Program

MARGARET SUTHERLAND (1897–1984)

Haunted Hills

From 1934 in the rainforest below Mount Dandenong, near Melbourne, William Ricketts created a garden filled with statues of fantastic creatures, native animals, and human figures that represent the traditional owners of the land, the Wurundjeri people. Some are winged, some crucified, and while they may now seem naïve there is no doubt of the artist’s sympathy with those wronged by colonial settlement.

Composed in 1950 and premiered the following year, Margaret Sutherland’s Haunted Hills has a similar intent: it celebrates the beauty of the Dandenong Ranges, but is, as she puts it, ‘a sound picture written in contemplation of the first people who roamed the hills, their bewilderment and their betrayal’ culminating in a ‘frenzied dance, its seeming gaiety born of despair.’

After an anguished rising gesture from the strings, a dignified maestoso theme – suggesting the Wurundjeri – is sounded by low woodwinds and strings, then brass. Its distinctive rhythm pervades the piece, where Sutherland varies the theme’s contour and harmony, as in the cor anglais solo that introduces the second ‘paragraph’ of the music. There follows a contrapuntal section, and reprise of the opening, though with the harmony inexorably falling.

A brief larghetto ‘movement’ might represent the Indigenous people’s ‘bewilderment’: much more sparse than the opening, it leaves air between chords, with a wan solo line for flute, and icy droplets from celesta. Energy bursts forth in the ‘frenzied dance’, where 3/4 and 6/8 contend for metrical dominance. The music is ebullient on the surface – for instance in a passage where a trumpet solo is punctuated by harp glissandos – but barely hides the bitterness that descends into a griefstricken 4/4 on solo violin. This in turn dissolves into spare wind duos, and a restatement of the lonely flute theme which restarts the dance. The frenzy leads to a massive climax with the opening maestoso theme rung out by trombones, but this is short-lived. The music retreats quickly through a patch of disembodied pizzicatos into empty silence.

Gordon Kerry © 2022

CLAUDE DEBUSSY (1862–1918) arr. Brett Dean (born 1961)

Ariettes oubliées (Forgotten Songs)

I. C’est l’extase langoureuse (It is the Languorous Ecstasy)

II. Il pleure dans mon cœur (Tears Fall in My Heart)

III. L’ombre des arbres (The Shadow of Trees)

IV. Chevaux de bois (Wooden Horses)

V. Green

VI. Spleen

Siobhan Stagg soprano

Roughly contemporary with Mahler’s First Symphony, Debussy’s songcycle Ariettes was first performed, to no great acclaim, in 1887 and revised for publication as Ariettes oubliées (Forgotten Songs) in 1903. The six songs set poetry by Paul Verlaine from his collection Romances sans paroles (Songs without Words) written in 1872 and 1873 when Verlaine had abandoned his wife and embarked on an affair with the young poet Arthur Rimbaud.

The songs, then, largely treat the notion of love. ‘C’est l’extase’ deals with post- coital languor and sadness; ‘Il pleure dans mon cœur’ famously likens the falling rain to falling tears despite no cause for grief; in ‘L’ombre des arbres’, shadows, water and mourning doves reflect the poet’s drowned hopes; the ‘Chevaux des bois’ are the horses on a merry-go-round in a slightly hellish carnival; ‘Green’ is another post-coital lyric, while ‘Spleen’ expresses the poet’s weariness with everything but the beloved, whom he fears will leave him.

Debussy’s piano accompaniments are extremely economical, and in his 2015 arrangement for the soprano Magdalena Kožená, Simon Rattle and the Australian World Orchestra, Brett Dean is careful to adhere to Debussy’s spirit. Naturally the trumpets, drums and bells, not to mention the sounds of the natural world that pervade the poetry, are irresistible to a composer, but Dean has changed none of the pitch material, has cultivated the orchestral palette of early Debussy works like the Nocturnes and Prélude à ‘l’après-midi d’un faune’ – mainly eschewing doubling, frequently dividing the strings and creating diaphanous wind textures. His only changes are in the interests, as he says, of giving the orchestration more time to unfold, judiciously adding the occasionally beat, bar or pause for that effect.

