2017/2018 Classical Season
Neil
Georgeson “Dance Music” Thursday 22 March
Programme
“Dance Music” Edvard Grieg Slåtter (Norwegian Folk Dances) op. 72 (1903) The Prillar from Os Parish Springdans Myllargutens Gangar Myllargutens Wedding March Nils Rekves Halling Jon Væstafæs Springdans Henry Purcell Minuet in A Minor (1689) Johann Sebastian Bach Minuets I and II from French Suite No. 1 (1722) Domenico Scarlatti Minuet, K.379 (c.1753) Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart Minuet in D, K.355 (1789) Joseph Haydn Minuet in F-sharp Major, Hob.IX:26 (1790s) Franz Schubert Minuet in C-sharp Minor, D.600 (1815) Edvard Grieg Grandmother’s Minuet, op. 68, no. 2 (1899) Maurice Ravel Menuet sur le nom d’Haydn (1909) Anton Webern Klavierstück, im Tempo eines Menuetts (1925) Sergei Prokofiev Minuet from Romeo & Juliet: Ten Pieces for Piano, op. 75 (1937) Jean-Baptiste Lully Minuet in A Minor from Atys (1676) Frédéric Chopin
Scherzo No. 1 (1831)
I N T E R V A L Anonymous
Estampie, from the Robertsbridge Codex (c.1360)
William Byrd Praeludium C Alman CLXIII Pavan CCLIV Galliard CCLV - from the Fitzwilliam Virginal Book (c.1590-1612) Patrick Nunn Morphosis for solo piano with 3D sensors and live electronics (2014) Claude Debussy
La plus que lente (1910) Hommage à Haydn (1909) Valse Romantique (1890)
Adolf Schulz-Evler
Arabesques on Themes from Johann Strauss II’s “On the Beautiful Blue Danube”, op. 12 (1904)
Music for dancing is one of the oldest, most fundamental and most enduring forms and functions of music, and the classical tradition is replete with a tremendous variety of dance music. In the nineteenth century especially, composers drew on folk music for their inspiration, and the Norwegian composer Edvard Grieg is known for being especially immersed in the folk culture of his country, but his Norwegian Folk Dances op. 72 is a unique piece in his output in that it is a collection of transcriptions of actual Hardanger-fiddle tunes. In April 1888, Edvard Grieg was contacted by a hardanger-fiddler, Knut Dale, who wanted Grieg to help him notate some of the slåtter, or folk dance tunes, that he was known for performing. Grieg was wary of the difficulty of transcribing this traditional style of folk music, but he decided to take on the project because he feared that otherwise these folk dance tunes, most of which had been passed along for many generations, would be forever lost in later times. He worked with the Norwegian violinist Johann Halvorsen in order to notate a number of the tunes, then spent almost an entire year arranging the work for solo piano to produce his Slåtter (Norwegian Folk Dances) op. 72. The work was published in its two versions, Halvorsen’s versions for violin and Grieg’s own for piano, in one volume, which also included information on the extensive background of the folk dance tunes. It became an important step in Grieg’s musical development, as well as in the course of the early twentieth century. In fact, in 1906, the adventurous harmonies and textures of this particular work made quite an impression on the young Impressionist composers of Paris, including Debussy and Ravel, who referred to it as “the new Grieg.”
There follows a set of 12 minuets I have gathered, by 11 different composers. The minuet is simply the most central and important dance form in classical music – from the time of its popularisation in the court of Louis XIV, it became ubiquitous, first in the set of dances that is the Baroque suite, then in the Classical sonata and symphony (almost every one of which contains a minuet). With this set I have set out to tell a story of the minuet across 250 years, drawing a thread through many of the great composers, and choosing minuets that are in themselves quirkily interesting as well as being paradigmatic, exemplifying well the idiosyncratic style of each composer. We begin with Purcell, whose minuet is contemplative, plaintive, introverted, mysterious, seeming to come out of the mists of time. Against this uncomplicated backdrop, the Bach minuets are ingeniously contrapuntal and incredibly beautiful. The Scarlatti minuet is anarchic, lively and completely its own world – he was a law unto himself, a maverick, and this piece contains the earliest known glissando! The Mozart is elegant and suave, incorporating startling dissonances and nonchalantly audacious harmony while remaining casually sophisticated. The Haydn is delightfully light and witty, and very short, mischievously displacing the beat so one can hardly discern the downbeat of the dance. The Schubert is where Classical style shades to Romantic - darkly atmospheric and funereal, it is chosen to mark the end of the minuet as a living, current form. The following minuets are self-consciously looking back to what was by then an archaic genre, a memory. The Grieg is light-hearted, jolly and homely, the title making clear it’s a genre piece and that the minuet is now an old-fashioned form. Ravel’s minuet was actually written as a homage to Haydn, composed for the centenary of his deathday and using his name to shape the tune; it is suffused with nostalgia, a reminiscence. The Webern minuet
