Programme

EDVARD GRIEG Peer Gynt: Suite No. 1, Op. 46 15’

1. Morning 2. Death of Åse 3. Anitra’s Dance 4. In the Hall of the Mountain King

Henrik Ibsen (1828–1906), Norway’s most famous playwright, wrote Peer Gynt in 1867. The long, highly involved story – more suitable for reading than for acting – relates the adventures of Peer, a liar, egotist and an all-around irresponsible and unpleasant character who leaves his homeland to roam the world in a restless search for happiness, his churlish behavior earning him the contempt of everyone he encounters. Ibsen realised that the addition of musical interludes and melodramas (music played over spoken text) would add to the dramatic effectiveness of Peer Gynt, so he asked Grieg if he would be interested in such a collaboration. The results were revealed to the world on 24 February 1876 in Christiania (present-day Oslo). In 1888, Grieg chose four of the more substantial musical numbers and arranged them into a suite.

Morning depicts the idyllic beauty and stillness of sunrise – not over the majestic fjords of Norway as one might blithely imagine – but over the desert of northern Africa where Peer wakens in Act IV. After years of wandering, Peer returns home for the Death of Åse, his mother, who dies in his arms. Anitra’s Dance is written for strings with delicate flecks of colour from the triangle. The scene is Morocco, where Peer is entertained by the beautiful

daughter of his Bedouin host. In the Hall of the Mountain King is set in the world of Norwegian fairy-tale. Hideous little trolls chase and torment Peer. The music consists of 19 varied repetitions of a fourbar theme, which increases in volume and speed to a highly effective conclusion.

YE XIAOGANG Mount E’mei, for violin, percussion and orchestra 17’ (Singapore Premiere)

Lu Wei, violin Hu Shengnan, percussion

Born on 23 September 1955, Ye Xiaogang is regarded as one of China’s leading contemporary composers. From 1978 to 1983, he studied at the Central Conservatory of Music in China, where he was later appointed Resident Composer and Lecturer; and from 1987 at the Eastman School of Music, New York. His former teachers include Du Minxin, Samuel Adler, Joseph Schwantner, Louis Andriessen and Alexander Goehr.

Among his many appointments, Ye is Vice Chairman of China’s Musicians’ Association, Vice President of the Central Conservatory of Music, and Founder and Artistic Director of Beijing Modern Music Festival, the biggest contemporary music festival in the Far East. He has received numerous prizes and awards from China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Japan and the US, in the fields of composition, culture and education.

Ye’s oeuvre comprises symphonic works, chamber music, stage works and film music, and much of his music bears a connection to Chinese culture and tradition. His representative compositions include The Last Paradise, Horizon, Twilight in Tibet, My Far Away Nanjing and Nine Horses. In The Song of the Earth for soprano and orchestra, premiered

in January 2005, Ye uses the original Chinese texts on which Mahler based his symphonic work of the same name. The work has received performances in New York, Munich, Berlin, Venice, Rome and Lucerne. The composer’s deep attachment to nature and Buddhist religion is shown especially in composition series such as the Tibet Series: Twilight of the Himalayas (2013).

In August 2008, Ye’s piano concerto Starry Sky was premiered during the opening ceremony of the Olympic Games in Beijing by Lang Lang. Accompanied by dance and light shows the live broadcast was watched by three billion people worldwide.

Mount E-mei, for violin, percussion and orchestra, is a duet concerto commissioned by the Sichuan Philharmonic Orchestra and Beijing Symphony Orchestra, written specifically for the guest soloists tonight, violinist Lu Wei and percussionist Hu Shengnan. The piece is based on folk music collected by the composer in the E’mei area of Sichuan Province, and inspired by the breathtaking scenery, profound historical culture and long-standing influence of the Buddhist music of that region. The music consists of landscape, humanistic history and religious culture, shows the calm inner realm of the composer’s heart, and reflects key developments in the innermost thoughts of the composer.

