The Cellist of Sarajevo: chamber music by David Wilde by Delphian Records

THE CELLIST OF SARAJEVO:

CHAMBER MUSIC BY DAVID WILDE

(b. 1935)

Red Note Ensemble

Jacqueline Shave violin

Tom Hankey violin

Rachel Roberts viola

Robert Irvine cello

Simon Smith piano

Recorded on 14-16 December 2015

at Broughton St Mary’s Parish Church, Edinburgh

Producer/Engineer: Paul Baxter

24-bit digital editing: Adam Binks

24-bit digital mastering: Paul Baxter

Cover image & design: Drew Padrutt

Booklet editor: John Fallas

Piano technician: Norman W. Motion

Session photography © Delphian Records

Delphian Records Ltd – Edinburgh – UK

www.delphianrecords.co.uk

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Suite ‘Cry, Bosnia-Herzegovina’

1 Totentanz: Ethnische Reinigung (Dance of Death: Ethnic Cleansing) – [3:41] 2 Totenglocke (Death Knell) – [2:28] 3 Notturno desolato – [4:04] 4 Lament in rondo form: The Cellist of Sarajevo [9:51]

String Quartet No 1

5 I. Senza misura – Allegro moderato, con molta energia – Allegretto grazioso [14:11]

6 II. Intermezzo: Andante espressivo, ma con alcuna licenza [4:34]

7 III. Scherzo: Allegretto grazioso – Vivace ed un poco grottesco [7:13]

8 IV. Threnody (for the unknown civilian victim of war and oppression) [10:01]

Total playing time (CD1) [56:07]

Piano Trio

1 I. Adagio ma non troppo – Allegro tempestuoso – Senza misura – [8:21]

2 II. Notturno: Lento [4:18]

3 III. Scherzo: Vivace (with Trio fantastico: quasi Arlecchino) –[4:09]

4 IV. Finale: Allegro vivace (Tempo di Valse) [9:29]

5 A Prayer for Bosnia [2:00]

Total playing time (CD2) [28:21]

Sarajevo posted a stark message to the world about European civilisation in the last century’s closing decade. The continent’s cherished myth of progress was reduced to ashes as the brutal Bosnian civil war filled mass graves with the victims of torture and genocide. Old enmities were revived, racial and religious divides restored, the eternal poisons of greed and hatred pumped into the body politic – deadly elements in a chain reaction accelerated by the disintegration of Yugoslavia and the rise of ethnic nationalism. The Yugoslav tragedy of the 1990s played out on television screens, often in real time, leaving Western leaders and the wider public fully aware of an unfolding humanitarian disaster. Many listened to bulletins from the Balkans with heavy hearts; few responded with action. David Wilde’s life changed when he decided listening was not good enough.

The pianist and composer, based in Hanover at the time of the Yugoslav wars, was captivated by a BBC radio report from Sarajevo in which the journalist David Reynolds described a concert given by the Sarajevo String Quartet in a hall rocked by a bomb blast. His account set Wilde on the road to Bosnia-Herzegovina. ‘Reynolds noted how the musicians continued playing despite the bombing,’ Wilde recalls. ‘The quartet’s leader, Dževad Sabanović, who later became my friend, stood up at the close of the performance and said, “You see:

music is more powerful than bombs.” After hearing that I told my wife, Jane, “I’m going to Sarajevo.”’ Visiting a war zone was no simple matter, but Wilde arranged to travel to the besieged Bosnian capital as an official United Nations representative. He wanted to show solidarity with Sarajevo’s musicians and was determined to help preserve the city’s cultural life in time of war.

