July 2019 Concert Program

CONCERT PROGRAM

J U LY / A U G U S T 2 0 1 9 LAST NIGHT OF THE PROMS

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THE RITE OF SPRING

E LG A R ’ S C E L LO C O N C E R TO

MSO/ BRIAN COX/ A SYMPHONIC UNIVERSE DANIEL HARDING CONDUCTOR JACK LIEBECK VIOLIN black

NOVEMBER 2019

Arts Centre Melbourne, Hamer Hall white

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CONTENTS

05 10 16 32 36

THE MELBOURNE SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA Your MSO Guest musicians LAST NIGHT OF THE PROMS Saturday 13 July / 7.30pm Arts Centre Melbourne, Hamer Hall

THE RITE OF SPRING – STRAVINSKY DOUBLE BILL Thursday 18 July / 7.30pm Saturday 20 July / 2pm Arts Centre Melbourne, Hamer Hall

THE RITE OF SPRING AND FIREBIRD Friday 19 July / 7.30pm Costa Hall, Geelong

ELGAR’S CELLO CONCERTO Friday 2 August / 7.30pm Saturday 3 August / 7.30pm Monday 5 August / 6.30pm Arts Centre Melbourne, Hamer Hall

In consideration of your fellow patrons, the MSO thanks you for silencing and dimming the light on your phone.

Many MSO performances are recorded for future broadcast

by ABC Classic. Visit abc.com.au/classic to listen online and view a broadcast schedule.

Cover image: Greta Bradman.

mso.com.au

(03) 9929 9600

Our Artistic Family

Melbourne Symphony Orchestra The Melbourne Symphony Orchestra is a leading cultural figure in the Australian arts landscape, bringing the best in orchestral music and passionate performance to a diverse audience across Victoria, the nation and around the world.

Each year the MSO engages with more than 5 million people through live concerts, TV, radio and online broadcasts, international tours, recordings and education programs.

Under the spirited leadership of Chief Conductor, Sir Andrew Davis, the MSO is a vital presence, both onstage and in the community, in cultivating classical music in Australia. The nation’s first professional orchestra, the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra has been the sound of the city of Melbourne since 1906.

The MSO regularly attracts great artists from around the globe including Anne-Sophie Mutter, Lang Lang, Renee Fleming and Thomas Hampson, while bringing Melbourne’s finest musicians to the world through tours to China, Europe and the United States.

The Melbourne Symphony Orchestra acknowledges the Traditional Owners of the Land on which we perform and would like to pay our respects to their Elders and Community both past and present.

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Your MSO

Your MSO

Sir Andrew Davis Chief Conductor

Benjamin Northey Associate Conductor

Tianyi Lu

Cybec Assistant Conductor

Hiroyuki Iwaki

Conductor Laureate (1974–2006)

FIRST VIOLINS Dale Barltrop Concertmaster

Sophie Rowell

Concertmaster The Ullmer Family Foundation#

Peter Edwards

Assistant Principal

Kirsty Bremner Sarah Curro

Michael Aquilina#

Peter Fellin Deborah Goodall Lorraine Hook Anne-Marie Johnson Kirstin Kenny Eleanor Mancini Mark Mogilevski Michelle Ruffolo Kathryn Taylor Michael Aquilina

#

SECOND VIOLINS

CELLOS

Matthew Tomkins

David Berlin

Robert Macindoe

Rachael Tobin

Monica Curro

Nicholas Bochner

Principal The Gross Foundation#

Principal MS Newman Family#

Associate Principal

Associate Principal

Assistant Principal Danny Gorog and Lindy Susskind#

Assistant Principal Anonymous*

Miranda Brockman

Mary Allison Isin Cakmakcioglu Tiffany Cheng Freya Franzen Cong Gu Andrew Hall Isy Wasserman Philippa West Patrick Wong Roger Young

