a huge orchestral canvas. The result, as tonight’s conductor John Mauceri explains, is ‘a tour de force of Schoenberg’s orchestrational genius. The very first note of this 15-minute work, presents us with four different simultaneous dynamics and “envelopes” – that is, the direction of those dynamics and whether they make a crescendo, diminuendo, start with an accent, and so forth.’
Paul Hindemith
Suite, Nobilissima Visione 1 Introduction and Rondo 2 March and Pastorale 3 Passacaglia
1895–1963
Bach’s music was a lifelong preoccupation for the German composer Paul Hindemith too, who, like Schoenberg, was fascinated by the process of integrating Baroque practices within a modern framework. But his relationship with his cultural and national identity was an uneasy one, and he fell in and out of favour with those in power throughout most of his life. Even in the early 1920s, when he had begun to develop a solid reputation for himself as a violinist and composer of some renown, there were rumblings among the Nazi press about the ‘un-Germanic’ nature of his music. Eventually, he was rejected by their more radical factions and effectively pushed out of Germany in 1937, seeking solace and a new career elsewhere in Europe before moving to America. The Suite from his 1938 ballet Nobilissima Visione (‘The Noblest Vision’) was completed just a year after his arrival in Italy, by which point, as conductor John Mauceri explains, ‘Hindemith’s densely chromatic music had crystalised into a unique voice that embraced the music of the Renaissance and Baroque while always sounding like Hindemith.’ Inspired by a trip to see Giotto’s frescoes depicting the life of Saint Francis of
Assisi in Santa Croce, Hindemith collaborated with celebrated choreographer Léonide Massine to create an original ‘dramatic and choreographic interpretation of the life of Saint Francis’, as Massine put it, sustaining ‘a mood of mystic exultation’ throughout. The three-movement Suite begins with Saint Francis lost in contemplation, the rich sonority of the full strings leading without pause into a lively depiction of a wedding ‘feast’, their cheer undimmed by being served only bread and water. The March that begins the second movement is rather more ominous, portraying the arrival of medieval soldiers who brutally attack and rob a man they discover at the side of the road. It provides a stark contrast to the ensuing Pastorale, in which Saint Francis dreams of humanity’s more endearing qualities – Obedience, Chastity and Poverty. The Suite’s closing movement is lifted directly from the ballet, an extended Passacaglia (variations above a ground bass) representing a Hymn to the Sun. ‘Here’, writes Hindemith, ‘all symbolic personifications of heavenly and earthly existence mingle in the course of the different variations.’
Interval – 20 minutes An announcement will be made five minutes before the end of the interval.
London Philharmonic Orchestra | 11