RSNO Friday Night Club: Beethoven Symphony No3 Eroica

Friday Night Club Fri 27 Mar 2020: 7.30pm BEETHOVEN Symphony No3 Eroica Sir Roger Norrington Conductor Royal Scottish National Orchestra Recorded on Sat 29 Feb 2020, Glasgow Royal Concert Hall

This performance was recorded for the RSNO Archive. Supported by the Iain and Pamela Sinclair Legacy.

RSNO Friday Night Club: Eroica

Symphony No3 in E flat Major Eroica Op55 Few works have truly changed the course of musical history. Mozart’s The Marriage of Figaro, Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde and Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring are undoubtedly among them, as is Beethoven’s Eroica Symphony, a piece completed in Vienna in early 1804 that left many of his contemporaries incredulous in the face of its sheer power and scale.

Both politics and intense personal crisis shaped the composition of this remarkable work.

Beethoven had been a strong supporter of the French Revolution and originally titled the work ‘Bonaparte’ in praise of his hero Napoleon, a figure he regarded as embodying the ideals of republicanism. Famously, however, when Napoleon named himself ‘Emperor of the French’ in 1804, a disillusioned Beethoven changed the title to Eroica (Italian for ‘heroic’) and angrily removed the dedication to Napoleon from its title page, pointedly changing it to ‘In Memory of a Great Man’.

Ludwig van Beethoven

(1770-1827)

FIRST PERFORMED 7 April 1805, Theater an der Wien, Vienna DURATION 47 minutes Allegro con brio Marcia funebre: Adagio assai Scherzo: Allegro vivace-Trio Finale: Allegro molto-Poco andante-Presto

Equally significant, however, is the autobiographical dimension of the Eroica.

Beethoven spent the spring and summer of 1802 in the Austrian village of Heiligenstadt, hoping the trip might alleviate his increasingly serious deafness. It failed, but while staying in the village Beethoven wrote his ‘Heiligenstadt Testament’, an often harrowing letter addressed to his brother with the strict instruction that it was not to be opened until after the composer’s death.

In the document Beethoven poured out his heart, contemplated suicide, and ultimately vowed to live with his deafness and fulfil his destiny as a great composer. It is no coincidence that Beethoven began sketching the Eroica in Heiligenstadt, for the Symphony

Scotland’s National Orchestra

is one of the first musical products of this new-found resolve, a token of Beethoven’s own heroism in the face of adversity.

As was the case with the music by Mozart, Wagner and Stravinsky mentioned earlier, originality often meets with a deal of bafflement, even antagonism – at least initially. At the premiere of the Eroica, in Vienna on 7 April 1805, the Symphony received only scattered applause and, according to Beethoven’s pupil Carl Czerny, critics found the performance ‘interminable, overloaded, incomprehensible and much too noisy’ (someone in the gallery was also heard to shout, ‘I’ll give another kreuzer if the thing will only stop!’). Nevertheless, the negative criticism was short-lived. Very soon, as they gained fuller insight into the work, both critics and audiences began to recognise the Eroica as the masterpiece it is.

Beethoven’s first two symphonies both open with slow introductions, but in the Eroica’s first movement the composer immediately sets a tone of strident heroism with two arresting E flat Major chords, out of which emerges the movement’s expansive first theme. Heroic struggle comes in the central development section, whose brutality and harsh dissonances would no doubt have shocked Beethoven’s contemporaries. Eventually, over mysterious string tremolandos, a single horn quietly sounds out the first theme and the opening section is reprised, though with no shortage of ingenious variation.

The opening of the slow second movement – a funeral march – is sombre in the extreme, with the plangent sound of the double basses propelling the music forward at its solemn

pace. Between renditions of the march theme are two contrasting episodes: the first (in the bright key of C Major) seems to offer a degree of consolation; the second is a powerful double fugue that reaches a cataclysmic climax, like a terrifying vision of Judgement Day. By the end of the movement, the march has become a tragically haltering affair – any hope of consolation would seem to have been in vain.

