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The British Music Society of York, BMS 3 2 10 |
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BAS
YORK
The Nash Ensemble
Friday, 11 January 2002
Programme: £1.00
Presented by the British Music Society of York
in asso ion with the Department of Music
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NOTICE BOARD
Advertising our Concerts
The bigger the audience we can attract to BMS concerts, the more money there
will be for the concerts budget, which means we would be able to afford artists
we can at present only dream of inviting. You can help. You must know of
places where our posters could be seen by potential new audience. Posters for
our next concert are available in the foyer: help yourself and help the Society.
Forthcoming Concerts
One of the ways we are increasing our publicity effort is by reciprocal
advertising with other concert promoters: when they have a concert coming up
shortly we tell our audience about it and they reciprocate. You will find details
of these concerts towards the end of this book.
Your Views
The BMS is a society run for the benefit of its members by a dedicated
committee elected from amongst those members. If there is something you
think we should be doing, or should not be doing, don't keep it to yourself:
please tell a committee member. They should all be wearing badges, and,
however it may appear, they do want to hear from you.
Our Website
The BMS has its own dedicated website, containing a short history of the
Society and an updated list of forthcoming concerts. If you haven't found it
already, the URL is http://www.bms-york.org.uk/
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BRITISH MUSIC SOCIETY
of YORK
81st Season A
Friday, 11 January 2002
Sir Jack Lyons Concert Hallidosza
The Nash Ensemble
Ian Brown piano, Richard Watkins horn
Marianne Thorsen violin, Paul Watkins cello
Beethoven Piano Trio in D, Op.70 No.1 (Ghost)
Lennox Berkeley Trio for horn, violin & piano, Op.44
Debussy
Brahms
INTERVAL
Sonata for cello & piano
Trio for horn, violin & piano, Op.40
For the sake of others in the audience, please turn off all
mobile phones and alarms on watches, calculators etc.,
and use a handkerchief when coughing.
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THE NASH ENSEMBLE
The Nash Ensemble has built up a remarkable reputation as one of Britain's
finest chamber groups, and, through the dedication of its founder and artistic
director Amelia Freedman and the calibre of its players, it has gained a similar
reputation all over the world. Its repertoire is vast, and its imaginative,
innovative and unusual programmes are as finely architectured as the beautiful
Nash terraces in London from which the Ensemble takes its name.
Not that the Nash Ensemble is restricted to the classical: it performs with equal
sensitivity and musicality works from Mozart to the avant garde. Indeed, the
Ensemble has always been at the forefront in the recognition and promotion of
new creative talent: its has given the first performances of over 230 new works,
including 90 pieces commissioned specially for the Ensemble.
The group's impressive collection of recordings illustrates the same varied and
colourful combination of classical masterpieces, little-known neglected gems
and important contemporary works. Their recordings such as the Hyperion
British Composers series are frequently nominated for awards, the most recent
releases being chamber and vocal works by Peter Warlock, Robin Holloway and
Arthur Bliss.
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PROGRAMME NOTES
Piano Trio in D, Op.70 No.1 (Ghost)
Allegro vivace e con brio
Largo assai e espressivo
Presto
Ludwig van Beethoven
(1770-1827)
The decade from 1800 to 1810 Beethoven's 30s saw an extraordinary
outpouring of masterworks. It was not until the end of the decade his pace
began at all to falter. Between 1807 and 1809 alone there tumbled from his
imagination: the Coriolan Overture (Op.62); Fifth and Sixth Symphonies
(Op.67/8); A major Cello Sonata (Op.69); two Piano Trios (Op.70); opera
Fidelio (Op.72); Emperor Piano Conerto (Op.73); Harp String Quartet (Op.74);
six Songs (Op.75); Variations and Fantasy for piano (Op.76/7); Piano Sonatas in
F# and G (Op.78/9); Choral Fantasia (Op.80); Les Adieux Piano Sonata
(Op.81a); incidental music to Egmont (Op.84) and C major Mass (Op.87).
In 1808 Beethoven was living in the house of Countess Erdödy and hard at work
on the sketches of the Sixth Symphony (Pastoral). Sometime during the
summer he moved on to a new piece, a piano trio in D major. As he worked on
it, he began to jot down ideas for the various movements of a companion trio in
E flat major. Around September he ran out of pages in his current sketchbook:
he presumably carried on his work on the E flat Trio either on loose sheets or in
a sketchbook that has not survived. The two Trios were published in 1809: the
D major appeared in June as Op.70 No.1; the E flat followed in August as Op.70
No.2. Both were dedicated to Countess Erdödy.
This Pastoral Symphony Sketchbook, by the way, also contains jottings for the A
major Cello Sonata and the famous piano piece known as Für Elise, as well as
two projects which, tantalisingly, went no further - an opera on the subject of
Macbeth and a piano concerto in the key of F minor.
Beethoven's style gradually evolved throughout his composing career. In the
early days his pieces, like Mozart's and Haydn's, would start from self-
contained themes, put together in ways music students today struggle to copy for
the higher grades of Music Theory. Fragments from these themes - motifs -
would then be extracted and made the subject of all sorts of development and
musical play. As this development of ideas assumed more and more importance
with composers, in particular Beethoven, there came a change of emphasis.
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Instead of these motifs being extracted from the themes, the motifs assumed
primacy, with the themes as such reduced to the disposable packaging in which
the motifs are first delivered.
By 1808 Beethoven had reached the point where he was questioning whether
themes were even necessary, certainly in the form of carefully balanced, self-
contained 16- or 32-bar melodies as had been standard a decade earlier. Hence
we find themes which begin as melodies, but which fizzle out without reaching a
logical end. Or even nothing but the bare motifs themselves, as at the opening
of the Fifth Symphony - a move so radical many at the time thought Beethoven
had taken leave of his senses. Or, as at the opening of the D major Trio,
something that gives the impression of a jumble of ideas falling over each other.
The slow movement is unusually slow, even for Beethoven, and contains some
particularly eerie-sounding passages, which have given the work its nickname
The Ghost. It would be hard to believe that Beethoven had composed such
spooky music in the same year as contemplating an opera on the subject of
Macbeth and there being no connection between the two.
The Finale goes almost to the other extreme. It is particularly quick and full of
surprises and abrupt changes of direction. Beethoven also manages to build up
fully functional climaxes without ever once seeming to overload the piano trio
texture -- a lesson unfortunately ignored by composers later in the century.
Trio for horn, violin and piano, Op.44
Allegro
Lento
Theme and 10 variations
Lennox Berkeley
(1903-1989)
If there'd been any justice, Lennox Berkeley would have been an earl: he was
after all the eldest son of the eldest son of the seventh Earl of Berkeley. The
obstacle was the inconvenient fact that Lennox's father was actually born before
his parents were able to marry: the strict rules of succession meant that the title
and estates went to the next son, Lennox's uncle.
Berkeley studied modern languages at Oxford, but decided during his time there
that his future lay in music. He showed some of the scores he had written to
Ravel, who advised him to study with Nadia Boulanger, one of the great
composition teachers of the 20th century. Berkeley spent the years 1927 to 1932
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in Paris as her pupil: she gave him a thorough technical grounding, and it is
some measure of her regard for her former pupil that when a celebration was
mounted in London to celebrate his 70th birthday she came in person to deliver a
tribute in defiance of her 86 years. It was during his years in Paris, in 1928,
that Berkeley became a Roman Catholic, unsurprisingly the driving force behind
his numerous religious works.
Berkeley was a friend of Benjamin Britten: ironically, they had attended the
same prep school, but as Berkeley was some ten years older their paths didn't
cross there. It seems they first met in Barcelona, at the Festival organised there
by the International Society for Contemporary Music, at which they both had a
piece being played. They quickly became friends and were soon planning a joint
composition. Britten noted down some Spanish folksongs they heard in a park
outside Barcelona, and they arranged two each for orchestra, publishing the
result as a joint composition under the name of the park - the Mont Juic Suite.
Berkeley later wrote several works for Britten to perform at Aldeburgh.
Another artist with an important place in Berkeley's career was the New
Zealand-born pianist Colin Horsley, a consistent champion of his piano music.
It was for Horsley that Berkeley wrote the present Trio in 1953 as a companion
piece to the Brahms Trio which he was then playing with a trio he'd formed with
the violinist Manoug Parikian and the legendary horn player Dennis Brain.
They gave its first performance in the Victoria and Albert Museum in London in
March 1954.
The Trio uses the same implausible combination as the Brahms E flat Trio we'll
be hearing later - horn, violin and piano. When I was very young I had a
sneaking suspicion that composers I'd barely heard of who used a combination
like this were almost cheating - counting on the fact that their piece would
effectively get a "piggyback" from an established masterpiece with unique
instrumentation. In fact, as I quickly realised, it is more usually the other way
round. More often composers are cajoled into writing such pieces by performers
trying to build sensible programmes. There is, indeed, something slightly
suicidal about writing a piece you know is almost always going to be performed
with an acknowledged masterpiece and inevitably judged by its standards.
The commission came at a time when Berkeley was heavily involved with vocal
music. Indeed, between 1952 and 1956 he wrote three operas, the first of them
the three-act Nelson, first performed, like this Trio, in 1954. It was also a time
when Berkeley's style was beginning to move away from a clear sense of
tonality towards a more complex and dissonant harmonic language - witness the
use fourths in this Trio. This was hardly surprising: the war had been over
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nearly ten years, and it was the golden era of the Third Programme when Britain
was connected once more with cultural developments on the continent.
The Trio has three movements in all. The slow movement lies second and the
Finale takes the form of a theme and ten variations. Movements in variation
form figure prominently amongst Berkeley's instrumental works.
INTERVAL
Coffee and drinks are available in the foyer. Coffee is 80p a cup: to find us, just
go past the bar, out on to the landing, and turn to the left.
Sonata for cello and piano
Prologue: Lent
Sérénade: Modérément animé --
Finale: Animé
Claude Debussy
(1862-1918)
[principal tempo markings only]
When war broke out in 1914 the patriotic Debussy answered his country's call
and volunteered. Of course, he was turned down flat by the authorities: he was
52 and already ill enough with the cancer that was to kill him to have been
forced to abandon a projected concert tour of the USA.
Fortunately for us, Debussy channelled his patriotic fervour into what he did
best, embarking on a set of Six Sonates pour divers instruments composées par
Claude Debussy, musicien français.
The plan was that each of the first five sonatas would be for different
instruments, while the sixth, anticipated as the most important of the set, would
include all the instruments used so far, plus a double bass. Maddeningly, he
lived to complete only three of the sonatas: for cello and piano (1915); for flute,
1
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viola and harp (1915); and for violin and piano (1916/7). It is doubly
unfortunate considering the combinations planned for the remaining works.
What would a colouristic imagination like Debussy's have made of sonatas for
oboe, horn and harpsichord and for clarinet, bassoon and trumpet - not to
mention the promise of all these put together?
tradition
It is tempting to imagine that Debussy's motive in choosing these sonatas for his
patriotic gesture (musicien français the original title pages loudly declaim) arose
from what must have appeared the total stranglehold of the Austro-German
all forms of chamber music. In every other type of composition
orchestral, opera, ballet, pinao and so on - French, Italian and Russian music
between them had managed some kind of challenge, but chamber music was
virtually a province of Austro-Germany. I like to imagine the musicien français
squaring himself up and then launching a fierce and fearless attack at the very
point where the enemy seemed strongest.
Although the sonata cycle continues the trend towards abstract musical forms
seen, for instance, in the Studies for piano (1915), the Cello Sonata has strong
extra-musical associations.
Debussy was long fascinated by the Italian
Commedia dell'arte and originally intended to have the Sonata published with
the title Pierrot fâché avec la lune [= Pierrot angry with the moon]. It is
certainly easy, whilst listening to the Sonata, to imagine Pierrot himself in the
cello part.
The Sonata is in three short movements, the last two linked together. In the
central Serenade the cello's pizzicato has been seen as a parody of Pierrot's
mandolin, while the Finale plainly contrasts the nervous and languid sides of his
character.
Trio for horn, violin and piano in E flat, Op.40
Andante - alternating with Poco più animato
Scherzo: Allegro
Trio: Molto meno allegro
Adagio mesto
Finale: Allegro con brio
Johannes Brahms
(1833-1897)
Brahms was one of those composers who need peace, quiet and solitude to
immerse themselves in the creative process, and so this tended to be
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concentrated in the months between Easter and September, which, more often
than not he would spend in some Alpine resort. Because of the area of music he
worked in, he couldn't, unlike his close friend of later years Johann Strauss, rely
on the income from his compositions to support him, not at any rate until his last
years. And so October to Easter were spent essentially earning a living: by
conducting orchestras, choirs, choral societies; by giving concerts - either
introducing his own music or acting as pianist for such friends as the violinist
Joachim and the baritone Julius Stockhausen; by doing jobbing work for
publishers - for instance, immediately before writing this Trio Brahms arranged
the vocal score of Schubert's 1828 Mass in E flat, being published for the first
time in 1865; and, in later years, by assisting in the production of those scholarly
collected editions of various composers' works that rank among the great
achievements of 19th-century music publishing.
In 1865 Brahms' favoured summer resort was Lichtenthal, hard by the
fashionable spa town of Baden-Baden, down in the SW corner of what was soon
to be Germany. Brahms rented a small cottage, and despite the absence of a
piano the time seems to have been very productive: he finished the Second
String Sextet and First Cello Sonata he had been composing over the last few
summers and composed the Horn Trio, an even more impressive tally when you
realise he was still hard at work on the German Requiem, which he was not to
finish for another three years.
That February Brahms' mother had died at the age of 76: he had set out almost
as soon as he received the telegram, but he was unable to make the journey from
Vienna to Hamburg in time. Brahms' immersion in work and the scale of his
productivity may well have been his way of coping with her death, and it's not
difficult to see Brahms' reaction to the bereavement either in the Requiem itself,
or in the third movement and other passages of the Horn Trio.
Brahms was himself the pianist at the first performance of the Trio. You still
find this listed as 6 December 1865 in Karlsruhe, not far from Baden-Baden, but
another performance has been unearthed, a couple of weeks earlier, in Zürich.
Brahms was at the time undertaking a concert tour of Switzerland and the
southwest region of "Germany." It was something he disliked doing, but the
state of his finances had made it essential. In fact, more was to come of it than
the money, for amongst the audiences in Switzerland were two men who were to
become his closest friends, amongst the very few to whom Brahms ever opened
it - the surgeon Theodor Billroth and the writer Johann Viktor Widmann.
Widmann didn't in fact meet Brahms face-to-face until the following year, 1866,
and their close friendship did not begin until 1874, when Brahms returned for
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the Zürich Festival. If you will indulge me, though, I'd like to quote Widmann's
description of Brahms as he first saw him, in 1866. Our mental picture of
Brahms is so dominated by the iconic image of the elderly, portly,
extravagently-bearded, cigar-smoking, wine-drinking, urbane, witty, gemütlich
composer of the late years, it is a useful corrective to see him at the age of 33,
not that long after this Trio was composed. Brahms, Widmann wrote:
immediately gave the impression of powerful individuality. not only by means of his
mighty piano-playing, which cannot be compared even with the greatest of merely
brilliant virtuosity, but also through his personal appearance. It is true, the short
square figure, the almost straw blond hair, the jutting lower lip which lent the
beardless youth a slightly sarcastic expression, were conspicuous and hardly
prepossessing peculiarities; but his entire aspect was permeated by strength. The
broad lion-like chest, the Herculean shoulders, the mighty head at times tossed back
energetically when playing, the contemplative, beautiful brow glowing as if by an
inner light, and the Germanic eyes framed in blond lashes and radiating a
marvellously fiery glance, they all betrayed an artistic personality brimming to the
very fingertips with genius. There was also a certain confidence of victory in his
countenance, the glowing cheerfulness of a spirit happy in the execution of his art ...
Horn, violin and piano is a strange combination: no one had ever written for it
before. Early on in the study of orchestration you learn that the horn is the best
mixer amongst orchestral instruments, its sound capable of blending almost
everywhere. The trouble is, this really applies to a group of three or four horns
in the context of a larger orchestral texture, not one horn with a piano and a
violin. Why Brahms wrote for the horn in this work is a mystery. We know he
played the horn as a teenager, and retained a predilection for the sound it made.
