Dallapiccola: a portrait - CD Booklet

DCD34020

Dallapiccola ~

a portrait

David Wilde piano Susan Hamilton soprano Robert Irvine ‘cello Nicola Stonehouse mezzo-soprano

Dallapiccola ~

a portrait

Sonatina Canonica in mi bemolle, su “Capricci” di Niccolò Paganini (1942-43) 1. I.

Allegretto comodo - Allegro molto misurato - Primo tempo

(after Paganini’s Capriccio No 20 in D) 2. II.

Largo - Vivacissimo - Largo (after Paganini’s Capriccio No 19 in Eflat)

3. III.

Andante sostenuto

La primavera ha venido Ayer soñé que veía 18. III. Señor, ya me arrancaste lo [2:19] que yo más quería 19. IV. La primavera ha venido [3:48]

[2:43]

(after Paganini’s Capriccio No 11 in C) 4. IV.

Alla marcia; moderato

(after Paganini’s Capriccio No 14 in Eflat)

[2:32]

Quaderno Musicale di Annalibera (1952) 5. 1.

6. 2.

2

7. 3.

8. 4.

9. 5.

10. 6.

11. 7.

12. 8.

13. 9.

14. 10.

15. 11.

Simbolo - Quasi lento Accenti - Allegro; con fuoco Contrapunctus primus - mosso; scorrevole Linee - tranquillamente mosso Contrapunctus secundus (canoncontrario motu) Poco allegretto; “alla Serenata” Fregi - Molto lento; con espressione parlante Andantino amoroso e contrapunctus tertius (canon cancrizans) Ritmi - Allegro Colore - Affettuoso; cullante Ombre - Grave Quartina - Molto lento; fantastico

Quattro Liriche di Antonio Machado per canto e pianoforte (1948)

[3:07] [0:35] [1:15] [0:50]

[0:30] [1:26]

[1:38] [1:33] [1:02] [2:15] [2:22]

16. I.

[1:20]

17. II.

[2:14] [1:44] [3:01]

Ciaccona, Intermezzo e Adagio per violoncello solo (1945) 20.

21.

22.

Ciaccona Intermezzo Adagio

[7:17] [2:41]

In tausend Formen magst du dich verstecken 24. 2. Die Sonne kommt!

Ein Prachterscheinen!

25. 3. Lass deinen süssen Rubinenmund 26. 4. Möge Wasser, springend, wallend 27. 5. Der Spiegel sagt mir:

ich bin schön!

28. 6. Kaum das ich dich wieder habe 29. 7. Ist’s möglich, dass ich,

Liebchen, dich kose 23. 1.

[1:53] [0:55] [0:37] [0:46] [1:11] [0:58] [1:26]

Tre episodi dal balletto MARSIA (1949) Angoscioso Ostinato Sereno

[4:24]

Total playing time:

[74:12]

30. I. 31. II. 32. III.

When a powerful team of new music exponents come together, magic will happen; when the music is by Giles Swayne, a composer whose light shines brilliantly in its own unique direction, the results will entrance.

This disc offers a bracing sonic experience - vividly communicative music performed with rare verve, passion, and youthful vibrancy.

‘Swayne is a master’ – The Independent

[6:14]

Goethe-Lieder per una voce di mezzo soprano e tre clarinetti (1953)

Giles Swayne: Convocation The National Youth Choir of Great Britain; Laudibus; Mike Brewer, conductor; Michael Bonaventure, organ; Stephen Wallace, counter-tenor DCD34033

[4:00] [5:31]

Sir Peter Maxwell Davies: Sacred Choral Works The Choir of St Mary’s Cathedral; Matthew Owens, conductor; Michael Bonaventure, solo organ; Simon Nieminski, organ accompaniment; RSAMD Ensemble DCD34037 In the 1960s few would have predicted that Sir Peter Maxwell Davies would eventually write a set of Evening Canticles; yet religious texts have always been of fundamental importance to the composer as this disc vividly demonstrates by bringing together sacred masterworks from both ends of his career.

‘All the music on this disc represents a very important and vivifying contribution to the Anglican choral repertoire, one that ought to be longlasting.’ – Gramophone, Awards edition 2006

New music on Delphian A’e Gowden Lyric: Songs by Ronald Stevenson Susan Hamilton, soprano; John Cameron, piano DCD34006 The lyric Scots poetry of Hugh MacDiarmid, Sorley MacLean, and William Soutar and Robert Louis Stevenson’s A Child’s Garden of Verses are featured in this premiere recording of songs by Borders composer Ronald Stevenson. Susan Hamilton’s clarion soprano voice is the perfect instrument for this introspective recital, which is, in the words of MacDiamid, ‘sharp and sweet and breaks the heart’.