uses Bach’s name in the same way, using the letters BACH to form the tone row in what is one of his first truly serial pieces. The integrity of the serial writing requires the hands to leap over each other constantly, the left hand playing high notes and the right hand low notes, in a way that makes the hands themselves dance, and seeing the execution of the piece is part of the music. Prokofiev’s minuet is reworked for solo piano by the composer from his ballet Romeo and Juliet and illustrates the scene (at a dance) where Romeo and Juliet meet for the first time. Its style represents the other major movement of the beginning of the twentieth century (apart from serialism) – neoclassicism, which looks back to earlier forms, adopting certain elements and reworking them. And at the end of the set we look back to the very beginning, finishing with the oldest piece – by Lully, court composer to Louis XIV, who initially popularised the minuet – and this little piece exemplifies well the character of the dance: lively and spirited, while remaining aristocratic and elegant. Chopin’s four scherzos are one-movement epic pieces for piano, considered among Chopin’s more popular and difficult works. The scherzo, as a form, developed from the minuet and remains very much like it; it retains the ABA form and the ¾ time signature (almost always), and often took the place of the minuet in a sonata or symphony. The change from minuet to scherzo is gradual and not clear-cut – it was Schubert and especially Beethoven who started calling them scherzos, but before this, Haydn had written many minuets which sound more like what we now call scherzos. At any rate, minuets and scherzos are essentially two versions of the same genre.
Composed during the 1831 November Uprising, Chopin’s Scherzo No. 1 is dark, suspenseful and full of chaos, opening with a series of dramatic outbursts happening at a dangerously fast tempo. In the centre of the piece, there is a beautiful moment of complete calm, which feels like a remembrance or a hope for the future – in fact the melody here is based on a Polish Christmas carol, “Lulajże Jezuniu” (a lullaby for baby Jesus). After this, the dark and stormy music crashes in again, this time leading to a darkly dramatic and virtuosic coda, with dizzying flights up and down the keyboard. The second half begins with the earliest known piece of keyboard music, discovered in a 14th century manuscript of English origin (from around 1360) known as the Robertsbridge Codex - and, perhaps unsurprisingly, the piece is a dance. An estampie was a very popular medieval dance, and this piece is a sort of rondo, contrasting sections alternating with a refrain. The piece was most probably played on an organ at that time, but is also often played on a clavichord or other keyboard instrument. In terms of harmony, it primarily uses parallel fifths, giving the music to our ears an exotically archaic sound. William Byrd (c.1539-1623) was one of the most important and influential English Renaissance composers, studying with Thomas Tallis and obtaining the prestigious post of Gentleman of the Chapel Royal in 1572, where he was composer and organist. His keyboard output is substantial and varied, with several large sets of keyboard variations, fantasias and voluntaries, two monumental Grounds, and two famous pieces of programme music, The Battle and The Barley Break, as well as many and varied dance pieces.
I have put together a little set of Byrd dances – a prelude followed by an Alman, then a Pavan and Galliard (which always go together). An Alman (or Allemande) is an elaborate courtly dance popular in the 16th century, involving a line of couples who took hands and walked the length of the room, walking three steps then balancing on one foot, or executing three springing steps and a hop. A Pavan is a slow processional dance, used to open ceremonies and display one’s extravagant attire, described in Thoinot Arbeau’s 1589 dance manual as “a grave kind of dance, wherein the performers make a kind of wheel or tail before each other, like that of a peacock, whence the name”, the name Pavan coming from the French word for peacock. A Galliard is an athletic dance, full of leaps, jumps, hops and spins. It was a favourite dance of Queen Elizabeth I of England who, according to a member of her Privy Chamber, would dance “six or seven galliards in a morning, besides music and singing, as her ordinary exercise”. Incidentally, these pieces are actually contemporaneous with Shakespeare’s plays - if we imagine the characters Romeo and Juliet as living in Shakespeare’s time, they would be dancing Pavans and Galliards (rather than minuets). Patrick Nunn has long been interested in melding movement and sound – not in a theatrical way, but rather a literal, technical way. All sound is a result of movement, and one could say that humans (and animals) have a sense of hearing in order to perceive movement that we can’t see or feel. We are tuned in to hearing the movingness of a thing – the speed of the oscillation and force of the movement. This connects with what I’ve always thought about music – that seeing the movements required to perform the music live is not an optional extra, but part of the music itself.