It may of course be simply that the initial inspiration for the piece came with the
sound of the horn attached: in fact we know the first idea came to him in the
woods above Baden-Baden unusually for such a secretive composer, he
actually showed a friend the exact spot.
A particular type of horn, though. Brahms did all he could to encourage
performance of the work on the Waldhorn. This was the old natural, i.e.
valveless horn, which Brahms probably preferred because it had a softer tone
that would balance better. The problem was, by the 1860s few horn players still
used the old instrument and were understandably reluctant to learn (or re-learn)
the rather different playing technique. Brahms even made the publisher Simrock
re-engrave the title page to read Trio für Pianoforte, Violine und Waldhorn oder
Violoncello. We know he felt strongly on the subject from a letter that suggests
that where only the valve horn was available, he'd rather rather have the cello as
the third instrument. (He changed his mind later, writing to Simrock that his
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Trio should be published with the alternative part given to the viola, as it
sounded "dreadful" on the cello.)
Unusually for Brahms, the first movement is not in sonata form. Instead a 2/4
Andante is alternated with a 9/8 Poco più animato: it was a pattern he was to
repeat in later works, though there he used it to merge slow movement and
scherzo as a single middle movement. The Scherzo comes second, full of a
combination of restless energy and good-natured playfulness. The Trio section
is a complete contrast, slower, more lyrical and sober, almost sombre in mood,
though it doesn't keep us away from jollity for long. Which makes the plunge
into the plaintive, tragic Adagio mesto all the more telling. And when he has
wrung your heart out, Brahms has the perfect antidote: courtesy of the
Waldhorn, a hunting finale which gallops at positively breakneck speed over
terrain strewn with more obstacles than a steeplechase course.
Programme notes by David Mather
Floral decorations by Sue Bedford
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er
FORTHCOMING CONCERTS
The next concert in the 81st Season of the British Music Society of York,
presented in association with the Department of Music at the University, takes
place as usual in the Sir Jack Lyons Concert Hall, beginning at 8 pm.
Friday, 15 February 2002
Haydn
Bartók
Beethoven
The Medici Quartet
Quartet in E flat, Op.33 No.2 (Joke)
Quartet No.2
Quartet in B flat, Op.130 (with Große Fuge)
More dates for your diaries:
Wednesday, 16 January 2002
Sir Jack Lyons Concert Hall, 8 pm
Andrew Manze violin
Gary Cooper harpsichord
Baroque music for violin and continuo by Uccellini, Schmelzer, Walther,
Westhoff, Marcello and J.S. Bach. Followed by a free Baroque Workshop on
Thursday 17 January from 11 am to 1 pm.
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Saturday, 19 January 2002NIM
St Olave's Church, Marygate, York, 8 pm
Academy of St Olave's
John Hastie director
Gabrieli's Sonata pian' e forte, Mendelssohn's Violin Concerto (Anila Milaj -
violin) and Beethoven's Symphony No.8
*** Wednesday, 23 January 2002
Sir Jack Lyons Concert Hall, 8 pm
Schubert Ensemble
Piano Quartets by Brahms (No. 1) and Judith Weir, with the Piano Quintet No.2
by Louise Farrenc
Saturday, 9 February 2002
York Barbican Centre, 7.30 pm u sol estab szeM
City of York Guildhall Orchestra
Simon Wright director
Lynn Dawson soprano
Mozart's Marriage of Figaro Overture, the Moonlight Music and Final Scene
from Richard Strauss' Capriccio and Mahler's Symphony No.4
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2
BRITISH MUSIC SOCIETY
of YORK
OFFICERS OF THE SOCIETY
President Dr Francis Jackson
Vice-Presidents
Chairman
Vice-Chairman
Hon. Treasurer
Hon. Asst. Treasurer
Hon. Secretary
Hon. Publicity Secretary
Hon. Programme Secretary
NFMS Representative
Hon Auditor
Members of the Committee
Jim Briggs, Rosalind Richards
David Mather
John Robinson
Albert Ainsworth
John Petrie
Nigel Dick
Marc Schatzberger
Amanda Crawley
Dr Richard Crossley
Derek Winterbottom
Sue Bedford, Dr John Dawick, Peter
Marsden, Bob Stevens and Dr Mary Turner
BENEFACTORS AND PATRONS
The BMS manages to maintain the high standard of its concerts largely through
the generosity of its Benefactors and Patrons. Without their gifts to the Society,
many of them covenanted, we could not hope to balance our books.
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Our Benefactors (§) and Patrons are as follows:
DIUM
Mr A Ainsworth §
Mr RA Bellingham
Mrs SM Carter §
Mrs M Danby-Smith §
Mr CGM Gardner
Mr JC Joslin
Mr RP Lorriman §
Mrs GO Morcom §
Mrs IG Sargent §
Mr RDC Stevens §
Dr & Mrs GMA Turner §
Mrs HB Wright §
HAITIAN
Dr DM Bearpark
Mr J Briggs
Mr J Curry §
Mr NJ Dick §
Dr FA Jackson
Prof. R Lawton §
Mr GC Morcom §
Mr & Mrs Rowlands §
Mrs I Stanley §
na Mr DA Sutton
Mr R Wilkinson §
Mrs PJ Armour
Mr & Mrs DAC Blunt §
Dr RJS Crossley
Dr JD Dawick
Mr JA Gloag
Mr N Lange §
Mr & Mrs B Mattinson §
Canon & Mrs JS Pearson
Mr M Schatzberger
Mrs DC Summers §
Mr JI Watson
Mrs SM Wright
If you would like to become a Benefactor or Patron, please get in touch with our
Hon. Treasurer, either at the ticket desk before each concert, or at 8, Petersway,
York, YO30 6AR. All other correspondence about the Society should be
addressed to the Hon. Secretary, 6, Bishopgate St., York, YO23 1JH.
Making
Music societies throughout the United Kingdom.
Society also gratefully acknowledges the assistance
THE NATIONAL FEDERATION of the Royal Bank of Scotland.
OF MUSIC SOCIETIES
DORTHWICK INSTITUTE
*BMS 3/2/10 (1)
OF HI
The BMS is affiliated to Making Music, the National
Federation of Music Societies, which represents and
supports amateur vocal, instrumental and promoting
The
Registered Charity No.700302
TORICAL
Compiled by David Mather and published by the British Music Society of York.
Reproduced by the Trophy & Print Shop, Commercial St, Norton, Malton.
RESEARCH
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BAS
YORK
The Medici
String Quartet
Friday, 15 February 2002
Programme: £1.00
**Presented by the British Music Society of York
in association with the Department of Music
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NOTICE BOARD
Jim Briggs
The Committee of the BMS was much saddened to learn of the death of Jim
Briggs, who died on 12 January, the morning after our Nash Ensemble concert.
Jim was one of the Society's great stalwarts, Treasurer for longer almost than
any of us can remember and, from even before his retirement from that post in
1993, honoured as one of our Vice-Presidents. He will be much missed by us
all, and we would like to extend our sympathy to the rest of the family.
Your Views
The BMS is a society run for the benefit of its members by a dedicated
committee elected from amongst those members. If there is something you
think we should be doing, or should not be doing, don't keep it to yourself:
please tell a committee member. They should all be wearing badges, and,
however it may appear, they do want to hear from you.
Bartók String Quartet No.2
If you'll forgive the self-indulgence of an autobiographical aside: tonight marks
a small personal milestone. The Bartók Second Quartet is the work for which I
wrote my first ever programme note: the Secretary of the Lancaster Music and
Arts Club allowed myself and another sixth former from his school to provide
the notes for a concert. My friend sensibly cut my effusions from two pages to
two paragraphs, which the Secretary reduced to two lines. You will not be so
fortunate tonight, though the content has improved over the intervening years.
* Our Website
The BMS has its own dedicated website, containing a short history of the
Society and an updated list of forthcoming concerts. If you haven't found it
already, the URL is http://www.bms-york.org.uk/
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BRITISH MUSIC SOCIETY
of YORK
81st Season
Friday, 15 February 2002
Sir Jack Lyons Concert Hall
The Medici String Quartet
Paul Robertson & Stephen Morris violins
Ivo-Jan van der Werff viola, Anthony Lewis cello
Haydn
Bartók
Beethoven
Quartet in E flat, Op.33 No.2 (The Joke)
Quartet No.2, Sz.67
INTERVAL
Quartet in B flat, Op.130
with Große Fuge as finale
For the sake of others in the audience, please turn off all
mobile phones and alarms on watches, calculators etc.,
and use a handkerchief when coughing.
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THE MEDICI STRING QUARTET
The Medici Quartet, formed in 1971, is widely regarded as one of Britain's
leading international ensembles, having appeared to critical acclaim in more than
thirty countries across five continents. They broadcast regularly on radio and
television and have made over forty acclaimed recordings for EMI, Nimbus,
Meridian, Whitehall and Hyperion, including a complete Beethoven Quartet
cycle.
In 1996 Channel Four broadcast a three-part series entitled Music and the Mind
in which Paul Robertson and the Quartet examined the profound relationship
between music and the human brain. In addition, the growing awareness of the
role that music plays in the healing process has led to the establishment of links
with the Amsterdam Medical Centre, Chelsea & Westminster Hospital and
Geneva University Hospital.
In autumn 1996 the Medici were appointed Artists in Residence at the
University of Surrey; in addition to celebrity concerts this very successful
residency has included composers' workshops, string orchestra workshops,
Tonmeister sessions, an experimental dance Project and a performance of
Haydn's Seven Last Words in Guildford Cathedral. In the autumn of 1999 the
University of Surrey extended this residency for a further three years and in
October 2000 the Medici took up a visiting residency at the Royal College of
Music in Stockholm.
Last year the Medici launched their 30th Season at the 2001 Harrogate Festival
with a repeat of the programme they gave at the 1971 Harrogate Festival - their
first professional engagement.
Paul Robertson plays a violin by Domenicus Montagnana (Venice, 1729),
Stephen Morris a violin by Nicolas Lupot (Paris, 1809), Ivo-Jan van der Werff a
viola by Giovanni Grancino (Milan, c.1690) and Anthony Lewis a cello by
Giancinto Rugeri (Cremona, c. 1690).
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PROGRAMME NOTES
String Quartet in E flat, Op.33 No.2
Allegro moderato cantabile
Scherzo: Allegro
Largo sostenuto
Finale: Presto
Joseph Haydn
(1732-1809)
Those of you who waded through my note on the fifth quartet from Haydn's
Op.33, which the Falk Quartet played for us in December, will have read most
of this before. In which case, unless you are determined on self-mortification, I
suggest you skip straight to the bottom of the next page.
There are a lot of Haydn quartets, 80 or so, depending on how, or which, you
count - getting on for as many as there are symphonies. Musicians need some
way of identifying which piece they're talking about. Keys are no help: "the
Quartet in F sharp minor" narrows it down to one certainly, but there are ten
quartets each in D major, E flat major and B flat major. And few musicians are
that keen on numbers. So nicknames quickly sprang up. For a few individual
quartets there are such names as the Bird, the Lark, the Sunrise - even the
Razor: for the rest, the sets in which they were published acquired names. The
set of six Quartets, Op.33, is particularly rich in this respect, being known as the
Russian, the Jungfrau (or Maiden) and the Gli scherzi. The last two are easily
explained: a Berlin publisher decorated the covers of his edition of the Quartets
with the face of a girl and -- well, you know musicians, these things stick in their
minds; and then the movement known heretofore as the minuet is for the first
time called either Scherzando or Scherzo in all six quartets - hence the Italian
name "all scherzos".
Haydn completed the Op.33 Quartets in 1781: by that December he was writing
a circular to possible foreign clients offering to supply manuscript copies on a
subscription basis. At the time this was a quite usual preliminary to the release
of engraved copies on the home market, though in this case the publisher Artaria
issued the engraved copies in 1782, rather sooner than was decent after the
subscription manuscript copies, which embarrassed Haydn more than somewhat.
Haydn's circular recommending the subscription copies spoke of the Quartets
being written in "a new and special manner." Opinion has been divided over
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this description, some taking it literally, some seeing it as no more than hype
the advertisers' "new, improved" we have all come to suspect. Certainly there is
nothing noticeably new in intent, structure or technique in comparison with his
previous set of Quartets, the six Op.20 of 1772. What is different is the ease and
fluency with which Haydn handles the radical style he had pioneered in Op.20.
For Haydn, the years in between Op.20 and Op.33 had been dominated by opera.
The Esterházys had their own opera house and during the mid to late 1770s seem
to have been particularly keen on showing it off to visitors. It was a huge extra
burden on Haydn and was responsible for, amongst other things, a noticeable
falling-off in the quality of the symphonies of the period. But by the end of the
1770s, Haydn could again look outside the opera house. He even had time to
mix with other composers when the family was in residence at its house in
Vienna. At the time he was composing Op.33, these included Mozart, just
beginning his career as a freelance musician in the capital, having been sacked a
few months earlier by the Prince-Archbishop of Salzburg. It was the start of a
friendship between the two, despite the 24 year age gap between them. They
played quartets together, including Op.33, and it was that experience which
inspired the younger composer to write the six Quartets published in 1784 with a
flowery dedication to Haydn.
Mozart was
1781 was also the year the Russian Grand Duke Pavel (tsar' from 1796 until he
was assassinated in 1801) embarked with his German second wife on a
European tour which would last in the end over a year. His mother Catherine
the Great had sent him off on it in October 1781: she was convinced he would
make a hopelessly ineffective ruler and was getting him out of the way largely to
undermine what support he had at court. The couple arrived in Vienna in
November and everything was laid on to impress them.
commissioned to write Die Entführung for the visit, though in the end the
performance in Grand Duke's presence had to be delayed until the return
journey in October 1782. The Esterházy musicians also performed before the
visitors. Indeed a quartet actually went to their apartments to play Haydn's
newly composed Op.33: it was for this reason that Artaria, reprinting the
Quartets in his Haydn collected edition, added a dedication to the Grand Duke.
And that explains the remaining nickname of the set - Russian.
The second Quartet fre a Op.33 is one of those select Haydn quartets that has
acquired its own individual nickname. It's known as The Joke, but only, it
seems, in the English-speaking world: at any rate there doesn't seem to be a
German equivalent. I'm not going to tell you why it's called this that would
spoil the surprise. I will, though, give you a couple of clues: you'll have to wait
to the end.
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To appreciate the way Haydn has structured the Quartet, it's interesting to
compare it with the G major Quartet (Op.33 No.5) which the Falk Quartet
played in December. There Haydn had a light-hearted and lively first movement
and a comparatively sedate finale in siciliano rhythm, so, for the best contrast
and balance, it paid him to have his Adagio movement second and his querky
scherzo third. But with Op.33 No.2 the arrangement is effectively reversed: it is
the first movement which is restrained (for Haydn, that is) and the finale that is
bubbling over with fun. And so the scherzo and slow movement are the other
way round. The scherzo lies second, the irregular phrases of the scherzo proper
nicely counter-balanced by the more regular patterns of the Trio. And the slow
movement lies third, a time of poise and reflection between the jollity of the
Scherzo and the mayhem released in the finale. Notice the way the slow
movement's opening theme is played by just the viola and cello at the opening,
picks up a third instrument at the repeat, but is not given the full quartet
treatment until on the last page.
String Quartet No.2, Sz.67
Moderato
Allegro molto capriccioso
Lento
Béla Bartók
(1881-1945)
(principal tempo markings only)
Bartók was a small, frail, painfully shy man for whom music seems to have
amounted to an obsession: few people ever noticed in him more than a passing
interest in anything else, except wild flowers, butterflies and insects, all of which
he apparently collected from boyhood. This obsessive side surfaced in all three
branches of music in which he was active: composition, the piano and
ethnomusicology. You only have to look at a Bartók score to realise why: I
know of no major composer whose autographs are so neat, nor of any before
him who made such an effort to commit to paper exactly how he wanted the
music played, even down to precise, to-the-second timings for individual
sections.