Luigi Dallapiccola (1904-1975) David Wilde piano Susan Hamilton soprano Robert Irvine ‘cello Nicola Stonehouse mezzo-soprano

‘Anyone interested in the composer, the poets, the singer, in the twentieth-century British song generally, should buy this disc.’

– International Record Review, June 2003

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Eddie McGuire: Music for flute, guitar and piano Nancy Ruffer, flute and piccolo; Abigail James, guitar; Dominic Saunders, piano DCD34029 Over the past 40 years, Eddie McGuire, British Composer Award Winner and Creative Scotland Award Winner, has developed a compositional style that is as diverse as it is concentrated. This disc surveys a selection of his solo and chamber works, written for his home instruments, flute, guitar, and piano. The writing, whilst embracing tonality, focuses on texture and aspects of colour, drawing on a myriad of folk influences. At once bold and playful, the listener cannot help be drawn in to McGuire’s evocative sound-world. ‘this is quite simply beautiful music ... Performances are excellent, the overall playing as expressive as the music itself requires; Delphian’s sound is spot-on.’ – Gramophone Editor’s choice, Awards edition 2006

David Wilde piano (tracks 1-19 and 30-32) Susan Hamilton soprano (tracks 16-19) Robert Irvine ‘cello (tracks 20-22) Nicola Stonehouse mezzo soprano (tracks 23-29) Katie Lockhart Eb clarinet Colin Blamey Bb clarinet Marianne Rawles bass clarinet in Bb (tracks 23-29)

Recorded on: 16 and 17 December 2003 (tracks 1-19) in St Mary’s Parish Church, Haddington, Scotland; 10 January 2005 (tracks 23-29) in Saint Silas the Martyr, Kentish Town, London; 10 February 2005 (tracks 30-32) in the Reid Concert Hall, University of Edinburgh, Scotland; 17 April 2005 (tracks 20-22) in Gartmore Parish Church, Gartmore, Scotland.

Steinway Model B Grand Piano, 1978, serial number 455808 (tracks 1-19) Steinway Model D Grand Piano, 1995, serial number 527910 (tracks 30-32) Pianos prepared by: Norman W Motion, Consultant to Steinway & Sons

Producer: Paul Baxter Engineer: Adam Binks 24-bit digital editing and mastering: Paul Baxter Design: Drew Padrutt

Notes on the music

The initial stimulus for the Sonatina Canonica came in 1942, when the Milanese music publishers Suvini Zerboni requested a contribution for a collection of short contemporary Italian piano pieces. Dallapiccola obliged with a ‘Study based on Paganini’s Capriccio No.14 in E b’. Himself a fine pianist who taught piano at the Florence Conservatory for over 30 years, he of course knew the classic keyboard interpretations of Paganini

by Schumann, Liszt and Brahms. What distinguished his own study from these earlier works, he explained to Alfredo Casella, was his interest in ‘sounding out the contrapuntal possibilities’ of the material.

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Clarinet Ensemble

revered Ferruccio Busoni, some of whose own sonatinas show a similar fascination for taking ready-composed material and working it anew.

I. A naive pastoral melody over a drone bass is joined by one, then two canonic inner voices, in augmentation; the whole unfolds at a low dynamic level in the upper part of keyboard, creating an exquisite example of what Fedele d’Amico called Dallapiccola’s ‘fondness for soft and starry climes’. The energetic middle section ingeniously combines its own proper material in double couterpoint with a passage from Capriccio No. 13.

II. A brief Largo, juxtaposing shrill trillings against In due course the study became the finale of mysterious washes of harmony, frames what a four-movement Sonatina Canonica, which is in effect the Sonatina’s scherzo movement.

Dallapiccola characterized in the following terms: III.The slow third movement likewise has a It is a series of trifles on various Paganini Caprices. frame, a canonic one based on the opening Just as Liszt created a pianistic equivalent to the bars of the capriccio, at the start in the depths, technique of Paganini, so, within due proportions, at the end in the soprano register. The main I wanted to use a contrapuntal equivalent of the part of the movement begins with a close same technique, and the whole thing with only the transcription – closer even than Schumann’s slightest changes to the original harmony. By good – of Paganini’s richly voiced original. A fortune, the piece is very difficult (it is dedicated to counterstatement acquires what sounds like Scarpini) and there is no danger that it will be played a free florid descant – in fact it is a cancrizans by the girls in the Conservatory. canon – climbing ever higher and ultimately transformed into distant bell-like chimes.

