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BMS
YORK
Angela Hewitt
(piano)
Friday, 10 January 2003
Programme: £1.00
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,
not far from the first 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, 10 January 2003
Sir Jack Lyons Concert Hall
Angela Hewitt piano
Ordre No.18
Bach English Suite No.2 in A minor
Couperin
Messiaen
Ravel
INTERVAL
4 Preludes
Le tombeau de Couperin
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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ANGELA HEWITT
Angela Hewitt comes from a musical family, her father being organist of
Ottawa Cathedral. She began learning the piano at the age of three, at four gave
her first public recital and at five won her first scholarship. She also studied
violin, recorder, singing and classical ballet. At nine she gave her first recital at
Toronto's Royal Conservatory of Music, where she studied from 1964 to 1973.
She then studied with the French pianist Jean-Paul Sévilla at the University of
Ottawa, from which she graduated with a bachelor of music degree at the age of
18.
Ms Hewitt won prizes in many piano competitions - Italy's Viotti Competition,
the Bach Competitions held in Leipzig and in Washington DC, the Schumann
Competition in Zwickau, the Casadesus Competition in Cleveland and the Dino
Ciani Competition at La Scala, Milan - before winning the Toronto International
Bach Competition in 1985. She was awarded an honorary doctorate from the
University of Ottawa in 1995 and two years later received the key to that city.
In 2000 she was made an Officer of the Order of Canada.
Ms Hewitt's repertoire is vast, ranging from Bach to the contemporary. She has
recorded CDs of music by, amongst others, Granados, Messiaen and Ravel. But
it is with the music of Bach that her name is most associated. In 1994 she
embarked on a 10-year project to record all the major keyboard works of the
composer for Hyperion, a series which the Sunday Times welcomed as "one of
the record glories of our age." In 2001 The Guardian called her "the pre-
eminent Bach pianist of our time" whilst Stereophile magazine referred her in
1998 as "nothing less than the pianist who will define Bach performance on the
piano for years to come."
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Ordre No.18
PROGRAMME NOTES
Allemande La Verneuil
La Verneüilléte: Légérement, et agéablement
Sœur Monique: Tendrement, sans lenteur
Le turbulent: Tres viste
François Couperin
(1668-1733)
L'atendrissante: Douloureusement
Le tic-toc-choc ou Les maillotins: Légérement, et marqué
Le gaillard-boiteaux: Dans le goût burlesque
From around 1750, one format dominated instrumental music cast in more than
a single movement: symphony, sonata, duo, trio, quartet, concerto - its name
changed depending on the instrumental line-up and how it was used, but it was
still essentially the same phenomenon. The pattern was not rigid, which went
some way to ensuring its success and longevity, but you knew where you were
with it.
Before 1750, the equivalent format was the suite, which also went under a
number of names, not so much because of the instrumental line-up, but more as
a result of local preference - suite, partita, Ouverture etc. The word suite derives
from the verb suivre, "to follow:" English goes back to the original Latin verb
sequor for its sequence, though musicians don't seem to have used that word,
settling on the more robust set ["sett"].
For many French composers of the period, the term of choice, at least for
harpsichord works, was ordre, and one of the greatest of them, François
Couperin, published between 1713 and 1730 four books of Pièces de clavecin
[-harpsichord pieces], containing well over two hundred pieces organised into
twenty-seven ordres.
There was no fixed shape to the Baroque suite, but the pieces were usually in the
same key and by and large adopted stylised dance forms, most frequently around
the skeleton sequence of allemande-courante-sarabande-gigue. Couperin's
earliest ordres did include such dance forms, but later on he plumped for the
more modern idea of a character piece - pieces describing friends, colleagues
and acquaintances or abstract qualities or simply an image.
No.18 is the last but one of the seven ordres making up Couperin's Troisiéme
Livre de pièces de Clavecin [-third book of harpsichord pieces - don't complain
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to me about the accents being wrong: they're original]. All the pieces in the
Ordre are in F - some in the major, the others in the minor. The first two bear
such similar names, the Allemande La Verneüil and La Verneüilléte, it is thought
they are probably portraits of a mother and daughter. Soeur Monique [-Sister
Monique], one of Couperin's prettiest pieces, takes the form of a rondeau with
three couplets: it must have been a great favourite right from the start as it seems
to have been reworked as everything from canticles to bawdy songs. Le
turbulent is rare amongst Couperin's pieces in having a tempo marking that
indicates speed ("tres viste" - or, in modern French, "très vite") rather than the
general mood of the piece. It's also one of the few to have the masculine
definite article - but who this boisterous gentleman was, no one knows. Any
more than we know who L'atendrissante was: the adjective, though, means
"moving, touching or affecting." The piece, written in the harpsichord's lowest
register, is one of the most sorrowful to be found in the Third Book. Le tic-toc-
choc ou Les maillotins is another of Couperin's most famous pieces. As you
might have guessed from the title it's based on the sounds made by a clock,
"maillotins" being the little hammers. It's a piéce croisée, a piece where the two
hands spend most of their time in the same narrow confines - a doddle if you're
playing a two-manual harpsichord, of course: rather trickier on a piano with just
the one set of keys. The final piece, as the title suggests, is a portrait of a
strongman with a limp: is marked to be played in the burlesque style with what
has been described as "a vein of buffoonery straight out of the fairground."
English Suite No.2 in A minor, BWV 807
Prelude
Allemande
Courante
Sarabande
Les agréments de la même Sarabande
Bourrée I & II alternativement
Gigue
Johann Sebastian Bach
(1685-1750)
Bach wrote quite a few suites for harpsichord. The most substantial is the
Ouvertüre nach französischer Art [=overture in the French style], published in
1735 alongside the Italian Concerto in the second volume of his Clavier-Übung.
Aside from this, the most important are found in three sets of six: the Partitas,
the French Suites and the English Suites.
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The English Suites pose two enduring mysteries: when they were composed, and
why on earth they are called English. Unless hard documentary evidence, or
better still autographs, turn up we will be compelled to date them partly by
stylistic, partly by circumstantial evidence. It leaves room for discussion. There
are those who make the English Suites the earliest of the three sets to be
composed, dating them about 1715, in other words in the last years of Bach's
service at the court of Weimar. Others put them as much as ten years later, at
the start of his tome as Kantor at St Thomas, Leipzig. Still others hedge their
bets, arguing that the set wasn't composed at one go, but gradually assembled
over a period of up to ten years.
As to the description English, there is no evidence it has anything to do with
Bach himself. It is thought to have been attached to the pieces quite early on, to
distinguish the set from the "French" Suites - which have no greater claim to
their name. Several explanations have been advanced. The first biography of
Bach (1802) mentions a tradition that the Suites were composed "for an English
nobleman," but if this is true, it is strange the commission didn't leave more of a
documentary wake. One of several surviving manuscript copies (the hand is
unknown) bears the inscription "Fait pour les Anglois" [=done for the English],
which some have seen as supporting evidence for the anecdote: but, judging by
the poor French found in the rest of the manuscript, it could just as well have
been a mistake for "Fait à les Anglois" [=done the English way].
Most scholars incline to the idea that the "English" connection has something to
do with the format of the suites. The most noticeable difference between the
French and English Suites, apart from the various movements of the English
being rather longer then the French, is that the English Suites begin with
Preludes, some of them substantial. Many different models have been suggested
for this feature: ironically, one of the most persuasive is French. There are
striking similarities between Bach's English Suites and a set of six by the French
composer Charles or François Dieupart: Dieupart spent most of his working life
in London, and we can be certain Bach knew of these suites, since we have a
copy of one he made in his own hand.
To complete the geographical confusion, Dieupart's Suites all begin with
substantial overtures, an idea which was virtually unknown in France at the time
and which he may have borrowed from Germany. It is Bach who plays the
geographical joker, though: his Preludes owe most to Italian models.
No.2 in A minor and No.3 in G minor are the two runaway favourites amongst
the English Suites. Like all the Suites in the set, they take the classic allemande-
courante-sarabande-gigue skeleton and preface it with a Prelude. Between the
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sarabande and gigue, Bach places a pair of what he called galantieren,
movements added effectively for light relief: they are played alternativement,
that is the first of the pair is repeated after the second has been played - the
origin, in fact, of the minuets and trios in symphonies, sonatas and quartets from
Haydn onwards.
In the Prelude of the Second Suite it's not difficult to hear the influence of
Italian concerto form - the alternating of orchestral ritornelli with solo passages,
and a sense of bustle and rhythmic drive that would not be out of place in
Vivaldi. The Allemande and Courante run true to form: the Allemande a
moderately paced dance in four time, serious without being heavy; the Courante
a more rapid, flowing dance in three time.
The Sarabande is a slow, stately dance in three time. It is unusual in having the
secondary stress of each bar on the second beat, rather than the third, as in a
minuet. Bach immediately follows it with a second version, more elaborate and
decorated, entitled Les agréments de la même Sarabande [= the embellishments
of the same Sarabande]. This decorated style of harpsichord writing came from
France Couperin was one of its most celebrated exponents: indeed his 1716
L'art de toucher le clavecin [-the art of playing the harpsichord], which
advocates and explains it, is known to have influenced Bach.
For his galantieren movements here, Bach chooses bourrées, as had for the First
English Suite. The bourrée is a dance in four time, not unlike the gavotte, but
livelier and usually with a single upbeat. As with many of his galantieren pairs,
Bach contrasts major and minor tonalities, Bourrée I being in A minor and
Bourrée II in A major. Then in the final Gigue, Bach once more returns to the
Italian model, slick and virtuosic, rather than the querky French type of Gigue.
The gigue as a dance, incidentally, seems to have originated in England as far
back as the 15th century. Which, if I say so myself, brings us very neatly back
to our geographical starting point.
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
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1
1
from Preludes for piano
1. La colombe: Lent, expressif, d'un sonorité très enveloppée
3. Le nombre léger: Vif et léger
7. Plainte calme: Lent
8. Un reflet dans le vent: Modéré
Olivier Messiaen
(1908 - 1992)
Messiaen came from a cultured home: his father, Pierre, was a teacher of English
whose translations of Shakespeare are still in print and his mother was the
poetess Cécile Sauvage. It was hardly surprising, then, that Messiaen's musical
talent was encouraged and supported. He began composing at the age of seven,
and three years later the gift of a score of Debussy's opera Pelléas et Mélisande
fixed his unusually strong resolve to become a composer. Aged 11 he entered
the Paris Conservatoire, studying harmony, counterpoint and fugue (premier
prix, 1926), piano accompaniment (premier prix, 1928), history of music
(premier prix, 1929) and, of course, composition (premier prix, 1930). He
graduated in 1930, becoming organist of La Trinité in Paris, in which post he
remained for forty years. Six years later he joined the teaching staff of the École
Normal de Musique in Paris, but it was the informal seminars in composition
and analysis he gave in the mid 1940s that were his great teaching achievement:
based on passionate but rigorous analysis of music from Beethoven quartets to
the music of Schoenberg and Webern, they attracted the brightest minds from
the next generation of composers, such as Boulez. Fortunately, the director of
the Paris Conservatoire had the percipience to create an analysis class for
Messiaen in 1947, and there for twenty years he continued to teach in his own
way. The classes quickly gained an international reputation and were the
postgraduate course of choice for composers from all over the world.
Messiaen's musical world is dominated by several obsessions: religious
mysticism, birdsong, ancient Greek and Indian rhythmic patterns, the use of
highly individual scale patterns, and colour (like a few other composers, he sees
colours whilst composing or listening to music, and co-ordinating these colours
inevitably affects the contents of a given piece).
His eight Preludes for piano were composed during his final years at the Paris
Conservatoire, 1928 and 29. He showed them to his composition teacher,
Dukas (of the famous Sorcerer's Apprentice), who immediately arranged for
them to be taken on by his own publisher, Durand. They appeared in 1930 with
a dedication to Mademoiselle Henriette Roget, a fellow student. Messiaen later
wrote of them:
I was twenty at the time and had not yet undertaken my experiments in rhythm which
were to transform my whole life. I had a passion for birds, but did not yet know how
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to notate their songs. However, I was already familiar with tone-colour. By means of
harmonic modes of a limited number of transpositions from which they derive their
individual coloration I had managed to put discs of colour in opposition, interweave
rainbows and discover "complementary colours" in music. The titles of the Préludes
hide the studies in colour.
Messiaen then proceeds to say more about the colours of the eight pieces. Here
are his remarks about the four Ms Hewitt is playing for us:
I- La colombe [-the dove]: orange veined with violet.
III - Le nombre léger [-the light number]: orange veined with violet.
VII - Plainte calme [=calm lamentation]: velvet grey, reflections of mauve and
green.
VIII - Un reflet dans le vent [=a reflection in the wind]: the light storm that opens
and closes the piece alternates orange veined with green dappled with a few black
spots; the central development is more luminous; the second theme, very melodic and
coated in sinuous arpeggios, is orange blue for the first presentation, orange green for
the second.
Dominant colours of the [eight Preludes] as a whole: violet, orange, purple.
Le Tombeau de Couperin
Prélude: Vif
Fugue: Allegro moderato
Forlane: Allegretto
Rigaudon: Assez vif
Menuet: Allegro moderato
Toccata: Vif
Maurice Ravel
(1875 - 1937)
Tombeau means the same as our tomb or tombstone. The word was used in
France by poets as the title of pieces written in honour of someone recently
deceased, and the name was taken over briefly by composers for a musical piece
of similar intent (which had previously gone by the name of déploration).
Though by the time Couperin was commemorating artists he admired, he was
using the more exalted term Apothéose.
Ravel, like Debussy, was an admirer of the great school of French Baroque
keyboard composers
Couperin, Rameau, D'Anglebert, Chambonnières, the
clavecinistes as they came to be known. In part, I suppose, it was a natural
reaction against the present, a nostalgia for a time when music was pure, clean,
witty and, above all, French. Before the Germans marched in, trampled it under
foot and took away its charm and innocence. Given the world situation in the
summer of 1914, what more natural than that Ravel should set out to evoke the
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vel
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tion
lost innocence of that time? The work, as Ravel himself said, "is an act of
homage addressed less to Couperin himself than to the music of eighteenth-
century France." He began Le tombeau in July, as he was just completing the
Piano Trio we shall be hearing in our next concert.
