New York comes to Stratford:Themes and variations

5 December 2017: Stratford ArtsHouse

• Aaron Copland – Music for Movies
• Pedro H da Silva – Portuguese Guitar Concerto [world premiere]
• Lucía Caruso – ‘Clouds’, for piano and orchestra
• Aaron Copland – Music for the Theatre

Both George Gershwin and Aaron Copland were born in Brooklyn, New York: Gershwin in September 1898; Copland in November 1900. Having both played the piano from an early age, both went on to study composition with Rubin Goldmark – who had once been a pupil of Antonín Dvořák. However, whilst Gershwin remained in America (producing, among other things, a string of successful musicals), in 1920 Copland moved to France, to study with Nadia Boulanger. While there, he was introduced to many European composers – including Igor Stravinsky – and began to realize that, whereas he could easily identify music as, say, ‘French’, or ‘Russian’, there was no immediately recognizable ‘American’ style.

He therefore set out to deliberately create such a language (and “purge” his music of its European influences). Thus, when he returned to the US in 1924 (the year of Rhapsody in Blue), he looked to jazz as a key ingredient. It certainly permeates (if not dominates) this concert’s Music for the Theatre (strangely, Copland preferred the British spelling) – and is the first piece to sound so obviously ‘by Copland’ (as we now know him). “I was anxious to write a work that would immediately be recognized as American in character,” he later recollected. While no particular dramatic device was involved, Copland said that he chose the title because “the music seemed to suggest a certain theatrical atmosphere”. Labelled a “suite in five parts for small orchestra” (not to mention an expansive percussion section!), it received its first performance by the Boston Symphony Orchestra on 20 November 1925.

But there is a great deal more to Copland’s music than ‘all that jazz’. Indeed, that genre’s influence dissipated soon afterwards; and other constituents – especially those derived from American ‘folk’ and ‘popular’ music – started to come to the fore. These can clearly be heard in later masterpieces such as Rodeo, Billy the Kid, and Appalachian Spring – music which is readily identifiable as both Copland’s, and, therefore, as ‘American’.

Although Stateside ‘classical’ music has also moved on – think of John Adams or Milton Babbitt – it could be suggested that Copland was, perhaps, too successful in propagating his national idiom. Nearly a century later, and so many film scores still owe him their existence. Thankfully, his own Music for Movies – which opens this concert – stands head and shoulders above those who try to mimic his matchless style.

Tamsin Waley-Cohen plays Mozart:Themes and variations

21 November 2017: Stratford ArtsHouse
22 November 2017: Town Hall, Birmingham

• Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart – Symphony no15 in G major, K124
• Edvard Grieg – Holberg Suite, op40
• Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart – Violin Concerto no4 in D major, K218
• Joseph Haydn – Symphony no22 ‘The Philosopher’ in E-flat major, Hob.I:22

In different ways, all three of today’s composers (and all four of today’s works) can be seen as reflecting on their compositional inheritance – or even looking back at it deliberately, with unfeigned affection – especially in the use of earlier dance-forms. In doing so, they each not only shine a new light on such musical history and tradition, but also breathe fresh energy into its utilization.

Fifteen, when he wrote his Fifteenth Symphony, and only eighteen or nineteen when he wrote his five violin concertos, Mozart’s style, here, is not yet fully mature, of course: and he is therefore still audibly influenced by that of his predecessors and elders – including his father, Leopold; as well as JC Bach and Michael Haydn. Nevertheless, the obvious musical growth demonstrated by this concert’s two compositions is quite astounding. And it is in the later work’s final movement – the Violin Concerto’s explicitly French-style Rondeau (Italian: rondó; ‘round’) – that Mozart’s retrospection takes its most concrete form. (As with its predecessor, K216, though, this movement stops and starts, and veers off in all sorts of ‘modern’ and ‘humorous’ directions!)

Additionally, until supplanted by the Beethovenian scherzo (Italian for ‘jest’ or ‘joke’), the minuet (Italian: minuetto; German: Menuett; French: menuet) was a recognizable, characteristic part of most classical symphonies: and thus features in both of today’s, along with its typical, central trio (so-called because, initially, this was in three-part harmony: as with the minor-key sections of sixteenth-century masses). Originally a rustic French dance, the menuetto (a neologism frequently used by both Mozart and Beethoven) is always in triple time – its epithet deriving from its distinctive dainty step: that is, from the French menu, for ‘small’.

As well as including such a Menuet e Trio, the overall structure of Haydn’s symphony also references the past: its slow-fast-slow-fast sequence of movements being more typical of the Baroque-era (roughly 1600 to 1750) sonata da chiesa (‘church sonata’). Its instrumentation, though, is both unique and groundbreaking.

However, it is in Grieg’s Holberg Suite that we find bygone styles evoked most knowingly – the deliberate call to earlier forms and styles (as with Warlock’s Capriol Suite and Prokofiev’s Classical Symphony) coloured with, and seen from, a more distant remove; as well as treated with a more modern discernment. Proof indeed that looking back is no hindrance to looking – and moving – forward.