Since sonata-form was something which, Dallapiccola remarked, ‘held no interest’ for IV. With each passing phrase the canonic him, we may perhaps interpret his choice of procedures become more fanciful. In particular, title as an obeisance in the direction of the Paganini’s old-worldly circles of fifths acquire a

Colin Blamey was born in 1976 and brought up in Fife, Scotland. He studied at the Royal Northern College of Music, graduating in 1999 with a BMus (Hons), a Postgraduate Diploma and a Professional Performance Diploma; the College’s highest award. Colin currently enjoys a varied freelance career, working with orchestras such as: Manchester Camerata; Northern Chamber Orchestra; Performing Arts Symphony Orchestra; Scottish Ensemble; National Festival Orchestra; Opera Box; Carl Rosa Opera; and Manchester Concert Orchestra. An active chamber musician, Colin is also a member of the Fell Clarinet Quartet who were recent recipients of a Tunnell Award and with whom he has performed at venues throughout the UK and is also extremely active in the Live Music Now! scheme. Recent work has included concerts as principal clarinet for Katherine Jenkins’ 2005 Tour, and a highly successful tour of Yorkshire performing Messiaen’s Quartet for the End of Time.

Born in Glasgow in 1979, Marianne Rawles attended the Junior Department of the RSAMD. In 1997 she began her studies at the Royal Northern College of Music, where she won the Sydney Fell Prize for Clarinet. Since graduating, Marianne has enjoyed a successful freelance career, performing with orchestras

such as the Hallé, the BBC Philharmonic and the BBC National Orchestra of Wales. A keen chamber musician, she is a member of the award-winning Fell Clarinet Quartet, and the Langdale Ensemble, with whom she has broadcast live on BBC Radio 3. Both groups are active within the Live Music Now! scheme, performing to a wide range of audiences: from the Bridgewater Hall to Wakefield Prison.

Katie Lockhart studied with John Bradbury and Nicholas Cox at the Royal Northern College of Music, Manchester, and then at the Royal Academy of Music, London, where she undertook her postgraduate studies with Angela Malsbury, Nicholas Rodwell and Mark van de Wiel. As a student Katie was a woodwind finalist in the BBC Young Musician of the year 2000 competition and was also winner of the Academy’s Sir Nicholas Blake prize for woodwind and brass ensemble 2003.

Whilst at the RAM Katie played bass clarinet in the RAM Symphony Orchestra which toured the UK with Sir Elton John and also performed Mozart’s Requiem on period instruments as part of the Spittalfields Festival, conducted by Sir Roger Norrington and broadcast on BBC Radio 3. Since graduating from the RAM in 2004 Katie has performed with: Manchester Camerata; the Southbank Sinfonia; The New Professionals; Opera East; and the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra.

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Nicola Stonehouse

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Nicola Stonehouse recently completed her operatic studies at the Benjamin Britten International Opera School at The Royal College of Music where she studied as a Mezzo-Soprano and is currently studying privately as a Soprano with the renowned tenor Ryland Davies. Her roles have included: Menotti The Medium (Mrs Gobineau) Wexford Festival Ireland, Gounod Romeo et Juliette (Stephano) BYO, Saariaho L’Amour de Loin (Le Pélerin) Al Bustan International Festival Beirut, Puccini La Fanciulla del West (Wowkle) and Suor Angelica (Lay Sister) Opera Holland Park, Holst S_vitri (title role) for the Montepulciano Festival, Mozart Cosi Fan Tutte (Dorabella), Britten The Rape of Lucretia (Female Chorus), Handel Sosarme (Melo), Britten The Turn of the Screw (Miss Jessel) all at BBIOS, Mozart The Magic Flute (Third Lady), Britten A Midsummer Night’s Dream (Hippolyta cover) both for British Youth Opera. Staged opera scenes at the RCM include Ariadne Auf Naxos (Komponist), title role in Carmen, and Così fan tutte (Dorabella).

Also Orlando Gough For The Public Good at English National Opera on the Baylis Project.

Nicola is an experienced concert soloist. Her work further comprises most of the standard oratorio repertoire; Handel’s Messiah; Bach’s Magnificat; St John and St Matthew Passions; Christmas Oratorio with Peter Schreier at St. John’s Smith Square; Mendelssohn’s Elijah; Mozart’s Requiem with Hilary Davan Wetton and the London Mozart Players; Vivaldi’s Gloria at St Martin in the Fields. Nicola was also a soloist on Chandos’s recording of Percy Grainger a capella choral songs with Richard Hickox.

delicious mordancy from Dallapiccola’s canonic treatment (later canonic by inversion). Towards the close there are high-spirited allusions to two other capriccios, first to ‘La Caccia’, and then, in the flamboyant closing cadences, to the fifteenth capriccio, for pianists one of the bestknown, thanks to Liszt’s brilliant paraphrase.

character is determined by their emphasis on lines, rhythms, colours etc., alternating with others that are more highly organized contrapuntally; and that the whole set is framed by two movements which somehow stand apart.