With the piano, this obsessive not only allowed him to acquire his formidable
technique, but also resulted in the exceptionally large body of teaching pieces he
composed, not to mention the very many instructional editions he produced of
classics of piano literature from Bach and Scarlatti through to Chopin. While
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with ethnomusicology, it wasn't just a question of taking a notebook on holiday
and jotting down any bits of local material he happened to hear: Bartók treated
the whole business with scientific rigour, mounting expeditions virtually every
year, collecting folksong material in exhaustive detail throughout south-east
Europe and north Africa, and then writing analytical studies of the material for
publication.
It was through his piano playing that Bartók first came to public attention during
the 1900s, and through this his compositions began to be known. In 1907 he
succeeded his old teacher as professor of piano at the Budapest. Then 19
he wrote his opera Duke Bluebeard's Castle, on the success of which he placed
many of his hopes. It was turned down (if you've seen the opera, you'll
understand why a conservative national theatre in 1911 were frightened of it):
moreover his publishers seemed to be showing no interest in original
compositions. In his disappointment, Bartók withdrew from Budapest musical
life: he moved to the cheaper eastern suburb of Rákoskeresztúr where his
Academy salary and income from such work as editing was enough to finance
his folksong collecting trips and keep himself and his new family in the frugal
style to which he was accustomed. His compositions dried up, though, as if he
felt nobody had any use for them.
Hungary, though it enjoyed considerable autonomy, was nevertheless part of the
so-called Dual Monarchy with Austria and thus automatically partner to the July
1914 declaration of war against Serbia that sparked off World War I. Bartók
was declared unfit for military service and so spent practically the whole of the
War in effective isolation in Rákoskeresztúr. It was this that seems to have got
him composing again, most notably on the ballet The Wooden Prince, which he
began in 1914 and completed in 1916. While still at work on that he began two
other pieces of substance: the Suite for piano, finished in February 1916, and the
Second String Quartet, begun in 1915 and completed in February 1917.
Bartók had composed his First String Quartet in 1908, but for two years didn't
manage to find a quartet that would agree to play it. That changed when in 1909
four young string players came together to form the group known as the
Waldbauer-Kerpely Quartet after its leader and cellist. They joined Bartók in his
first "composer's evening" in March 1910 at which the First String Quartet was
premiered. Members of the Quartet visited Bartók in Rákoskeresztúr,
occasionally in uniform, as they were on active war service. It may well have
been their visits that spurred him to compose the Second Quartet: certainly he
dedicated it to them, using individual names, and they gave the work its first
performance in Budapest on 3 March 1918.
1
1
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ed
st
r
)
The obsessive side of Bartók's nature often shows in the way that his pieces
seem to be not so much composed as precision engineered. In the first
movement, in particular, one can only watch and listen with awe as Bartók lays
down his basic musical premise and draws the rest of the movement effortlessly
from it, down, it sometimes seems, to the smallest decorative detail.
The second movement is an almost excessively wild scherzo, using ideas
derived from Arab folk-music Bartók had collected in North Africa. It takes one
stage further the composer's "barbaric" side, seen in the notorious Allegro
barbaro for piano of 1911. Its harmonic language, though, goes several stages
further, presenting an uncompromising blend of chords based on seconds,
fourths and sevenths, effectively turning the piece into a manifesto for his
mature style of the late 20s and 30s.
Incidentally, those of you interested in the extremes to which musical notation
can be stretched should listen for the ghostly whirlwind in the closing pages of
this movement. It's easy to spot: Bartók directs the players to put on their mutes
for it. He cranks up the metronome mark to an alarming dotted minim = 200,
and those notes flitting nightmarishly past your ear are all, I promise you,
crotchets.
And then, implausible though it may seem, the final Lento manages to provide
still more of a contrast: a sombre movement, by turns bleak, plangent and
impassioned. Music, in fact, altogether suited to its date of composition: the
time of Verdun and the Somme on the Western Front, and in the east of the
Falkenhayn Offensive.
PS In case you were wondering about the Sz.67. Only some of Bartók's
published works originally had opus numbers, and even these stopped in the
early 1920s with Op.21. The Sz numbers come from the list of Bartók's musical
works and musicological writings compiled by András Szöllősy for the 1956
companion to Bartók's life and work edited by Bence Szabolsci. In the case of
Bartók's folksong arrangements - for piano, for voice and piano, for choir - the
sheer profusion of works, and their confusingly similar titles, make such
numbers a godsend for identification purposes. But the six quartets are the six
quartets, and "No.1," "No.2," "No.3," etc are really all the identification they
need.
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INTERVAL
Coffee and drinks are available in the foyer. Coffee is 80p a cup: to find us, just
go past the bar, out on to the landing, and turn to the left.
String Quartet in B flat major, Op.130
Adagio ma non troppo - Allegro
Presto
Andante con moto ma non troppo
Alla danza tedesca: Allegro assai
Cavatina: Adagio molto espressivo
Große Fuge: Allegro
Ludwig van Beethoven
(1770-1827)
(principal tempo markings only)
Beethoven's creative life is customarily divided into three periods, and the string
quartets are split, with almost suspicious neatness, between them. The six Op.18
Quartets belong to the height of the Early Period; the next five quartets (the three
making up Op.59, Op.74 in E flat and Op.95 in F minor) are spread over the
Middle Period; while the remaining five quartets are the culmination of the Late
Period. They are, in order of composition: Op.127 in E flat, Op.132 in A minor,
Op.130 in B flat, Op.131 in C sharp minor and Op.135 in F. They were the last
things Beethoven composed.
It was a long time before the subtleties and refinements of their musical
language were generally understood. Minds that had balked at the Fifth
Symphony, assuming it to be some kind of joke, were scarcely going to make
much of the late quartets, and throughout the 19th and early 20th centuries it
seemed to be a point of pride with even quite eminent musicians to profess not
to "understand" these works.
Commentators on Beethoven's quartet output are divided over his greatest
achievement in the medium, but there are two main factions, one favouring the
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st
D
B flat, Op.130, the other the C sharp minor, Op.131. The choice between the
two may even be not so much a musicological as a psychological one: Op.131
inhabits a darker, more negative terrain than the sunnier, more positive Op.130.
The B flat Quartet, Op.130, was composed in the late summer and autumn of
1825. It was first played by the Schuppanzigh Quartet on 21 March 1826,
following which Beethoven was urged to replace the huge and complex fugue
which formed the work's finale with a less daunting movement. For once he
agreed with his critics, and the replacement finale, composed in the late autumn
of 1826, was his last completed work.
Many scholars are dismayed by Beethoven's capitulation: the fugue, they argue,
is the proper and inevitable conclusion to the piece, prepared by cross-
referencing of material and demanded by the work's structural and dramatic
scheme. On the other hand, Beethoven was by this stage totally deaf, and when
it came to the impact of the work in performance was forced to rely on the
opinion of his friends: and in this instance they were better qualified than most
to understand his music. And it may well be that Beethoven attached more
weight to his publisher's promise to issue the Große Fuge [-great fugue]
separately for an additional fee. My own opinion, for what it's worth, is that
Beethoven's friends were right: the Fugue is dangerously close to being over the
top.
The new finale doesn't so much spoil the work, as effectively give us two
quartets for the price of one: the Quartet as originally conceived, with its
towering, magisterial close; and the Quartet as published, with a down-to-earth
finale, full of good-natured charm and a lack of pomposity. The Quartet can be
Olympian or Arcadian as you wish -- a Michelangelo or a Brueghel.
The first movement begins with a slow introduction, music which Beethoven
brings back later in the movement. The main Allegro is a masterpiece of
controlled energy, creating and dissipating tension at will, with almost instant
access.
After one of the longest movements in all the Beethoven quartets comes one of
the shortest: despite all its repeats, the whirlwind Scherzo takes less than two
minutes to play. It is followed by what seems from the first two bars to be a
melodramatic slow movement, but which melts at once into a genial, at times
light-hearted Andante.
The key scheme of Op.130 is remarkable. In a conventional four-movement
quartet, you would expect three movements to be in the home key, with one of
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the middle movements in a different, but closely-related key. But Op.130 is
much more wide-ranging. Only the first and last movements are in the home
key of B flat major. The scherzo second movement is in B flat minor and the
Andante that follows is in that key's relative major - D flat major.
This is the point Beethoven chooses for his major coup. The fourth movement is
in G major - totally removed from D flat major: indeed, in the major/minor
system it is impossible for any two keys to be further apart. This helps to
underline the sense of otherworldliness of a movement which purports to be a
simple German dance, but which extraordinary dynamic markings and textural
experimentation turn into something quite radical.
The fifth movement, the E flat Cavatina, is the Quartet's true slow movement. It
is at once simple and profound: we have the evidence of the sketches that it cost
Beethoven a great struggle to get it just right. And it is a nice irony that the
composer who in his younger days was wont to scoff at those who wept when he
played the piano was himself reduced to tears whenever he read the music
through. Indeed the music itself weeps: as he had done in the Funeral March
from the Eroica Symphony, Beethoven at one point fragments the melodic line
and displaces it rhythmically to achieve an effect very much like sobbing.
The Medici are playing the finale Beethoven originally intended for Op.130 -
the Große Fuge. When this was published by itself as Op.133, its oddities were
excused with the subtitle tantôt libre, tantôt recherchée: Beethoven's late fugues
do have the reputation of working much better on paper than they do in real
sound, but there is no escaping the grandeur and sheer exhilaration this splendid
finale generates.
Programme notes by David Mather
Floral decorations by Sue Bedford
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IS
or
0
a
31
#
FORTHCOMING CONCERTS
The final concert in the 81st Season of the British Music Society of York,
presented in association with the Department of Music at the University, takes
place as usual in the Sir Jack Lyons Concert Hall, beginning at 8 pm.
Thursday, 14 March 2002
Chick Corea
Piazzolla
Bartók
Ives
Beethoven
Joanna MacGregor
(piano)
Children's Songs
Milonga del angel
Libertango
Sonata for piano, Sz. 80
The Alcotts
Piano Sonata No.32 in C minor, Op.111
More dates for your diaries:
Wednesday, 20 February 2002
Sir Jack Lyons Concert Hall, 8 pm
University New Music Players
Music by Schoenberg, Berg, Eisler, Edward Dudley Hughes and Elisabeth
Lutyens
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Saturday, 2 March 2002
St Olave's Church, Marygate, 8 pm
York Cantores
Marion Best conductor
Italian baroque music including Scarlatti's Stabat Mater and works by Caldara
Wednesday, 6 March 2002
Sir Jack Lyons Concert Hall, 8 pm
University Choir & Baroque Ensemble
Peter Seymour conductor
John Potter Evangelist
Thomas Thomaschke Christus
Bach's St John Passion
Sunday, 10 March 2002
York Minster, 7 pm
York Musical Society
Philip Moore conductor
Tavener's Svyati and motets by Bruckner
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ra
BRITISH MUSIC SOCIETY
of YORK
OFFICERS OF THE SOCIETY
President Dr Francis Jackson
Rosalind Richards
Vice-President
Chairman
Vice-Chairman
Hon. Treasurer
Hon. Asst. Treasurer
Hon. Secretary
Hon. Publicity Secretary
Hon. Programme Secretary
NFMS Representative
Hon Auditor
Members of the Committee
David Mather
John Robinson
Albert Ainsworth
John Petrie
Nigel Dick
Marc Schatzberger
Amanda Crawley
Dr Richard Crossley
Derek Winterbottom
Sue Bedford, Dr John Dawick, Peter
Marsden, Bob Stevens and Dr Mary Turner
BENEFACTORS AND PATRONS
The BMS manages to maintain the high standard of its concerts largely through
the generosity of its Benefactors and Patrons. Without their gifts to the Society,
many of them covenanted, we could not hope to balance our books.
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Our Benefactors (§) and Patrons are as follows:
Mr A Ainsworth §
Mr RA Bellingham
Mrs SM Carter §
Mrs M Danby-Smith §
Mr CGM Gardner
Mr JC Joslin
Mr RP Lorriman §
Mrs GO Morcom §
Mrs IG Sargent §
Mr RDC Stevens §
Dr & Mrs GMA Turner § Mr JI Watson
Mrs HB Wright §
Mrs SM Wright
Making
Music
Mrs PJ Armour
Mr & Mrs DAC Blunt §
Dr RJS Crossley
THE NATIONAL FEDERATION
OF MUSIC SOCIETIES
Dr JD Dawick
Mr JA Gloag
Mr N Lange §
Mr & Mrs B Mattinson §
Canon & Mrs JS Pearson
Mr M Schatzberger
Mrs DC Summers §
Dr DM Bearpark
Mr J Briggs
Mr J Curry §
Mr NJ Dick §
If you would like to become a Benefactor or Patron, please get in touch with our
Hon. Treasurer, either at the ticket desk before each concert, or at 8, Petersway,
York, YO30 6AR. All other correspondence about the Society should be
addressed to the Hon. Secretary, 6, Bishopgate St., York, YO23 1JH.
Dr FA Jackson
Prof. R Lawton §
Mr GC Morcom §
Mr & Mrs Rowlands §
Mrs I Stanley §
Registered Charity No.700302
Mr DA Sutton
Mr R Wilkinson §
The BMS is affiliated to Making Music, the National
Federation of Music Societies, which represents and
supports amateur vocal, instrumental and promoting
societies throughout the United Kingdom. The Society
also gratefully acknowledges the assistance of the Royal
Bank of Scotland.
INSTITUTE
Juninwlu.
* SMS 5/2/10 (2)
OF
HISTORICAL
Compiled by David Mather and published by the British Music Society of York.
Reproduced by the Trophy & Print Shop, Commercial St, Norton, Malton.
*
RESEARCH
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BAS
YORK
Joanna MacGregor
(piano)
Thursday, 14 March 2002
Programme: £1.00
Presented by the British Music Society of York
in association with the Department of Music
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NOTICE BOARD
Farewell to the 81st Season
Tonight is the last concert of the 81st Season of the British Music Society of
York, held in association with the Department of Music of the University of
York. Our next fixture will be the Society's Annual General Meeting, which
we're aiming to hold in the first half of June. There will be a short business
meeting (to include the unveiling of next season's programme), followed by a
short musical entertainment and a meal, to both of which guests are welcome.
All members of the Society will receive notification of the date and venue nearer
the time. Meanwhile, the 82nd Season is set to begin in mid October. Some
weeks before this, the Season's brochure will automatically be sent to all our
members, as well as to all those on the mailing list run jointly by the BMS, the
University Music Department and a basket of local concert-giving organisations.
If you suspect you might not be on this list, or have recently changed address,
could you please contact our Treasurer, Mr Albert Ainsworth, 8 Petersway,
York, YO30 6AR.
Your Views
The BMS is a society run for the benefit of its members by a dedicated
committee elected from amongst those members. If there is something you
think we should be doing, or should not be doing, don't keep it to yourself:
please tell a committee member. They should all be wearing badges, and,
however it may appear, they do want to hear from you.
Our Website
The BMS has its own dedicated website, containing a short history of the
Society and an updated list of forthcoming concerts. If you haven't found it
already, the URL is http://www.bms-york.org.uk/
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BRITISH MUSIC SOCIETY
of YORK
81st Season
Thursday, 14 March 2002
Sir Jack Lyons Concert Hall
Joanna MacGregor piano
Chick Corea
Ligeti
Astor Piazzolla
Bartók
Charles Ives
Beethoven
3 Children's Songs
3 Studies
Milonga del Angel
Libertango
Sonata for piano, Sz 80
INTERVAL
The Alcotts
Piano Sonata No.32 in C minor, Op.111
For the sake of others in the audience, please turn off all
mobile phones and alarms on watches, calculators etc.,
and use a handkerchief when coughing.
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JOANNA MacGREGOR
Joanna MacGregor is widely thought of as one of the most innovative and
wide-ranging of today's pianists, dividing her time between playing classical,
jazz and contemporary music. She has premiered many landmark compositions
in contemporary music, working with, amongst others, Harrison Birtwistle,
Pierre Boulez, John Adams and Lou Harrison. She is also a long-time
collaborator with jazz composer Django Bates, both playing with his quartet
Human Chain and premiering his Concerto What it's like to be alive. Her series
of teaching books, Piano World, was published by Faber in May of 2000 and
described as "a tutor worthy of the new millennium."
Joanna is becoming increasingly interested in working alongside visual artists
and in 1999 collaborated with digital artist Andrew Stones on a Contemporary
Music Network tour. In 2001 she mounted two multimedia shows, Ultramarine
and Street Music with video artist Kathy Hinde.
