SCO.ORG.UK PROGRAMME KRISTIINACONDUCTSPOSKA BEETHOVEN, SHOSTAKOVICH AND TÜÜR 14 – 17 September 2022 SUMMER TOUR 22
The Scottish Chamber Orchestra is a charity registered in Scotland No. SC015039. Company registration No. SC075079.
Blair Castle & Gardens
Beethoven Symphony No 2
Kristiina Poska Conductor
Shostakovich (arr. Barshai) Chamber Symphony Op 110a
Friday 16 September, 7.30pm St Michael’s Parish Church, Linlithgow
4 Royal Terrace, Edinburgh EH7 5AB +44 (0)131 557 6800 | info@sco.org.uk | sco.org.uk
Interval of 20 minutes
Saturday 17 September, 7.30pm The Beacon Arts Centre, Greenock
Beethoven Coriolan Overture
Tüür Flamma
Summer Tour 22
KRISTIINA POSKA CONDUCTS BEETHOVEN, SHOSTAKOVICH AND TÜÜR
Thursday 15 September, 7.30pm Blair Castle
With
Wednesday 14 September, 7.30pm St Mary’s Parish Church, Haddington
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Michael Gurevich
Cello
Zoë
Christian Elliott Donald SoniaChristoffGillanFourieCromarty
Nikita Naumov
Ben Burnley
Flute
Oboe Robin KatherineWilliamsBryer
Bassoon
Trumpet
Gordon Bragg
Pawel Jaworski
Bass
Information correct at the time of going to printFirstORCHESTRAYOURMusiciansViolin
Clarinet
Felix Tanner
AbigailSianCatherineWenAmiraKawashimaBedrush-McDonaldWangJamesHoldingYoung
SteveBrianMatthewsSchieleKing
Daniel YvonnePailthorpeRobertson
Harry Johnstone
Peter ShaunFranksHarrold
Timpani
Tijmen Huisingh
Principal Clarinet
Our
Viola
Second Violin
Maximiliano Martín
Rachel StewartNiamhRachelSiobhanSpencerDoyleSmithLyonsWebster
Maximiliano Martín
Kana
Alasdair Kelly
Alison GraemeGreenBrown Horn Robert Ashworth
Adagio molto – Allegro con brio
Symphony No 2 (1801–1802)
Tüür Flamma(b.1959)(2011)
AllegroScherzo:LarghettoAllegromolto
WHAT YOU ARE ABOUT TO HEAR
Coriolan Overture (1807)
It’s not surprising that Beethoven’s Coriolan Overture provoked such action, however. It’s a
Beethoven (1770-1827)
AllegroLargo LargoLargoAllegrettomolto
Beethoven (1770-1827)
Deepest tragedy contrasts with soaring optimism in tonight’s programme, which brings together music of bright light and profound Beethovenshade.wrote his Coriolan Overture, not for Shakespeare’s great Roman drama Coriolanus, but for a lesser-known adaptation of the same story by Austrian dramatist Heinrich Joseph von Collin. This later play was clearly a work Beethoven admired, though we don’t know whether that’s because he saw it at its successful but brief run in Vienna in 1802, or simply because he’d read the script. Doubtless there was an element of selfidentification with the heroism and integrity –and, we should probably admit, obstinacy – of the legendary Roman general who, having defeated the Volsci tribe in battle, becomes so disillusioned with the Roman populace and Senate that he eventually switches sides, joining his erstwhile enemies and leading them in battle towards the Eternal City. Things can only end badly, for Coriolanus at least: his mother and wife persuade him to call off the attack but, having burnt his bridges with both camps, he takes his own life.
The 1802 performances of von Collin’s Coriolan were given with music adapted from Mozart’s opera Idomeneo. But, following successful performances of Beethoven’s new Overture at two subscription concerts sponsored by the composer’s patron Prince Franz Joseph von Lobkowitz, a one-off, fulllength performance of the play was organised for 24 April 1807 at Vienna’s Imperial Theatre, solely as a vehicle for Beethoven’s Overture. (It can’t have been a coincidence that Prince Lobkowitz was one of the theatre’s directors.)
Shostakovich (1906-1975) arr. Barshai
Chamber Symphony Op 110a (1960/67)
Sombre themes continue in tonight’s second piece. When Dmitri Shostakovich applied to join the Communist Party in 1960, at the age of 54, it seemed like a mystifying, if not downright shocking act. He’d not only endured decades of scrutiny and criticism from the Soviet authorities but had also seemed to hold his nerve (just about) during the particular terrors of Stalin’s dictatorship, including two brutal condemnations of his music – the first in 1936 for his opera Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk,
Ludwig van Beethoven
masterpiece of musical drama, encapsulating the play’s essential ingredients in a mere eight or so minutes. Following an orchestral call to attention, its stormy main theme serves to represent Coriolan’s resolve and belligerence, while the tender theme that follows surely represents his mother and wife’s pleadings. In the central development section, the Coriolan theme gradually loses its bite as the Roman commander works through his inner struggles, until he seems to simply fade away at the piece’s tragic close.
the second in 1948 in a post-war crackdown on the arts – that left him fearing for his career, his freedom and even his life.
