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Richard Strauss and the Viennese Trumpet

Jonathan Freeman-Attwood Chiyan Wong 1

Credits Tracklist Programme note

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Biographies

Richard Strauss and the Viennese Trumpet

Jonathan Freeman-Attwood Chiyan Wong

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Recorded in St George’s Bristol, UK, January and April 2019

Text Preparation Kathleen Rule

Recording Producer & Engineer Philip Hobbs

Score Preparation Stuart Garden

Cover Image Relaxing in the Au

by Carl Moll (1861–1945), Christie’s Images, Bridgeman Images

Post-production Julia Thomas

Design stoempstudio.com

Special thanks to the Royal Academy of Music, London 3

Richard Strauss and the Viennese Trumpet

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61:17 JONATHAN FREEMAN-ATTWOOD tru m pet CHIYAN WONG piano

A Sonata for Trumpet and Piano

‘after Richard Strauss’

(written and conceived by Thomas

Oehler and Jonathan Freeman-Attwood)

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Allegro energico 10:48

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Andante cantabile 7:40

3 — Rondo 6:29

Franz Schubert (1797–1828),

Johann Joseph Fux (c. 1660–1741),

arr. Timothy Jones

arr. Jonathan Freeman-Attwood

Sonata (from K. 347 and K. 367)

Sonata in G minor, D. 408

4 — Grave 0:45

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Allegro giusto 3:46

5 — Allegro 2:06

9 — Andante 4:03

6 — Adagio 1:57

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Menuetto – Trio 2:47

7 — Allegro 1:13

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Allegro moderato 2:50

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Anton Bruckner (1824–1896)

Anton Webern (1883–1945),

12 — Ave Maria III (1882) 3:04

arr. Jonathan Freeman-Attwood

Two Pieces (1899)

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No. 1 in G major: Langsam 1:27

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Alexander Zemlinsky (1871–1942)

Six Songs after Poems

by Maurice Maeterlinck, Op. 13

Ludwig van Beethoven (1770–1827),

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No. 3: Lied der Jungfrau 2:01

arr. Timothy Jones

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16 — Seven Variations on Gustav Mahler (1860–1911)

Des Knaben Wunderhorn

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No. 11: Urlicht 4:17

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‘God Save the King’, WoO78 5:28

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Richard Strauss and the Viennese Trumpet

If there was ever a composer in the era of late-flowering Romanticism from whom instrumentalists would hanker for a sonata or concerto, Richard Strauss would surely be amongst the top contenders.

His wide-ranging orchestral and operatic creations abound with gloriously idiomatic writing for every instrument, and yet only the piano, violin, oboe and horn can really claim to have bespoke solo works by Strauss between the 1880s and the late 1940s, and collectively they form only a small proportion of his output.

Our Sonata ‘after Richard Strauss’ is not a transcription in any conventional sense of the term. Rather, it emerges out of a desire – and a long gestation in its making – to deliver a significant trumpet sonata which Strauss did not write. The idea of assembling a patchwork quilt of excerpts from the composer’s oeuvre held no special allure because implicit in the notion of a ‘sonata’ is that ideas must be generated organically, and with balance and thematic and formal integrity.

Our compositional approach would therefore need to be conceived on a macro and micro level simultaneously: a combination of various dovetailing processes (from original Strauss material adopted and re-drawn, to newly imagined ‘Strauss’) underpinned by a structural landscape

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appropriate to the ambitions of the invention, per se, and drawing on the specific challenges of creating a rare brass sonata in this style. Indeed, our primary motivation was to fill the chasm of good ‘serious’ late-Romantic recital music for trumpet players, to be performed in toto as a sonata or as ‘Drei Konzertstücke’.