The following month, of course, the world started to fall apart as one by one the
countries of Europe raced or were dragged into war. Ravel was desperate to get
into the armed forces and tried many times, but he was simply too small: short
and thin, he was under the minimum weight requirement, but only by two kilos -
his letters of the time apparently crackle with indignation over those two kilos.
Eventually, he pulled strings and in 1916 was admitted - not into the air service,
which was his goal, but of all things the heavy artillery! He was in time to see
action at the Battle of Verdun, as the driver of a truck (called "Adelaide")
carrying shells to the big guns, but was sent home to recuperate after a bad bout
of dysentery in September. An even bigger blow was the death of his mother the
following January. He was provisionally discharged from the army and went to
stay with his godmother at Lyons-la-Forêt; and there he finally managed to
complete Le tombeau.
Le tombeau is a work that looks back on a lost world: not just the world of
Couperin and the clavecinistes, but, understandably in the circumstances, more
recent losses. Each of the movements is individually dedicated to a friend lost in
the war. At the same time the work is not at all morbid: it is nostalgic, of course,
but thanks to Ravel's immaculate sensibilities never maudlin or cloying.
The great champion of Ravel's pre-war piano works had been his boyhood
friend the Spanish virtuoso Ricardo Viñes, but he wanted his friend Marguerite
Long to give the first performance of Le tombeau. It wasn't going to be quite
that simple. To begin with, she lost her husband, the musicologist Joseph de
Marliave (to whose memory the last movement of Le tombeau is dedicated) in
the very first month of the War and virtually gave up playing the piano: it was
only three years later that friends and colleagues managed to persuade her to
resume her career. Then, before the premiere could take place, Ravel had to go
to Switzerland to be treated for neurasthenia and depression. By this time the
music had already been published, though no pianist had taken the liberty of
playing it publicly. Eventually it was arranged that Miss Long would play it at a
concert given on 11 April 1919 in Paris. Even that concert almost didn't take
place. As she described it in her book Au piano avec Maurice Ravel:
That day I went down with tonsillitis and a high fever, and my doctor forbade me to
go out. I ignored him, and when I reached the Salle Gaveau Ravel said: "something
else is sure to happen. Perhaps the piano will lose its legs."
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The composer
But all went well and the performance was a great success.
consented to come on to the platform to acknowledge the lengthy welcome that
awaited him. It was the first appearance in public since the war of one who - since
the recent death of Debussy - was regarded as the uncontested and glorious
representative of French music. Everyone in the audience wanted his favourite piece
encored. In the end I played them all again.
There are six pieces making up Le tombeau de Couperin: to those who know the
work only from the composer's 1919 orchestral version the second and last will
come as a surprise. All six are cast in forms that would have been familiar in
Couperin's day, though no suite of the time would have included such a line-up.
First come a Prelude and, uniquely in Ravel's mature output, a Fugue. Next
comes a Forlane. The forlana was originally a lusty Venetian flirting dance
which, in a bowdlerised version, had something of a vogue at the French court in
Couperin's time: Couperin indeed included a Forlane in one of his Concerts
Royaux for ensemble, and Ravel actually transcribed it for piano as part of his
preparation for Le tombeau.
Next comes a Rigaudon, a duple time dance originating in the Provencal region.
The composer revels in the rustic nature, producing something that wouldn't
have sounded out of place in Stravinsky's Pulcinella of two years later. This is
followed by a Minuet, which has as its central section not the familiar trio, but a
musette. Musette is the name given to a type of bagpipe popular in the French
court during Couperin's time, and the main characteristic of a piece bearing the
name is its use of bagpipe-like drones. There was something of a vogue for
musettes amongst late 19th- and early 20th-century composers experimenting
with antique forms, probably because of the special challenge posed by adapting
so primitive a device as the drone to contemporary music style. [Why else
would Schoenberg include one in his first wholly serial piece, the Suite for
piano, Op.25?]. Finally comes a Toccata. As Miss Long wrote:
All these pieces are dedicated to the memory of friends killed on active service, but
nobody was surprised that so lively a work should be associated with an attestation of
reverence. It is true that neither lamentation nor funeral rhythms are to be found.
Except for the gentle serenity of the Fugue, the grace of movement and the love of life
possessed by these young men reign supreme. But does it have to be that one offers
them a constant lament? That a musician can give them the best of himself, and the
nearest to their lost delights, is surely the most moving tribute! If ever a composer
should one day wish to honour my memory, let it be with a toccata or a perpetuum
mobile.
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, 14 February 2003
Haydn
Ravel
Brahms
Eimer Piano Trio
Piano Trio in Eb, Hob.XV:30
Piano Trio
Piano Trio in B, Op.8
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)
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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
Wednesday, 19 February 2003
Sir Jack Lyons Concert Hall, 8 pm
Michael Collins clarinet
Kathryn Stott piano
Two cornerstones of the clarinet repertoire - Brahms' Eb Sonata and Weber's
Grand duo concertant - plus arrangements of Beethoven's Spring Sonata and
Schubert's Arpeggione Sonata
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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 §
Canon & Mrs J.S. Pearson
Mr & Mrs D.G. Rowlands §
Mr & Mrs M. Schatzberger
Mr D.A. Sutton
Mr J.I. Watson.
Making
Music
THE NATIONAL FEDERATION
OF MUSIC SOCIETIES
Dr D.M. Bearpark
Mr & Mrs D.A.C. Blunt §
Mr J. Curry §
Dr J.D. Dawick
Mr C.G.M. Gardner
Dr F.A. Jackson
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.
Prof. R. Lawton §
Mrs G.O. Morcom §
Mr & Mrs L.W. Robinson §
Mrs I.G. Sargent §
Registered Charity No.700302
Mrs D.C. Summers §
Dr & Mrs G.M.A. Turner §
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
JORTHWICK
*(SMS 3/2/11 (1)
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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BS
YORK
The Eimer
Piano Trio
Friday, 14 February 2003
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. 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
82nd Season
Friday, 14 February 2003
Sir Jack Lyons Concert Hall
The Eimer Piano Trio
Matthew Denton violin Emma Denton cello
Nicola Eimer piano
Haydn
Ravel
Piano Trio in E flat, Hob.XV:30
Piano Trio
INTERVAL
Brahms Piano Trio in B, Op.8
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 EIMER PIANO TRIO
The Eimer Piano Trio was formed in 1997 and made its debut in the Wigmore
Hall, London in 2000 as a result of winning the Tillet Trust Young Artists
Platform competition. They have performed extensively throughout the UK,
including recitals at St Martin's in the Fields and Fairfield Halls as well as
appearances at the Kings Lynn, Warwick and Leamington Festivals.
The Trio has worked extensively with Siegmund Nissel of the Amadeus Quartet,
Michael Dussek and Louis Carus, and has performed in masterclasses held by
Emmanuel Hurwitz and the Vienna Piano Trio at the Wigmore Hall. The Eimer
Piano Trio was awarded the Harry Isaacs Prize and the Max Pirani Prize at the
Royal Academy of Music, and has performed in a number of national festivals
and concerts sponsored by the Piano Trio Society.
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PROGRAMME NOTES
Piano Trio in E flat, Hob.XV:30
Allegro moderato
Andante con moto -
Presto
Joseph Haydn
(1732-1809)
Haydn would have made a wonderful father - modest, kindly, understanding and
brimming over with fun. In reality he was locked in a barren and increasingly
loveless marriage with a woman who turned out to be a shrew. It must be some
consolation to his ghost to be remembered as "Papa" Haydn and as the father of
the symphony. And not just the symphony: he would have been one of the
prime suspects in the paternity of the string quartet and piano trio, though
ultimately he would (if you will indulge me while I bludgeon this criminal
metaphor to death) have failed the DNA test.
One might be forgiven for thinking that the piano trio (harpsichord/piano, violin
and cello) had its origin in the baroque violin sonata (violin and continuo - the
latter played by harpsichord and, usually, cello). The time frame, at least, fits:
Haydn was already 18 by the time J.S.Bach died and by his own admission
learned almost everything he knew about composition from playing the
keyboard sonatas of J.S.'s son C.P.E.Bach. But there is a clear distinction
between the two types of composition. The baroque violin sonata was definitely
a violin piece with a "continuo" accompaniment, that is a bass line to be played
by both a cello (or similar) and keyboard instrument, with the keyboard player
vamping harmonic support from chord symbols. Only a very few such sonatas
ever came with a written-out keyboard part.
The "piano" trio, as Haydn wrote for it, though, is not violin-, but piano-led.
The early examples are intended for the pianist/harpsichordist, with the violin
and cello there just to fill out the texture and make the keyboard player feel
good: they spend much of their time doubling music in the keyboard part, adding
much needed sonority. It all made sense given the relatively simple textures of
the early classical period. As the years went by, however, textures became more
subtle and complex, thanks in no small measure to Haydn's own example. So
the early history of the piano trio is the long story of the emancipation of first the
violin and then the cello from the tyranny of servitude to the harpsichord/piano.
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The received wisdom of music history is that full emancipation came only with
the middle period trios of Beethoven, in the first years of the 19th century. In
Haydn's later, mature trios the violin is seen as beginning to break free, in places
managing to drag the cello with it, if only briefly. Generations of musicians and
music-lovers have belittled or ignored Haydn's piano trios, as though the
composer somehow hadn't the imagination to see beyond this restriction. It's a
breathtaking insult to the memory of the man who effectively created the string
quartet as a game for four equal players. Of course, he had the imagination to
envisage such music, he didn't have the instruments. The way he wrote for the
three players was what worked best on the instruments he had available to him at
the time -as performance on period instruments has proved.
Haydn's greatest achievements in the genre are his four last piano trios, a set of
three written for the pianist Therese Jansen (Mrs Bartolozzi, as she was by then)
and this E flat Trio. The exact chronology of the four works is uncertain, but it
is fairly clear that all were written in the sixteen months following the end of
August 1795, when Haydn returned from his second and final stay in London.
In the final volume of his exhaustive Haydn: Chronicle and Works, the pre-
eminent Haydn scholar H.C. Robbins Landon said of these works:
On these last four piano trios - and it must have been abundantly clear that very soon,
works like The Creation would not allow Haydn to devote anymore time to such
smaller forms as piano trios - their composer lavished all his talents; it is almost as if he
wished to show the world what possibilities in tonal relationships, harmonic subtleties,
instrumental combinations and sheer brilliance of form these trios could display in the
hands of a master at the summit of his artistic career. Haydn in fact pursued several
new avenues of thought in these trios, some of a purely technical (but nonetheless
musical) nature.
The opening Allegro is widely regarded as about the most massive of Haydn's
first movements, spilling over with themes in a way that belies his advancing
years. The slow movement (in C major - Haydn developed a fascination with
juxtaposing movements in keys a third apart) has been described as alone
enough to "make this the most unjustly neglected masterpiece in all Haydn's
works." (Charles Rosen The Classical Style) It leads without a break into the
Presto finale, full of Haydn's infectious, boisterous sense of fun.
The rather forbidding "Hob.XV:30," by the way, is easily explained. It means
this work is listed as No.30 in Group XV (piano trios) in Antony van Hoboken's
catalogue of Haydn's music. Unfortunately, Hoboken's listings are unreliable as
a chronological guide and even as regards authenticity: two of the listed trios
(Nos.3 & 4) have since been shown to be by Haydn's pupil Pleyel.
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Piano Trio
Modéré
Pantoum: Assez vif
Passacaille: Très large -
Final: Animé
Maurice Ravel
(1875-1937)
[principal tempo markings only]
At our October concert we left Ravel in 1905 overcoming the bitter
disappointments of the Affaire Ravel with the success of his String Quartet.
Over the next three years he produced, amongst other things: the ever popular
Introduction and Allegro for harp, flute clarinet and strings; his first mature
orchestral work, the Rapsodie espagnole; another Spanish-flavoured work, the
opera L'heure espagnole; the formidable piano suite Gaspard de la nuit and,
alongside it, the charming fairytale suite for piano duet, Ma mère l'oye.
In 1908 something of a cultural bombshell hit Paris: Sergei Dyagilev arrived to
present a season of Russian music. The following year he was invited back to
present a season of Russian opera and ballet, which marked the establishment of
the Ballets Russes. An entirely new avenue in contemporary music had opened
up. The Dyagilev company had an insatiable appetite for new and exciting
talent, and Ravel was inevitably sucked in. He was soon providing
orchestrations of all sorts of music, either for Dyagilev or other companies
taking advantage of the new vogue for ballet. His own piano music was not, of
course, immune, and he produced ballet scores from both Ma mère l'oye and his
new piano piece the Valses nobles et sentimentales of 1911. The summit of his
achievement over these years was the purpose-written ballet score Daphnis et
Chloé which occupied him from 1909 to 1911 and was first performed, with
choreography by Fokin, in Paris in June 1912.
Ravel naturally met Stravinsky, and the two men became quite close. Indeed in
1913 Ravel went to Clarens in Switzerland, to collaborate with Stravinsky on
another Dyagilev commission, the orchestration of Musorgsky's unfinished
opera Khovanshchina. While he was there Ravel wrote his Trois poèmes de
Stéphane Mallarmé under the influence of Stravinsky's newly composed 3
Japanese Lyrics and was amongst the first to hear, and understand, his almost-
finished work-in-progress, Rite of Spring.
Ravel returned to Paris, but found the noise and bustle of the capital so irksome
he moved to St-Jean-de-Luz in the Basque region in the very south west of
France. (He was half-Basque himself, on his mother's side.) And there it was in
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March 1914 that he began work on his Piano Trio. He'd apparently had the idea
of trying his hand at a piano trio back in 1906, in the wake of the String Quartet
and Introduction and Allegro, but this was the first time he'd done something
about it. The first movement came quite quickly, the sinuous rhythm of the
opening idea deriving from a projected piano concerto on Basque themes, but
work on the remaining three movements ground to a halt in the middle of July.
It was the outbreak of war that galvanised Ravel. He was eager to join up and so
put on a spurt enabling him to complete the Trio before the end of August. As
he wrote to Stravinsky on 26 September:
The thought that I would be leaving forced me to do five months' work in five weeks. I
have finished my Trio. But I was forced to abandon the works I hoped to finish this
winter: La cloche engloutie!! and a symphonic poem Wien!!! But, of course, it's not
quite the right time for that subject.
