LPO/RAM pre-concert performance programme: 30 Apr 2022 - A tribute to Oliver Knussen

Pre-concert performance A tribute to Oliver Knussen Saturday 30 April 2022 | 5.30pm Southbank Centre’s Royal Festival Hall

Edward Gardner conductor Cassandra Wright soprano Members of the London Philharmonic Orchestra LPO Foyle Future Firsts Students from the Royal Academy of Music Knussen Two Organa 6’ Gareth Moorcraft Reflections (After Orlando Gibbons) 12’ Louise Drewett The Transparent Building 6’ Knussen Songs and a Sea Interlude 17’

Welcome Welcome to this evening’s performance, a collaboration between the London Philharmonic Orchestra and the Royal Academy of Music. This event is part of our Oliver Knussen celebrations, marking what would have been the composer’s 70th birthday, and features two works by Knussen alongside pieces by his former students from the Academy, Gareth Moorcraft and Louise Drewett. The concert is also a key event in the Academy’s Bicentenary celebrations, marking 200 years since the founding of the institution in 1822.

Knussen was the Richard Rodney Professor of Music at the Academy from 2014 until his death in 2018.

In this special performance, LPO Principal Conductor Edward Gardner brings together an ensemble of LPO members, Royal Academy of Music students, and LPO Foyle Future Firsts and Foyle Future First Associates.

Participants on the LPO’s annual Foyle Future Firsts programme are talented instrumentalists who aspire to become professional orchestral musicians. Across the year participants benefit from individual mentoring from London Philharmonic Orchestra Principals, mock auditions, involvement in full orchestral rehearsals and Education & Community projects, and wider professional development sessions. Members are supported and nurtured to the highest standards and we are proud to see current and past Foyle Future Firsts consistently taking professional engagements with the London Philharmonic Orchestra and other world-class ensembles.

The Foyle Future Firsts Development Programme is generously funded by the Foyle Foundation with additional support from the Barbara Whatmore Charitable Trust and The Thriplow Charitable Trust.

Programme notes Oliver Knussen (1952–2018) Two Organa (1995)

These two short pieces approach the same idea in quite different ways.

The 12th-century organa of the Notre Dame School (e.g. Perotin) employ plainchant tones as the slow foundation for rapid, ecstatic, dance-like melismata. In June 1994 I used this technique to write a very short piece for a Dutch ‘music box’ project in which 32 composers wrote for a two-octave musical box using only white notes. I dedicated the resulting Notre Dame des Jouets to Sir Peter Maxwell Davies on his 60th birthday and orchestrated it in February 1995.

The second Organum, dedicated to Reinbert de Leeuw, brings the same technique into a less ‘innocent’ world, employing the total chromatic in elaborate polyrhythmic layers. It should be listened to with half an ear on the foreground activity (which is partly defined by specific musical identities) and the other half on the extremely slow cantus firmus that defines its scale and resonances. The second Organum was first performed by the Schönberg Ensemble under Reinbert de Leeuw at its 20th anniversary concert in Utrecht in September 1994.

Oliver Knussen

Gareth Moorcraft (born 1990) Reflections (After Orlando Gibbons) (2017)

Reflections (After Orlando Gibbons) was commissioned by the Royal Philharmonic Society, after Gareth was awarded the RPS Composition Prize (2016).

I II III IV V

The piece explores the practice of creative transcription and ‘recomposition’, i.e. the borrowing and reworking of existing music. It is based on fragments from a collection of fantasias, dances and madrigals by English composer Orlando Gibbons (1583–1625). Across the work’s five short movements, different aspects of the source materials, such as melodic lines, imitative/ canonic textures, and harmonic progressions, are taken as points of departure for free musical development. Each movement focusses on one of these key elements and aims to present it in a new or distorted musical context. The final movement resembles a musical palimpsest, with elements of the rich counterpoint in Gibbons’s second Fantasia for Six Viols erased or simplified, allowing space for new layers to take their place.

Lines Chords Canon 1 Canon 2 Fantasia

This is Gareth’s second piece based on the music of Orlando Gibbons; the first was Seven Inventions for cello octet, written for Cellophony in 2015.

Gareth Moorcraft

Programme notes Louise Drewett (born 1989) The Transparent Building (2018)

The Transparent Building drew inspiration from my visit to a building of the same name (‘Edificio Transparente’ in Portuguese). Constructed for the ‘Porto 2001: European Culture Capital’ festival, the Edificio Transparente is a vast and unlikely structure on the Portuguese coast. The idea behind the building was to allow for panoramic views on two long facades: of a beach and the Atlantic Ocean, and of a city park. This resulted in a ‘transparent’ structure of a thin white concrete frame that supports large glass windows.

I visited the building by walking along a coastal path, and used my impressions of this experience as a starting point for my piece. I thought of the landscape along my walk, dominated by organic movement of the ocean and the coastal gardens, and how it juxtaposed with the building’s grid-like and static structure. I also noticed how the building visually transformed with the changing reflections on its glass facades. Despite its still, fragile form, its appearance shifted with the changing perspectives on my walk and with its own shifting environment, most notably, dramatically changing colour with the sunset.

