. Morlot was Chief Conductor of Belgium’s La Monnaie (2012–14) where he conducted operas such as La clemenza di Tito, Jenůfa and Pelléas et Mélisande. Committed to new work, he conducted the world premiere of Caroline Shaw’s Piano Concerto in February.

It would be fair to say that Anatol Liadov is better known for his laziness than for his music. A pupil of Rimsky-Korsakov at the St Petersburg Conservatory, he was expelled from the diploma class because of his failure to attend. There are no large works in his output: he was by nature a writer of miniatures. Towards the end of his life he was commissioned by the impresario Sergei Diaghilev to write the music for a new ballet, to be called The Firebird, but did very little work on it. This indolence led to Stravinsky being given the commission and, as a result, attaining his first major public success. Stravinsky later described Liadov as ‘a darling man, as sweet and charming as his own A Musical Snuffbox’. That little piano piece is still his most famous work.

A NIGHT AT SEA | 16–17 May

Program Notes

The emblematic work of Liadov’s life was the opera Zoriushka, which he began to compose in 1879 and was still writing in 1909. The story concerns a princess who falls under the spell of some water nymphs and is rescued by her betrothed, who, while hacking his way through dense forest, sets the dry woods on fire with his sword. Initially the subject, with its possibilities for combining the idioms of Russian fantasy opera and Wagnerian nature music, appealed greatly to the composer. But Liadov’s first librettist lost interest in it; and two librettists later, Liadov had still to complete any major portions of it. The material he did finish found its way into his slender catalogue of orchestral music, including Kikimora, Baba-Yaga, and probably even his Eight Russian Folk-Songs. 19

A NIGHT AT SEA | 16–17 May

The Enchanted Lake (1909) is perhaps the most beautifully poised of all the music to have been salvaged from this opera. Meant to depict the lake inhabited by the water nymphs, its shimmering sound world reveals Liadov’s fine ear for orchestral colour. Yet the piece has many of the qualities we associate with the music of the impressionists, not least a serene textural transparency and a debt to Wagnerian chromaticism. Its atmosphere of mystery and magic is established at the outset by muted strings divided into nine parts, and there is great freedom of movement between keys. The Enchanted Lake is one of the most seductive pieces of tone painting in all of Russian music. Phillip Sametz © 1997 The MSO first performed The Enchanted Lake on 10 November 1945 under Joseph Post, and most recently in November 2010 with Tadaaki Otaka.

JEAN SIBELIUS

(1865–1957)

The Oceanides, Op.73 However consciously, the string quartet Voces intimae (1909), the Fourth Symphony (1911) and the tone poems The Bard (1913–14) and Luonnotar (1913) form a cycle of intense introspection Sibelius was not to emulate in any of his other instrumental works. It might be said that, collectively, this is the coldest of Sibelius’ music and that the thaw begins with The Oceanides. Indeed his friend and patron Axel Carpelan wrote to him at this time: ‘I have always thought that pain would reach you in the end and that from its furnaces, a greater, nobler and more beautiful Sibelius would emerge.’ This is one of those rare Sibelius works that looks not to Finnish mythology for inspiration but to the legends of the South: the river nymphs of Homer’s poetry known as the Oceanides. 20

Early in 1914, as he began work on the piece, Sibelius took one of his regular

pilgrimages to Berlin, where he made it his business to hear a lot of new music. Many of the novelties of the day left him cold, but he was genuinely delighted by a piano recital given by Rudolf Ganz, which included Debussy’s L’Isle joyeuse. Sibelius, a student of mythologies, would have been well aware that this work was inspired by Watteau’s painting L’Embarquement pour Cythère. That the music impressed Sibelius, we know; that it helped inspire The Oceanides is a tantalising possibility. Sibelius created The Oceanides on commission from American businessman and philanthropist Carl Stoeckel, for performance at his Norfolk Festival in Connecticut. But the piece as we know it today is the result of revisions made on Sibelius’ Atlantic crossing, on his way to the Festival. On board ship, he wrote in his diary: ‘It is as if I find more and more of myself…there are places that make me go mad. What poetry!!!’ And he told Carpelan: ‘The ocean has really inspired me.’ When he translated the title into Finnish for publication he called it Aallottaret or Spirits of the Waves. (Actually, the work is based on a three-movement suite Sibelius began composing in 1913 under a different title, Rondo der Wellen, some material from which also, subsequently, found its way into his piano piece To Longing.) The Oceanides has been called Sibelius’ most impressionistic work; as far as orchestral colouring is concerned, that is true only for about the first third of its duration. Flutes and harps dominate a diaphanous soundscape, while the string figures are frequently onomatopoeic. But the texture gradually thickens, glinting with hide-and-seek recurrences of the main melodic material, before the mood darkens dramatically and the sunlight is banished by a tremendous ocean swell; a brief conclusion, recalling the opening, suggests calm and clarity.

BENJAMIN BRITTEN

(1913–1976)

Four Sea Interludes from Peter Grimes, Op.33a Dawn (Act I) Sunday Morning (Act II) Moonlight (Act III) Storm (Act I) His first full-scale opera, it was Peter Grimes which made Britten’s name as a musical dramatist of the highest order. Britten and Peter Pears were visiting California in 1941 when Pears bought a copy of the works of poet George Crabbe – like Britten, a native of Suffolk. However it was an article in The Listener by E.M. Forster, ‘George Crabbe: the Poet and the Man’, with its evocations of England’s east coast, which first prompted the pair’s interest in Crabbe’s poem The Borough upon which Peter Grimes is based. With financial assistance from the Koussevitzky Foundation, Britten and Pears began to sketch out a scenario for Peter Grimes before leaving America in 1942. They fleshed it out aboard ship, and on arrival home in England called in a librettist to write the words. Britten began to compose the music in January 1944. In June 1945, Sadlers Wells decided to reopen their North London theatre with this work, and it was premiered there on 7 June of that year.