As we learned at the last concert, Ravel's attempt to enlist initially failed and
instead he began work on the piano pieces that would become Le tombeau de
Couperin. Finally, in 1916, he was accepted, as a driver in the heavy artillery,
but his service was short: he developed dysentery and was invalided out the
army. He completed Le tombeau de Couperin in 1917. Of the two projected
works mentioned to Stravinsky, nothing came of the opera La cloche engloutie,
but the symphonic poem Wien [the German form of Vienna], envisaged as a sort
of apotheosis of the Viennese waltz, did bear marvellous fruit in the form of the
"choreographic poem" La valse of 1919-20.
The first performance of the Trio was given in January 1915 at a Société
Musicale Indépendante concert in the Salle Gaveau in Paris. The pianist was the
Italian composer Alfredo Casella. (Marguerite Long, to whom he entrusted the
premieres of all his later piano music, may well have had her hands full
preparing to give the Debussy Studies their premiere later that year.)
The first movement is dominated by the subtle, fluid Basque rhythm heard at the
outset: the music is in 8/8, with the quavers grouped 3+2+3, and the underlying
sense of restless is increased by almost constant fluctuations in tempo. The
second movement is a virtuoso scherzo movement based on the pantun, a
Malayan verse form that Baudelaire and Verlaine had experimented with. The
rhyme scheme is abab bcbc cdcd dede and so on, and there are elements of this
pattern in Ravel's structure, particularly in the rapid alternation of two distinct
ideas.
The slow third movement reverts to a form that was known to Couperin, the
passacaglia. The essence of the form is a theme a few bars long (usually, as
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)
())
D
>
here, eight bars), which is constantly repeated while different things happen
round it. In baroque times the repeated theme virtually never left the bottom of
the texture, hence the name ground bass, but Ravel is far more adventurous.
The finale is an astonishing virtuoso tour-de-force. Once again, it is based on
characteristic Basque rhythms, this time 5/4 with occasional bars of 7/4 thrown
in. Ravel's ability to conjure huge, sonorous climaxes from an ensemble as
small and intrinsically unbalanced as the piano trio is simply staggering.
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.
Piano Trio in B major, Op.8
Allegro con brio
Scherzo: Allegro molto (with central Meno allegro)
Adagio
Allegro
Johannes Brahms
(1833-1897)
Mention Brahms, and what picture forms in your mind? Pound to a penny it's
the middle-aged Brahms, fulsome of body and beard, in all likelihood smoking a
cigar almost as strong as his coffee. This is the iconic image of Brahms, the one
illustrators use when they want their sketch of Brahms to be instantly
recognised. And it is an image which, admittedly, sits rather well with much of
his music - expansive, measured, matured, substantial.
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It was not always thus. He was young, once. A firebrand. Passionate.
Reckless. Slim. Clean-shaven. Most people, even music lovers, would struggle
to put a name to a photograph or drawing of
him in his twenties. Would you have
recognised him from this picture?
This was how he appeared to Robert and
Clara Schumann when, during a walking
tour of the Rhineland, he turned up on their
Düsseldorf doorstep on 1 October 1853,
aged just twenty. It took a lot of courage for
him to do this: three years earlier he had
sent a package of his best compositions to
the master for his comments, only to have it
returned unopened. His reception now
couldn't have been more different:
Schumann's diary entry for the day includes the simple comment "Visit from
Brahms, a genius." He and Clara took their "Young Eagle," as they (helpfully
anticipating my metaphor) called him, under their wing.
This happy time was not to last. Schumann immediately set about doing what
he could to further Brahms' career as a composer, strongly recommending a list
of six of his compositions to the publisher Breitkopf & Härtel. But at the end of
the following February Schumann threw himself in the Rhine in an attempt at
suicide, and eventually had to be removed to an institution. At which, with one
of those bizarre gestures that seem designed merely to baffle onlookers, Brahms
effectively seemed to have assumed responsibility for the Schumann family.
This was precisely the period when Brahms wrote the B major Piano Trio. He
was already at work on it during his 1853 walking tour and completed it in
January 1854. It was not his first trio by any means: one of the works Schumann
suggested to Breitkopf & Härtel was a two-movement Phantasy for piano trio.
Brahms, though, was notoriously self-critical, and even as a teenager would not
put his name to anything he wasn't entirely happy with: he even used a
pseudonym when doing hackwork, such as piano duet arrangements. Works that
failed to come up to his standards he didn't just shove aside, he destroyed them:
no trace now of the Phantasy Trio, or the A minor Violin Sonata, another work
mentioned in Schumann's letter. Others had to go through radical reworking
before he would share them with the public: the two-piano sonata he began
immediately after this Trio, metamorphosed into a symphony before finally
going public five years later as the D minor Piano Concerto.
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d
Not that Brahms was entirely satisfied with this Trio, his first published chamber
work. Breitkopf & Härtel bought it from him in June 1854, publishing it that
November, but Brahms said at the time he'd wished he waited, as he knew he'd
want to make changes. He had a long time to wait for the opportunity. Brahms'
publisher of preference was the firm of Simrock, who handled virtually every
work of his from Op.16 (1860) onwards. In 1888, Simrock acquired all the
Brahms works published by Breitkopf & Härtel and generously asked the
composer if he would like to revise any of them. He did, the B major Trio being
the most urgent.
As to the nature of the changes, I can't improve on the summary by the German
scholar Wilhelm Altmann:
In the new arrangement the Scherzo remains practically the same. In the other
movements Brahms has supplied fresh subsidiary themes, the original ones appearing to
him, and with reason, of too little independence and weak; above all, in the first
movement the development section is considerably shortened and the fugue deleted.
The new constituent parts are so wonderfully blended with the old that the new edition
forms a complete whole, but there will be some who prefer the older work and will
cling to it.
Simrock had to wait a while for the new version, though: Brahms played it with
some success all over the place for the best part of a year before Simrock could
persuade him to part with the music. It eventually came out in 1890.
The first movement has an opening of Schubertian breadth which hides the real
pace of Allegro con brio. Only in the development does it lead to the remains of
what Brahms described as "the many unnecessary difficulties" of the earlier
version. The Scherzo is in B minor, and based on a staccato hunting call figure.
With its contrast of the hushed and the violent, its headlong drive and the
commanding technique it demands of the pianist, it is more clearly the work of
the twenty-year-old keyboard lion. The opening of the third movement is, by
complete contrast, sombre, despite its return to the warmth of B major. More
passion is generated by the long cello solo that follows, but the mood of the
opening soon returns. The Finale is once more in B minor, and apart from the
central contrast in the major, pursues the minor insistently and resolutely to the
very final bar.
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.
Thursday, 13 March 2003
Madeleine Mitchell violin
Andrew Ball piano
Mozart
Delius
James MacMillan
Fauré
Violin Sonata in E minor, K.304
Violin Sonata, Op. posth.
After the Tryst
Violin Sonata No.1 in A, Op.13
More dates for your diaries:
Wednesday, 19 February 2003
Sir Jack Lyons Concert Hall, 8 pm
Michael Collins clarinet
Kathryn Stott piano
Two cornerstones of the clarinet repertoire - Brahms' Eb Sonata and Weber's
Grand duo concertant - plus arrangements of Beethoven's Spring Sonata and
Schubert's Arpeggione Sonata
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es
Wednesday, 26 February 2003
Sir Jack Lyons Concert Hall, 8 pm
Fitzwilliam String Quartet
Shostakovich's 11th Quartet, Beethoven's Grosse Fuge and Bruckner's Quintet
(with Caroline Sparey - viola)
Saturday, 8 March 2003
York Minster, 8 pm
York Cantores
Marion Best conductor
The group's 10th anniversary concert, to include Vaughan Williams' Mass in G
minor
Saturday, 15 March 2003
Sir Jack Lyons Concert Hall, 8 pm
York Symphony Orchestra
David Blake conductor
Mendelssohn's overture A midsummer night's dream, Mozart's last Piano
Concerto, the Bb, K.595 (Faye Williams - piano) and Sibelius' First Symphony
Saturday, 15 March 2003
North Transept of York Minster, 8.00 pm
Chapter House Choir
Stephen Williams director
Portuguese Polyphony - a programme of choral music by Cardoso, Escobar,
Esteves, Lobo and Magalhães
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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 §
Canon & Mrs J.S. Pearson
Mr & Mrs D.G. Rowlands §
Mr & Mrs M. Schatzberger
Mrs D.C. Summers §
Dr & Mrs G.M.A. Turner §
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
THE NATIONAL FEDERATION
OF MUSIC SOCIETIES
Dr D.M. Bearpark
Mr & Mrs D.A.C. Blunt §
Mr J. Curry §
Dr J.D. Dawick
Mr C.G.M. Gardner
Dr F.A. Jackson
Prof. R. Lawton §
Mrs G.O. Morcom §
Mr & Mrs L.W. Robinson §
Mrs I.G. Sargent §
Mrs I. Stanley §
Mr D.A. Sutton
Mr J.I. Watson
Mrs H.B. Wright §
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.
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
* (ISMS 3/2/11 (2)
OF
it
SURTHWIJA
HISTORICAL RESEARCH
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BMS
YORK
Madeleine Mitchell
Andrew Ball
(violin & piano)
Thursday, 13 March 2003
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 82nd Season
Tonight is the last concert of the 82nd 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 83rd 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 John Robinson, 20 Barmby Ave.,
York, YO10 4HX.
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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S
a
T
BRITISH MUSIC SOCIETY
of YORK
82nd Season
Thursday, 13 March 2003
Sir Jack Lyons Concert Hall
Madeleine Mitchell violin
Andrew Ball piano
Mozart Sonata in E minor, K.304
Delius Sonata in B (Op. posth.)
James MacMillan
Fauré
INTERVAL
After the Tryst
Sonata No.1 in A major, 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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MADELEINE MITCHELL
& ANDREW BALL
Madeleine Mitchell has a successful international career spanning two decades
and has earned a reputation as one of Britain's most outstanding violinists,
performing as a soloist in over forty countries. She was a finalist in both the
European Women of Achievement Awards and the Creative Briton Awards,
described by the editor of BBC Music as "an artist of visionary imagination."
She broadcasts frequently for both television and radio, including ABC-
Australia, BBC TV, European TV and the BBC Proms with Joanna MacGregor.
Madeleine is particularly well known for her recitals in a wide repertoire with
lively spoken introductions. She was recently invited to represent Britain in the
major festival UKinNY with a recital at Lincoln Center. She has given recitals
at Sydney Opera House, Seoul Center for the Arts, toured for the British
Council, played at many international and British festivals, frequently performed
in London and for Radio 3. Her recordings include Messiaen's Quartet for the
end of time with Joanna MacGregor, Christopher van Kampen and David
Campbell.
Madeleine Mitchell won the Tagore Gold medal as a scholar at the Royal
College of Music. As a Fulbright/ITT fellow she gained a master's degree in
New York at the Eastman and Juilliard Schools.
Andrew Ball studied with Kendall Taylor at the Royal College of Music, and
read music at Queen's College, Oxford. Regarded as one of the foremost British
pianists of his generation, a busy career has taken him all over the world. He has
a reputation for innovative and imaginative programmes, and chamber music
and contemporary music have always played a large part in his repertoire. He
has given countless premieres (including the first British performance of Sofia
Gubaidulina's Piano Sonata at the Bath Festival), made his Proms debut playing
Messiaen and studied Tippett's piano sonatas with the composer. Ives and
Busoni are also special interests. He has played with the Nash Ensemble,
London Sinfonietta, Villiers Piano Quartet and Gemini.
Madeleine Mitchell and Andrew Ball have performed together for ten years,
since their successful recital for the Huddersfield Festival.
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t
PROGRAMME NOTES
Violin Sonata in E minor, K.304
Allegro
Tempo di Menuetto
Wolfgang Amadé Mozart
(1756-1791)
One of the most widely known incidents in Mozart's short life was the occasion
(8 June 1781) when he was dismissed the service of the Prince Archbishop of
Salzburg, being literally kicked out of the room by the Oberküchenmeister
Count Arco. But this was not the first time he'd engineered his own dismissal
from the Archbishop's employ. In the summer of 1777 Mozart was chafing at
his servitude in Salzburg and in a petition of thinly-veiled insolence asked to be
released so he could undertake another foreign tour. In retaliation the
Archbishop released both father and son from their contracts, but evidently
Leopold could not afford to make the trip under these conditions and quickly got
himself reinstated. Instead young Wolfgang set out, chaperoned by his mother,
to make what money he could and, if possible, find a suitable position.
Mother and son left Salzburg on 23 September 1777 in a chaise of their own,
making for Munich where they stayed over a fortnight. But there was no
suitable opening for Mozart there, either, and they travelled on to Augsburg,
where they stayed with relatives for another fortnight. (Mozart discovered a
kindred spirit in a young girl cousin, who for a while was to receive from him a
barrage of his most lavatorial and obscene letters.) Eventually, on 30 October,
Mozart and his mother arrived in Mannheim, an important musical centre with a
legendary orchestra. Again, there was no post here for Mozart, but he stayed
several months all the same, picking up work as he could, getting to know the
principal musicians and falling in love with a 16-year-old singer called Aloysia
Weber. (Another man was to claim Aloysia, but Mozart married her younger
sister Constanza, on 4 August 1782.)
Back in Salzburg, Leopold was getting frantic at Wolfgang's waste of time. He
urged and bullied his son on to Paris. Wolfgang and his mother left Mannheim
on 14 March 1778 and arrived in Paris just over a week later. It was not the
success the family had hoped for: Paris was polarised between two musical
camps into neither of which Mozart fitted. To make matters infinitely worse,
Frau Mozart succumbed to fever, dying on 3 July.
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By August Leopold had renegotiated a better position for his son at Salzburg and
was urging him to return. Wolfgang set out from Paris at the end of September,
dawdling away (to his father's extreme vexation) another month in Mannheim,
but arrived back in January 1779, in time to petition the Archbishop formally for
the new post.