In this context ‘free’ and ‘highly organized’ are relative terms. When Dallapiccola transcribed the Quaderno for orchestra, he called the piece Variazioni. The unifying element of the This work, composed on a commission from the variations is, however, not a theme in the Pittsburgh International Contemporary Music Festival customary sense, but a tone-row; for this is 1952, is dedicated to my dear daughter, on the a serial work, indeed it is one of the classics occasion of her eighth birthday. of a Golden Age of serialism, written at a The title clearly alludes to J.S. Bach’s Notebook time when the composer was, in his own words, ‘patiently seeking understanding’ of for Anna Magdalena Bach, though the abstract the scope of serial composition, and seeking and sometimes recondite procedures of the music are perhaps more redolent of other Bach it ‘in the direction of sensibility, not of theory’. sets: the Goldberg Variations, for instance, or the In his characteristically civilized serial manner Musical Offering. The score also specifies how the groupings of notes within the twelvethe work should be described in a programme: tone row recognizably retain much of the meaning they had acquired from centuries of ANNALIBERA’S MUSICAL NOTEBOOK Western musical practice: first three pairs of Symbol [but Simbolo also means Confession of notes traditionally expressive in character:- a Faith] Accents - first Contrapunctus Lines - second semitone, a minor third, a tritone; then two Contrapunctus (Canon by contrary motion) Friezes [or Decorations] - Andante amoroso and third harmonically expressive groups of three:- an implied ‘half-diminished seventh’ chord, and a Contrapunctus (crab canon) minor triad.

Rhythms - Colour - Shadows Quatrain The published score of Annalibera’s musical notebook is prefaced by the comment:

Evidently this layout is intended to tell us something about the overall conception of the set:- that it consists of a sequence of short (often tiny), freely designed movements, whose

Despite their formidable sub-titles the canonic movements are as expressively vivid as the rest. In Contrapunctus primus the row forms a melodic line, which is presented – cantus

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Notes on the music

firmus-like – in simple repetitive rhythms in the left hand. Above this is woven an ingenious canon – in fact, a modern example of that latemediaeval genre, the mensuration canon. But despite all the contrapuntal artifice, the effect is rather of a single cantus firmus, reverberating and echoing in space. Contrapunctus secundus is serenade-like; Contrapunctus tertius like a gently whispering colloquy.

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As for the framing movements, they seem designed, symbolically and allusively, to affirm Dallapiccola’s links with the Great Traditions of classical music, Italian and Central European.

The ‘symbol’ of the first movement, as the listener will readily recognize, is a musical encryptment of the name B A C H, which recurs, motto-like, in various transpostions and textures, against a background of ostinato quavers. In Quartina the symbolism is less transparent; but the movement may perhaps be read as a tribute to that Italian tradition represented most nobly by the operas of Verdi.

Conceived under the title Sogni (Dreams), it was eventually given the name of an Italian verse-form, a verse-form, moreover, which was to loom large in a celebrated Dallapiccola essay on the subject of poetry and music in nineteenth-century Italian opera. Verdian opera may not be the first thing that comes to mind when listening to this piece. But it sets an expressive, declamatory melody of four four-bar phrases against an accompaniment of soft chords; and there is no mistaking its vivid

Robert Irvine

embodiment of what has come to be known among historians of opera as ‘Dallapiccola’s law of the third line’: ‘the drama comes in the third line: the emotional crescendo is reached by a broken and agitated presentation of the text.’ He is speaking of a movement in La Traviata, but he might equally well be describing his own Quartina.

Dallapiccola’s wide and deep knowledge of poetry was legendary, and Pierluigi Petrobelli has remarked that the texts of his vocal works would constitute a superb verse anthology.

Very often, as in the Machado songs, the verse chosen is epigrammatic in character. The composer has described his way of working: It has always been my custom to copy out the poetry which, perhaps, I might one day set to music, to keep the copy in my briefcase (sometimes for years at a time), to study and memorize it ... For me, to know a poem by memory is the proper way to appreciate it; pondering and repondering it, even when I am walking along the street, and savouring its every word and syllable. Without such a process of gradual absorption I do not believe I could find a musical equivalent of the poetry.