Nunn writes: “Morphosis explores the creative possibilities that arise in a performance with the addition of live electronics and control sensors whereby the expressive nature of the pianist’s hand is captured through the use of triple-axis sensors measuring acceleration, deceleration and inclination on each hand. In Morphosis, the musical landscape is in a continuous state of flux. Several transfomations of a single musical idea are presented and subsequently subjected to and contained by an array of electronic processes that are equally fluid and evolutionary. These transformational spaces, triggered and shaped by the performer, oscillate between clearly focused and more ambiguous causal relationships between hand movements and the resulting electronic process.” This weekend marks the centenary of Claude Debussy’s deathday, 25 March 1918, so I thought it fitting to include some of his work in this concert, including a work he composed for the centenary of Haydn’s deathday in 1809. Hommage à Haydn was composed in 1909, like Ravel’s minuet, as a tribute - and it also uses Haydn’s name to determine the notes of the melody. It is designated a “slow waltz” though it has a rather more mercurial and lively middle section. La plus que lente may be translated as “The even slower waltz”, and was a typically sardonic reaction to the ubiquitous trend of the slow waltz in French social life at the time; in a wryly humorous way, he has written the slow waltz to outdo them all. Finally the Valse Romantique, the earliest of the set, composed in 1890, shows the meeting of full-blooded Romanticism with Debussy’s characteristic style, and despite being written very early in his career, is an exciting and idiosyncratic piece which could not have been written by anyone else.
The Blue Danube Waltz, or to give it its proper title “On the Beautiful Blue Danube� by Johann Strauss II, has been one of the most consistently popular pieces in the classical repertoire since its first success, and it remains one of the most instantly recognisable tunes ever written. Johannes Brahms is known to have joked that he wished he had written it, and countless composers, including Arnold Schoenberg and Michael Finnissy, have made faithful arrangements of it. This version by Adolf Schulz-Evler enjoyed huge popularity in the early 20th century, and is very much in the tradition of Lisztian virtuoso concert paraphrase, a scintillating and ridiculously difficult piece capturing the atmosphere of the original waltz, from the orchestral tremolo of the introduction (rendered here as incredibly fast figuration at the top of the piano), through extravagantly complex settings of all the famous tunes, to a rousing and bombastic coda.
Neil Georgeson biography Neil Georgeson is a pianist, writer, composer and director from Shetland and is currently based in London. He appears regularly and widely as a solo pianist and a chamber musician, and has performed as a soloist all over the world, and at UK venues such as the Royal Festival Hall, Queen Elizabeth Hall, King’s Place, the Barbican, St David’s Hall in Cardiff, the Colston Hall in Bristol and the Queen’s Hall in Edinburgh, as well as more unconventional venues like the Glastonbury Festival and at London contemporary music nights Kammerklang and Nonclassical, and several times on BBC Radio 3. He has appeared at festivals such as Soundings at the Austrian Cultural Forum, the York Late Music Festival, Sounds New in England and France, and the Johnsmas Foy in Shetland, for which he was commissioned as a composer. He co-directed, wrote and produced Piano Theatre, a inter-disciplinary tour of Taiwan with Veronica Yen. He is extensively involved with contemporary music, giving the première of countless new pieces, including piano concertos by Darren Bloom and Aaron HollowayNahum (recorded at Abbey Road), and has worked with many illustrious composers on performances of their music such as Sir Peter Maxwell Davies, Martin Bresnick, Graham Fitkin, Bent Sørensen, Thomas Ades and Jonathan Harvey.
Neil is Artistic Director and pianist for new-music group the Ossian Ensemble, a member of the renowned original six-piano group Piano Circus, with whom he has just completed a residency at Snape Maltings, and has performed with Squib-box/CRAM, the Riot Ensemble, the Arcomis Ensemble, the Continuum Ensemble and the London Contemporary Orchestra. Neil has written three opera libretti, produced in London over the last few years: KETTLEHEAD for composer Darren Bloom, Angela for Corin Buckeridge, and Njogel – a folkloric tale set in Shetland – for James Young, with whom he also created the semi-improvised music-theatre show Event001. Neil enjoyed a prize-winning academic career on scholarship at the Royal Academy of Music, where he studied with Patsy Toh and Ian Fountain. He completed a Masters degree with a highly-acclaimed thesis on the role of the performer in classical music, which became the exemplar dissertation for Masters students, then became a Fellow at the Academy working with composers on new music. Upcoming engagements include giving the première of six new pieces at the Nordic Days festival in Sweden, performances with Piano Circus in Liverpool and Southwold, presenting a new interdisciplinary piece with the Metapraxis Ensemble, and a tour of Eight Songs for a Mad King with the Ossian Ensemble.
2017/2018 Classical Season
The Wallace Collection Saturday 9 June, 7.30 pm Led by highly acclaimed virtuoso trumpet player John Wallace, The Wallace Collection brings together a group of extraordinary musicians, presenting a unique combination of performance, education, innovation, creativity, research and development. Together they embrace the potential of brass music, where anything becomes possible. Mareel £16 / £5