OAE programme January – March 2016 by Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment

Independent Day School for Girls from 4-18 years Queen’s Gate School offers girls a warm, supportive environment, where individuality is nurtured, academic standards are high and a broad based curriculum ensures a well rounded education. A range of Scholarships and means-tested bursaries are available to assist girls to join us and parents are welcome to visit us throughout the year. See our website for details of Open Events for entry to the Senior and Junior Schools in 201 . For a prospectus, or to make a private visit to the School, please contact the Registrar, Miss Janette Micklewright, on 020 7594 4982 or email, registrar@queensgate.org.uk.

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This year the Festival ends with performances by three great European orchestras, including the Vienna Philharmonic with whom Festival director and pianist Rudolf Buchbinder will perform all five Beethoven piano concertos in a single day – a veritable tour de force. Concerts are held in the architecturally dramatic Wolkenturm, in the grounds of the Metternich estate. Staying at the 4* Steigenberger Hotel set amongst the Grüner-Veltliner vineyards, we will also enjoy day trips to the picturesque village of Dürnstein, the Benedictine Abbey at Melk, and a panoramic tour of Vienna. Price from £2,286 per person for five nights including return flights, accommodation with breakfast, five dinners, one lunch, tickets and programmes for five concerts, all sightseeing, entrance fees and gratuities and the services of the Kirker Tour Leader.

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Contents

Spring Concerts 2016

Introducing this season

Marin, Madness and Music Saturday 6 February 2016

Welcome to this concert with the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment, one of Southbank Centre’s four Resident Orchestras. This is our sixth season of offering free programmes and we hope that they’re helping you enjoy our concerts. This programme covers three different concerts. So if you’re coming to another one, don’t forget to bring it back with you. You can also download copies of our programmes from oae.co.uk/programmes.

Some of our concerts this year will be held at St John’s Smith Square. They’re still part of our Southbank Centre residency, but while the Queen Elizabeth Hall is closed for refurbishment, they’re taking place at St John’s Smith Square instead. At both St John’s Smith Square and Southbank Centre, please do not hesitate to approach our Duty Manager and ushers/hosts with any questions you may have. Eating, drinking, shopping? There are numerous cafes, restaurants and shops around the Southbank Centre site, including inside the Royal Festival Hall itself. At St John’s Smith Square the Footstool Restaurant in the Crypt will serve interval and post-concert refreshments, but please note at both venues that refreshments will not be allowed in the concert hall. If you wish to make a comment following your visit please contact Visitor Experience Team at Southbank Centre, Belvedere Road, London SE1 8XX, phone 020 7960 4250 or email customer@southbankcentre.co.uk.

Compulsive Lyres and Fowl Play Sunday 14 February 2016 13 Bach, Secular and Sacred Thursday 10 March 2016

OAE Biography

The OAE Team

Glossary

Education

News

Future Concerts

OAE Supporters

We look forward to seeing you again soon.

Max Mandel, co-principal viola

A small group of period instrument-playing pioneers formed the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment 30 years ago. At that point public enthusiasm for historically performed performance was still relatively recent and the idea of a player-led period group revolutionary.

Introducing this season

A lot has changed since then, but the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment continues to ride a wave of adventure and experimentation. This season is no different, and curators Andrew Watts (bassoon) and Cecelia Bruggemeyer (double bass) have put together a series of concerts that includes old, firm favourites alongside new ground for the Orchestra to tread.

The Old Cecelia comments on how the Orchestra remains true to its roots this season: One of the primary motivations of OAE was to be player-led rather than director-led, and 30 years on that’s still very much at the heart of what we do now. So you have players like Andy and me curating the season. You have players directing concerts – Steve Devine will be directing the opening concert and Matt Truscott directing the Winds of Change concert. And you have soloists from within the Orchestra throughout the season such as Lisa Beznosiuk, Antony Pay, Margaret Faultless, Kati Debretzeni and David Blackadder to name a few. Andrew adds: We felt it was important to feature the Baroque and Classical repertoire that has always been at the heart of the OAE’s work but to bring our approach up to date with the latest scholarship and research. So we’re delighted that John Butt is joining us for an all Bach programme. John is one of the leading Bach scholars of our time with a formidable breadth of knowledge and insight.

The New 2015–2016 also sees the Orchestra venturing into later repertoire. Cecelia says, ‘We’ve also got Mahler’s Second Symphony to look forward to with Jurowski – who would have thought when the OAE started 30 years ago, we would one day be talking about a period instrument performance of Mahler. It’s extraordinary how far we’ve come’ This season we perform with Principal Artists Sir Mark Elder, Vladimir Jurowski and Sir Simon Rattle and we’re reunited with Emeritus Conductor Sir Roger Norrington. But we’ll be forging new relationships as well, not least with our new Principal Artist John Butt. Cecelia comments:

I’m so looking forward to working for the first time with Patricia Kopatchinskaja, and hearing what Michael Gordon composes for the classical bassoon. It will be fascinating to see what the chemistry between them and us will create. I can’t wait to see how David Pountney brings Der Freischütz to the concert platform. And I’m really delighted that we are playing with Sir András Schiff again. It’s only the second time I’ll have worked with him and the Orchestra still have such wonderful memories of the Haydn and Mozart project we did together.’

A message from OAE supporter Nigel Jones Marin, Madness and Music – 6 February 2016 I have worked in the City for the last three decades and have the privilege of serving as a board member of both the City Mental Health Alliance (CMHA) and the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment (OAE). I am in no doubt that everyone will benefit, both personally and professionally, if together we all consider people’s mental health more proactively. As this concert will demonstrate, music has an important part to play in that effort. Hence the pleasure my wife and I, and my CMHA colleagues, have in supporting it. Those of you are not already familiar with the OAE can find out more about its wonderful work elsewhere in this programme. As for CMHA, it was founded in 2013 to help City-based organisations be more open about mental health, to improve literacy around the topic, and to encourage more practical approaches to promoting positive mental health in our working environments. Our membership includes many leading City organisations (banks, professional service and law firms, and corporates), all of whom share a commitment, including at Board level, to addressing these challenges. If you would like to know more, including about how your organisation can get involved, please visit the CMHA website www.citymentalhealthalliance.org or email cmha@citymha.org.uk I hope you enjoy this evening’s performance, and come away mentally refreshed. Nigel Jones Partner, Linklaters LLP and Board member, CMHA & OAE

Marin, Madness and Music Saturday 6 February 2016

Marin, Madness and Music Saturday 6 February 2016 7pm Royal Festival Hall

Brahms Variations on a theme by Haydn Schumann Violin Concerto Interval

Violins 1 Matthew Truscott Jennifer Godson Ken Aiso Julia Kuhn Roy Mowatt Leonie Curtin Declan Daly Lucia Veintimilla* Simon Kodurand Persephone Gibbs Noyuri Hazama Jayne Spencer Lucy Waterhouse Violins 2 Richard Blayden Andrew Roberts Claire Holden Henry Tong George Clifford Andrej Kapor* Stephen Rouse Colin Callow Stephen Pedder Catherine Ford Flora Curzon

Double basses Chi-chi Nwanoku MBE Cecelia Bruggemeyer Kate Aldridge John-Henry Baker Flutes Lisa Beznosiuk Katy Bircher Piccolo Neil McLaren Oboes Daniel Bates Leo Duarte Clarinets Antony Pay Jane Booth

Marin Alsop conductor Patricia Kopatchinskaja violin Part of Southbank Centre's Changing Minds festival.

Recorded for BBC Radio 3 for broadcast on 8 February 2016.

Bassoons Meyrick Alexander Sally Jackson Contrabassoon David Chatterton

Violas Sophie Renshaw Nicholas Logie Annette Isserlis Kate Heller Marina Ascherson Thomas Kirby Penny Veryard Elisabeth Sordia* Christopher Beckett

Horns Roger Montgomery Martin Lawrence Gavin Edwards David Bentley Brendan Thomas

Cellos Luise Buchberger Andrew Skidmore Ruth Alford Helen Verney Catherine Rimer Richard Tunnicliffe

Trombones Philip Dale Hilary Turner Patrick Jackman

Trumpets David Blackadder Phillip Bainbridge

Timpani Adrian Bending Percussion Glyn Matthews

Schumann Symphony No. 3, Rhenish

*OAE Experience Scheme

We are grateful to the CMHA (through members who wish to remain anonymous) without whose support this concert would not have been possible. We also acknowlege with gratitude the support of patrons Selina & David Marks. This concert will finish at approximately 8.45pm, with an interval of 20 minutes. OAE Extras at 5.45pm, free admission Clore Ballroom A panel of speakers including Marin Alsop and Gillian Moore (Director of Music, Southbank Centre) discuss whether madness and genius really do go hand in hand. Or does this notion misrepresent both creativity and mental health problems? Aftershow Clore Ballroom, immediately after the concert Join members of the Orchestra for a Q&A session.

Concert in context

*Words indicated by an asterisk are explained on page 43

The relationship between Robert Schumann and Johannes Brahms remains one of the most fascinating and significant in musical history. Schumann’s forceful imagination, his inquisitive mind filled with literature and art, and his music of instant power and poetry had a huge effect on European music and helped shape the minds of a generation of composers after him. One of those was Johannes Brahms, who picked-up where Schumann left off in matters of melodic construction, fascination with counterpoint, the ordering of musical keys and in the sheer forcefulness of his orchestral expression. Schumann recognized Brahms’s potential, and in one sense dropped everything to nurture it, such was his generosity. Perhaps, as he slipped towards the mania that took full control after the propulsive joy of his Third Symphony, Schumann was keen to nurture a creative spirit in someone else. As for Brahms, the jury’s out on how well he repaid the favour. Rumours abound that he enjoyed a romance with the composer’s widow Clara and that he helped suppress Schumann’s Violin Concerto. But perhaps Brahms, the nervous perfectionist, had his reasons… Tonight we hear one of Brahms’s most delicately chiseled creations, a set of variations on a theme that allowed him to deploy his proportionate perfectionism with unusual straightforwardness and clarity. Brahms and the virtuoso Joseph Joachim believed Schumann’s Violin Concerto unbecoming of the genius that had spawned countless masterpieces for piano, voice, orchestra and ensemble. Were they right? Is Schumann’s concerto bad, odd, or just different? You can decide for yourself, but there’s no disputing the wonder of Schumann’s third

and final Symphony, a tour de force capable of inspiring anyone… except, perhaps, those with an aversion to the interval of the perfect fourth.

Marin, Madness and Music Saturday 6 February 2016

Programme Notes Johannes Brahms (1833–1897) Variations on a theme by Haydn, Op. 56 (1873)

In 1853, Robert Schumann opted to go public with his belief in the outstanding young composer he’d been mentoring. Schumann declared his discovery ‘a man singled out to make articulate the highest expression of our time.’ The composer in whom Schumann had placed so much confidence was Johannes Brahms. History has shown how prescient that confidence was. But for all Brahms’s fluent genius, he didn’t have it easy. His First Symphony of 1876 took an age to emerge through the mists of self-doubt and aesthetic stasis. To shake those problems off and re-set his creative compass, Brahms would spend many an hour copying-out scores by others he admired – a process of creative jump-starting that some composers still use today. One of the figures Brahms most frequently turned to was Joseph Haydn, the so-called ‘father of the symphony.’ Some time around 1870, and in consultation with his friend the Haydn scholar Carl Ferdinand Pohl, Brahms copied out a melody that the two believed had flowed from Haydn’s pen. Brahms decided in the summer of 1873 to compose a freestanding set of variations on the tune, initially for two pianos. In September of the same year, he orchestrated it; on 2 November, he conducted the Vienna Philharmonic in the first orchestral performance of the work, which has come to be known as the St Anthoni Chorale (we now know the tune to be a pilgrim’s hymn honouring that saint). It wasn’t just Haydn’s tune that shaped Brahms’s work. The composer also took his structural lead from Haydn, alternating major and minor keys at the start of his 8-variation design just as Haydn had in his set of F minor variations for piano (Brahms might have been expected, at the time, to begin with a stream of stylistic

contrasts before moving into alternating tonalities). So, the theme. It certainly has a hymn-like quality, and you’ll hear it first played on winds over plucked cellos and double basses. The first variation follows: an embellishment of the theme from the violins over a darkened orchestra punctuated by timpani strokes. The theme becomes more animated as it turns into the minor with something like a dance, and then more lyrical as it’s sung-out by an oboe and subsequently by violins. Brahms’s fourth variation returns to the minor and uses a scalic version of the theme as the basis for some stern counterpoint, while the fifth variation presents another contrast with nonchalant woodwinds playing in thirds. French horns energetically launch the sixth variation and muted cellos and violas characterize the veiled seventh. Brahms had wanted to end with a giant fugue, but made do with a grand, imposing finale in which theme, restored to its original shape, is rendered by full orchestra after a festival of instrumental imitation.