1. De l’aube à midi sur la mer (From Dawn to Noon on the Sea) 2. Jeux de vagues (Play of the Waves) 3. Dialogue du vent et de la mer

Jeux (“Games”), poème dansé in one act 17’

Jeux was Debussy’s last purely orchestral work, written within the span of three weeks in August 1912. It resulted from a commission by Sergei Diaghilev for his Ballets russes. However, when Debussy learned that the scenario called for a tennis game interrupted by an airplane crash, he balked. Furthermore, there were to be only three solo dancers, no corps de ballet, and no traditional dances. Debussy was eventually won over with the promise of twice the originally quoted fee, but even with the removal of the airplane crash, the composer was not particularly eager to work. Only financial need drove him to comply. The first performance took place in Paris on 15 May 1913, conducted by Pierre Monteux.

What makes Jeux a compositional landmark is its approach to form and content. Debussy deliberately avoided any reference to a logical, ordered sequence of musical events, preferring instead to create a mosaic of fragments that seemed superficially unrelated, yet held together only by a couple of recurring and constantly changing motifs and by a subtle inner tension almost impossible to analyse. The effect produced was a series of fleeting, ever-changing musical images. In the use of orchestral colour too, the score is remarkable for its richness, subtlety and variety. The scoring changes

constantly in kaleidoscopic hues and patterns, is often of chamber music delicacy, and even at the climaxes there is never a moment where every instrument is required.

The jeux (“games”) of the title refer not only to tennis but to love as well.

The whole affair can be as innocent or risqué as each choreographer – or listener – wishes to make it. After a brief introduction, the curtain rises on an empty park. A tennis ball falls on the stage. A young man dressed in a tennis outfit leaps across the stage and disappears. Two timorous girls appear. They start to dance, and are joined by the young man who has been observing them stealthily. He joins one of the girls, provoking mild jealousy in the other, who eventually gets her turn at the man’s attention. The action continues as they chase, embrace and hide from each other. Finally the man succeeds in bringing them all together in an ecstatic three-way kiss. Suddenly another ball bounces in. Alarmed, the characters all scamper away.

La Mer (“The Sea”) 23’

Few works so richly and evocatively portray the sea as Debussy’s trois esquisses symphoniques (“three symphonic sketches”). Oddly enough, though, the music was not written anywhere near the sea, but rather in various inland locations, including the Burgundian mountains and Paris. In La Mer, Debussy portrays the sea in its various moods, but does not attempt explicit images in sound; rather, through sonorities he seeks to stir the memories, emotions and imagination, permitting each listener a personal perception of the sea. The first performance took place on 15 October 1905 at the Concerts Lamoureux in Paris, Camille Chevillard conducting.

The first part, From Dawn to Noon on the Sea, begins very quietly, with slow, mysterious murmuring. Through sonority itself, Debussy evokes the sensation of peering into the very depths of the dark, mysterious sea. As the sea awakens, the orchestral colours brighten and motion quickens. The music swings into a rocking 6/8 meter, and we hear a leisurely call from the muted horns. A mosaic of melodic fragments fills the music in constantly changing sonorities. One of these is heard in the divisi cellos, and is developed into an impressive climax. After subsiding, a new melodic idea, a noble chorale-like passage, appears and slowly grows to paint a majestic picture of the sea under the blazing noonday sun.

Play of the Waves is full of sparkle and animation. Like the first sea picture, melodic fragments are developed in an ever-changing mosaic of orchestral hues. The range and delicacy of Debussy’s scoring fascinate at every turn – even the “ping” of the triangle has evocative power. Debussy’s biographer Oscar Thompson describes this music as “a world of sheer fantasy, of strange visions and eerie voices, a mirage of sight and equally a mirage of sound. On the sea’s vast stage is presented trance-like phantasmagoria so evanescent and fugitive that it leaves behind only the vagueness of a dream.”

The final seascape, Dialogue of the Wind and the Sea, opens restless, gray and stormy, the music suggesting the mighty surging and swelling of the water. Melodic fragments from the first movement return. The activity subsides, and out of the mists comes a haunting, distant call, like that of the sirens, perhaps, high in the woodwinds. The music again gathers energy. Finally, we hear once more the grandiose chorale motif from the first sea picture, and La Mer ends in a great spray of sea water surging through the orchestra in spectacular colours.

https://www.sso.org.sg/listen/albums/ debussy-jeux Singapore Symphony Orchestra, Lan Shui (BIS Records, 2017)

https://www.sso.org.sg/listen/albums/ debussy-la-mer Singapore Symphony Orchestra, Lan Shui (BIS Records, 2014)