One of the jobs Mozart accepted over the winter of 1777-8 was to write
concertos and quartets for a Dutch amateur flautist. Amid the distractions of
Mannheim he found the work uncongenial. "Besides," he wrote to his father on
14 February 1778:
you know I am quite powerless whenever I have to write for an instrument I can't stand.
So as a diversion I compose something else, such as duets for clavier and violin, or I
work at my Mass. Now I am settling down seriously to the clavier [and violin] duets, as
I want to have them engraved.
These "duets for clavier and violin" are the six Violin Sonatas, K.301-306.
Mozart had finished four of them by the time he left Mannheim. The E minor
Sonata, K.304, was begun in Mannheim and finished in Paris, while the
sparkling D major, K.306, was written in Paris that summer. It took Mozart
some time to find an engraver who would print the Sonatas cheaply enough, but
eventually he succeeded. Although promised for the end of September, the
printed copies were in fact only ready in the last few days of the year. In time
for Mozart, returning via Munich, to present a copy to the dedicatee, the
Palatinate Electress Maria Elisabeth.
Mozart clearly considered these Sonatas, along with a second set of six from
1781, as music for the home rather than the concert hall, though a few do
contain writing as demanding as anything in the piano or violin concertos. The
E minor Sonata is in two short movements, an Allegro and a rondo in minuet
style. Mozart's use of the minor key here is a rarity: in all his thirty-odd works
for piano and strings there is only one other in a minor key, the G minor Piano
Quartet. The style of the Sonata is in keeping with the restrained, "classical"
style of the 1770s, but the minor inflections of the melodic line and the
underlying harmony give the music glimpses of a romantic poignancy that
would not be out of place in the Schubert of four decades later. Perhaps this
accounts for the Sonata being better known than even the violin and piano
masterpieces of the later 1780s.
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end
of
on
nd.
06.
nor
the
art
but
me
the
om
do
The
muet
rks
ano
ano
Violin Sonata in B (Op. posth.)
Allegro con brio
Andante molto tranquillo
Allegro con moto
Frederick Delius
(1862-1934)
Technically speaking, Delius classes as an English composer: at any rate he was
born in Bradford on 29 January 1862. But little of his subsequent biography
features his native country, for which he seems to have had little regard. He was
the son of a German export merchant and christened Fritz Theodor Albert: he
adopted the Frederick only in middle age, possibly to aid the establishment of
his music in England. In his early 20s he attempted to farm oranges in Florida;
but the venture failed, and, after a year in Virginia where he taught music, he
returned to Europe, to study at the Leipzig Conservatory. There he met one of
the most potent influences on his musical development - Grieg.
In 1888 Delius moved to Paris, frequenting artistic circles there, but in 1897 he
moved some 60km out of the capital to Grez-sur-Loing, where he spent virtually
the rest of his life. His final years were overshadowed by the effects of syphilis:
by 1921 his hands were paralysed, quickly followed by the rest of his body, and
by 1925 he was blind. It was not until 1928, with the arrival of the young Eric
Fenby, that composition became a possibility again: Fenby acted as the
composer's amanuensis, taking down music to his dictation.
The label Op. posth. hints at some of the history of this piece. It is used by
publishers of works printed after a composer's death, usually some manuscript
discovered amongst his or her papers. The idea is that the posth. itself is usually
enough to differentiate a piece from other sonatas, concertos or whatever, where
continuing the composer's opus number sequence might give a misleading idea
of the work's chronology. In Delius' case, three violin sonatas had already been
published during his lifetime - as a boy he'd studied both violin and piano.
After the composer's death, the bulk of his musical papers came into the
possession of that great champion of his music, the conductor Sir Thomas
Beecham. This Violin Sonata remained in the Beecham Collection unheard until
1957, when it was loaned out for two broadcast performances by the BBC. It
then seems to have returned to obscurity, only to come to light again when
Robert Threlfall was working on his 1977 catalogue of Delius' music: it was
thanks to Threlfall's efforts that the work was finally published that same year of
1977, apparently from a copy of the work made in connection with the BBC
broadcast.
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The Op.posth. work was the first of Delius' four violin sonatas to be written: it
was composed in 1892, straight after his first opera Irmelin, to which it is related
stylistically.
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.
After the Tryst
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.
James MacMillan wrote After the Tryst in 1988 and it was first performed on 19
September 1990 in the Henry Wood Hall, Glasgow, by members of the Paragon
Ensemble. The piece is a short one - only twenty-three slow bars in all - and
the composer has written the following about it:
In 1984 I set William Soutar's love poem The Tryst to music in the style of an old
Scottish ballad. This I sang in folk clubs and bars around Scotland with my old folk
group Broadstone. The composition and performances of this song made a lasting
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)
)
)
)
impression on me as it felt as if I had tapped into a deep reservoir of shared tradition
as my setting was quite faithful to the old ballad style.
Four years later I started developing this music into something else. In After the
Tryst I elongated and ornamented the original melody into a virtuosic and highly
expressive miniature for violin with piano accompaniment. The original harmonic
outline is still adhered to and emphasized by the most simple series of arpeggiated
chords on the piano. This work was the initial sketch for Búsqueda, and Tryst.
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.
Violin Sonata No.1 in A, Op.13
Allegro molto
Andante
Allegro vivo
Allegro quasi presto
...
With your indulgence, I'm going to list the principal nineteenth-century French
composers in chronological order. It's rather a schoolteacherish thing to do, but
I don't think it's a bad idea every once in a while: one can get distressingly
vague about the actual sequence.
Giacomo Meyerbeer 1791-1864 (technically German)
Hector Berlioz 1803-1869
Charles Gounod 1818-1893
Léo Delibes 1836 - 1891
Georges Bizet 1838-1875
Emanuel Chabrier 1841 - 1894
Jules Massenet 1842-1912
Gabriel Fauré
(1845-1924)
Jacques Offenbach 1819 1880 (again, technically German)
César Franck 1822 1890 (Yes, I know, a Belgian, but ...)
Camille Saint-Saëns 1835-1921
Gabriel Fauré
1845-1924
Henri Duparc
1848-1933
Vincent D'Indy 1851 - 1931
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Ernest Chausson
1855-1899
Claude Debussy 1862-1918
Paul Dukas 1865-1935
Erik Satie 1866 - 1925
Maurice Ravel 1875 - 1937
[Incidentally, be warned: anyone moaning about flagrant omissions from this list
gets the job, the unpaid job of writing these programme notes from now on.]
To complete the picture Fauré's nearest contemporaries amongst non-French
composers were Chaikovsky (1840), Dvořák (1841), Grieg (1843), Rimsky-
Korsakov (1844) and our own Hubert Parry (1848).
Look at the list of French composers again, and consider how many, or should I
say how few, wrote anything in the way of chamber music. Now you have some
idea of the significance of this Violin Sonata. Fauré wrote the bulk of it in the
summer of 1875, when he was just turned thirty and staying at the Normandy
summer house of his friend and champion Camille Clerc. The house guests also
included a Belgian violin virtuoso, so Fauré had the advantage of being able to
hear the result of each day's progress played over by an expert. The Sonata is
dedicated, though, to another violinist, Paul Viardot, son of the famous singer
Pauline Viardot. Fauré was much influenced by the time he spent at the Viardot
home, and in 1877 was briefly engaged to the daughter, Marianne. Until, that is,
she changed her mind and sent him packing. But that is, as they say, another
story.
Writing a violin sonata was a bold step to take. Fauré had written nothing of this
stature and complexity before. Of the composers listed above, only Saint-Saëns
had published a duo sonata, his First Cello Sonata of two years earlier. César
Franck might have been over twenty years Fauré's senior, but his celebrated
Violin Sonata was still ten years in the future: and when it did come it showed
distinct signs of having been influenced by this very Fauré work - we must, as
the composer Charles Koechlin quipped, "render unto Gabriel the things that are
Gabriel's, and not unto César."
With effectively no national tradition of chamber music, no French publisher
would take on such a substantial work by a relative unknown. Eventually the
Leipzig firm of Breitkopf & Härtel was badgered and coerced by the composer's
friends until they gave in and agreed to take the work on. They gave no money
to Fauré, but did pay for the work to be engraved and printed. In the end, it sold
well enough for them to make a tidy profit, though Fauré himself did not benefit.
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1
11
me
IS
er
not
S
The Sonata has four movements. The first shows two of Fauré's fingerprints:
the almost unceasing arpeggio- and broken-chord-based accompaniment patterns
in the piano part and the way the harmony slides in unpredictable directions.
The slow movement lies second and is the first of Fauré's many pieces cast in
barcarolle form. The scherzo lies third: its unexpected accents and elfin charm
so delighted the audience at the first public performance (Paris, 27 January
1877) they immediately encored it. The finale is close in mood to the first
movement: Fauré evidently looked on it with affection as he quoted its main
theme in the third movement (1896) of his famous Dolly Suite
Programme notes by David Mather
Floral decorations by Sue Bedford
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FORTHCOMING CONCERTS
This is the last concert in the 82nd 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, 15 March 2003
Sir Jack Lyons Concert Hall, 8 pm
York Symphony Orchestra
David Blake conductor
Mendelssohn's overture A midsummer night's dream, Mozart's last Piano
Concerto, the Bb, K.595 (Faye Williams - piano) and Sibelius' First Symphony
Saturday, 15 March 2003
North Transept of York Minster, 8.00 pm
Chapter House Choir
Stephen Williams director
Portuguese Polyphony - a programme of choral music by Cardoso, Escobar,
Esteves, Lobo and Magalhães
Saturday, 5 April 2003
St Olave's Church, Marygate, 8.00 pm
Micklegate Singers
Nicholas Carter director
Songs of Springtime - an exploration of English part songs of the early 20th
century, including works by Stanford, Bridge, Warlock, Delius, Moeran and
Vaughan Williams
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Sunday, 13 April 2003
York Minster, 6.30 pm
York Musical Society
Philip Moore conductor
J.S. Bach's Passion according to St John
Wednesday, 23 April 2003
St Olave's, Marygate, 9.00 pm
Christina Waldock cello
John Hastie organ
Music for unaccompanied cello and 20th-century French organ works played in
candle-lit church. Entry is free.
Wednesday, 7 May 2003
Sir Jack Lyons Concert Hall, 8 pm
Noriko Kawai piano
Music by Scarlatti, Scelsi, Skryabin (including Fifth Sonata), Beethoven and
Liszt (including Après une lecture du Dante)
Saturday, 17 May 2003
York Barbican Centre, 7.30 pm
City of York Guildhall Orchestra
Simon Wright music director
Programme includes Richard Strauss' tone poem Tod und Verklärung, Chopin's
First Piano Concerto (Martin Roscoe - piano) and Janáček's Sinfonietta
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BRITISH MUSIC SOCIETY
of YORK
OFFICERS OF THE SOCIETY
President Dr Francis Jackson
Vice-Presidents Prof. Nicola LeFanu, Rosalind Richards
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
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 §
Canon & Mrs J.S. Pearson
Mr & Mrs D.G. Rowlands §
Mr & Mrs M. Schatzberger
Mrs D.C. Summers §
Dr & Mrs G.M.A. Turner §
Mr R. Wilkinson §
Dr D.M. Bearpark
Mr & Mrs D.A.C. Blunt §
Mr J. Curry S
Dr J.D. Dawick
Mr C.G.M. Gardner
Dr F.A. Jackson
Prof. R. Lawton §
Mrs G.O. Morcom §
Mr & Mrs L.W. Robinson §
Mrs I.G. Sargent §
Mrs I. Stanley §
Mr D.A. Sutton
Registered Charity No.700302
Mr J.I. Watson
Mrs H.B. 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 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 Kingdom.
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
The Society also gratefully
THE NATIONAL FEDERATION acknowledges the assistance of the Royal Bank of
OF MUSIC SOCIETIES
Scotland.
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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SURTHWION
SMS 3/2/11 (3)
HISTORICAL
X
INSTITUTE
OF
RESEARCH
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BMS
YORK
Martinů String Quartet
& Christopher Langdown
Thursday, 9 October 2003
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 83rd Season
The BMS would like to welcome you all tonight, to the first concert of our 83rd
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 take tonight's ticket to the Treasurer's desk after
the concert, or bring it 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.
A message from the Treasurer
Our Treasurer has had to spend much of the summer working in Germany, and
some of his activities on our behalf have been delayed, for which he apologises.
In particular, cheques you sent for membership and ticket payments may have
been held by us longer than usual before being processed, which in turn means
that they may appear later than expected in your bank statements.
Can you help?
The BMS is run by a Committee whose members give their time and assistance
on a voluntary basis to make the concerts happen. Without their efforts, there
would simply be no BMS season. Being a member of the Committee does not
require any great musical knowledge and would not be too demanding of your
time the main responsibilities are attending three or four committee meetings
each year and assisting with stewarding etc. on concert nights. The Committee
needs new members to help continue this necessary work. Do please think
carefully about whether you could spare a little of your time to ensure the
continuation of the Society's work. If you would like to help or simply to find
out in a little more detail what might be involved - have a word with one of the
stewards or officers.
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BRITISH MUSIC SOCIETY
of YORK
83rd Season
Thursday, 9 October 2003
Sir Jack Lyons Concert Hall
Martinů String Quartet
Lubomir Havlák & Petr Matěják violins
Jan Jíša viola & Jitka Vlašánková cello
with
Christopher Langdown piano
Elgar Piano Quintet in A minor, Op.84
INTERVAL
Schumann Piano Quintet in E flat major, Op.44
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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TONIGHT'S ARTISTS
The Martinů Quartet was formed as the Havlák Quartet in 1976 from four
students of the Vlach Quartet's Viktor Moučka at the Prague Conservatory.
During their studies at the Academy of Music, the members of the Quartet
continued to study under Antonín Kohout of the Smetana Quartet. They have
also taken part in masterclasses held by leading ensembles such as the Tel Aviv,
Amadeus, Guarneri, Juilliard and Alban Berg Quartets.
The group changed its name to Martinů Quartet in 1985 in honour of the great
Czech composer Bohuslav Martinů. Its repertoire includes works from the
mainstream of the string quartet literature, but it has also naturally specialised in
the works of composers who are Czech or from the other homelands and peoples
of the former Czechoslovakia, such as Janáček. Many of these they have
recorded.