Programme Notes Robert Schumann (1810–1856) Violin Concerto in D minor, WoO. 23 (1853) I

In kräftigem, nicht zu schnellen tempo II Langsam III Lebhaft, doch nicht schnell

In the Spring of 1853 Schumann saw the great virtuoso Joseph Joachim play Beethoven’s Violin Concerto. The performance made a deep impression on the composer and prompted him to write two works for violin and orchestra with Joachim in mind. One was this concerto, started on 21 September 1853, finished on 1 October, and fully orchestrated two days later. Joachim, though, wasn’t too taken with Schumann’s efforts, which is where an extraordinary story begins. The violinist acted to stop the concerto being published with the support of Brahms; neither believed the score worthy of Schumann’s name (a combination of Brahms’s cripplingly unrealistic perfectionism and Joachim’s lack of judgment). Joachim squirreled the score away in the Prussian State Library. Seven decades later, enter stage left Joachim’s great niece Jelly d’Aranyi – a London violinist with a penchant for the supernatural. According to d’Aranyi, she heard of the unknown concerto’s existence when Schumann himself spoke to her from the grave during a session using a Ouija Board. D’Aranyi spread the word of the concerto’s existence and before long the manuscript stashed by Joachim was hunted down. D’Aranyi, the BBC Symphony Orchestra and Sir Adrian Boult gave the first UK performance of the work on 16 February 1938 in London, shortly after the German premiere in Berlin a few months earlier. Critics, eager to find reasoning for the actions of Brahms and Joachim, pointed to the work’s structural weaknesses. In a sense, they got to the bottom of it: the concerto’s relationship with traditional sonata form is uneasy and Schumann doesn’t always

INTERVAL

appear to develop his themes as a composer of his stature would have been expected to. They pointed, too, to a general lack of drama and a profusion of irritating repetition. These days, it’s easier to appreciate the piece as ‘different’ rather than simply ‘sub-standard’. The musicologist Alfred Nieman has noted Schumann’s lack of interest in pitting clashing opposites against one another, as most Romantic concertos were wont to do. Instead, writes Nieman, Schumann’s themes should be heard ‘as if characters in a play, forming new alignments in varying scenes but seldom drastically changing their basic personalities.’ In his first movement, Schumann fashions a traditional opening structure that’s eclipsed by his very different-sounding themes: two are presented by the orchestra before the soloist has played a note; towards the middle of the movement Schumann appears to deconstruct one of them as the orchestra and soloist trade short chords and delicate arpeggios in a moment of strange fragility. The theme of the slow movement is particularly touching (Brahms used it as the basis for another set of variations) not least when, towards the end of the movement, we hear it in a completely different light: shifted down a third and suddenly in a minor key. A short transition leads to the final movement, a cheerful Polonaise in which three themes are recalled no less than five times. But all is not jolly. At one point the music suddenly glances over its shoulder, recalling the main musical idea of the slow movement in what seems to be a moment of sudden, chilling fear. Schumann surely sensed what was coming his way.

Marin, Madness and Music Saturday 6 February 2016

Programme Notes Robert Schumann Symphony No. 3 in E flat major, Op. 97, Rhenish (1850) I II III IV V

Lebhaft Scherzo: Sehr massig Nicht schnell Feierlich Lebhaft

Mirroring its route through the western regions of Germany in which the composer spent his latter years, the Rhine cut its own dubious path through Robert Schumann’s life. It was in the river’s wide and treacherous waters that the composer attempted suicide in 1854, four years after the completion of this, his last symphony (the so called ‘fourth’ was actually composed second). It remains a paradox that such a magnificent, energetic, confident and joyous work was born at a time when the composer was approaching a peak of insecurity and illness. Schumann and his wife Clara had taken up residence in Düsseldorf in 1850, charmed by the Rhineland. But Robert remained frustrated by poor working conditions and became exhausted by his schedule (which included a significant amount of conducting). He started the symphony in November 1850, completing it shortly after a month later and conducting its first performance eight weeks after that (fast work, but Schumann had clearly mapped the piece in his mind before he put pen to paper). Two years later, Schumann would fall into an emotional tailspin. By 1854 he had been admitted by his own request to an asylum and by 1856 he was dead. Momentum is often cited as one of Schumann’s most fascinating and endearing compositional characteristics, and this symphony has it in spades. It commands from its first bar, launching as if midsentence with a propulsive theme on first violins supported by pulsating orchestral machinations underneath. This theme drives relentlessly forward – encouraged by braying horns and egged-on by rhythmic syncopations – towards a secondary theme that continues the music’s obsession with the interval of a fourth (think the first two notes

of Away in a Manger), but in a more swaying guise and now in the minor. Falling fourths also characterize the second movement that Schumann originally titled ‘Morning on the Rhine’, a smooth flowing movement whose use of the characteristic rhythm of the German Ländler give it an unmistakable sonic geography. There follows a delicate transitional movement marked Nicht schnell (‘not fast’), an intermezzo that might be seen as a stationery riverside picnic against the keen journeying of the other movements. Schumann was in bed ill when a new cardinal was installed at Cologne Cathedral on 12 November 1850, a ceremony that is often said to have shaped the grand procession of his fourth movement, Feierlich (‘Solemn’). Still, the movement was undoubtedly inspired by Cologne Cathedral: grand, imposing and built like a huge cathedral’s nave in its sequence of paragraphs abutted by firmly placed orchestral chords, and in its use of a single motif (built, again, on rising fourths). The fourth movement returns to Schumann’s Lebhaft (‘lively’) marking and begins diligently but jauntily with the spelling out of a fourth and the notes in between. Orchestral sections work hard at formulating and suggesting themes for some time before arriving at the unanimous statement of a fresh, skipping theme. As in the Violin Concerto, the previous movement is recalled, but here with multiple flashbacks: in grandiose brass statements or in the transformation of that movement’s solemn, minorkey theme into the major before a blazing statement of the first movement’s propulsive motif. Programme notes by Andrew Mellor © 2016

Boffin’s Corner Schumann’s Violin Concerto…and the Nazis Never shall I forget the moment when my mother came in to us and said, with deep but suppressed emotion on her face, ‘I have just settled with Joachim and Johannes [Brahms] that the concerto is not to be published, not now, or at any time’. So recalled Schumann’s youngest daughter Eugenie in an interview with The Times in 1938, a few days before the Violin Concerto’s UK premiere. Just one year before, Jelly d’Aranyi’s psychic gifts had lead hunters to the Prussian State Library where the unknown Violin Concerto in Eugenie’s father’s hand lay. D’Aranyi’s original plan was to perform the concerto in London in October 1937, but there was a problem. The Nazis had claimed copyright on the score as the property of a state-controlled library. There appeared to be an impasse. But d’Aranyi and Sir Adrian Boult were determined. Diplomatic wheels were set in motion, which involved an act of odd pre-war appeasement. With the agreement that the violinist Georg Kulenkampff could present the world premiere of the piece in Berlin in late 1937, D’Aranyi and Boult got the UK premiere and radio broadcast they wanted.

Marin, Madness and Music Saturday 6 February 2016

Biography Marin Alsop conductor Marin Alsop is an inspiring and powerful voice in the international music scene, a Music Director of vision and distinction who passionately believes that ‘music has the power to change lives’. She is recognised across the world for her innovative approach to programming and for her deep commitment to education and to the development of audiences of all ages. Her outstanding success as Music Director of the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra since 2007 has been recognised by two extensions in her tenure, now confirmed until 2021. As part of her artistic leadership in Baltimore, Marin Alsop has created bold initiatives that have contributed to the wider community and reached new audiences. Alsop took up the post of Principal Conductor of the São Paulo Symphony Orchestra in 2012 and became Music Director in July 2013. She continues to steer the orchestra in its artistic and creative programming, recording ventures and its education and outreach activities. Since 1992, Marin Alsop has been Music Director of California’s Cabrillo Festival of Contemporary Music, where she has built a devoted audience for new music. In September 2013, Marin Alsop made history as the first female conductor of the Last Night of the Proms. She returned to the Proms in 2015 to conduct the Last Night and an all-Brahms programme with the OAE. Marin Alsop is the recipient of numerous awards and is the only conductor to receive the prestigious MacArthur Fellowship, given to US residents in recognition of exceptional creative work. She was the only classical musician to be included in the Guardian’s ‘Top 100 women’, celebrating the centenary of International Women’s Day in 2011. Alsop is an Honorary Member of the Royal Academy of Music and the Royal Philharmonic Society and was recently appointed Director of Graduate Conducting Program at the Johns Hopkins Peabody Institute. Born in New York City, Marin Alsop attended Yale University and received her Master’s Degree from The Juilliard School. Her conducting career was launched when, in 1989, she was a prize-winner at the Leopold Stokowski International Conducting Competition and in the same year was the first woman to be awarded the Koussevitzky Conducting Prize from the Tanglewood Music Center, where she was a pupil of Leonard Bernstein.

Photo: Grant Leighton

Biography Patricia Kopatchinskaja violin Violinist Patricia Kopatchinskaja’s versatility shows itself in her diverse repertoire, ranging from Baroque and Classical often played on gut strings, to new commissions and re-interpretations of modern masterworks. Highlights of the 2015–2016 season include performances with Staatskapelle Berlin, a residency at the Laeiszhalle in Hamburg and a collaboration with Teodor Currentzis and Musica Aeterna with whom she will appear at Bremen Festspiele and tour across Europe. Kopatchinskaja will also tour with Camerata Salzburg under Langrée, La Chambre Philharmonique under Krivine, Chamber Orchestra of Europe, collaborate with Vladimir Jurowski and his State Academic Symphony Orchestra in Moscow and perform with the Houston Symphony and Seatle Symphony Orchestra. In London, Kopatchinskaja appears with the London Philharmonic Orchestra under Jurowski and she is the central figure of the Changing Minds festival at Southbank Centre – where she performs with the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment, Kafka Fragments with Anu Komsi and works by Ustvolskaja. Kopatchinskaja performs a number of new commission premieres this season: Turnage’s new piece for Violin and Cello with Sol Gabetta; Mauricio Sotelo’s new composition for string orchestra, flamenco dance and percussion with The Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra – where she is an Artistic Partner - as well as a new piece by Michael Hersch and the French premiere of Michael van der Aa’s new Violin Concerto. Last season’s highlights included her debut with the Berliner Philharmoniker performing Peter Eötvös’ DoReMi under the baton of the composer himself. She also performed at the closing concerts of Lincoln Center’s Mostly Mozart Festival, appeared with the London Philharmonic Orchestra at the Edinburgh International and Santander festivals and toured Switzerland with the Royal Stockholm Philharmonic Orchestra under Sakari Oramo. Chamber music is immensely important to Kopatchinskaja and she performs regularly with artists such as Markus Hinterhäuser and Polina Leschenko as well as members of her own family. She is a founding member of the acclaimed quartet-lab - a string quartet with Isabelle van Keulen, Lilli Maijala

and Pieter Wispelwey – with whom she undertakes a major European tour in autumn 2015. A prolific recording artist, this 2015–2016 season will see three major releases, one with Gidon Kremer and the Kremerata Baltica a CD of Kancheli’s music, TAKE 2 on Outhere/Alpha and Tchaikovsky’s Violin Concerto with Teodor Currentzis and Musica Aeterna on the Sony label. Her release for Naïve Classique with concerti by Bartók, Ligeti and Peter Eötvös won Gramophone’s Recording of the Year Award in 2013, the ECHO Klassik Award and a 2014 Grammy nomination.

