WHAT YOU ARE ABOUT TO HEAR

Janáček (1854 –1928)

String Quartet No 1 'Kreutzer Sonata' (1923) arr. for strings

Adagio – Con moto

Con moto

Con moto – Vivace – Andante

Con moto – (Adagio) – Più mosso

Trad . / Amidon (b. 1981)

Appalachian Folk Songs arr. Nico Muhly

Kedron

Way Go Lily

Wild Bill Jones

How Come That Blood

Mazzoli (b. 1980)

Dissolve, O My Heart (2010)

Sibelius (1809–1847)

Symphony No 3 in C major, Op 52 (1907)

Allegro moderato

Andantino con moto, quasi allegretto

Moderato – Allegro ma non tanto

Folk music has excited and inspired classical musicians for centuries. (Let’s set aside, for the moment, attempting to define ‘folk’ and ‘classical’ – and, for that matter, deciding where we draw the distinction between them, all issues that tonight’s concert prods at in any case.)

Just think of the countless idyllic pastoral evocations of contented shepherds and shepherdesses in Baroque opera and oratorio, or the bumbling, merry country folk dancing their way through the third movement of Beethoven’s ‘Pastoral’ Symphony.

It took until the 20th century, or at least the very end of the 19th, for classical musicians to begin to investigate the realities of their countries’ traditional cultures more seriously, and then to use what they discovered as a springboard for their own creativity. Most famously, Béla Bartók and Zoltán Kódaly began exploring Eastern European folk traditions in the early years of the 20th century, and Ralph Vaughan Williams did something similar with English folk songs around the same time.

Leoš Janáček, however, beat Bartók, Kódaly and Vaughan Williams to it by a couple of decades, beginning his own research into the folk music of his native Moravia and beyond in the 1880s. More than 40 years later, when he began work on his First String Quartet, ‘The Kreutzer Sonata’ (whose orchestral arrangement is in the first half of tonight’s concert), any melodic turns or rhythmic twists he’d learnt from folk music had become so deeply embedded in his own, idiosyncratic musical language that it would be almost impossible to isolate and identify them.

He wrote the Quartet in a flash of inspiration, between 13 and 28 October 1923, at the age of 69. Indeed, Janáček received little recognition until he was in his 60s, when he suddenly found a new sense of passion and energy for composing music – inspired, no doubt, by his own intense but unconsummated passions for a woman 37 years his junior, Kamila Stösslová, to the increasing disgust of his estranged wife Zdenka.

The direct inspiration for ‘The Kreutzer Sonata’, however, came from the novella of the same name by Leo Tolstoy, itself inspired by the Beethoven Violin Sonata with which it shares its title. Janáček was a huge admirer of Tolstoy (though, interestingly, not of the Beethoven Sonata), and even considered transforming the writer’s massive novel Anna Karenina into an opera. In Tolstoy’s far briefer The Kreutzer Sonata, however,

Janáčekreceivedlittle recognitionuntilhewasin his60s,whenhesuddenly foundanewsenseof passionandenergyfor composingmusic

Janáček discovered a story of love, lust, jealousy and guilt that surely resonated with the emotional turmoils in his own life.

Tolstoy’s anti-hero Pozdnyshev suspects his downtrodden pianist wife of having an affair with the vioinist Troukhatchevsky, a suspicion he sees confirmed in a deeply passionate performance of Beethoven’s ‘Kreutzer’ Sonata that she and Troukhatchevsky give. In a jealous rage, he stabs his wife to death, but is later acquitted of murder because of the woman’s apparent adultery, leaving him with a bottomless guilt at the brutal act he’s carried out.

Janáček doesn’t attempt to retell Tolstoy’s tale in music. But the work he built around the novella’s ideas is appropriately full of abrupt contrasts, fear and rage, though it’s also shot through with a soaring, passionate lyricism, almost as if it’s a depiction of a mind in turmoil. ‘I was imagining a poor woman, tormented and run down, just like the one Tolstoy describes in his Kreutzer Sonata,’ he wrote to Stösslová.

Janáček’s first movement collides together two contrasting ideas – a slow, yearning theme, and a far busier, more obsessive figuration – though its more flowing central section provides some relief from the opening agitation. His volatile second movement begins almost as if it’s a strutting Czech polka, and his third movement opens with an indirect quotation from the first movement of Beethoven’s own ‘Kreutzer’ Sonata, before its frenzied, dance-like music builds to a shattering climax. In his final movement, Janáček transfigures the original opening theme from his first movement into something regretful, if not downright tragic, before the music builds to another frantic climax – perhaps, it’s been suggested, depicting the moment when Pozdnyshev realises the true gravity of what he’s done.

Interspersed among the four movements of Janáček’s ‘The Kreutzer Sonata’ are four songs by Vermont-born singer, songwriter and multi-instrumentalist Sam Amidon. He’s a musician steeped in US folk music, growing up surrounded by traditional tunes and choral hymns, playing fiddle from the age of three, and joining his first band at 13. Amidon has so far released 11 discs of his music, providing a forward-looking perspective on centuries-old songs that brings in collaborators including New York composer Nico Muhly (orchestrator of tonight’s songs), British singer Beth Orton (who also happens to be Amidon’s wife), and Icelandic composer and producer Valgeir Sigurðsson.

