Programme notes

2003: FANTASY AND REVOLUTION

Few compositions have been as influential in the development of Western classical music as Beethoven’s ‘Eroica’ Symphony, which in 1803 not only opened up new formal horizons for a still-young genre, but also launched the idea that a symphony could convey an important and far-reaching extramusical message. 200 years later, Jörg Widmann’s Lied for Orchestra, like many of his works, is a modern-day response, an imaginary dialogue with the underlying emotionalism of the great Classical masters, in this case Schubert in particular. In between these two pieces comes Shéhérazade, one of the most heady yet typically controlled creations to have come from that ravishing musical orchestral colourist and lover of the exotic, Maurice Ravel.

2003

Jörg Widmann (born 1973) Lied for Orchestra

Commissioned by the Bamberg Symphony Orchestra, who gave the premiere, conducted by Jonathan Nott, in Bamberg, Germany, on 10 December 2003.

‘Schubert’s music brings tears to the eyes without questioning the soul: the music invades us completely without us even noticing. We cry without knowing why; because our lives are not as the music promises us they will be’. Thus wrote Theodor Adorno.

Jörg Widmann was immediately clear about his task when he was commissioned by the Bamberg Symphony Orchestra to write a piece on the theme of Schubert: the work should be centred on melody. ‘Schubert is a melodic genius’, said Widmann; nothing pleased Schubert more than experimenting with melodies, deriving new and wonderful ways of manipulating ideas. To Schubert a melody should not just be beautiful but should draw the listener in with immense intensity. It was with this in mind that Widmann’s original idea was conceived: this was to be a piece in one movement that should allow the orchestra to become one voice in which all the instruments sing, creating a type of continous melody. He wanted to create a work without the safety net of traditional form, as if one were stripping a Schubert song of its accompaniment.

10 | London Philharmonic Orchestra As the compositional process progressed, Widmann’s original ideas underwent certain changes. For example, rather than keeping strictly to the idea of the orchestra singing with one voice, he in fact changed this: in places the orchestra divides, with the main melodic material at fff, and a barely-audible pppp harmonic foundation.

Widmann concentrated on certain aspects of Schubert’s compositional style: the characteristic ideas of ‘searching’, travelling harmonically and frequently being ‘lost’ yet still ‘continuing’. Instead of incorporating specific Schubert works, he chose instead to hint at some: Schubert’s String Quartet and the Octet, for example. The resulting orchestral piece captures Schubert’s soundworld and emotional atmosphere through his compositional technique, while unquestionably bearing its composer’s own stamp.

Programme note by Torsten Blaich. English translation by Lindsay Chalmers-Gerbracht.

Composer Profile: Jörg Widmann

Jörg Widmann was born in Munich in 1973. He studied clarinet at the Hochschule für Musik in Munich and later at the Juilliard School in New York. He began to take composition lessons with Kay Westermann aged 11, and subsequently continued his studies with Wilfried Hiller and Hans Werner Henze, and later Heiner Goebbels and Wolfgang Rihm in Karlsruhe. From 2001–15 Widmann was Professor of Clarinet at the Freiburg Staatliche Hochschule für Musik, where he also took up the post of Professor of Composition in 2009. Since 2017 he has held a chair at the Barenboim-Said-Academy in Berlin.

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He is also Principal Conductor of the Irish Chamber Orchestra.

Widmann’s great passion as a clarinettist is chamber music and he regularly performs with partners such as Daniel Barenboim, Tabea Zimmermann, Heinz Holliger, András Schiff, Kim Kashkashian and Hélène Grimaud. He has also achieved great success as a soloist in orchestral concerts in Germany and abroad. Several works have been dedicated to Widmann by fellow composers including Wolfgang Rihm, Aribert Reimann and Heinz Holliger.

Widmann’s output includes a cycle of five string quartets, which form the core of his oeuvre; works for large orchestra; concertos for violin, viola, flute and piano; several music-theatre projects; the song-cycle Das heisse Herz; and the large-scale oratorio ARCHE.

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1903

The texts and translations begin on the opposite page.

When asked later in life which of his works best captured the freshness of his youth, Ravel’s immediate answer was Shéhérazade: ‘it’s full of things that I am ashamed to have written. But there is something in this composition that I have never found again.’ He had composed it in 1903, having, in his words, ‘yielded to the profound fascination that the East has always held for me since my childhood’ (he had already abandoned a project for an opera of the same name, based on episodes from A Thousand and One Nights). At the age of 28, however, and still eking out an unsatisfying studentship at the Paris Conservatoire, he was clearly also susceptible to influences closer to home, for Shéhérazade owes a clear debt to the sensuous soundworld of Debussy, whose opera Pelléas et Mélisande had been premiered in Paris the year before. In his setting of these three prose-poems by Tristan Klingsor (the improbably Wagnerian nom de plume of his friend Léon Leclère), Ravel employs a free, speech-related vocal style similar to Debussy’s – although, typically, his melody is slightly less diaphanous and his orchestral support more solid. But this is still superbly delicate and sensitive word-setting. Ravel had asked Klingsor to read the poems to him before he began the composition, and

Maurice Ravel (1875–1937) Shéhérazade

Christine Rice mezzo-soprano

1 Asie 2 La flûte enchantée 3 L’Indifférent

Klingsor himself later remarked that ‘for Ravel, setting a poem meant transforming it into expressive recitative, to exalt the inflections of speech to the state of song, to exploit all the possibilities of the words, but never to subjugate them’.

The first song depicts the poet’s longing for the visual delights of the East – for Persia, India, China. There he will witness great beauty and great horror – ‘paupers and queens’, ‘roses and blood’ and ‘men dying of love or hate’ – before returning home to tell artful tales of the things he has seen. In the second song a slave-girl listens to her lover playing on a flute while her master sleeps, each note brushing her like a kiss – yet at the end, the flute seems almost cruelly distant. A similar mood of mystery pervades the final song, in which an androgynous stranger, hips lightly swaying, remains unmoved by an admirer’s invitations to stop and drink.

Shéhérazade was one of Ravel’s earliest critical successes, a work that signalled his arrival and remains today among his most spellbinding creations. Whatever it was that this meticulous composer was ‘ashamed of writing’ is surely lost in the mists of time.

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