Joanna has recorded a dozen solo classical CDs, including music by Scarlatti,
Barber, Debussy, Ravel, Messiaen and Bartók. She now has her own acclaimed
label SoundCircus whose catalogue ranges from Bach to John Cage, with artists
as diverse as percussion quartet Ensemble Bash and pop musician Talvin Singh.
(www.soundcircus.com)
Joanna was Professor of Music at Gresham College in the City of London from
1998 to 2000. She is also an Honorary Fellow of the Royal Academy of Music
(where she studied) and Trinity College of Music. In January 2000 she was
awarded the South Bank Show Prize for classical music. She is a member of the
Arts Council of Great Britain.
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PROGRAMME NOTES
by Joanna MacGregor
Children's Songs No.s 4, 6 & 18
Chic Corea's long and illustrious career as a jazz pianist has encompassed the
invention of jazz fusion in the 70s and work with Miles Davis (most famously
on the seminal album Bitches Brew). More recently he has developed orchestral
composition, and played Mozart concertos with the New York Philharmonic.
The 20 Children's Songs were written specifically with young people in mind,
for use on any kind of keyboard, and with opportunities for improvisation and
experimentation.
Chick Corea
(b.1941)
These three short Children's Songs have a kind of playground feel, which can be
melancholy and Satie-like (No.4), or joyfully aggressive (No.18). Song No 6,
with its modal harmonies and drone-like left hand, foreshadows the Eastern
European pieces in tonight's programme.
3 Studies from Études Book One
Fanfare
Rainbow
Autumn in Warsaw
György Ligeti
(b.1923)
The Hungarian composer Ligeti's first book of Études broke like a thunderclap
on the piano world in 1983. It was a common complaint that "nobody could
write for the piano anymore", made by lazy pianists devoted to Chopin and
cynical critics yearning for the virtuoso excesses of the 19th century. To their
amazement, Ligeti conjured a world that was multifarious, complex, ambitious
but undeniably historical: there was a direct link to Chopin's and Debussy's
studies, Clementi, Stravinsky, the contrapuntal jazz models of Nancarrow and
the rhythmic layering of African music. Above all, the Études were undeniably
pianistic.
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Fanfare is a jazzy, driven moto perpetuo, with each hand taking turns to make
spiky interjections over a very Bartók-like 3+2+3 pattern. (There are great
similarities here with Bartók's Bulgarian dances, from the last Mikrokosmos
book.) Characteristically, it roams all over the piano, with extremes of
dynamics.
Rainbow is a dreamy, melodic piece with large chords for both hands, often
moving in a three against two pattern. It finally slips away into the ether off the
top of the keyboard.
Autumn in Warsaw starts as a gentle, rain-soaked black and white movie; a
simple falling phrase multiplies, interleaves and overlaps, building intensity until
the apocalyptic ending, this time thundering down to the bottom of the piano.
"My interest in polyrhythmics and different simultaneous speeds, which I heard
in Nancarrow's marvellous music for mechanical pianos, gave me the impulse to
consider looking for ways and means by which living interpreters could perform
a similarly complex music... I was also influenced by Charles Ives and his
thinking in different musical layers. You will not hear quotations of African
music in my work, but in my thinking of rhythmic and metric patterns, the
knowledge of Central African music is decisive". (Ligeti talking in 1986)
2 Pieces
Milonga del Angel
Libertango
Astor Piazzolla
(1921 - 1992)
Astor Piazzolla was a master of the bandonéon - the Argentine accordion - and
single-handedly re-invented Argentina's greatest musical form, the tango, not
without some controversy. Spending his childhood in New York, he headed
back to his hometown Buenos Aires at 16, where he formed his own orchestra.
It took him 20 years to conquer the hearts of the aficionados - his melting pot of
modern jazz, classical and folkloric Latin music so incensed some tango purists
that he received threats on his life. By his death he was recognised as a genius, a
prolific artist whose work looks deep into the dramatic heart and soul of the
human condition.
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Sonata for piano, Sz 80
Allegro moderato
Sostenuto e pesante
Allegro molto
Béla Bartók
(1881-1945
In the same year that Bartók wrote this Sonata (1926) he produced the Out of
Doors Suite, the First Piano Concerto, a set of Nine Little Piano Pieces, and the
beginnings of his six-volume teaching series, Mikrokosmos, all in preparation for
a tour of the United States the following year. In other words, this was a serious,
weighty year's work for Bartók the composer/pianist, who was refining his
percussive piano style (set out in the exciting but somewhat crude Allegro
barbaro of 1911), fusing it with a classical purity and ever imaginative
exploration of Eastern European folk music.
The Sonata is an impressively ambitious piece but quite short and punchy,
lasting only about 12 minutes. Its structure pays homage to the classical past - a
sonata-form first movement, a slow movement followed by a rondo - but it is
ferocious physically (it requires a great deal of strength and stamina) and
intellectually. It's this ferocity that first sent its critics into a tailspin - one
American critic described it as "amoral, beyond good and evil." The usually
perceptive English critic and composer Constant Lambert complained about the
growing gap between simple folk-melody and dissonant harmony: "the
composer gives up all attempts to bridge it, merely punctuating each pause in an
innocent folksong with a resounding, brutal and discordant crash, an effect
which, did it not remind one of a sadistic schoolmaster chastising a wretched
country bumpkin, would verge on the ludicrous." Whew! Setting aside the
sadism, this comment points up the Englishman's view of folk melody as
innocent (Arcadian, nostalgic, to be protected) as opposed to Bartók's serious
intent to preserve the lifeblood of Rumanian and Hungarian songs by
emphasising their raw intensity, their pounding rhythmic irregularity, and the
modern harmonies reached by analysing their quirky melodic shapes. Eastern
European folksongs are full of strange leaps of 2nds, 7ths and 9ths, swooping
and yowling their way through quarter tones, impossible to reproduce on the
piano, only emulated by the excitement of tone clusters.
The first and third movements of the Sonata are dominated, then, by the energy,
humour and rumbustiousness (almost getting out of control in the whirling last
movement) of peasant music; the slow movement an oasis of space and
mystery, a hymn to the gods, and in its quiet way, unsettling and severe.
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INTERVAL
Coffee and drinks are available in the foyer. Coffee is 80p a cup: to find us, just
go past the bar, out on to the landing, and turn to the left.
The Alcotts
Charles Ives
(1874-1954)
"Charles Ives is a key figure in American Art; his music is emblematic of a
broad and inclusive approach to culture, rather than an exclusive and elitist one;
it campaigns vigorously for artistic freedom and tolerance. In an occasionally
volatile mixture it includes hymn-tunes, ragtime, popular marches, references to
other composers, tone clusters, and rhythmically riotous distortion and
experiment. However, Ives had an excellent ear and a good, and conventional,
academic background - at Yale University. So the character of his music is
entirely determined by philosophical and aesthetic choices, not as some of the
snootier pundits would prefer - by wilful musical incompetence." (Michael
Finnissy)
The Alcotts is the third movement of Ives' huge, wild and visionary Second
Piano Sonata (1909-15), usually known as the Concord, after the town in
Massachusetts where such eminent men of literature as Emerson, Hawthorne
and Thoreau lived. The music is an improvisatory meditation on the opening
"fate" theme from Beethoven's Fifth symphony. Heard right from the start in a
hushed B flat major tonality, the theme slowly transforms itself into an
emotionally powerful outpouring of C major chords at the end. Along the way
we hear fragments of American folk and parlour songs. Writing about this
particular piece in Essays before a Sonata, Ives observed, "All around you,
under the Concord sky, there still floats the influence of that human-faith-
melody transcendent and sentimental enough for the enthusiast or the cynic,
respectively reflecting an innate hope, a common interest in common things
and common man."
1
I
1
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>>
)
Piano Sonata No.32 in C minor, Op.111
Maestoso - Allegro con brio ed appassionato
Arietta: Adagio molto semplice e cantabile
Ludwig van Beethoven
(1770-1827)
Beethoven's last sonatas are intimate and personal, possessing spacious spiritual
qualities that often collide with more jagged, abrasive music; surely something
to do with the circumstances that Beethoven was labouring under. Total
deafness had overwhelmed Beethoven by
he found it difficult to
communicate on any casual level (his friends wrote their side of the conversation
down in notebooks), he was plagued by debts and obsessed with disastrous
lawsuits concerning the custody of his nephew. Out of all this chaos sprang the
most innovative, mysterious and challenging of his sonatas (in 1822). This is
not a sentimental reflection (the power of artists to overcome the odds, shake
their fist at the gods etc, etc) but an observation that all artists possess, to a
greater or lesser degree, the abilities of an alchemist, the power to transform the
messy tragedies and pain of everyday life into the beauties of their language.
Beethoven's deafness was always a handy excuse for contemporary listeners
who found his work grotesque and harsh. The Arietta, for example, is a simple
song with the two hands spaced wide apart. Commentators found this opening
incompetent and strange, citing that Beethoven was trying to hear what he was
writing by using extreme registers. Today's listeners, however, will hear purity,
simplicity and an expression of the divine. The technical difficulties in
Beethoven's sonatas precluded amateurs for the first time in musical history, but
professional pianists armed with a virtuoso technique, an eye on the public
gallery and no brain were stumped by this music. Rather like a Zen master,
Beethoven was asking them to bring a powerful technique but then forget and
transcend it.
The first movement opens traditionally. After a slow introduction, with hushed,
dotted chords (in the manner of a curtain raising on an opera, complete with
thunder drum-roll) and trademark silences, Beethoven roars into a cataclysmic
sonata-form opening. There's a lot of muscular energy in this piano writing,
teetering on the edge of pared-down counterpoint, but the form is telescoped
down, as if Beethoven really doesn't need a lot of time to say what needs to be
said. Everything is kept brief: the second subject (6 bars long, barely there), a
fugato episode at the beginning of the development (8 bars), the development
itself is kept to a minimum (20 bars). After a final torrent of upward-moving
semiquavers the movement reaches its end with a succession of hammer blows
(another Beethoven trademark, but unlike the Eroica symphony, these hammer-
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Saturday, 4 May 2002
St Chad's, Campleshon Road, 8 pm
Micklegate Singers
Nicholas Carter director
Come Holy Ghost -- a programme embracing music for Pentecost, with a variety
of settings of the medieval hymn Veni creator Spiritus, including music by Byrd,
Harvey, Marlow, Penderecki, Rutter and Tallis.
Saturday, 18 May 2002
York Barbican Centre, 7.30 pm
Guildhall Orchestra
Simon Wright director
John Adams' A short ride on a fast machine, Elgar's In the South, Rutland
Boughton's Trumpet Concerto (John Wallace - trumpet) and Sibelius' Second
Symphony.
Saturday, 8 June 2002
York Minster, 7.30 pm
York Musical Society
Philip Moore conductor
An all-Beethoven programme - The Creatures of Prometheus, Violin Concerto
and Mass in C.
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21
e
FORTHCOMING CONCERTS
This is the last concert in the 81st Season of the British Music Society of York.
For our plans in the near future, see inside front cover.
More dates for
your diaries:
Saturday, 16 March 2002
North Transept of York Minster, 8 pm
Chapter House Choir
Jane Sturmheit director
Antiphonies - music for brass instruments and voices by Giovanni Gabrieli and
Bruckner. Programme also includes music by Schütz.
Saturday, 16 March 2002
Sir Jack Lyons Concert Hall, 8 pm
York Symphony Orchestra
Leslie Bresnen conductor
Sibelius' suite King Christian II, Franck's Symphonic Variations (Gemma
Webster-piano) and Borodin's First Symphony.
Saturday, 13 April 2002
St Olave's, Marygate, 9 pm
Academy of St Olave's
John Hastie director
A meditation on the Resurrection, to include Messiaen's spectacular Et expecto
resurrectionem mortuorum.
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blows quickly fade), and melts into a seething, troubling coda, reaching the final
chord of C major (hands wide apart).
For Beethoven's publisher Schlesinger, the most perplexing thing about the
second movement was that there was no third movement. For us, it cannot help
but represent Beethoven's farewell to the piano and now another movement
seems unthinkable (though I'm sure if Beethoven had decided to write another
movement our whole perspective of the piece would shift; he himself said, rather
flippantly, he ran out of time. You can always rely on composers to take a more
down-to-earth view). After the opening song the movement is a series of
seamless variations which flow and entwine, like a river of thought patterns. A
quick glance at the time signatures tells you how far ahead of his contemporaries
Beethoven was: the theme and first variation are in 9/16, the second is in 6/16
and the famous third variation, a truly jazzy, funky episode (admittedly both
those adjectives would be completely unknown to Beethoven) is in 12/32. If
you think this sounds complicated, take a look at the music, and you will find
that it is! But the point is Beethoven almost had to invent a notation to write
down very direct, simple music, music that escaped the old regularities and
reassurances of 3/4 and 4/4.
After this jazzy variation, repeat signs are forgotten and the music unfolds with a
rocking, tremulous bassline alternating with delicate, high and hypnotic music.
A series of intense trills leads into E flat major but quickly retracts to a full
exposition of the theme again back in C, with a tremendous build-up
Beethoven seems to be pushing to the limits of the pianist's and piano's strength,
as the river flows into the sea. The music subsides again with a trill variation
and an impossibly simple cadence at the end: unfussy, unforced, beautifully
paced, as the curtain that was raised some thirty minutes ago gently falls.
Beethoven really did "run out of time;" time literally stops at the end of this
magnificent work.
Programme notes © March 2002 Joanna MacGregor
Floral decorations by Sue Bedford
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BRITISH MUSIC SOCIETY
of YORK
OFFICERS OF THE SOCIETY
President Dr Francis Jackson
Rosalind Richards
Vice-President
Chairman
Vice-Chairman
Hon. Treasurer
Hon. Asst. Treasurer
Hon. Secretary
Hon. Publicity Secretary
Hon. Programme Secretary
NFMS Representative
Hon Auditor
Members of the Committee
David Mather
John Robinson
Albert Ainsworth
John Petrie
Nigel Dick
Marc Schatzberger
Amanda Crawley
Dr Richard Crossley
Derek Winterbottom
Sue Bedford, Dr John Dawick, Peter
Marsden, Bob Stevens and Dr Mary Turner
BENEFACTORS AND PATRONS
The BMS manages to maintain the high standard of its concerts largely through
the generosity of its Benefactors and Patrons. Without their gifts to the Society,
many of them covenanted, we could not hope to balance our books.
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Our Benefactors (§) and Patrons are as follows:
Mr A Ainsworth §
Mr RA Bellingham
Mrs SM Carter §
Mrs M Danby-Smith §
Mr CGM Gardner
Mr JC Joslin
Mr RP Lorriman §
Mrs GO Morcom §
Mrs IG Sargent §
Mr RDC Stevens §
Dr & Mrs GMA Turner § Mr JI Watson
Mrs HB Wright §
Mrs SM Wright
Mrs PJ Armour
Mr & Mrs DAC Blunt §
Dr RJS Crossley
Dr JD Dawick
Mr JA Gloag
Mr N Lange §
Mr & Mrs B Mattinson §
Canon & Mrs JS Pearson
Mr M Schatzberger
Mrs DC Summers §
Making
Music
If you would like to become a Benefactor or Patron, please get in touch with our
Hon. Treasurer, either at the ticket desk before each concert, or at 8, Petersway,
York, YO30 6AR. All other correspondence about the Society should be
addressed to the Hon. Secretary, 6, Bishopgate St., York, YO23 1JH.
Dr DM Bearpark
Mr J Briggs
Mr J Curry §
Mr NJ Dick §
Dr FA Jackson
Prof. R Lawton §
Mr GC Morcom §
Mr & Mrs Rowlands §
Mrs I Stanley §
Mr DA Sutton
Mr R Wilkinson §
The BMS is affiliated to Making Music, the National
Federation of Music Societies, which represents and
supports amateur vocal, instrumental and promoting
societies throughout the United Kingdom.
Society also gratefully acknowledges the assistance
OF MUSIC SOCIETIES of the Royal Bank of Scotland.
The
THE NATIONAL FEDERATION
Registered Charity No.700302
Compiled by David Mather and published by the British Music Society of York.
