Viennese New Year – Season 22/23 – Programme note

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Our Musicians YOUR ORCHESTRA

First Violin

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Second Violin

Gordon Bragg Michelle Dierx

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Cello

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Raquel Pinillos

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Clarinet Yann Ghiro Cathal Killeen

Bassoon

Information correct at the time of going to print

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Horn Huw Evans

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Ian Smith

Christine McGinley

Trumpet

Peter Franks Simon Bird

Brian McGinley

Trombone

Nigel Cox Chris Mansfield Alan Adams

Philip Higham Principal Cello

WHAT YOU ARE ABOUT TO HEAR

J Strauss II (1825-1899)

Overture, Die Fledermaus (1874)

J Strauss II (1825-1899)

Unter Donner und Blitz (Thunder and Lightning Polka) (1868)

Chausson (1855-1899) Poème Op 25 (1896)

J Strauss II (1825-1899) Kaiser-Waltzer (Emperor Waltzes) (1889)

Bizet (1838-1875)

Carmen Suite No 1 (1882)

Prelude & Aragonaise Intermezzo séguedille

Les dragons d’Alcala Les Toréadors

Ravel (1875-1937) Tzigane (1924)

J Strauss II (1825-1899)

An der schönen blauen Donau (On the Beautiful Blue Danube) (1866)

It might feel like Vienna’s famous New Year’s concert – and the global tradition for celebratory music from the Strauss family and colleagues at the start of the year that it’s now established – have always been with us. But the tradition began more recently than many imagine, and during one of the darkest times in the city’s history. The Vienna Philharmonic’s first all-Strauss New Year concert took place as recently as 31 December 1939, as a fundraiser for the Austrian war effort, and though a subsequent concert on 1 January 1941 was intended as an expression of Austrian individuality in the face of overwhelming German might, it was soon co-opted by the Nazi occupiers as a symbol of greater German cultural values.

Those sombre origins aside, however, the concerts also marked the admission of the Strauss family into their rightful place among Viennese high culture. It was they – father Johann Strauss I, and his three sons Johann II, Josef and Eduard – who, alongside other figures including fellow composer Joseph Lanner, transformed the waltz from a stomping peasant dance into the sophisticated creation that Viennese society would enthusiastically embrace at the city’s sparkling balls and dances.

While showcasing the sounds of the city of dreams, today’s concert also gazes west across the Alps into France, a country whose musical sophistication offers a more luxurious, languorous counterpoint to the crisp, unforgettable melodies of Vienna.

We begin, however, with the best-loved Viennese operetta of them all. Since it opened at Vienna’s Theater an der

Wien on 5 April 1874, Johann Strauss II’s effervescent Die Fledermaus has charmed and delighted audiences right across the world with its knowingly preposterous tale of extramarital flirtations, spouses in disguise, comic revenge and – of course – a deluge of champagne. In his Overture, Strauss takes the opportunity to whet his audience’s appetite for some of the operetta’s catchiest tunes, which they’ll hear sung later in the work, simply running them together in a way that sounds entirely natural. After a rushing introduction that must surely have silenced the chattering Viennese audience, and a couple of delicate tunes for the violins, he introduces the Overture’s rather bustling main waltz theme, first heard as a lowpitched melody in the strings before soaring higher across the full orchestra. A more melancholy, minor-key waltz for solo oboe provides contrast, but it’s the bustling

waltz that reappears to drive the Overture to its dashing, colourful conclusion.

There’s no lack of dash or drama, either, in Johann Strauss II’s thrillingly volatile Thunder and Lightning Polka, first unveiled in February 1868 under the title ‘Shooting Stars’ at the Vienna Artists’ Association Hesperus Ball, but now indelibly associated – through its rumbling drums and crashing cymbals – with the havoc and unpredictability of summer storms. Its memorable effects have made it one of Strauss Jnr’s most popular pieces, and certainly one of his noisiest. Distant rumbles of thunder underscore the piece’s fast-paced opening polka theme, and the cymbals’ lightning flashes crackle throughout the contrasting central trio section.

From elemental drama to something far calmer, more introspective, more languid.