The categories of engagement with Strauss’s music have been necessarily multi-dimensional as they sit alongside newly composed material. Because of the complex levels of creative collaboration between the two of us, we decided that individual operational distinctions were largely superfluous, save that one person thought up the idea and selected the majority of original pieces (the trumpet player) and the other (the composer) notated the material from a series of 30-40 practical sessions we undertook, and then drafted the multifarious sections leading, eventually, to a three-movement sonata. The pattern was fairly consistent: we would map out the structure together and experiment practically (our instruments at hand) with melodic characters, rhythmic motifs and harmonic worlds by drawing on a collective knowledge of Strauss’s oeuvre. The composer would then harness the results and develop the material before we reconvened to edit, refine and move forward to the next section.

The material found in the Sonata is drawn from five different categories of provenance and treatment: i) near-untouched material taken directly from the first movement of Strauss’s Violin Sonata in E flat major, Op. 18, ii) light arrangement of material from diverse original sources (lieder and orchestral pieces), iii) very significant arrangement

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and re-deploying of other material for a radical new context or purpose, iv) newly composed sections, and v) development or transitions based on existing material within the Sonata itself (be it Strauss’s or newly composed).

The success of such an undertaking depends largely on how the various levels of transcription, transformation, re-alignment and composition come together. How listeners judge each swathe of music in relation to their knowledge of ‘original’ Strauss must play some part. To what extent does this knowledge affect the enjoyment of the work as a whole? Is the problem obviated by there being no Strauss trumpet sonata in the first place? Orchestral trumpet players were, after all, just beginning to explore the chamber potential of their instruments in the first half of the twentieth century, though in Germany less than in France, where pièces de concours flourished in the solo-infused world of the Paris Conservatoire.

Apart from Karl Pilss (1935) and Paul Hindemith (1939), few trumpet sonatas existed within the model of mainstream Austro-German traditions of the nineteenth century.

We went off to work with a relatively empty canvas. The first questions to be addressed were simple: we needed a sonata structure for the first movement, a broad lyrical Andante second movement in an ABA form, and a classic Rondo for the last movement. The challenge with the first movement was practical on two fronts. Most solo trumpet pieces only last around fifteen minutes because of the stamina required to play a brass instrument with few points of rest; compressing a sonata in the opulent language of Strauss would present additional challenges.

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Secondly, there are few Strauss ‘sonata form’ templates in the way, say, one could find in Brahms. Ein Heldenleben is a sonata movement, in the grandest scheme, but not really helpful to us (though ‘Des Helden Widersacher’ and the battle scene did inspire the germs for some restless figuration in the development section of our Sonata).

That left us with the Violin Sonata, Op. 18, completed in 1888.

We took the signposts of the first movement as our guide with a general acceptance that it would be longer than most trumpet sonata movements, though not quite as long as the original sonata. The original opening theme is heroic and instantly lyrical – as you might expect of Strauss in E flat major – but it projects a character which failed to resonate with our understanding of Strauss’s view of the trumpet. Think of the great tutti sections in the tone poems and operas, then allow the composer’s famous horn writing to help fire the imagination, and you begin to ‘hear’ possibilities.

The first practical session was a matter of ‘trial and error’ in setting out a strong opening theme. No need for an introduction like the Violin Sonata; a dotted anacrusis would propel us into a figurative realm, instantly referencing the orchestral provenance of Strauss and his trumpet writing. It would evolve with the slow ratcheting up of rhythmic and melodic tension and contrasts in the phraseology, whose arc peaks on the note that so often sits at Strauss’s summit: a top C natural. The kind of epic and modulating kick-start we identified was partly inspired by the swagger of the song ‘In der Campagna’, Op. 41 No. 2.

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This is not the place for a full-blown narrative of how each movement was created (see our article on the Boosey & Hawkes website), but to offer a broad insight into how Strauss’s material has been used, abridged or transformed. The initial lyrical theme of the first movement draws temporarily on Strauss’s Violin Sonata but it is soon abandoned for a freshly composed link to a new idea (from the short quasi-recitativo song ‘Die Verschwiegenen’, Op. 10 No. 6). This is significantly arranged and re-configured from the original song, metricized and given a flowing piano accompaniment before it returns to the same bold homophonic exhortation that appears at the equivalent point in Strauss’s Violin Sonata.