Reproduced by the Trophy & Print Shop, Commercial St, Norton, Malton.
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INSTITUTE
DURTHWIJN
SMS 3/2/10 (3)
OF
HISTORICAL RESEARCH
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B'S
YORK
The Sorrell
String Quartet
Thursday, 10 October 2002
Programme: £1.00
Presented by the British Music Society of York
in association with the Department of Music
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NOTICE BOARD
Welcome to the 82nd Season
The BMS would like to welcome you all tonight, to the first concert of our 82nd
Season. I'm sure you'll agree our Programme Secretary has done us proud
again. If any of you are here on a £10.00 single ticket, but can't resist the look
of the rest of the season, simply bring tonight's ticket along to the November
concert and you can trade it in for a £40.00 season ticket for no more than the
balance of £30.00. Which has to be good value.
* Presentation to the retiring Honorary Treasurer
In appreciation of all his work over the years in this onerous post, a retirement
Thanks to the
gift was made to Albert Ainsworth at the AGM in June.
generosity of many members, we were able to present him with one of the
remarkable Bose Wave radios. A few days later, the Secretary received the
following letter:
May I, through you, express my thanks to the Officers, Committee and Members
of the British Music Society of York for their kindness and forbearance over the
last nine years and especially for the exciting and unexpected gift which I received
last Thursday evening.
The Wave Radio is a truly remarkable machine which I am sure will give Betty
and me great pleasure. Our only problem is where best to put it in a house rather
over-stocked with radios, although nothing of this quality.
Many thanks to all,
With Best wishes,
Albert.
Your Views
The BMS is a society run for the benefit of its members by a dedicated
committee elected from amongst those members. If there is something you
think we should be doing, or should not be doing, don't keep it to yourself:
please tell a committee member. They should all be wearing badges, and,
however it may appear, they do want to hear from you.
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BRITISH MUSIC SOCIETY
of YORK
82nd Season
Thursday, 10 October 2002
Sir Jack Lyons Concert Hall
The Sorrel String Quartet
Gina McCormack & Catherine Yates violins
Sarah-Jane Bradley viola, Helen Thatcher cello
Haydn
Walton
Mendelssohn
Quartet in D, Op.76 No.5
Quartet in A minor
INTERVAL
Quartet in A minor, Op.13
For the sake of others in the audience, please turn off all
mobile phones and alarms on watches, calculators etc.,
and use a handkerchief when coughing.
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The SORRELL STRING QUARTET
After several years' residency at the University, the Sorrell Quartet hardly needs
any introduction to a York audience. However, for newcomers to the district ...
The Sorrell Quartet was formed in 1987 and has held residencies at the
Universities of Liverpool and Newcastle as well as York. They now give
concert series and classes at the Universities of Bristol and Leeds, as well as at
the Royal Northern College of Music in Manchester.
Last year the group played at the Kuhmo International Festival in Finland and as
part of a complete Beethoven cycle in Vienna. Following a successful debut in
Switzerland, live on Swiss Radio, the Quartet will return this year, as well as
playing in Belgium and Germany.
The Sorrell Quartet has recorded nine discs on the Chandos label three
volumes of Shostakovich, all the major works of Britten, Carwithen and Pickard
as well as single CDs devoted to Elgar, Mendelssohn and Schubert. Following a
York tradition, the Quartet has built up a strong association and empathy with
the works of Shostakovich, the first of their Shostakovich discs being voted by
Classic FM the 20th-century CD of the year 2000.
Many composers have written for the Sorrell Quartet, including Elena Firsova,
Richard Orton, Geoffrey Palmer, John Paynter, Simon Rowland-Jones and
James Wishart. They have also given premieres of works by Diana Burrell,
Roxanna Panufnik and John Tavener.
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ve
at
as
10
25
a
PROGRAMME NOTES
String Quartet in D, Op.76 No.5
Allegretto
Largo. Cantabile e mesto
Menuetto: Allegro
Finale: Presto
Joseph Haydn
(1732-1809)
The string quartet - its composers, players and devotees - owe a great debt to
Joseph Haydn. He did not actually invent the form, but his efforts alone raised it
from relative obscurity, gave it cogent structure and sent it out into the world as
the powerfully expressive medium we now know. In Marion Scott's pretty
words, "Haydn and the string quartet were young together."
It was in the mid 1750s, his early 20s, that Haydn first wrote for the combination
of two violins, viola and cello: he had been invited to a nobleman's country
palace to spend the summer teaching and while there provided "divertimentos"
for entertainment. At the time Haydn was still scratching a precarious living as
a freelance musician in Vienna. It was only in 1759 that he entered service with
a certain Count Morzin, but he was quickly snapped up by the Esterházys, one of
the great houses of the Austrian Empire, with whom he spent nearly all his long
and astonishingly productive working career.
The Esterházy musical establishment, which Haydn soon came to direct, was a
large one and had little use for quartets: the demand was always for symphonies,
operas, masses, and, bizarrely, trios involving the baryton, a curious stringed
instrument that was a passion of Prince Nikolaus. But Haydn was allowed to
accept commissions from outside, provided he obtained permission first, and as
his fame spread throughout Austria and beyond to Paris, London and elsewhere
requests came flooding in.
Apart from symphonies, Haydn was most often asked for quartets. These were
popular with amateurs, but also had a vogue amongst the nobility. Not everyone
could afford a musical establishment on the opulent scale of the Esterházys, but
a string quartet was a respectable alternative with a burgeoning repertory.
And so Haydn produced quartets by the half dozen to various commissions. In
the 1790s alone he composed: six (Op.64) to join the similar set he had already
written for a former Eszterháza colleague, the violinist Johann Tost; six
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(published in two parts as Op.71 and Op.74) for Count Apponyi; and six (Op.76)
for Count Erdődy. In 1799 or shortly before, he was commissioned to write
another six by Prince Lobkowitz, one of Beethoven's long-suffering patrons.
Haydn set to work that year, but produced only two Quartets, published in 1803
as his Op.77.
The fifth of the Op.76 set is in D major. Amongst quartet players it is
sometimes referred to as "the quartet with the Largo", or simply the "Largo".
It's easy to see why. Musicians by and large are happier with names and
nicknames than catalogue numbers, and, of the many notable features of this
Quartet, the first that would naturally spring to any player's mind is the glorious
Largo slow movement. Not the only Largo in the Haydn quartets, but pre-
eminent amongst them. To begin with, it is almost as long as the rest of the
quartet put together and quite simply one of the greatest, most profound and
beautiful slow movements Haydn ever composed. And it is unlikely any player
would forget the key F sharp major, which any (almost any!) Grade 5
candidate will tell you has six sharps. As a key, many composers have used it
for its quality of radiance, even ecstasy, but Haydn has a different task for it, as
the tempo marking's Mesto [= sadly] testifies.
-
The first movement is unusual, too, its structure hovering tantalisingly between
sonata, variation and rondo forms. Its main idea has the dotted rhythm of a
siciliano, and, like a classical variation set, the movement closes with a faster
coda, perhaps a buffer between the main body of the movement, with its slowish
Allegretto speed, and the slow movement proper which follows.
The return to D major of the Minuet after the serenity of the Largo could have
been a disturbing experience, but Haydn turns it into the gentlest of bumps by
not quite cutting the cord: he starts the main opening theme with (allowing for
the difference in keys) the same four notes. The trio section slips into a D minor
dominated by the low grumbling of the cello.
If by this time you've been wondering what has happened to Haydn's legendary
high spirits, you are about to find out. The Presto Finale immediately grabs the
attention by opening exactly the way you'd expect it to end, before launching
into what seems one of the silliest, most inconsequential themes Haydn ever
wrote; but Haydn by this stage in his long career could do things with a silly,
inconsequential theme you just wouldn't credit.
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Op.76)
1803
ti
as
cen
VISIO
ave
por
String Quartet in A minor
Allegro
Presto
Lento
Allegro molto
William Walton
(1902-1983)
As you can see from his dates, this year has seen the centenary of Sir William
Walton, which the Sorrel Quartet is marking by playing us the A minor Quartet.
Walton was a northern boy, the son of a choirmaster in Oldham, who arranged
for him to compete for a place as chorister at Christ Church Cathedral, Oxford.
Although the boy had shown no particular precocity in music, he had a good
voice and the place offered the chance of an education superior to any within the
geographical or financial reach of the family. He won one, and whilst at Oxford
blossomed as a musician, so much so that the Dean of Christ Church persuaded
the father to let him become an undergraduate, despite being only 16.
Walton left the university in 1920 without a degree, not through any defect in his
musical education - he passed the B.Mus. examination but owing to the
technicality that he could not be granted the degree without having passed the
general first-year examinations which he repeatedly failed. While at Oxford he
had become close to Osbert and Sacheverell Sitwell and spent the next ten years
or so with them and their sister Edith as an "adopted, or elected, brother." The
Sitwell's support was to prove decisive: they gave him a home where he could
concentrate all he liked on composing, introduced him to their wider cultural
circle, and, slightly against his natural character, encouraged all that was radical
and intellectual in his art. Revisionist musicologists, as you might expect, have
put strange constructions on the relationship, but their reservations pale into
insignificance beside the achievement and success of Façade, with music by
Walton and poems by Edith.
-
This was the work that made Walton's a household name, first as an enfant
terrible, then as perhaps the leading mainstream British composer of the time.
The late 1920s and 1930s saw the peak of his career, starting with the 1928/9
Viola Concerto (still a cornerstone of the repertory), through the 1930/1 oratorio
Belshazzar's Feast (ditto) and First Symphony (1932-5) to the Violin Concerto
(1938/9). Much of the war years was spent writing music for films, including
The first of the few and the first of his three Shakespearean collaborations with
Laurence Olivier, Henry V.
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After the War, however, Walton's career declined, to a large extent eclipsed by
the rise of Benjamin Britten. Britten possessed three distinct advantages over
Walton. First he was simply more fluent and prolific - you only have to look at
the dates attached to the works mentioned above to see Walton took a long time
over his music. Second, Britten was active as a performer, both as conductor
and as accompanist to friends who numbered some of the great vocalists and
instrumentalists of the age - all of which helped his celebrity profile. And
thirdly, the public was keen to distance itself from memories of the recent
horrific past, and the familiar was being thrown out in favour of the new,
modern and progressive in every field from architecture to prime ministers. Not
always resulting in an improvement.
Walton had no answer to the new state of affairs, not without, as the cliché has
it, compromising his artistic integrity. In 1948 he married Susana Gil, whom he
met at a Performing Rights Society conference in her native Argentina, and
decamped to the island of Ischia in the Bay of Naples. And who can blame him?
Certainly no one who has actually been there. He continued composing, mostly
to commission, the most notable works being the opera Troilus and Cressida
(1950-4), Cello Concerto (1956), Partita for orchestra (1957), Second Symphony
(1959-60), Variations on a theme of Hindemith (1962/3) and one act
"extravaganza" The Bear (1965-7). That none was received with anything better
than mixed reviews says much more about the musical orthodoxies of the time
than about the quality of the music.
The String Quartet dates from the immediate post-war period. Walton had
written an earlier quartet, which was performed in Salzburg at the first festival
(1923) promoted by the International Society for Contemporary Music. It was
praised by no less a person than Alban Berg, but Walton wasn't satisfied and
quickly withdrew it. He seems to have begun thinking of writing another quartet
in 1939, but was prevented from getting any further by work on film scores
during the war years. It was perhaps as an antidote to this film work that he
turned immediately after the War to the field of chamber music, producing the A
minor Quartet, completed in 1947, followed immediately by a Violin Sonata
(1949) for Yehudi Menuhin and Louis Kentner.
The lyrical, rather yielding mood established by the opening of the Quartet's
first movement contrasts with some of the grittier writing to follow, particularly
the muscular fugue that dominates the development section. The scherzo-like
Presto that follows grows out of material heard in the first movement and
maintains its taut rhythmic character almost throughout, allowing just a slight
softening at the end. In the slow movement it is the viola, for once, that gets
more than its fair share of the melodic lines, ranging in mood from the
1
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over
ct
2
me
S
D
melancholy and withdrawn to open passion. The finale bursts in with a
pulsating rhythmic gesture crackling with nervous energy: this dominates the
movement, never far away even in the music of the most lyrical episode.
INTERVAL
Coffee and drinks are available in the foyer. Coffee is 80p a cup: to find us, just
go past the bar, out on to the landing, and turn to the left.
String Quartet in A minor, Op.13
Adagio - Allegro vivace
Adagio non lento
Felix Mendelssohn
(1809-1847)
Intermezzo: Allegretto con moto (with central Allegro di molto)
Presto - Adagio come primo
Mendelssohn belonged to a remarkable intellectual Jewish family: his
grandfather had been the famous philosopher Moses Mendelssohn, an influential
teacher who almost single-handedly steered Judaism through the Age of the
Enlightenment. Young Felix's upbringing proceeded with a combination of
German thoroughness and Jewish intensity. The use of private tutors allowed an
education that was exceptionally broad and deep - not to mention long: it is said
the boy's studies began at five in the morning.
The family and its circle contained many fine amateur musicians, and domestic
music-making was frequent, adventurous and of a high standard. Mendelssohn
took an active part as pianist and violinist, and it was not long before
compositions of his own came to be included, starting in May 1820 with a trio
for violin, viola and piano. The experience this music-making allowed, both in
assimilating the music of others and assessing the effect and effectiveness of his
own, goes some way to explaining the precocity of his talent - the almost
flawless mastery of the Octet (1825) and the remarkable overture to A
midsummer night's dream (1826).
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It is perhaps an indication of the thoroughness of his education that Mendelssohn
had unusual interest and regard for music of the past, particularly Bach: he
conducted the first performances since the Bach's own day of the St Matthew
Passion, events that single-handedly kick-started the Bach Revival. To judge
from some accounts, you'd imagine the whole project came about solely because
of Mendelssohn's enthusiasm and persistence. In fact, there was a sizeable
group of enthusiasts eager to get the work performed, and, if anything, it was
Mendelssohn himself who had misgivings, doubting both his own (untried)
ability to direct the rehearsals and performance of such a large body of
musicians and the capacity of the audience to take an antiquated work of such
epic spiritual, intellectual and temporal dimensions. But two performances were
given in Berlin in March 1829, just before Mendelssohn embarked on the trip to
England, Wales, and, especially, Scotland that would result in the Hebrides
Overture and the Scottish Symphony.
Two string quartets date from these years. Op.12 in E flat was written in
London in the autumn of 1829, at the conclusion of his tour, and published later
in the year. Op.13 in A minor appeared the following year, but was actually an
earlier work, the score being dated 26 October 1827: Mendelssohn wrote it after
another long summer trip, this time only as far as the Harz Mountains, Bavaria,
Baden and the Rheinland.
Where Mendelssohn's earlier music had shown signs of his great love of Bach
and Mozart, the two Quartets are unmistakably influenced by Beethoven - the
middle period quartets in the case of Op.12 and the late with Op.13. As
Beethoven had, Mendelssohn prefaces the A minor first movement Allegro with
a slow, A major introduction that sets out material he will allude to throughout
the piece. In particular a three-note motif heard twice a few bars before the
Allegro proper, a motif taken from his recently composed song Frage [=
question]. The main Allegro sets the tone for most of the work, writing that
inclines to the contrapuntal and is as intense as only people in their late
teens/early 20s can be.
The second movement begins and ends calmly in F major, but the bulk of it is
more restless, making use of fugal textures and building up a good head of
steam. A passionate admirer of Bach and Beethoven, Mendelssohn found fugue
came easily to him. The precise tempo marking Adagio non lento suggests a
well-educated young man (let's not forget that on his return from the British
Isles early in 1830 the University of Berlin offered him its newly-established
professorship of music, which, mercifully, he declined) claiming to understand a
distinction that is in reality illusory.
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2
the
As
with
out
the
que
51
The third movement takes the place of the minuet/scherzo of the four-movement
classical scheme. Mendelssohn calls it Intermezzo probably because it is in two
time, not three. The A minor Allegretto con moto has just about the most
relaxed music in the whole Quartet, enclosing a much faster, scherzo-like
Allegro di molto in the major.