Britten was fascinated by the sea, and particularly his native coast. He once wrote: ‘My parents’ house in Lowestoft directly faced the sea, and my life as a child was coloured by the fierce storms that sometimes drove ships on our coast and ate away whole stretches of neighbouring cliffs.’ But The Borough didn’t just provide Britten with opportunities for musical portrayal of the forces of nature. Britten and Pears found something to sympathise with in the human drama of the protagonist and his isolation from his community.

A NIGHT AT SEA | 16–17 May

Despite the change in colour which anticipates the ‘great wave’ section, the piece develops in an organic fashion; Sibelius is less interested in savouring each moment than he is in placing his main melodic ideas (his Oceanides, perhaps) in an evolving series of musical surroundings.

In Peter Grimes, the orchestral writing is particularly substantial. The Four Sea Interludes, entr’actes or preludes in the opera, are effective concert pieces. Although they comprise some of the most effective portrayals of the sea in all of orchestral literature, they are also riven with the emotion which makes Grimes a very human drama. Dawn appears in Act I, after the Prologue’s coronial inquest has established that Grimes cannot be held culpable for the death by drowning of his young apprentice. The high flutes and violins suggest almost uncannily the cold glassy greyness of the sea, or of a deserted beach; the swirl of harp, clarinets and violas an encroaching wave; while a brass chorale suggests the swell with even, at one point, a note of menace. The tolling of Sunday morning church bells is rendered most effectively by the overlapping clashing pairs of French Horns in Sunday Morning, the beginning of Act II in the opera. Onstage, the repose of Moonlight is ironic. Another of Grimes’ apprentices has died by misadventure, and already the audience senses that Grimes is steering unavoidably towards tragedy. Arnold Whittall calls this ‘one of Britten’s most subtle nature scenes, a night-piece shot through with luminous shafts of moonlight’.

A NIGHT AT SEA | 16–17 May

Stage directors can founder on attempts to render a visual analogue to Britten’s highly effective Act I Storm; it is sometimes best to leave the curtain down. The storm here is also a mental storm, a musical postscript to Peter’s outpouring of anguish and lonely confusion in his account of events to one of his few friends, Balstrode. A minute or so of respite is granted by the violins’ recollection of the melody which in the opera accompanied Peter’s words ‘What harbour shelters peace?…What harbour can embrace terrors and tragedies?’, but the return of the storm snuffs out any hope of peace or happiness. Gordon Kalton Williams Symphony Australia © 1997/2008 The MSO’s first complete performance of the Four Sea Interludes took place on 27 July 1950, under conductor Henry Krips, and most recently under Sir Andrew Davis in August 2016.

MARC-ANDRÉ DALBAVIE

(born 1961)

La Source d’un regard

Marc-André Dalbavie was a student of Marius Constant at the Paris Conservatory (1980–86) and studied conducting with Pierre Boulez. He subsequently spent five years at the Institute for Research and Coordination in Acoustics/Music. In the early 1980s he became interested in spectral music, where the intrinsic properties of individual sounds – the overtones or partials produced by a low pitch, for instance – create musical ideas. The result is music concerned less with the organisation of pitch and rhythm into themes than with the creation of texture and colour, and harmony that is to be savoured for its own sake rather than as part of a goal-directed argument. In La Source d’un regard, Dalbavie cultivates what he calls ‘process polyphony’ where the implications of different spectral ideas are superimposed. Perhaps paradoxically this creates music that

behaves, in places, like more traditional works generating and dissipating tension. La Source d’un regard was composed in 2007 as a tribute piece to the late Olivier Messiaen, hence its title’s allusion to the latter’s Vingt Regards sur l’EnfantJésus. The ‘source’ of Dalbavie’s work is a four-note motif stated and restated emphatically after a quiet opening. The first three notes imply a stable consonance, only slightly undermined by the dissonance of the fourth: in a classical spectral technique, the strong articulation of the motif masks the sounding of the same notes much more quietly, which are sustained to produce a long-lasting echo. Dalbavie is essentially a melodist, so this process produces longer lines with acoustic haloes which are called to unison order by a glissando gesture on trombones. The first section elaborates this material, the melodic lines supported by increasingly intricate textures, which gives the impression of a very gradual acceleration. In fact, the latter section is genuinely fast, its momentum occasionally arrested by the eddies of sound where a trill or repeated motif seems to go out of phase with itself, bringing the music briefly to stillness. The implications of Dalbavie’s initial four-note unit become clear when the piece quotes the plainchant Puer natus est (Unto us a child is born), a melody close to the heart of the great French composer whom this piece celebrates. The Child is the source of les regards. Gordon Kerry © 2019 This is the first performance of this work by the MSO.