Photo: Marco Borggreve

Marin, Madness and Music Saturday 6 February 2016

Compulsive Lyres and Fowl Play Sunday 14 February 2016 7.30pm Royal Festival Hall

Haydn Symphony No. 83, La Poule Mozart Concerto for Flute and Harp

Interval

Violins 1 Margaret Faultless Huw Daniel Alison Bury Jennifer Godson Sophie Barber Rachel Isserlis Andrew Roberts Noyuri Hazama Violins 2 Matthew Truscott Colin Scobie Roy Mowatt Claire Holden Debbie Diamond Stephen Rouse Catherine Ford George Clifford Violas Max Mandel Nicholas Logie Martin Kelly Annette Isserlis Kate Heller Thomas Kirby Cellos Andrew Skidmore Catherine Rimer Helen Verney Ruth Alford Jennifer Morsches Double basses Chi-chi Nwanoku MBE Cecelia Bruggemeyer Christine Sticher

Flutes Lisa Beznosiuk Neil McLaren

Chevalier de Saint-Georges Overture from L'Amant anonyme

Oboes Daniel Lanthier Nicola Barbagli

Beethoven Symphony No. 2

Clarinets Antony Pay Jane Booth Bassoons Peter Whelan Sally Jackson Horns Phillip Eastop Martin Lawrence Trumpets David Blackadder Matthew Wells Timpani Adrian Bending

Sir Roger Norrington conductor Lisa Beznosiuk flute Frances Kelly harp

We are very grateful to Julian and Annette Armstrong and Bruce Harris for their support of this concert. We are delighted to dedicate this concert to our Supporting, Bronze, Silver and Gold Friends and Patrons in recognition of all their support of the Orchestraâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s work.

This concert will finish at approximately 9.30pm, including an interval of 20 minutes. OAE Extras at 6.15pm, free admission Royal Festival Hall Has period performance done its job? With the OAE marking its 30th Birthday this year we host a panel debate looking at what the period performance movement has achieved and ask, is its job now done?

Concert in context

*Words indicated by an asterisk are explained on page 43

Rarely in living memory have we been made so acutely aware of Paris’s cultural significance and multicultural makeup. Two of the pieces we hear tonight are inextricably linked to a black man who fought hard in a time of racism and slavery to become one of the French capital’s most respected musicians. Joseph de Bologne, aka Le Chevalier de Saint-Georges, conducted a string of ensembles in the city including the orchestra that commissioned and performed Haydn’s landmark Paris Symphonies. We hear one of those symphonies tonight, the only one of the six that occupies the dark shading of a minor key. After that comes a strong-willed, three-part Overture by Saint-Georges himself in which we hear the sure signs of Haydn’s influence. The centre of musical gravity might have looked like it was drifting west towards Paris in the late 1700s, which was one reason the twenty-something Mozart moved to the city. But Wolfgang’s time in the French capital didn’t go well. The French wound him up, he was visited by personal tragedy and he never seemed to get on side with Parisian audiences and their particular tastes. That didn’t stop Mozart writing some sublime music in the city, including a concerto for flute and harp in which he toys with the perceived characteristics of French music in his own inimitable way. As for France’s pole position on the music scene, thanks to one Ludwig van Beethoven it never really got going (not for another century, at least). In Beethoven’s Second Symphony of 1802, we begin to hear the impetuousness, boldness, zeal and invention that would make its creator the most important symphonist for many generations – and make Austro-Germany the epicentre of musical creativity once more.

Compulsive Lyres and Fowl Play Sunday 14 February 2016

Programme Notes Franz Joseph Haydn (1732–1809) Symphony No. 83 in G minor, Hob. I:83, La Poule (1785) I II III IV

Allegro spiritoso Andante Menuet: Allegretto Finale: Vivace

Unlike his friend and pupil Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Joseph Haydn spent the vast majority of his career in one place: Esterházy in Austro-Hungary, home to the aristocratic family who paid his wages. But that didn’t stop Haydn’s reputation from traveling. In early 1780, the composer’s music was pricking up ears all over Paris. A French aristocrat and freemason named Claude François-Marie Rigoley, Count of Ogny, developed a particular penchant for Haydn’s works. Perhaps the Count recognised that the composer’s symphonies were starting to hit upon something new: that his experience with opera was seeping into symphonic scores increasingly concerned with dramatic flow; that his handling of contrasting keys was becoming ever more overarching and broad without losing its sense of impish cheek. In 1784, the Count asked Haydn to write six symphonies for the huge orchestra of his masonic lodge, known colloquially as the Loge Olympique. Haydn, now contractually permitted to accept external commissions despite his continuing employment at Esterházy (he was offered an astronomical fee by the Count), wrote six symphonies that built on all those burgeoning symphonic ideas. The so-called Paris symphonies felt more lively, engaging, emotionally true and structurally sound than any that had flowed from Haydn’s pen before. Haydn took his small Esterházy orchestra through the pieces before sending the scores off to the Count. The Orchestra of the Loge Olympique took two years to schedule them but when it eventually presented the works, it went all out. Each concert of the 1787-88 series contained at least one symphony of the Paris set,

sometimes two. The huge orchestra played the scores in its distinctive sky blue uniform, each musician carrying a sword. The performances were conducted by one Le Chevalier de SaintGeorges, more of whom anon. The ‘Paris’ Symphony numbered 83 was probably written in 1785. Of the six, this is the only example in a minor key, though in truth the first movement sees much of its ominous darkness off and by the fourth the music is singing out resolutely in the major. That first movement builds in intensity from its initial idea stalked by silence to a more lighthearted secondary theme which, long after Haydn’s time, gave the symphony its ‘the hen’ nickname: an oboe repeats a single note while violins play a theme that clucks along with a little gracenote. The contrast between those two themes is underlined when they are discussed together in Haydn’s development section. Haydn instructs the gentle Andante to be played mostly at ‘piano’ and ‘pianissimo’ volumes (‘quiet’ and ‘very quiet’) but that state is briefly but abruptly interrupted by invading forces. Two dance movements round the symphony off: a minuet with the gait of a waltz, and a finale characterized by a gigue-like theme whose energy takes the music from key to key – no less than seven keys are visited in one particular 20-bar stretch. Haydn’s musical phrases here are typically short and snappy, but all the while his orchestra is growing in independence, instruments blossoming into characters or individual phrases where they might have been used for accompaniment or harmonic filling before. The music feels full of spirit, until it reaches a hesitant pause…and then an emphatic close.

Programme Notes Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756–1791) Concerto for Flute, Harp and Orchestra in C major, K. 299/297c (1778) I Allegro II Andantino III Rondo. Allegro.

Mozart claimed to dislike the flute and apparently wasn’t overly keen on the harp either. The composer told his mother that he wrote this double concerto for the two instruments to avoid having to write individual ones. But there were positive impulses behind the work’s birth, too. During his troubled early weeks in Paris in 1778, Mozart was looked upon kindly by the Count of Guines, whose flute playing the composer described as ‘incomparable’. The Count soon had Mozart teaching his daughter, who was equally proficient on the harp – enough for Mozart to describe her playing as ‘magnificent’. The relationship, like much else in Mozart’s Paris period, soon turned sour. But not before the composer had written this concerto for the father-daughter duo, cannily bearing his French audience in mind. What it might

lack in bold gestures the concerto certainly makes up for in elegance and texture – not least the very distinct and luminous combination of those plucked and blown solo instruments. More than that, though, Mozart put his concerto on something of a French footing by employing a native dance in his final movement (a gavotte) and scattering the music with Gallic decoration in the form of trills and turns. Mozart often criticised French aesthetics and some say he wanted to challenge them in this piece – creating a tension between his natural voice and his parodying of debonair stylistics that propels the music forwards. But there’s plenty of straightforwardly brilliant Mozart in here too, not least in the ravishing slow movement where soloists and orchestra constantly shift roles to unique and charming effect.

INTERVAL

Boffin’s Corner The glitz and glamour of the Loge Olympique Many 18th-century musicians were freemasons, including the first three composers we hear from tonight. When Saint-Georges’s orchestra Le Concert des Amateurs folded in 1781, a group of masons founded an ensemble sponsored by one of the most prominent lodges in Paris, L’Olympique de la Parfait Union (‘The Olympic of the Perfect Union’). In keeping with the flair and sporting prowess of its conductor SaintGeorges, the orchestra played in an outlandish uniform of sky-blue dress coats with elaborate lace ruffs and accessory swords, as reported by the music historian HC Robbins Landon. All very impressive, especially when you consider the ensemble’s size: it had over forty musicians in its violin section alone (more than in Haydn’s entire orchestra at Esterházy). The first performance of Haydn’s Paris symphonies attracted much attention, not least from the Queen, Marie-Antoinette, who attended the first airing of each of the symphonies and was rather taken with No 85, hence its nickname (not ‘the hen’ but La Reine, ‘The Queen’). Haydn would have been quite taken with his fee, too, which at 25 gold coins for each symphony plus another five for the publication rights was around four times what he would have expected elsewhere. If that seemed outlandish, it was. Claude François-Marie Rigoley, the Count of Ogny – the prominent member of the lodge who commissioned the symphonies, stumped up the cash and himself played the cello in the orchestra – was found to have amassed huge debts when he died.

Compulsive Lyres and Fowl Play Sunday 14 February 2016

Programme Notes Le Chevalier de Saint-Georges (1745-1799) Overture from L’Amant anonyme (1780)

Joseph de Bologne, aka Le Chevalier de Saint-Georges, was the son of a French aristocrat and one of the slaves that worked on his plantation in Guadeloupe. An outstandingly talented fencer, lover, violinist, keyboardist, conductor, and no mean composer either, Saint-Georges was living proof that the only way black people could gain true recognition and acceptance in 18th-century Europe was though a combination of formidable talent and extremely hard work. Saint-Georges might have become famous for his antics with a sword – he was once lured to England by the Prince of Wales for a celebrity fence-off with a wellknown swordswoman – but he mastered his musical technique and found his voice as a composer pretty early on. Much of the music he wrote was induced by the orchestras he played in, directed and transformed into first-rate ensembles (including, late in his career, the famous Le Cercle de l’Harmonie). When Saint-Georges became one of the first black freemasons in France at the Loge Olympique, he was entrusted with the directorship of its orchestra, the successor to Le Concert des Amateurs, which he had already taken to new heights. Seven years earlier, with Haydn clearly on his radar, Saint-Georges wrote the only one of his comic operas that survives in score today: L’Amant anonyme (The Anonymous Lover). After its first performance in Paris on 8 March 1780, it became the most popular of the composer’s stage works. The music might not be on the consistently inspired level of Haydn’s, but it certainly reveals that composer’s influence in the bustling energy and rhythmic gameplay of its symphonic, threemovement Overture. The Overture’s three movements are often built on elegant elaborations

on simple figures, but it launches with an angular theme, full of purpose. A whimsical slow section follows, and then a return to fast music full of brightness but with a dash of intrigue too.

