SCHUMANN’S CELLO CONCERTO

Dale Barltrop plays Schumann

Thursday 13 May / 8.30pm Friday 14 May / 8.30pm Saturday 15 May / 8.30pm

Arts Centre Melbourne, Hamer Hall

Melbourne Symphony Orchestra

Umberto Clerici conductor Dale Barltrop violin

SCHUMANN Violin Concerto

BRAHMS Variations on a theme by Haydn

A musical Acknowledgement of Country, Long Time Living Here by Deborah Cheetham AO, will be performed before the start of this concert. Running time: Approximately 1 hour, no interval.

Umberto Clerici

conductor

With a career spanning more than 20 years as a gifted cello soloist, orchestral musician, and now emerging conductor, Umberto Clerici is swiftly gaining a reputation as an artist with a diverse and multifaceted career.

Umberto started studying the cello at the age of five. As a cello soloist, he has appeared with some of the world’s most prestigious orchestras including the Vienna Philharmonic, St. Petersburg Philharmoni and at the Salzburg Festival amongst many others. Umberto then moved to Australia to take up the position as Principal Cello of the Sydney Symphony during the years 2014–2020. Umberto is now successfully establishing his reputation as a conductor after making his debut with the Sydney Symphony Orchestra last season. He recently made his debut with the Queensland Symphony and looks forward to making his debut with the Melbourne Symphony. Umberto is already enjoying a special relationship with the Sydney Symphony, who, he will conduct three times this season in Mahler’s Symphony No.4, Classics in the City and two regional tours. Umberto also enjoys his position as the Artistic Director of the Sydney Youth Orchestra Chamber Ensemble.

Dale Barltrop

violin

Brisbane-born violinist, Dale Barltrop, is Concertmaster of the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra and First Violinist of the Australian String Quartet. He previously served as Concertmaster of the Vancouver Symphony Orchestra in Canada and Principal Second Violin of the St Paul Chamber Orchestra in the United States, having performed with all of these orchestras as soloist and director.

Barltrop has also appeared as Concertmaster of the Australian World Orchestra, guest director of the Australian Chamber Orchestra, ACO2 and the Camerata of St John’s chamber orchestra in Brisbane. He has performed at numerous music festivals across North America.

Barltrop made his solo debut with the Queensland Symphony Orchestra at the age of 15 and was Concertmaster of both the Queensland and Australian Youth Orchestras.

A passionate educator, Barltrop has served on the faculties of the Vancouver Symphony Orchestra School of Music and the Vancouver Academy of Music, amongst other organisations. Barltrop performs on a violin crafted by JB Guadagnini, Turin, 1784. It is on loan from the Ukaria Cultural Centre and was purchased through the generosity of Allan J Myers AO, Maria J Myers AO and the Klein Family.

Program Notes

ROBERT SCHUMANN

(1810–1856) Violin Concerto in D minor

In kräftigem, nicht zu schnellem Tempo (In a strong, not too fast tempo)

Langsam (Slowly) –

Lebhaft, doch nicht schnell (Lively, but not fast) Dale Barltrop violin In May 1853, the rising virtuoso Joseph Joachim performed Beethoven’s Violin Concerto in Düssseldorf, where Robert Schumann was music director. ‘Joachim won victory over us all – he played with a perfection and deep poetry, so much soul in every tiny tone, a real ideal, such violin playing as I’ve never heard,’ recorded Clara, Robert’s wife, a celebrated pianist, accomplished composer, his staunchest defender and most exacting critic. Thus wrote Joachim to Robert: ‘May Beethoven’s example incite you, wondrous guardian of the richest treasures, to draw a work out of your deep quarry, and bring into the light something for us poor violinists…’ Schumann worked quickly, finishing his violin concerto on 3 October 1853, sketching and orchestrating it in under two weeks. He described it as ‘a reflection of a certain seriousness with an underlying mood of happiness.’ Such happiness was found in the extraordinary musical company gathered in Düsseldorf as the concerto neared completion; it included the young Johannes Brahms, recommended to the Schumanns by Joachim. Robert and Clara were totally enthralled with their new friend; their home resounded with music the three made performing for each other. Robert declared Brahms ‘a genius’ and wrote what would be his last essay, praising Brahms lavishly as a musical visionary. These joyous moments were a respite from Robert’s recurrent ills — anguished visions and physical torments that often rendered him, in his early 40s, wretched and incapacitated. Robert persevered, seeking solace and sustenance in composition when he could. In January 1854, the Schumanns visited Hamburg, where Joachim gave them a private reading of the concerto. Responding to Robert’s requests, Joachim made comments and suggested revisions in the solo part’s most difficult passages, recorded in Joachim’s score and a piano reduction Robert had prepared. Weeks later, Schumann attempted suicide by jumping into the River Rhine. His subsequent confinement at the Endenich asylum ended their plans of a premiere. Before Schumann’s death, Joachim performed the concerto again for Clara and voiced criticisms, especially of the third movement. The Schumanns’ daughter, Eugenie, recalled the sad conviction with which, following consultation with Joachim and Brahms, Clara decreed the violin concerto should never be published, believing it suffered from a significant ‘defect’ arising from Robert’s condition. Concerned that mental illness had diminished his creative judgment and wishing to preserve his artistic reputation, Clara withheld several of Robert’s last compositions from the complete edition of his works, and destroyed others. The Violin Concerto manuscripts survived in Berlin’s Prussian State Library. Against the wishes of Eugenie Schumann, a prohibition on publication placed by Joachim’s heirs was broken in August 1936 by interested parties, including Jelly d’Aranyi, a violinist, distant relative of Joachim and spiritualist who declared that for years Schumann had given her telepathic instruction on how to perform the concerto. Nazi propaganda trumpeted the November 1937 Berlin premiere