With Nikita Khrushchev as Soviet leader from 1958, it seemed like the terror had marginally relaxed – but there was ever increasing pressure on the composer to give credence to the new leader’s regime and join up to the Party. His String Quartet No. 8, written in just three days from 12 to 14 June 1960 –and transformed in 1967 into the Chamber Symphony for string orchestra that you hear tonight by Shostakovich’s friend Rudolf Barshai – may, it’s been speculated, reflect the composer’s inner struggles during this difficult time.
It’s not surprising that Beethoven’s Coriolan Overture provoked such action, however. It’s a masterpiece of musical drama, encapsulating the play’s eightingredientsessentialinamereorsominutes.
That cautious reference to speculation is intentional. For, as with so much of Shostakovich’s music, intentions, meanings, and purposes are almost impossible to pin down. The facts around the Eighth Quartet’s composition are fairly clear. Shostakovich
Dmitri Dmitriyevich Shostakovich
was in Dresden, at that time in East Germany, in a rare excursion outside the Soviet Union, writing music for the film Five Days, Five Nights, about the Allied bombing of the city during the Second World War. It was there that, in those three June days, he wrote one of his most personal and deeply felt works.
Shostakovich dedicated the Quartet to ‘the victims of fascism and the war’, but even that dedication is open to interpretation. Some take it at face value, citing the ‘Jewish’ theme (from his own Piano Trio No. 2) that Shostakovich quotes in the Quartet’s second movement as a reference to Nazi atrocities. Others, however, believe that Shostakovich effectively dedicated the work to himself. He wrote about the piece to his friend Isaac Glikman: ‘When I die, it’s hardly likely that someone will write a quartet dedicated to my memory. So I decided to write it myself.’ Another friend, Lev Lebedinsky, claimed that Shostakovich believed joining the Communist Party represented a moral death
that could only be followed by a physical one. On returning to Russia from Dresden, the composer apparently purchased a large number of sleeping pills, and Lebedinsky spent as much time as he could with Shostakovich over the following few days until he felt the immediate danger of suicide had passed.
The Eighth Quartet received its public premiere in Leningrad in 1960, in a performance by the Beethoven Quartet. An earlier, private performance, given by the Borodin Quartet for the composer at his Moscow home, perhaps revealed more about the work’s significance. The Borodin players were hoping for guidance from the composer about their interpretation. Instead, when they’d finished, Shostakovich simply buried his head in his hands and wept. The four players quietly packed away their instruments and left.
It’s unlikely we’ll ever know for sure what was Shostakovich’s true message behind the piece
That cautious reference to intentions,speculationisintentional.For,aswithsomuchofShostakovich’smusic,meanings,andpurposesarealmostimpossibletopindown.
“Flamma begins with a brief and extremely intense introduction. The double bass and cellos perform furious ascending passages that reach higher and higher in mutating chains. On this, the violins and violas form constantly shifting 'sound clouds' that consist of up to 15-tone chords; at some point the introduction is led to its culmination by the violas with a melodic line that emerges from the contact of the sound clouds and ascending passages.
The tension dissipates – momentarily, at least – in the ghostly waltz of the third movement, whose skittering violin melody is again based on the composer’s four-note name motif, and it moves on to a tune from Shostakovich’s First Cello Concerto. Things wind down further into the enigmatic fourth movement: its distinctive texture of a long, whining drone with sudden explosions of sound was long thought to depict anti-aircraft gunfire and the distant whine of a bomber. It’s more likely, however, that Shostakovich had something more personal in mind: later in the movement we gain a rare glimpse of light and hope,
From despairing introspection to fiery energy: the concert’s next piece couldn’t offer a more striking contrast. Estonian composer ErkkiSven Tüür was the frontman in prog rock group In Spe early in his career, before leaving to focus on classical composition – though a sense of rock-like directness and power remains in his deeply expressive music. He’s now one of Estonia’s most prominent and celebrated composers. He writes about his volcanic 2011 work Flamma:
“The extraordinariness of the culmination chord lies in the fact that the ‘low’ instruments are playing in their highest and the ‘high’ instruments in their lowest register.
Shostakovich’s final movement returns to the brooding intensity of the first, and pits a new, more lyrical accompaniment figure against Shostakovich’s now familiar four-note name motif. A brief memory of the first movement’s repeated-note theme takes the piece to its desolate conclusion.
