Brian Cox: A Symphonic Universe by Melbourne Symphony Orchestra

MSO/ BRIAN COX/ A SYMPHONIC UNIVERSE 15â&#x20AC;&#x201C;17 NOVEMBER 2019

BRIAN COX/A Symphonic Universe/15–17 November 2019

Artists Melbourne Symphony Orchestra Brian Cox OBE presenter Benjamin Northey conductor Jack Liebeck violin

Program SIBELIUS Symphony No.5: III. Allegro molto PAUL DEAN* A Brief History WORLD PREMIERE OF AN MSO COMMISSION

MAHLER Symphony No.10: Adagio

Running time: approximately 100 minutes with no interval *2019 MSO Composer in Residence Regretfully, Daniel Harding has had to withdraw from this week’s concerts due to an injury. In his place, we are delighted to welcome our Principal Conductor in Residence, Benjamin Northey who will conduct the Orchestra through some of classical music’s most universal repertoire.

Assistive hearing: A hearing system is available from Arts Centre Melbourne ushers, providing coverage to all seats via headphones or neck-loops. In consideration of your fellow patrons, the MSO thanks you for silencing and dimming the light on your phone. Photos and videos of this performance are not permitted.

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.

BRIAN COX/A Symphonic Universe/15–17 November 2019

Melbourne Symphony Orchestra The Melbourne Symphony Orchestra is a leading cultural figure in the Australian arts landscape, bringing the best in orchestral music and passionate performance to a diverse audience across the nation and around the world. Each year the MSO engages with more than 5 million people through live concerts, TV, radio and online broadcasts, international tours, recordings and education programs. Under the spirited leadership of Chief Conductor, Sir Andrew Davis, the MSO is a vital presence, both onstage and in the community, in cultivating classical music in Australia. The nation’s first professional orchestra, the MSO has been the sound of the city of Melbourne since 1906.

The MSO regularly attracts great artists from around the globe including Anne-Sophie Mutter, Lang Lang, Renée Fleming and Thomas Hampson, while bringing Melbourne’s finest musicians to the world through tours to China, Europe and the United States.

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BRIAN COX/presenter Professor Brian Cox OBE FRS is Professor of Particle Physics at The University of Manchester, The Royal Society Professor for Public Engagement in Science and a Fellow of the Royal Society. As a broadcaster, he has presented a number of highly acclaimed science programmes for the BBC, boosting the popularity of subjects such as astronomy and physics and garnering a host of accolades, including two Royal Television Society awards and a Peabody Award for Wonders Of The Solar System. He has also authored a series of best-selling books, including the widely acclaimed Human Universe and Universal: A Guide to the Cosmos, and is recognised as the foremost communicator for all things scientific. Following on from his critically acclaimed 2016 BBC series, Forces of Nature, his latest BBC series, The Planets, aired earlier this year to rave reviews and international plaudits, becoming one of BBC Two’s most watched series of the year with huge consolidated audiences and being seen by more than half a billion people in China. Soon after, he hosted Stargazing: Moon Landing Special, and in September 2019 he returned, alongside co-host Robin Ince, with a brand-new series of BBC Radio 4’s The Infinite Monkey Cage, marking a decade of the show. He holds multiple Guinness World Record titles for his sell-out live tours, including most tickets sold for a science tour and most tickets sold for a science show – set during his recent world tour, Universal, when 11,433 people attend his show at The Arena Birmingham. The Universal tour concluded in October 2019 and has seen over 250,000 people attend, the largest ever tour of its kind.

Benjamin Northey is Chief Conductor of the Christchurch Symphony Orchestra and Principal Conductor in Residence of Melbourne Symphony Orchestra. Winner of the 2019 Limelight Magazine Australian Artist of the Year award, Northey appears regularly as guest conductor with all major Australian and New Zealand symphony orchestras, Opera Australia, New Zealand Opera and State Opera South Australia. His international appearances include concerts with London Philharmonic Orchestra, the Hong Kong, Tokyo and Malaysian Philharmonic Orchestras, the National Orchestra of Colombia and the Mozarteum Orchestra Salzburg. Northey is a strong advocate for music by Australian composers. He has a progressive and diverse approach to repertoire having collaborated with a broad range of artists including Pinchas Zukerman, Maxim Vengerov and AnneSofie von Otter, as well as KD Lang, Tim Minchin and James Morrison. His awards include the 2001 Symphony Australia Young Conductor of the Year, the prestigious 2010 Melbourne Prize Outstanding Musician’s Award and multiple awards for his many recordings with ABC Music.

