Programme 3 | Sept 2017
HAMILTON | TAURANGA | TAUPO
Welcome from the Music Director Kia ora and welcome to this concert by the wind players from Opus Orchestra. I’ll be honest. The main driver for this has been the financial difficulty of getting the entire orchestra together for a third series in 2017. This is deeply disappointing. Since here I know that I’m addressing Opus supporters, please spread the word. This wonderful orchestra can only survive if we increase our audience sizes.
Photo Credit: Ashley Hopkins
Having said that, the wind players and I have talked for some time about how good it would be to do a programme that really gave them a chance to show what they could do. It seems that even adversity can present opportunity. So, here we have three masterpieces: the Strauss Opus 7 Serenade, the much better known Dvorak Serenade for Wind Instruments Op. 44 and Mozart’s “Gran Partita”. Mozart’s love for woodwind (including the basset horn) and horns stands out in this extraordinary work. Basset horns are an endangered species. There are very few working pairs in Aotearoa. We are very grateful, indeed, to Bill Taylor of Tauranga, who not only loaned us his pair (the fact that he owns a set is testimony to his deep love of Mozart’s music) but also had them refurbished by experts in Auckland in time for our rehearsals. Enjoy the concert. And, I do hope to see you – and your friends – at Opus Orchestra concerts in 2018. Peter Walls ONZM Music Director
Peter Walls Conductor
Peter Walls has been Music Director of Opus Orchestra since 2004. He is currently also Music Director of Nota Bene, a Wellington chamber choir. He has appeared as a guest conductor with the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra, the NZSO National Youth Orchestra, Orchestra Wellington, the Christchurch Symphony Orchestra, Voices New Zealand Chamber Choir, and various other choirs including the Civic Choirs in Hamilton, Tauranga and Rotorua. Peter was Music Director of The Tudor Consort from 19931999, a position he resigned to take up a Visiting Fellowship at Magdalen College, Oxford. His CD with that choir of motets by Peter Philips was listed by Neue Musik Zeitung as one of the top early music CDs released in 2002 and received a CHOC award from Le Monde de la Musique (the highest award from one of the leading French magazines for Classical music). Classics Today wrote “Conductor Peter
Walls understands the overall period style and he obviously cares a lot about ensemble balance and uniformity of tone and colour.” He has conducted many opera productions including Jack Body’s Alley in the New Zealand Arts Festival in 1998, Puccini’s Gianni Schicchi for Southern Opera in 2009, Verdi’s La Traviata for the Gisborne Opera Festival and Leoncavallo’s Cavalleria Rusticana for Opera Whanganui (these last two productions with a young Simon O’Neill as Alfredo and Turridu respectively). Peter is Emeritus Professor of Music at Victoria University of Wellington. He was Chief Executive of the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra from 2002 until 2011 and now holds that same role with Chamber Music New Zealand. He was made an Officer of the New Zealand Order of Merit for services to music in 2012.
W. A. Mozart (1756-1791)
Serenade in B-flat major, K. 361 ‘Gran partita’ 1.
Largo – Allegro molto
4.
Menuetto – Trio I – Trio II
2.
Menuetto – Trio I – Trio II
5. Romanze
6.
Tema con variazioni
7.
Finale: Molto allegro
3. Adagio In eighteenth-century Austria, the wind serenade enjoyed great popularity. Mozart’s father, Leopold, produced more than thirty such works (only one survives), and Mozart also composed a good number of serenades. In 1798, one of Mozart’s first biographers, Franz Xaver Niemetschek wrote that Mozart’s compositions included several ‘partitas for wind instruments for table and night music. Here in Prague, much of this is well-known. Their beauty is enchanting, and moves the most insensitive heart. There also exists a serenade for 13 instruments....’
Identifying precisely when Mozart wrote this B-flat major Serenade for thirteen instruments is difficult: studies of the paper he used for the work suggest anywhere between 1781 and 1784. Compelling evidence for the Serenade’s first performance being in 1784 comes from. an advertisement in the Wienerblättchen of 23 March 1784 of a concert by Anton Stadler, ‘at which will be given … a great wind piece of a very special kind composed by Herr Mozart.’
