CAPLET, CLYNE & DVORÁK Thursday 15 April 2021, Perth Concert Hall –––––
PROGRAMME
SCO.ORG.UK
Season 2020/21
CAPLET, CLYNE & DVORÁK Thursday 15 April 2021, 7.30pm Perth Concert Hall
CAPLET Suite Persane CLYNE Overflow (SCO commission, World Premiere) DVOŘÁK arr. Sheen Czech Suite SCO Wind Soloists Nicholas Daniel Director Introduced by Nicholas Daniel and Anna Clyne This concert is dedicated to the memory of James B Meff (1938-2020).
Our Musicians
YOUR ORCHESTRA DIRECTOR Nicholas Daniel
CLARINET Maximiliano Martín William Stafford
FLUTE Brontë Hudnott Emma Roche
BASSOON Cerys Ambrose Evans Alison Green
OBOE Nicholas Daniel Robin Williams
HORN Patrick Broderick Jamie Shield
OBOE/COR ANGLAIS Julian Scott
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WHAT YOU ARE ABOUT TO HEAR Caplet (1878-1925) Suite Persane (1901) Scharki Nihavend Iskia Samaïsi
Clyne (b.1980) Overflow (SCO commission, World Premiere) (2020)
Dvořák (1841-1904) Czech Suite arr. Sheen (1879) Preludium (Pastorale) - Allegro moderato Polka - Allegretto grazioso Sousedská (Minuetto) - Allegro giusto Romance (Romanza) - Andante con moto Finale (Furiant) - Presto
––––– Classical music is often concerned with nothing more than its own workings: with abstract issues of contrasting harmonies and themes, for example, or their transformations and developments. But it can also tell stories, conjure moods, or paint pictures. Today’s concert reveals two composers doing just that, in creating vivid musical evocations of place: one location mysterious, imagined and exotic; the other very real, and a formative part of the composer’s own experience. In between, as if symbolising a voyage between them, comes a brand new, ocean-inspired work by the SCO’s Associate Composer, Anna Clyne. Though he was prominent and highly regarded in his own time, we might not remember French composer André Caplet much these days – and if we do, it’s probably as an expert arranger of some of Debussy’s piano music for orchestra, including Pagodes and Clair de lune. Indeed, it was Debussy who championed Caplet early in his career, drawing attention to the younger man’s talents under the guise of his music critic alter ago, Monsieur Croche. Born in Le Havre in 1878, Caplet won numerous prizes at the Paris Conservatoire, and even beat Ravel to the prestigious Prix de Rome in 1901, though (for reasons that are not entirely clear) he cut short the residency at the Italian capital’s Villa Medici he received as a prize and headed back to Paris, where he became a close friend of Debussy, Ravel, Falla and others. Volunteering for combat in the Great War had a profound effect on his later life, however: he was caught in a German poison gas attack, which left him with health complications for many years, and may
The orient – and all the mystery, opulence and sensuality that came with it – was very much in vogue among Parisian society at the time, and Caplet’s Suite fits in perfectly with an imagined, idealised vision of the Near East. André Caplet
have contributed to his early death, at just 46, in 1925, when a simple cold developed quickly into pleurisy. His Suite Persane for ten wind instruments, however, came long before the dramas of his later life. He wrote it in 1901 while still a student at the Conservatoire, probably inspired by the oriental exhibits he’d encountered at the Paris Exposition Universelle the previous year. It was premiered on 9 March 1901 in the Salle Érard, in an all-Caplet concert given by the Société de Musique Moderne pour Instruments à Vent and flautist Georges Barrère. And it gained a rave review from Le Monde Musical, which called the Suite “a very ingenious work of instrumental combinations and much inspiration”.
with an imagined, idealised vision of the Near East. But it’s no mere orientalist fantasy: Caplet clearly researched his subject matter, using an authentic Persian melody (or so he claimed) in his first movement and evoking a particular Arabic maqam (or scale, a bit like an Indian raga) in the second.