Geelong Friends of the MSO#

Rohan de Korte

Andrew Dudgeon#

Keith Johnson

Barbara Bell, in memory of Elsa Bell#

Sarah Morse Maria Solà#

Angela Sargeant Maria Solà#

Michelle Wood

Michael Aquilina#

VIOLAS

DOUBLE BASSES

Christopher Moore

Steve Reeves

Principal Di Jameson#

Principal

Lauren Brigden Katharine Brockman Christopher Cartlidge Michael Aquilina

#

Anthony Chataway

Dr Elizabeth E Lewis AM

#

Gabrielle Halloran Maria Solà#

Andrew Moon

Associate Principal

Sylvia Hosking

Assistant Principal

Damien Eckersley Benjamin Hanlon Suzanne Lee Stephen Newton

Trevor Jones Fiona Sargeant

Sophie Galaise and Clarence Fraser#

Maria Solà#

FLUTES

Cindy Watkin Elizabeth Woolnough

Prudence Davis Principal Anonymous#

Wendy Clarke

Associate Principal

Sarah Beggs

Sophia Yong-Tang#

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Your MSO

PICCOLO Andrew Macleod

HORNS

PERCUSSION

Nicolas Fleury

Robert Clarke

Saul Lewis

John Arcaro

Principal John McKay and Lois McKay#

Principal

OBOES

Principal Third The Hon Michael Watt QC and Cecilie Hall#

Jeffrey Crellin

Principal

Thomas Hutchinson Associate Principal

Ann Blackburn

The Rosemary Norman Foundation#

COR ANGLAIS Michael Pisani

Principal

Abbey Edlin

Nereda Hanlon and Michael Hanlon AM#

Trinette McClimont Rachel Shaw

BASS CLARINET Jon Craven Principal

BASSOONS Jack Schiller

Principal

TROMBONES Richard Shirley

Tim and Lyn Edward#

Mike Szabo

Principal Bass Trombone

TUBA Timothy Buzbee

Principal

TIMPANI**

Natasha Thomas

Principal

Dr Martin Tymms and Patricia Nilsson#

Principal

John and Diana Frew#

Elise Millman

Associate Principal

Yinuo Mu

Shane Hooton William Evans Rosie Turner

Craig Hill

HARP

Principal

David Thomas

Associate Principal

Drs Rhyll Wade and Clem Gruen#

TRUMPETS

Associate Principal

Philip Arkinstall

Tim and Lyn Edward#

Robert Cossom

Owen Morris

CLARINETS Principal

Principal

Christopher Lane

CONTRABASSOON Brock Imison

Principal

# Position supported by ** Timpani Chair position supported

by Lady Potter AC CMRI

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Guest Musicians

Guest Musicians LAST NIGHT OF THE PROMS | 13 July Tair Khisambeev

Rachel Atkinson

Leah Scholes

Aaron Barnden

Mee Na Lojewski

Lara Wilson

Madeleine Jevons

Rohan Dasika

Jacob Abela

Jenny Khafagi

Vivian Qu Siyuan

Laurence Matheson

Miranda Matheson

Rebecca Johnson

Nicholas Waters

Ian Wildsmith

William Clark

Tim Dowling

Isabel Morse

Matthew Van Emmerik

assistant concertmaster violin violin violin violin violin viola viola

cello cello

double bass double bass

percussion percussion piano piano

flute

assistant principal horn principal trombone tenor tuba

THE RITE OF SPRING | 18 & 20 July Tair Khisambeev

Taryn Clarke

Anton Schroeder

Aaron Barnden

David Reichelt

Tristan Rebien

Madeleine Jevons

Lloyd Van’t Hoff

Tim Dowling

Nicholas Waters

Colin Forbes-Abrams

Robert Collins

William Clark

Chloe Turner ^

Alex Jeantou

Paul McMillan+

Ian Wildsmith

Lara Wilson

Rohan Dasika

Carla Blackwood

Melina van Leeuwen

Vivian Qu Siyuan

Josiah Kop

Leigh Harrold

assistant concertmaster violin violin violin viola viola

double bass double bass

flute

cor anglais

bass clarinet

contrabassoon bassoon

assistant principal horn horn horn

+ Appears courtesy of Orchestra Victoria ^ Appears courtesy of West Australian Symphony Orchestra * Appears courtesy of Tasmanian Symphony Orchestra â ‘ Appears courtesy of BBC Symphony Orchestra 8

Information correct as of 5 July 2019.

