BRANDENBURG 5 2 – 3 Dec 2021
SCO.ORG.UK
PROGRAMME
Season 2021/22
BRANDENBURG 5
Thursday 2 December, 7.30pm The Queen’s Hall, Edinburgh Friday 3 December, 7.30pm City Halls, Glasgow Adams Shaker Loops Mozart Movements from Serenade No 10 in B-flat Major, K 361 'Gran Partita' Bach Brandenburg Concerto No 5 in D Major, BWV 1050 Maxim Emelyanychev Conductor / Harpsichord Stephanie Gonley Violin André Cebrián Flute Please note there will be no interval. Maxim Emelyanychev
Stephanie Gonley
André Cebrián
4 Royal Terrace, Edinburgh EH7 5AB +44 (0)131 557 6800 | info@sco.org.uk | sco.org.uk
The Scottish Chamber Orchestra is a charity registered in Scotland No. SC015039. Company registration No. SC075079.
Our Musicians
YOUR ORCHESTRA FIRST VIOLIN Stephanie Gonley Alexandra Lomeiko Siún Milne Amira Bedrush-McDonald Sarah Bevan-Baker SECOND VIOLIN Ruth Crouch Aisling O’Dea Fiona Alexander Rachel Spencer Niamh Lyons THIRD VIOLIN Marcus Barcham Stevens Gordon Bragg Alicia Berendse Kristin Deeken
VIOLA Max Mandel Brian Schiele Steve King Rebecca Wexler FIRST CELLO Philip Higham Su-a Lee SECOND CELLO Donald Gillan Eric de Wit BASS Ciro Vigilante Adrian Bornet
The orchestra list is correct at time of publication
OBOE Robin Williams Katherine Bryer CLARINET Maximiliano Martín Calum Robertson BASSET HORN William Stafford Lawrence Gill BASSOON Cerys Ambrose-Evans Alison Green HORN Zoe Tweed Jamie Shield Rachel Brady Harry Johnstone
Adrian Bornet Sub-Principal Double Bass
W H AT YO U ARE ABOUT TO HEAR Adams (b. 1947) Shaker Loops (1978) Shaking and Trembling Hymning Slews Loops and Verses A Final Shaking
Mozart (1756-1791) Movements from Serenade No 10 in B-flat Major, K 361 'Gran Partita' (1781-84) I. Largo. Molto Allegro
––––– Tonight’s wide-ranging programme spans two and a half centuries, and three distinct – and distinctly different – musical styles. If there’s a thread linking the trio of works, however, it’s rhythm – urgent, propulsive rhythm that serves to drive the three pieces ever onward. Propulsive rhythm is one of the clear defining features US composer John Adams’s early music. He’s often lumped together with Steve Reich and Philip Glass as a ‘minimalist’, writing music concerned with repetition, gradual change, hypnotic soundscapes and yes, driving rhythms. In truth, however, he never quite fitted into that neat category. Shaker Loops, from 1978, was the first piece to bring his name to a wide international audience, but even here, he harnesses the unmistakable elements of minimalism in music that’s full of energy, power and emotional drive.
III. Adagio. Andante VI. Tema con variazioni. Andante VII. Finale. Molto Allegro
Bach (1685-1750) Brandenburg Concerto No 5 in D Major, BWV 1050 (1720–21) Allegro Affettuoso Allegro
Adams wrote the piece while teaching at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music, and tried it out on willing student players as he was developing it out of his earlier conceptual piece Wavemaker. Its quirky title makes several references. First, ‘loops’ is a term still used for short repeating sections in pop and rock tracks. For Adams in the 1970s, it meant a literal loop: a section of pre-recorded tape attached to itself in an unending circle, and played over and over, as many times as needed. ‘Shaker’ refers to the United Society of Believers in Christ’s Second Appearing, the Christian sect that had a defunct community near where Adams grew up in New Hampshire, and whose ecstatic praise is said to lead to bodily convulsions.
Shaker Loops, from 1978, was the first piece to bring his name to a wide international audience, but even here, he harnesses the unmistakable elements of minimalism in music that’s full of energy, power and emotional drive. John Adams
The word also sums up the movements that Adams’s string players carry out
the piece before ending with the gentle euphoria of apparently endless waves of
to achieve the rapid tremolos his music demands.
sound.
Those lightning-quick movements are most evident in the propulsive energy of Shaker Loops’s first movement, ‘Shaking and Trembling’. After that frenetic activity, it feels as though time has stopped in the second movement, ‘Hymning Slews’, with just a few raindrop-like pizzicatos, sighing slides (the ‘slews’ of the movement’s title) and icy harmonics left. A solo cello launches the third movement, ‘Loops and Verses’, in which Adams pulls off a remarkable aural illusion of the music seeming to perpetually accelerate. In the last movement, ‘A Final Shaking’, he
Almost exactly 200 years before Adams was creating Shaker Loops, Mozart put together his Serenade No 10, nicknamed the ‘Gran partita’, a title that wasn’t given by the composer. Indeed, the origin of its nickname is just one of the many mysteries about what’s one of the composer’s grandest pieces for wind instruments, written for pairs of oboes, clarinets, basset horns and bassoons, plus four horns and a double bass (sometimes substituted by a contrabassoon). For a composer renowned for sharing his opinions on his music and plenty more in his letters home, it’s unusual that the ‘Gran partita’
looks back over material from earlier in
doesn’t get a single mention.
