Chamber Contrasts Soloists of the London Philharmonic Orchestra at Wigmore Hall Saturday 30 June 2012 | 7.30pm Supported by Dunard Fund Programme ÂŁ2
lpo.org.uk
PROGRAMME NOTES
Saturday 30 June 2012 | 7.30pm Brahms Piano Trio No. 3 in C minor, Op. 101 (21’) Pieter Schoeman violin Kristina Blaumane cello Rustem Hayroudinoff piano
Schubert Piano Quintet in A major, D667 (Trout) (40’) Pieter Schoeman violin Alexander Zemtsov viola Kristina Blaumane cello Kevin Rundell double bass Rustem Hayroudinoff piano
Interval Shostakovich Piano Quintet in G minor, Op. 57 (29’) Pieter Schoeman | Vesselin Gellev violins Alexander Zemtsov viola Kristina Blaumane cello Rustem Hayroudinoff piano Would patrons please ensure that mobile phones are switched off. Please stifle coughing as much as possible and ensure that watch alarms and any other electronic devices which may become audible are switched off. The London Philharmonic Orchestra’s Chamber Contrasts series at Wigmore Hall is generously supported by Dunard Fund.
This concert brings together three works from the rich repertoire of music combining the piano with string instruments. The last of Brahms’s three Trios for piano, violin and cello, from 1886, has tersely dramatic outer movements enclosing a shadowy scherzo and a metrically ingenious Andante. Schubert’s Quintet of 1819 is for a non-standard combination of piano, violin, viola, cello and double bass, and has a non-standard five-movement plan, with its central Scherzo preceded by a slow movement and followed by a set of variations on Schubert’s song ‘The Trout’. Shostakovich’s 1940 Quintet, for the more regular combination of piano and string quartet, is also in five movements: a linked pair of Prelude and Fugue, an explosive Scherzo, a lyrical Intermezzo and a relaxed Finale.
JOHANNES BRAHMS (1833–97) Piano Trio No. 3 in C minor, Op. 101 (1886) 1 2 3 4
Allegro energico Presto non assai Andante grazioso Allegro molto
This was the last of Brahms’s three Trios for the standard combination of violin, cello and piano (though it was followed by a revision of the first Trio which was so thoroughgoing as almost to make it a new work). It was one of the fruits of the productive summer of 1886, which Brahms spent at a villa overlooking Lake Thun in Switzerland. During his stay, he also composed his F major Cello Sonata and A major Violin Sonata, and sketched his D minor Violin Sonata. It may well be that he took on all these projects partly in order to prepare himself for the composition of his last orchestral work, the Double Concerto for violin and cello. Certainly there is an extrovert, soloistic quality about much of the string writing of the Trio; and, as in the Concerto, much use is made of the sonority of violin and cello in octaves – occasionally diverging and reuniting to heighten the expressive impact. The textures of the Concerto are also anticipated in the slow movement, in the longest stretches in any of Brahms’s trios of string duo writing unsupported by the piano. The first movement of the Trio is dramatic and tightly compressed. The weighty opening theme reappears at the start of the development section, in counterpoint with the smoother second subject, but then disappears from the recapitulation – only for its opening phrases to burst out in the coda. The second movement, also in C minor, is a subdued, shadowy scherzo in 2/2 time, with very short outer sections around a more expansive (and slightly slower) trio section. The C major slow movement is one of Brahms’s most remarkable experiments in metre: the outer sections are in a mixture of 3/4 and 2/4, usually grouped to create seven-beat units; the slightly more animated middle section is in a mixture of 9/8 and 6/8, usually alternating to make five-beat units. The extended exchanges at the opening between the two strings and the piano become in the reprise a dialogue at closer quarters. The finale is in 6/8 time, frequently disrupted by duplet rhythms and, in the slower
second subject, by cross-rhythms in an apparent 3/4. This movement is in C minor once more, but turns to C major for the coda, in which the terse opening theme is transformed into a sustained expressive melody – a moment which the composer’s biographer Malcolm MacDonald describes as ‘a glimpse of the warm heart and noble nature lurking beneath an outwardly depressive and argumentative personality’.