Programme Notes Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827) Symphony No.2 in D major, Op. 36 (1802) I

Adagio molto – Allegro con brio II Larghetto III Scherzo: Allegro IV Allegro molto

A wise individual once wrote that if Beethoven’s symphonies were presented un-dated and unnumbered, the easiest to guess the position of – after the Ninth – would be the First and Second. Whether or not you feel you could deliver on that challenge, it’s a useful observation. These are symphonies that demonstrate a distinct process of expansion and exploration, not only as a pair but also in the context of the soil from which they grew: the late symphonies of Mozart and Haydn. Beethoven, though, was already his own man. The forces that were to make him the most important musician for centuries were already beginning to form at the time of this, the Second Symphony. One of the most significant of those forces was the decline in the composer’s hearing. As he began to acknowledge that performing as a pianist with an orchestra would become increasingly difficult given his encroaching deafness, Beethoven veered towards the creation of symphonies which would prove that the same drama and intensity could be achieved without a pianist on stage at all. His First Symphony had famously launched with a discord; his Second would speak even more of the unorthodoxy, grandeur and brilliance that was soon to usher ‘the symphony’ into the new century. Beethoven was in one of his darkest emotional states while working on this symphony. One concurrent, non-musical piece of writing on his desk in 1801-2 was the Heiligenstadt Testament – a determined railing against his hearing condition from Beethoven in the form of a letter to his brothers in which he explores the full extent of his despair and at one point contemplates suicide. Perhaps this is what we hear in the symphony’s opening bars. Clouds gather as the long, slow introduction becomes increasingly tense, twisting itself up

through various remote keys to an angst-ridden D minor stalemate before slipping into the first movement’s ‘fast’ theme which itself prompts wild snaps and blows from the orchestra. What follows is particularly interesting. A slow movement which unveils for the first time the sort of rich, lyrical wind ideas and hymn-like melodies that Beethoven would develop fully in the most exalted moments of his late symphonies and string quartets. Then we have Beethoven’s first orchestral Scherzo, the joke being a three-note fragment that’s tossed merrily between instrumental groups – listen in particular for the misplaced accents in the violins, the emergence of one of Beethoven’s most distinctive hallmarks. It’s in the finale that the most explicit facets of Beethoven’s epic symphonic imagination are laid out. Initially we hear a pithy theme that’s picked up and thrown away in upper-register instruments and greeted gruffly by lower ones. That idea is taken forward until an extraordinary ‘coda’ arrives, built from a subdued, lyrical theme that passed almost unnoticed earlier in the movement; here it combines with the earlier motif in a massive cranking-up of symphonic momentum that demands a wildly dramatic ending. That’s what one critic was getting at when he described the symphony after its first performance on 5 April 1803 as ‘a hideously writhing wounded dragon that refuses to expire’. They might have sounded bizarre and savage to those first listeners, but we now recognize these early protests from Beethoven – his first outcries in the face of fate – as strides towards Romanticism and an appropriate prelude to the upheavals of his symphonies to come. Programme notes by Andrew Mellor © 2016

Compulsive Lyres and Fowl Play Sunday 14 February 2016

Biography Sir Roger Norrington conductor Sir Roger Norrington came from a musical family in Oxford, England and played the violin and sang from a young age. He studied History at Westminster School and English Literature at Cambridge University, where he was a choral scholar. Several yearsâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; wide experience of top class amateur music making, while working as a publisher of scholarly books, ended with a return to musical studies at the Royal College of Music in London and the start of his professional career as a singer and conductor. During the 1980s and 1990s Norrington was much in demand as a guest conductor (as he still is today). He worked in Britain at Covent Garden and the English National Opera, with the BBC Symphony and the Philharmonia orchestras, and was Chief Conductor of the Bournemouth Sinfonietta. Abroad he appears with the Berlin Philharmonic, the Vienna Philharmonic, the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra, the Orchestre de Paris, and in America the New York, Washington, Boston, Chicago, Cleveland, Philadelphia, San Francisco and Los Angeles orchestras. Since 1998 Norrington has been the Principal Conductor of the Stuttgart Radio Symphony Orchestra (SWR), and until 2006, of the Camerata Salzburg. Since the 2011/12 season he is the Principal Conductor of the Zurich Chamber Orchestra. In 2012 he was awarded the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany, the only federal decoration of Germany, for his collaboration with the RSO Stuttgart. He is also Emeritus Conductor of the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment.

photo: Manfred Esser

Biography Lisa Beznosiuk flute Born in England of Ukrainian/Irish descent Lisa Beznosiuk is one of the worldâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s leading performers on early flutes. As solo flautist and orchestral principal she has performed and recorded a wide range of 18th and 19th century repertoire on a variety of historical flutes, both copies and originals, from her own collection. It was after hearing baroque flautist Stephen Preston play a recital at the Guildhall School of Music that Lisa was inspired to take up the traverso. She developed a passion for wooden flutes and baroque music, also finding herself busy playing harpsichord continuo - a skill which has become useful in her teaching career. Lisa has received many enthusiastic reviews for her live and recorded performances. Her solo recordings include the complete sonatas of Bach and Handel, concertos by Vivaldi, and quartets and concertos by Mozart. She also features on numerous recordings of orchestral music from Bach to Brahms and beyond with many of Europeâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s best-known period instrument ensembles. Lisa is a founder of the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment, and as a member of its Players Artistic Committee she is closely involved in programme planning and the artistic future of the orchestra. Lisa is also a passionate and dedicated teacher and is Professor of Early Flutes at the Royal Academy of Music, Guildhall School and the Royal College of Music. She holds an international reputation as a teacher and coach; many of her former students are now successful and well-known flautists.

Compulsive Lyres and Fowl Play Sunday 14 February 2016

Biography Frances Kelly harp Frances Kelly has had a wide-ranging career reflecting her broad interest in music from the Middle Ages to the present day. Trained on the modern harp, (her professors include the wonderful Dutch harpist and teacher, Phia Berghout), and with a music degree from Cambridge University, she was one of the first harpists to commission the building of baroque harps in order to explore their repertoire and role as a continuo instrument. She is now a leading exponent of early harps, in great demand as a continuo player, and has performed, broadcast and recorded with many distinguished early music ensembles, as well as most of the major UK opera companies. She has made numerous chamber music and solo recordings and her work has taken her throughout Europe and to the USA, Mexico, China and Japan. Frances enjoys teaching and holds posts at Trinity Laban Conservatoire of Music and Dance and at the Royal Academy of Music.

A message from our Major Sponsor, Jupiter Asset Management I am delighted to welcome you to tonightâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s concert: Bach, Secular and Sacred by the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment, directed by John Butt. Jupiter has been sponsoring the Orchestra since 1999 and over the past sixteen years we have established a successful partnership based on our shared strengths of integrity and innovation. Founded just one year apart, in 1985 and 1986 respectively, Jupiter and the OAE have much in common. Like the Orchestra, over the past three decades Jupiter has also developed an impressive reputation for expertise and professionalism - albeit in the field of fund management rather than music! I hope that you will enjoy listening to another memorable performance from the OAEâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s fine musicians.

Maarten Slendebroek

Bach, Secular and Sacred Thursday 10 March 2016

Bach, Secular and Sacred Thursday 10 March 2016 7pm St John’s Smith Square St John’s Smith Square, London SW1P 3HA Box Office 0207 222 1061 sjss.org.uk

Bach Sinfonia from Cantata No. 42 Bach Lutheran Mass No. 3 Interval Bach Brandenburg Concerto No. 2 Bach Lutheran Mass No. 4

John Butt director

Violins Matthew Truscott Huw Daniel Rachel Isserlis Viola Max Mandel Cello Luise Buchberger Bass Chi-chi Nwanoku MBE Oboes Daniel Lanthier Lars Henrikkson

Mary Bevan soprano Meg Bragle mezzo-soprano Thomas Hobbs tenor Edward Grint bass-baritone David Blackadder trumpet Pamela Thorby recorder Daniel Lanthier oboe Matthew Truscott violin

Recorder Pamela Thorby Bassoon Rebecca Hammond Trumpet David Blackadder Organ Stephen Farr

This concert will finish at approximately 9pm, including an interval of 20 minutes. We are very grateful to our major sponsor, Jupiter Asset Management, for their support of this concert. OAE Extras at 5.45pm, free admission Europe House, Smith Square (just across the street from St John’s Smith Square) An introduction to tonight’s performance

Concert in context

Programme Notes Johann Sebastian Bach (1685-1750) Sinfonia from Am Abend aber desselbigen Sabbats, BWV 42 (1725)

*Words indicated by an asterisk are explained on page 43

Bach is music’s most universal creative genius. Every note of his plays a vital role in a complex web of melody, harmony, rhythm, counterpoint and symbolism that binds each work together. Uniquely amongst the great composers, Bach saw everything he composed as having instructional value. He was essentially a practical man who valued his music more for its unassailable logic and structural impregnability than its profound spiritual and emotional content. Yet although his music is deeply embedded in the German tradition, he enthusiastically embraced influences from other countries, including the concerto from Italy and the dance suite from France. ‘The miracle of Bach has not appeared in any other art,’ asserted the pioneering Spanish

cellist Pablo Casals, who effectively sealed Bach’s modern reputation. ‘To make divine things human and human things divine – such is Bach, the greatest and purest moment in music of all time.’

Bach never felt drawn to the operatic stage, yet he composed over 300 dramatically compelling church cantatas, of which sadly only two thirds have survived. The cantata was developed initially by the Italian organist-composer Giacomo Carissimi (1605–74) as a scaled-down oratorio for the more intimate surroundings of the parish church. The first major composer working in Germany to adopt the burgeoning genre was Danishborn Dietrich Buxtehude (c.1637/39–1707), although it was Bach who realised its full potential as a way of embracing the major events of the church year in music. As the distinguished historian Charles Sanford Terry aptly put it ‘the cantatas reveal Bach as a man singularly pondering, emotional and above all controlled by a religious sense as profound as it was simple.’

Am Abend aber desselbigen Sabbats (‘On the evening, however, of the same Sabbath day’) is the only one of Bach’s cantatas in his second yearly cycle to open with an extended sinfonia. First performed in Leipzig on 8 April 1725, it seems that he created this arresting orchestral introduction as a means of resting his over-worked choir, which the previous week had performed two other cantatas (BWV1 and BWV4) and the entire St. John Passion. Cast in da capo (ABA) form, the Sinfonia’s central cantabile section may have been intended to evoke the risen Christ’s evening walk to Emmaus.

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Programme Notes Johann Sebastian Bach Mass in G minor, BWV 235 (Lutheran Mass No.3, c.1738/1739) I II III IV V VI\

Kyrie Gloria in excelsis Gratias agimus tibi Domine Fili unigenite Qui tollis Cum sancto Spiritu

Such is the supreme quality of Bach’s epic Mass in B minor BWV 232 that the four shorter Lutheran masses he completed in the decade between 1737 and 1747 have tended to be overlooked. Another important factor in their relative neglect is the fact that when collating his materials Bach borrowed heavily from (or ‘parodied’) ten existing cantatas dating from the mid-1720s. In the case of BWV 235 the opening movement was adapted from Cantata No.102, the second from No.72 and the remainder from No.187. Practical as ever, bearing in mind that his sacred cantatas were timespecific and could only be performed on one particuar day of the year, by adapting carefully selected movements in the form of a Mass, Bach was potentially able to give some of his finest choral music a more regular airing. The juxtaposition of

the varous movements and emotional pacing was also carefully considered, so that far from being merely cobbled together to save time and effort, each Mass possesses its own unique creative flavour and sense of structural narrative. As was common procedure at the time, Bach reduced the five main sections of the full Roman Ordinary – Kyrie, Gloria, Credo, Sanctus and Agnus Dei – to just the opening two. He further sub-divided the Gloria into two pairs of contrapuntallyintricate choruses – Gloria in excelsis and Cum sancto Spiritu – and solo arias – Gratias agimus tibi for the bass and the tenor-led Qui tollis – placed symmetrically around a central alto aria (Domine Fili unigenite). The latter provides a sublime oasis of major-key calm in the second half of a work otherwise most striking for its minorkey intensity.