Christopher Langdown studied with John Barstow at the Royal College of
Music in London, where he was chosen to play Shostakovich to the remarkable
Tat'yana Nikolayeva, for whom Shostakovich wrote his 24 Preludes and Fugues.
He made his London debut at the South Bank Centre in 2001, and two solo CD
recordings have been released on the WMP Classics label.
Christopher is in demand as a chamber music player and appears regularly with
the Martinů Quartet. He is currently Head of Piano at the Kingsley School in
Leamington Spa and has been a visiting teacher at the Birmingham
Conservatoire Junior Department and the Royal Academy of Music in London.
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PROGRAMME NOTES
Piano Quintet in A minor, Op.84
Moderato [with faster passages]
Adagio
Andante - Allegro
Edward Elgar
(1857-1934)
The Piano Quintet is the most important of the three chamber works at the heart
of Elgar's legendary "Indian Summer" between the close of the First World War
and the death of his wife in 1920. Elgar's career had hit its natural peak around
the year 1910. He had come to prominence relatively late: he was already in his
forties when the 1899 premiere of the Enigma Variations laid the foundation of
his reputation. It was followed by Gerontius (1900), the Introduction and
Allegro for strings (1905), First Symphony (1907/8), Violin Concerto (1910),
Second Symphony (1911) and the symphonic study Falstaff (1913).
Then came a period when he produced nothing of significance: a fear of
rejection after a sea change in musical tastes around 1912/3 conspired with the
outbreak of war to send him off mining an inconsequential seam of nostalgia and
fantasy for several years. It wasn't until the tide of the war was beginning to
change, in 1918, that Elgar as it were snapped out of it. That March he was in
hospital in London for an operation on his tonsils. On the twenty-second he was
discharged to his town house in Hampstead, where he wrote down a theme that
was haunting him - an idea that was soon to become the main theme of the first
movement of the Cello Concerto. Three days later he began a different work, a
string quartet, but before long this in turn was interrupted by a violin sonata.
By now Elgar and his wife had retreated, as they did whenever they could, to
their country cottage - Brinkwells, in Fittleworth, Sussex. Here Elgar started to
concentrate on the Sonata, particularly after a piano was delivered in mid
August. By the end of that month, Elgar invited his friend W.H. Reed (leader of
the LSO) down to try over the new work. Reed was back at Brinkwells on 18
September, by which time Elgar had completed the Sonata and had begun a
piano quintet.
By the time Elgar posted the Sonata to his publishers on 1 October 1918 he was
already working side by side on the String Quartet and Piano Quintet. In fact it
was the Quartet that was finished first, in mid December, with the Piano Quintet
following in February 1919 All three works were given their first public
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performances together at the Aeolian Hall in London on 21 May 1919: the
Quintet was played by a quartet consisting of Albert Sammons, Billy Reed,
Raymond Jeremy and Felix Salmond, with Sammons' regular duo partner,
William Murdoch, playing the piano.
With this concert out of the way, Elgar returned to the theme he'd noted down a
year earlier, on coming out of hospital: it now took flesh as the Cello Concerto,
completed by the beginning of August. The following year Elgar's wife died: it
seems to have been the final straw and Elgar produced nothing of consequence
thereafter. Indeed, he seems at times to have gone out of his way to avoid
music, and the only major achievement of his final fourteen years was the
magnificent series of archival recordings of his own music coaxed out of him by
Fred Gaisberg of the Gramophone Company.
The premiere in May 1919 was not, of course, the first airing of the Quintet: two
months earlier it was played through privately at Elgar's Hampstead house. One
of the people who heard it there was George Bernard Shaw, who commented,
"The Quintet knocked me over at once... This was the finest thing of its kind
since Coriolan - there was the same quality - the same vein."
Elgar was himself a violinist: indeed in his earlier, lean years, part of his living
came from playing and teaching the instrument. This gave him a thorough
understanding of string writing, and strings in general figure prominently in his
output: you have only to think of the two concertos, the E minor Serenade and
the Introduction and Allegro. And in this Quintet it is the strings that seem to
dominate: the piano, in comparison, is almost reticent. This is so far from the
state of affairs usual in the great piano quintets - many of which amount almost
to piano concertos writ small - that for decades the work struggled to get an
airing. Despite its containing what is, in Percy Young's words, "in some ways
Elgar's single greatest movement."
The movement referred to was the opening Allegro. Writing to the work's
dedicatee, the critic and biographer Ernest Newman, Elgar said: "It is strange
music I think and I like it - but it's ghostly stuff." The remark is explained by
entries in Lady Elgar's journal. The mood was inspired by "reminiscences of
sinister trees & impressions of Flexham Park... sad 'dispossessed' trees & their
dance & unstilled regret for their evil fate or rather curse - wh. brought it on."
Flexham Park is close to Brinkwells, and Elgar had been struck by the sinister
brooding quality of some withered trees there, which local legend had it were the
remains of Spanish monks struck dead whilst celebrating sacrilegious rites. The
tale may also account for the recognisable Spanish colour of the movement's
second theme.
1
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>
D
>
>
is not
The Adagio slow movement opens in a warm autumnal E major, but
afraid to show its emotion, or even to let itself go when it comes to a big climax.
The A major finale makes use of some of the ideas from the first movement: its
opening introduction is based on a subsidiary idea from the earlier movement,
while the haunting opening of the work as a whole is clearly alluded to just
before the Finale's main Allegro theme is brought back. For all the reticence of
some of the Quintet's musical gestures, there is no doubting it closes in Elgar's
most grandiose style.
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.
Piano Quintet in E flat major, Op.44
Allegro brillante
In modo d'una Marcia: Un poco largamente - Agitato
Scherzo: Molto vivace
Trio I
Trio II: L'istesso tempo
Allegro, ma non troppo
Robert Schumann
(1810-1856)
Schumann originally studied law at Leipzig University, but was attracted more
by philosophy and music. He had great natural facility at the piano and in 1830
began lessons with the celebrated teacher Friedrich Wieck. He made swift
progress, and it seemed as though the virtuoso's glittering career, on which he'd
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set his heart, was in his grasp. But in 1832 he permanently damaged his hand -
it's said by using a contraption of his own devising meant to strengthen his
fingers, though these days the blame for the weakening of his fingers is laid on
mercury poisoning. All the energy he had so far put into practising he now
transferred to composition. Predictably, his early works were for the piano: the
first twenty-three published opuses are piano works and they straddle the 1830s.
When Schumann first arrived in Leipzig, Wieck's daughter Clara was still a girl,
and Schumann looked elsewhere for romance. But as Clara grew up, he fell in
love with her, and the couple planned to marry. Wieck refused his consent, and
they took him to court, with whose permission they married on 12 September
1840, the day before Clara's twenty-first birthday.
The prospect of marriage to the woman he loved brought a change in
Schumann's compositional output: the year 1840 was devoted almost
exclusively to song, including some of the greatest works in the Lieder repertory
- the Eichendorff Liederkreis, Op.39, and the true song cycles Frauenliebe und
-leben and Dichterliebe. In 1841 it was the turn of orchestral music - the First
Symphony and the Phantasie that a few years later was to become the first
movement of the Piano Concerto.
The couple were forced to spend a month apart in the spring of 1842: Clara, one
of the great pianists of the age in her own right, travelled to Denmark on a
concert tour while Schumann himself stayed in Leipzig. He was genuinely
needed there he couldn't delegate all his work as editor of the music journal
Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung - but in part his reason for not accompanying
her on this tour was that he was finding it increasingly difficult coming to terms
with her being the one to receive all the attention. Wieck, incidentally,
immediately started spreading the rumour that the couple had in fact separated.
Schumann missed his wife terribly, though, and found himself unable to
compose. And to channel all that unstoppable energy he turned to the study of
counterpoint, and of string quartets by Haydn and Beethoven. This bore
spectacular fruit in the early summer: in the joy of being reunited with Clara, he
threw himself into chamber music, composing in just six months the three String
Quartets, Op.41, this Piano Quintet and the Piano Quartet, Op.47.
Combining the piano with a string quartet seems to us now such an obvious
notion, that it comes as quite a surprise to realise that Schumann had no model.
The Trout Quintet of Schubert is, to be sure, for piano and strings, but the four
strings aren't the conventional string quartet, but a line-up of violin, viola, cello
and double bass: in any case the Trout's combination was dictated by the patron
T
S
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I
1
it was written for. Mozart, it is true, had sanctioned the issuing of arrangements
of some of his early piano concertos for the piano and string quartet
combination, but Schumann may not even have known of these. If he needed
models at all, it is likely he turned to the two Mozart piano quartets.
The Schumann E flat is without doubt the most immediate and attractive work in
the piano quintet repertoire, which it continues to dominate. In mood and
outlook it would be hard to imagine more polar an opposite to the Elgar. It's
fashionable to belittle Schumann's abilities when it came to scoring, either in
orchestral or chamber music, and it's true he have a tendency to over double
instrumental lines, but there's much less of it in the Quintet than people make
out. The Scherzo, perhaps, is the worst offender here.
The first movement starts in bold, confident mood, but it's not long before
Schumann the Lieder composer takes over, with the piano gently accompanying
a conversation between the cello and viola. The C minor second movement, as
the title states, is "in the manner of a march." A slow, melancholy march, but
emphatically not a funeral march Schumann's metronome mark makes this
clear. The structure is interesting. The march idea comes first, followed by the
first contrasting episode, in a serene C major with a chorale-like theme. The
march music returns and leads to the second, even more contrasting episode, a
high-voltage Agitato in F minor. Schumann's clever idea is to bring back the
march theme with the Agitato still going on round it, before the music subsides
into a return of the serene, chorale-like episode, now in F major. And finally the
march music returns, briefly in F minor, before returning to C minor.
The energetic Scherzo has two trio sections. Beethoven had introduced this
extra repetition (scherzo - trio - scherzo - trio - scherzo) in some of his middle
period works to provide adequate balance for his longer other movements,
particularly the first and slow ones. But it was Schumann who pioneered the
true double scherzo, where the two trio sections are completely different. In this
case the two trios mirror the characters of the two episodes of the march
movement: the first is in a gentle, unassuming G flat, while the second is a
stormy, sometimes even aggressive number in A flat minor.
In its use of keys, the finale is a tour de force. Its home is technically E flat, but
the first subject alone has components in, respectively, C minor, G minor and E
flat. The opening idea alone returns in a bewildering variety of keys - E minor,
C sharp minor, G sharp minor and E flat minor. Schumann's time spent
studying counterpoint earlier in the year pays dividends in the final coda, where
the main components of the first subject come back in an entertaining fugato.
Still better is to come: after a grandiloquent slowing up, Schumann embarks on a
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double fugato, adding the opening idea of the first movement to the contrapuntal
mêlée. The result still always makes my remaining hair stand on end - which,
as you can imagine, is no mean achievement.
Programme notes by David Mather
Floral decorations by Sue Bedford
FORTHCOMING CONCERTS
The next concert in the 83rd 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, 21 November 2003
Radoslav Kvapil (piano)
Dvořák
Chopin
Josef Suk
Janáček
Liszt
Variations, Op.36
Dumka and Furiant, Op.12
Ballade No.3 in Ab, Op.47
Studies, Op.10
Spring
On an overgrown path
Concert Study in Db Un sospiro
Paganini Study No.2 in Eb
Hungarian Rhapsody
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S
BRITISH MUSIC SOCIETY
of YORK
OFFICERS OF THE SOCIETY
President Dr Francis Jackson
Vice-Presidents
Chairman
Vice-Chairman
Hon. Treasurer
Hon. Secretary
Hon. Publicity Secretary
Hon. Programme Secretary
NFMS Representative
Hon Auditor
Members of the Committee
Prof. Nicola LeFanu, Rosalind Richards
Bob Stevens
Dr Sandy Anderson
John Robinson
Nigel Dick
Marc Schatzberger
Amanda Crawley
Dr Richard Crossley
Derek Winterbottom
Helen Mackman, Lesley Mather, Mary
Ormston 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
Mr J. Curry §
Dr J.D. Dawick
Mr C.G.M. Gardner
Dr F.A. Jackson
Prof. R. Lawton §
Mrs G.O. Morcom §
Mr & Mrs M. Schatzberger
Mrs D.C. Summers §
Dr & Mrs G.M.A. Turner §
Mrs H.B. Wright §
Dr D.M. Bearpark
Dr R.J.S. Crossley
Mrs M. Danby-Smith §
Mr N.J. Dick §
Mr J.A. Gloag
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
Mr N. Lange §
Mr G.C. Morcom §
Canon & Mrs J.S. Pearson
Mrs I. Stanley §
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
societies throughout the United Kingdom. The Society
also gratefully acknowledges the assistance of the
OF MUSIC SOCIETIES Royal Bank of Scotland.
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.
INSTITUTE
*(BMS 3/2/11 (4)
OF
HISTORICAL
RESEARCH
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BAS
YORK
BY
Radoslav Kvapil o
piano
Friday, 21 November 2003
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. 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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sts
BRITISH MUSIC SOCIETY
of YORK
83rd Season
Friday, 21 November 2003
Sir Jack Lyons Concert Hall
Radoslav Kvapil piano
Dvořák Theme & Variations in Ab, Op.36
Dumka & Furiant
Chopin Ballade No.3 in Ab
4 Studies from Op.10
Josef Suk
Janáček
Liszt
INTERVAL
Spring
On an overgrown path (extracts)
Concert Study in Db (Un sospiro)
Paganini Study No.2 in Eb
Hungarian Rhapsody No.15
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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RADOSLAV KVAPIL
Radoslav Kvapil is recognised as one of world's greatest interpreters of Czech
music. He was the first person in history to record the complete piano music of
Dvořák, between 1967 and 1969, returning to this music in 1999 to record three
CDs using the composer's own 1879 Bösendorfer piano. These were issued as
part of his comprehensive Anthology of Czech Piano Music, which has so far
encompassed eleven volumes containing works, by Dvořák, Smetana, Martinů,
Voříšek, Fibich, Janáček, Novák and Suk. Most recently, in Paris, he released
the last three Pianos Sonatas by Viktor Ullmann, whose complete Sonatas he
recorded for Czech Radio.