FRANZ SCHUBERT (1797–1828) Piano Quintet in A major, D667 (Trout) (1819) 1 Allegro vivace 2 Andante 3 Scherzo and Trio: Presto 4 Theme and Variations: Andantino 5 Finale: Allegro giusto In the summer of 1819, Schubert spent a holiday with his friend the singer Michael Vogl in Vogl’s birthplace, the town of Steyr in upper Austria. While they were there, Schubert was commissioned by a local amateur cellist named Sylvester Paumgartner to write a quintet for piano and strings. The unusual scoring, with double bass instead of a second violin, is due to Paumgartner, who wanted a companion-piece for a work by Hummel for the same instruments (probably an arrangement of his D minor Septet, unless Paumgartner had a set of manuscript parts of the as yet unpublished E-flat Quintet). The combination poses the threat of bottom-heaviness; but Schubert averts this with a piano part of exceptional lightness, its most characteristic texture being octaves between the two hands high in the treble. It also seems to have been at Paumgartner’s suggestion that Schubert used his own song Die Forelle (‘The Trout’) as the theme for the D major variations that make up the second of two slow, or slow-ish, movements flanking the very fast Scherzo. A delightful touch is that the rippling accompaniment to the original song is not introduced at once, but is saved up for the last of the six variations. Elsewhere, Schubert’s chief formal concern seems to have been to achieve balanced structures with a minimum of trouble – or, to put it another way, with a maximum of repetition. Large sections of movements are repeated more or less exactly in every respect
except their key: in the opening movement, the third section, the recapitulation, is not just an adaptation of the initial exposition but a replica of it; in the F major slow movement, the two halves are identical except for one extra bar in the second half; in the finale, the two halves are exactly the same. All this explains why, if you already know the piece but don’t have perfect pitch, you may feel more than once that a movement has come to an end when it is in fact only halfway through. However, Schubert keeps any sense of déja entendu at bay by the unpredictability of his mercurial switches of key within each section. And as William Mann once wrote about the finale: ‘If the thrushes of Steyr choose to sing this song twice over, with only a change of key, no one has yet complained.’ After all, he went on, the composer was on holiday, and ‘the holiday relaxation of the “Trout” Quintet has always been its most engaging feature, the inspiration of some of Schubert’s most generously captivating melodies.’
Interval: 20 minutes Please check that your mobile phone is switched off, especially if you used it during the interval.
DMITRI SHOSTAKOVICH (1906–75) Piano Quintet in G minor, Op. 57 (1940) 1 2 3 4 5
Prelude: Lento – Fugue: Adagio Scherzo: Allegretto Intermezzo: Lento – Finale: Allegretto
It was after the crisis provoked by the official denunciation of his opera The Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District in 1936, and resolved by his Fifth Symphony of 1937, that Shostakovich turned his attention towards chamber music as a regular, relatively safe vehicle for his musical thought. In 1938 he composed the first of his series of 15 string quartets, and in 1940 his only Quintet for piano and strings. The Quintet was first performed by the composer and the Beethoven Quartet in Moscow in December 1940. The following year, it was awarded a Stalin Prize, a sign of Shostakovich’s return to official favour – at least for the time being.
One of the work’s most remarkable features is the clarity of its textures. The piano and the string quartet frequently play alone, and when they are combined they remain separate entities, with virtually no doubling, and an emphasis on extremes of upper and lower registers. The use of the whole ensemble in full harmony and with the middle register filled in is reserved for a single passage, the climax of the Intermezzo. Mahler’s Fifth Symphony may have been the model for the Quintet’s unusual formal plan of two linked pairs of movements around an extended central Scherzo; but it was surely Shostakovich’s lifelong admiration for Bach that prompted his decision to make the first pair a Prelude and Fugue, both in G minor. The Prelude relaxes its initial intensity in a lightly scored middle section, and then redoubles it at the end of the movement. An expressive phrase from this movement recurs in the Fugue, which is intense and concentrated throughout. After these two slow movements, an effective contrast is provided by the relentless rhythmic drive, brittle sonorities and bright B major tonality of the rondo-form Scherzo.
The final two movements are an Intermezzo in D minor and a G major Finale. The Intermezzo is an outpouring of sustained melodic writing, beginning over a cool Bachian pizzicato bass line, but rising in the middle to the biggest climax of the whole work. The Finale is an engagingly (or perhaps ironically) relaxed affair, based on a couple of catchy but never quite predictable tunes – though a note of greater seriousness is struck at the end of the central development section, in a string passage which quotes the expressive phrase from the Prelude and Fugue. One of the most appealing features of this movement is its manner of arrival and departure: sidling in with a gradual accelerando at the beginning; disappearing into thin air at the end. Programme notes © Anthony Burton
Next concerts by soloists of the London Philharmonic Orchestra at Wigmore Hall Sunday 28 April 2013 | 7.30pm Milhaud Françaix Martinů Beethoven
Wind Quintet, Op. 443 Wind Quintet No. 1 Sextet for Piano and Winds Quintet in E-flat major for Piano and Winds, Op. 16
Thursday 13 June 2013 | 7.30pm Mozart Ireland Brahms
String Quintet No. 1 in B-flat major, K174 Sextet for Clarinet, Horn and String Quartet String Sextet in G major, Op. 36
Tickets £26, £22, £16, £12 London Philharmonic Orchestra Box Office (no booking fee) 020 7840 4242 (Mon–Fri; 10.00am–5.00pm) lpo.org.uk Wigmore Hall Box Office 020 7935 2141 (7 days a week: 10.00am–7.00pm. Days without an evening concert: 10.00am–5.00pm) (£2 booking fee for telephone bookings) www.wigmore-hall.org.uk (£1 booking fee online)
TONIGHT’S PERFORMERS Pieter Schoeman (violin) was appointed Co-Leader of the London Philharmonic Orchestra in 2002 and Leader in 2008. Born in South Africa, he made his début at the age of 10 with the Cape Town Symphony Orchestra. Since then he has performed as soloist and recitalist in such famous halls as the Concertgebouw in Amsterdam, Moscow’s Rachmaninov Hall, Capella Hall in St Petersburg, Staatsbibliothek in Berlin, Hollywood Bowl in Los Angeles and Wigmore Hall. He has played on radio and television in the USA, Russia, South Africa, China and the UK, and has appeared as Guest Leader with the orchestras of Barcelona, Bordeaux, Lyon, Rotterdam and Baltimore, as well as with the BBC Symphony Orchestra. He is a Professor at Trinity College of Music in London. Vesselin Gellev (violin) was born in Bulgaria and joined the London Philharmonic Orchestra as Sub-Leader in 2007. He has been a featured soloist with the London Philharmonic, New Haven Symphony, Spoleto Festival and Juilliard orchestras, among others. He has recorded several albums and toured worldwide as Concertmaster of Kristjan Järvi’s Grammy-nominated Absolute Ensemble. He has also appeared as Guest Leader with orchestras including the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, Royal Scottish National Orchestra, BBC National Orchestra of Wales, Mahler Chamber Orchestra and the Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia. Vesselin’s chair in the London Philharmonic Orchestra is supported by John and Angela Kessler.