horn

trumpet

principal trombone bass trumpet tuba

percussion harp

piano

Taryn Clarke

Anton Schroeder

Aaron Barnden

David Reichelt

Tristan Rebien

Madeleine Jevons

Lloyd Van’t Hoff

Tim Dowling

Nicholas Waters

Colin Forbes-Abrams

Robert Collins

William Clark

Chloe Turner ^

Alex Jeantou

Paul McMillan+

Ian Wildsmith

Lara Wilson

Rohan Dasika

Carla Blackwood

Stefan Cassomenos

Vivian Qu Siyuan

Josiah Kop

assistant concertmaster violin violin violin viola viola

double bass double bass

flute

cor anglais

bass clarinet

contrabassoon bassoon

assistant principal horn horn

horn

Guest Musicians

THE RITE OF SPRING AND FIREBIRD | 19 July Tair Khisambeev

trumpet

principal trombone bass trumpet tuba

percussion piano

horn

ELGAR’S CELLO CONCERTO | 2–5 August Harry Bennetts

Matthew Laing

Thomas D’Arth

Aaron Barnden

Isabel Morse

Carla Blackwood

Jenny Khafagi

Jack Bailey

Josiah Kop

Michael Loftus-Hills

Mee Na Lojewski

Jonathon Ramsay*

Oksana Thompson

Josephine Vains

Alex Hurst

Jose Luis Tochon Quintero

Zoe Wallace

Tony Bedewi⁑

Stefanie Farrands*

Kylie Davies

Bronwyn Wallis

William Clark

Vivian Qu Siyuan

Calvin Bowman

Helen Ireland

Emma Sullivan

associate concertmaster violin violin violin violin violin

principal viola viola viola

viola viola cello cello cello cello

double bass double bass

clarinet

associate principal horn horn

principal trombone tuba

timpani harp

organ

double bass

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Last Night of the Proms 13 July 2019 | 7.30pm Arts Centre Melbourne, Hamer Hall Melbourne Symphony Orchestra Sir Andrew Davis conductor Lu Siqing violin Greta Bradman soprano Melbourne Symphony Orchestra Chorus Warren Trevelyan-Jones chorus master BERLIOZ Lélio, or The Return to Life: Fantaisie sur la Tempête de Shakespeare [14'] SAINT-SAËNS Introduction and Rondo capriccioso [10'] ROSSINI The Barber of Seville: Una voce poco fa

[7']

VERDI I l trovatore: Vanne... Lasciami... D’amor sull’ali rosee

[6']

RIMSKY-KORSAKOV Neapolitan Song [3'] — INTERVAL — PARRY Blest pair of Sirens [12'] HORN Cherry Ripe [2'] BRADMAN (arr. Mills) Every Day is a Rainbow Day for Me [3'] HURST Swagman’s Promenade: Waltzing Matilda

[3']

ELGAR Pomp and Circumstance March No.1

[6']

WOOD Fantasia on British Sea Songs [15'] ARNE (arr. Sargent) Rule, Britannia! [5'] PARRY (arr. Elgar) Jerusalem [3'] Running time: approximately 2 hours and 10 minutes including a 20-minute interval. Timings listed are approximate.

Lu Siqing

Chief Conductor of the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra, Sir Andrew Davis is also Music Director and Principal Conductor of the Lyric Opera of Chicago. He is Conductor Laureate of both the BBC Symphony Orchestra and the Toronto Symphony, where he has also been named interim Artistic Director until 2020.

Lu Siqing is the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra’s 2019 Soloist in Residence.

Born in Qingdao, China, Lu Siqing was invited by Yehudi Menuhin to study at his school in London aged 11. In 1984 he returned to China and five years later went to Juilliard to study with Dorothy DeLay. In 1987 he was the first Asian to win First Prize at Italy’s Paganini International Violin Competition.

conductor

In a career spanning more than 40 years he has conducted virtually all the world’s major orchestras and opera companies, and at the major festivals. Recent highlights have included Die Walküre in a new production at Chicago Lyric.

Sir Andrew’s many CDs include Messiah, nominated for a 2018 Grammy, Bliss’s The Beatitudes, and a recording with the Bergen Philharmonic of Vaughan Williams’ Job/Symphony No.9 nominated for a 2018 BBC Music Magazine Award.