Mr Kvapil's recording of the complete piano works of Janáček was only the
second ever made. He has a personal connection with the composer, having
studied under Janáček's pupil Ludvík Kundera.
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PROGRAMME NOTES
Theme & Variations in A flat, Op.36
Antonin Dvořák
(1841 - 1904)
Challenge the average pianist to name one piano work by Dvořák and you'll find
you're putting them on the spot rather. They'll know the Slavonic Dances
almost certainly, except of course the Slavonic Dances are for piano duet. And,
if of a certain age, your pianist will maybe also be able to name the G flat
Humoresque, a work once so ubiquitously popular that it became fair game for
music parodists such as Victor Borge. They may even know of the G minor
Piano Concerto that a few brave and inquisitive souls like Sviatoslav Richter and
Andras Schiff have in the past championed: they may well have played the piano
parts of chamber works -- very likely the Violin Sonatina and, if they're lucky,
the equally attractive Piano Quintet and Dumky Piano Trio. But of the bulk of
the music for piano solo, enough to fill two or more hefty volumes, they're
likely to know nothing.
It seems to be a common fate amongst symphonists who weren't first-study
pianists: Bruckner, Chaikovsky, Elgar, Sibelius all produced piano music that is
either ignored or played more for its curiosity value. As for Mahler: according
to the work list in Grove, there isn't a single extant piece for piano solo at all.
Perhaps it all boils down to the fact that some composers compose with their
inner ears and others with their fingers. This neglect is a waste, of course, since
these are self-evidently great composers, whose piano music is as much a
product of their genius as their symphonies, and readily accessible to any pianist
prepared to overlook the occasional infelicity in the piano writing.
Dvořák's Theme and Variations in A flat, Op.36, date from December 1876. It
was the period when Dvořák was beginning to get the first taste of success. Two
years before he'd felt confident enough in his work to submit a parcel of pieces
for a state prize aimed at helping and encouraging poor and struggling artists
anywhere within in the vast Austro-Hungarian Empire. He won, but possibly
more important even than the 400 gulden prize was the fact that the panel of
assessors included Brahms and Hanslick. Dvořák had won the same award
again, earlier in 1876, and was to win a third time the following year, by which
time his growing prominence had made him ineligible for entry.
It was in the summer of 1876 that Dvořák had composed his G minor Piano
Concerto, a thank-you present to the leading concert pianist in Prague at the
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time, who had taken enough of an interest in Dvořák's music to take the piano
part in performances of his early chamber music. Work on the Concerto seems
to have kindled an interest in writing for the piano and several pieces for the
instrument date from this time. The A flat Variations are the most important,
and the evidence is that Dvořák took particular care over it, modelling it in part,
it has been suggested, on the variation-form first movement of Beethoven's
Piano Sonata in the same key, Op.26. Like the Beethoven it has a theme in 3/8
with the measured tread of a minuet and a genial first variation with demi-
semiquavers on each first beat. The second variation is dominated by legato
triplets, and the slightly slower third variation is in the minor. Variation Four is
more radical: a miniature scherzo in 4/16 with a lot of chromatic writing.
Variation Five is a bravura display of flying octaves, and is followed by the
rather slower sixth variation in which Dvořák finds a novel way of escaping
from the straitjacket of A flat. Variation Seven has the most conventional design
of all: its juxtaposition of rippling legato passage work in one hand against
slightly syncopated staccato chords in the other was a Beethoven favourite. The
eighth variation is extended to make a peroration commensurate with the work's
aspirations: its more obvious virtuosic display is alternated with music of a
calmer, more lyrical character, in which mood the work ends.
Dumka and Furiant
Dvořák
Dvořák's Dumka and Furiant have a slight English connection. In 1883 his
Stabat Mater was performed in London and made a considerable impression.
The composer was invited over to conduct his music in the early spring of 1884
the first time he'd been invited to conduct anywhere outside his native
Bohemia. The visit was such a success that he was immediately commissioned
to write large-scale choral works for the Birmingham and Leeds Festivals and a
new symphony for the Philharmonic Society in London. For Dvořák, indeed,
the years 1884 to 1886 were dominated by music composed for, and visits to,
England. The Dumka and Furiant for piano were written in September 1884,
when Dvořák was two thirds of the way through his piece for Birmingham, the
dramatic cantata known in English as The Spectre's Bride. It's possible they too
were meant for England: at any rate the Dumka was first published in 1884 as a
Christmas supplement to the London Magazine of Music.
The word dumka is formed from two common Slavonic roots: dum-, the basis
for a host of words to do with thinking (hence the Russian parliament is the
Duma); and -ka, the commonest diminutive-forming suffix (vodka, endearingly
enough, is the diminutive of voda, water, in Czech as well as in Russian). The
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1
S
dumka originated in the Ukraine, as a sung lament, and spread with the pan-
Slavism movement through the Slavonic world. The name was borrowed for
instrumental pieces of a melancholy or ruminative nature, Dvořák himself being
one of the prime proponents of the form.
The Furiant is a dance form, fast-paced, rhythmic and exciting, typically making
much of the cross-play derived from alternating 3/4 and 3/2 rhythms. The more
energetic of Dvořák's popular Slavonic Dances are in the form of furiants.
Because of its wild, slightly abandoned nature, some have linked it directly with
the Latin word furia, meaning fury, madness. The word does derive ultimately
from there, but in Bohemia was on the way applied to a boastful swaggerer, the
sort that might be expected to execute such a dance.
Ballade No.3 in A flat, Op.47
Frédéric Chopin
(1810-1849)
Music knows two unrelated types of ballade. The first was a medieval vocal
piece, one of the forms dominating French song and poetry in the 14th and 15th
centuries. The other is an instrumental (usually piano) piece in narrative style.
In the second meaning it was coined by Chopin for his Op.23: Chopin is said to
have borrowed the term from poetry, in particular from the ballades of the great
19th-century Polish poet Adam Mickiewicz. The concept was copied by several
other composers, notably Liszt, Brahms and Fauré.
The Third Ballade was composed in 1840/1: under the influence and protection
of his mistress George Sand Chopin was happier and more fulfilled than at
possibly any other period in his life since childhood. He was living a placid and
essentially uneventful life, which may account for this being the most genial and
attractive of the four Ballades. Though even the most genial sizable work by
him wouldn't be Chopin if there weren't moments of tension and turmoil: and,
sure enough, many of the work's main ideas (including the rising gesture with
which it opens and the famous "rocking" motif about a minute into the piece) go
through some almost nightmarish distortions on the way to the barnstorming
finish.
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Studies Op.10
No. 1 in C major: Allegro
No.9 in F minor: Allegro, molto agitato
No.3 in E major: Lento ma non troppo
No. 12 in C minor: Allegro con fuoco
Chopin
The great majority of études or studies belong in the practice room. They are
pieces written not to be listened to, but to help the player surmount a particular
technical problem or weakness. They are usually wearisomely repetitive, since
any given problem usually needs to be tackled across a wide spectrum of notes,
keys, hand positions, dynamic levels and so on. But the qualities that turn mere
note-spinning into music - expression, elegant variation, development of ideas -
rarely get a look in: they get in the way of the business in hand, cloud the
player's focus and therefore involve the writer in unnecessary effort.
The great heyday of the study was the last decade of the eighteenth and first
three decades of the nineteenth century: before that, if teachers and students
needed to address a particular technical problem, they had to find a piece that
included it or make up their own exercises: it was the advent of more
systematised teaching methods over the latter part of the eighteenth century and
the immense growth of amateur music making into the nineteenth that brought
the study with it. And since technical problems never go out of date, neither do
the studies designed to surmount them: violinists are still using Kreutzer's 1796
Studies, and pianists drowning in those pouring from the indefatigable Czerny.
Having spent hours mastering all these problems, many players were
understandably keen to display their formidable techniques before a public, and
it occurred to composer-instrumentalists that the technical study could be turned
into a perfect vehicle: all it needed was turning back into a piece of music. The
first really influential set of such pieces, however, didn't bear the title studies:
they were the 24 Capricci, Op.1, by Paganini. Paganini mania hit Europe around
1830, exactly at the right time to catch perhaps the most striking generation ever
of pianist composers just as they hit their late teens/early twenties. The 1830s
saw the publication of: from Schumann two sets of disappointingly literal
studies based on the Paganini Caprices, plus one of his first great works, the
Symphonic Studies; from Liszt two sets so formidable he later had to tone them
down even to get the Paganini and Transcendental Studies; and from Chopin the
two sets of twelve, Opp. 10 and 25.
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Chrja
ey are
des
cett
more
rought
s 1796
ever
Chopin's first set of twelve Études was published in Paris in 1833 as his Op.10,
but it wasn't exactly written as a set - it more, as it were, coalesced out of
individual or pairs of studies, some composed as far back as 1829. Mr Kvapil is
playing four studies from the set. The C major Study, Op.10's sparkling
opening, is primarily for the right hand, which its glittering figurations force into
extended positions, cruelly targeting the weaker fingers. No.9 in F minor poses
the challenge of keeping the wide-ranging left hand figuration sufficiently quiet
and legato to contrast with the more agitated, slightly less legato melodic line.
No.3 in E major is one of the most celebrated of the studies, so much so that it
has attracted the nickname Tristesse: its apparently simple opening has inspired
generations of amateur pianists to attempt it, rarely achieving the fine control of
texture it demands. Again, the piece generates an unexpectedly turbulent middle
section. But for real turbulence, look no further than the C minor Study that
closes the set, a piece in Chopin's most commanding style. It is without doubt
the most famous of all the studies, nicknamed Revolutionary, not for any mould-
breaking qualities it possesses, but in the belief that its stormy nature enshrines
Chopin's reaction to the news that Tsarist forces had brutally suppressed an
1830 insurrection in his native Poland.
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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Jaro, Op.22a
1 Jaro: Allegro con brio
2
3
Vánek: Andante, quasi allegretto
V očekávání: Andante con moto ed espressivo
4 [no title]: Andante
5 V roztoužení: Allegro non troppo
Josef Suk
(1874-1935)
Josef Suk was the son of the village schoolmaster and organist. His musical
talent was enough to get him into the Conservatory in Prague when he was only
eleven. He studied the violin and later composition with Dvořák, who
considered him his best pupil. Suk in turn was devoted to his teacher, marrying
his daughter Otilie in November 1898, on the very day of the Dvořáks' silver
wedding.
Suk's career was two-pronged. As a composer he was a member of that circle of
Dvořák pupils who carried on the nationalist school of composing founded by
their teacher and Smetana. As a player he was second violinist of the successful
and hugely influential Czech Quartet. Formed from four students in Hanuš
Wihan's chamber music classes at the Conservatory, the Quartet gave its first
concert in 1892 and never looked back. Indeed, when the original cellist died,
Wihan took his place and remained with the Quartet through its vintage years
until his retirement twenty years later. The group carried on until it finally
disbanded in 1933, unable to find a fitting replacement when Suk retired.
Though a professional chamber music player, Suk wrote surprisingly little music
in that genre. Indeed he wrote rather more music for the piano, on which he was
proficient enough to play before friends and even, occasionally, in public. Jaro
[-spring] dates from 1902. In part it is designed to reflect the various moods
that spring occasions, but it is much more a product of the euphoria generated by
the birth of his son the preceding December. The opening piece, Spring, begins
with three chords are used to give a sense of unity to the whole cycle; there's no
missing the sense of excitement in the music that follows. The next piece, The
Breeze, clearly suggests the quickening of new life. The central piece, In
expectation, begins in introspection then travels through the anxiety of awaiting
the loved one to the relief of safe arrival. The fourth piece lacks a title, but
speaks clearly of some form of inner turmoil eventually giving way to serenity,
whilst in the final Wistful the music goes a long way to reminding us that in
Czech "V roztoužení" can also mean "love-sick."
}
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S
I
S
)
The happiness, alas, was not to last. When Dvořák died two years later it was a
severe blow, but worse was to come when Otilie herself died the following year
of a heart condition, when the child was only three and a half. Suk never
remarried: instead he threw himself into the work of the Quartet.
5 Pieces from Po zarostlém chodníčku
1 Naše večery: Moderato
2 Lístek odvanutý: Andante
3 Pojdte s námi!: Andante
4 Frýdecká panna Maria: Grave
5 Štěbetaly jak laštovičky: Con moto
Leoš Janáček
(1854-1928)
Janáček's music for the piano is still not as widely known as quality and
originality warrant. He was himself no mean performer on the instrument and at
various times made plans for advanced study with Saint-Saëns in Paris and
Anton Rubinstein in St Petersburg, though these came to nothing, largely
because of the poverty that made his student and early professional years so hard
a struggle. Nor does it help that he composed so little music for the instrument:
his complete mature works for occupy less than seventy pages - the so called
Zdenka Variations, the Sonata 1.X.1905 and the two cycles On an overgrown
path and In the mist.
Of the ten pieces that make up On an overgrown path, three were composed in
1901, two the following year, and the remaining five in 1908. The set was
eventually published, after some difficulty, in 1911. Mind-bending though it
may seem when you hear them, the three pieces dating from 1901 (Nos. 1, 2 &
10) may not even have been composed originally for piano: at any rate they were
published that year in an anthology of music for harmonium entitled Slav
Melodies. As were Nos.4 & 7 the following year. These pieces are all steeped
in memories of his youth, in the Moravian town of Hukvaldy: the later pieces
were written under the influence of the death of his much-loved daughter Olga,
his only surviving child, in 1903 just short of her twenty-first birthday.
Mr Kvapil is playing the first five pieces from the set. Their titles are, in
English: Our evenings; A blown-away leaf; Come with us!; The Madonna
[literally: Lady Mary] of Frýdek; They chattered like swallows. All of them
have programmatic content, some of which Janáček divulged in 1908 to a critic
who was at the time attempting to get the cycle (then only seven pieces long)
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published. No.2, A blown-away leaf, is described as "a love-song," while No.3,
Come with us!, is a "letter put away and forgotten."
The title of No. 4, The Madonna of Frýdek, is a reference to the twin township
of Frýdek and Místek, up near the Polish border, the closest population centre to
Janáček's home village of Hukvaldy: Místek was the working-class, Czech town
in the valley, while the German-Jewish Frýdek lay on the hill above and
contained the red church to which an image of the Madonna was taken in
processions. Tradition has it that No.5, They chattered like swallows, was
inspired by the village gossips who gathered beneath the plane tree in the main
square of Hukvaldy.