Gordon Kerry © 2023

Richard Strauss

(1864–1949)

An Alpine Symphony

Night –

Sunrise –

The ascent

Entry into the wood –

Wandering by the side of the brook –

At the waterfall –

Apparition –

On flowering meadows –

On the alpine pasture –Through thicket and undergrowth on the wrong path

On the glacier –

Dangerous moments –On the summit –

Vision –

Mists rise –

The sun gradually becomes obscured

Elegy –

Calm before the storm –

Thunder and tempest, descent –Sunset –

Conclusion –Night

Around the time he wrote An Alpine Symphony, Strauss boasted that he could, if necessary, describe a knife and fork in music. Indeed An Alpine Symphony marks the limit in Strauss’ nearly three-decades-long quest to extend music’s capacity for illustration and representation – an effort which began with Don Juan in 1888 and reached a highpoint with Thus Spake Zarathustra’s attempt to express the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche.

Strauss turned to An Alpine Symphony after writing Ariadne auf Naxos. Critics had just remarked on the Mozartean turn in his music, referring to the chamber forces required for Ariadne, when he produced this piece of orchestral gigantism. The orchestra needs 137 players, but what would you expect? Strauss is attempting nothing less than a literal portrait of a mountain.

Strauss composed this work in Garmisch, where he could look out over the Zugspitze and the Wettersteingebirge. Although he completed the orchestration in 100 days in 1914–15, the work itself had been long in gestation. As an idea, it had occurred to him as a boy, after he and a party of climbers got lost during a mountain hike and were overtaken by a storm on their return.

The form of An Alpine Symphony is spectacularly simple. The listener is drawn into the idea of ascending and descending a mountain. The timeframe is a 24-hour period. This format guarantees Strauss certain musical highlights: yet another opportunity to depict an opening sunrise (as impressive in its own way as Zarathustra’s), and a sunset sequence, eminently suited to Strauss in one of his ‘autumnal moods’. Strauss ingeniously avoids the obvious at ‘the summit’, where, after the predictable big statement of one of the earlier themes he shifts focus to a halting oboe. One writer has remarked that it is as if we are suddenly made aware of the impact of the stupendous view on an awestruck human. The predictability of the descent is offset by one of the most graphic storms in musical literature.

Although the work is not constructed like a symphony in the conventional sense, the 22 continuous sections can be grouped to suggest a huge Lisztian single-movement sonata form with delayed recapitulation, like 1896’s Ein Heldenleben.

‘At last I have learnt to orchestrate,’ Strauss said at the General Rehearsal with the Dresden Hofkapelle. Some of the more obvious orchestral highlights include the exhilarating depiction of spray at the waterfall. Then there is the strange colouring of the ‘Sun theme’ mixed with organ reeds to depict rising mists (‘perhaps the most brilliantly clever section of the work’, according to Strauss biographer, Norman Del Mar).

The work has often been dismissed as just a piece of ‘orchestriana’. But is it more than a shallow display? Del Mar points to Strauss’ ‘curiously detached attitude to the Nature subject…giving it a de-humanised majestic quality reminiscent, in a unique way, of Bruckner.’

The work can also be seen in the context of the mystical importance which mountains held for Germans in the 19 th century. The sense of the great mass of the mountain, barely discernible in the gloom, at the very end of the work, certainly has a Brucknerian scale and aspect, and it is probable that Strauss would have understood the remarks of his philosophical model Nietzsche who said:

He who knows how to breathe the air of my writings knows that it is an air of the heights, a robust air.

Unlike Nietzsche, Strauss could lapse into banality when he attempted to express Eternal and Absolute Truths. But whether he did so here or not, he never risked another tone poem. After An Alpine Symphony, he turned decisively to the stage, where his skills in musical depiction were a decided asset.

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