In the case of these Spanish poems, it was the fourth line of Señor, ya me arrancaste that first possessed Dallapiccola’s imagination. Indeed, so vividly did it encapsulate a relationship that was central to his spiritual world (God – the individual heart – the vastness of the created

Robert Irvine was born in Glasgow, and at the age of 16 was awarded a scholarship to the Royal College of Music where he studied with Christopher Bunting and Amaryllis Fleming. Whilst there he won most of the major prizes in chamber music and solo playing.

He went on to further studies with William Pleeth and Pierre Fournier before joining the Philharmonia as sub principal cello. He also worked extensively at Aldeburgh, forming the Brindisi String Quartet and working closely with Sir Peter Pears as continuo cellist and as principal cellist of the Britten Pears Orchestra.

At this time he toured much of Europe with the Brindisi Quartet, making numerous festival appearances and broadcasts.

Irvine left the Philharmonia in 1988 to take up the position of principal cello with the Academy of St. Martin-in-the-Fields, touring all over the world. In 1990, he returned to Scotland to take up the post of principal cellist with Scottish Opera, and with Sally Beamish and James MacMillan founded the Chamber Group of Scotland, performing and broadcasting a wide range of music both chamber and solo.

Current activities include concerts and recitals throughout the UK, including the Cheltenham Festival, St Magnus festival, Gloucester, Norwich, Glasgow, and Edinburgh. International appearances include concerts in Paris, Berlin, Eire, Latvia, New York amongst others.

Commercial recordings include the complete cello works of Sally Beamish for the BIS, which was met with great critical acclaim and was selected CD of the month in the Gramophone magazine. Forthcoming recordings include Russian cello sonatas and new music recording activities for Delphian. Robert plays on a fine Venetian cello by Gofriller from 1725.

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Susan Hamilton

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Soprano, Susan Hamilton, is a noted soloist specialising in Baroque and Contemporary music. She sings regularly in Britain and Europe with the Dunedin Consort, Collegium Vocale, Florilegium, The King’s Consort, Monteverdi Choir, The New London Consort, The Ricercar Consort and A Sei Voci, and has appeared at major International Festivals in Europe, Japan, Australia and the USA. She has worked with conductors such as Philippe Herreweghe, Sir John Eliot Gardiner, Raphael Frühbeck de Burgos, Paul McCreesh and Ton Koopman, composers including Witold Lutoslawski and Ronald Stevenson. Hamilton appears regularly on the radio and television and has recorded for Astree-Auvidis, Delphian, Harmonia Mundi, Hyperion, Linn, Ricercar and Virgin Classics.

Recent work has included a programme of English Music with the The Ricercar Consort in Lausanne, Rosenmüller’s Vespers with Cantus Cölln, Haydn’s Scot Songs at ‘Les Folles Journee’ in Nantes and Lisbon, Michael Daugherty’s What’s That Spell? with the Paragon Ensemble, a tour of the USA with the Collegium Vocale, performing music by Schütz and a performance of Stimmung by Stockhausen at the Edinburgh International Festival with the Dunedin Consort.

Susan’s latest solo recording of music

by Ronald Stevenson, with pianist John Cameron, was recently released to great critical acclaim.

Susan Hamilton is co-founder and CoArtistic Director of the Dunedin Consort, Scotland’s premiere vocal ensemble.

universe) that he was to quote it again, lightly paraphrased, in his last opera Ulisse (Berlin 1968) as UIysses sets out on his final journey.

The songs show the composer’s mastery of serial technique in its most beguiling light. In the opening song, the row, heard very clearly from the fifth bar in the piano prelude and again in the opening vocal phrase, is, in the broadest terms, a rising and falling scale. Out of this easily apprehended idea, Dallapiccola creates a deliciously bright and bell-like soundscape – never in this song, and rarely in the whole cycle, does the piano descend into the bass clef: soaring and tumbling chimes of bells in the voice, zestful rhythmic tintinnabulations (or are they fanfares?) in the piano. Aptly enough, the same row underlies the final song: the scales are now slow, soft, almost disembodied, while the piano’s fanfares are transformed into ‘sweet, sustained, serene’ harmonies.

Dallapiccola’s incantation-like use of melisma throughout the cycle has been seen by some critics as an aspect of his Italian insistence upon cantabilità – songfulness.

At this stage he still chooses to have different rows for each movement, and, particularly in the Chaconne and Adagio, he designs rows which carry a certain amount of traditional expressive nuance with them.