The opening ad lib. recitative of the Presto finale shouts its Beethovenian
lineage. The movement keeps up its driving intensity, virtually without
flagging, until the very last lines, when an extended version of the A major
music which began the first movement finally makes the self-quotation from the
song Frage explicit.
Programme notes by David Mather
Floral decorations by Sue Bedford
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FORTHCOMING CONCERTS
The next concert in the 82nd Season of the British Music Society of York,
presented in association with the Department of Music at the University, takes
place as usual in the Sir Jack Lyons Concert Hall, beginning at 8 pm.
* Friday, 22 November 2002
Severin von Eckardstein (piano)
Beethoven Variations on Righini's Venni Amore, WoO 65
Sonata in F sharp minor, Op.11
Schumann
Canto
Sonata in B minor
Giles Swayne
Liszt
More dates for your diaries:
Saturday, 12 October 2002
York Barbican Centre, 7.30 pm
City of York Guildhall Orchestra
Simon Wright music director
Prokof'yev's Third Piano Concerto (Grace Huang-piano) and Mahler's Fifth
Symphony
Wednesday, 16 October 2002
Sir Jack Lyons Concert Hall, 8 pm
Peter Donohoe piano
Programme includes sonatas by Mozart (K.332 in F), Prokof'yev (No.6) and
Chopin (No.3) as well as Debussy's Estampes
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Saturday, 2 November 2002
National Centre for Early Music, Walmgate, 8.00 pm
York Cantores
Marion Best conductor
J.S. Bach's motets Der Geist hilft and Komm, Jesu, komm
Saturday, 9 November 2002
York Minster, 7.30 pm
York Musical Society
Philip Moore conductor
Settings of the Te Deum by Dvořák and Stanford, Fauré's Cantique de Jean
Racine and Psalms by Holst
Sunday, 10 November 2002
St Olave's, Marygate, 10.30am
Academy of St Olave's
John Hastie director
To celebrate Remembrance Sunday, a solemn Requiem Mass incorporating the
setting by Fauré. Entry is free.
Saturday, 16 November 2002
Chapter House of York Minster, 8.00 pm
Chapter House Choir
Stephen Williams director
The heritage of English church music - a concert featuring treasures of our
church music heritage, including Vaughan Williams' Mass in G minor
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BRITISH MUSIC SOCIETY
of YORK
OFFICERS OF THE SOCIETY
President Dr Francis Jackson
Vice-Presidents
Chairman
Vice-Chairman
Hon. Treasurer
Hon. Asst. Treasurer
Hon. Secretary
Hon. Publicity Secretary
Hon. Programme Secretary
NFMS Representative
Hon Auditor
Members of the Committee
Prof. Nicola LeFanu, Rosalind Richards
David Mather
Bob Stevens
John Robinson
John Petrie
Nigel Dick
Marc Schatzberger
Amanda Crawley
Dr Richard Crossley
Derek Winterbottom
Dr Sandy Anderson, Helen Mackman, Lesley
Mather, Dr Mary Turner and John Woods
BENEFACTORS AND PATRONS
The BMS manages to maintain the high standard of its concerts largely through
the generosity of its Benefactors and Patrons. Without their gifts to the Society,
many of them covenanted, we could not hope to balance our books.
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Our Benefactors (§) and Patrons are as follows:
Mr A. Ainsworth §
Mr R.A. Bellingham
Dr R.J.S. Crossley
Mrs M. Danby-Smith §
Mr N.J. Dick §
Mr J.A. Gloag
Mr N. Lange §
Mr G.C. Morcom §
Mr & Mrs L.W. Robinson §
Mrs I.G. Sargent §
Mrs D.C. Summers §
Dr & Mrs G.M.A. Turner §
Mrs S.M. Wright
Dr D.M. Bearpark
Mrs S.M. Carter §
Mr J. Curry §
Dr J.D. Dawick
Mr C.G.M. Gardner
Dr F.A. Jackson
Prof. R. Lawton §
Canon & Mrs J.S. Pearson
Mr & Mrs D.G. Rowlands §
Mr & Mrs M. Schatzberger
Mr D.A. Sutton
Mr R. Wilkinson §
If you would like to become a Benefactor or Patron, please get in touch with our
Hon. Treasurer, either at the ticket desk before each concert, or at 20, Barmby
Ave, Fulford, York, YO10 4HX. All other correspondence about the Society
should be addressed to the Hon. Secretary, 6, Bishopgate St., York, YO23 1JH.
Making
Music Society also gratefully acknowledges the assistance
The BMS is affiliated to Making Music, the National
Federation of Music Societies, which represents and
supports amateur vocal, instrumental and promoting
societies the United Kingdom. The
Registered Charity No.700302
THE NATIONAL FEDERATION of the Royal Bank of Scotland.
OF MUSIC SOCIETIES
Compiled by David Mather and published by the British Music Society of York.
Reproduced by the Trophy & Print Shop, Commercial St, Norton, Malton.
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INSTITUTE
BURTHWIC
BMS 3/2/10 (4)
HISTORICAL RESEARCH
*
OF
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BAS
YORK
Severin von Eckardstein
(piano)
Friday, 22 November 2002
Programme: £1.00
Presented by the British Music Society of York
in association with the Department of Music
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NOTICE BOARD
* Advertising our Concerts
The bigger the audience we can attract to BMS concerts, the more money there
will be for the concerts budget, which means we would be able to afford artists
we can at present only dream of inviting. You can help. You must know of
places where our posters could be seen by potential new audience
our next concert are available in the foyer: help yourself and help the Society.
Posters for
* Forthcoming Concerts
One of the ways we are increasing our publicity effort is by reciprocal
advertising with other concert promoters: when they have a concert coming up
shortly we tell our audience about it and they reciprocate. You will find details
of these concerts towards the end of this book.
Your Views
The BMS is a society run for the benefit of its members by a dedicated
committee elected from amongst those members. If there is something you
think we should be doing, or should not be doing, don't keep it to yourself:
please tell a committee member. They should all be wearing badges, and,
however it may appear, they do want to hear from you.
Our Website
The BMS has its own dedicated website, containing a short history of the
Society and an updated list of forthcoming concerts. If you haven't found it
already, the URL is http://www.bms-york.org.uk/
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BRITISH MUSIC SOCIETY
of YORK
82nd Season
Friday, 22 November 2002
Sir Jack Lyons Concert Hall
Severin von Eckardstein
piano
Beethoven
Schumann
Variations on a theme of Righini, WoO 65
Piano Sonata in F# minor, Op.11
Giles Swayne
INTERVAL
Canto
Liszt Piano Sonata in B minor, S. 178
For the sake of others in the audience, please turn off all
mobile phones and alarms on watches, calculators etc.,
and use a handkerchief when coughing.
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SEVERIN von ECKARDSTEIN
Severin von Eckardstein was born in 1978 in Düsseldorf. He had his first
piano lessons at the age of six and six years later became a junior student at the
Düsseldorf Musikhochschule, where he was taught by Barbara Szczepanska.
Since then he has also studied with Karl-Heinz Kämmerling in Hanover and
Salzburg, and with Klaus Hellwig at the Hochschule der Künste in Berlin.
Severin has won prizes at many international competitions, including the
International Chopin Competition in Göttingen and the Ferruccio Busoni
Competition in Italy. In 1999 he won second prize at the ARD Competition in
Munich and in 2000 third prize at the Leeds International Piano Competition: at
the latter he also won the special prize for contemporary music. (Many who
were there felt he should have won the whole competition. But that's the Leeds
for you.)
PROGRAMME NOTES
Variations on a theme of Righini, WoO 65
Ludwig van Beethoven
(1770-1827)
Vincenzo Righini (1756-1812) was born and died in Bologna, but spent most
of his working life in the German-speaking world (Prague, Vienna, Mainz and
Berlin) as a singer, singing teacher, composer of operas and other vocal music
and operatic administrator. He was originally brought to Vienna as a singing
teacher by the Emperor, which made him, of course, the teacher to go to: even
Mozart was envious of the fees he made. By all accounts he was a thoroughly
likable man, straightforward, unpretentious and respected by all.
The Variations WoO 65 actually form one of Beethoven's earliest "mature"
pieces, dating from 1790, before his move to Vienna, while he was still in the
service of the Elector of Cologne in Bonn. The work predates, for instance, the
Op.1 Piano Trios by three or four years and the Op.2 Piano Sonatas by slightly
more.
The Variations take as their theme the arietta Venni Amore, not an extract from
an opera this time, but one of a set of 12 Ariettas published during Righini's
time in the service of the Elector of Mainz. The theme is ideally suited to
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variation treatment, having a strong harmonic structure, a simple and logical
structure to the melodic line and a helpful amount of literal repetition or
sequence: this is hardly surprising, since Righini's original is cast as a set of
theme and five variations - in itself a fairly unconventional idea for an arietta at
the time, but one frequently explored by the composer. Beethoven was
evidently pleased with the result, since he not only had it published in 1791 but,
according to his pupil Czerny, chose the work to introduce himself to the
Viennese public a couple of years later.
In the autumn of 1791, the Elector of Cologne had to make a trip with his court
as part of his obligations as Grand Master of the Teutonic Order. A few
members of the Electoral orchestra decided to take advantage of their proximity
and travel to Ashaffenburg, summer residence of the Elector of Mainz, to pay
their respects to the court pianist, Abbé Sterkel, possibly the most celebrated
pianist in "Germany." They took Beethoven along with them. He was still only
20 and, however big a fish in their relatively small pond, still unpolished. As
Franz Wegeler, a close friend of the young Beethoven, put it in his
reminiscences: "because he had not yet heard any great or celebrated pianists,
Beethoven knew nothing of the finer nuances of handling the instrument; his
playing was rough and hard."
The group easily persuaded Sterkel to play for them, but, after his display, they
had more difficulty persuading Beethoven to do the same. Eventually they hit
on the idea of getting him to play the recently-pubished Righini Variations, a
good choice for two reasons: first, Sterkel's half-sister Anna Maria was actually
married to Righini; and second, Sterkel could goad Beethoven into playing by
suggesting the variations were too hard even for their composer to play. As
Wegeler describes it:
Sterkel's playing was very light, highly pleasing, and, as the elder Ries put it, somewhat ladylike.
Beethoven stood beside him concentrating intensely. Then he was asked to play, but only
complied when Sterkel intimated that he doubted whether even the composer of the Variations
could play them all the way through. Beethoven played not only these variations, as far as he
could remember them (Sterkel could not locate the music), but also a number of others no less
difficult and, to the amazement of his listeners, he played everything in precisely the same
pleasant manner with which Sterkel had impressed him. That is how easy it was for him to adapt
the style of his playing to someone else's.
The Variations were re-published in 1802, the year that saw also saw the
publication of the Piano Sonatas Op.22, 26, 27 and 28 (one of them the
Moonlight) and the composition of the Second Symphony, the three Op.30
Violin Sonatas and three Op.31 Piano Sonatas. The republished Variations were
described as "revised," but to what extent this is true cannot be judged: no copy
of the 1791 edition appears to have survived to form the basis of a comparison.
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There are 24 variations in all, a large number for the time (Mozart, for instance,
never went beyond 12), but one which Beethoven went on to exceed and
eventually dwarf with the monumental Diabelli Variations. The 24, however,
show an impressive range for one so young and have been described as
amounting to a resumé of current piano technique.
As was usual during this period, the set includes an excursion into the minor
(Var.12 & 13), and the penultimate variation (No.23) is an Adagio. Other
unusual variations are: No.14, which switches between fast and slow speeds
every four bars; No.20, with its sly Beethovenian humour; and the extended final
variation with its dramatic pauses, changes of key and speed, and carefully
written out slowing down at the end.
Piano Sonata No.1 in F# minor, Op.11
Un poco Adagio - Allegro vivace
Aria: MM crotchet = 54
Scherzo ed Intermezzo: Allegrissimo
Finale: Allegro un poco maestoso
[principal tempo markings only]
Robert Schumann
(1810-1856)
A strange thing happened to the piano sonata on the deaths of Beethoven and
Schubert in the late 1820s: it turned into a dinosaur almost overnight.
For 60-odd years it had dominated the keyboard output of composers who are
still in the active repertoire. Mozart wrote getting on for 20, Schubert slightly
more (in various stages of completion), Beethoven over 30, Haydn over 60. But
when it came to that remarkable generation of composers in their late teens when
Beethoven died, none of them managed more than three. Remarkable,
especially when you consider that two of these men, Schumann and Chopin,
were amongst the tiny handful of composers who instinctively knew how to
write music that unlocked the full potential of the instrument's sonority. Yet
each tackled the piano sonata only three times.
Why this should be is not a simple question. Many factors were involved, and I
doubt even the most modest compromise selection would go unchallenged by
every musicologist. But with two causes, at any rate, we are on safe ground.
The passing of Beethoven and Schubert can be seen as point at which the
"Classical" age of music definitively gave way to the "Romantic." The Age of
Reason was overtaken by the Age of the Senses. The sonata, with its emphasis
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on musical argument, is probably the most rigorously reasoned form, outside
fugue, that piano music has to offer. There was no longer any place for it -
except maybe when a composer wished to measure himself against the giants of
the past.
At the same time we were entering the time when pianos themselves were
changing. They were now the products of industry rather than of craftsmen: the
middle classes were becoming more affluent at the time when pianos were
becoming cheaper. Music for the piano was on its way to becoming more of a
mass market than it has ever been. And mass markets do not like to be over
challenged, technically or artistically: pieces such as Mendelssohn's Songs
without Words or Grieg's Lyric Pieces were always going to win out over the
likes of the Hammerklavier Sonata.
It was only when the various reactions to music of the Romantic school set in
with the late 19th and early 20th centuries that the piano sonata was reinvented
by the likes of Skryabin, Bartók, Stravinsky, Hindemith, Prokof'yev and, more
radically still, Ives and Boulez.
Schumann's Op.11 didn't even begin life as a piano sonata. It started with a
Fandango, described as a "fantasie rhapsodique," which Schumann composed in
1832 and included in a batch of piano works offered to the publisher
Hoffmeister. Unfortunately he mislaid the manuscript and had to send
Hoffmeister something else in its place. It turned up again, and Schumann
found a new home for it, in the one of three piano sonatas mentioned in several
letters of March 1834.
The F# minor Sonata takes and slightly expands the original Fandango to form
its first movement, following it with a fairly literal transcription of Schumann's
own early song To Anna (1828) as a slow movement appropriately titled Aria.
To link the two movements, and indeed to start the whole work like a piano
sonata, not a free standing dance movement, Schumann hit on the brilliant
solution of prefacing the first movement with a dramatic slow introduction,
which incorporates clear references to the song melody.
The remaining two movements, the Scherzo plus Intermezzo and Finale, were
newly composed for the Sonata, and to judge from the surviving sketches caused
Schumann considerable problems. But he overcame them, and completed the
work towards the end of August 1835.
This was the time when Schumann's former teacher, Friedrich Wieck, was
becoming increasingly alarmed with the young man's interest in his daughter
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Clara, just turning 16 and already a pianist and composer of some stature.
Schumann took advantage of Wieck's temporary absence in February 1836 to
see her, on learning which Wieck, infuriated, wrote to break off all relations
between them. Undaunted, Schumann dedicated the F# minor Sonata to her,
sending her a copy when it was published four months later. On which Clara,
almost certainly compelled by her father, wrote returning all Schumann's letters
to her, and demanding hers to him. Wieck's efforts were ultimately in vain, and
after a long legal battle the couple were married on 12 September. Her father's
fears proved not totally unfounded.
The Sonata opens with the Un poco Adagio introduction which sows the seeds
of material to be heard later in the work, a relatively new concept at the time.
The body of the first movement betrays its origins as a fandango, and there has
been no shortage of critics pointing to Schumann's inability to disenthrall
himself from main idea's bouncy rhythm; but for all its minor weaknesses, it is
hard not to be carried away by Schumann's passionate commitment.
As for the Aria (Schumann transposed his original song from F major up to A, a
more appropriate key for its new context), I can't improve on Liszt's opinion
that it is amongst the loveliest utterances ever confided to the piano.
The Scherzo is Schumann at his most over-excited. There are effectively two
"trio" sections: the first, slightly quicker, contrasts a legatissimo melodic line
with the lightest of staccato accompaniments; while the second is headed
"Intermezzo," a slower piece in burlesque style with a mock recitative ending.