‘I entered Sarajevo in an armoured car and noticed how the Sarajevans were all so well dressed. People told me that this was their weapon, to carry on as usual.’ Wilde soon discovered that other weapons were at large in Bosnia. On his daily walk to the Kamerni Teatar or the nearby Sarajevo Music Academy, he rushed to dodge Karadžić’s snipers, who were covering the junctions of Marshall Tito Street. This game of chance, which so many lost, was played by Sarajevans from 5 April 1992, when the city was first attacked by Serb forces, until 29 February 1996, when the long siege was lifted. During this period the Sarajevo String Quartet defied death by giving over two hundred concerts in public buildings that had been badly damaged by gunfire. Although the ensemble suspended its activities at the conflict’s beginning, it soon resumed rehearsals. In June 1992 the quartet was invited to perform in a synagogue ruined by gunfire. The concert took place despite sirens warning of imminent missile attacks,

and bombs falling elsewhere in Sarajevo. The audience, reduced to tears, persuaded the quartet to continue playing against the war; it did so despite the violent deaths of its leader, whose place was taken by Dževad Sabanović, and second violinist.

Bosnia burned into Wilde’s consciousness. His anger against Serb aggression and the West’s pusillanimous response to war crimes being committed close to the heart of Europe drove him to compose. The works that arose from Wilde’s reflections on the Bosnian conflict are strikingly unsentimental yet never dispassionate. They include the opera London under Siege (to a libretto by Bosnia’s national poet Goran Simić), a searing indictment of the Major–Hurd government’s policy of inaction over Bosnia; the children’s cantata Anne in Mostar, written at the request of the Anne Frank House, Amsterdam for its exhibition in Mostar, Bosnia-Herzegovina, and first performed at the Pavarotti Music Centre there in 1998; and three instrumental works – The Cellist of Sarajevo, the Suite ‘Cry, BosniaHerzegovina’, and A Prayer for Bosnia. Each piece conveys the composer’s compassion for a people’s tragedy with an emotional honesty open to the profound spiritual dimension of human suffering.

by a report by New York Times journalist John Burns about Vedran Smailović, cellist of the Sarajevo String Quartet and member of a remarkable Bosnian musical dynasty. On 27 May 1992, almost a month after the Serbs enforced a blockade on Sarajevo, a mortar round struck a queue of people waiting to buy flour from a bakery in the Vase Miskina shopping precinct. The missile killed twenty-two and wounded a hundred others. Smailović, a local resident, later put on evening dress, walked to the scene of the massacre, placed the spike of his cello in the hole where the shell had exploded and played Albinoni’s Adagio. He repeated the performance every afternoon for twenty-two days, one for each of those killed, risking his life to create a memorial in sound to the dead and offer solace to the living.

The earliest of these works predates Wilde’s arrival in besieged Sarajevo, and was inspired

Wilde read Burns’s article during a train journey from Nuremberg to Hanover. As he sat with the story’s after-effects, a cello melody sounded deep within his imagination and continued to revolve there like an endless lament. The Cellist of Sarajevo, which Wilde subtitles ‘a lament in rondo form’, was first performed by Matthew Barley for Classic FM and in concert by Alexander Baillie at the Queen Elizabeth Hall, London; was toured by Penelope Lynex to Australia and Japan; and further extended its global reach when it was recorded by Yo-Yo Ma. ‘It’s not, as one

might sense from some performances, an improvisation,’ the composer cautions. ‘Rather it is a carefully structured piece, with two distinct underlying tempi that are essential to the cohesion of that structure.’

It is heard here as the finale of the Suite ‘Cry, Bosnia-Herzegovina’. (The Suite is otherwise scored for violin and piano, and in its published form concludes with a transcription of The Cellist of Sarajevo for solo violin, but for the present recording the original cello version has been restored.) Wilde wrote this work for Violeta Smailović-Huart, ‘so that she, too, can honour her brother – the renowned cellist of Sarajevo – and plead for her people’, and his title echoes that of Alan Paton’s Cry, the Beloved Country, a 1948 novel rooted in the social problems of South Africa as it slumped towards apartheid.