With the MSO he has released a third recording in the ongoing Richard Strauss series, featuring the Alpine Symphony and Till Eulenspiegel.

violin

LAST NIGHT OF THE PROMS | 13 July

Sir Andrew Davis

Lu Siqing has performed at some of the world’s most famous concert halls in more than 40 countries. He has released more than 20 CDs, performed with leading orchestras such as the Philharmonia and San Francisco Symphony, and collaborated with conductors such as Maazel, Gergiev, Ashkenazy, van Zweden, Slatkin and Yu Long. In 2012, he formed the China Trio with cellist Li-Wei Qin and pianist Yingdi Sun. He plays the “Miss Crespi” 1699 Stradivari violin, generously loaned to him by Chinese-Australian arts philanthropist Mr David Li AM.

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LAST NIGHT OF THE PROMS | 13 July

Greta Bradman

Melbourne Symphony Orchestra Chorus

Greta Bradman is one of Australasia’s most celebrated operatic and concert artists. Recent performance highlights include Mimi (La bohème) for Opera Australia, Lisa (La sonnambula) for Victorian Opera and the title roles in Theodora (Canberra) and Rodelinda (Melbourne). Her 2015 début album for Decca Classics My Hero received fivestar reviews and topped the classical and classical crossover ARIA charts for several months. Her new album Home is now available.

For more than 50 years the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra Chorus has been the unstinting voice of the Orchestra’s choral repertoire. The MSO Chorus sings with the finest conductors including Sir Andrew Davis, Edward Gardner, Mark Wigglesworth, Bernard Labadie, Vladimir Ashkenazy and Manfred Honeck, and is committed to developing and performing new Australian and international choral repertoire.

soprano

After obtaining her music degree from the Elder Conservatorium of Music, Greta received her Fellowship from the Australian National Academy of Music before completing a Graduate Diploma in Advanced Vocal Studies at the Wales International Academy of Voice – where she studied under Dennis O’Neill CBE and Dame Kiri Te Kanawa.

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Commissions include Brett Dean’s Katz und Spatz, Ross Edwards’ Mountain Chant, and Paul Stanhope’s Exile Lamentations. Recordings by the MSO Chorus have received critical acclaim.

It has performed across Brazil and at the Cultura Inglese Festival in Sao Paolo, with The Australian Ballet, Sydney Symphony Orchestra, at the AFL Grand Final and at Anzac Day commemorative ceremonies.

MSO Chorus Master

LAST NIGHT OF THE PROMS | 13 July

Warren Trevelyan-Jones Warren Trevelyan-Jones is the Head of Music at St James’, King Street in Sydney and is regarded as one of the leading choral conductors and choir trainers in Australia. Warren has had an extensive singing career as a soloist and ensemble singer in Europe, including nine years in the Choir of Westminster Abbey, and regular work with the Gabrieli Consort, Collegium Vocale (Ghent), the Taverner Consort, The Kings Consort, Dunedin Consort, The Sixteen and the Tallis Scholars.

Warren is also Director of the Parsons Affayre, Founder and Co-Director of The Consort of Melbourne and, in 2001 with Dr Michael Noone, founded the Gramophone award-winning group Ensemble Plus Ultra. Warren is also a qualified music therapist.

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LAST NIGHT OF THE PROMS | 13 July 14

Program Notes When Henry Wood was engaged by the Queen’s Hall, London, to create a series of Promenade Concerts from 1895 the brief was to provide inexpensive tickets, an informal setting and a diet of mainly light music over the summer. Wood, however, was determined to make the ‘Proms’ a vehicle for innovative programming, including as much recent European music – symphonic and operatic – as he could. And in this he was uncommonly successful, perhaps realising that the informal setting made people receptive to unfamiliar work.

But the ‘Last Night’ soon became something different – a celebration of all things British with staples like Elgar’s first Pomp and Circumstance march, Rule, Britannia! and Wood’s own Fantasia on British Sea Songs. But even the most chauvinistic little Englander, like the absurd Uncle Matthew in Nancy Mitford’s ‘Radlett’ novels (who regards ‘abroad’ as ‘unutterably bloody’ and foreigners as ‘sewers’ but repeatedly listens to a gramophone record of Amelita Galli-Curci singing Rossini’s ‘Una voce poco fa’) would agree that such things are enhanced by music from further afield.