The row in the Chaconne, for example, contrasts whole-tone tetrachords at start and close with a chromatically creeping tetrachord in the middle. Individual tones tend to hang on as pedal notes, giving anchors to the unfolding musical argument. And in the more lyrical passages, each type of tetrachord is likely to be ruminated over obsessively before giving way to the next. In the Adagio, on the other hand, a hexachord of perfect fifths is set against another from which diatonic and largely conjunct melodies can easily be fashioned.

The apparent allusion to the opening of Berg’s Violin Concerto has often been noted.

The chaconne character of the first movement is clearest in the grave triple-time metre, especially in the opening eight bars, which recur in enriched form at the close of the movement. It comprises a series of thirteen For several years Dallapiccola had employed variations, differing from other serial works (all twelve-tone serialism as one among a wide of which are, in a manner of speaking, variation repertory of compositional resources. By the movements) in the generally regular eight-bar end of the Second World War he was ready to phrases in which they recur. Exceptions are embark on a more systematic exploration of a series of briefer and often faster moving the method, and the Chaconne, Intermezzo and variations that flit past, spectre-like, before the Adagio for solo cello, begun in the late summer solemn tread of the chaconne is re-established. of 1945, was the first fruit of that exploration.

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David Wilde

Notes on the music

The Intermezzo is in fact an Intermezzo and Trio, the brief Trio differing in its unearthly colouring (‘pianissimo, on the fingerboard, visionary’) and its gently flowing rhythm from the robust and spasmic Intermezzo, where longer and shorter bars alternate in systematic disorder.

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b

b

b

of instrumental colour to a single family: E clarinet, B clarinet and bass clarinet in B .

Dallapiccola’s partiality for epigrammatic verse is again in evidence (most of the poems are single stanzas from longer poems), in this case selected from Goethe’s West-östlicher Divan, and surely not just because of his admiration In the Adagio, the contrasting hexachords for the literary qualities of these sophisticated of the row are used in alternation: the fifths stanzas. Years before he had made his first supply a weirdly ‘colourless’ frame or ritornello attempts at serial composition by consciously for an expressive melody which recurs in a imitating certain literary features he had variety of clearly audible forms. At the climax observed in the novels of Marcel Proust of the movement this melody is presented in and James Joyce. Now a past master of the intricately canonic dress – a characteristic touch. style, he was looking for poems that offered a kind of analogy to more sophisticated serial The Chaconne, Intermezzo and Adagio was explorations. And indeed, Goethe’s lines are commissioned by the distinguished Spanish full of comings and goings, of objects hid in ‘cellist Gaspar Cassadó, whose advice during multitudinous forms, of mirrors and reflections, the composition encouraged Dallapiccola to of turnings in on oneself. explore the sonorous and technical resources of the instrument no less than those of the Thus the opening song punningly treats serial method. Having given the premiere in the row in the manner suggested by the Milan in February 1946 (it was the first of words, hiding it, if not in a thousand forms, Dallapiccola’s serial compositions to be publicly at any rate among the three voices of the performed) Cassadó played it frequently in the clarinets, and revealing it authoritatively only following years, and it did much to establish at ‘Allgegenwärt’ge’. It shines outs even more the composer’s international reputation. unmistakably as a ‘vision of splendour’, More typical of Dallapiccola than the song a ‘Prachterscheinen’, at the start of the second cycle for solo voice and piano are the various song. Perhaps the very audible canonic sets of songs for solo voice with chamber reinforcements of the seductively lyrical vocal ensemble. The Goethe-Lieder of 1953 melody of ‘Lass deinen süssen Rubinenmund’ represent the composer in his most spare, are an image of the ‘importunity’ of which the Webernesque mode: he bases the whole set poem speaks; certainly the mirror canon of the on a single 12-tone row, and restricts the range fifth song is self-explanatory. In the sixth

Pianist and composer David Wilde was born in Manchester in 1935. As a boy he studied with Solomon and his pupil Franz Reizenstein, who had also studied composition with Hindemith and Vaughan Williams. A frequent soloist at the Henry Wood Proms, working with such conductors as Horenstein, Boulez, and Downes, he shared with Jacqueline du Près the honour of opening the BBC’s second TV Channel in the North of England with Sir John Barbirolli and the Hallé Orchestra in 1962, and was a soloist at the Royal Concert the same year.

During the 1990s he composed many works protesting against human rights abuses in our time and was twice honoured by the city of Sarajevo. The ‘Cellist of Sarajevo, (1992) dedicated to Vedran Smailovic, is played the world over and was recorded by Yo-Yo Ma for Sony Classical, and the opera London under Siege, after an idea by Bosnian poet Goran Simic, was produced by the State Theatre of Lower Saxony in 1998.