Completed in March 1993, the Suite opens with a menacing Totentanz. In a note to the score, Wilde insists that its title, ‘Dance of Death: Ethnic Cleansing’, must always be used in full and that ‘this piece must not be performed or recorded for any concert society, radio station, or recording company for whom the portrayal of the Satanic doctrine of so-called Ethnic Cleansing as a Dance of Death is not acceptable’. The movement, propelled at first by rhythmic riffs projected into shifting metrical patterns, eventually coalesces around the ancient Dies irae chant. This aural signifier of

death and destruction from the Roman Catholic Mass for the Dead is announced by the violin before being echoed in sonorous low piano chords. Death’s headlong dash is arrested by a series of arpeggiated chords in the piano part, above which the violin slowly ascends towards a vertiginous open harmonic. ‘Totenglocke’ (Death Knell) follows without pause, its chilling signature chord hammered out a dozen times by the pianist against the violin’s plaintive lament. A transformation occurs as the second movement gives way to its successor, in which the will to destroy yields to the contemplation of spiritual emptiness. This ‘desolate nocturne’ harbours the stillness of grief, stripped bare of rage and denial to reflect on the dark side of human nature.

A Prayer for Bosnia forms a short coda to these larger ‘Bosnian’ works. The piece was originally written for the Sarajevo String Quartet, and Wilde made the violin-and-piano arrangement heard here in October 1995 as a gift to Osman-Faruk Sijarić, Dean of the Sarajevo Academy of Music. Subtle melodic and rhythmic imitation is employed to unify the material of the two instrumental parts. Marked Lento religioso, this brief composition evokes music’s power to transform and transcend even the most destructive of emotions. The works on this recording, whether crafted before or after the horrors of Bosnia, reflect

their composer’s creative engagement with the individual and collective psyche. After acquiring his solid technical foundation as a pianist between 1945 and 1947 through lessons with Franz Reizenstein, who was then working as teaching assistant to Solomon, Wilde studied composition with Richard Hall at the Royal Manchester College of Music in the early 1950s. Later he gained intense insights into the musician’s craft as a mature student of Nadia Boulanger. Yet the emergence of a fully formed compositional language in mid-life was the result of a further experience, and an ostensibly non-musical one, following as it did upon two years of Jungian analysis. Beset by many personal and family conflicts, including the collapse of his first marriage and the aftermath of his elder brother’s suicide, Wilde pursued the demanding Jungian process of ‘individuation’ – the difficult development of a whole, indivisible and distinct self – under the guidance of the Australian musicologist and Jungian analyst Sally Kester (then O’Brien) while he was artist-in-residence at the University of Nedlands, Perth. ‘I think many hidden tensions were released in me,’ he says. ‘I’m certain that my playing improved as a result of analysis. And I’ve written most of my compositions since then.’

The Piano Trio was drafted in 1988, during Wilde’s sessions with Sally Kester, and he twice returned to the score to make revisions,

in 1995 and again in 2004. The finished work explores the drama inherent in contrasting emotional forces. It opens with a cello solo, the thematic material of which is taken up by violin and piano and probed by the full ensemble in a wistful slow introduction that seems to pose the question: ‘What next?’ The answer arrives in the shape of an Allegro tempestuoso propelled by sforzando chords and elaborated by the strings’ lyrical reworking of the theme of the introduction. A spate of developmental episodes follows, fortified by a piano ostinato in octaves, stemmed by tremolando strings and vibrant piano chords, and dissipated by the solo cello’s cadenza. The movement’s final bars, haunted by a brief return of its main theme, resolve into the rhapsodic space of the Notturno, a song-without-words for violin and cello above a rocking piano accompaniment. Strings and piano follow parallel dialectical tracks in the Scherzo, the violin and cello circumscribing an expressionist counterpoint to the piano’s jovial, albeit dissonant, theme; the Trio fantastico – quasi Arlecchino adopts the mask of the archetypal Trickster, injecting mischief at the movement’s midpoint and inflecting the character of the Scherzo when it recurs. The finale follows without pause, recasting material from the opening movement’s Allegro tempestuoso in the form of a dashing waltz before embarking on a sequence of dream-like recollections of what has gone before.