The orient – and all the mystery, opulence and sensuality that came with it – was very much in vogue among Parisian society at
The restless first movement, ‘Scharki’, is named after a hot, humid wind that blows in the Persian Gulf in early summer and early winter. The music opens strikingly with an exotic Persian melody first heard unadorned in unison flutes and clarinets, though Caplet later clothes it in Debussian harmonies that would have been far more familiar to his Parisian listeners. The second movement’s title, ‘Nihavend’, refers to a particular maqam or scale used in Persian music. It opens with a melancholy, rhapsodic flute theme, harmonised using bare intervals, before a more overtly
the time, and Caplet’s Suite fits in perfectly
Western-sounding central section. The final
©Jennifer Taylor
Overflow is inspired by Emily Dickinson’s poem By the Sea, in which we experience the ocean’s power over the poet’s imagination – alluring, unsettling and dangerous. Anna Clyne
movement, ‘Iskia Samaïsi’, is the longest and most elaborate of the three, colliding together contrasting musical ideas in its opening section, before slowing down for what feels like a kind of love song, led by a
the ocean floor can cause great waves above. The opening sonority of Overflow also draws inspiration from Rumi’s words of a ‘slow and powerful root that we can’t see’ with a low B flat, the lowest pitch of the
horn melody, in its sultry central section.
ensemble emerging from silence.
Departing from Caplet’s Parisian evocation of Persia, we head into the ocean for Overflow, commissioned by the SCO from the orchestra’s Associate Composer Anna Clyne, and receiving its world premiere performance. Clyne writes about her own piece: Overflow is inspired by Emily Dickinson’s poem By the Sea, in which we experience the ocean’s power over the poet’s imagination – alluring, unsettling and dangerous. The line from which this piece takes its title, ‘Would overflow with Pearl’, reminded me of an image from Jelaluddin Rumi’s poem Where Everything is Music
If Caplet used his Suite Persane to convey an imagined orient, in his Czech Suite, Antonín Dvořák painted vivid musical pictures of both a countryside and a collection of folk dances that he’d known all his life. He wrote the Suite in 1879, when his fame was beginning to grow. In the wake of Liszt’s Hungarian Rhapsodies and Brahms’s Hungarian Dances, character pieces in a colourful, nationalistic style were all the rage. It was on the recommendation of Brahms, in fact, that publisher Friedrich August Simrock approached Dvořák to compose something along similar lines. The resulting Slavonic Dances, originally written for piano duet and intended for domestic
whereby the tiniest motion of a pearl on
consumption, were an enormous success,
In his Czech Suite, Antonín Dvořák painted vivid musical pictures of both a countryside and a collection of folk dances that he’d known all his life. Antonín Leopold Dvořák
but the composer nonetheless received a pitifully small fee. (It was only when he orchestrated them the following year that he negotiated a more reasonable sum for himself.)
a serenade. The work opens with a lyrical, scene-setting ‘Pastoral’, which evokes the work’s bucolic atmosphere with the distant hum of Czech bagpipes ever present behind a smoothly flowing melodic line. The
What Dvořák created in his Suite falls
second movement is a stylisation of a polka, one of the most popular Bohemian dance forms, which found its way into many other composers’ works. It begins with a wistful, somewhat understated melody in the minor, but becomes far more confident and rambunctious when it shifts to the brighter major. The third movement is a ‘Sousedská’, a Czech folk equivalent of a minuet, though with an accent on the second beat of the bar. Fourth comes a lyrical nocturne in the form of a ‘Romance’, which opens with a flute melody against gently pulsing accompaniment, and a dazzling, dashing, boisterious ‘Furiant’ brings the Suite to an exuberant conclusion – and may recall some of the wilder moments in Dvořák’s earlier Slavonic Dances.
somewhere between a set of dances and
© David Kettle
This, however, was just one of many disagreements between composer and publisher. Dvořák disliked, too, his first name being Germanicised to Anton to indicate that he wasn’t simply a Czech country bumpkin, and was far from happy with Simrock’s insistence that he’d get first refusal on any future compositions. So much so that when it came to the Czech Suite, composed the year following the Slavonic Dances and intended as a kind of follow-up, Dvořák gave it a low opus number of 39, implying it was an older work from his back catalogue to evade the disputed agreement.
POEM Emily Dickinson (1830-1886) By The Sea (Circa 1862) I started Early – Took my Dog – And visited the Sea – The Mermaids in the Basement Came out to look at me – And Frigates – in the Upper Floor Extended Hempen Hands – Presuming Me to be a Mouse – Aground – opon the Sands – But no Man moved Me – till the Tide Went past my simple Shoe – And past my Apron – and my Belt And past my Boddice – too – And made as He would eat me up – As wholly as a Dew Opon a Dandelion's Sleeve – And then – I started – too – And He – He followed – close behind – I felt His Silver Heel Opon my Ancle – Then My Shoes Would overflow with Pearl – Until We met the Solid Town – No One He seemed to know – And bowing – with a Mighty look – At me – The Sea withdrew –
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