While providing an American counterpart to the European folk influences in Janáček’s music, Amidon’s songs also reflect and refract some of the themes of love, morality and death conveyed in ‘The Kreutzer Sonata’. The intimate ‘Kedron’ is a shape note hymn – printed using different shapes for its different notes, to make congregational hymn-singing simpler for those who struggled to read music. It was originally published in Britain, in the 1762 Short Hymns compiled by Charles Wesley, before making its way to America, where it first appeared in South Carolina in 1799 in a harmonisation credited to the Rev Elkanah Kelsy Dare. It’s a popular and widely sung hymn, conveying the simple ideas of the inevitability of death, and Christ’s grace and patience as he slowly died on the cross.

The chant-like ‘Way Go, Lily’ is Amidon’s reimagining of a children’s game song from the dark days of slavery in the American south – deceptively upbeat, but with a strong sense of resistance and resilience underlying its hypnotic repetitions, and even the hope of turning the tables on the slave masters.

From mortality and resistance, we move to murder. ‘Wild Bill Jones’ is a southern Appalachian murder ballad that closely mirrors the storyline of Tolstoy’s novella: the song’s narrator surprises Wild Bill Jones of the title out walking with his own beloved, and murders him in a fit of rage. Similarly, the tense, disturbing ‘How Come That Blood’ is another murder ballad, thought to be originally from Scotland, which exists in earlier versions called ‘Edward’ or ‘My Son David’, and was even known to Schubert and Brahms. It’s a series of questions and answers in which a mother interrogates her son about his blood-soaked shirt: although at first he blames a hawk and a greyhound, he eventually admits he has slain his brother, and accepts that he must flee across the sea, taking his beloved with him, but leaving their three children behind.

We depart from folk music in the second half of tonight’s concert, but we begin with a piece that takes its inspiration from an earlier work. Pennsylvaniaborn Missy Mazzoli is one of America’s most exciting younger composers, and a well-established figure internationally. She’s composed operas (her operatic reimagining of Lars von Trier’s 1996 movie Breaking the Waves was staged at the Edinburgh International Festival in 2019) as well as much orchestral and chamber music, and she writes extensively for film and TV, in a wide-ranging, immediate style that sometimes straddles classical, rock and plenty more.

Her short Dissolve, O my Heart for solo violin comes from 2010, and was inspired by one of the most iconic works in the solo violin repertoire: the mighty Chaconne from Bach’s Partita No 2 in D minor. Mazzoli writes about the piece:

"Dissolve, O my Heart has its roots in a late-night conversation over Chinese food and cupcakes with violinist Jennifer Koh. She told me about her Bach & Beyond project, a programme that combines Bach’s Sonatas and Partitas with newly commissioned works, and asked if I would write a piece that referenced Bach’s Partita in D minor. This request was, to put it mildly, utterly terrifying; the last movement of the Partita, the Chaconne, is undoubtably the most famous piece of solo violin literature in the world. It overwhelmed Brahms, has been subject to hundreds of transcriptions and arrangements over the past two centuries, and is dizzying in its contrapuntal complexity. But something about Jennifer’s enthusiasm was infectious, and I agreed to the project before I realised what I was getting myself into. Jennifer seemed to approach Bach through the lens of contemporary music, and I realised that this was what this new piece should do as well.

Dissolve, O my Heart begins with the first chord of Bach’s Chaconne, a now iconic D minor chord, and spins out from there into an off-kilter series of chords that doubles back on itself, collapses and ultimately dissolves in a torrent of fast passages. The only direct quote from the Partita is that first chord, which anchors the entire piece even as it threatens to spiral out of control. The title comes from an aria in the St John Passion, but has many potential interpretations".

Like Janáček, Jean Sibelius held a huge admiration for the folk music of his native country. And also like Janáček, he absorbed any direct influence deeply into his own, distinctive musical language – no matter how those original tunes might have been perceived from outside. ‘I certainly do believe in Finnish music, regardless of the smirks of the self-appointed authorities,’ he wrote to his wife Aino in 1891. ‘That sonorous, remarkably melancholy monotony in all Finnish melodies, although it is a defect, properly speaking, is nevertheless characteristic.’

But Sibelius’s respect for Finnish folk music was part of a broader appreciation of his country’s wider culture, especially its ancient mythology, and its natural wonders. In 1904, he moved with his family from the hustle and bustle of Helsinki to a specially constructed villa on the shores of Lake Tuusula, which he called Ainola after his wife. Though it’s now in what’s virtually a Helsinki suburb, reachable by a short train ride, in 1904 Ainola was surrounded by unspoilt countryside, with fine views across the lake and abundant wildlife nearby.

And you can’t escape the feeling that Sibelius’s move played a role in the creation of his Third Symphony, which closes tonight’s programme. The Symphony came out of various disconnected themes he was working on at the time – a trilogy of short ideas he tried out on Finnish painter Oscar Parviainen in Paris (prompting the artist to respond with a painting that Sibelius later hung in Ainola), and even material originally intended for his concurrent tone poem Pohjola’s Daughter.