La Mer – Three Symphonic Sketches De l’aube à midi sur la mer (From Dawn to Noon on the Sea) Jeux de vagues (Play of Waves) Dialogue du vent et de la mer (Dialogue of the Wind and the Sea) La Mer’s greatness had by no means seemed self-evident when it first appeared in 1905. Debussy himself was weathering a personal scandal, having left his wife, and part of the lack of enthusiasm on the part of the Parisian public may stem from its disapproval. The first performance, too, was by all accounts under-rehearsed and the conductor, Camille Chevillard, unsympathetic to Debussy’s style. The critic Pierre Lalo complained that he could neither hear, see nor feel the sea, and a reviewer in Boston wrote: ‘We clung like a drowning man to a few fragments of the tonal wreck, a bit of theme here, a comprehensible figure there, but finally this muted-horn sea overwhelmed us.’ The point missed by these authors is that Debussy’s music is not intended as visual imagery, or the soundtrack to some imaginary film. Debussy may have invited such misinterpretations: in subtitling the work ‘Three Symphonic Sketches’ he evokes the media of visual art; moreover, he often used terms like ‘colour’ and ‘shading’ when discussing his music. But in 1903, when he began work on La Mer, Debussy wrote to a friend from the Burgundian countryside: You may not know that I was destined for a sailor’s life, and that only chance led me in another direction…You will say that the ocean does not exactly bathe the hills of Burgundy, and my seascapes may be studio landscapes, but I have an endless store of memories, and in my mind they

are worth more than reality, whose beauty often weighs heavily on the imagination. The work, then, is about the idea of the sea rather than being a representation of it; significantly, much of its composition took place away from the coast. Debussy’s genius for orchestration and subtle rhythmic organisation certainly make for an evocative work where it is possible to imagine the crash of waves, the call of seagulls and the movement of light on water. The final climax of the first movement, for instance, somehow creates a sense of emerging from the deep into the light.

A NIGHT AT SEA | 16–17 May

CLAUDE DEBUSSY

(1862–1918)

Other masterly touches abound: the unusual timbre of cellos divided into four parts; the use of muted horns (which Debussy admitted to taking from the music of Weber) to evoke space; the soloistic use of wind instruments and harp. But La Mer is as much ‘symphonic’ as it is ‘sketch’. Its three movements are by no means simply rhapsodic, but rather show Debussy’s subtle and careful approach to form. In the first movement his development of motifs is perfectly symphonic; the second movement is a symphonic scherzo; and the third movement – which has one of the rare ‘big finishes’ of any work by this composer – is a symphonic finale. By a nice paradox, Debussy’s musical reflection on the constant flux of the sea is achieved by the most painstaking and careful calculation. Not for nothing did the published score carry the intricately designed woodcut The Great Wave by the Japanese artist Hokusai. Abridged from a note by Gordon Kerry © 2005 The MSO first performed La Mer on 16 May 1942, with Sir Bernard Heinze conducting, and most recently in October 2017 with Otto Tausk.

Mozart Symphony No.29 29 May 2019 | 7.30pm Melbourne Recital Centre

31 May 2019 | 7.30pm Robert Blackwood Hall, Monash University Melbourne Symphony Orchestra Christopher Moore viola / director Stefan Cassomenos piano PÄRT Cantus in memoriam Benjamin Britten [6'] BRITTEN Rondo Concertante

[15']

BRITTEN Young Apollo [10'] — INTERVAL — MOZART Serenata notturna [14'] MOZART Symphony No.29

[28']

Running time: approximately one hour and 50 minutes including a 20 minute interval. Timings listed are approximate. Pre-concert talk: 29 May at 6.30pm, Elisabeth Murdoch Hall / 31 May at 6.30pm, Robert Blackwood Hall balcony foyer. Learn more about the performance at a pre-concert presentation with MSO Assistant Principal Second Violin, Monica Curro.

Stefan Cassomenos

After completing his Bachelor of Music at the University of Newcastle, Christopher played the violin with the Adelaide and New Zealand Symphony Orchestras and spent nine years travelling the globe as principal violist of the Australian Chamber Orchestra. As romantic as that sounds, he missed his old chums Mahler, Schoenberg and Adès, and so has returned to these and other old friends at the MSO.

Melbourne pianist and composer Stefan Cassomenos is one of Australia’s most vibrant and versatile musicians. He has been performing internationally since the age of 10, and gave the world premiere of his own Piano Concerto No.1 with the Adelaide Symphony Orchestra at the age of 16. In 2013, Cassomenos was a grand finalist and recipient of both the Second Grand Prize and the Chamber Music Prize in the prestigious International Telekom Beethoven Piano Competition Bonn.

viola/director

Not surprisingly, Christopher’s wife and two daughters are pleased that Papa has hung up his rock star garb and come home to roost like their pet chickens. If you’re lucky, he may hand you a bona fide free-range egg; if you’re unlucky, you’ll be stuck hearing about how much he loves brewing beer and riding his bike into town from the suburbs. As principal violist with the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra, Christopher plays a Maggini viola, on loan to the MSO by an anonymous benefactor and crafted in 1610.

piano

MOZART SYMPHONY NO.29 | 29–31 May

Christopher Moore

Cassomenos founded the contemporary chamber ensemble PLEXUS (MSO Ensemble in Residence) with violinist Monica Curro and clarinetist Philip Arkinstall, which since launching in 2014 has commissioned over 100 composers and given over 80 world premieres. Born in 1985 in Melbourne, Stefan completed his Bachelor of Music (Honours) on full scholarship at the University of Melbourne, majoring in Performance. He also undertook the Advanced Performance Program on full scholarship at the Australian National Academy of Music. Stefan is generously supported by Kawai Australia.

MOZART SYMPHONY NO.29 | 29–31 May

Program Notes ARVO PÄRT

(born 1935)

Cantus in memoriam Benjamin Britten One of Arvo Pärt’s shorter works, Cantus in memoriam Benjamin Britten (1977) is nonetheless a complex response to the death of Benjamin Britten. For 40 years the Estonian Pärt was ‘shielded’ from many musical developments in the West by a repressive cultural policy enforced by Soviet authorities. As such Pärt only became aware of Benjamin Britten’s compositional style and techniques scant years before Britten’s death in 1976. Though Britten was the impetus, the style of this piece is most definitely Pärt’s own. Typical of the mystic minimalist form of which Pärt is arguably the greatest exponent, there is an ‘old’ feel to this composition. Pärt scholar Paul Hillier states that Pärt’s music reveals ‘a kinship with the likes of [early Renaissance composers] Ockeghem and Josquin’, both in its spiritual nature and in its technical organisation (long lines of melody revealing passing passages of unity and dissonance). Major works that reveal Pärt’s interest in his Orthodox heritage and the melodies and modes from the church include his Symphony No.3 (1971) and Credo (1968). Also inherent in Pärt’s compositions, and strongly linked to the spiritual, is his use of bells, both literally and harmonically: literally in pieces such as De profundis (1980) and Cantus, and harmonically in his mimicking of bells and/or their harmonic series to create a tintinnabular style.