The piece has three main sections that corresponded to my impressions: firstly, my walk towards the building, secondly, the movement of the ocean, and finally, the building ‘close-up’, ending with the sun setting. With this structure I aimed to explore the relationships that struck me between the building’s form, its changing environment, and my own changing perspective.

Louise Drewett

Oliver Knussen (1952–2018) Songs and a Sea Interlude, Op. 20a From the opera Where the Wild Things Are (1979–82) Cassandra Wright soprano I

Overture

II

Scherzino And Humming Song Max, a small boy, cavorts around the hallway of his house, ‘performing’.

III

Battaglia Max is chased off to his room by his mother’s vacuum cleaner.

IV Arietta 1 V

Transformation Max’s bedroom is transformed into a forest.

VI Arietta 2 VII Sea Interlude Max alone at sea in his boat, on his journey to the Wild Things’ island.

A pageant of different lights and times of day is projected behind the slow rocking of the boat. Ultimately dawn appears, and with it a huge Sea-Monster Wild Thing.

VIII Night Song Max, sitting by his tent among the sleeping Wild Things, longs for home.

Songs and a Sea Interlude is an orchestral song-cycle derived from the one-act opera Where the Wild Things Are that Maurice Sendak and I wrote in 1979–82, based on his well-known children’s book of the same name.

The story centres around Max, a small boy dressed in a white wolf suit, who misbehaves and is sent to bed without his supper. That night, a forest grows in his room, an ocean appears, and Max sails off ‘through night and day and in and out of weeks and almost over a year to where the wild things are’.

The appearance and antics of these fantastic monsters scare Max at first, but he tames them in short order, and is duly crowned King of all the Wild Things. After sending the Wild Things to bed without their supper, however, Max becomes lonely and leaves, much to the monsters’ fury. When he reaches home the forest vanishes, and he finds supper waiting for him in his room – still hot.

Songs and a Sea Interlude, which lasts about 17 minutes, brings together the bulk of Max’s solo scenes in the opera to form a little character portrait, beginning with an external view of his naughty antics and gradually working inwards toward the final Night Song (The Wild Things themselves are represented by the brief but characteristically forceful appearance of the Sea-Monster near the end of the Sea Interlude).

The music grows – in many directions – from the chords heard at the outset. These are derived from the Coronation Scene of Mussorgsky’s Boris Godunov, and the musical language is in some ways an elaborate homage to Mussorgsky and Debussy (matchless composers of music about children); but equally to the fantasy, richness and directness of Maurice Sendak’s art.

Songs and a Sea Interlude is dedicated to Jane Manning, who created the part of Max in the 1980 Brussels Opera production of the first version of Where the Wild Things Are. Oliver Knussen

On stage tonight First Violins Vesselin Gellev* Leader Claudia Tarrant-Matthews# Preston Yeo§ Sophie Phillips‡ Mio Takahashi§ Francisca de Brito§

Piccolos Stewart McIlwham* Katie Taunton§ Alto Flutes Stewart McIlwham* Katie Taunton§

Trumpets Nick Walker# Nicholas Budd§ Rui Ribeiro§ Trombones David Whitehouse* Merin Rhyd# Jan Kruijsse§

Second Violins Emma Oldfield* Matilde Santos de Pinho§ Berfin Aksu§ Elena Blanco Junquera§ Elizabeth Jiřičkov᧠Emily Bosenius§

Oboes Eleanor Sullivan§‡ Christopher Vettraino§ Isabella Pincombe§ Cor Anglais Isabella Pincombe§

Timpani Luke Taylor#

Violas David Quiggle* Lukas Bowen§ Abby Bowen# Julia Doukakis‡

Clarinets Benjamin Mellefont* Isha Crichlow# Lucia Porcedda§

Percussion Andrew Barclay*

Cellos Pei-Jee Ng*

LPO chair supported by The Candide Trust

Kristian Chojecki§ Pedro Silva# Pingping Zhang§

Double Basses Sebastian Pennar* Nicholas Broughton§ Thomas Morgan# Ruohua Li§ Flutes Stewart McIlwham* Lucy Driver# Katie Taunton§

E-flat Clarinet Lucia Porcedda§ Bassoons Jonathan Davies*

LPO chair supported by Sir Simon Robey

Emily Newman# Ruihan Kee§ Contrabassoon Ruihan Kee§

Horns Mark Vines* Isabella Ward-Ackland§ Flora Bain# Timothy Doyle‡

Tuba Adam Collins#

LPO chair supported by Gill & Garf Collin

Iolo Edwards#§ Luke Taylor# Harry Lovell-Jones‡ Piano Fionnuala Ward# Yana Khvan§ Celeste Fionnuala Ward# Yana Khvan§ Chamber Organ Fionnuala Ward# Harp Esther Beyer§‡ * # ‡ §

LPO member Foyle Future First 2021/22 Foyle Future First Associate 2021/22 Royal Academy of Music student