INTERVAL

Johann Sebastian Bach Brandenburg Concerto No. 2 in F major, BWV 1047 (c.1720) I (Allegro) II Andante III Allegro assai

It was during the summer of 1719 that Christian Ludwig, Margrave of Brandenburg, first commissioned Bach to write some music for his court orchestra. Two years later, Bach dispatched a set of six concertos, begging his patron in a self-effacing dedication not to judge the ‘imperfections’ of the concertos too harshly, but rather to find in them ‘the profound respect and very humble elegance which they seek to convey’. Each concerto is scored for a different combination of soloists and sustains an exceptionally high level of inspiration. Indeed, the distinguished Bach scholar Albert Schweitzer considered them ‘the purest products of Bach’s polyphonic style.’ The latest scholarship would seem to indicate that Bach sent the concertos to the Margrave in the hope that he might win some form of permanent employment. However, Christian Ludwig clearly did not appreciate the imagination, beauty

and wealth of originality that marks out these timeless scores, as in the catalogue of his musical library Bach’s name is notable for its complete absence. It defies belief that one of the summits of Western music initially went ignored, unheard and unacknowledged, and was probably sold on as part of a job lot. The exact dating of the Brandenburg Concertos is still a matter for conjecture, although it is now generally assumed that most were originally composed for and performed by the skilled musicians of Cöthen (where Bach was based between 1717 and 1723) prior to their being bound together for the Margrave. In the Second Concerto, Bach strived for more soloistic brilliance than usual, employing a highly distinctive concertino line-up of trumpet, recorder, oboe and violin, the first of which falls silent in the wistful central Andante.

Programme Notes Johann Sebastian Bach Mass in G major, BWV 236 (Lutheran Mass No. 4, c. 1738/1739) I II III IV V VI

Kyrie Gloria in excelsis Gratias agimus tibi Domine Deus, agnus Dei Quoniam tu solus sanctus Cum sancto Spiritu

Bach’s final and longest-lasting appointment in Leipzig between 1723 and 1750 was sadly not his happiest. His essential duties were to direct and compose music for the churches of St. Thomas and St. Nicholas, and to superintend the musical training of the St. Thomas School choristers. But with inadequate numbers of competent musicians at his disposal he found himself constantly at loggerheads with the authorities, whom he exasperatedly dismissed as ‘peculiar and not very devoted to music’, while describing the atmosphere in Leipzig as one of ‘almost constant vexation, envy and persecution.’ Bach did his best to raise musical standards at the school, although his main concern was the quality of music performed in his two churches on Sundays. For their part, the town fathers were concerned primarily in the smooth functioning of the system and had neither the time nor inclination to indulge the whims of a creative genius. Yet despite the lack of interest shown in his music, Bach produced a series of works at an exalted level, including his matchless series of cantatas, the St. John and St. Matthew Passions, Magnificat, Christmas Oratorio, Mass in B minor and the shorter Mass in G major that concludes tonight’s programme. Dating from the same period as the G minor Mass heard earlier, BWV 236 is similarly derived from a number of cantatas: Nos.179 (Kyrie and Quoniam), 79 (Gloria and Domine Deus), 138 (Gratias) and 17 (Cum sancto Spiritu). It also adopts a similar pattern by subdividing the Gloria into five main sections (nos.2–5), in which the choral Gloria in excelsis and Cum sancto Spiritu frame a sequence of three soloistic numbers – another inspired bass-led Gratias agimus tibi and the Quoniam tu solus sanctus for tenor, with the sopranoalto duet Domine Deus at its

epicentre. Interestingly, Bach reverses exactly the tonal procedure of BWV 235 by casting the hauntingly reflective Domine Deus and Quoniam in the minor mode, forming a profoud contrast with the predominantly upbeat, majorkey music that surrounds them. Programme notes by Julian Haylock © 2016

Bach, Secular and Sacred Thursday 10 March 2016

Boffin’s Corner J S Bach: Music’s Indestructible Genius With the notable exception of opera, Bach composed towering masterpieces in every major Baroque genre – sonatas, concertos, suites and cantatas – as well as innumerable keyboard, organ and choral works. Yet during his lifetime his creative genius went largely unappreciated, and by the time of his death he was viewed as something of a musical dinosaur – someone who had stubbornly refused to move with the times. Difficult though it is to believe, in Bach’s day music was treated as a consumable commodity, in many ways reminiscent of contemporary pop culture. Here one day, gone the next, as the tide of taste and fashion rolled by inexorably, so new pieces were required on an almost daily basis for a wide variety of purposes. Yet Bach’s reputation was first and foremost as Germany’s leading organist – not as a composer. The notion of rows of music-lovers gathering to listen in hallowed silence to music composed the previous year, let alone centuries before, was practically unheard of at the time. The modern concert programme – what the late, great French composer-conductor Pierre Boulez despairingly referred to as ‘museum culture’ – was an essentially Romantic concept that lay nearly a hundred years in the future. Ironically, despite being derided as hopelessly old-fashioned during his own lifetime, Bach’s music has proved amazingly adaptable to modern popular idioms. Not only has it been embraced convincingly by the masters of swing, blues, rock, Hawaiian, steel drums, brass band, barber shop and synthesiser, but the Swingle Singers can ‘doo-be-doo’ along to the Third Brandenburg Concerto as though it was the most natural thing in the world, while Jacques Loussier’s cool jazz treatment of Bach’s celebrated Air from his orchestral Suite No.3 has (thanks to the power of modern advertising) become indelibly associated in many people’s minds with smoking cigars. Celebrated composer-pianists Rachmaninov, Grainger and Busoni created indelible modern keyboard arrangements of Bach’s masterpieces, while Villa-Lobos rethought Bach’s miraculous counterpoint in the popular Brazilian style via a series of pieces entitled Bachianas Brasileiras. Indeed, so impregnable is Bach’s contrapuntal logic that his music has proved virtually indestructible.

Biography John Butt director John Butt, two-times Gramophone Award winner, is Gardiner Professor of Music at the University of Glasgow and musical director of Edinburgh’s Dunedin Consort. His career as both musician and scholar centres on music of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, but he is also concerned with the implications of the past in our present culture. Author of five monographs, Butt has written extensively on Bach, the baroque, the historical performance revival and issues of modernity. His discography includes eleven recordings on organ and harpsichord for Harmonia Mundi (France) and eleven recent recordings for Linn Records. Highlights, as conductor of Dunedin, include the award-winning recordings of Handel’s Messiah and Mozart’s Requiem (which was also nominated for a Grammy Award), together with significant recordings of Bach’s Passions, Mass and Brandenburg Concertos, and Handel’s Acis and Esther. His recording of Bach’s Magnificat, in the context of Bach’s Christmas Vespers service was released in November 2015 and, early in 2016 Bach’s Violin Concertos (with Dunedin’s leader, Cecilia Bernardini) will be released. John Butt appears regularly as a guest conductor with orchestras such as the SCO, OAE, Aurora Orchestra, English Consort, Stavanger Symphony, Portland Baroque and Irish Baroque. Forthcoming concerts include debuts with Ars Lyrica, Orchestra of the Eighteenth Century and the BBC Welsh Orchestra. He has recently been appointed as a Principal Artist with the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment. He has been appointed an FBA and a FRSE, and has been awarded the Dent Medal of the Royal Musical Society, and the RAM/Kohn Foundation’s Bach Prize. In 2013 he was awarded the medal of the Royal College of Organists, together with an OBE.

Bach, Secular and Sacred Thursday 10 March 2016

Biography Mary Bevan soprano Hailed by the Telegraph as one of the first-rate young British singers ‘delivering consistently exciting singing’ for her stand out performances on opera and concert platforms, Mary Bevan is a winner of the Royal Philharmonic Society’s Young Artist award and UK Critics’ Circle Award for Exceptional Young Talent in music. In the 2015-2016 season Bevan sings the title role in Orpheus (Luigi Rossi) for the Royal Opera House at the Sam Wanamaker Theatre, returns to the English National Opera to sing Yum-Yum in The Mikado, and Elvira in Rossini L’italiana in Algeri at Garsington Opera. On the concert platform, Bevan will sing Silandra in Cesti Orontea with La Nuova Musica, Bach cantatas with the Dunedin Consort, Messiah with the BBC National Orchestra of Wales and Royal Northern Sinfonia, baroque programmes with the Academy of Ancient Music, and Fauré Requiem with Orquestra Sinfonica de Sevilla. She will also give recitals at Wigmore Hall, Leeds Lieder, The Danube Music Festival, and Solent Music Festival. Recent opera highlights included Bevan’s critically acclaimed Susanna The Marriage of Figaro and Despina Così fan tutte at English National Opera and Music / Euridice in Monteverdi L’Orfeo with the Royal Opera House at the Roundhouse. She is currently a Harewood Artist at the ENO and was formerly Associate Artist of Classical Opera, she most recently performed Servilla La clemenza di Tito and Gerechtigkeit Die Schuldigkeit des ersten Gebots. Much in demand on the concert platform, Mary Bevan recently performed Bellezza in Il trionfo del tempo e del disinganno with Dunedin Consort, a Handel Residency week with Emmanuelle Haïm at the Aix-en-Provence Festival, Bach’s St John Passion with the Choir of King’s College, and Fauré’s Requiem with the Philharmonia Orchestra. She has also appeared at the BBC Proms, Edinburgh International Festival and Spitalfields Festival. In recital Bevan has sung at the Wigmore Hall, Oxford Lieder Festival, St John’s Smith Square and Rhinegold LIVE. Bevan can be heard in such recent recordings as Handel in Italy with London Early Opera for Signum Records, Handel The Triumph of Time and Truth and Ode for St Cecilia’s Day with Ludus Baroque for Delphian Records, Ludwig Thuille songs with Joseph Middleton, and Mendelssohn complete songs

with Malcolm Martineau for Champs Hill Records. She also appeared in David Starkey’s Music & Monarchy on BBC4. Bevan trained at the Royal Academy Opera, and read Anglo-Saxon Norse and Celtic at Trinity College, Cambridge. She is an Associate of the Royal Academy of Music.

photo:Victoria Cadisch

Biography Meg Bragle mezzo-soprano Widely praised for her musical intelligence and ‘expressive virtuosity’ (San Francisco Chronicle), American mezzo-soprano Meg Bragle is quickly earning an international reputation as one of today’s most gifted and versatile mezzo-sopranos. Meg has sung in North America and Europe with the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra, the Orchestra of St. Luke’s, Orchestre Révolutionnaire et Romantique, Tafelmusik Baroque Orchestra, Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment, Les Violons du Roy, Apollo’s Fire and the Dunedin Consort, as well as with the symphony orchestras of Toronto, Colorado, Calgary, Memphis, San Antonio, Charlotte, Akron, North Carolina, and Nova Scotia. Frequently a featured soloist with Sir John Eliot Gardiner and the English Baroque Soloists, she has performed with them at the Leipzig Bachfest and the Prague Spring, Luzerne, Aldeburgh and Brighton festivals. Recent and upcoming highlights include her BBC Proms debut singing Bach’s Easter and Ascension Oratorios with Sir John Eliot Gardiner and the English Baroque Soloists; Mendelssohn’s Elijah with the Colorado Symphony and Matthew Halls; a program of Bach cantatas with Giovanni Antonini and the Symphonieorchester des Bayerischen Rundfunks; the title role in Handel’s Susannah with Ars Lyrica Houston; performances and recording of Bach’s Easter Oratorio with the English Baroque Soloists; Bach’s Magnificat and cantatas with Music of the Baroque and Nicholas Kraemer; Handel’s Messiah at the National Arts Centre with Matthew Halls; and Bach cantatas with Early Music Vancouver. Her opera roles include Dido and the Sorceress in Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas, Dardano in Handel’s Amadigi, Amastre in Handel’s Serse, Speranza in Monteverdi’s L’Orfeo, Ippolita in Cavalli’s Elena, and Elpina in Vivaldi’s La Fida Ninfa. Meg has made several recordings with Apollo’s Fire: Mozart’s Requiem (Koch), Handel’s Dixit Dominus and Ode for the Birthday of Queen Anne and Monteverdi’s Vespro della Beata Vergine and L’Orfeo. Other recordings include JS Bach’s Ascension Cantatas with John Eliot Gardiner and the English Baroque Soloists (SDG), JS Bach’s St. John Passion with Arion Baroque and Les Voix Baroques (ATMA Classique), Cozzolani’s Vespro della Beata Vergine and Messa Paschale with Magnificat (Musica