Structurally and technically (some of the stretches alone make my hands ache
just looking at them) Schumann throws almost everything into the finale and,
once more, manages by sheer unstoppable youthful enthusiasm to get away with
it.
INTERVAL
Coffee and drinks are available in the foyer. Coffee is 80p a cup: to find us, just
go past the bar, out on to the landing, and turn to the left.
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1
1
1
}
Canto for piano
Giles Swayne
(b.1946)
Born in 1946, Giles Swayne started composing at an early age, and in his teens
was helped by the advice and encouragement of his cousin Elizabeth Maconchy,
whilst studying the piano with Gordon Green. After leaving school, he attended
Guido Agosti's piano classes at the 1964 Accademia Chigiana summer school in
Siena, and that autumn went up to Trinity College, Cambridge, where he studied
the piano with Phyllis Hepburn-Lee and composition with Nicholas Maw. In
1968 he won a composition scholarship to the Royal Academy of Music.
From 1971 Swayne worked as accompanist, répétiteur and teacher, while
developing his career as a composer. He was on the Glyndebourne music staff
for several years, but thereafter concentrated exclusively on composition. His
huge work for voices, CRY, commissioned by the BBC and first performed by
the BBC Singers under John Poole in October 1980, was hailed as a landmark,
and has since received two acclaimed Proms performances, in 1983 and 1994.
CRY has also been performed worldwide - most recently at the Wien Modern
Festival in 1997. Swayne has been described as "the most accomplished choral
composer in Britain," and his works in progress include a full-length opera,
Hamlet, commissioned by Opera North.
The Canto for piano was composed in 1973. The first performance took place in
an autumn 1974 broadcast by the redoubtable Susan Bradshaw, while the first
public performance was given on 23 November 1975 in the Purcell Room,
London, by Klaus Hellwig, one of Severin von Eckardstein's teachers.
When it came to writing an introduction to the piece, my most obvious source of
information was the composer himself. Giles Swayne sends us his apologies: he
has the builders in at the moment, and cannot get access to the cabinet where his
original programme note is stored. His e-mail did, though, include "some useful
if tedious facts" in case the original note couldn't be located. I've taken the
liberty of repeating them verbatim, as their informality has a endearing quality
rarely found in composer introductions:
It is very difficult to master, and I take my hat off to Herr von E for learning it. There is a
passage in parallel thirds in the middle - a sort of silly little ditty - which puzzled old Messiaen
greatly when I showed it to him in Paris in 1976. He was mystified by what he called "le
humour britannique." As far as I remember, the Canto is written in a free non-serial atonal
idiom. There probably are serial things going on, but they are quite free and undogmatic. I think
it's rather a good piece, but I haven't heard it for many years, so cannot be sure.
And in a second message:
...
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I shall look out the original programme note, but can tell you now that the Canto starts in a cool,
tinkly mood, lurches into wild extravagance, has a clown-like silly little interlude, and ends back
in cool tinkling. The idiom is 1970s atonal, but I hope with grace and humour.
Piano Sonata in B minor, S.178
Franz Liszt
(1811-1886)
The life of Franz Liszt has to rank as one of the most colourful amongst the
famous composers. I'll do what I can to reduce it to monochrome.
He was born in Hungary, the son of an official in the service of the Esterházy
family. The family moved to Vienna in 1821, where Franz studied with Czerny,
and two years later to Paris. The teenager's phenomenal abilities as a pianist
and improviser were by then obvious, and he toured England and France several
times until 1827 when his health began to suffer. He set up house in Paris with
his mother, making a living as a piano teacher, reading voraciously and having
to be restrained by his mother from joining the church. He moved easily in
artistic circles, meeting many artists who were to have great influence on him,
most particularly Berlioz and Chopin. But the most far-reaching influence came
in 1831, when Liszt heard Paganini for the first time. It inspired him, as many
before him, to do for and with the piano what Paganini had done on the violin.
It also meant seriously hard work four to five hours a day on technical
exercises alone.
Then came a complete break in his career. In 1835 he effectively eloped with a
married woman, the Countess Marie d'Agoult. They lived for four years in
Switzerland and Italy, during which time they had three children Blandine,
Cosima and Daniel. It was during this time that Liszt wrote the nature pictures
that eventually became his Années de pèlerinage, together with the original,
extreme versions of the Transcendental and Paganini Studies.
His life changed again in 1839. He'd heard that a proposed Beethoven
monument in Bonn was being shelved for lack of money and immediately
offered to provide what was needed. This meant giving concerts, and once
started he didn't stop for eight years, playing in towns and cities literally the
length and breadth of Europe, including the European parts of Turkey and
Russia. In February 1847 his travels took him to Kiyev, where he met the
Princess Carolyne Sayn-Wittgenstein, who pretty much dominated his life from
this point on. She persuaded him to give up his career as a travelling virtuoso
and concentrate on composition - a nobler profession.
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7
Liszt gave his last public concert that September in the Ukrainian city of
Yelizavetgrad [now Kirovograd]. He chose as his centre of activities Weimar,
whose court was so strongly steeped in culture it had already employed Bach
and Goethe. He'd held the post of Grand Ducal Director of Music Extraordinary
there from 1842, but the appointment was more for the prestige of both sides
than in any sense a serious commitment.
That now changed: Liszt made
conducting the Weimar orchestra his principal job, moving to the city in
February 1848. He spent the next 12 years in Weimar, during which he
composed or produced the definitive final versions of virtually every work by
which he is remembered.
Unfortunately, the grand duke that had appointed Liszt died in 1853. His
successor was more interested in drama, and musical performances were cut
down. Liszt's position gradually became untenable and he resigned in
December 1859, though it wasn't until the autumn of 1861 that he left for Rome,
his base for the next eight years during which he concentrated almost entirely on
religious music.
From 1869 until his death he lived what he himself referred to as his vie
trifurquée, "trifurcated" meaning having three forks. He divided his time
between three centres: Weimar, where he held piano masterclasses; Rome,
where he continued his existence of the 1860s; and Budapest, where, a native
German speaker, he bravely attempted to master Hungarian and was active in
Hungarian causes. Some have seen the three cities as syn olising the three
poles of his character: respectively, creative artist, Franciscan and gipsy. During
this last period he was a kind of musical elder statesman, visited by virtually
every musician and composer of note. He also wrote some of the most visionary
piano music of the 19th century.
The B minor Piano Sonata dates from the beginning of Liszt's full-time
residence at Weimar: he began it in 1852 and completed it, according to a note
on the autograph, on 2 February 1853. The work was published the following
year, but it was 1857 before anyone had the temerity to perform it in public.
There were private performances, of course: Liszt played it in the spring of 1853
to his own circle, while two years later his pupil Karl Klindworth played it
through to Wagner, bizarrely enough in London. The first public performance
was given in Berlin on 22 January 1857 by Hans von Bülow, the most talented
of Liszt's pupils, except perhaps for Carl Tausig: the recital was not only a
premiere for the Liszt Sonata, it was the first public appearance of a piano
bearing the name Bechstein.
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The B minor Sonata is seen by many as Liszt's greatest single achievement: it is
certainly the most successful (in every sense) piano sonata produced between the
late works of Beethoven and (at least) the start of the 20th century. It is a work
of great historical as well as artistic importance. Among its many innovations is
its use of single-movement form. He wasn't the first composer to run together
two or more movements of a multi-movement work, with or without thematic
inter-reference, but in his Piano Sonata Liszt created a deliberate fusion of
sonata form and four-movement form: the work is designed in such a way that
its various component sections match the delicately-balanced exposition-
development-recapitulation organisation of sonata form, while relating to each
other emotionally and intellectually as would the separate parts (typically: first
movement, slow movement, scherzo, finale) of a four-movement piece.
The principal means by which Liszt achieves this is the technique of thematic
metamorphosis, where one theme can be transformed into another, of an entirely
different character, by changing radically nearly every attribute except pitch. In
a way it could be seen as the motivic unity of late Beethoven writ large.
The work begins with a few bars of slow, quiet mysterious music, followed by a
serious of loud, dramatic gestures. Out of this material, virtually the whole of
the remaining 25-30 minutes of the Sonata is formed. First comes what
corresponds to the opening Allegro of a traditional sonata: it included the one
idea not adumbrated on the first page, a grandiose second subject. This Allegro
gradually runs out of steam, and after a few recitative-like passages gives on to
the slow movement equivalent, an Andante sostenuto in (to begin with) Liszt's
most intimate vein. A reminder of the mysterious music which opened the
Sonata introduces a taut, energetic fugal section (and scherzo-substitute) after
which we return to the music of the main Allegro, which Liszt soon whips up
into a barn-storming climax, demanding everything player and instrument can
possibly give. The Liszt of ten or twenty years before would have ended at this
point, no doubt to storms of applause from adoring audiences. His approach
now is more transcendental: one by one he visits each of his themes with a
sense, almost, of detached curiosity, before ending on a series of luminous
chords.
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3
FORTHCOMING CONCERTS
The next concert in the 82nd Season of the British Music Society of York,
presented in association with the Department of Music at the University, takes
place as usual in the Sir Jack Lyons Concert Hall, beginning at 8 pm.
Friday, 13 December 2002
Emperor String Quartet
Mozart
James MacMillan
Ravel
String Quartet in D minor, K 421
Why is this night different?: Quartet No.2
String Quartet
More dates for your diaries:
Saturday, 30 November 2002
Quire of York Minster, 8.00 pm
Micklegate Singers
Nicholas Carter director
John Scott Whiteley organ
Music by Duruflé (including his Requiem) and Stanford (including his
Magnificat in Bb for double choir)
Wednesday, 4 December 2002
Sir Jack Lyons Concert Hall, 8 pm
University Symphony Orchestra
John Stringer conductor
Gershwin's Concerto in F (Alex Rotherham - piano), Satie's Parade and Ravel's
La valse
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Saturday, 7 December 2002
York Minster, 7.30 pm
York Musical Society
Philip Moore conductor
A Christmas concert with Carols, Readings and the Christmas Oratorio
(Oratorio de Noël) by Saint-Saëns
** Saturday, 7 December 2002
Central Hall, University of York, 8 pm
York Symphony Orchestra
David Blake conductor
Weber's overture Oberon, Janáček's From an overgrown path, Prokof'yev's
First Violin Concerto (Gina McCormack - violin) and Dvořák's Fifth Symphony
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BRITISH MUSIC SOCIETY
of YORK
OFFICERS OF THE SOCIETY
President Dr Francis Jackson
Vice-Presidents
Chairman
Vice-Chairman
Hon. Treasurer
Hon. Asst. Treasurer
Hon. Secretary
Hon. Publicity Secretary
Hon. Programme Secretary
NFMS Representative
Hon Auditor
Members of the Committee
Prof. Nicola LeFanu, Rosalind Richards
David Mather
Bob Stevens
John Robinson
John Petrie
Nigel Dick
Marc Schatzberger
Amanda Crawley
Dr Richard Crossley
Derek Winterbottom
Dr Sandy Anderson, Helen Mackman, Lesley
Mather, Dr Mary Turner and John Woods
The programme notes in this book were written by David Mather, with help
from Giles Swayne in the case of his Canto. The floral decorations, which do so
much to soften the otherwise basic, utilitarian appearance of the performance
area, were created, as always, by Sue Bedford.
BENEFACTORS AND PATRONS
The BMS manages to maintain the high standard of its concerts largely through
the generosity of its Benefactors and Patrons. Without their gifts to the Society,
of them covenanted, we could not hope to balance our books.
many
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Our Benefactors (§) and Patrons are as follows:
Mr A. Ainsworth §
Mr R.A. Bellingham
Dr R.J.S. Crossley
Mrs M. Danby-Smith §
Mr N.J. Dick §
Mr J.A. Gloag
Mr N. Lange §
Mr G.C. Morcom §
Mr & Mrs L.W. Robinson §
Mrs I.G. Sargent §
Mrs D.C. Summers §
Dr & Mrs G.M.A. Turner §
Mrs S.M. Wright
Making
Music
Dr D.M. Bearpark
Mrs S.M. Carter §
If you would like to become a Benefactor or Patron, please get in touch with our
Hon. Treasurer, either at the ticket desk before each concert, or at 20, Barmby
Ave, Fulford, York, YO10 4HX. All other correspondence about the Society
should be addressed to the Hon. Secretary, 6, Bishopgate St., York, YO23 1JH.
Mr J. Curry S
Dr J.D. Dawick
Mr C.G.M. Gardner
Dr F.A. Jackson
Prof. R. Lawton §
Canon & Mrs J.S. Pearson
Mr & Mrs D.G. Rowlands §
Mr & Mrs M. Schatzberger
Mr D.A. Sutton
Mr R. Wilkinson §
The BMS is affiliated to Making Music, the National
Federation of Music Societies, which represents and
supports amateur vocal, instrumental and promoting
The
societies throughout the United Kingdom.
Society also gratefully acknowledges the assistance
Registered Charity No.700302
THE NATIONAL FEDERATION of the Royal Bank of Scotland.
OF MUSIC SOCIETIES
Compiled by David Mather and published by the British Music Society of York.
Reproduced by the Trophy & Print Shop, Commercial St, Norton, Malton
cole, INSISTE
GMS 3/2/10 (5)
HISTORICAL RESEARCH
OF
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HOST
THE SALON.
B'S
YORK
The Emperor
String Quartet
aydfiraus
Fridays
Friday, 13 December 2002
Decem
Programme: £1.00
Presented by the
Presented by the British Music Society of York
in association with the Department of Music
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NOTICE BOARD
Car Parking
On Fridays we share music department facilities with another organisation, and
the usual car park quickly reaches saturation point. There is another car park
you could use, however, almost as close. It's marked Pf on the map on the back
of our Season's Brochure. You'll find the entrance just down University Road,
near the footbridge.
*Advertising our Concerts
The bigger the audience we can attract to BMS concerts, the more money there
will be for the concerts budget, which means we would be able to afford artists
we can at present only dream of inviting. You can help. You must know of
places where our posters could be seen by potential new audience. Posters for
our next concert are available in the foyer: help yourself and help the Society.
** Your Views
The BMS is a society run for the benefit of its members by a dedicated
committee elected from amongst those members. If there is something you
think we should be doing, or should not be doing, don't keep it to yourself:
please tell a committee member. They should all be wearing badges, and,
however it may appear, they do want to hear from you.
Our Website
The BMS has its own dedicated website, containing a short history of the
Society and an updated list of forthcoming concerts. If you haven't found it
already, the URL is http://www.bms-york.org.uk/
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BRITISH MUSIC SOCIETY
of YORK
82nd Season
Friday, 13 December 2002
Sir Jack Lyons Concert Hall
The Emperor String Quartet
Martin Burgess & Clare Hayes violins
Fiona Bonds viola, William Schofield cello
Mozart Quartet in D minor, K.421
James MacMillan Why is this night different?
INTERVAL
Ravel Quartet
For the sake of others in the audience, please turn off all
mobile phones and alarms on watches, calculators etc.,
and use a handkerchief when coughing.
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THE EMPEROR STRING QUARTET
Formed in 1992, the Emperor String Quartet became the first British winners
of the Evian International String Quartet Competition in 1995. They
immediately received invitations to play debut recitals in Paris, Vienna and New
York. With its founder membership still intact, the Emperor is now one of the
UK's leading ensembles.
In the ten years since its formation, the Quartet has toured in North and South
America and played at festivals such as Prague, Edinburgh and Mostly Mozart
in New York, as well as all the major UK festivals.
They launched their own chamber music festival and course in the Loire Valley
and have continued to develop their outreach programme, taking chamber music
into primary and secondary schools, largely under the auspices of the Cavatina
Chamber Music Trust.
The Quartet's recording of Walton for Black Box received great acclaim, being
included in the Editor's Choice of the August 2002 Gramophone and nominated
for a Grammy award. They have also recorded the quartets of James
MacMillan, including the central work in tonight's concert, for the Bis label, for
whom they are also planning Martinů and Sally Beamish cycles.