After the large-scale, Romantic statements of his two earlier symphonies, however, in his Third, Sibelius was already beginning a move into greater purity, refinement and classicism that would continue in his later works. He condensed the piece into three movements rather than the customary four, and even indicated that he’d be happy for the Symphony to be performed by an orchestra of fewer than 50 players rather that a larger symphony orchestra. It might not seem terribly revolutionary to us more than a century later, but Sibelius’s thinking was quietly radical for its time, and flew in the face of prevailing musical fashion for grand, extravagant, epic gestures. Mahler’s gargantuan Symphony No 8, the notorious ‘Symphony of a Thousand’, for example, is an almost exact contemporary of Sibelius’s Third.

Sibelius himself conducted the premiere, in Helsinki on 25 September 1907, and his slimmed-down, modest, thoughtful new piece left many in his audience confused. He later recounted to a friend an encounter with a fellow composer at an early performance: ‘After hearing my Third Symphony, Rimsky-Korsakov shook his head and said: “Why don’t you do it the usual way? You will see that the audience can neither follow nor understand this.”’ Just a month after the Third Symphony’s premiere, Sibelius put forward his thinking on the function of a symphony at his famous meeting with Gustav Mahler in Helsinki. ‘I said that I admired its strictness and style and deep logic, which requires that all its motifs must be linked to each other.’ Mahler took an entirely different perspective, in a reponse that’s gone down in history: ‘No, the symphony must be like the world. It must encompass everything!’

That’s not to say that Sibelius’s Third isn’t full of beguiling melody, stirring emotion and sonorous climaxes: it very much is, even if they’re a little more modest than they were in earlier works. He opens his first movement with what sounds like a distant rustic dance in the cellos and double basses, who are quickly joined by other instruments as the music rises to a majestic conclusion, only to slip sideways into a far more melancholy, minor-key theme. His central development section fractures his earlier themes and reconsiders them, often in quite cool, austere settings, but a sudden injection of energy leads to the return of the opening theme, as though what was cloudy and indistinct suddenly comes into sharp focus. Sibelius rounds things off, however, with a transcendent chorale, and a grand, conclusive ‘Amen’ sign-off.

The second movement feels like a cross between a dreamy nocture, a ghostly waltz, and a set of ever-evolving variations. Its main theme – first heard from a duo of flutes – seems like it might circle around and around forever, and sounds like it might be about to head off again before the strings bring the movement to a brusque conclusion.

Sibelius described his final movement as ‘the crystallisation of thought from chaos’, and it fuses together the dashing wit and playful mischief of a conventional symphonic scherzo with the grandeur of a finale. His ‘chaos’, in fact, might well be the themes and ideas from the previous movements that he tosses around near the beginning of the movement, building to a loud, brassy climax that prefigures the majestic chorale that closes the Symphony. Its closing theme is first heard from the viola section, before it expands across the orchestra, bringing the Symphony to a powerful, hymn-like conclusion.

© David Kettle

Violin / Director PEKKA KUUSISTO

Violinist, conductor, and composer Pekka Kuusisto is renowned for his artistic freedom and fresh approach to repertoire. Kuusisto is Artistic Director of the Norwegian Chamber Orchestra and Principal Guest Conductor & Artistic Co-Director: Helsinki Philharmonic Orchestra from the 2023/24 season. He is also Artistic Partner with the Mahler Chamber Orchestra, a Collaborative Partner of the San Francisco Symphony, and Artistic Best Friend of Die Deutsche Kammerphilharmonie Bremen.

In the 2022/23 season Kuusisto debuted with Berliner Philharmoniker and will perform with the Tokyo Metropolitan Symphony Orchestra. He will return to orchestras such as The Cleveland Orchestra, San Francisco, and Cincinnati symphony orchestras, Gürzenich-Orchester Köln, and Mahler Chamber Orchestra. Kuusisto makes his debuts as a conductor with the Philharmonia, Gothenburg, and City of Birmingham symphony orchestras. He is also Sinfonieorchester Basel’s Artist-in-Residence with whom he appears as conductor, soloist, and recitalist.

As a conductor, recent highlights include appearances with Helsinki Philharmonic, Saint Paul Chamber, and European Union Youth orchestras, the Concertgebouworkest, and Die Deutsche Kammerphilharmonie Bremen, hr-Sinfonieorchester Frankfurt, Orchestre de chambre de Paris and Scottish Chamber Orchestra.

Kuusisto is an enthusiastic advocate of contemporary music and a gifted improviser and regularly engages with people across the artistic spectrum. Uninhibited by conventional genre boundaries and noted for his innovative programming, recent projects have included collaborations with Hauschka and Kosminen, Dutch neurologist Erik Scherder, pioneer of electronic music Brian Crabtree, eminent jazz-trumpeter Arve Henriksen, juggler Jay Gilligan, accordionist Dermot Dunne and folk artist Sam Amidon.

Pekka Kuusisto plays the Antonio Stradivari Golden Period c.1709 ‘Scotta’ violin, generously loaned by a patron through Tarisio.

For full biography please visit sco.org.uk