featuring Georg Kulenkampff as rediscovered evidence of German cultural glory. Yehudi Menuhin became an international champion of the concerto, declaring it to be the ‘historically missing link’ between the Beethoven and Brahms violin concertos, and ‘a treasure…it is real Schumann, romantic and fresh and so logically interconnected in every impulse.’ Few musicians would characterise the Violin Concerto as the most sophisticated of Schumann’s compositions, and some may find justification for Clara’s decision. Schumann explores unusual harmonies in unexpected directions and employs short, asymmetrical, often irregular phrases. However, the concerto’s lasting beauty lies not in perfection of form or exceptional fusion of harmony and texture, but in the solo line, inspired by Joachim’s artistry, to which Schumann gives a lyrical freedom worthy of his noblest works.

The solo violin immediately elaborates on the imposing first-movement opening theme with Baroque-like figurations, later embracing the simpler, heartfelt contrasting F major theme with soulful warmth and imagination. A sublime second-movement intermezzo, in the style of a romance, evokes quiet but intense rapture, the soloist’s line marked ausdrucksvoll (expressively), enfolded by the strings, sustained by horns and bassoons. A dramatic crescendo leads without pause to the third movement’s hearty, strongly accented triple-metre polonaise. The violin takes pleasure in its dance with the orchestra, embellishing with variations, engaging in playful exchanges and concluding in buoyant spirits.

Samuel C. Dixon © 2003 (1833–1897) Variations on a theme by Haydn, Op.56a The violinist Joseph Joachim once reassured a youthful Brahms, who had pestered him anxiously for an opinion on his new Variations on a theme by Schumann, ‘If I could, I would turn every one of the Variations into a triumphal arch and the theme into a laurel wreath for you to wear as I led you through them, you young Emperor of Music!’ For Brahms, like Haydn and Beethoven before him, the variation form was central to his musical life. While he declared a ‘particular affection’ for the form, which he argued should be used more creatively and with greater freedom, his own exploration of variation form nevertheless remained conservative, a challenge to his ingenuity in remaining faithful to the theme. His creativity shone in spinning off entirely new ideas from fragments of the original theme. Brahms was at a crossroads when he came, aged 40, to consider a theme from an old manuscript apparently by Haydn. He was in 1873 still three years from completing his long-gestating first symphony. His experience of the art of orchestration was limited to a first piano concerto and a pair of serenades, all composed long before he had even arrived from his native Hamburg in 1862 to make a permanent home in Vienna. Now, in his Variations on a theme by Haydn, the composer turned two notable corners. Composing the work in two separate versions more or less concurrently, one for two pianos (Op.56b) and one for orchestra (Op.56a), Brahms on one hand closed his career as a composer of major piano works — henceforth there would be only miniatures; and on the other hand he created, triumphantly, the world’s first

free-standing variations for orchestra. At the same time, in his confident and subtle mastery of a constantly varying instrumental palette through ten distinct environments (theme, eight variations and finale), he announced his arrival as an orchestrator.

The ‘theme by Haydn’ had been discovered and shown to Brahms three years previously by his Viennese friend Carl Ferdinand Pohl, librarian of the Society of the Friends of Music and Haydn’s first comprehensive biographer. Pohl had unearthed a set of half a dozen wind band divertimenti, or Feldparthien (literally, field partitas), in which it appeared, as the second movement of the last, under the heading Corale St Antonii. All six divertimenti are now considered spurious, possibly by Ignaz Pleyel, and the St Antony Chorale itself perhaps an old Austrian pilgrims’ hymn. Brahms in his opening statement of the theme consciously imitates the early Classical wind sonorities in the original divertimento. He reserves his upper strings for the actual variations, which follow, as John Horton has suggested, in a loosely symphonic sequence — energetic in the first three variations; Romantically melancholy in the fourth (Andante con moto); scherzo-like in 5, 6 and 8, with Variation 7 (Grazioso) a contrasting centrepiece; and gloriously cumulative in a passacaglia finale which builds in Bachian fashion from a ground bass constantly reiterating the first five bars of the St Antony theme. The bell-like tolling of the note B flat from the end of the theme echoes constantly through Variation 1, interwoven with sweeping string figures. Variation 2, in the minor, propels each scampering phrase with a peremptory shove, but the more delicate Variation 3 flows placidly, evoking Romantic horn sighs. The poignant expressiveness of the minor-key Variation 4, based on two new, wistfully flowing melodies, is achieved with a deceptive simplicity which refuses to proclaim its extraordinary contrapuntal skill. The impetuous Variation 5 pits different rhythms against each other within a basic 6/8 metre and a swaggering march follows in the equally brilliant Variation 6. The languorous siciliano of Variation 7 is another contrapuntal tour de force with glowing Brahmsian harmonies. A final, fleeting ghost-like variation — the third in the minor – leads to the solemn ground bass of the finale, a mere ten notes from which Brahms builds a kaleidoscopic edifice, rising inexorably to a majestic return of the full chorale theme.

Brahms’ unprecedented use of a passacaglia, or ground bass, finale to a set of variations is both a homage to the towering example of Bach and an advance hint of the great passacaglia, based on a theme of Bach himself, with which, 12 years later, he would close his fourth, and final, symphony.

Anthony Cane © 2004