Special indeed: scored for two oboes, two clarinets, two basset horns, two bassoons, four horns, and double bass, Mozart imbued his B-flat major Serenade with unprecedented richness and invention, exceeding all previous conceptions of the form. Despite the work’s complexity, Mozart designed every phrase to beguile and delight, whether through vigorous theatrical flourishes, or languorous lyricism. He constantly alters textures to
provide variety, for example in the Trio of the first Minuet, where just four instruments (clarinets, and/or basset horns) play, while in Trio II, the bassoon provides a virtuosic foil to the oboes. Endlessly intriguing, the Serenade exemplifies Mozart’s tenet that music must always please the ear. In fact, the Serenade includes one of Mozart’s most sublime moments, the third movement Adagio, which defies any attempt at description, such is its transcendent perfection
Richard Strauss (1864-1949) Serenade in E-flat major, Op. 7 Richard Strauss scored his Serenade in E-flat major for flutes, oboes, B-flat clarinets, bassoons, contrabassoon, and four French horns. He wrote the Serenade in 1881, while still in his teens, but Strauss had been immersed in the world of orchestral instruments from an early age. Strauss’s father, Franz, was one of the best French horn players in Germany, and from 1873 he enjoyed the high rank of Kammermusiker at the Munich Court of King Ludwig II of Bavaria. Franz Strauss ensured that his son received a rigorous musical education, which included extensive exposure to orchestras. Renowned throughout his life as a master of orchestration – as his operas and tone poems would demonstrate – Richard Strauss learnt his early lessons well: his musical maturity, and command of instrumental
colour immediately become evident in the Serenade, the premiere of which took place in Dresden in 1882 with a wind ensemble from the Court Orchestra. Kapellmeister Franz Wüllner, of the Dresden Hofkirche, conducted. The Serenade demonstrates how thoroughly Strauss had studied classical models. Very often the grace of his writing evokes moments from symphonies by Mozart and Haydn, both of whom he revered. However, even at this early stage in his career, Strauss coloured the Serenade with the inimitable, sensual richness we associate with the operas of his later career. His gracious yet determined Serenade provides a clear statement of aesthetic conviction, and true craftsmanship.
Antonín Dvořák (1841-1904) Serenade in D minor, Op. 44 1.
Moderato quasi Marcia
3.
Andante con moto
2.
Menuetto (Tempo di minuetto) – Trio (Presto)
4.
Finale: Allegro moderato
The composition of the D minor Serenade marked a crucial time in Dvořák’s career. In 1874 he first applied for the Austrian State Stipendium – a competitive award for composers in the Habsburg Empire – with fifteen compositions. The application proved successful, and Dvořák made four more Stipendium applications. His 1877 entry yielded special results: Brahms was on the adjudication committee, and Dvořák’s compositions impressed him so much that he recommended them to his publisher, Simrock: “Play [these pieces] through and you will like them as much as I do. As a publisher, you will be particularly pleased with their piquancy. … Dvořák has written all manner of things: operas (Czech), symphonies, quartets, piano pieces. In any case, he is a very talented man. Moreover, he is poor! I ask you to think about it!’” Simrock commissioned the Slavonic Dances from Dvořák: their popularity resulted in ‘a positive assault on the sheet music shops’. Working with customary intensity, Dvořák composed the richly inventive Serenade between the 4th and 18th of January 1878. The premiere took place in Prague on 17 November. Dvořák structured his Serenade on symphonic lines, synthesizing Classical models with the expansive emotions of Romanticism, and the inimitable fresh lyricism
that Brahms so enjoyed. The Serenade also presents a seductive musical view of the Czech musical environment in the later nineteenth century: its Menuetto and Trio looks back at late eighteenth-century Austro-German symphonic models, but highlights Czech influences, including idiomatic dance rhythms, and the birdsong that Dvořák particularly loved. Dvořák’s Serenade also reflects the ubiquitous presence of military bands in the Habsburg-ruled Czech lands. In any garrison town, military bands fulfilled a ceremonial role, but also performed concerts and participated in religious pageantry, providing daily reminders to the Czech people of Austria’s imperial might. In The Radetzky March, Joseph Roth provides an evocative vignette: the daily performance by the military band beneath District Commissioner Trotta’s window, always beginning with Johann Strauss’s ‘Radetzky March’. Roth described how the music ‘began with a drum roll, contained the accelerando of the tattoo and an outbreak of hilarity from the winsome cymbals, and ended with a rumble of thunder from the great side drum – the brief and cheerful storm of a marching tune.’ While Dvořák’s Serenade includes no great rumbling drum, the ‘Tempo di Marcia’ sections of the finale vividly evoke this heterogeneity of late nineteenth-century Central European culture and music. Programme note © Corrina Connor, 2017
Ensemble Players Flutes Agnes Harmath* Anita Macdonald + Oboes Joy Liu* Annabel Lovatt Clarinets Ashley Hopkins* Justus Rozemond Basset Horns Elsa Lam* Sarah Shieff
Bassoons Philip Sumner* Jacqui Hopkins Horns John Ure* MNZM Jill Ferrabee Jennifer Hsu Henry Swanson Cello Martin Griffiths* Db Bass Marija Durdevic*
* Section Principal + Sponsored Seats
We gratefully acknowledge our generous family of donors Waikato Malcolm and Margaret Carr Glenice and John Gallagher Trust Katie Mayes and Hugh Goodman Jakob and Lydia Lenggenhager Trudi Miles J and V Russenberger
Rotorua/Bay of Plenty Roger Brewster Peter and Elizabeth Carr Steve Chou Dorothy and Roger Gibbs Martin Hampson Alan and Nadine Hooper Jenny Joyce Tom Louisson Val Pollock
We also wish to thank Chris Finlayson, and a further three Donors who choose to remain anonymous
PATRON:
James Judd
Opus Orchestra Life Members Doug Arcus Robert Blair Andrew Buchanan-Smart Brigid Eady
Bob Hudson Kathryn Orbell Rita Paczian Christine Polglase Peter Walls ONZM
Sharon Stephens Bill Taylor Marion Townend Michele Wahrlich
Thank you to our sponsors
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Thanks and acknowledgement to the National Library for music hire