After all the solemnity, there is a tremendous sense of rebirth with the third-movement Scherzo. It steals into life in the hushed strings and woodwind before suddenly bursting into a gloriously exuberant dance. The three French horns dominate the movement’s central trio section (Beethoven’s soloistic horn-writing is a characteristic of the Symphony as a whole) before the scherzo returns, at one point seemingly stumbling over itself in all its high spirits. At the end, however, horns and timpani inject a hint of menace.

The fourth movement opens with a headlong rush of sound that subsides to make way for a set of variations on a theme from Beethoven’s ballet score The Creatures of Prometheus.

Mythology has it that the titan Prometheus defied the gods of Mount Olympus by stealing fire from heaven and bringing warmth, light and cultural enlightenment to mankind, a story with which Beethoven strongly identified.

Though the theme is cast in different guises, it occasionally returns in something like its original form. After it does so for a final time, slowly and with great nobility, a return of the rushing introductory music heralds the onset of a gloriously ebullient – and suitably heroic – closing coda. © Anthony Bateman

RSNO Friday Night Club: Eroica

Sir Roger Norrington CONDUCTOR Roger Norrington is a frequent guest with many of the world’s leading orchestras, including the Berlin Philharmonic, Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra, Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra, Philadelphia Orchestra and London Philharmonic Orchestra. He has had memorable tenures as Chief Conductor with the SWR Stuttgart Radio Symphony Orchestra (13 years), Camerata Salzburg (10 years) and Zürich Chamber Orchestra (five years). Other permanent posts include Chief Conductor of the Bournemouth Sinfonietta and Music Director of the Orchestra of St Luke’s in New York. He is currently Conductor Emeritus in Stuttgart, Salzburg and Zürich, and of the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment.

For 50 years Roger Norrington has been at the forefront of the movement for historically informed musical performance. He has sought to put modern musicians in touch with the style of the music they play.

Roger Norrington has made over 150 recordings. He was knighted in June 1997 and is, among other distinctions, an honorary fellow of the Royal Academy of Music and of the Royal College of Music.

Roger Norrington sang and played the violin from a young age and began to conduct while at Cambridge. He also studied History at Westminster School and English Literature at Cambridge, where he was a choral scholar, and later at the Royal College of Music in London under Adrian Boult.

Roger Norrington appeared most recently with the Royal Scottish National Orchestra in February 2019, when he conducted a programme of Schumann’s Symphonies Nos3 and 4, and Mozart’s Violin Concerto No4.

His Heinrich Schütz Choir, founded in 1962, made many recordings and his London Classical Players, founded in 1978, achieved worldwide fame with their dramatic CDs of the Beethoven symphonies, as well as many other works.

As early as 1969, Roger Norrington was made Music Director of Kent Opera. He conducted hundreds of performances for the company and went on to work at the Royal Opera House, English National Opera, La Scala Milan, La Fenice Venice and the Vienna State Opera.

Scotland’s National Orchestra

Royal Scottish National Orchestra

Formed in 1891 as the Scottish Orchestra, the company became the Scottish National Orchestra in 1950, and was awarded Royal Patronage in 1977. The Orchestra’s artistic team is led by Danish conductor Thomas Søndergård, who was appointed RSNO Music Director in October 2018, having previously held the position of Principal Guest Conductor. Hong Kong-born conductor Elim Chan succeeds Søndergård as Principal Guest Conductor. They are joined by Assistant Conductor Junping Qian.

The RSNO performs across Scotland, including concerts in Glasgow, Edinburgh, Dundee, Aberdeen, Perth and Inverness. The Orchestra appears regularly at the Edinburgh International Festival and the BBC Proms, and has made recent tours to the USA, China and throughout Europe.