All these sections are given a structural length which serves the abstract ‘reinvention’ of a sonata within the technical possibilities of the trumpet.

The majority of the development section, and the link before it, are either newly composed or submitted to alterations, both lightly and heavily applied. Seasoned Straussians will enjoy spotting the occasional references to other works – deliberate or serendipitous – and if there is ever uncertainty over which material is echt Strauss, partly Strauss or not Strauss and therefore pasticcio Strauss, the authors will feel a degree of gentle satisfaction! The recapitulation follows the usual form, with one particularly extended section taken from the original Violin Sonata, alongside compression of material for the sake of balance and economy. There is, for instance, no reflective return to the first lyrical subject in the Violin Sonata, but a new and bold coda which catapults the theme into the highly articulated patterning of Strauss’s most exercised horn writing.

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The second movement is essentially a straight reduction of the rich string theme which appears after the sunrise at the opening of Also sprach Zarathustra – and, specifically, ‘Von den Hinterweltlern’, with the piano introduction fashioned from its final phrase. The middle section is intended to provide an animated contrast, a tussle or battle of wills, where the heroic song ‘Liebeshymnus’ (the third of five songs in Strauss’s short Op. 32 cycle) is offset against original material to extend its dramatic impact, before a return to the Also sprach Zarathustra theme and a hybrid coda of original and invented Strauss.

The third movement Rondo employs a freshly composed theme with a passing regard for the equivalent place in the Second Horn Concerto. The final movement of the Symphony for Wind Instruments, ‘Fröhliche Werkstatt’, contains a glorious oboe tune which is shamelessly purloined and accompanied with a similarly mischievous running commentary of quavers from the main Rondo theme. Attempting to retain fluency and quixotic melodic variety and character, we turned to Ariadne auf Naxos and Zerbinetta’s famously flirtatious – at worst nymphomaniac – aria, where she suggests to the newly chaste Ariadne that she find another man, whilst claiming (in the same breath) that she’s a one-man woman and yet ‘every man was like a God’. Such quixotic moods suited the episodes of our Rondo.

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The remainder of the programme positions Strauss loosely in a thread of works which celebrate a range of Viennese music from the mid-Baroque to the fin de siècle, and into the twentieth century.

The famous theorist and composer Johann Joseph Fux is marked by a ‘mash up’ of movements from the Sonata a 4 for violin, cornett, trombone, bassoon and continuo, K. 347, and the Trio Sonata, K. 367, whose brilliant – if didactic – fugal writing is joyfully quirky in its rhythmic character, and becomes positively demonic in the final movement.

No Viennese album would be complete without Beethoven and Schubert or, indeed, Mozart. The latter appears here only in the strong resonances in Schubert’s Violin Sonata in G minor, D. 408 (though, also, briefly in a quotation from Figaro’s aria ‘Non più andrai’ in the Beethoven variations). This is one of three ‘sonatinas’ presented with this playful title by the publisher Diabelli to attract amateur interest, written in 1816, when the composer was nineteen years old. With a few judicious changes in figuration, the violin part sits beautifully on a modern trumpet, prescient in language of the solo cornet genre which was to become popular in Paris in the following decades. Its Mozartian credentials rest in the three key centres of the first movement, an Andante of simple pathos and delicate decoration, a concise Menuetto with a rustic Trio, and a restless finale of melodies straight from the stage.

Beethoven’s Seven Variations on ‘God Save the King’ is a concise celebration of the tune which was fast establishing itself as the ubiquitous song of allegiance to King George. Beethoven offered these variations, and five on ‘Rule, Britannia!’, to Breitkopf in 1803, no

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doubt in a spurt of enthusiasm for a country that had started to show its admiration for the composer. There is a chirpy air of anti-establishment irreverence in both sets, something which Timothy Jones’s arrangement emphasizes in a newly chiselled dialogue between the trumpet and piano. Allusions to one or two other emblematic melodies fused in an age of emerging European identities abound, including an unmistakeable reference to a would-be national anthem by another composer with Viennese credentials, Haydn.