Hector Berlioz’s entirely one-sided passion for his idol, the Irish actress Harriet Smithson, had been consuming him for three years. When Berlioz heard rumours about Smithson and her manager, he was overwhelmed, and composed his Symphonie fantastique or ‘Episodes in the Life of an Artist’ to exorcise his feelings of betrayal. The work’s ‘story’ is about a young Musician obsessed by a woman who does not return his love: his daydreams and passions, a visit to a ball, a scene in the fields all inspire single movements of the work, which is linked by the frequent use of a theme or idée fixe

that represents the beloved. The Musician then descends into a nightmarish fantasy, in which he has killed the woman who has been driving him mad; the beloved’s melody appears ‘like a last thought of love interrupted by the fatal stroke’.

The ghost of the beloved presides at the satanic orgy which follows. Feeling his love for Smithson was hopeless, Berlioz promptly conceived an equally doomed passion for Marie Moke, who jilted him for pianist and publisher Camille Pleyel. In despair, Berlioz repaired to Italy, as one does, and recycled various bits of music (including the beloved’s idée fixe) to create the melodrama – that is, a work using music and spoken text – Lélio. Berlioz conceived it as a sequel to the Symphonie fantastique which all turns out to have been a bad, opiated dream, leaving the chastened artist to muse on various slabs of European literature including two plays of Shakespeare: Hamlet and The Tempest.

The sixth and final movement is a fantasia on Shakespeare’s late romance, in which the Spirits of the Air bid farewell – in Italian, naturally – to Miranda. The piece was performed together with the Symphonie fantastique in 1832 and Berlioz, according to his memoirs, arranged for Smithson to be invited to the concert where she realised his love for her, ‘felt the room reel about her and sat as in a dream’. Reader, she married him.

Paris in the 1860s enjoyed something of a golden age. The Emperor Napoléon III had become a progressively more liberal leader over the previous decade; Hausmann created the boulevards and avenues that define the city; buildings such as the Gare du Nord, L’Opéra and the Trinité church appeared; in the visual arts, this was the period of the Realist painters like Corot, Manet and the young Degas. Saint-Saëns was in his early maturity and enjoyed some fame as a pianist and composer. The violinist Pablo Sarasate had premiered

Beethoven is said to have quipped that Rossini would have been a great composer if his teacher had ‘spanked him harder’. At their one meeting he warned Rossini to avoid serious opera, as Italians, he opined tactlessly, had no dramatic sense. But Beethoven knew a masterpiece when he saw one, and his farewell advice to Rossini was, ‘Write more “Barbers”!’

The Barber of Seville was written over about three weeks (though with some recycling of music from other shows) at the end of 1815, when the 24-yearold composer was churning out operas for the Teatro San Moisè in Venice.

As a version of the first of the ‘Figaro’ trilogy by the well-known watchmaker, gun-runner and author Pierre-Augustin Caron de Beaumarchais, the ‘Barber’ is a prequel to Mozart’s The Marriage of Figaro (which is based on the second play). In Rossini’s opera, the happy ending is never in doubt, and the fun is in how the composer dramatises, through disguise and intrigue, the inevitable misunderstandings, digressions and obstacles to the course of true love.

One obstacle is Dr Bartolo who disagrees

with his ward Rosina about the man she wishes to marry. Her character is established in her celebrated cavatina ‘Una voce poco fa’. It falls into two parts: the imperious dotted rhythms of the opening section indicate serious strength of purpose, and the vivacity of the second (the cabaletta) depicts the energy that she will use in getting her own way. (It is no accident that this piece was recycled from Elisabetta, regina d’Inghilterra, his 1815 opera about Elizabeth I.) Verdi’s Il trovatore (The Troubadour) dates from 1853 and tells a story, set in medieval Spain, of complex and tragically hidden relationships that are revealed only too late: murder, revenge, love, jealousy, soldiers, nuns and gypsies. All in all, a Romantic opera par excellence. Leonora, a lady-in-waiting to the Princess of Aragon, has fallen in love with a mysterious knight, Manrico (the troubadour of the title, and supposedly the son of the gypsy matriarch Azucena), but is herself the object of the Count of Luna’s passion. The Count and Manrico are sworn enemies, and when the count captures Azucena, Manrico leads an unsuccessful attack to save her. In Act IV, Leonora appears at the Count’s palace to try and save the imprisoned Manrico, singing her undying love for him in the aria ‘Vanne, Lasciami … D’amor sull’ali rosee’.