As a pianist Wilde has won several major prizes, including a first at the Liszt-Bartok competition in Budapest in 1961. The legendary Nadia Boulanger was a jury member and invited him to Paris for further study. He remained in close touch with ‘Mademoiselle’, who described Wilde publicly as ‘Superb performer,

magnificent musician’, for the rest of her long life. Professor of Piano at the Music Academy in Hannover from 1981 to 2000, he moved to Edinburgh in 2001, where he is Visiting Professor in Keyboard Studies at the University of Edinburgh. He continues to play, write, compose, and teach.

Recordings include the complete Sonatas for violin and piano by Beethoven with Erich Gruenberg; the Sonata for violin and piano by his master Franz Reizenstein; also with Gruenberg, the Thomas Wilson Concerto (composed for Wilde), and works by Schumann, Liszt, and Chopin. Wilde now records exclusively for Delphian; previous recordings include a Chopin recital and numbering amongst forthcoming issues are a disc of music

by Busoni and Liszt, and a recording of the complete Preludes and Fugues of Reizenstein.

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Texts and translations 3.

Lass deinen süssen Rubinenmund Zudringlichkeiten nicht verfluchen: Was hat Liebesschmerz andern Grund, Als seine Heilung zu suchen?

6.

Do not allow your sweet ruby lips to curse my importunity; what else can a lover do but seek some cure for his pains?

4.

Möge Wasser, springend, wallend, Die Cypressen dir gestehn: Von Suleika zu Suleika Ist mein Kommen und mein Gehn.

May the water, springing and bubbling, and may the cypresses avow it to you: from Suleika to Suleika is all my coming and going.

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5.

Der Spiegel sagt mir: ich bin schön!

Ihr sagt: zu altern sei auch mein Geschick.

Vor Gott muss alles ewig stehn, In mir liebt Ihn für diesen Augenblick.

The mirror tells me I am beautiful!

You tell me it is also my fate to grow old.

Before God everything must stand eternally; for this moment, love Him in me.

Kaum das ich dich wieder habe, Dich mit Kuss und Liedern labe, Bist du still in dich gekehret; Was beengt und drückt und störet?

Hardly do I hold you in my arms again, reviving you with kisses and with songs, than you start to brood.

What oppresses, what troubles and disturbs you?

7.

Ist’s möglich, dass ich, Liebchen, dich kose, Vernehme der göttlichen Stimme Schall!

Unmöglich scheint immer die Rose, Unbegreiflich die Nachtigall.

Is it possible, beloved, that I should be caressing you, that I should be hearing the sound of your heavenly voice!

The rose seems always an impossibility, the nightingale an unfathomable mystery.

the quality of oppressive brooding is reflected in the obsessive preoccupation with the tiny chromatic cell of three notes that opens the row; while in the final song a sense of release is achieved by letting voice and instruments loose on the whole row once more. But that same 3-note motif from number 6, initially setting and canonically reinforcing the question ‘Ist’s möglich?’, also pervades the song, now ‘echoing’ and ‘murmuring’ in more and more florid repetitions until it is difficult not to hear it as Goethe’s unfathomable nightingale.

The whole cycle is laid out in strictly symmetrical form: the clarinets come and go in a 3-1-2-3-2-1-3 sequence; tempos accelerate from an initial Largo towards the central Impetuoso, and broaden again to the Quasi lento at the close. In that ‘impetuous’ fourth song, the pivotal point of the cycle, Suleika – to whom and from whom is all the poet‘s coming and going – is named for the only time.

The mystery of this elusive beauty – that she derives, via Persian legend, from the biblical Potiphar’s wife – was clarified for Dallapiccola

by Thomas Mann’s account in Joseph und seine Brüder. Only after reading this, he tells us, did Suleika appear with sufficiently plastic clarity for his imagination to be fired.

Marsyas. Discovering the flute and the art of playing it, Marsyas presumes to challenge the God Apollo, is outdone by Apollo’s supernatural powers, and is punished for his presumption by being flayed. Dallapiccola persuaded Milloss that the fitting end for this myth was a lament for the satyr, not a god’s dance of triumph; in other respects he was a deferential collaborator, taking a stopwatch to his music to fit it with film-like exactitude to the timings of the choreography.

Wartime conditions made it impossible to stage the ballet until 1948, when Milloss produced it at the Venice Festival. Meanwhile, however, Pietro Scarpini had made a piano reduction of the whole ballet, which was published in 1943, and which Dallapiccola seems to have used as a kind of first draft for his own Episodes. He, of course, is able to treat the transcriptions with a composer’s sovereignty, often departing from Scarpini’s dutiful ‘reduction’ in the interests of a more pianistically effective version, but only very rarely altering the substance of the music, with a shift of pitch perhaps, or the abbreviation of some transitional episode.