Concert Study in D flat, S.144 No.3
Franz Liszt
(1881-1886)
It didn't take long for someone to coin the phrase concert study, to distinguish
studies designed for public consumption from those meant merely to hone the
technique. Amongst the first to bear the title was a set of three Études de
concert by Liszt, written probably in 1848 and published in 1849. Liszt had
only just renounced the public stage in 1847, at the height of his career as a
travelling virtuoso, to devote himself to the more reputable professions of
teaching and composition, and these three studies were amongst the first fruits of
this major career change.
A different edition of the pieces appeared almost immediately in France, under
the title Trois caprices poetiques, and it was in this publication that the three
Studies bore the titles: Il lamento [= lament], La leggierezza [= lightness] and
Un sospiro [= a sigh]. What, if anything, these titles have to do with Liszt is not
certain, but they are not unfitting and are too widely used to quail before the
tongue-clucking of pedants.
Un sospiro is a study in hand-crossing and what is sometimes called the three-
hand effect. The effect is really a trick, the melody being created by
highlighting certain notes of the accompaniment pattern and often disguising this
by using the hands alternately. The effect was a speciality of the Swiss pianist
Thalberg, one of Liszt's main rivals in the 1830s.
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No3,
had
251
nder
composed in 1837 and 1838 respectively, the first a reworking of basic Czerny-
like studies he'd written when he was a teenager, the second based on music by
Paganini. It was the time he was embarking on his career as an international
virtuoso (and. apparently. devourer of groupies) and he made them so difficult
tha
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Symphony
Orchestra
Conductor David Blake
Leader Claire Jowett
with
Laura Moody Cello
Overture in G minor
Cello concerto in B minor
Symphony No.6 'Pastoral'
Bruckner
Dvořák
Beethoven
Tickets (unreserved) £8.00 /£7.00 (concessions) £4
(children under 16 & full time students)
from Ticket World, Patrick Pool, York,
or members of the orchestra or at the door.
The YSO is a Registered Charity N° 515145
Making
Music
Saturday 29th November 2003
at 8pm
Central Hall
University of York
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Liszt's Hungarian Rhapsodies have come in for a bit of stick over the years.
First, many have complained, they're not genuine Hungarian music in the first
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No3,
me the
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composed in 1837 and 1838 respectively, the first a reworking of basic Czerny-
like studies he'd written when he was a teenager, the second based on music by
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virtuoso (and annarently devourer of grounies) and he made them so difficult
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Liszt's Hungarian Rhapsodies have come in for a bit of stick over the years.
First, many have complained, they're not genuine Hungarian music in the first
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Was
the
desde
781
its of
SD
med by
composed in 1837 and 1838 respectively, the first a reworking of basic Czerny-
like studies he'd written when he was a teenager, the second based on music by
Paganini. It was the time he was embarking on his career as an international
virtuoso (and, apparently, devourer of groupies) and he made them so difficult
that hardly anyone except him could get close to playing them. When he gave
up the concert stage for composition he had second thoughts about this and
within four years had produced new versions, designed to make mastering them
improbable rather than downright impossible.
Although they're known as the Transcendental Studies, it's not the studies
themselves that are transcendental, but the technique required to play them - as
the full title makes clear: études d'exécution transcendante. In fact the title
wasn't originally used for the 12 Transcendental Studies at all (they came out in
1839 as simply Grandes études), but for the other set, published in 1840 as the
Études d'exécution transcendante d'après Paganini. It was with the later
revisions that the two sets swapped titles, the Grandes études de Paganini
coming out in 1851 and the Études d'exécution transcendante the following
year. I hope that wasn't too confusing.
Of the six Paganini Studies, perhaps the best known is the third, La campanella,
which is a Lisztian confection using just themes from Paganini, primarily the
finale of the B minor Violin Concerto. The other five are more like pianistic
elaborations of five of Paganini's Op.1 Caprices, carefully following the
structure and content of the original and reproducing it in a piano equivalent,
comparable both in technical demands and bravura display. Liszt's second
Study is based on Caprice No.17. It is one of the most wryly humorous of the
set, with the Puckish alternation of quicksilver scales and more pedestrian sixths
(expanded by Liszt to more sinew-testing stretches). The more turbulent C
minor central section is, in the Paganini original, entirely in octaves, making it
easy to hear exactly what Liszt has added.
Liszt
Hungarian Rhapsody No.15 in A major
Liszt wrote nineteen Hungarian Rhapsodies in all. The first fifteen appeared in
the early 1850s, though they were based on earlier pieces from the 40s. The
remaining four Rhapsodies are rather different in character, dating from the
1880s, during his late, experimental period.
Liszt's Hungarian Rhapsodies have come in for a bit of stick over the years.
First, many have complained, they're not genuine Hungarian music in the first
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place, but merely gipsy music. Liszt later admitted that in his ignorance he'd
taken gipsy music as the authentic music of Hungary, and what the peasants
sang in the villages as a watered-down version of it, rather than the other way
round. In fact, as Bartók later pointed out, even this was not quite right. What
the gipsies (by which were meant the café and restaurant musicians whether
gipsy by blood or merely costume) played was in fact music by and large
composed by upper- and upper-middle-class dilettantes, to which had been
added, by way of seasoning, the rhythms and inflections of genuine Hungarian
music. All to give a suitably exotic, but not too exotic-sounding background
against which people of that very class could indulge their various pleasures.
Another criticism of the Rhapsodies touches on their vulgar showmanship, but it
should be remembered that these were pieces written not for cultural or spiritual
enlightenment, but purely for the entertainment of a public not yet too inhibited
to enjoy itself.
The Fifteenth Hungarian Rhapsody is entirely based on the famous Rákóczi
March, named after the great patriot Prince Ferenc Rákóczi, who led a
Hungarian revolt against their Austrian overlords in the early 1700s. The March
has a very patriotic ring to it, but what else it might have to do with Rákóczi is
unclear: it has been traced back no further than the violinist and composer János
Bihari (1764-1827). Liszt follows the original march so closely, that he didn't
in fact use the title Hungarian Rhapsody in this case: though it appears in a
volume with the other Rhapsodies, it is headed "15. Rákóczi March arranged for
concert performance" [zum Concert Vertrag bearbeitet].
If the music sounds awfully familiar to you, but for orchestra not piano, you're
probably thinking of the orchestral version Berlioz wrote for a visit to Hungary
in 1846. He was so pleased with the result, he shoe-horned it into his
Damnation of Faust, despite the violence he had to commit to Goethe's play to
transport Faust to the Hungarian plains.
Programme notes by David Mather
Floral decorations by Sue Bedford
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3.
Kocz
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János
idn't
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FORTHCOMING CONCERTS
The next concert in the 83rd 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, 11 December 2003
William Coleman & Anton Kernjak
(viola & piano)
Bach
Schubert
Brahms
Viola da Gamba Sonata No.1
Arpeggione Sonata in A minor, D.821
Scherzo from the FAE Sonata
Sonata in F minor, Op. 120 No.1
More dates for your diaries:
Saturday, 15 November 2003
Chapter House, York Minster, 8.00 pm
Chapter House Choir
Stephen Williams director
Lassus' Lagrime di San Pietro [-tears of St Peter]
Wednesday, 26 November 2003-
Sir Jack Lyons Concert Hall, 7.30 pm
Réjouissance
James Bowman countertenor
The early-music group Réjouissance makes its first appearance as one of the
University's ensembles in residence. Programme includes music by Monteverdi,
Mattheis, Purcell, Legrenzi, Corelli, Vivaldi & Handel
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Saturday, 29 November 2003
Central Hall, University of York, 8.00
York Symphony Orchestra
David Blake conductor
Bruckner's G minor Overture, Beethoven's Pastoral Symphony & Dvořák's
Cello Concerto (Laura Moody)
Saturday, 6 December 2003
St Olave's Church, Marygate, 8.00 pm
Micklegate Singers
Nicholas Carter director
Ave Maria - Music from around the world written in honour of the Blessed
Virgin Mary, including works by Victoria, Palestrina, Bruckner, Stravinsky,
Guerrero, Panufnik, Rautavaara, Howells, Tavener, Stanford, Poulenc &
Lennox Berkeley
Thurs, Fri & Sat, 18-20 December 2003
Chapter House, York Minster, 8.00 pm
Chapter House Choir
Stephen Williams director
The Chapter House Choir's perennially popular Carols by Candlelight. Tickets
on sale in the Minster from 6 December: early booking advised.
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ts
BRITISH MUSIC SOCIETY
of YORK
OFFICERS OF THE SOCIETY
President Dr Francis Jackson
Vice-Presidents
Chairman
Vice-Chairman
Hon. Treasurer
Hon. Secretary
Hon. Publicity Secretary
Hon. Programme Secretary
NFMS Representative
Hon Auditor
Members of the Committee
Prof. Nicola LeFanu, Rosalind Richards
Bob Stevens
Dr Sandy Anderson
John Robinson
Nigel Dick
Marc Schatzberger
Amanda Crawley
Dr Richard Crossley
Derek Winterbottom
Helen Mackman, Lesley Mather, Mary
Ormston 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
Mr J. Curry §
Dr J.D. Dawick
Mr C.G.M. Gardner
Dr F.A. Jackson
Prof. R. Lawton §
Mrs G. M com §
Mr & Mrs M. Schatzberger
Mrs D.C. Summers §
Dr & Mrs G.M.A. Turner §
Mrs H.B. Wright §
Dr D.M. Bearpark
Dr R.J.S. Crossley
Mrs M. Danby-Smith §
Mr N.J. Dick §
Mr J.A. Gloag
Making
Music
Mr N. Lange §
Mr G.C. Morcom §
Canon & Mrs J.S. Pearson
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.
Registered Charity No.700302
Mrs I. Stanley §
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
societies throughout the United Kingdom. The Society
also gratefully acknowledges the assistance of the
OF MUSIC SOCIETIES Royal Bank of Scotland.
THE NATIONAL FEDERATION
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
ORTHWICK
SMS 3/2/11 (5)
OF
HISTORICAL RESEARCH
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B'S
YORK
William Coleman
Anton Kernjak/TOY
(viola & piano)
Thursday, 11 December 2003
Programme: £1.00
Presented by the British Music Society of York
in association with the Department of Music
podle
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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
83rd Season
Thursday, 11 December 2003
Sir Jack Lyons Concert Hall
William Coleman viola
Anton Kernjak piano
Concert supported by the Countess of Munster
Musical Trust
J.S. Bach
Schubert
Brahms
Gamba Sonata No.1 in G, BWV 1027
Arpeggione Sonata in A, D.821
INTERVAL
Scherzo from the FAE Sonata
Viola Sonata in F minor, Op.120 No.1
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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WILLIAM COLEMAN
Born in England, violist William Coleman is active as both soloist and chamber
musician. He is a member of the Kuss Quartet in Berlin, where he now lives,
and he has already been invited to many of the world's most prestigious festivals
and concert halls. During the coming season, he will be performing in the
festival at Lockenhaus, as well as venues such as the Wigmore Hall, Carnegie
Hall and the Vienna Musikverein.
Mr Coleman studied for four years at the Mozarteum Hochschule in Salzburg
with Thomas Riebl and Veronika Hagen, and then moved to the United States
where he completed his studies with Kim Kashkashian at the New England
Conservatory in Boston. It was during this time in America that he joined the
Kuss Quartet, with whom he completed a programme of study there under the
founding cellist and violist of the Cleveland Quartet, Paul and Martha Katz.
William Coleman's appearance here tonight is made possible thanks to the
generosity of the Countess of Munster Musical Trust. Founded by the
Countess of Munster in 1959, the Trust aims to provide financial support to
newly-qualified musicians in those all-important months at the outset of their
careers. Grants are available for further specialist study, and a certain number of
interest-free loans to enable the aspiring professional to acquire an instrument
that would otherwise be way beyond their means.
Of more benefit to societies like the BMS, however, is the Recital Scheme,
begun in 1976. Each year a small number of young artists, chosen by audition,
are sponsored by the Trust: any concert organiser booking one of these artists
pays only a very modest portion of the fee, the remainder being paid directly to
the artist by the Trust. For more information on the work of this admirable
institution, visit their website on http://www.munstertrust.ukgateway.net
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PROGRAMME NOTES
Sonata for bass viol and harpsichord in G, BWV 1027
Adagio
Allegro ma non tanto
Andante
Allegro moderato
J.S. Bach
(1685-1750)
Ever since the start of the classical period the viola has been at the heart of
chamber music, but somehow - perhaps because of its homely image, because it
lacks the facile brightness of the violin or the effortless nobility of the cello -
composers have been reluctant to bring it into, or trust it with, the spotlight.
Confronted by a lack of repertory, viola-players have been forced to borrow, if
not pillage. Sometimes the borrowing was sanctioned by the composers,
sometimes not, and occasionally, like a plant or animal species, the viola was
merely seizing an evolutionary opportunity afforded by an extinction.
And speaking of extinctions, the first piece in tonight's programme marks
something of an evolutionary divide in the string kingdom, where the
instruments of the viol family were ousted by their counterparts in the violin
family. The two are closely related in evolutionary terms Neanderthal Man
being superseded by Cro-Magnon - indeed, the violin family almost certainly
developed out of makers' experiments to improve the efficiency of the viol. The
main differences are in the body of the instrument: with the viol the box is very
deep, with a flat back, an overall teardrop shape, )-shaped sound holes and a
"waist" provided by two shallow concavities; in the violin family the box is
much less deep, with a convex back, an overall, more rounded figure 8 shape, f-
shaped sound holes and a "waist" provided by two deep, C-shaped concavities.
Of course, when the new family started to appear, connoisseurs, purists and oth
critics derided the brash, Johnny-come-lately swagger of the violin, but
composers, music directors and instrument makers were bowled over by the
agility, expressiveness and above all the brighter, more powerful and more
immediately sound the violin family was capable of. They voted
overwhelmingly with their feet, and within a generation or two of the design of
the violin family being perfected by the makers centred on Cremona in the late
seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries the viol was effectively extinct.