The quartet of pieces by Bruckner, Mahler, Zemlinsky and Webern – figures intertwined by personal, pedagogical and musical links – reveals the range of musical dialects sitting within the kaleidoscopic world of late-Romantic Vienna. Bruckner’s little-known final setting of ‘Ave Maria’ for alto and organ (or harmonium) from 1882 is a neglected gem whose intimate devotions find a distilled mystery in the happy combination of plainsong and the bold chromatic shifts of his last symphonies. The pantheist theology of Mahler’s ‘Urlicht’, as an early song for piano in 1892, seems as far from Bruckner’s as you can get. Mahler realized that its gentle peace and tantalized yearning (through alternating sections, but grippingly unified) makes for a powerfully original scena which – via his orchestrated song cycle Des Knaben Wunderhorn – was to find its enduring home as the fourth movement of the ‘Resurrection’ Symphony: ‘I am from God and want to return to God’.

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Steeped in Viennese lieder, Zemlinsky composed his Six Songs after Poems by Maurice Maeterlinck between 1910 and 1913.

The meditative ‘Lied der Jungfrau’ returns us to the Marian theme through brittle, remote shards of sensuality: ‘All guilt dissolves before the prayers of love’. Like Mahler, it is a world apart from Bruckner and yet contains an expressionistic dissipation, both mollifying and a touch disquieting, which looks as much to Alban Berg as it does to his brother-in-law Arnold Schoenberg. Webern’s Two Pieces for cello and piano (both instruments which he played) are described by Hans Moldenhauer as ‘gentle soliloquys’ and represent the composer’s earliest known compositions. The first, in G major, lasts only twenty-four bars but encapsulates a teenager’s view of the ineffable in the transformational world of Viennese musical aesthetics. They were premiered in public in 1924 by Gregor Piatigorsky. © Jonathan Freeman-Attwood and Thomas Oehler, 2020

Thomas Oehler is a composer and teacher, based in Basel. He studied at the Paris Conservatoire and the Royal Academy of Music in London and has developed an unusual ability to master a wide range of styles and techniques. His works, composed for the classical concert stage to media music, have been published by the Associated Board of the Royal Schools of Music and Warwick Music. The Trumpet Sonata ‘after Richard Strauss’ is his first piece for Boosey & Hawkes.

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Jonathan Freeman-Attwood Trumpet

Jonathan Freeman-Attwood is the fourteenth Principal of the Royal Academy of Music, London, a post he has held since 2008.

His commitment to education spans over thirty years, within which time he has also established himself as a recording producer, freelance trumpet player, writer and broadcaster. In the early years of his career he was awarded the Healey-Willan Memorial Scholarship at the University of Toronto, from which he graduated with First Class Honours, before embarking on research at Christ Church, Oxford.

In 2001 he was conferred Professor of the University of London.

From 1991 to 1995 Freeman-Attwood served as Dean of Undergraduate Studies at the Royal Academy of Music, then spent thirteen years as its Vice-Principal and Director of Studies. For over a quarter of a century in senior posts at the Academy he has played a leading role in launching pioneering programmes and fostering major international relationships. He has been instrumental in nurturing a fifteen-year collaboration with The Juilliard School in New York, as well as curating several artistic and professional development initiatives, including the founding of the Academy’s recording label in 1997.

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As a trumpet soloist Freeman-Attwood has released over ten albums, the majority of them for Linn, and they have attracted wide critical acclaim for their musical originality and effective ‘re-imagining’ of the trumpet as a chamber instrument in reconstructions of works from 1600 to the twentieth century. He is Series Editor for Resonata Music’s ‘The Re-Imagined Trumpet’ in which, amongst other pieces from his catalogue, newly configured sonatas by Schumann, Mendelssohn and Fauré have been published.