The ‘melody’ of Cantus in memoriam Benjamin Britten is essentially a slowly moving, at times almost glacially slow, descending scale on A minor (but, typical of Pärt, the scale is in its older sacred form, the Aeolian mode). The first violins

begin in their highest register while the double basses (which enter several bars later) are confined to their lowest notes. As such, it is a piece of tonal extremes. All string sections are divided except the violas, which seem to play a different role, adding a fifth contrasting harmonic voice to the mix of the surrounding strings. The addition of the tolling bell takes the work to a higher level that Paul Hillier describes as one of ‘ineffable sadness’ – bringing to mind the ending of a funeral rite. Pärt has said of the genesis of Cantus: In the past years we have had many losses in the world of music to mourn. Why did the date of Benjamin Britten’s death – December 4, 1976 – touch such a chord in me? During this time I was obviously at the point where I could recognise the magnitude of such a loss. Inexplicable feelings of guilt, more than that even, arose in me. I had just discovered Britten for myself. Just before his death I began to appreciate the unusual purity of his music – I had had the impression of the same kind of purity in the ballads of Guillaume de Machaut. And beside, for a long time I had wanted to meet Britten personally – and now it would not come to that. Out of this ‘inexplicable feeling of guilt’ came one of Pärt’s greatest meditations on loss. David Vivian Russell Symphony Australia © 2002 The MSO first performed this work in May 2002 under Markus Stenz and most recently in June 2014 with Olari Elts.

Rondo concertante Allegro molto Lento On 8 October 1930 Britten wrote in his diary that he had just had ‘a marvellous lesson from Mr Benjamin. I don’t touch the piano, but he goes thro’ my concerto & says he likes it & when it is finished will try it.’ ‘Mr Benjamin’ was the Australian pianistcomposer Arthur Benjamin to whom the freshman student at the Royal College of Music had been assigned for piano lessons. They seem to have had an easy relationship, even though Benjamin had said frankly that he didn’t think Britten was ‘built’ to be a concert pianist. (And he was probably right – Britten had an immaculate technique and musicianship, but suffered terrible stage fright and would probably not have been suited to bashing out Beethoven or Rachmaninov concertos.) Relations with his composition teacher, John Ireland, were less comfortable, but Britten had had years of rigorous training in private lessons with Frank Bridge. The ‘concerto’ alluded to was what is now known as the Rondo concertante, one of several early works that have become available through publication since Britten’s death. Britten’s diary entries from 1930 suggest he had written the main theme of the first movement in August, but only worked on the piece between 6 and 13 October. Here, the work’s surviving fragments have been edited together by composer and Britten amanuensis Colin Matthews so presumably reflect Britten’s intentions. A composer’s decision to abandon or suppress works – juvenilia or otherwise – often proves to be the right one, but in this case, while not a staggeringly original work, Rondo

concertante offers some insights into the composer that the 17-year-old Britten would become. Of the two extant movements the first is the more conventional, beginning with a characteristic driving through repeated rhythmic motifs in the strings, before an explosive gesture from the piano, which then trades a series of muscular ideas with the ensemble. The piano then introduces a more expansive Romantic – indeed somewhat Russiansounding – section of rolling figures answered by solo string melodies. The piano takes over again with a gradually intensifying and accelerating paragraph that leads to another texture of pithy short motifs overlaid to create tense momentum. This predates Britten’s acquaintance with the music of Shostakovich, but makes it plain why the Russian composer’s work would appeal.

MOZART SYMPHONY NO.29 | 29–31 May

BENJAMIN BRITTEN

(1913–1976)

The Lento is more striking in its ability to work with the barest of materials such as the stark, angular figures that the piano outlines in octaves at the start. This calls forth a wan response from the strings, which, even as it gathers in strength, is repeatedly interrupted by uncompromising gestures from the piano, breaking the strings’ theme into units of three or two notes in octaves. The bleak vision of this central section sinks to almost nothingness and gives way to what is arguably the most arresting section of the piece: a simple, rhythmically unvaried pattern of piano chords supports a long-breathed melody in the strings, whose passionate arching phrases and ‘big’ triplets look forward to such mature works as the Cello Symphony. Gordon Kerry © 2019 This is the first performance of this work by the MSO.