We begin, however, with the best-loved Viennese operetta of them all. Since it opened at Vienna’s Theater an der Wien on 5 April 1874, Johann Strauss II’s effervescent Die Fledermaus has charmed and delighted audiences right across the world

Johann Strauss II

Ernest Chausson was the son of the building contractor who’d made a fortune during Baron Haussmann’s development of Paris in the 1850s. The young man hardly needed to earn a living, but began working as a barrister to please his father, before accepting his real calling: music. He became a familiar face at fashionable Parisian salons (and hosted many of his own), and was soon hobnobbing with the likes of fellow composers Jules Massenet (also his teacher at the Paris Conservatoire), Gabriel Fauré, Claude Debussy and Isaac Albéniz. He had a particularly distinctive musical style that in many ways prefigures the pastel-hued impressionism of Debussy, but he left behind a mere 39 numbered pieces of music before dying tragically young at the age of just 44, when he lost control of his bicycle and hit a brick wall.

It was from the illustrious Belgian virtuoso Eugène Ysaÿe that Chausson received a request for a violin concerto. The composer, however, felt too daunted to attempt such a large-scale work, writing back to the violinist: ‘I hardly know where to begin with a concerto, which is a huge undertaking, the devil's own task. But I can cope with a shorter work. It will be in very free form with several passages in which the violin plays alone.’

What he came up with was the moody, rhapsodic Poème you hear today. Its original title, however, was the far more descriptive Song of Love Triumphant (or Chant de l’amour triomphant in its original language), in reference to an 1881 novella by Russian writer Ivan Turgenev, who also lived in Paris. Turgenev and Chausson knew each other, and the composer was no doubt aware of the probable origins of

Ernest Chausson

The young man hardly needed to earn a living, but began working as a barrister to please his father, before accepting his real calling: music.

Turgenev’s novella. The writer was living on the estate of famed French mezzosoprano Pauline Viardot, whose daughter Marianne had been courted by composer Gabriel Fauré, who she eventually rejected for another. In Turgenev’s novella – and also, possibly, buried within the deeply romantic, somewhat melancholy music of Chausson’s Poème – a young musician is likewise rejected by the beautiful Valeria, who chooses another man. As a result, however, the musician travels across Asia, returning to serenade Valeria with a snaking, passionate Indian melody he’s learnt, in which he conveys his unending love for her.

There’s indeed something undeniably exotic about much of the violin writing in Chausson’s opulent Poème. The composer alternates yearning slow music with faster, more dashing sections, the soloist introducing the piece’s slow-moving, melancholy melody after a sombre but heavily perfumed orchestral introduction, later spinning a high, passionately searching tune against gently rippling accompaniment from the orchestra. The piece’s final slow music seems to waver between the more optimistic major and the darker, more fateful minor – perhaps reflecting the conflicted emotions of hope and despair felt by Turgenev’s returning traveller.

We return to Johann Strauss II for tonight’s next piece, but we find him in Berlin rather than in Vienna, and for one of his most majestic, most sophisticated creations. In October 1889, Strauss Jnr was invited to give a series of five concerts at the newly opened concert hall in Berlin’s Königsbau, which also housed the court of Kaiser Wilhelm II. The occasion for

the performances was a visit by the Austrian Emperor Franz Joseph I to the Prussian court, for which Strauss wrote his appropriately grand, stately Emperor Waltz. He originally called it ‘Hand in Hand’, so as not to indicate that either ruler was more important, but it was his publisher, Fritz Simrock, who suggested Kaiser-Walzer (literally ‘Emperor Waltzes’) as a more marketable alternative title.

It’s one of the composer’s last works, and seems to bring together all his melodic gifts in the service of something grand and noble. The piece begins quietly with a tick-tocking, march-like introduction that already has a regal, slightly pompous feel, and also looks ahead to the piece’s main waltz tune. It’s a cello solo that eventually takes us there, and though it has a hushed, rather awe-struck first outing, the waltz soon erupts across the whole orchestra. More waltz tunes follow hot on its heels – listen out for piping birdsong in one, and dramatic, brassy interjections from trumpets and trombones in another – but it’s the original melody that takes the piece to its triumphant but also slightly nostalgic conclusion.

Following our Berlin excursion, we head again to France for tonight’s next piece – or, rather, further west to Spain, and Seville to be precise. Bizet’s Carmen is now arguably the world’s best-loved opera, and has given rise to countless adaptations, from musicals to flamenco dance productions and even a 2001 ‘hiphopera’ (starring someone called Beyoncé Knowles). It’s probably hard for us, therefore, to believe that its Paris premiere in 1875 was a bit of a flop. Those Parisian audiences, however, were more alarmed and outraged by the opera’s scandalous

storyline – of a cigarette factory girl who corrupts and tosses aside a corporal of the guard in favour of a strutting toreador, with murderous consequences – than they were by Bizet’s glittering, energetic music. Indeed, the composer seems to sum up the French obsession with the exotic, sultry, sensual character of Spain.