Omnia). A recording of JS Bach’s Easter Oratorio and BWV 106 “Actus Tragicus” is forthcoming. Meg Bragle studied both violin and voice at the University of Michigan before earning a Bachelor of Musical Arts degree in Voice Performance and English. She also completed a Master’s degree in Choral Conducting from Michigan State University. She is the recipient of several awards and recognition from Symphony Magazine, the American Bach Society, the Carmel Bach Festival and the Bethlehem Bach Festival.

photo:Fernanda Monteiro

Bach, Secular and Sacred Thursday 10 March 2016

Biography Thomas Hobbs tenor Thomas Hobbs is in demand with many leading baroque and early music ensembles, appearing throughout Europe and the US as a soloist in key works from the 16th, 17th and 18th centuries. Hobbs works frequently with, among others, Philippe Herreweghe and his acclaimed ensemble Collegium Vocale Gent and Raphaël Pichon and his Ensemble Pygmalion. Recent concert performances include Evangelist in the Bach St Matthew Passion and St John Passion with the Choir of King’s College, Cambridge, Le Concert Lorrain and Ensemble Pygmalion, arias in the Passions with the Academy of Ancient Music, CVG and Ex Cathedra, Bach B minor Mass with CVG, Le Concert Lorrain, Akademie für Alte Musik Berlin, Bach Akademie Stuttgart and the Freiburg Bachchor, Bach Magnificant with De Nederlandse Bachverenigning, Bach Ascension Oratorio with CVG, Bach Christmas Oratorio with the Australian Chamber Orchestra, title role in Handel Joshua with the Akademie für Alte Musik and RIAS Kammerchor, Handel Israel in Egypt with the Choir of King’s College, Cambridge, Handel Messiah Le Concert Lorrain, Mozart Requiem with Dunedin Consort and Beethoven Mass in C with Stuttgart Kammerchor. Hobbs has also made debuts with the Northern Sinfonia, City of Birmingham Symphony, Royal Scottish National and Bournemouth Symphony orchestras and with renowned period ensemble Accademia Bizantina under Ottavio Dantone. Hobbs’s operatic roles include a critically acclaimed Telemachus The Return of Ulysses in a new production for English National Opera conducted by Jonathan, Apollo and Shepherd in Monteverdi’s Orfeo in semistaged performances with Richard Egarr and the AAM, the title role in Albert Herring and Ferrando Così fan tutte. A keen recitalist, highlights include Brett Dean Winter Songs at the Cheltenham Festival, Vaughan Williams On Wenlock Edge with the Edinburgh Quartet, Schubert Die Schöne Müllerin and Schumann Liederkreis Op.39, a recital of Mozart songs at London’s Kings Place, a recital of English song and German lieder for the Festival Accademia delle Crete Senesi in Tuscany, and, most recently, Wolf songs at the Oxford Lieder Festival and a recital at the Ryedale Festival with Christopher Glynn. Hobbs’ ever-expanding discography includes Bach B minor Mass with CVG and Dunedin Consort, Bach Motets, Leipzig cantatas and Christmas Oratorio with

CVG, Handel Acis et Galatea and Esther with Dunedin Consort and Beethoven Mass in C with Stuttgart Kammerchor. His most recent recordings of Handel Chandos Anthems with Stephen Layton and the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment and Mozart Requiem with John Butt and the Dunedin Consort have been universally praised, with the latter receiving the 2014 Gramophone Award for best Choral recording. Current and future engagements include further tours with Collegium Vocale; Damon Acis and Galatea with Dunedin Consort, Bach cantatas with De Nederlandse Bachverenigning and Ensemble Pygmalion, Bach Christmas Oratorio with the Tonkünstler-Orchester Niederösterreich, Tonhalle Orchester Zürich and Le Concert Lorrain. Born in Exeter, Thomas Hobbs studied at the Royal College of Music under the tutelage of Neil Mackie, where he was awarded the RCM Peter Pears and Mason scholarships, and at the Royal Academy of Music under Ryland Davies, where he held a Kohn Bach Scholarship in addition to a full entrance scholarship. He was also awarded a Susan Chilcott Scholarship, has been made a Royal Philharmonic Society Young Artist and was an Associate Artist of the Classical Opera Company. He was also a member of the prestigous Académie at the Aix-en-Provence Festival, where he performed in concert with Louis Langrée and the Camerata Salzburg.

photo: Benjamin Eolovega

Biography Edward Grint bass-baritone British bass-baritone Edward Grint studied at King’s College, Cambridge as a choral scholar, and at the International Benjamin Britten Opera School at The Royal College of Music. Edward was awarded 2nd prize at the 3rd International Singing Competition for Baroque Opera Pietro Antonio Cesti in Innsbruck, was a finalist in the 2014 London Handel Competition, and won the Clermont Ferrand competition in France. Recent roles include Marchese in La Traviata, Arcas in Iphigenie en Aulide and Adonis in Venus and Adonis. At the Royal College of Music, Edward performed Count Almaviva in Le nozze di Figaro, Isacio in Riccardo Primo and Splendiano in Djamileh. Other roles performed include Colonel in Patience at Musée D’Orsay, Hobson in Peter Grimes and Mother in Die Sieben Tödsunden. Edward’s interest for contemporary music has led him to perform Brother in The House Taken Over by Vasco Mendonca, the world premiere of The Cool Web – A Robert Graves Oratorio by Jools Scott in Bath Abbey, and Eddy in Mark Anthony Turnage’s Greek in the UK and Korea with Music Theatre Wales. Also in demand on the concert platform, Edward works with leading ensembles. Highlights include performing some Bach and Kuhnau Cantatas with The King’s Consort, Bach’s St. John Passion at St. Paul’s Cathedral with the London Mozart Players, and Bach’s Magnificat with the OAE. Passionate recitalist, Edward has performed Brahms’ Vier Ernste Gesänge, Dvorak’s Biblical Songs, and Vaughan Williams’ Songs of Travel. Edward has also recorded the baritone solo in Faure’s Requiem for a BBC Radio 2 broadcast, and High Priest, Judas and Pilate in St Mark’s Passion by Charles Wood. Recent and future highlights include Missa Solemnis at the Three Choirs festival, Polyphemus in Acis and Galatea under Damien Guillon, Gelone Orontea with David Bates and a new compositions by Vasco Mendonca in Mexico City and Handel’s Chandos Te Deum for the London Handel Festival.

Bach, Secular and Sacred Thursday 10 March 2016

Biography David Blackadder trumpet David took up the trumpet aged nine, following in the footsteps of his grandfather who was a bandmaster in the North East. He joined the Leicestershire Schools Symphony Orchestra and went on to study at the Royal College of Music with Michael Laird. After a season as guest principal trumpet with Scottish Opera he joined the English Baroque Soloists and Orchestre Revolutionaire et Romantique as principal trumpet under Sir John Eliot Gardiner. He also became principal trumpet of the AAM with Christopher Hogwood. In 1993 David formed the groundbreaking group Blackadder Brass, which became the resident educational ensemble at Symphony Hall in Birmingham and played to over 40,000 children in its first three years. He is also a professor at the Birmingham Conservatoire. He is renowned as a soloist, having performed and recorded with conductors including Sir Simon Rattle, Sir Roger Norrington and Vladimir Jurowski. His recordings of Handel arias with singers including Renee Fleming and Kiri Te Kanawa have received particular critical acclaim; and he has recorded the Brandenburg Concertos with Trevor Pinnock and with the AAM.

photo:Boyd Gilmour

Biography Pamela Thorby recorder Pamela Thorby is unique among recorder players in the breadth and variety of her work and is widely regarded as the UK’s most stylish and creative recorder virtuoso. Through her playing and teaching, she has been at the forefront of raising standards and expectations for the instrument in the UK over the last 25 years. Her ability to assimilate many styles of music and her love of improvisation has led to work with leading jazz, folk and pop artists, and her stylish virtuosity can be heard on many film soundtracks and numerous recordings of music ranging from the medieval period to the present day. She has toured internationally as concerto soloist, chamber musician and orchestral principal and appears on over 100 recordings in those roles. Thorby was the driving force behind the muchadmired Palladian Ensemble. They toured worldwide, performing more than 1000 concerts over 16 years and making for Linn ten acclaimed albums that garnered seven prestigious Diapason d’Or Awards. Thorby has also made numerous solo recordings on Linn: Baroque recorder concertos with Sonnerie, led by Monica Huggett (Gramophone Critic’s Choice), Handel recorder sonatas with Richard Egarr (BBC Music Magazine Chamber Music Disc of the Month and Gramophone Critic’s Choice), Garden of Early Delights with the harpist Andrew Lawrence-King (‘This is Paradise indeed’: Gramophone) and French Baroque works, The Nightingale and the Butterfly, with the lutenist Elizabeth Kenny. Her most recent release on Linn Records is Telemann Recorder Sonatas and Fantasias. As a student, Thorby was awarded the Dove Prize for the highest mark on graduation from the Guildhall School of Music and Drama in London. After postgraduate studies she was awarded a Dutch Government Scholarship to spend a further year studying with Walter van Hauwe at the Sweelinck Conservatorium in Amsterdam. Shortly after this, she became principal teacher of recorder at the GSMD. Thorby is now Professor of Recorder at the Royal Academy of Music in London, where she leads the recorder teaching and was recently made an Honorary Associate. She also teaches recorder at the University of York.

photo:Jim Poyner

Bach, Secular and Sacred Thursday 10 March 2016

Biography Daniel Lanthier oboe Originally from Montreal, Canada, Daniel Lanthier is currently based in the Netherlands, enjoying the busy life of international soloist, recitalist and orchestra musician. He regularly plays with the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment, Il Giardino Armonico, Arion Baroque Orchestra, Barokkanerne and in recitals with harpsichordist Geneviève Soly. He also frequently gives masterclasses at Montreal Conservatory and Prince Claus Conservatory. Daniel Lanthier completed his Master studies in historical oboes at the Conservatorium van Amsterdam in the class of Alfredo Bernardini in 2015. He previously studied modern oboe with Lise Beauchamp at the Montreal Conservatory, with Melanie Ragge at the Royal Academy of Music and with Guy Porat at Tel Aviv University. These extensive studies were made possible by means of many scholarships from different organizations, including the Canada Council for the Arts, the Countess of Munster Musical Trust, the Fonds Québécois de Recherches sur la Société et la Culture, the Buchmann-Mehta Foundation and the Amsterdamse Hogeschool voor de Kunsten.

photo: Jostijn Ligtvoet

Biography Matthew Truscott violin Matthew Truscott is a versatile violinist who shares his time between period instrument and ‘modern’ performance, appearing with some of the finest musicians in both fields. One of the leaders of the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment since 2007, he has recently been appointed concertmaster of the Mahler Chamber Orchestra, dual roles which he relishes equally. In demand as a guest leader, engagements in this capacity have included projects with The English Concert, Le Concert d’Astrée, The King’s Consort, Arcangelo, Budapest Festival Orchestra, English National Opera, Dutch National Opera and the Netherlands Chamber Orchestra. He is also leader of St James’ Baroque, Classical Opera and the Magdalena Consort. A keen chamber musician, recent recordings have included a set of Purcell Trio Sonatas with Retrospect Trio, a disc of Bach chamber music with Trevor Pinnock, Emmanuel Pahud and Jonathan Manson, and one of Haydn Piano Trios with Richard Lester and Simon Crawford-Phillips. Matthew teaches baroque violin at the Royal Academy of Music in London.

Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment

Principal Artists John Butt Sir Mark Elder Iván Fischer Vladimir Jurowski Sir Simon Rattle

Emeritus Conductors Sir Roger Norrington William Christie

‘For this remarkable ensemble, it’s all about the music’ Independent on Sunday

Three decades ago, a group of inquisitive London musicians took a long hard look at that curious institution we call the Orchestra, and decided to start again from scratch. They began by throwing out the rulebook. Put a single conductor in charge? No way. Specialise in repertoire of a particular era? Too restricting. Perfect a work and then move on? Too lazy. The Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment was born. And as this distinctive ensemble playing on period-specific instruments began to get a foothold, it made a promise to itself. It vowed to keep questioning, adapting and inventing as long as it lived. Those original instruments became just one element of its quest for authenticity. Baroque and Classical music became just one strand of its repertoire. Every time the musical establishment thought it had a handle on what the OAE was all about, the ensemble pulled out another shocker: a Symphonie Fantastique here, some conductor-less Bach there. All the while, the Orchestra’s players called the shots. At first it felt like a minor miracle. Ideas and talent were plentiful; money wasn’t. Somehow, the OAE survived to a year. Then to two. Then to five. It began to make benchmark recordings and attract the finest conductors. It became the toast of the European touring circuit. It bagged distinguished residencies at the Southbank Centre and Glyndebourne Festival Opera. It began, before long, to thrive. And then came the real challenge. Eccentric idealists the ensemble’s musicians were branded. And that they were determined to remain. In the face of the music industry’s big guns, the OAE kept its head. It got organised but remained experimentalist. It sustained its founding drive but welcomed new talent. It kept on exploring performance formats, rehearsal approaches and musical techniques. It searched for the right repertoire, instruments and approaches with even greater resolve. It kept true to its founding vow. In some small way, the OAE changed the classical music world too. It challenged those distinguished partner organisations and brought the very best from them, too. Symphony and opera orchestras began to ask it for advice. Existing period instrument groups started to vary their conductors and repertoire. New ones popped up all over Europe and America. And so the story continues, with ever more momentum and vision. The OAE’s series of nocturnal Night Shift performances have redefined concert parameters. Its home at London’s Kings Place has fostered further diversity of planning and music-making. Great performances now become recordings on the Orchestra’s in-house CD label, OAE Released. The ensemble has formed the bedrock for some of Glyndebourne’s most groundbreaking recent productions. It travels as much abroad as to the UK regions: New York and Amsterdam court it, Birmingham and Bristol cherish it. Remarkable people are behind it. Simon Rattle, the young conductor in whom the OAE placed so much of its initial trust, still cleaves to the ensemble. Iván Fischer, the visionary who punted some of his most individual musical ideas on the young orchestra, continues to challenge it. Mark Elder still mines for luminosity, shade and line. Vladimir Jurowski, the podium technician with an insatiable appetite for creative renewal, has drawn from it some of the most revelatory noises of recent years. John Butt, the intellectual powerhouse, pushes for well-researched period performance excellence. All five share the title Principal Artist. Of the instrumentalists, many remain from those brave first days; many have come since. All seem as eager and hungry as ever. They’re offered ever greater respect, but continue only to question themselves. Because still, they pride themselves on sitting ever so slightly outside the box. They wouldn’t want it any other way. © Andrew Mellor, 2014

Chief Executive Crispin Woodhead Projects Manager Laura Sheldon Projects Officer Sarah Irving Orchestra Manager Philippa Brownsword Librarian Colin Kitching Director of Finance and Operations Ivan Rockey Finance Officer Daniel da Silva Education Director Cherry Forbes Education Officer Louise Malijenovsky

Board of Directors Sir Martin Smith (Chairman) Cecelia Bruggemeyer (Vice-Chair) Lisa Beznosiuk Luise Buchberger Robert Cory Nigel Jones Roger Montgomery Olivia Roberts Susannah Simons Matthew Truscott Mark Williams Crispin Woodhead

Leaders Kati Debretzeni Margaret Faultless Matthew Truscott Playersâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; Artistic Committee Cecelia Bruggemeyer Lisa Beznosiuk Luise Buchberger Roger Montgomery Matthew Truscott

Programme Editor Charles Lewis Design Harrison Artwork Heather Kenmure Season Photography Eric Richmond Printed by Cantate

OAE Trust Sir Martin Smith (Chair) Edward Bonham Carter Robert Cory David Marks Julian Mash Imogen Overli Rupert SebagMontefiore Diane Segalen

Director of Press Katy Bell Director of Marketing and Audience Development John Holmes Digital Content Officer Zen Grisdale Marketing and Press Officer Charles Lewis Development Director Emily Stubbs Head of Individual Giving Liz Scase Development Officer Jo Harvey Corporate Relations Officer Catherine Kinsler OAE Trainee Alex Crick

The OAE team Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment Kings Place, 90 York Way, London, N1 9AG Tel: 020 7239 9370 Email: info@oae.co.uk Website: oae.co.uk orchestraoftheageofenlightenment theoae Registered Charity No. 295329 Registered Company No. 2040312

Andante Slower than allegro, andante tempo is often described as ‘at a walking pace,’ between 76 - 108 beats per minute.

Glossary

Baroque A period of musical style used from approximately 1600 to 1750 that used exaggerated motion and clear, easily interpreted detail to produce drama, tension, exuberance, and grandeur. The baroque period saw the creation of tonality, elaborate use of ornamentation, and the establishment of opera, cantata, oratorio, concerto and sonata as musical genres. Cantata A work for one or more voices with instrumental accompaniment. Counterpoint Derived from the Latin Punctus contra Punctum (‘note against note’) the term applies to a texture in which each line is granted a degree of distinctiveness and audibility because of its ‘being played against’, its ‘difference’ from each other line. As a result, in a contrapuntal passage, the sense of melodic direction emerges from the intertwining of different lines rather than from a treble-bass contrast. da capo (ABA) structure A da capo aria is in ternary form, meaning it is in three sections. The first section is a complete musical entity, ending in the tonic key, and could in principle be sung alone. The second section contrasts with the first in its musical texture, mood, and sometimes also tempo. The third section was usually not written out by the composer, who rather simply specified the direction “da capo“ (Italian for “from the head”) - meaning from the beginning, which meant that the first section should be repeated in full. It was sung by a soloist with the accompaniment of instruments, often a small orchestra. The da capo aria was common in the musical genres of opera and oratorio.

Intermezzo A composition which fits between other musical or dramatic entities, such as acts of a play or movements of a larger musical work. In music history the term has had several different usages, which fit into two general categories: the opera intermezzo and the instrumental intermezzo. Key A common use is to speak of music as being in a specific key, such as in the key of C or in the key of F-sharp. Sometimes the terms ‘major’ or ‘minor’ are appended, as in the key of A minor or in the key of B-flat major. Although the concept of musical key can be a complicated subject when examined closely, broadly speaking the phrase’ in key of C’ means that C is the music’s harmonic centre or tonic. Mass A form of sacred musical choral composition that sets the invariable portions of the Eucharistic liturgy (principally that of the Roman Catholic Church, the Anglican Communion, and the Lutheran Church) to music. Most Masses are settings of the liturgy in Latin, the traditional language of the Roman Catholic Church, but there are a significant number written in the languages of non-Catholic countries where vernacular worship has long been the norm. Overture An instrumental composition planned especially as an introduction to an extended work, such as an opera or oratorio. The earliest Italian opera overtures were simply pieces of orchestral music and were called ‘sinfonie’, later the overture begun to foreshadow the themes and melodic strands of the subsequent larger work and in the 19th and 20th Centuries the overture became a potpourri of the work’s proceeding tunes, played as a teaser.

Glossary

Polyphony In music, polyphony is a texture consisting of two or more independent melodic voices, as opposed to music with just one voice (monophony) or music with one dominant melodic voice accompanied by chords (homophony). Within the context of Western music tradition the term is usually used in reference to music of the late Middle Ages and Renaissance. Baroque forms such as the fugue which might be called polyphonic are usually described instead as contrapuntal. Sonata form Sonata form refers to the standard layout of an entire work, or more specifically to the standardised form of the first movement of a work. The basic model consists of an exposition, where the main thematic material is introduced; this then goes on to be explored harmonically and texturally in the development. Following on from this is the recapitulation, in which the thematic material returns in the tonic, or home, key before the piece or movement ends with a coda.

Education As we herald in the New Year, here is the latest crop of OAE Education projects that reflect new beginnings and new ventures. Something Special At the beginning of term we took part in Camden Music’s Music is Special celebration. Two special and one mainstream primary schools took part in what was one of the last special needs projects on our Watercycle marathon. Working with composer James Redwood and a team from the Orchestra, pupils created a band and performed together at the Camden Centre. On these projects everyone can reach their own potential, whatever that might be.

Something Healthy Our collaboration with scientists from the Sleep & Circadian Neuroscience Institute (SCNI) at Oxford University and animateur Mark Withers on our Sleeping Sense project has begun. The project mixes together the science behind sleep and music inspired by sleep, and involves work with primary and secondary schools in Oxford. The whole project will culminate in a day of public performances at the Sheldonian Theatre on 9 June 2016. Something that works As part of our 30th birthday season we have chosen one project from the past to revisit – Opposites. High and low, fast and slow, smooth and spikey, loud and quiet – the fundamental building blocks of music will be explored by more than 1000 5–7 year olds.

Something Royal Cecelia Bruggemeyer (double bass) has designed a project for nurseries and children’s centres in Camden and Brent called Kings and Queens. Exploring families of instruments, dynamics, movement, pitch and rhythm youngsters will sing, play and listen to music from the Tudor era. Something at Sea We’re off to Southampton for our final Watercycle residency. It seems a long time since we started the water-themed tour in April 2014 and, thousands of participants later, we are on the last leg before our final performance at the Royal Albert Hall on 21 March 2016. In Southampton we’re working with the Turner Sims Concert Hall and the Southampton Music Hub and activity will include OAE TOTS, school and community concerts and a first for the OAE, playing on the Isle of Wight ferry.

OAE News

William Christie

Asia here we come

We’ve just appointed William Christie to the position of Emeritus Conductor. He’ll join Sir Roger Norrington as the only other holder of the title. William has conducted the OAE many times over the years and we’ve always loved working with him. His appointment means two things – it’s a recognition of his contribution to the Orchestra as well as a commitment to work with him on a regular basis in the future. He’ll be working with us next season, so keep an eye out.

You might have caught our Baroque programme at St John’s Smith Square last year with Steven Devine and Ian Bostridge. Well we’re taking that same programme on tour in February and March to Vienna, Daejeon, Shanghai, Beijing and errr… Bath. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter (@theoae) and Instagram (@oae_photos) for updates.

Co-Principal Oboe After an extensive trial process, we’ve appointed two new Co-Principal Oboes, Daniel Bates and Katharina Spreckelsen. Both have played with the Orchestra as guest principals in the past, and it give us huge pleasure to welcome them both to the OAE team properly. Katharina will take up her position on Baroque projects, while Daniel will play in Classical and Romantic programmes. Look out for them on stage.

2016–2017 season We’ve just released details of our 2016–2017 season. Highlights include the complete Brandenburg Concertos, Bach’s Christmas Oratorio across two consecutive evenings, and exciting collaborations with artists including Sarah Connolly and Isabelle Faust. You can buy tickets from 23 February, but OAE Friends get priority booking from 2 February 2016.