Jack Liebeck possesses “flawless technical mastery” and a “beguiling silvery tone” (BBC Music Magazine). His fascination with all things scientific has included performing the world premiere of Marianelli’s Voyager Violin Concerto and led to his most recent collaboration, A Brief History, with Professor Brian Cox and Daniel Harding, commissioned for him by the MSO and composed by Paul Dean.

BRIAN COX/A Symphonic Universe/15–17 November 2019

Benjamin Northey/conductor JACK LIEBECK/violin

Jack has worked with major international conductors and orchestras including Sir Mark Elder, Brett Dean, Jakub Hrůša, Oslo Philharmonic, Moscow State Symphony, and all UK orchestras. Jack recently recorded the Brahms and Schoenberg violin concertos with BBC Symphony Orchestra. Programs include Vivaldi Four Seasons with Professor Brian Cox and Brett Dean’s birthday celebrations. Jack is the artistic director of Oxford May Music and Alpine Classics (Grindelwald), a professor of violin at the Royal Academy of Music and a member of Salieca Piano Trio. Jack plays the ‘Ex-Wilhelmj’ J.B. Guadagnini dated 1785 and is generously loaned a Joseph Henry bow by Kathron Sturrock in memory of her late husband Professor David Bennett. Jack Liebeck is managed worldwide by Percius. 5

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ABOUT THE MUSIC JEAN SIBELIUS

(1865–1957)

Symphony No.5 in E flat, Op.82: III. Allegro molto The pitiless despair of Sibelius’ Fourth Symphony (1911) puzzled many of its first listeners. The work seemed an unlikely sequel to the gentle radiance of the Third (1907), yet its gaze into the abyss gave way, in the Fifth, to one of Sibelius’ most shining, life-affirming creations. Sibelius wrote the Fifth Symphony at a time of great personal difficulty. The Great War had broken out and, as a result, he had lost access to the revenue from his German publishers. To earn some regular income he wrote a great number of salon pieces for domestic performance, and had little time for other composing; the Fifth Symphony is his only major work of the war years. Sibelius himself conducted the symphony’s first performance, at a concert given on 8 December 1915 to mark his 50th birthday. It was a jubilant event, treated almost as a national holiday, but Sibelius was unhappy with the work and revised it several times before it was published in 1919. The finale opens with a whirlwind passage for the strings leading to one of the most famous of all themes in Sibelius’ music, that in which, as scholar Donald Tovey famously described it, Thor swings his hammer. It is a good example of how orchestrally conceived Sibelius’ ideas are. Played on the piano the tune would mean very little, but given out on horns with a high, syncopated woodwind counterpoint, it attains a unique nobility. After some woodwind carolling and a return to the gusty sounds of the movement’s opening, Sibelius prepares us for a return of the swinging horn theme.

When this finally reappears, it does so as a chorale that has to struggle through long pedal-points and changes of key before bursting into its sunset glory. These final minutes contain the richest orchestration of the whole work, but almost before we can register the fact, the movement ends with six jubilant, adamant chords. Abridged from Phillip Sametz © 1995/2004

PAUL DEAN (born 1966)

A Brief History for violin and orchestra WORLD PREMIERE OF AN MSO COMMISSION Brisbane-born Paul Dean is regarded as one of Australia’s foremost musicians in his capacities as soloist, composer and artistic director. He is a founding member of the Endeavour Trio, and was Principal Clarinet with the Queensland Symphony Orchestra until 2000. He now holds the position of Head of Winds at Queensland Conservatorium, Griffith University. Paul has composed music for violinist Jack Liebeck, pianist Daniel De Borah, and Katie Noonan, among others. His opera Dry River Run, commissioned by the Queensland Conservatorium Opera School, premiered in 2018. The composer writes: I was greatly honoured to receive the commission to write a work for violin and orchestra for Jack Liebeck and the MSO as part of my residency with them this year. And given the enormity of the occasion at its premiere, I quickly decided on a dedicating the piece to Professor Stephen Hawking, who died in March 2018. I was one of the millions worldwide who read A Brief History of Time only to finish and need to start again and again. But his presence and importance