The Chamber Symphony is cast in five short movements, all of which run together without breaks, and each of which uses the distinctive, four-note motif that Shostakovich derived from his own name (transformed into the initials DSCH, and then, via the German note-naming system, into D-E flat-C-B). In fact, those notes are the very first things we hear, quietly in the cellos, as the theme that launches the first movement’s intense, slowmoving fugue. Listen out, too, for a memorable accompaniment figure with repeated notes, which goes on to play a central role in the rest of the piece – not least in the blazing, vitriolic second movement, whose furious opening violin theme is a simple transformation of that repeated-note idea. Shostakovich adds his own four-note name motif into the mix, and about halfway through breaks into the ‘Jewish’ theme from his Second Piano Trio. The result is an often-terrifying mix of material, pitched at a screaming intensity.
with a yearning, nostalgic melody high in the cellos, singing an aria from the composer’s denounced opera Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk.
“The composition then starts unravelling through solos alternating with instrument groups. Ensembles are formed within
that became the Chamber Symphony, and it’s equally unlikely that there’s even such a simple key to unlocking its enigmas. That sense of unanswered questions, however, only adds to the already immense power that the piece conveys.
Beethoven wrote the Symphony in 1802, while staying in the Viennese village (now suburb) of Heiligenstadt, where he’d been sent by his doctor in the hope of relieving his alarmingly increasing deafness, away from the noise and bustle of the capital. Beethoven’s stay, however, had the opposite effect. He noticed no improvement in his condition, and, isolated from distractions, had far more time to reflect on it, and what it might mean for the career as a performer and composer he’d envisioned for himself.
At the start of his stay, he wrote to childhood friend Franz Wegeler: ‘That jealous demon, my wretched health, has put a nasty spoke in my wheel; and it amounts to this, that for the past three years my hearing has become weaker and weaker.’ By the end of his time away,
“Fire is both a destructive and purifying force –indigenous Australians have understood it well and have tapped the idea extensively in their traditions. Hence the title, rich in allusions. Flamma is dedicated to the Australian Chamber Orchestra and Richard Tognetti. This is my second work I was commissioned to compose for ACO.”
indigenousandFireisbothadestructivepurifyingforce–Australianshaveunderstooditwellandhavetappedtheideaextensivelyintheirtraditions.Hencethetitle,richinallusions.
the orchestra to contradict the full sound of the orchestra. The principal thematic development takes place slowly – this is achieved alternately by the first and second violins through constantly evolving repetitions. The same material is then presented in its so-called 'frozen state', like a chorale with homophonic texture played by the whole orchestra – at first it intersects the composition in fragments and only later appears in its entirety. We enter the summarising section of the piece in a position resembling the mirror effect: the first violins are playing ascending passages, supported by the static multi-tone chords ‘below’.
Erkki-Sven Tüür
There’s more energy and optimism in the concert’s final piece, Beethoven’s Second Symphony. But the piece is also a statement of determination and resilience.
Though we think of Beethoven’s Third Symphony, the ‘Eroica’, as his great breakthrough work, he sows the seeds that will later blossom there in his Second. The slow introduction to the Second’s first movement, for example, is weighty enough almost to feel like a movement in its own right, and leads to a faster section full of extreme dynamic contrasts, abrupt shifts between major and minor, and plenty of timpani strokes to add to its resounding climaxes.
because its simpler style would have been far more familiar to its Viennese audience. Indeed, one critic in the Zeitung für die elegante Welt went as far as describing the Second Symphony as ‘a hideously writhing, wounded dragon that refuses to die, but writhing in its last agonies and, in the fourth movement, bleeding to death’.
After his gently flowing second movement, the Second Symphony marks Beethoven’s first use of a playful scherzo as his third movement, instead of the then-customary elegant refinement of a minuet. And Beethoven’s inaugural symphonic scherzo finds him in particularly mischievous mood, with unexpected accents, stomping rhythms, and sudden swerves into unexpectedly different material, though never without a knowing smile on its face.
© David Kettle
The Symphony got its premiere on 3 April 1803 in a lengthy concert at Vienna’s Theater an der Wien, in the same performance as the unveiling of Beethoven’s Third Piano Concerto and the oratorio Christ on the Mount of Olives, as well as a repeat performance of his First Symphony. The First went down far better than the Second, inevitably, mainly
It’s in his hurtling, breakneck finale, however, that Beethoven really showcases his brilliant, forward-thinking creativity, with a main theme that’s barely more than a high-pitched flick and a low-down grumble, and an extended coda where he lets his innovative, comic juices flow. If there’s a story behind the Symphony, it’s one of perseverance and stoicism in the face of apparently insurmountable difficulties.
however, and nearing the Second Symphony’s completion, he’d written a letter to his two brothers, Carl and Johann, one that he’d never send. In what’s become known as Beethoven’s Heiligenstadt Testament, he set out his predicament, and explained the turmoil into which it had thrown his hopes and ambitions, even admitting that he’d contemplated suicide. But, he explained, he’d resolved to put what he felt to be his artistic destiny before the difficulties of his personal circumstances, and vowed to overcome whatever obstacles fate decided to throw in his path.