MOZART SYMPHONY NO.29 | 29–31 May

BENJAMIN BRITTEN Young Apollo, Op.16 Before John Woolford died in Australia in 2016, having immigrated from the UK in the 1980s, he was interviewed by John Bridcut for his study Britten’s Children. Woolford, whose birthname was Wolfgang Scherchen, was the son of conductor Hermann Scherchen, and in his interview talked of the intense, but not sexual, relationship he had in his late teens with the then 24-year-old composer. It was 1938. The following year Britten and Peter Pears – later Britten’s life-partner – travelled to North America for a concert tour which turned into some years of expatriation. The relationship with ‘Wulff’ never recovered, but for a time he remained a kind of muse. Britten dedicated the song ‘Antique’ in Les Illuminations to Wulff, and when he received a commission from CBC Toronto for a ‘fanfare for piano and orchestra’, he once again thought of Wulff. In a letter Britten said, ‘you know whom that is written about.’ Britten described it to his friend Enid Slater as ‘very bright and brilliant music – rather inspired by such sunshine as I’ve never seen before…may call it “The Young Apollo”’. The sunshine was that of the Catskills in summer, where Britten and Pears had holidayed with Aaron Copland; the title comes from John Keats’ abandoned epic poem Hyperion. In Greek mythology, the Titans were vanquished and supplanted by the Olympian gods led by Zeus. Hyperion, the Titan sun-god, would be replaced by Apollo, who also took the music portfolio. Keats’ poem trails off with a description of the young Apollo realising his own divinity in lines that Britten used to preface the score:

Soon wild commotions shook him, and made flush All the immortal fairness of his limbs; …so young Apollo anguished: His very hair, his golden tresses famed Kept undulation round his eager neck. At length Apollo shriek’d; – and lo! from all his limbs Celestial… Keats’ vision is disquieting in its sense of Apollo’s anguish; Britten’s piece (which he withdrew after its premiere) by contrast seems to evoke what comes next – in his own words, having ‘thrown off his mortal form’, Apollo ‘stands before us – the new, dazzling Sun-god, quivering with radiant vitality’. Scored for piano, string quartet and ripieno strings, the piece is in A major (not insignificantly the key of the boy Tadzio in Britten’s late opera Death in Venice) and pretty much remains there throughout. (Britten was rather taken with certain works of Buxtehude at the time, noting the Danish composer’s ability to create huge spans without shifting key.) Against a long held pedal note the piano opens, proceeding with a series of bravura scale passages, running upward over the full compass of the keyboard. Notwithstanding the lack of modulation, the music passes quickly through, but never stays in, various keys; in other words, the music is inherently static, but with a busy – quivering – foreground. The latent energy is released in a buoyant scherzo that dominates the music until a section in which the string quartet’s introspection calms things briefly before a sparkling coda. David Vivian Russell Symphony Australia © 2002 The MSO first performed this work in May 2002 under Markus Stenz and most recently in June 2014 with Olari Elts.

(1756–1791)

Serenade No.6 in D, K239 Serenata notturna Marcia (Maestoso) Menuetto – Trio Rondeau (Allegretto – Adagio – Allegro) In Salzburg Mozart wrote a great deal of occasional music, for social and ceremonial events – music designed to be performed once. The wonder is that so much of Mozart’s ‘utility’ music is great music. Most of the pieces don’t fit neatly into modern concert conventions. Where they are chamber pieces, they require extras such as horns; where orchestral, many of them are luxuriously but unmanageably long. The ‘Serenada notturna’ (as the title is spelled on the manuscript) is an exception, being neither long nor inconveniently scored. But the popularity it has gained in recent times owes most to its special character, and its memorable sounds and melodies. This ‘nocturnal serenade’ is basically a concerto grosso, but with some unusual features. Scholars have noted the makeup of the concertino (soloists’) group – two violins, viola and double bass. This implies the conventions of outdoor performance – where the players would arrive and depart playing on the march. A cello cannot readily be played on the move, the argument goes, whereas the double bass can be strapped to the player, and so can the kettledrums. Indeed, this serenade begins with a march. On the other hand, Mozart’s autograph score bears the date January 1776, and it is unlikely that the music was played out-of-doors in winter. There are no clues in the Mozart family correspondence as to the occasion for which he wrote this piece. The evidence that the ‘serenade quartet’ in Salzburg consisted of two violins, viola and double bass, and no cello, rests in

fact largely on this particular piece of Mozart’s. Since it was probably played indoors, it may be relevant that a cellist cannot play standing up, and sitting was disrespectful when the Archbishop was present (in the 18th century musicians usually played standing). Perhaps Mozart was using the conventions of outdoor music, with their suggestion of an al fresco style, as a substitute for the out-of-doors itself (Notturno may have been the special Salzburg name for such music). The timpani are particularly prominent: the presence of these drums in the ripieno (large group) balances the double bass in the concertino. Mozart makes the most of the colours available from this combination of instruments. The first movement, a march, is restricted to a simple alternation of tonic and dominant because only two notes are available from the timpani (D and A in this key). The sound combination of pizzicato strings with timpani is particularly original. The minuet, a rather grand one, has a trio for the concertino alone; the final Rondeau really lets its hair down, especially in its episodes – one of them a poignant adagio leading to a sprightly contredanse. Mozart authority Alfred Einstein suggests that these episodes, contrasting so strikingly with the lively country dance of the returning refrain, are allusions to tunes known to the first audience, to whom they meant something amusing. One traveller observed that ‘the Salzburger’s spirit is exceedingly inclined to low humour. Their folksongs are so comical and burlesque that one cannot listen to them without side-splitting laughter.’

MOZART SYMPHONY NO.29 | 29–31 May

WOLFGANG AMADEUS MOZART

MOZART SYMPHONY NO.29 | 29–31 May

WOLFGANG AMADEUS MOZART Symphony No.29 in A, K201 Allegro moderato Andante Menuetto and Trio Allegro con spirito At a festival’s closing concert this symphony of Mozart’s was followed by a suitably festive and droll conclusion: the same composer’s A Musical Joke. This unintentionally revealed that Mozart himself was ‘guilty’, in the rushing scales of the symphony’s last movement, of the same mechanical and inept writing at which he poked fun in Ein musikalischer Spass. Or was he? Context and handling are everything. Eighteenth-century composers used simple musical materials, sometimes little more than tags which could be found in works by any composer of the time. At the risk of offending, some of Mozart’s early symphonies are conventional in just this way. It should be remembered that the symphony then was not the dominant genre that Haydn and Beethoven were to make it – many symphonies of the 1770s were there not to be listened to very carefully, but to make a good festive noise. Worth saying, because the Symphony in A that Mozart completed on 6 April 1774 is the first of his symphonies which is by common consent not only worth listening to closely, but a masterpiece from start to finish.

