WHAT YOU ARE ABOUT TO HEAR

Sibelius (1809–1847)

The Tempest Suite No 2 (1925–26)

Chorus of the Winds

Intermezzo

Dance of Nymphs

Prospero

Song I

Song II

Miranda

The Naiads

Dance Episode

Miller (b. 1976)

I cannot love without trembling

(Viola Concerto) (2022) UK Premiere

Co-commissioned by BBC Radio 3, Brussels Philharmonic, National Arts Centre, Ottawa, Canada and Scottish Chamber Orchestra, supported by The Viola Commissioning Circle.

Verse 1: To love purely is to consent to distance

Verse 2: I cannot love without trembling

Verse 3: Buried deep under the sound of his own lamentations is the pearl of the silence of God

Verse 4: Absolutely unmixed attention is prayer

Cadenza: Stars and blossoming fruit trees: Utter permanence and extreme fragility give an equal sense of eternity

Tchaikovsky (1840-1893)

Symphony No 5 in C minor, Op 67 (1888) arr. G. Morton (2017)

Andante – Allegro con anima

Andante cantabile con alcuna licenza

Allegro moderato

Andante maestoso – Allegro vivace

Theatrical imagination, profound contemplation and a vivid battle against the forces of fate come together in tonight’s wide-ranging concert.

The incidental music Jean Sibelius wrote for Shakespeare’s The Tempest in 1925-26 formed his penultimate large-scale work, followed only by the brooding, forest-themed tone poem Tapiola , and then silence for the final three decades of his life. So crippling had the effects of self-criticism become to Finland’s most celebrated and respected composer that he even notoriously burnt the unfinished manuscript of his partcomposed Eighth Symphony, providing music history with one of its most enduring what-ifs.

The suggestion of writing music for Shakespeare’s final play was first put to Sibelius as far back as 1901, by his friend and patron Axel Carpelan (another of whose ideas would go on to become Tapiola). But it took more definite form in 1925, when Sibelius was approached by his Copenhagen publisher, Wilhelm Hansen, with news that the Danish capital’s Royal Theatre was planning a production of The Tempest for the following year, and that its producer would like Sibelius to write the music for it.

The production proved an enormous success. One review observed: ‘Shakespeare and Sibelius, these two geniuses, have finally found one another.’ Sibelius’s original score – consisting of 34 separate numbers, running to more than an hour of music, and written for vocal soloists, chorus, harmonium and large orchestra – was of an opulence that might surprise modern-day theatregoers. He derived two suites from the incidental music – the first keeping its lavish forces, but the second, heard tonight, for a more modest orchestra –and combined and condensed several of his original numbers in the suites’ individual movements, aiming for musical effectiveness rather than necessarily narrative sense.

The Second Suite’s opening ‘Chorus of the Winds’ comes from near the play’s beginning, depicting the gentle breezes that remain once The Tempest’ s opening storm, whipped up by the spirit Ariel, has subsided. Listen out for the prominent harp, the instrument that Sibelius used to symbolise Prospero, the sorcerer (and rightful Duke of Milan) who’s exiled on the island and acts as puppetmaster to the play’s other characters. The graceful but sorrowful ‘Intermezzo’ originally formed a bridge between Acts III and

IV, and symbolises Alonso, King of Naples, repenting for his misdeeds in the (mistaken) belief that Prospero has caused the death of his son, Ferdinand (and Prospero’s harp is never far away). In the tripping minuet of the ‘Dance of the Nymphs’, mermaids celebrate Miranda and Ferdinand’s engagement in Act IV, while ‘Prospero’ is a portrait of the play’s central character from Act II, undeniably Baroque in its majesty, but with slippering, shifting harmonies that reflect his ambiguous motives.

The rather melancholy ‘Song I’ is an instrumental version of the song sung by Ariel at Miranda and Ferdinand’s union in Act IV, while the hint of Iberian energy in ‘Song II’ reflects Ariel’s joy at being released from his bonds in Act V. The gossamer textures and unpredictable melody of ‘Miranda’ capture the elusive character of Prospero’s daughter, in music originally planned to introduce Act III of the play, and ‘The Naiads’ takes us right back to the beginning, when Ariel plays in the water following the play’s opening storm – a distant memory of which can be heard about halfway through. Sibelius’s closing ‘Dance Episode’ is a portrait of Prospero’s villainous brother Antonio, who organised the magician’s exile from Milan in The Tempest ’s backstory. The movement pulls the classic Sibelian trick of transforming what was originally a melody into an accompaniment figure simply by speeding it up. It builds to the Suite’s only truly loud music, before melting away magically into silence.