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The nomenclature of the two families is distressingly confused. Viols came in
several sizes, treble, tenor and bass, each known as a viol - or in Italian viola.
All members of the viol family were played with the instrument held vertically
in front of the player, between the legs or resting in the lap depending on size:
the box was simply too deep for even the smallest to go under the chin. The
shallower violin family except for the cello of course would fit under the
chin, allowing much greater agility. To distinguish the two families, the viol
came to be known as the viola da gamba, that is the viol of the leg, and the
violin family as the viola da braccio, the viol of the arm (German still retains a
corruption of this name: it calls the modern viola Bratsche). The smallest
member of the new family came to be called by the diminutive of viola
violino. What we call the double bass was a "big viol," violone, and to add to
the confusion, its shape proudly declares it is still to this day a member of the
viol not the violin family. And, if you're ready for this, our "cello" is an
abbreviation of violoncello, "little big viol" - though of course it is not really a
little violone at all, belonging to quite a different family. Taxonomy - don't you
just love it?
All of which serves to show, I hope, that when Bach produced his three Sonatas
for bass viola da gamba and harpsichord, thought to be in about 1720 during his
time at the court at Cöthen, the instrument was at the very least obsolescent.
Prince Leopold of Cöthen was an enthusiast for the instrument, however, and
one theory has it that Bach wrote the three sonatas for Christian Ferdinand Abel,
gamba player and violinist on the court strength, to teach to the prince; though
by all accounts it was unlikely the prince could ever have mastered them. It
wasn't the only time Bach wrote for the bass viol, incidentally: there is a
notoriously scary obbligato for one in the aria Komm, süßes Kreuz in the St
Matthew Passion, but in the Sixth Brandenburg Concerto they're put firmly in
their place, forced to stooge along while the new-fangled violas take the
limelight.
The first of Bach's three Gamba Sonatas started life as a trio for two flutes and
continuo. There's nothing at all unusual about this: a large proportion of Bach's
music for more than one instrument was either borrowed from elsewhere or
recycled.
The G major Sonata is cast in the four-movement slow-fast-slow-fast
arrangement common for instrumental sonatas in the Baroque period. As often
happens, the movements are paired, the more florid, lyrical slow movements
ending inconclusively to lead straight into the more energetic quick movements,
stuffed full of Bach's contrapuntal tricks. And when it came to imitative
counterpoint, few composers could be trickier than Bach.
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With the effective extinction of the viol family in the eighteenth century, Bach's
Gamba Sonatas came up for grabs. You'd think the most obvious contender
would have been the instrument that had usurped the bass viol's place in music-
making, the cello. But in fact the modern viola can actually make a more
reasonable claim. For a start its less powerful, more intimate tone is a better
match for the gamba. And as to the actual range of the instruments: the bass viol
can get down to within a note of the cello's bottom string, almost an octave
lower than the modern viola can manage. BUT - the objection is so strong it
required capitals - Bach does nothing to exploit this lower range of the bass viol,
and in fact there is only one single note in the whole of the G major Sonata that
strays off the bottom of the modern viola. Bach does, however, make a lot of
use of the bass viol's top strings, to make a more effective trio texture (viol,
harpsichord right hand, harpsichord left hand), resulting in writing that is so
uncomfortably high for the cello that even the most scrupulously scholarly
editions move certain passages down an octave in their cello adaptations. So,
the viola version is the one to go for if you want to get closest to Bach.
Incidentally, those amongst you who are suckers for a good weepie might like to
know that it is music from one of these three gamba sonatas that the Alan
Rickman and Juliet Stepvenson characters are discovered playing over the 200
opening credits of the film Truly, Madly, Deeply. Not, alas, an extract from
tonight's Sonata, but the Adagio second movement of the Third Sonata in G
minor.
Sonata for arpeggione and piano in A, D.821
Allegro moderato
Adagio - Allegretto
Franz Schubert
(1797--1828)
Evolution doesn't always get it right. Sometimes it will come up with a new
species that will out-compete the occupiers of some ecological niche; but
equally it can come up a newcomer, often quite bizarre, that never makes it,
being unable to wrench the niche for which it was designed from the current
occupier. It happens a lot with musical instruments. Makers are always having
ideas for a new instruments. Occasionally one will succeed, as for instance the
new wind instrument (whose name I expect you can guess) invented by Adolph
Sax about 1840, but most fall by the wayside.
One of the ones that got away was an instrument invented a generation earlier, in
1823 by the Viennese instrument-maker J.G. Staufer. He referred to his
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invention by three names: Bogengitarre [-bowed guitar], Guitarre d'amour and
Guitarre-Violoncell. It was indeed a cross between a guitar and a cello. It was
meant to be bowed, so the main body of the instrument was like a cello's, except
that the "waist" of the instrument had the sinuous curves of Sophia Loren's
rather than the deep gouges of a cello's, while the sound holes were the shape - I
really must apologise for the vulgarity of my imagery tonight - of Frankfurter
sausages. The guitar ancestry of the instrument is apparent from the fact that it
had six strings tuned like a guitar and the fingerboard was fretted.
The new instrument was taken up by one Vincenz Schuster, who became its first
professional champion, even publishing a tutor in 1825. But the instrument
didn't catch on and would have vanished almost entirely without trace but for
one circumstance. In 1824 Schuster prevailed on Schubert to write him a sonata
with piano accompaniment. Schubert obliged, completing the work in
November 1824. Schuster gave the first performance of the work in Vienna
before the year was out.
In the autograph manuscript of the Sonata, Schubert refers to the instrument as
the "arpeggione." Where he got this name for it isn't known: it is not found in
any other contemporary source. But such is the enduring popularity of
Schubert's Sonata for it, that the instrument is remembered by his name for it,
not Staufer's and Schuster's.
The Sonata is in two movements, a basically lyrical, sonata-form movement in A
minor followed by what seems like an E major slow movement, but which turns
out to be an extended introduction to the final A major Allegretto.
Schubert makes no concessions at all to the new instrument the Sonata was
meant for: he writes for it in exactly the same way as he writes for violin, viola
or cello. True, he makes a lot of use of the instrument's top E string, which
makes it uncomfortably high for a cello - the most usual exponent of the part
meant for the arpeggione - and this in itself justifies appropriation of the work
by viola players.
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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.
Scherzo from the FAE Sonata
Johannes Brahms
(1833-1897)
In 1853 the twenty-year-old Brahms was staying in Düsseldorf with the
Schumanns and had become friends with the older composer's pupil Albert
Dietrich. Schumann had the idea that the three of them should write a joint
"welcome home" sonata to mark the return of Joseph Joachim - at twenty-two
already one of the great violinists of his day. Dietrich provided the opening
Allegro, Schumann the Intermezzo, Brahms the Scherzo and Schumann again
the Finale. All were based on the notes FAE, an allusion to Joachim's motto
Frei aber einsam [-free but solitary]. The Sonata was played privately on 27
October 1853 by Joachim and Brahms: Joachim had to work out who had
written which movement, which he did without much difficulty.
What Joachim though of the work as a whole is not known, though it is said he
held on to work and allowed only one of the movements to be published in his
lifetime - Brahms' Scherzo which appeared in 1906. Back at the time of the
FAE Sonata Schumann had composed a first movement and scherzo of his own
to expand his contribution into the Violin Sonata No.3 in A minor, but this was
one of several unpublished late works that Brahms, Joachim and Clara
Schumann suppressed after his death because of their uneven quality: it wasn't
published until 1956.
The slightly earthy quality of Brahms early writing rather suits the viola.
Indeed, the last time we heard it at a BMS concert was in a version for viola:
Paul Cassidy played it for us, this time twelve years ago.
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Sonata for viola and piano in F minor, Op.120 No.1
Allegro appassionato
Andante un poco adagio
Allegretto grazioso
Vivace
Johannes Brahms
The two Sonatas making up Op.120 constitute Brahms' farewell to chamber
music. He wrote them for clarinet and piano but saw to it they were also
published in versions for viola and piano and violin and piano, making the
necessary adaptations himself. Since violinists already have three perfectly
good Brahms sonatas to be getting on with, their versions of Op.120 are seldom
heard, but as viola sonatas they are much needed additions to the repertoire.
All those great composers who contributed a number of works to the clarinet
repertory seem to have been inspired to do so by the playing of a particular
instrumentalist: with Mozart it was Anton Stadler, with Weber Heinrich
Baermann and with Brahms Richard Mühlfeld.
Richard Mühlfeld (1856-1907) was principal clarinet and assistant conductor
of the court orchestra of Saxe-Meiningen, a small duchy in the Thuringian
Forest region. Brahms knew the Duke and Duchess personally and was invited
to Meiningen for a week-long festival in March 1891, during which his First and
Fourth Symphonies were to be played. For him, though, the highlight of the
festival was Mühlfeld's playing in one of the Weber Concertos and the Mozart
Quintet. It proved inspirational. After the Second String Quintet, Op.111,
Brahms had been thinking he was written out and had even written his will and
sent it to his publisher Simrock. Now, inspired by Mühlfeld's playing - it tells
you something of Mühlfeld's expressiveness on the instrument that Brahms
nicknamed him "Fräulein Klarinette he embarked on an Indian summer of
composition, producing before the year was out the Clarinet Trio Op.114 and
Clarinet Quintet Op.115. Three years later, after closing his piano music
account with the twenty pieces spread over Op.116, 117, 118 and 119, he turned
again to the clarinet and wrote the two Sonatas.
For nearly all his mature life, Brahms did all his composing during the summer
months when he would get out of the city into the splendour and quiet of the
Alps. In the late 1880s his favoured resort had been Lake Thun, but he had been
obliged to give this up when a new riverside promenade was built which allowed
sight-seers too close to his house. (Apparently the English were worst for this.)
Instead he went to Bad Ischl, which had the advantage of being close to friends
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for
20
the
art
ms
met
the
such as Johann Strauss: in fact the summer of 1894 he had to curtail his time in
the mountains, returning to Vienna to throw himself into the celebrations
marking Strauss' Golden Jubilee as a professional musician. The Sonatas were
given private performances in the autumn, including four for Clara Schumann,
now so deaf she could only hear a small part of the music, and that distorted.
The first public performances were given in Vienna in January 1895, after which
Brahms and Mühlfeld took them on tour. 1895, incidentally, is the first year of
Brahms' maturity in which he is not known to have composed any music at all.
The Sonatas are old man's music in one sense: a lifetime of composing had
given Brahms the mastery to find seemingly limitless possibility in the smallest
and simplest of ideas. Unlike what you might think of his earlier music, there is
virtually no fat here to trim: every note is there for a purpose. And yet there is
still passion when Brahms wants it. In the F minor Sonata it comes in the
brooding first movement with its stormy outbursts and visits to the extremes.
The A flat major Andante slow movement has a structural freedom that allows
you to believe it is being improvised in front of you. The Allegretto grazioso,
again in A flat major, is full of old-fashioned charm, with occasionally the twang
of Brahms' folk-song settings: it is set off by a more mysterious central section
in F minor. The F major finale bubbles over with a sense of fun, though it does
indulge itself here and there with Gemütlichkeit and even a tinge of melancholy
Programme notes by David Mather
Floral decorations by Sue Bedford
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FORTHCOMING CONCERTS
The next concert in the 83rd 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, 16 January 2004
Trio Melzi
Sarah Beth Briggs (piano) Richard Howarth (violin)
Jonathan Price (cello)
A concert dedicated to the memory of Jim Briggs
Piano Trio in C, Hob.XV:27
Haydn
Shostakovich
Beethoven
Piano Trio No.2 in E minor, Op.67
Piano Trio in B flat, Op.97 (Archduke)
More dates for your diaries:
Saturday, 17 January 2004
St Olave's Church, Marygate, 8.00 pm
Academy of St Olave's
John Hastie director
Vivaldi Concerto for 2 violins (Claire Jowett & Clare Howard), Milhaud's
Boeuf sur le toît & Haydn Symphony No.99 in E flat
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Wednesday, 21 January 2004
*
Sir Jack Lyons Concert Hall, 7.30 pm
m
Ashley Wass piano
A recital by the pianist who so impressed us with his BMS concert in March
1998. Music by Bartók (Out of Doors), Schumann (C major Fantasy), Janáček
(In the Mist) & Beethoven (Appassionata)
Saturday, 31 January 2004
York Barbican Centre, 7.30
City of York Guildhall Orchestra
Simon Wright conductor
Beethoven's Egmont Overture, Brahms' Violin Concerto (Nicholas Wright)
& Dvořák's Symphony No.7
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BRITISH MUSIC SOCIETY
of YORK
OFFICERS OF THE SOCIETY
President Dr Francis Jackson
Vice-Presidents Prof. Nicola LeFanu, Rosalind Richards
Chairman
Vice-Chairman
Hon. Treasurer
Hon. Secretary
Hon. Publicity Secretary
Hon. Programme Secretary
NFMS Representative
Hon Auditor
Members of the Committee
Bob Stevens
Dr Sandy Anderson
John Robinson
Nigel Dick
Marc Schatzberger
Amanda Crawley
Dr Richard Crossley
Derek Winterbottom
Helen Mackman, Lesley Mather, Mary
Ormston 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
Mr J. Curry §
Dr J.D. Dawick
Mr C.G.M. Gardner
Dr F.A. Jackson
Prof. R. Lawton §
Mrs G.O. Morcom §
Mr & Mrs M. Schatzberger
Mrs D.C. Summers §
Dr & Mrs G.M.A. Turner §
Mrs H.B. Wright §
Dr D.M. Bearpark
Dr R.J.S. Crossley
Mrs M. Danby-Smith §
Mr N.J. Dick §
Mr J.A. Gloag
Mr N. Lange §
Mr G.C. Morcom §
Canon & Mrs J.S. Pearson
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.
THE NATIONAL FEDERATION
OF MUSIC SOCIETIES
Mrs I. Stanley S
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
Making
Music societies throughout the United Kingdom.
Registered Charity No.700302
Society also gratefully acknowledges the assistance
of the Royal Bank of Scotland.
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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BURTHWICK
SMS 3/2/11 (6)
OF HI
INSTITUTE
TORICAL
#
RESEARCH