Considering the personal turmoil in which he composed it, many commentators have expressed surprise at just how sunny, carefree and upbeat the Second Symphony is (Berlioz wrote that ‘this Symphony is smiling throughout’). That astonishment is entirely legitimate, of course, but it rests on the assumption that a creator’s personal circumstances will necessarily permeate and influence the work they’re producing. It could have been that Beethoven was consciously attempting to distract himself by writing thoroughly jolly music. More likely, perhaps, is that the Second Symphony may be the embodiment of Beethoven’s renewed sense of dogged optimism, of belief in his pioneering perspectives on music –something that can surely be sensed not only in its eagerness and energy, but also in its rather gritted-teeth determination, its urgency and its restless power.
For full biography please visit sco.org.uk
POSKAKRISTIINAConductor
The award-winning conductor Kristiina Poska is in high demand on the international music scene. She has held the post of Chief Conductor of Flanders Symphony Orchestra since 2019/20 season and took up the post of Principal Guest Conductor of Latvian National Symphony Orchestra in 2021. Having studied choral conducting at the Estonian Academy of Music and Theater in Tallinn, and orchestral conducting at the Hochschule für Musik Hanns Eisler, Berlin. Poska was a finalist at the renowned Donatella Flick LSO Competition in 2010 and at the Malko Competition in May 2012 where she won the audience prize. She then went on to win the prestigious German Conductors’ Prize in April 2013.
Poska’s previous roles have included Principal Conductor of Cappella Academica from 2006 to 2011, and Kapellmeister at Komische Oper Berlin from 2012 to 2016, and Music Director for Theater Basel for the 2019/20 season. Poska’s latest recording of Beethoven’s Symphonies 1&7 released on Fuga Libera/Outhere is the fruit of her successful collaboration with the Flanders Symphony Orchestra.
This season’s highlights include Poska making her debuts with Royal Concertgebouworkest, Orchestre National de Lille, Aalborg Symfoniorkester, the Hallé, Minnesota Orchestra; at Staatsoper Berlin to conduct a production of Mozart’s Die Zauberflöte by Yuval Sharon, and at Opera Vlaanderen to conduct a production of Puccini’s La bohème by Robert Carsen. She also returns to Netherlands Philharmonic Orchestra, MDR Sinfonieorchester and Västerås Sinfonietta.
Equally prolific in the operatic repertoire, Poska conducted productions of Carmen with Staatsoper Stuttgart, and Die Entführung aus dem Serail with Sächsische Staatsoper Dresden (Semperoper) in recent seasons. She has appeared with Komische Oper Berlin, Royal Swedish Opera, Norwegian Opera, Semperoper Dresden, English National Opera, Finnish National Opera, Teatro del Maggio Musicale Fiorentino, Staatsoper Stuttgart and Volksoper Vienna.
The Orchestra enjoys close relationships with many leading composers and has commissioned almost 200 new works, including pieces by the late Sir Peter Maxwell Davies, Sir James MacMillan, Sally Beamish, Martin Suckling, Einojuhani Rautavaara, Karin Rehnqvist, Mark-Anthony Turnage, Nico Muhly and Associate Composer Anna Clyne.
The internationally celebrated Scottish Chamber Orchestra is one of Scotland’s National Performing Companies.
Making a significant contribution to Scottish life beyond the concert platform, the Orchestra works in schools, universities, colleges, hospitals, care homes, places of work and community centres through its extensive Creative Learning programme. The SCO is also proud to engage with online audiences across the globe via its innovative Digital Season.
An exciting new chapter for the SCO began in September 2019 with the arrival of dynamic young conductor Maxim Emelyanychev as the Orchestra’s Principal Conductor.
Formed in 1974 and core funded by the Scottish Government, the SCO aims to provide as many opportunities as possible for people to hear great music by touring the length and breadth of Scotland, appearing regularly at major national and international festivals and by touring internationally as proud ambassadors for Scottish cultural excellence.
The SCO also has long-standing associations with many eminent guest conductors including Conductor Emeritus Joseph Swensen, François Leleux, Pekka Kuusisto, Richard Egarr, Andrew Manze and John Storgårds.
For full biography please visit sco.org.uk
ORCHESTRACHAMBERSCOTTISHBiography
The SCO and Emelyanychev released their first album together (Linn Records) in November 2019 to widespread critical acclaim. The repertoire - Schubert’s Symphony No. 9 in C major ‘The Great’ –is the first concert Emelyanychev performed with the Orchestra in March 2018.
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