More than one composer has assumed that the popular ‘Funiculi, funiculà’ is a Neapolitan folk-song: Richard Strauss got himself sued over it (he uses it in the early tone poem Aus Italien); Rimsky-Korsakov seems to have avoided legal trouble, but felt free to make this arrangement in 1907. RimskyKorsakov literally wrote the book on orchestration, so it’s no surprise that it is a glittering showpiece. The tune was composed in 1880 by Luigi Denza (who sued Strauss) to lyrics by local journalist, Peppino Turco, which celebrate the

LAST NIGHT OF THE PROMS | 13 July

his Violin Concerto No.1 at the start of the decade, in a work that Saint-Saëns’ biographer James Harding describes as ‘tailor-made for Sarasate’s bewitchingly elegant style, all silver sheen and icecold sweetness’. It was the beginning of a long-lasting relationship – some 20 years later, Saint-Saëns wrote his Third Concerto for Sarasate. The violinist was born in the Spanish city of Pamplona in 1844 and first appeared in Paris in 1860, where he worked with a number of French composers. Saint-Saëns, like a number of his colleagues, pays tribute not only to Sarasate’s virtuoso brilliance in the Introduction and Rondo Capriccioso, but to his nationality, introducing a pronounced Spanish flavour in the rhythm and orchestration at several points throughout the piece.

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LAST NIGHT OF THE PROMS | 13 July

somewhat optimistic construction of a funicular railway on the slopes of nearby Mount Vesuvius.

At a concert to celebrate Queen Victoria’s Golden Jubilee in 1887 the main event was the London premiere of Berlioz’s gargantuan Te Deum by the Bach Choir under Charles Villiers Stanford. Stanford’s younger colleague, Hubert Parry, was recovering from the cancellation of his opera Guenever, so the older man generously commissioned Parry to write a curtain-raiser for the concert. It is no small feat that this work, Blest Pair of Sirens, not only held its own against Berlioz’s, but established Parry as an important British composer.

Its text is ‘At a Solemn Musick’ by the 17th-century poet of Paradise Lost, John Milton. The sirens (using the term to denote irresistibly sweetly-singing creatures) are Voice and Verse, that is music and poetry, and their relationship is seen as an emblem of the ideal relationship between heaven and earth.

Parry’s music foreshadows Elgar in its dignified themes and Vaughan Williams in the bright optimism of its harmony.

Milton’s slightly older contemporary, Robert Herrick was less concerned with the marriage of heaven and earth than with the need to seize the day, or as he famously put it elsewhere, ‘Gather ye rosebuds while ye may’.

Cherry Ripe is one of his best-known poems, and was set to music by the English singer Charles Edward Horn for a production of the 1826 farce Paul Pry, about a compulsive busybody and eavesdropper. As Nicholas Temperley has pointed out, Horn was accused of plagiarising the song from his colleague Thomas Attwood, ‘but cleared himself in court – according to one story by singing Attwood’s song and his own to the jury’.

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The great critic Neville Cardus wrote with eloquence and authority on two subjects – cricket and classical music.

In 1930, for instance, he wrote about the 21-year-old Donald Bradman whom he saw in action at a test match at Lords: ‘The genius of this remarkable boy consists in the complete summary he gives us of the technique of batsmanship. The really astonishing fact about Bradman is that a boy should play as he does, with the sophistication of an old hand and brain. How came this Bradman to expel from him all the greenness and impetuosity of youth while retaining the strength and alacrity of youth?’ Cardus may not have known that Bradman, like him, balanced his love of cricket with that of music, and it was about this time that the young batsman composed the charming Every Day is a Rainbow Day for Me for his wife Jessie, to words by Jack Lumsdaine. (Cardus did, however, write presciently that ‘perhaps by making a duck some day, Bradman will oblige those of his critics who believe that there should always be some strangeness, something unexpected, mingled with art and beauty.’)