The work begins with slight nod to Wagner, and the presence of the brass chords throughout the work are a constant reminder of the Professor’s love for the German composer. Whilst not necessarily using chords or progressions common to Wagner, the sense of the opening is my version of the incomprehensible openness of space. The violin first appears as the young Hawking begins to grapple with his study and research and the immensity of what he was working on. The second section, starting with the bassoon solo, is representative of his sense of fun and humour. This is followed by a sequence where he confronts for the first time, the illness that was to shape his life. A large orchestral tutti concludes this section, combining the power of the universe with his own power of survival against the odds. The last two sections are much more sombre. An Adagio section highlights the sadness the world faces without such a great mind there to guide us, and the final section, an aleatoric section featuring harmonics in the strings and a soliloquy in the solo violin, pay farewell respects and homage to the great Professor and wish him well as he takes flight into the unknown. Paul Dean © 2019

Mahler’s Tenth Symphony was left incomplete upon his death in 1911. Various performing versions of the composer’s five-movement draft have been created over the years, however Mahler essentially completed the composition and orchestration of the opening Adagio, and it is often performed on its own, as in this concert.

BRIAN COX/A Symphonic Universe/15–17 November 2019

in the world was beyond the need for my understanding. His achievements in science and in the understanding of the mysteries of the universe are extraordinary. So my research which involved interviews and documentaries and another viewing of the famous film, The Theory of Everything, gave me a fan’s guide to the understanding of his work and life, and character. I think of the new work to be more of a tone poem rather than a violin concerto – a through-composed work that touches briefly on various aspects of his life that struck me during my observations.

GUSTAV MAHLER

(1860–1911)

Adagio from Symphony No.10 (a performing version of Mahler’s draft, prepared by Deryck Cooke [1919–1976] in collaboration with Berthold Goldschmidt, Colin Matthews and David Matthews)

This eloquent slow movement, recognisably the work of Gustav Mahler, contains strains which will be new to those who know his other music. Mainly restrained in dynamics and transparent in orchestral textures, it moves to one overpowering outburst, where a searing dissonant chord is pierced by a high note for trumpet. Then the music subsides in a reflective, even idyllic, drawn-out coda. The facsimile of Mahler’s draft of the symphony, published in 1924, revealed even to superficial readers the anxious personal messages to his wife written over parts of the score: ‘farewell, my lyre’; and, over the end of the last movement: ‘to live for you, to die for you’. In July 1910, while he was composing the Tenth Symphony, Mahler discovered his wife’s passionate affair with the young architect 7

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Walter Gropius. Many biographers concluded this was the last straw for the composer. It came on top of his resignation from the Vienna Opera in 1907, the death of his eldest daughter, and the diagnosis of his heart disease. But Mahler’s reaction to his wife’s unfaithfulness was affirmative – a new commitment to support Alma emotionally, and a trip to Holland for a consultation with Sigmund Freud. He had optimistic plans for his future seasons with the New York Philharmonic, and in September 1910 experienced the greatest public success of his life at the Munich premiere of his Eighth Symphony. New York was soon to unravel in opposition between Mahler and the board of the Philharmonic. The recurrence of a throat ailment in February 1911 developed into a serious infection which killed him soon after his return to Europe, on 18 May 1911. A closer study of the Tenth’s score, however, should have revealed that Mahler had transcended the superstitious belief his admirer Schoenberg later reinforced by observing, with implied reference to Beethoven and Bruckner, ‘It seems that the Ninth is a limit. He who wants to go beyond it must pass away.’

Mahler regarded the orchestral songcycle The Song of the Earth (1908) as his ninth symphony, not so-called, and had in his own mind already composed a tenth (No.9). In spite of the despairing imprecations Mahler wrote in the Tenth’s score, the music revealed a new and even positive mood. If Symphony No.9 was a journey through the Valley of Death, No.10 seemed to express a calm acceptance of the Divine Will. His nearly completed Tenth Symphony shows that Mahler’s music was entering a new phase, and one even more prophetic than what had gone before, foretelling the atonal freedom of the music of Schoenberg, Berg and Webern. Yet the Adagio, the most comprehensively worked-out movement where we can get closest to Mahler’s definitive intentions, embraces a rich complexity, as the ‘shadowy’ melody for violas alone which opens it and recurs later unfolds into the rich, broad, almost Brucknerian melody and harmony of the Adagio. It is the achievement of this beauty with an often daringly sparse and widely spread orchestral texture which makes us so grateful that we can be sure that, for the first movement at least, this is what Mahler meant. Adapted from a note by David Garrett © 2003

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