OAE on camera Photographer Eric Richmond has been shooting the OAE for 21 years. This summer (4–8 June 2016) he is holding a retrospective of his work in the Royal Festival Hall to coincide with the our performance of Der Freischütz with Sir Mark Elder. Find out more at ericrichmond.net.

Saturday 20 February 2016 Level 5 Function Room, Royal Festival Hall

2015-16 Southbank Centre Concerts Booking Information Southbank Centre Ticket Office 0844 847 9922 southbankcentre.co.uk/oae Tickets: £10–£60 unless otherwise indicated. Premium seats available for selected concerts.

All concerts start at 7pm unless otherwise indicated and are preceded by a free pre-concert OAE Extras event at 5.45pm. Free programmes are available at every concert.

OAE TOTS: Storytelling 10.15am, 11.15am and 12.15pm £1 TOTS, £7 adults

Saturday 27 February 2016 Royal Festival Hall stage and choir stalls Baroque TOTS 10.30am and 12 noon £1 TOTS, £9 adults

Tuesday 1 April 2016 Royal Festival Hall Resurrection Mahler Symphony No. 2, Resurrection Vladimir Jurowski conductor Adriana Kučerová soprano Sarah Connolly mezzo-soprano Philharmonia Chorus

You can find more information about the OAE at:

Friday 22 April 2016 Royal Festival Hall

Email: info@oae.co.uk

Rattle's Bruckner

Website: oae.co.uk orchestraofthe ageofenlightenment

Brahms Tragic Overture Rott Scherzo from Symphony No. 1 in E Bruckner Symphony No. 6

theoae

Sir Simon Rattle conductor

Sunday 1 May 2016 Royal Festival Hall stage and choir stalls Classical TOTS 10.30am and 12 noon

Saturday 7 May 2016 St John’s Smith Square Winds of Change Mozart Symphony No. 33 in B flat Michael Gordon New Work for Bassoon and Orchestra (world premiere) Mozart Symphony No. 1 in E flat Mozart Clarinet Concerto in A Matthew Truscott director/violin Peter Whelan bassoon Antony Pay clarinet

Tuesday 7 June 2016 Royal Festival Hall 30th Birthday Gala Concert Weber Der Freischütz (semidramatised performance) Sir Mark Elder conductor David Pountney text and translation Wyn Pencarreg Cuno Rachel Willis-Sorenson Agathe Sarah Tynan Annchen Simon Bailey Caspar Christopher Ventris Max Brindley Sherratt Hermit Marcus Farnsworth Kilian London Philharmonic Choir

EARLY OPERA COMPANY Christian Curnyn director Sophie Bevan soprano

Friday 18 March 7.30pm Handel Concerto Grosso in D minor Op. 6 No. 10 Handel Motet ‘Silete Venti’ HWV242 Wassenaer Concerto in F minor from Concerti Armonici Biber Battalia a 10 Muﬀat Concerto No. 5 in G from Armonico Tributo Early Opera Company and Christian Curnyn explore rich and varied orchestral music from the seventeeth and eighteenth centuries. They will be joined by soprano Sophie Bevan for Handel’s ravishing motet Silete Venti, a ﬁne example of Handel’s skillful text setting and his remarkbale ability to create rich orchestral timbres through economical forces. The motet culminates in a thriling and virtuosic ‘Alleluia’.

Patron HRH The Duchess of Cornwall

Box Oﬃce 020 7222 1061 sjss.org.uk

O T S T E “O AN A D E10 AR ” D FO TI R C 10 KE % TS O

Tickets £35, £28, £21, £15

Support Us The OAE continues to grow and thrive through the generosity of our supporters. We are very grateful to our sponsors and patrons and hope you will consider joining them. We offer a close involvement in the life of the Orchestra with many opportunities to meet players, attend rehearsals and even accompany us on tour.

OAE Thirty Circle The OAE is particularly grateful to the following members of the Thirty Circle who have so generously contributed to the re-financing of the Orchestra through the OAE Trust THIRTY CIRCLE PATRONS Bob & Laura Cory Sir Martin Smith & Lady Smith OBE THIRTY CIRCLE MEMBERS Victoria & Edward Bonham Carter Nigel Jones & Franรงoise Valat Jones Selina & David Marks Julian & Camilla Mash Mark & Rosamund Williams

Our Supporters ANN & PETER LAW OAE EXPERIENCE SCHEME Ann & Peter Law MAJOR SPONSOR

CORPORATE PARTNERS Apax Partners E.S.J.G. Limited Lindt Lubbock Fine Chartered Accountants Macfarlanes Parabola Land Swan Turton The Lant Street Wine Company SEASON PATRONS Bob & Laura Cory Adrian Frost Bruce Harris Sir Thomas Hughes-Hallett KBE Nigel Jones & Franรงoise Valat Jones Selina & David Marks Sir Martin Smith & Lady Smith OBE Mark & Rosamund Williams

PROJECT PATRONS Julian & Annette Armstrong Julian & Camilla Mash Philip & Rosalyn Wilkinson ARIA PATRONS Denys & Victoria Firth John & Martha Graham JMS Advisory Limited Gary & Nina Moss Andrew Nurnberg Rupert Sebag-Montefiore Eric Tomsett CHAIR PATRONS Mrs Nicola Armitage Education Director Victoria & Edward Bonham Carter Principal Trumpet Anthony & Celia Edwards Principal Oboe Sir Vernon & Lady Ellis Co-Principal Viola Franz & Regina Etz Principal Double Bass James Flynn QC Co-Principal Lute/Theorbo Paul Forman Co-Principal Cello Sir Timothy & Lady Lloyd Co-Principal Keyboard The Mark Williams Foundation Co-Principal Bassoon Haakon & Imogen Overli Co-Principal Cello Professor Richard Portes CBE FBA Co-Principal Bassoon Olivia Roberts Violin John & Rosemary Shannon Principal Horn Roger & Pam Stubbs Sub-Principal Clarinet Crispin Woodhead & Christine Rice Principal Timpani EDUCATION PATRONS John & Sue Edwards (Principal Education Patrons) Mrs Nicola Armitage Patricia & Stephen Crew Venetia Hoare Rory and Louise Landman Professor Richard Portes CBE FBA

The OAE is a registered charity number 295329 accepting tax efficient gifts from UK taxpayers and businesses

Our Supporters ASSOCIATE PATRONS Michael Allen Felix Appelbe & Lisa Bolgar Smith Hugh & Michelle Arthur Josh Bell & Adam Pile Mrs A Boettcher Marius & Anna Carboni John & Jennifer Crompton David Emmerson Stanley Lowy Michael & Harriet Maunsell David Mildon in memory of Lesley Mildon Tim & Jenny Morrison North Street Trust Andrew & Cindy Peck Michael & Giustina Ryan Ivor Samuels & Gerry Wakelin Emily Stubbs & Stephen McCrum Shelley von Strunckel Rev.d John Wates, OBE & Carol Wates THE AMERICAN FRIENDS OF THE OAE Jane Attias Wendy Brooks & Tim Medland Steve and Joyce Davis Jerome and Joan Karter Andrew Wilson

GOLD FRIENDS Noël & Caroline Annesley Marius & Anna Carboni Mr & Mrs C Cochin de Billy Geoffrey Collens Simon Edelsten Kitty Sage Mr J Westwood SILVER FRIENDS Haylee & Michael Bowsher Michael Brecknell Christopher Campbell Michael A. Conlon Christopher & Lesley Cooke Mr & Mrs Michael Cooper Michael & Barbara Gwinnell Ray & Liz Harsant Patricia Herrmann Peter & Sally Hilliar Rupert & Alice King Marsh Christian Trust Roger Mears & Joanie Speers Stephen & Roberta Rosefield Anna Rowe and Jonathan White Susannah Simons Her Honour Suzanne Stewart David Swanson BRONZE FRIENDS Keith Barton Dennis Baldry The Revd Brian Blackshaw Dan Burt Tony Burt Cynthia Butterworth Anthony & Jo Diamond Mrs S M Edge Marianne Edwards Mrs Mary Fysh Auriel Hill Professor John Irving John & Shirley Lloyd Professor Ingrid Lunt Nigel Mackintosh Hugh & Eleanor Paget Alan Sainer Ruth & David Samuels Derek Sugden Gillian Threlfall Mr & Mrs Tony Timms Dr Trilby Johnson Mrs Joy Whitby Mr Paul Willans Dr & Mrs Christopher Williams David & Vivienne Woolf Tony & Jackie Yates-Watson

TRUSTS AND FOUNDATIONS Angus Allnatt Charitable Foundation Apax Foundation Arts Council England Catalyst Fund Arts Council England Small Capital Grants Arts Council England Strategic Touring Fund Austin and Hope Pilkington Trust Brian Mitchell Charitable Settlement The Charles Peel Charitable Trust Comninos Charitable Trust The D’Oyly Carte Charitable Trust Dunard Fund Esmée Fairbairn Foundation Fenton Arts Trust Foyle Foundation The Golden Bottle Trust Goldsmiths’ Company Charity The Helen Hamlyn Trust The Hinrichsen Foundation Idlewild Trust Jack Lane Charitable Trust John Lyon’s Charity Ling Trust The Liz and Terry Bramall Foundation Lord and Lady Lurgan Trust The Mark Williams Foundation Marsh Christian Trust National Foundation for Youth Music The Nugee Foundation Orchestras Live Radcliffe Trust The Rayne Foundation The RK Charitable Trust The Thistle Trust Valentine Charitable Trust

We are also very grateful to our anonymous supporters and OAE Friends for their ongoing generosity and enthusiasm. For more information on supporting the OAE please contact Emily Stubbs, Development Director emily.stubbs@oae.co.uk 020 7239 9381.

Handel Acis & Galatea 7 May 2016, Kings Place

A tale of tragedy, eternal love and & $ % % ! $ ! ( $ ###( ( (!

The Choral Pilgrimage 2016

19 May 2016, Old Royal Naval College, Greenwich " ! % # ! ) % " ( $ ( ( (! ' * !

Lubbock Fine is proud of its ongoing association with the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment and wishes it every success in its 30th birthday season. We have a dedicated creative and music team which provides specialist accounting and tax advice. Paternoster House, 65 St Paulâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Churchyard, London EC4M 8AB T. 020 7490 7766

www.lubbockfine.co.uk Member of Russell Bedford International

Practice-a-thon is a national dance, music and singing event that gets the best out of young performers and supports children with cancer. Last year, schools and groups from across the UK had a great time and raised over ÂŁ800,000!

Have fun and develop your pupilsâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; or groupâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s skills For all ages and abilities, any instrument and any singing or dancing style Your school or club can choose to keep 25% of the money you raise (75% goes to children with cancer)

08451 20 63 40 10RP378H

Registered charity number 1107328 and registered in Scotland (SC039857)

London season Spring/Summer 2016 LENTEN AND PASSIONTIDE CANTATAS 24 March 2016 Milton Court, London VIVALDI IN DRESDEN 13 April 2016 Milton Court, London HANDEL’S ACIS AND GALATEA 21 May 2016 Milton Court, London THE BACH FAMILY 18 June 2016 Barbican Hall, London

Tickets £10-£35* (£3 for AAMplify members) Book at barbican.org.uk or call 020 7638 8891 For more information visit aam.co.uk/concerts

AVAILABLE FROM AAM RECORDS

JS BACH ST MATTHEW PASSION 1727 JS BACH ORCHESTRAL SUITES JS BACH ST JOHN PASSION 1724 BIRTH OF THE SYMPHONY HANDEL TO HAYDN

For more information visit aam.co.uk/recordings

*Plus booking fee: £3 online, £4 by telephone, no fee when tickets are booked in person

Los Angeles Philharmonic Gustavo Dudamel

22–24 Mar A residency redefining the new-world orchestra, with music from John Williams, Copland, Messiaen and Mahler’s Third Symphony ‘The LA Phil is a class act, bringing something new to town’ Telegraph

American Soundscapes