Born on Vancouver Island in British Columbia, and now resident in London, Cassandra Miller is one of today’s most fascinating composers, creating works that sometimes peer deep into the heart of music itself, examining not only how it works, but also its almost spiritual meaning to us. She’s particularly interested in transcription as a creative process, whereby reworking existing music – for example the Greek melodies in tonight’s work – can transform and transfigure it, sometimes beyond recognition. Miller has often written works with specific performers in mind: she’s collaborated regularly with soprano Juliet Fraser, for example, as well as the Bozzini Quartet and conductor Ilan Volkov. She wrote tonight’s viola concerto specifically for British viola player Lawrence Power, having previously composed the solo piece Daylonging, Slacktide for Power in July 2020, during the first months of the Covid pandemic. Power premiered that piece online in September 2020.

Miller writes about tonight’s I cannot love without trembling :

"In the last year of her life, the French philosopher Simone Weil wrote in a letter to her friend Gustave Thibon, ‘Human existence is so fragile a thing and exposed to such dangers that I cannot love without trembling.’ In Gravity and Grace (published posthumously by Thibon), Weil wrote about the nature of distance and separation, expanding on Plato’s concept of metaxu – ie that which both separates and connects – grounding her mystical philosophy in the idea (to summarise crudely) that every absence can be interpreted as presence. ‘Every separation is a link.’

Thirty years earlier, following a period of upheaval as Greece resisted Ottoman rule, the Epirot violinist Alexis Zoumbas left his mountain home in Northern Greece for the USA. In New York, he recorded his mournful shimmering music – including several examples of moiroloi , an improvisatory composition of keening gestures and flickering flame-like ornamentation. The moiroloi compositions refer to the moirologia funeral laments of the women of Epirus, and invoke the feeling of xenatia (a Greek word which translates to English as ‘a catastrophic longing for home’). In these recordings, one can clearly hear the immigrant’s connection to the realitypresence of home, through the act – as in Weil’s metaxu – of singing its absence.

This concerto is about the basic human need to lament, that is, to speak the distance/sing the separation (in a trajectory loosely narrated by the Weil quotations that name each of the concerto’s sections). It is also about Alexis Zoumbas. Using one of his moiroloi recordings as a source, I sang along many times (first to Zoumbas, then to myself) in a ritualised, meditative process I call ‘automatic singing’. This method transformed the moiroloi into the violist’s trembling-loving-mourning sighs. Within Zoumbas’ plaintive song, I sought a metaphysical space in which to dream – a space of separation-connection-absencepresence – in the hope to lament and to dream together in this hall tonight."

By the time Tchaikovsky embarked on what would become his Fifth Symphony, in the spring of 1888, it had been ten years since his Fourth (though he’d written his Byron-inspired 'Manfred' Symphony during that intervening decade). His creative life was riddled with periods of intense selfdoubt, and this was one of them: he feared his creativity had dried up, but nonetheless wrote to his brother Modest in May 1888:

Cassandra Miller is one of today’smostfascinating composers,creating works that sometimes peerdeepintotheheart ofmusicitself,examining notonlyhowitworks,but alsoitsalmostspiritual meaningtous.

‘I am hoping to collect, little by little, material for a symphony.’

In the end, he put the Fifth Symphony together in the space of four months, during the summer of 1888, ensconced at his holiday retreat in Frolovskoye, near Moscow. He wrote copious letters to his patron and supporter Nadezhda von Meck during that time, providing something of a blow-by-blow commentary on the developing composition. ‘I am exceedingly anxious to prove to myself, as to others, that I am not played out as a composer,’ he wrote in June 1888, when beginning work in earnest. ‘Have I told you that I intend to write a symphony? The beginning was difficult, but now inspiration seems to have come. We shall see.’