Alexander Zemtsov (viola) was born in Ufa, USSR, and studied with Elena Ozol, Mikhail Kugel and Tabea Zimmermann. He was Principal Viola of the London Philharmonic Orchestra from 2003–11. He is a member of the Hermitage Trio and as a soloist has played with the Belgian Radio Orchestra, Konzertverein Orchester Vienna and London Philharmonic Orchestra. His recordings have been released on the Naxos,
Pieter Schoeman
Vesselin Gellev
Chandos and LPO labels. He is a Professor of Viola at the Guildhall School of Music & Drama and at the Konservatorium in Vienna.
Kristina Blaumane (cello) was born in Riga and studied at the Latvian Academy of Music and the Guildhall School of Music & Drama. She has appeared as a soloist with orchestras in Latvia as well as with the Amsterdam Sinfonietta, Kremerata Baltica, Britten Sinfonia, Lithuanian Chamber Orchestra and Netherlands Wind Ensemble, among others. She has also been a guest at many festivals including Cheltenham, Aldeburgh, Salzburg, Verbier, Lockenhaus and Gstaad. Her recordings have been released on the Conifer Classics, Quartz and Onyx labels. She is a laureate of the Latvian Great Music Award. Kristina joined the Orchestra as Principal Cello in 2007. Kevin Rundell (double bass) joined the Orchestra of the Royal Opera House at the age of 19, before being appointed Principal Double Bass in the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra. He has since held Principal positions at English National Opera and the London Symphony Orchestra. He joined the London Philharmonic Orchestra as Principal Double Bass in 1991. He has taught at the Guildhall School of Music since 1975 and has given classes at all the music colleges in England, as well as masterclasses in Spain and at The Juilliard School, New York. Rustem Hayroudinoff (piano) graduated from the Moscow Conservatory and London’s Royal Academy of Music. He has since performed to critical acclaim in his native Russia, Japan, the USA, Canada and Europe. In the UK he has appeared at St John’s, Smith Square; the Barbican; Wigmore Hall; and Queen Elizabeth Hall. In 2008, his CD of Rachmaninoff’s complete Études-Tableaux was chosen as Instrumental Choice of the Month and nominated for Best Instrumental CD of the Year by BBC Music Magazine. Rustem is a Professor of Piano at the Royal Academy of Music.
Alexander Zemtsov Kristina Blaumane
Kevin Rundell
Rustem Hayroudinoff
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LONDON PHILHARMONIC ORCHESTRA Concert presented by London Philharmonic Orchestra 89 Albert Embankment, London SE1 7TP • lpo.org.uk Tel 020 7840 4200 • Box Office 020 7840 4242 HRH The Duke of Kent KG Patron Vladimir Jurowski Principal Conductor Yannick Nézet-Séguin Principal Guest Conductor Pieter Schoeman Leader Julian Anderson Composer in Residence Timothy Walker AM† Chief Executive and Artistic Director Board of Directors Desmond Cecil CMG • Vesselin Gellev* • Jonathan Harris CBE FRICS • Dr Catherine C. Høgel • Martin Höhmann* • Angela Kessler • Stewart McIlwham* Gareth Newman* • George Peniston* • Sir Bernard Rix Kevin Rundell* • Victoria Sharp • Julian Simmonds Mark Templeton* • Sir Philip Thomas • Natasha Tsukanova • Timothy Walker AM† • Laurence Watt Dr Manon Williams * Non-Executive Directors †Supported by Macquarie Group The London Philharmonic Orchestra Limited is a registered charity No. 238045. Front cover photograph Pieter Schoeman © Patrick Harrison.