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PROGRAMME NOTES
String Quartet in D minor, K.421
Allegro
Andante
Menuetto: Allegretto
Allegretto ma non troppo
Wolfgang Amadé Mozart
(1756-1791)
The string quartet is without doubt and by a long way the dominant form of
chamber music. Credit for establishing it is often given to Joseph Haydn (1732
- 1809): like many such claims, this is an over-simplification, but like most such
simplifications it is as true as anything need be in real life.
Music for four string players existed before Haydn, but it was he who
standardised the four-movement work for a group consisting of two violins,
viola and cello. More importantly, it was he who began to explore the extra-
ordinary expressive, textural and plastic potential of the medium.
Haydn and Mozart were contemporaries in fact we know they occasionally
played quartets together in the early 1780s, when Haydn managed to get to
Vienna. Yet even though Haydn outlived him by 17 years we must never lose
sight of the fact that Mozart was a generation younger. In many areas he was
cultivating ground that had already been broken by Haydn. Thus Mozart's two
early half dozens of quartets (1772/3) are seen as imperfect attempts to
assimilate the early published quartets of Haydn.
In 1782 Artaria of Vienna published Haydn's six Quartets, Op.33, the so-called
Russian Quartets. Haydn had said in a notice which went out to subscribers that
they were "written in a new and special way," and they clearly made an
enormous impression on Mozart, who set about matching them with a set of six
quartets of his own. These were composed between 1782 and 1785 and
published in the latter year as Mozart's Op.10 ("Opus X"), complete with
elaborate and deferential dedication to Haydn.
Mozart's father Leopold was visiting Vienna in February 1785 and was present
when a group that included Haydn on first violin and Mozart on viola played
over these new quartets. He reported to his daughter (Wolfgang's sister
Nannerl) what Haydn had said to him:
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Before God and as an honest man I tell you that your son is the greatest composer
known to me, either in person or by name. He has taste and, what is more, the most
profound knowledge of composition.
Recommendations really don't come much higher.
The D minor Quartet, K.421, was the second of the set to be composed and also
in the order of the published "Op.X". Mozart had left the employ of the Prince-
Archbishop of Salzburg in 1781 and settled in Vienna as a freelance musician.
In the late summer of 1782, with his father's grudging consent, he had married
Constanze Weber. Haydn's Op.33 had come out early in the year and by the end
of it Mozart had begun his response: the first of the set, K.387 in G major, is
dated 31 December 1782. The next two, K.421 in D minor and K.428 in E flat,
were composed in the June and July of 1783: indeed Constanze remembered that
her husband was working on the D minor Quartet when she was undergoing her
first confinement with their son Raimund Leopold (born 17 June, died nine
weeks later)
K.421 is the only one of Mozart's ten mature quartets in a minor key, the
brooding D minor of the Piano Concerto K.466, the Requiem and the more
dramatic sections of Don Giovanni. The first movement has a restlessness and
turbulence that was quite new in the refined world of the string quartet. Some
sort of repose comes with the F major Andante, though here too Mozart cannot
resist plunging the music into the murkier realm of C minor.
In some respects the Minuet is the most radical movement of the four. When
they weren't already straining at the leash to become scherzos minuets of the
time were meant to be pleasant, inconsequential movements, a relaxing buffer
between the intellectual and emotional food of the first and slow movements and
the high jinx of the finale. Mozart's Minuet in K.421, by contrast, is utterly
serious, the only let up being the D major Trio in old-fashioned divertimento
style.
Nor is there anything at all high-spirited about the finale. It takes the form of
theme and variations on a siciliano-like theme which apparently owes something
to Gluck. There are four variations in all, the last of them in the major. But
Mozart then returns to the minor, increasing the speed and bringing the first half
of the theme to set his coda in motion. At the end he does relent and turn the
music towards the major for the last four bars, but in context the gesture seems
more one of defeat than triumph.
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Why is this night different? String Quartet No.2
James MacMillan
(b.1959)
James MacMillan was born in Ayrshire. He read music at Edinburgh University
and did postgraduate study in composition with John Casken at Durham
University. After working as a lecturer at Manchester University, he returned to
Scotland and settled in Glasgow. The successful premiere of Tryst at the 1990
St Magnus Festival led to his appointment as Affiliate Composer of the Scottish
Chamber Orchestra, and this season celebrates his tenth and final year as Artistic
Director of the Philharmonia Orchestra's Music of Today series of contemporary
music concerts. MacMillan is internationally active as a conductor and in 2000
was appointed Composer/Conductor with the BBC Philharmonic.
His many
compositions include Veni, Veni, Emmanuel (a percussion concerto composed
for Evelyn Glennie), The World's Ransoming (a cello concerto for Mstislav
Rostropovich) and two symphonies.
Why is this night different?, MacMillan's second string quartet, written in 1998
ten years after the first, Visions of a November Spring. It was given its world
premiere in the Wigmore Hall, London, on 23 April 1998 by the Maggini
Quartet. The composer wrote the following programme note for that
performance:
Certain prevalent concerns in some of my recent music, namely a sense of ambiguity
between darkness and light, and the confrontation of extremes, resurface here in my
second string quartet. In particular terms of mood, there is here an attempt to present
a sense of celebration within a context of danger and violence. Children's themes
appear again as they did in my opera Inés de Castro, my cello concerto and
Symphony: 'Vigil'. However, the themes used here are quotations and allusions to
melodies written by me as a child some thirty years ago.
The music is in one continuous movement divided into four main sections. A slow
introduction presents the principal idea - a chromatically twisting melodic line on
violin, accompanied by the first 'childhood' theme, plucked and resonated on the
other instruments. This leads to the first main section which involves a number of
characteristics: a fast sul ponticello scurrying in parallel motion, the 'childhood'
theme on high sustained harmonics, a variation of the principal theme accompanied
by biting semi-quaver bursts, and the main theme transformed into a waltz for viola
with strangely tangential comments on violin and cello. The section culminates in a
longer, meatier passage involving a combination of disparate elements, led by a
muscular melody passing from instrument to instrument.
The second section is based on a second 'childhood' theme, here remodalised to fit the
new context. It is first carried on a high cello with the melodic notes resonated on the
other instruments to form a shadow. There is then a slow intense pulsing on viola and
cello over which there are fragmented versions of both 'childhood' tunes.
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The return of the high cello sweeps towards the next section - a fast brutal scherzo.
The short violent glissandi which proliferate are eventually transformed into a high
ethereal sheen, gliding through the natural harmonics. The final slow section gathers
up fragments of all the principal ideas, but now much more tentative and broken.
The title is taken from the Jewish rite of commemoration on the Sedah Night which is
that before Pesach (Passover) begins. Here the family celebrate the flight of the
Children of Israel from Egypt. The youngest present asks "Why is this night different
from all other nights?" before the father relates the tale of flight and liberation from
slavery.
The drama of the story, the closeness between elation and despair, between joy and
fear, and the centrally important figure of the child in the ritual, suggested the
archetypes which lie behind my musical interests, and provided the initial spark of
inspiration for this piece.
James MacMillan's Second String Quartet, Why is this night different? lasts
about 21 minutes.
If you should want to find out more about James MacMillan and his music, his
publishers Boosey & Hawkes have a section devoted to him on their website.
Simply go to http://www.boosey.co.uk, click on composers & repertoire,
scroll down the drop-down menu where it says choose... until you get to
MacMillan, James. Highlight this, then click on the sign next to it. You will
then have a choice of biography, discography, news, performances, worklist and
even the composer's own notes on his pieces, such as the one above, used with
their kind permission.
INTERVAL
Coffee and drinks are available in the foyer. Coffee is 80p a cup: to find us, just
go past the bar, out on to the landing, and turn to the left.
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0
0
)
String Quartet in F major
Allegro moderato, très doux
Assez vif, très rythmé
Très lent
Vif et agité
Maurice Ravel
(1875-1937)
Ravel wrote his String Quartet in 1902 and 1903, which makes it one of the
earliest of his works to have an assured place in the repertory. It dates from his
problematical time as a composition student at the Paris Conservatoire. Ravel
had entered the Conservatoire in 1889 and studied piano and harmony,
graduating unspectacularly in 1895. Two years later he re-entered, attending
Fauré's composition classes and also studying counterpoint and orchestration.
Unfortunately, Ravel's aspirations as a composer simply did not fit in with the
Conservatoire's rigid and (needless to say) conservative requirements, so he was
not allowed to re-enrol after 1900: he was, however, permitted to continue
attending Fauré's classes, in the capacity of auditeur, and could still enter for the
Prix de Rome.
Thereby hangs another tale. The Prix de Rome was the top prize for composers
at the Conservatoire, affording the winner three years' residence at the Villa dei
Medici in Rome, soaking up Italian artistic tradition alongside similar laureates
in literature, painting, architecture etc. Most of the great French composers,
from Berlioz onwards, had won the prize, but Ravel, despite entering five times,
never succeeded. Contestants, after getting past the qualifying round, had to
produce a cantata to a set text. On his first attempt in 1900, Ravel failed to get
past the qualifying round. In 1901, 1902 and 1903 he produced cantatas to the
prescribed texts, but failed to impress the jury. In 1904 he neglected to put in his
entry, while in 1905, on the brink of the age limit, he entered once again only to
be knocked out at the preliminary stage. But by then he was a nationally known
composer with a fast growing reputation, and his Prix de Rome failure became a
public scandal - as such things will in France. The scandal did his reputation no
harm whatever, though it failed to get him to Rome. It is strongly suspected that
what ultimately cost him a prize was his inability to compose an academic
fugue, virtually a crime in reactionary Conservatoire circles.
His time in Fauré's class was hardly wasted, however, as is attested in the
dedication of the Quartet "à mon cher maître Gabriel Faure" [= to my dear
master, Gabriel Fauré]. The work would scarcely have pleased the
Conservatoire authorities, but Fauré himself was a much more sympathetic
figure, happy to help talented pupils find and develop their own individual
voices.
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90 The British Music Society of York, BMS 3 2 10, Page 90 |
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Another potent influence on Ravel was Debussy, a composer a dozen years older
and a dozen years ahead in compositional experience. More to the point,
Debussy had composed his only String Quartet some 10 years earlier, providing
Ravel with a perhaps more congenial model than much earlier works from the
Austro-German tradition.
The influence of Debussy on Ravel can easily be over-stressed, but not denied,
especially in these earlier years. Both quartets are cyclic in their structure - that
is the various movements are made to form an integral whole by the sharing or
exchanging of material. The idea is at least as old as Beethoven and Schubert,
but was a feature of Liszt and his school and came to Paris through the works of
its textbook exponent, the Belgian composer César Franck.
One of the favourite devices of cyclic form is to open a work with an arresting
idea, which is subsequently transformed to provide material for other
movements. This is precisely what happens with both the Debussy and Ravel
quartets: indeed, so similar are their opening gestures that one critic at the first
performance (March 1904) accused Ravel of plagiarism. In a way, though, the
Ravel marks a significant advance over the Debussy. It shows a much more
perceptive understanding and manipulation of the string quartet texture,
underlining Ravel's great sensitivity for instrumental colour whether writing
with full orchestral palette or the comparative monochrome of the piano.
The second movement is a scherzo in A minor with the opening section played
pizzicato - again like the Debussy. If you find the music annoyingly familiar
when you haven't, to your knowledge, ever heard the Ravel String Quartet, you
may be remembering it from Sir Peter Hall's television adaptation of Mary
Wesley's The Camomile Lawn, whose music was largely based on this one
movement.
The slow movement, lying third, is in the distant key of G flat major, its
atmospheric mood enhanced by the instruments' being muted. The finale, by
contrast, is vigorous to the point of aggressiveness, its driving rhythms
contrasting markedly with more lyrical passages in 2.
Floral decorations by Sue Bedford
Programme notes by David Mather & James MacMillan
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91 The British Music Society of York, BMS 3 2 10, Page 91 |
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Ocr'd Text:
2t
8
e
at
H
r
U
S
FORTHCOMING CONCERTS
The next concert in the 82nd Season of the British Music Society of York,
presented in association with the Department of Music at the University, takes
place as usual in the Sir Jack Lyons Concert Hall, beginning at 8 pm.
Friday, 10 January 2003
Couperin
Bach
Messiaen
Ravel
Angela Hewitt
(piano)
18ème Ordre
English Suite No.2 in A minor, BWV 9
Préludes
Le tombeau de Couperin
More dates for your diaries:
Saturday, 18 January 2003
St Olave's, Marygate, 8 pm
Academy of St Olave's
John Hastie director
Ravel's Suite Mother Goose, Elgar's Serenade (in an arrangement for winds)
and Britten's Nocturne (Robert Thompson - tenor)
Saturday, 8 February 2003
York Barbican Centre, 7.30 pm
City of York Guildhall Orchestra
Simon Wright music director
Stravinsky's Symphonies of wind instruments, Chaikovsky's Violin Concerto
(Marat Bisengaliev - violin) and Rakhmaninov's Symphonic Dances
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92 The British Music Society of York, BMS 3 2 10, Page 92 |
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Ocr'd Text:
BRITISH MUSIC SOCIETY
of YORK
OFFICERS OF THE SOCIETY
President Dr Francis Jackson
Vice-Presidents
Chairman
Vice-Chairman
Hon. Treasurer
Hon. Asst. Treasurer
Hon. Secretary
Hon. Publicity Secretary
Hon. Programme Secretary
NFMS Representative
Hon Auditor
Members of the Committee
Prof. Nicola LeFanu, Rosalind Richards
David Mather
Bob Stevens
John Robinson
John Petrie
Nigel Dick
Marc Schatzberger
Amanda Crawley
Dr Richard Crossley
Derek Winterbottom
Dr Sandy Anderson, Helen Mackman, Lesley
Mather, Dr Mary Turner and John Woods
BENEFACTORS AND PATRONS
The BMS manages to maintain the high standard of its concerts largely through
the generosity of its Benefactors and Patrons. Without their gifts to the Society,
many of them covenanted, we could not hope to balance our books.
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93 The British Music Society of York, BMS 3 2 10, Page 93 |
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Ocr'd Text:
Our Benefactors (§) and Patrons are as follows:
Mr A. Ainsworth §
Mr R.A. Bellingham Ste
Dr R.J.S. Crossley
Mrs M. Danby-Smith §
Mr N.J. Dick §
Mr J.A. Gloag Stet
Mr N. Lange §
Mr G.C. Morcom §
Canon & Mrs J.S. Pearson
Mr & Mrs DG. Rowlands §
Mr & Mrs M. Schatzberger
Mr D.A. Sutton
MrJ.I.Watson Mr. IM Stady
-Mre to woods
Making
Music
THE NATIONAL FEDERATION
OF MUSIC SOCIETIES
Armor
Ander sa
Dr F.A Jackson Stel
Prof. R. Lawton §
Mrs G.O. Morcom § Ser
Mr & Mrs L.W. Robinson §
Mrs I.G.Sargent §
Mrs D.C. Summers Stet cl. Mr Steven,
Dr & Mrs G.M.A. Turner § M. T wings.
MrR Wilkinson Svet
right *
Prof.
My WR Tuime
If you would like to become a Benefactor or Patron, please get in touch with our
Hon. Treasurer, either at the ticket desk before each concert, or at 20, Barmby
Ave, Fulford, York, YO10 4HX. All other correspondence about the Society
should be addressed to the Hon. Secretary, 6, Bishopgate St., York, YO23 1JH.
Dr D.M. Bearpark
Mr & Mrs D.A.C. Blunt §
Mr J. Curry S
Dr J.D. Dawick
Mr C.G.M. Gardner
Registered Charity No.700302
Bund der.
Carte
Frectorn
Новини
Compiled by David Mather and published by the British Music Society of York.
Reproduced by the Trophy & Print Shop, Commercial St, Norton, Malton.
Hunt
Mard
The BMS is affiliated to Making Music, the National
Federation of Music Societies, which represents and
supports amateur vocal, instrumental and promoting
societies throughout the United Kingdom. The
Society also gratefully acknowledges the assistance
of the Royal Bank of Scotland.
Push
Pataly
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94 The British Music Society of York, BMS 3 2 10, Page 94 |
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Ocr'd Text:
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HISTORICAL
RESEARCH
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95 The British Music Society of York, BMS 3 2 10, Page 95 |
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Ocr'd Text:
INSTITUT
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96 The British Music Society of York, BMS 3 2 10, Page 96 |
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Ocr'd Text:
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