It was following Bizet’s death that his friend and colleague Ernest Guiraud put together two orchestral suites of music from Carmen, with the aim not so much of reflecting the opera’s storyline, but rather simply bringing together some of its most memorable music. The Suite No 1 kicks off with the opera’s main ‘Prélude’, whose darkly passionate, dramatic music already tells you that things can only end badly. The fiery, rhythmic ‘Aragonaise’ that follows is based on a Spanish jota dance, with percussion emulating castanets and strings

imitating the plucking and strumming of guitars against a sensual, winding oboe melody. The ‘Intermezzo’ serves as the Prelude to the opera’s Act III, and finds Carmen and her gypsy companions asleep high in their mountain hideaway, its peaceful melody for flute and harp belying the drama and intrigue happening in the plot. We jump back to almost the beginning of the opera for the ‘Séguidille’, and to the moment when Carmen first seduces the corporal Don José, her song here sung in a flirtatious oboe solo. The unfortunate corporal makes a reappearance with his regiment in the rather pompous bassoon tune of ‘Les dragons d’Alcala’, and the Suite comes to a rousing conclusion with what’s arguably the opera’s most famous, hottestblooded music. The swaggering bullfighters – including Carmen’s beloved Escamillo –make their entrance to Bizet’s brash, bright, bold music, before their somewhat calmer,

Georges Bizet

It was following Bizet’s death that his friend and colleague Ernest Guiraud put together two orchestral suites of music from Carmen, with the aim not so much of reflecting the opera’s storyline, but rather simply bringing together some of its most memorable music.

Maurice Ravel

more dignified song in the middle of the movement.

We’ve already glimpsed Carmen’s ‘gypsy’ companions slumbering high in the mountains, and tonight’s next piece puts those ‘gypsies’ – or at least their music – firmly in the spotlight. Though, it should be said, this is ‘gypsy’ culture in the generic sense of something exotic, alluring, possibly slightly wild and dangerous, in rather shorthand terminology that no doubt felt more comfortable a century ago than it does today. Indeed, there’s little explicit reference to anything we’d probably now be happier calling Roma culture in Ravel’s glittering, virtuosic violin showcase Tzigane (literally ‘Gypsy’). Its jumpingoff points are more Eastern European traditions, along similar lines to Liszt’s Hungarian Rhapsodies.

And it was a Hungarian musician – the legendary violinist Jelly d’Arányi – who inspired Ravel to compose the piece. They’d met in London in 1922, where they were both touring, and d’Arányi had given Ravel a private performance of his Sonata for Violin and Cello, which he found so entrancing that he requested some traditional Hungarian tunes from her. The violinist duly obliged, and reportedly kept the composer entertained into the small hours. Two years later, he presented her with Tzigane, which she premiered in London on 26 April 1924.

Tzigane is a rich, hard-edged, breathtakingly virtuosic violin showpiece that puts paid to the notion that Ravel was simply a purveyor of hushed, dreamy impressionism. Taking the traditional Hungarian slow-fast dance form (of the lassù and friss sections of a traditional

There’s little explicit reference to anything we’d probably now be happier calling Roma culture in Ravel’s glittering, virtuosic violin showcase Tzigane (literally ‘Gypsy’)

csárdás dance), it opens with a long, slow, pungently flavoured and increasingly virtuosic solo for the violin, before the orchestra joins in with a series of increasingly wild and abandoned dances.

So over-the-top are Tzigane’s fiddle fireworks, indeed, that some listeners wondered if it was all a bit tongue-incheek, a send-up of earlier composers of virtuoso violin music, or even audaciously artificial. Ravel replied: ‘Doesn’t it ever occur to these people that I can be “artificial” by nature?’

Our final piece is almost certainly the most famous Strauss waltz of them all. The Blue Danube actually began life as a vocal number, written in 1866 for the Vienna Men’s Choral Association, though it was given a rather muted reception at its premiere on 15 February 1867, possibly

because of a mismatch between Strauss’s joyful, nostalgic music and some illadvisedly satirical lyrics by the Association’s poet, Joseph Weyl. Strauss created a purely orchestral version the following year for performances at the Paris World’s Fair, and since then it’s become Vienna’s unofficial national anthem (as well as famously serving to accompany the elegant choreography of spaceships in Stanley Kubrick’s 1968 sci-fi epic 2001: A Space Odyssey). And if there’s one work that sums up the Strauss family’s disarming blend of joy, excitement and poignant nostalgia, it’s this, from the expectation of its opening evocation of dawn light hitting the river to its quiet, unassuming melody that glides effortlessly between horns and woodwind, returning as a fleeting, distant memory in its poignant conclusion.