Freeman-Attwood has produced over 250 commercial recordings for many of the world’s most prestigious independent labels. His productions have won major awards, including several Diapasons d’or, Gramophone Awards and numerous nominations over the last twenty years with artists and ensembles including Rachel Podger, The Cardinall’s Musick, Trevor Pinnock, Phantasm, I Fagiolini, the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment, and various leading cathedral choirs, including St Paul’s Cathedral and Christ Church Cathedral, Oxford.

As an educator and scholar Freeman-Attwood continues to be active as a lecturer, critic and contributor to journals (including Gramophone since 1992) and books including The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians (second edition) and The Cambridge Companion to Recorded Music, as well as broadcasting regularly on BBC Radio 3. He is an established authority on Bach interpretation.

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Freeman-Attwood is a trustee of Christ Church Cathedral Oxford Music, the Associated Board of the Royal Schools of Music and the Countess of Munster Musical Trust. He is on the board of the British Library’s SAGA Trust, as well as on the Advisory Board of the Academy of Ancient Music. He is the Vice-President of the National Youth Wind Orchestra of Great Britain, Patron of London Youth Choirs, and a trustee and Chair of the Artistic Advisory Committee of Garsington Opera.

Freeman-Attwood was appointed CBE in the 2018 New Year’s Honours List.

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Chiyan Wong

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Piano

Hong Kong-born pianist Chiyan Wong has been astonishing audiences with the sincerity and authority of his playing. He was recently awarded the prestigious Grand Prix du Disque by the Franz Liszt Society in Budapest, in recognition of his critically acclaimed debut album, Liszt Transfigured: Operatic Fantasies for Piano, on Linn, which features Liszt’s operatic transcriptions, completed and edited by Wong.

In summer 2019 Wong made his recital debut at the Proms at St Jude’s in London and was featured in a duo recital with Chinese violist Diyang Mei at the Festspiele Mecklenburg-Vorpommern. He has made successful debuts with Okko Kamu and the Singapore Symphony Orchestra, with a performance of Prokofiev’s Second Piano Concerto; with Edward Gardner at the Royal Academy of Music; and with the Hong Kong Philharmonic Orchestra, where he was immediately re-invited for the following season. In 2017 he returned to the Singapore International Piano Festival and was a prize-winner at the Mozarteum International Summer Academy in Salzburg, consequently performing in a recital at the Salzburg Festival that was broadcast by ORF radio.

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Other debuts include the Hong Kong Arts Festival, Wigmore Hall and the Ville de Dinard International Music Festival in France. Wong was invited to return to Hong Kong for a Liszt recital, broadcast live as part of the city’s celebration of the composer’s bicentenary and sponsored

by Radio Television Hong Kong, and he has also been invited to return to Singapore Symphony Orchestra for a performance of Mozart’s Piano Concerto No. 23 in A major, K. 488, in 2021.

Wong has received prizes at the International Competition for Young Pianists in Memory of Vladimir Horowitz in Ukraine and Premio Zanfi in Parma, as well as from the Hattori Foundation in London. He was the recipient of an award from the Bernard van Zuiden Music Fund of the Hong Kong Philharmonic Orchestra and won first prize at the Jaques Samuel Pianos Intercollegiate Piano Competition.

Wong began his piano studies in Hong Kong at the age of six with Grace Man. He moved to England to pursue his studies at Chetham’s School of Music and the Royal Northern College of Music under Norma Fisher. He later graduated from the Royal Academy of Music, where he studied with Christopher Elton. He has also studied composition with Naji Hakim in Paris.

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‘This series of boundary-busting discs for Linn.’

— BBC Radio 3 Record Review ‘Freeman-Attwood’s tone itself is a joy: warmly glowing with a multitude of different colours, and deliciously sleek both in technical execution and overall sound.’

– Gramophone ‘For sheer originality, this has to take some kind of prize.’

– Observer

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