The seeds of Wilde’s String Quartet No 1 (written in 1992, and revised like the Piano Trio in 2004) grew from the post-Soviet landscape created by the fall of the Berlin Wall in November 1989. While Western commentators celebrated the ‘bloodless’ collapse of communism, civilians from Croatia to Nagorno-Karabakh fell victim to the rise of cynical nationalism and ethnic hatreds. ‘With the collapse of the Soviet Union, we felt we could look forward to a much better world,’ notes Wilde. ‘Then came the disastrous disintegration of Yugoslavia. The genocide at Srebrenica, the worst crime perpetrated by the Bosnian Serb Army against the Muslim Bosnians, was by no means the only massacre that took place in the Balkans at that time. And the bloodshed still goes on today – in Ukraine, in Syria, in so many other places.’ The artist, he suggests, can introduce a sense of hope into a world that appears doomed to repeat history’s catastrophic errors, not least by responding to the redemptive theme of suffering and spiritual renewal exemplified by the close of T.S. Eliot’s Little Gidding: ‘We shall not cease from exploration / And the end of all our exploring / Will be to arrive where we started / And know the place for the first time.’

Recurrence and redemption are central to the String Quartet. The work opens with a slow introduction, hallmarked at first by sustained string chords and an impassioned first violin

melody, thereafter by an introspective passage including ghostly artificial harmonics in the cello and viola parts. The strophic form of the first movement, comprising two repeated sections and a coda, unfolds with a lively Allegro moderato built from rich thematic material. Wilde briefly suspends the sense of measured time in the contrasting second section, before deconstructing the quartet’s texture to make room for an expressive solo viola melody. The recall of the Allegro moderato sets the stage for an elaborate dance, shot through with metrical shifts and complex rhythmic subdivisions, which in turn dissolves in a pizzicato haze to reveal a restatement of the second section, now with the cello occupying the solo spot. The movement’s wistful coda, shaped from material from the Allegro moderato, finds rest in a sublime final cadence. Motifs from the first movement resurface in the second-movement Intermezzo, where they are developed through repetition and imitation. The music’s noble simplicity here creates a cumulative emotional weight that calls for and receives release into silence. Yet the tension remains until the Scherzo, a movement amiable in its initial fugato phase, becoming more troubled as it lurches towards a state of intoxicated agitation (intended – as in the Piano Trio – to suggest the spirit of the commedia dell’ arte).

warrior,’ observes Wilde. ‘My Threnody is dedicated to “the unknown civilian victim of war and oppression”.’ The score is headed by the closing line of Dylan Thomas’s ‘A Refusal to Mourn the Death, by Fire, of a Child in London’, written when the poet heard news of a young girl incinerated during an air raid in the Blitz: ‘After the first death, there is no other.’ The movement falls into verse-like sections, each assigned a particular metronome marking and textural quality, including an otherworldly chorale, a sombre funeral march and an Adagio distinguished by a prominent solo melody. The composition’s structural certainty is undermined at first by agitato bridge passages and then, decisively, by rapid-fire outbursts of repeated notes played sul ponticello. Silence arises from the movement’s final notes, delivering its act of commemoration into the infinite time of sacred space.

Andrew Stewart has been a freelance writer since 1989. He studied historical musicology at King’s College London, was artistic director of the Southwark Festival, and is an experienced choir trainer and choral conductor.

Red Note Ensemble is Scotland’s contemporary music ensemble, dedicated to developing and performing contemporary music to the highest standards, and taking new music out to audiences around and beyond Scotland. Red Note is Associate Contemporary Ensemble at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland in Glasgow, an Associate Company of the Traverse Theatre Edinburgh and Associate Ensemble of the Sound Festival Aberdeen.

Founded in 2008 by Scottish cellist Robert Irvine, the ensemble is directed by John Harris (Chief Executive and Artistic Co-Director) and Robert Irvine (Artistic Co-Director), and led by violinist Jackie Shave. Red Note performs the established classics of contemporary music; commissions new music; develops the work of new and emerging composers from around the world; and finds new spaces and new ways of performing contemporary music to attract new audiences. The ensemble’s work in 2016 includes a Reels to Ragas tour of the Highlands and Islands with Indian tabla player Kuljit Bhamra, a new string quartet for invented instruments by François Sarhan, and a large-scale co-production and European tour with Antwerp-based wind ensemble I Solisti.

The quartet’s finale stands as a Threnody. ‘Every major city has its tomb of the unknown

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