Julian Bliss plays Weber:Themes and variations

25 October 2017: Town Hall, Birmingham

• Gioachino Rossini – Overture, ‘The Barber of Seville’
• Carl Maria von Weber – Clarinet Concerto no2 in E-flat major, op74 (J114)
• Ludwig van Beethoven – Symphony no8 in F major, op93

All of this afternoon’s works were composed within three years of each other – Weber’s concerto first, in 1811; Rossini’s overture last, in 1813 (albeit originally for his earlier opera, Aureliano in Palmira) – and yet, stylistically, apart from their Classical structures, they have little in common. What they do share are a contagious joie de vivre and characteristic confidence: all three composers at the top of their game – which, considering Rossini was only twenty-one, and Weber twenty-four, demonstrates just how rapidly their brilliance ripened. All three composers knew of each other, too: Rossini and Weber both meeting Beethoven in Vienna, in 1822 and 1823, respectively (around the time he was completing his Missa Solemnis and the Choral Symphony).

Both of the younger composers were much saddened at seeing their idol so isolated by his deafness; but it seems Beethoven’s wicked sense of humour (so apparent in today’s symphony) was still to the fore. He said to Rossini – a backhanded compliment, if ever there was one – that The Barber of Seville was “an excellent opera buffa”; but that Rossini should “never try to do anything other than comic operas – to want to succeed in another style would force your nature”! (This was despite the success of ‘serious’ operas such as Tancredi, Otello, and Mosè in Egitto.) His final words, repeated as he saw Rossini out of his “dirty and frightfully disorderly attic”, being: “Above all, you must make more Barbers.”

Weber was perhaps more fortunate – “You’re a devil of a fellow!” – even though he had been publicly critical of some of Beethoven’s earlier compositions, including the Fourth Symphony. Beethoven had been deeply impressed by Der Freischütz, and was so astonished at its originality that – according to Weber’s son, Max – he struck the score with his hand, and exclaimed “I never would have thought it of the gentle little man”. When they parted, Beethoven – having “served [him] at table as if I had been his lady” – embraced and kissed him several times and cried: “Good luck to the new opera [Euryanthe]; if I can, I’ll come to the first performance!”

Although this afternoon’s music is still essentially Classical in nature – Beethoven resolutely recalling its glory years – all three are now seen as the founding fathers, or architects, of Romanticism (despite Rossini describing himself as “the last of the Classicists”). What a joy it is to have them all in the same room!

Viola and double-bass take centre stage!Themes and variations

20 June 2017: Stratford ArtsHouse

• Carl Ditters von Dittersdorf – Sinfonia Concertante for Double-Bass and Viola in D major, Kr.127
• Julian Philips – Ballades Concertantes [world premiere]
• Joseph Haydn – Symphony no49 ‘La Passione’ in F minor, Hob.I:49

Most – if not all – concertos are composed with specific performers in mind. Sometimes, they are written to showcase the composer’s own skills (think Mozart, Liszt, Rachmaninoff, etc.). Many times, they are written for a restricted number of instruments – particularly, it seems, violin and piano.

At the time of writing, IMSLP – the International Music Score Library Project: “Sharing the world’s public domain music” – holds 119,774 works, by 15,188 composers. Of these, 4,136 are labelled as concertos: 1,081 including ‘violin’ in their title (26.1%); and 471 containing the word ‘piano’ (11.4%). There are nearly as many concertos written for oboe (238) as there are cello (257); but only 117 for my favourite instrument, the bassoon… – and only one (yes, one!) for the glorious cor anglais (a very recent work, by Simon Laumer). Even the tuba has more written for it: with seven!

Tonight’s soloists – Virginia and Stacey – have, respectively 99 (viola) and 27 (double-bass) to choose from. But it is only when you type in ‘Dittersdorf’ or ‘Symphony Concertante’ that tonight’s first ‘double concerto’ is revealed – which, I’m afraid, only goes to show that all the above numbers should be treated (like opinion polls) as reasonably indicative (especially as contemporary composers seem to be much more inventive in their solo works: there already being two concertos listed for ‘electric bass’).

The point I’m trying to make is that such instruments are very rarely brought forward from their places in the orchestra… – and yet, when they are, we realize just how unfair this is: both the viola and double-bass being capable (as you will hear) of sonorous lyricism and striking virtuosity so different from their smaller cousins, the violin and cello. I accept that there are fewer players (certainly fewer solo players) of these instruments; and that surrounding such lower voices with orchestral timbres that do not overpower them may present more complex challenges… – although Tchaikovsky, Dvořák and Elgar met these head-on in creating glorious works for cello, of course!

We should therefore be immensely grateful to Carl Ditters von Dittersdorf and to Julian Philips, for creating pieces that, although around 250 years apart, demonstrate what we have been missing. In their extremely different ways, not only do they give us the full range of these wonderful instruments’ capabilities, whilst producing music that captivates; but they demonstrate – as the Dalai Lama said – that “if you listen, you may learn something new”.