Right from the start something arresting is happening: the violins have a theme proceeding in upward sequences and marked at each step with a falling octave. It has a strong rhythmic pulse. But simultaneously and equally the lower parts are proceeding gently, glidingly, in long notes – a rising bass. Instead of a loud attention-getter, Mozart begins with expanded chamber music, or more exactly what Jens-Peter Larsen calls

a fusion of symphonic and chambermusical styles, the fusion explored by Haydn in his symphonies of the same period. The previous year Mozart stayed in Vienna for months, and no doubt heard there symphonies by Haydn and his Viennese contemporaries, in the weightier and more argumentative fourmovement form they were developing. The graceful second theme gives this opening movement memorable charm, which recalls later works in the same key, such as the Piano Concertos K414 and 488. The clearly defined coda is another feature of the Viennese style, and continues the development of the themes. Many of Haydn’s slow movements show economical use of wind instruments against a texture of muted strings as Mozart does in his stately, but intimate Andante, where the pace of movement increases with the triplet figures which dominate the development. At the end, the winds on their own intone a fanfare while the strings remove their mutes, joining in the fanfare and repeating it to impose a conclusion. Staying in the mind from the Minuet are the humour of the loud restarts on unexpected notes, and of the comic tailpiece for the winds, having the last word. The Trio in E major is mostly in sustained notes, in contrast to the angular rhythms of the Minuet. The finale, it has already been said, is made up entirely of formulaic scraps, including those rushing scales – but how brilliantly organised they are to combine noise, excitement and musical interest! No trumpets, but the horns, which are allowed to go so wrong in the Musical Joke, have to be on their mettle here: their parts reach dizzying heights by the end. David Garrett © 2003 The MSO first performed Mozart’s Symphony No.29 on 10 February 1951 with Sir John Barbirolli, and most recently in November 2013 with James Ehnes.

Q&A with

Christopher Moore What do you love about performing in the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra? There’s something special about playing with 80 or so of your friends and colleagues on stage. It’s such a thrill to be part of the extraordinary palette of colours that we can create. How different is directing a program from performing in a standard concert? When performing with so many musicians on the stage, there are many decisions that need to be made in order for the result to be convincing and congruous. In my usual job as Principal Viola, I help bring the viola section together. As director, I try to bring everyone together – hopefully without irritating everyone. We want to have fun after all! What excites you about your program with Stefan Cassomenos on 29 & 31 May? From the moment I met Stefan, he made me laugh. That hasn’t changed over the years. He also happens to be an extraordinary musician. I can’t wait to hear what he brings to these two Britten pieces. How does a viola differ from a violin? That’s easy. The viola is... erm... bigger, better and viola players are always more fun. What makes your Maggini viola special? No one really knows why many of these old Italian instruments are so special. But something tells me that they have always been outstanding otherwise they wouldn’t have survived for so long. The Maggini was made in 1610. That’s 409 years ago. A lot has happened in those 409 years.

What is the value to a player to have an instrument like the Maggini viola? The way these instruments react to the player is more immediate, focussed and penetrating which means the player has a wider range of colours to draw from. What’s your favourite piece of music that features the viola? At the moment it would have to be Walton’s Viola Concerto. It was written at a time when the post-war period of prosperity was well and truly over and the Great Depression was looming. It’s not clear what he was thinking about when he wrote it but to me it sounds like War - Boom - Bust. He’s about as positive as a Brit could be at the time.

Romance and Rhapsody 2 June 2019 | 11am Iwaki Auditorium, ABC Southbank Christopher Cartlidge viola Rachael Tobin cello Philip Arkinstall clarinet Laurence Matheson piano Mairi Nicholson presenter BRUCH Eight pieces for clarinet, viola and piano

[35']

â&#x20AC;&#x201D; INTERVAL â&#x20AC;&#x201D; DEAN^ Suite for clarinet and cello

[15']

BRAHMS Trio for clarinet*, cello and piano

[23']

WORLD PREMIERE

*performed on viola

^MSO Composer in Residence Running time: approximately one hour and 50 minutes including a 20 minute interval. Timings listed are approximate.

Rachael Tobin

Sydney-born violist Chris Cartlidge studied on a full scholarship at the Tasmanian Conservatorium of Music and the Australian National Academy of Music, and was the recipient of several awards including the UTas Director’s Prize. His main teachers were Josephine St Leon and Roger Benedict. Chris began playing the violin at the age of seven, and the viola at fourteen whilst a student at the Sydney Conservatorium of Music High School.

Rachael was appointed Associate Principal Cellist of the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra in 2014. Hailing from Adelaide, she moved to London at 18 for undergraduate study at the Royal Academy of Music, and subsequently completed a Masters’ degree at Mannes College of Music, New York.

viola

Chris has been a full time member of the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra since 2011, and has appeared on numerous occasions as Principal Viola. He has appeared as Guest Principal with Orchestra Victoria and Melbourne Chamber Orchestra, and Guest Associate Principal with both Victorian Opera and the Australian Opera and Ballet Orchestra. He has also worked with the Tasmanian Symphony Orchestra, and is regularly invited to perform with the Australian Chamber Orchestra.

cello

ROMANCE AND RHAPSODY | 2 June

Christopher Cartlidge

Performance highlights include solo performances at the Park Lane Group’s New Year Series (Southbank Centre, London), and concertos with The London Soloists’ Chamber Orchestra and the Mannes Symphony Orchestra. She has performed at music festivals including the International Musicians’ Society at Prussia Cove and the Taos Chamber Music Festival, New Mexico. Prior to her appointment with the MSO, Rachael was a member of the Estonian National Opera Orchestra. She has also worked with Philharmonia (UK), Juilliard Opera Orchestra, the Sydney Symphony Orchestra, Australian Opera and Ballet Orchestra and the Tasmanian Symphony Orchestra.