If writing the Fifth Symphony was something of a triumph over self-doubt for Tchaikovsky, then that’s perhaps an idea we can also hear embedded in the

Symphony’s music itself. In later letters to von Meck, he revealed more about the specific inspirations behind the piece: the inescapable forces of fate that forever haunted him, his fragile beliefs in his own abilities, even darker thoughts about his very role and purpose. Indeed, the Fourth, Fifth and Sixth are often seen as a kind of unofficial trilogy of symphonies, each one representing a different perspective on Tchaikovsky’s battles with ‘fate’ (most devastatingly in the final ‘Pathétique’ Symphony).

But if ‘fate’ is the inescapable presence hovering behind these three major works, we should be clear about what it means in this context. Tchaikovsky himself described fate as ‘the force that prevents the impulse towards happiness from achieving its aim’. That’s quite a long way away from any idea of predestination, or of a higher power guiding one’s life. In Tchaikovsky’s case, the idea of ‘fate’ is surely far more directly linked to his homosexuality, his desires forbidden by the society that defined his reputation, and the efforts he felt compelled to make in order to conceal it. The biggest of those was his ill-fated marriage to former student Antonina Milyukova in 1877, which lasted less than three months and almost caused the composer a complete breakdown (it didn’t do much for Milyukova’s mental health either). After recovering in the Swiss resort of Clarens, Tchaikovsky became increasingly convinced that his life was being guided by some kind of malevolent force.

If that’s the case, though, his Fifth Symphony represents at least a possible victory over the forces of darkness –though its final movement might sound a little too good to be true. The Symphony’s heart-on-sleeve emotion went down a storm with the audience at its premiere in St Petersburg on 17 November 1888, though the critics were more sniffy. One particular wag wrote about an early performance: ‘If Beethoven’s Fifth is Fate knocking at the door, Tchaikovsky’s Fifth is Fate trying to get out.’

Tchaikovsky, of course, felt the critics were right. ‘Having played my Symphony twice in Petersburg and once in Prague, I have come to the conclusion that it is a failure. There is something repellent in it, some over-exaggerated colour, some insincerity of fabrication that the public instinctively recognises,’ he wrote dejectedly to von Meck. The following year, however, he took rather a different perspective after none other than Johannes Brahms admired the Symphony at a Hamburg performance: ‘I have started to love it again. My earlier judgment was undeservedly harsh,’ he wrote to his nephew.

There’s little doubt that Tchaikovsky’s Fifth is a symphony it’s hard to feel indifferent about. It conveys big emotions, and demands equally largescale emotional engagement from its listeners, through its ever-developing ‘storyline’ of battles with fate. That storyline begins right at the start of the first movement, when the rich, low sound of a clarinet announces the Symphony’s unforgettable ‘fate’ theme, which will return again and again in different guises throughout the piece. The beginning is almost like a funeral march, though the energy quickly builds for the movement’s main waltz-like theme, introduced by clarinet and bassoon, and its more rustic second theme, propelled along by urgent woodwind rhythms. Despite its brightness and energy, however, the movement ends back in the gloom of its opening.

Tchaikovsky’s second movement cushions a ravishing horn melody (said to have inspired John Denver’s 1970s ‘Annie’s Song’) against luscious strings: if the Symphony’s opening theme represented fate, it’s hard to see this as anything other than love. The return of the fate theme, however, blared out across the full orchestra, brings the music to a sudden halt, though the movement manages to regain its composure and gather its passions again.

The brief, blithe waltz of the third movement could have come straight out of one of Tchaikovsky’s ballet scores, though the fate theme returns quietly to trouble its otherwise serene close. You might be surprised to hear the fate theme return yet again at the opening of Tchaikovsky’s finale, now bold, positive, and in the brighter major. Is this fate finally overcome, or fate itself the victor? After the strings introduce a new, aggressive, march-like falling theme, there’s what sounds like open musical warfare between the two ideas – though fate surely comes out on top, judging by the swaggering, dance-like setting of the fate theme, which surely counts as a victory celebration of sorts.

Tchaikovsky originally wrote his Fifth Symphony, of course, for the full forces of a larger-scale symphony orchestra. Tonight’s arrangement for chamber orchestra – made by Sheffield-based conductor and arranger George Morton in 2017 – retains all of the detail of the original, while focusing its power on a narrower target.

© David Kettle