The Orchestra is joined for choral performances by the RSNO Chorus, directed by Gregory Batsleer. The RSNO Chorus evolved from a choir formed in 1843 to sing the first full performance of Handel’s Messiah in Scotland. Today, the RSNO Chorus is one of the most distinguished large symphonic choruses in Britain, with a membership of around 160. The Chorus has performed nearly every work in the standard choral repertoire, along with contemporary works by composers including John Adams, Howard Shore and James MacMillan.

Formed in 1978 by Jean Kidd, the acclaimed RSNO Junior Chorus, under its new director Patrick Barrett, also performs regularly alongside the Orchestra. Boasting a membership of over 400 members aged from 7 to 18, it has built up a considerable reputation singing under some of the world’s most distinguished conductors and appearing on radio and television.

The RSNO has a worldwide reputation for the quality of its recordings, receiving two Diapason d’Or awards for Symphonic Music (Denève/ Roussel 2007; Denève/Debussy 2012) and eight GRAMMY Awards nominations. Over 200 releases are available, including the complete symphonies of Sibelius (Gibson), Prokofiev (Järvi), Glazunov (Serebrier), Nielsen and Martinů (Thomson) and Roussel (Denève) and the major orchestral works of Debussy (Denève). Thomas Søndergård’s debut recording with the RSNO, of Richard Strauss’ Ein Heldenleben, was released on Linn Records in 2019.

The RSNO’s pioneering learning and engagement programme, Music for Life, aims to engage the people of Scotland with music across key stages of life: Early Years, Nurseries and Schools, Teenagers and Students, Families, Accessing Lives, Working Lives and Retired and Later Life.

The team is committed to placing the Orchestra at the centre of Scottish communities via community workshops and annual residencies across the length and breadth of the country.

RSNO Friday Night Club: Eroica

On Stage FIRST VIOLIN Maya Iwabuchi

CELLO

Aleksei Kiseliov

Martin Murphy

Lena Zeliszewska

Betsy Taylor Kennedy Leitch William Paterson Sarah Digger

Alison Murray Lauren Reeve-Rawlings David McClenaghan Christine McGinley

DOUBLE BASS

TRUMPET

LEADER

ASSOCIATE LEADER

Emily Davis

ASSOCIATE LEADER

Patrick Curlett Barbara Paterson Alan Manson Elizabeth Bamping Lorna Rough Susannah Lowdon Caroline Parry

PRINCIPAL

Margarida Castro Michael Rae Paul Sutherland John Clark Sally Davis

SECOND VIOLIN

FLUTE

PRINCIPAL

PRINCIPAL

Xander van Vliet

Katherine Bryan

HORN

ASSISTANT PRINCIPAL

Christopher Hart PRINCIPAL

Marcus Pope Jason Lewis TROMBONE

Lance Green

ASSOCIATE PRINCIPAL

Paul Stone Alastair Sinclair

Marion Wilson Harriet WIlson Nigel Mason Michael Rigg Wanda Wojtasinska Paul Medd Anne Bünemann Robin Wilson Liam Lynch Fiona Stephen

Helen Brew Janet Richardson

Peter Dykes Henry Clay

PERCUSSION

PRINCIPAL COR ANGLAIS

GUEST PRINCIPAL

VIOLA

CLARINET

HARP

PRINCIPAL PICCOLO

OBOE

Adrian Wilson PRINCIPAL

Tom Dunn

Nicholas Carpenter

Asher Zaccardelli Susan Buchan Lisa Rourke Claire Dunn Katherine Wren Francesca Hunt

Robert Digney Robert Fairley

PRINCIPAL

GUEST PRINCIPAL

BASS CLARINET

BASSOON

David Hubbard PRINCIPAL

Luis Eisen Paolo Dutto

PRINCIPAL CONTRABASSOON

PRINCIPAL BASS TROMBONE

TIMPANI

Paul Philbert PRINCIPAL

Tom Hunter

Pippa Tunnell Mary Reid