ROMANCE AND RHAPSODY | 2 June

Philip Arkinstall

Laurence Matheson

Philip Arkinstall has been Associate Principal Clarinet of the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra since 2009 and was principal with the Malaysian Philharmonic for 11 years prior. He was the winner of the Australian Woodwind Competition in Brisbane at the age of just 18 and also won the 2MBS Radio Performer of the Year in 1996 and the ABC Young Performers Award in 1997. Queen’s Trust and Big Brother awards enabled him to further his studies in Europe and he has appeared both as a soloist and as a guest principal with the Sydney, West Australian, Queensland, and Tasmanian symphony orchestras.

From Melbourne, Laurence won the Dorothy Glover Piano Award in 2010. In 2013, he began full-time studies at the Australian National Academy of Music with Timothy Young. He was selected as a Fellow of the Australian National Academy of Music in 2016, curating a year-long series of concerts involving students, faculty and guests.

clarinet

He’s an active chamber musician and has been fortunate enough to tour Australia for Musica Viva with the Auer quartet, also working with groups like the Goldner Quartet, the Eggner trio, as well as the Australia Ensemble, The Australian Chamber Orchestra, the Melbourne Chamber Orchestra and many contemporary ensembles including PLEXUS, MSO’s Ensemble in Residence.

piano

Laurence is regularly broadcast on ABC Classic and 3MBS, and has appeared as soloist with the Sydney Symphony Orchestra, Orchestra Victoria and with the Australian Ballet, as well as in recital at the Melbourne Recital Centre. Laurence has a particular passion for chamber music and has been involved in projects with the Aurora Ensemble, Anthony Marwood, Peter Hill and Kathy Stott, while his regular duo partners include Sophie Rowell, and Kristian Chong. He is a mentor and pianist for many of Australia’s top young violinists, including Christian Li.

presenter

ROMANCE AND RHAPSODY | 2 June

Mairi Nicholson Mairiâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s long and varied career as a broadcaster and music journalist for both the ABC and BBC has taken her from the Sydney Opera House to New Yorkâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s David Geffen Hall, from the Royal Albert Hall, London to Hamer Hall, Melbourne. Currently for ABC Classic she presents the Lunchtime Concert, The Opera Show and Legends plus live broadcasts of MSO and Musica Viva concerts and Opera Australia productions. Mairi writes for Limelight magazine, leads Opera and Music tour groups to Europe and America and conducts Media training with singers and instrumentalists.

ROMANCE AND RHAPSODY | 2 June

Program Notes MAX BRUCH

(1838–1920)

Eight pieces for clarinet, viola and piano, Op.83 No.1 in A minor: Andante No.2 in B minor: Allegro con moto No.3 in C sharp minor: Andante con moto No.4 in D minor: Allegro agitato No.5 in F minor: Rumänische melodie (Andante) No.6 in G minor: Nachtgesang (Andante con moto) No.7 in B major: Allegro vivace, ma non troppo No.8 in E flat minor: Moderato Born in Cologne in 1838, Max Bruch was a direct contemporary of Brahms, whom he outlived by 20 years. In some respects he trod a middle path between Brahms’ resuscitation of classical forms and the ‘music of the future’ touted by Liszt and Wagner. His works tend to be Romantic in feeling, with rich harmony and orchestration and often built on a large scale. As a conductor he held posts at Koblenz and Berlin, in Liverpool in England, and in Breslau in presentday Poland. Like many composers he was cursed with early success: his Violin Concerto in G minor, Op.26 dates from the mid-1860s, and the acclaim it immediately attracted meant that his subsequent achievement, with the possible exception of his Kol nidrei for cello and orchestra, was neglected. Both feature strings, which, Bruch said, ‘sing a melody better than a piano, and melody is the soul of music’.

The Eight Pieces, Op.83, date from 1910 and show Bruch holding to an aesthetic that was under siege from the modernisms of Schoenberg and

Stravinsky. They were probably inspired by Bruch’s son, Max Felix, who was a gifted clarinettist; and indeed a year or so later, Bruch composed the only known concerto for clarinet and viola. Each of Op.83’s movements is a short, strongly-profiled character piece. All but one (No.7) are in a minor key, and most fall into simple formal designs. The third is the most expansive and formally sophisticated, with extended solo and duo passages. Two of the pieces are named: No.5 is in the style of a ‘Romanian song’, while No.6 is a Nocturne. The major-key No.7 has something of the quality of a classical finale in its use of dance rhythms, but the actual final piece is marked Moderato, returning the work to the mood of the opening. © Gordon Kerry 2015 This is the first performance of this work by the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra.