In 1895 the poet A.B. ‘Banjo’ Paterson visited Dagworth Station in outback Queensland where Christina Macpherson played him a tune that much intrigued him. Macpherson had heard it at the Warrnambool Steeplechase the previous year, where it was played by a band in honour of the Vice-Regal couple.

The tune was known as ‘The Bonnie Woods of Craigielea’ and was attributed to a Scottish composer, James Barr, though it has been claimed it in turn was derived from a march called ‘The Gay Fusilier’. Paterson wrote a ballad to the tune, based, apparently, on an incident that had happened in the wake of the recent Great Shearer’s Strike, where an unemployed homeless person, having stolen a sheep, commits suicide in a billabong rather than face the rough justice of the local police and landowners. ‘Waltzing’ was, it seems, then-current slang for walking, and a ‘matilda’ was the swag in which the

By the turn of the last century Elgar was a national figure in Britain, especially after the success of his ‘Enigma’ Variations in 1899, and in the next few years embarked on works that would rank among his masterpieces: the deeply felt religiosity of The Dream of Gerontius, the wit and vigour of the Cockaigne Overture, and four of the five Pomp and Circumstance marches for symphony orchestra. The title comes from Shakespeare’s Othello, where the eponymous character cries out: O farewell, Farewell the neighing steed, and the shrill trump, The spirit-stirring drum, th’ earpiercing fife; The royal banner, and all quality, Pride, pomp, and circumstance of glorious war!

Elgar’s Marches are by no means jingoistic or unduly martial – indeed at some points they too suggest a mood of farewelling, but they are apt for the celebration of public events.

In 1901 he was very pleased with himself when he came up with ‘a tune that will knock ‘em flat’ – the central ‘trio’ section of the otherwise boisterous Pomp and Circumstance March No.1 It was premiered in Liverpool in 1901, and when Henry Wood introduced it in London, he had to play it three times before the audience would let him go on! King Edward VII was clearly ‘knocked flat’ by the piece, and suggested that the trio tune would make a ‘great song’.

The Master of Magdalene College, Cambridge, A.C. Benson, obliged in 1902 with the now famous words, Land

of Hope and Glory, which were sung at Edward’s coronation in 1902.

Founder of the Proms, Henry Wood, created his Fantasia on British Sea Songs for a 1905 concert to celebrate the centenary of the battle of Trafalgar.

It features bugle calls and several (then) well-known tunes, including ‘Jack’s the Lad’, ‘Farewell and adieu, Ye Spanish Ladies’, ‘Home Sweet Home’, ‘See the conqu’ring Hero Comes’ and Thomas Arne’s Rule, Britannia!.

Arne was one of the most prolific English composers of the 18th century, though sadly much of his work – including several operas for the theatres of Drury Lane and Covent Garden – has been lost. Rule, Britannia! was originally the finale of a masque, Alfred, that celebrated the legendary Saxon king.

The piece was composed in 1740 to flatter, and perhaps comfort, the then Prince of Wales, Frederick, who was ostracised by his father, George II, but all that has survived posterity is the rousing finale with its text by James Thomson.

The masque was premiered at Frederick’s estate, Cliveden.

LAST NIGHT OF THE PROMS | 13 July

itinerants kept their belongings, and, at night, slept. Michael Hurst’s celebrated riff on ‘Waltzing Matilda’ is the finale from his Swagman’s Promenade, a fantasia on Australian bush songs that he composed for the Promenade concerts established by John Hopkins in Sydney in the 1960s.

The poet and artist William Blake was tried for sedition in 1803 (and acquitted) and soon after began work on his epic poem Milton, in which the great poet returns to earth. The preface to this long and somewhat bizarre text contains the lyric that we now know as ‘Jerusalem’.

It refers to one legend of Jesus having visited Britain as a young man, but, far from being a piece of British jingoism, ‘Jerusalem’ damns what Blake regarded as a warmongering, imperialist society (the ‘dark Satanic mills’ referring to the manufacture of armaments). ‘Jerusalem’ is a symbol for a peaceful, utopian society, an image captured in the beautiful tune to which Hubert Parry set Blake’s words in 1916.