While Dallapiccola’s Episodes make no specific reference to the ballet, Scarpini’s reduction The ‘dramatic ballet’ Marsia, composed in 1942, was published with Milloss’s version of the in collaboration with the Hungarian-born dancer scenario carefully cross-referenced to the and choreographer Aurel Milloss de Miholy music. The ballet has equally prominent roles (Milloss), is a retelling of the myth of the satyr for Marsyas and Apollo, but Dallapiccola’s

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Notes on the music

Texts and translations

interpretation of the myth unmistakably makes Marsyas the primary figure: ‘the central idea of all my works for the musical theatre is always the same: the struggle of man against some force much stronger than he.’ In the Episodes Marsyas virtually monopolizes the scene, and the story is reordered in the process.

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The opening flourish of the Angoscioso is Apollo’s challenge to Marsyas, the remainder a transcription of what in the ballet is described as ‘Marsyas’s final dance’. Having turned the flute upside-down, Apollo invites Marsyas to demonstrate whether he can still compete with him. Marsyas attempts the impossible.

In vain. But while undergoing his defeat, he strives with might and main: he leaps, twists, leaps again, doing everything in his power to astonish; but he cannot conceal his inferiority.

The dance becomes an expression of man’s immense striving to approach godhead.

All this is from Part Two of the ballet.

The Ostinato looks back to the happier times in Part One, and is a transcription of the movement already entitled ‘Ostinato’ in the ballet. [Marsyas] finds the flute, takes it up and, without fully realizing what he is doing, plays it. Little by little he discovers the world of sound; he grows enthusiastic, exultant, and breaks into a frenzied dance. Expression of the highest intoxication of joy. Human pride is born in him. At the climax of Marsyas’s dance, Apollo appears. That is the blazing chord - F major + G major - at the close.

I

The Sereno is a transcription of the whole of Part Three of the ballet, ‘The death of Marsyas’.

Marsyas dies in the arms of the nymphs.

The nymphs weep and their bodies are metamorphosed into tears, which uniting with the blood of Marsyas, turns into a river, the river Marsia, symbol of the immortality granted

by Apollo to the defeated artist.

Four lyrics of Antonio Machado I.

La primavera ha venido. ¡Aleluyas blancas de los zarzales floridos!

II.

Ayer soñé que veía a Dios y que a Dios hablaba; y soñé que Dios me oía...

Después soñé que soñaba.

Goethe-Lieder for mezzo-soprano and three clarinets 1.

Yesterday I dreamt that I saw God, and that I spoke to God; and I dreamt that God heard me...

Afterwards I dreamt that I was dreaming.

III.

Bibliography Luigi Dallapiccola, Dallapiccola on opera. Selected writings of Luigi Dallapiccola, Volume One, Translated and edited by Rudy Shackelford, London 1987 Raymond Fearn, The music of Luigi Dallapiccola, University of Rochester Press, 2003 Dietrich Kämper, Gefangenschaft und Freiheit: Leben und Werk des Komponisten Luigi Dallapiccola, Cologne

Señor, ya me arrancaste lo que yo más quería.

Oye otra vez, Dios mío, mi corazón cla mar.

Tu voluntad se hizo, Señor, contra la mía.

Señor, ya estamos solos mi corazon y el mar.

Lord, already you have snatched away that which most I loved.

Hear once more, o my God, the cry of my heart.

Thy will be done, o Lord, contrary to mine.

Lord, now we are alone, my heart and the sea.

La primavera ha venido.

Nadie sabe cómo ha sido.

Spring has come.

No-one knows how.

Spring has come.

White alleluias of the flowering briars!

© 2006 David Kimbell At the time of his retirement in 2001, David Kimbell was Dean of the Faculty of Music at The University of Edinburgh.

IV.

In tausend Formen magst du dich ver stecken, Doch, Allerliebste, gleich erkenne ich dich; Du magst mit Zauberschleiern dich be decken, Allgegenwärt’ge, gleich erkenn ich dich.

You may hide yourself in a thousand shapes, but, best-beloved, I recognize you at once; you may cover yourself with magic veils, but, ever-present one, I recognize you at once.

2.

Die Sonne kommt! Ein Prachterscheinen!

Der Sichelmond umklammert sie.

Wer konnte solch ein Paar vereinen?

Dies Rätsel, wie erklärt sich’s? Wie? The sun is rising! A vision of splendour!

The crescent moon embraces it.

Who could unite such a pair?

How, how can this mystery be explained?

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