PAUL DEAN

(born 1966)

Suite for clarinet and cello for our amazing friends Di and Ken Haskell March for the love of chocolate orange with great affection and admiration to Sergei Prokofiev

Flight of the Winged Messenger with homage to Gustav Holst

Sunset Music

in memory of Peter Sculthorpe

Tex and his amazing ropes

a tribute to the Vaudeville years

Coming to this suite for my two favourite instruments was one of great joy following the completion of my clarinet concerto. From endless numbers of lines in the score to just two was such a relief. The first movement

The quirky fast march rhythm that starts the movement reminded me somewhat of any number of his quasi-marches and this one just grew and grew from various games and rhythmic variations I could drag from that opening bar. The second movement is in humble tribute to Gustav Holst. I am a huge fan of The Planets and am always saddened that so little of his other music gets much airtime and even less concert time. My favourite moment of The Planets at the time of composition was the third movement scherzo, Mercury, the winged messenger. Breathtakingly scored and conceived from beginning to end, the thoughts of the music that whooshed through my head as I was writing gave me endless inspiration. The third part of the suite is in memory of the great Australian Peter Sculthorpe, to whom we owe an enormous debt of gratitude, for all that he forged as an Australian in the world of music on our behalf. The music is peaceful, plaintive and suggests a few Sculthorpe motives in honour of the great man. The Suite then ends with a bit of fun. I was walking along a street after hearing my partner play in a rehearsal of the great Francaix String Trio and my head was full of extraordinary Vaudeville motives and images. Thanks to an hour on Google that followed I found a rather brilliant and now forgotten character: Tex Glanville. What he could do with a pair of ropes beggars belief! So the suite finishes with a romp through the world of Vaudeville, and a time that in so many ways was more filled with humour and entertainment than our world today. © Paul Dean 2019 This is the world premiere of this work.

JOHANNES BRAHMS

(1833–1897)

Trio in A minor for clarinet*, cello and piano, Op.114 *performed on viola Allegro Adagio Andantino grazioso Allegro Reporting Brahms’ death in April 1897, the Melbourne Argus observed that the world had lost not only a ‘great composer’, but ‘unquestionably the greatest musician of Europe’. This may well have been one of the last times in classical music history when anyone known chiefly as a composer was awarded this more general accolade. Increasingly, when the public thought of musicians, performers came to mind, and – counter to the usual gender prejudice – more and more of these popularly anointed stars were women. Brahms’ own friend and mentor, Clara Schumann, was a pioneer among pianists, while – in the 1880s – even Australia made its first international inroad by exporting home-grown colonial singers Amy Sherwin (‘The Tasmanian Nightingale’) and, of course, Nellie Melba. Wilma Neruda succeeded her former mentor Joseph Joachim as preferred violinist in performances of Brahms’ music in the 1890s; while, only shortly before his death, one of Brahms’ last generous acts was to arrange for a rich benefactor to buy a 1742 Guarnerius violin for a talented protégée, Marie Soldat. Nor was Brahms immune to the cult of the star male performer, there being no better example than his last major series of instrumental works, inspired by the clarinettist Richard Mühlfeld (1856-1907). In December 1890, at the not so very advanced age of 57 and with his critical faculties sharper than ever, Brahms had resolved that it was time

ROMANCE AND RHAPSODY | 2 June

started life as a tribute to one of my gods: Prokofiev. It seems his music just continues to grow on me and his influence on me is endless.

ROMANCE AND RHAPSODY | 2 June 38

to retire. Yet, only months later, hearing Mühlfeld perform a Weber Clarinet Concerto and Mozart’s Clarinet Quintet persuaded him to return temporarily to his desk. Accordingly, summer 1891 yet again saw his annual vacation at the Austrian mountain resort of Bad Ischl given over to composing, producing this trio and a clarinet quintet (Op.115) for his new muse. In doing so, Brahms imagined certain feminine qualities attaching to the dapper young clarinettist and his instrument, referring to them coquettishly as ‘meine Primadonna’, ‘Fräulein Klarinette’, and ‘the orchestral Nightingale’.

intensifies this illusory quality. A more expansive second theme in C major allows for some fulsome duetting for clarinet or viola and cello, Brahms clearly delighted that their apparently effortless interaction is in fact a strict canon in contrary motion (he introduces the same technical trick at the corresponding point in the last movement). Yet despite warming and broadening into the tonally familiar, the music always returns to the spare, barely harmonised modal theme, ultimately to dissolve in an eerie pianissimo of contrary-motion scales and broken chords to close.

Thereafter, in the six years remaining to him, Brahms largely kept to his retirement resolve, though his occasional relapses included two more clarinet sonatas for Mühlfeld in 1894. Still under Mühlfeld’s spell, Brahms even went so far as to remark that ‘the clarinet blends better with piano than strings do’. Yet he did not succumb entirely to infatuation with the clarinet’s distinctive tone colour, and perhaps to ensure the wider dissemination and proper appreciation of both this trio and the sonatas for their other musical qualities, Brahms also sanctioned substituting the viola as leading instrument. Joseph Joachim may have had an active hand in advocating a viola version of the trio, for he played it through with Brahms as early as November 1891, hot on the heels of the first rehearsals with Mühlfeld of the clarinet version.

The second movement is, by contrast, an almost luxuriant Adagio in D major, in which the clarinet or viola and cello genuinely lead. Brahms’s friend and amanuensis, Eusebius Mandyczewski, wrote to the composer whimsically, ‘It is as if the instruments were in love with each other.’ The third movement is a gentle intermezzo rather than a scherzo, consisting of an Andantino grazioso in A major, a contrasting waltz-like central section in D major, and a reprise of the first section. The brief finale returns to A minor, and, resisting the lure of a sunny major conclusion, remains there at the end. The constant rhythmic alternation of duple and triple divisions of the main beat lends it a folkdance-like vehemence.

But whether performed with clarinet or viola, the trio calls for the ‘nightingale’ more often than the ‘prima donna’. Compared with the generous expanses of Brahms’ earlier chamber music, this late work is unexpectedly constrained in scope, with an often mysterious, shadowy tone quality. From the bare unaccompanied cello solo opening onward, the plaintive modal feel of the A minor first movement theme

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