© David Kettle

And if there’s one work that sums up the Strauss family’s disarming blend ofjoy,excitement and poignant nostalgia, it’s this

Conductor JOSEPH SWENSEN

Joseph Swensen is Artistic Director of the NFM Leopoldinum Orchestra (Wroclaw), Conductor Emeritus of the Scottish Chamber Orchestra and Principal Guest Conductor of the Orquesta Ciudad de Granada. He has previously served as Principal Guest Conductor & Artistic Adviser of the Orchestre de Chambre de Paris (2009-2012), Principal Conductor of the Scottish Chamber Orchestra (1996-2005) and Principal Conductor of Malmö Opera (2005-2011). Recognized for forging solid bonds with orchestras, 2019-20 also includes returns to Swensen’s closest guestconducting partners, the Orchestre National du Capitole de Toulouse and Orquestra Sinfónica do Porto Casa da Música, as well as re-invitations from BBC National Orchestra of Wales and Orquesta Sinfónica de Navarra.

A multifaceted musician, Joseph Swensen is an active composer and orchestrator. His orchestration of Prokofiev’s Five Songs Without Words (1920) is published by Boosey and Hawkes and Signum recorded Sinfonia in B (2007), an orchestration of the rarely performed 1854 version of Brahms’ Trio Op 8. His work also includes orchestrations of Nielsen G minor quartet, Four Movements for Orchestra (1888) as well as arrangements for string orchestras of Beethoven String Quartet op 131 and Debussy String Quartet, which he recorded with the NFM Leopoldinum. His most notable compositions include Shizue (2001) for solo shakuhachi and orchestra, and the Sinfonia-Concertante for Horn and Orchestra (The Fire and the Rose) (2008) as well as infonietta (2017) for strings and synthesizer.

A sought-after pedagogue, Joseph Swensen teaches conducting, violin and chamber music at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland in Glasgow, while he and Victoria Swensen present year-round workshops and offer residencies for chamber-music, conducting and instrumental study at their 250-year old, farmhouse in Vermont.

An American of Norwegian and Japanese descent, Joseph Swensen was born in Hoboken, New Jersey and grew up in Harlem, New York City.

For full biography please visit sco.org.uk

Joseph's Chair is kindly supported by Donald and Louise MacDonald

Violin

KOLJA BLACHER

Kolja Blacher studied at the Juilliard School of Music with Dorothy DeLay and with Sandor Vegh in Salzburg. He performed as a soloist all over the world, with orchestras such as Berlin Philharmonic, Munich Philharmonic, NDR Symphony, Gewandhaus Leipzig, Orchestra di Santa Cecilia and Baltimore Symphony. He has worked with conductors including Kirill Petrenko, Vladimir Jurowski, Dimitri Kitajenko, Mariss Jansons, Matthias Pintscher, Markus Stenz, Simone Young and Asher Fish.

Blacher’s programmatic spectrum comprises works for solo violin from Bach to Berio, the classicalromantic core repertoire, and contemporary music for violin and orchestra (including works by Magnus Lindberg, Kurt Weill, Hans Werner Henze and Bernd Alois Zimmermann). Open to new concert experiences, he gave the German premiere of Brett Dean’s Electric Preludes for the sixstring e-violin.

Blacher has recorded highly acclaimed CDs (e.g. Diapason d’Or) in collaboration with Claudio Abbado, with whom he has maintained close ties since their time at the Berlin Philharmonic and the Lucerne Festival Orchestra. His CD with Schönbergs’s Violin Concerto (with Markus Stenz and Gürzenich-Orchester Köln) was released in Autumn 2013.

Kolja Blacher was a professor at the Hochschule für Musik und Theater in Hamburg before returning to his hometown of Berlin, where he teaches at the Hochschule für Musik Hanns Eisler. A born and bred Berliner – his father was the Baltic-German composer Boris Blacher – Kolja Blacher lives with his family in Berlin.

He plays a 1730 'Tritton' Stradivari, generously on loan from Ms Kimiko Powers.

For full biography please visit sco.org.uk

Biography SCOTTISH CHAMBER ORCHESTRA

The internationally celebrated Scottish Chamber Orchestra is one of Scotland’s National Performing Companies.

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.

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.

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 symphony Emelyanychev performed with the Orchestra in March 2018.

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.

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, Anna Clyne and Associate Composer Jay Capperauld.

For full biography please visit sco.org.uk

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