The ‘Gran partita’ is Mozart’s response to the passion for Harmoniemusik, and he’s clearly out to demonstrate his mastery of the genre. This is no mere lightweight entertainment... Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
He probably wrote it, however, in 1781 or 1782, shortly after his move from his
wind players – at its simplest, a few popular opera arias as background
birthplace of Salzburg to the glittering lights of Vienna, and very possibly as a way of making his musical mark in the grandest and most public way possible. It may have been premiered at a benefit concert in March 1784 for clarinettist Anton Stadler (for whom Mozart would later write his Clarinet Quintet and Concerto), but again, that’s only speculation.
music for dinner, but at its most sophisticated, elaborate arrangements of whole symphonies or operas, intended as serenades for banquets or garden parties, or to charm and delight hunting trips. The trend really took off in spring 1782, when Austrian Emperor Joseph II formed an eight-piece wind ensemble from his Vienna court orchestra (which would later become the Vienna Philharmonic) to provide his own ‘table music’. Courts and wealthy families across central Europe quickly followed suit.
What’s clear, however, is that the ‘Gran partita’ was Mozart’s ambitious response to the fashion for Harmoniemusik, or music for wind band, that raged across central Europe in the second half of the 18th century. Nobility or wealthy landowners would demand light music for entertainment from their household’s
The ‘Gran partita’ is Mozart’s response to the passion for Harmoniemusik, and he’s clearly out to demonstrate his mastery of the genre. This is no mere lightweight
Sensing the possibility of jumping ship to a wealthier royal household, Bach assembled a beautifully printed score of these six sophisticated concertos and duly sent them off. He never heard back. Johann Sebastian Bach
entertainment: the ‘Gran partita’ is a work of symphonic dimensions, cast
oboe, clarinet and basset horn almost as singing soloists against the rest of the
across seven substantial movements that together run to around 45 minutes. There’s a question, however, as to whether it was ever intended as a unified whole, or instead simply as a collection of character pieces arranged into a conventional ordering, from which individual movements might be selected for performance. The March 1784 performance (perhaps the work’s premiere) used only four, as does tonight’s.
ensemble. Following a witty theme with six contrasting variations, Mozart rounds off the ‘Gran partita’ with a boisterous finale, whose stomping rhythms drive the work to its breathless conclusion.
The first movement’s slow introduction establishes the work’s grandeur right from the start, and its extended, faster section brings all the vibrancy and wit of an opera overture. The Adagio continues the operatic theme, pitting a trio of
Although inhabiting a starkly contrasting stylistic world, Bach’s six Brandenburg Concertos date from just six decades before Mozart’s wind serenade. And they must surely count as music history’s most elaborate, ambitious, but ultimately failed attempt to gain employment. Bach wrote them around 1721, when his employer, Prince Leopold of AnhaltKöthen, was reallocating funds from his court musicians to his palace guards.
Nonetheless, Bach’s unsuccessful job application has left us with some of music’s most distinctive and memorable pieces, in which he displays not only his mastery of weaving together contrapuntal melodic lines, but also his expertise in intense, emotional melodies.
The composer could see what was on the cards. He’d met Christian Ludwig, Margrave of Brandenburg, two years earlier in Berlin, while on a shopping trip
writing for harpsichord, almost certainly intended to show off the new instrument he’d just purchased in Berlin.
for a new harpsichord for the Köthen court, and the nobleman suggested that Bach might put together a few concertos for his own court orchestra. Sensing the possibility of jumping ship to a wealthier royal household, Bach assembled a beautifully printed score of these six sophisticated concertos and duly sent them off. He never heard back.
Flute and violin begin seem to be the true soloists at the start of the Concerto’s first movement, though the harpsichord quickly begins to assert its individuality, leading eventually to an extraordinary, flamboyant solo towards the end of the movement. The gentle second movement transports us into the more intimate world of chamber music: it’s effectively a trio sonata for the Concerto’s three soloists, who genially pursue and copy each other’s melodies. Bach concludes with a sprightly, spirited gigue, characterised by distinctive bouncing rhythms, and with his cherished harpsichord returning for its own moments in the spotlight.
Nonetheless, Bach’s unsuccessful job application has left us with some of music’s most distinctive and memorable pieces, in which he displays not only his mastery of weaving together contrapuntal melodic lines, but also his expertise in intense, emotional melodies. And, in this exuberant, extravagant Fifth Concerto, of his lavish, virtuosic
© David Kettle
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