London Philharmonic Orchestra 29 April 2020 programme notes

Principal Conductor and Artistic Advisor VLADIMIR JUROWSKI Principal Conductor Designate EDWARD GARDNER supported by Mrs Christina Lang Assael Principal Guest Conductor Designate KARINA CANELLAKIS Leader PIETER SCHOEMAN supported by Neil Westreich Patron HRH THE DUKE OF KENT KG Chief Executive and Artistic Director TIMOTHY WALKER CBE AM Chief Executive Designate DAVID BURKE

Programme notes Wednesday 29 April 2020 | 7.30pm

Ravel La valse Fauré Pavane, Op. 50 Saint-Saëns Symphony No. 3 in C minor, Op. 78 (Organ)

Programme notes

Speedread This evening’s programme focuses on music from France. Maurice Ravel’s La valse of 1919/20 is a re-creation of the Viennese waltzes of the Strauss family, overshadowed by the grim experience of the First World War. Gabriel Fauré’s Pavane of 1886 similarly evokes the solemn dance form of Elizabethan and Jacobean England and of the

Maurice Ravel

French Renaissance. Saint-Saëns’s Third Symphony of the same year, written for performance in London, is an ambitious work in four movements, in two linked pairs, which derives all its themes from a handful of basic ideas. It culminates in a grandiose finale, given extra weight by the addition to the orchestra of the mighty voice of the organ.

La valse

1875–1937

Ravel composed La valse in 1919 and 1920 to be danced

by Sergei Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes company, and was greatly disheartened by the impresario’s rejection of it as unsuitable for the stage. It was first performed as a concert piece, and was never staged as a ballet in Ravel’s lifetime. But when he published it, he retained its subtitle of ‘choreographic poem’; and he printed as an introduction to the score his scenario for the opening minutes of the work: ‘Swirling clouds allow glimpses, through occasional rifts, of waltzing couples.

The clouds gradually disperse, revealing a whirling mass of people in an immense ballroom. The stage lightens progressively ... An Imperial Court, around 1855.’

It is clear from this that Ravel’s intention was to reproduce, in his own musical language and in brilliant orchestral colours, the Viennese waltzes of the Strauss family, which he greatly admired. The work even has the formal outline of a Strauss waltz, with an introduction, a series of dances, and a coda. But inevitably, looking back at the heyday of the Austro-Hungarian empire from just after the end of a ruinous European war, the piece could hardly be a simple celebration. Ravel himself said to a friend that he had intended it ‘as a kind of

apotheosis of the Viennese waltz, linked in my mind with the impression of a fantastic and fateful whirl’ (un tournoiement fantastique et fatal).

And there is indeed something decidedly dark, and ultimately even savage, in La valse. It manifests itself in the mysterious introduction, with its shadowy string tremolos and sinister bassoons, and its uneasy superimposition of 2/2 time on the basic mouvement de Valse viennoise; it is heightened by the nightmarish inexorability of the main sequence of waltzes; and it reaches a culmination in the ‘over-the-top’ mechanistic frenzy of the closing pages.

Gabriel Fauré

Pavane, Op. 50

1845–1924

Fauré composed his Pavane for small orchestra in 1886, shortly before starting work on his well-known Requiem. The following year, he added an optional part for chorus, with specially written words by Count Robert de Montesquiou-Fezensac enacting the dalliance of nymphs and shepherds; but it is usually heard in its original version. The piece is in the moderately slow tempo of the Renaissance pavane, with an accompaniment of pizzicato strings suggesting a guitar

or lute. It has an opening section of wistful melody, a sterner middle section, and a subtly varied reprise of the opening. Towards the end of his life, Fauré incorporated the piece into his one-act divertissement Masques et Bergamasques, which suggests that he associated it with the Watteau-inspired setting of the divertissement, that of the leisured era of open-air aristocratic entertainments in pre-Revolutionary France.

Camille Saint-Saëns

Symphony No. 3 in C minor, Op. 78 (Organ) 1 Adagio – Allegro moderato – Poco adagio 2 Allegro moderato alternating with Presto – Maestoso – Allegro

1835–1921

At the beginning of 1886, Saint-Saëns embarked on a tour of Germany as conductor and pianist in his own works, but encountered protests and cancellations because of his well-publicised opposition to German music. He retreated to a small town in Austria, where he wrote his light-hearted Carnival of the Animals, but also worked on his last essay in the most Germanic – and, many then believed, least Gallic – of forms, that of the symphony. He continued to work on the score in Prague and Vienna, and completed it after his return home to Paris – where he played it through to his old friend and mentor Franz Liszt. The piece had been commissioned by the Philharmonic Society of London, Saint-Saëns having become a popular visitor here, and it was first performed under the composer’s direction on 19 May 1886 in the St James’s Hall (which stood near Piccadilly

Circus). The following month, Liszt responded with pleasure to the news of the success of the premiere, correctly predicted an equally warm response to the work in Paris, and accepted its dedication. But he died at the end of July, and the published score is inscribed to his memory.

Saint-Saëns said that in the Third Symphony he had ‘given all that I had to give’; and indeed it is the most ambitious of all his concert works. The scoring is for large orchestra augmented by piano duet and organ, the latter contributing especially to a conclusion of sustained grandiosity (which has won the work its nickname of ‘Organ Symphony’). The timescale is correspondingly generous, though the usual four movements of the symphony are conflated into two

Programme notes continued

parts, the first Allegro leading into the slow movement and the scherzo into the finale. These links are cemented, and the whole work drawn tightly together, by the use of recurring themes, transformed from one appearance to another in the manner pioneered by Liszt and later taken up by Wagner and César Franck.

Two of these ‘cyclic’ ideas alternate in the short slow introduction. But it is the first theme of the following Allegro moderato, a string melody in busy semiquavers which initially traces the first phrase of the funeral plainchant Dies irae, that is to prove the principal unifying factor of the whole work. Its urgent offbeat rhythms and, later, its melodic outline in an insistent rhythm permeate the first movement. Another rhythmic transformation appears on pizzicato strings in the middle section of the slow movement, an interlude between the first statement of a long, gradually unfolding melody and its soaring reprise. The principal theme also generates the two main ideas of the scherzo – which alternates with two faster trio sections, the second turning into a bridge to the finale. And the same protean theme is the source of the chorale that appears in the finale’s imposing introduction, of the subject of the fierce fugue that launches the movement’s main quick section, and of yet more transformations in the massive major-key peroration.

Programme notes © Anthony Burton