Gordon Kerry © 2019

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LAST NIGHT OF THE PROMS | 13 July 18

MSO Symphony Orchestra Chorus | Last Night of the Proms REPETITEUR

ALTO

TENOR

Yasmin Rowe

Satu Aho Cecilia Björkegren Kate Bramley Lisa Faulks Natasha Godfrey Jillian Graham Debbie Griffiths Ros Harbison Sue Hawley Kristine Hensel Helen Hill Helen MacLean Stephanie Mitchell Sandy Nagy Natasha Pracejus Alison Ralph Kate Rice Mair Roberts Maya Tanja Rodingen Lisa Savige Helen Staindl Melvin Tan Emma Warburton

Matthew Castle Peter Clay John Cleghorn Keaton Cloherty James Dipnall Simon Gaites Julian Jones Wayne Kinrade Jessop Maticevski Shumack Michael Mobach Jean-Francois Ravat Colin Schultz Nathan Guan Kiat Teo

SOPRANO Emma Anvari Eva Butcher Georgina Charteris Michele de Courcy Maureen Doris Catherine Folley Georgie Grech Aurora Harmathy Penny Huggett Maya Kraj-Krajewski Natasha Lambie Judy Longbottom Clancye Milne Tian Nie Susie Novella Karin Otto Tanja Redl Natalie Reid Beth Richardson Janelle Richardson Mhairi Riddet Jo Robin Jodi Samartgis Lydia Sherren Freja Soininen Elizabeth Tindall Christa Tom Fabienne Vandenburie Julia Wang Ivy Weng Tara Zamin

BASS Maurice Amor Alexandras Bartaska Peter Deane Andrew Ham Andrew Hibbard Jordan Janssen Evan Lawson Douglas McQueen-Thomson Steven Murie Vern O’Hara Liam Straughan Tom Turnbull Foon Wong

Thank you for supporting MSO Education and Community Engagement programs

To the many community members who donated to our appeal in May and June – THANK YOU! Whether through access to concerts for those with sensory sensitivities or through free music tuition for underserved children, by choosing to contribute, you are making a difference in the life of a child.

A recently published study in the Journal of Educational Psychology once again found that learning a musical instrument helps children achieve higher grades – and highly engaged music students were on average one year ahead of their nonmusical peers in academics. But music also brings us together and creates joy.

Thank you for joining us in the concert hall – and for supporting music experiences and learning in our community.

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The Rite of Spring STRAVINSKY DOUBLE BILL

18 July 2019 | 7.30pm 20 July 2019 | 2pm Arts Centre Melbourne, Hamer Hall Melbourne Symphony Orchestra Sir Andrew Davis conductor Paul Groves tenor Lotte Betts-Dean narrator Australian Girls Choir National Boys Choir of Australia Melbourne Symphony Orchestra Chorus Warren Trevelyan-Jones chorus master STRAVINSKY Perséphone

[48'] — INTERVAL —

STRAVINSKY The Rite of Spring [35']

Running time: approximately two hours including a 20-minute interval.

Timings listed are approximate.

These performances of Perséphone by Igor Stravinsky are given by permission of Hal Leonard Australia Pty. Ltd. exclusive agent for Boosey & Hawkes Music Publishers Ltd of London.

Biographies of Sir Andrew Davis, the MSO Chorus and Warren Trevelyan-Jones are available on pages 11–13.

Pre-concert talk: 18 July at 6.15pm & 20 July at 12.45pm, Hamer Hall. Learn more about the performance at a pre-concert presentation with Cybec Assistant Conductor, Tianyi Lu.

Lotte Betts-Dean

One of the great American tenors of his generation, Paul Groves enjoys an impressive international career performing on the stages of the world’s leading opera houses and most prestigious concert halls. He makes his debut at the National Kaohsiung Center for the Arts in Taiwan this November as Candide. A veteran of the concert stage, Groves appears this season with the Los Angeles Philharmonic for Stravinsky’s Perséphone with Esa-Pekka Salonen and the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra for Mahler’s Das Lied von der Erde with Donald Runnicles.

Praised by The Guardian for her “irrepressible sense of drama and unmissable, urgent musicality”, Australian mezzo-soprano Lotte Betts-Dean’s performance experience encompasses contemporary music, art song, chamber music, early music, opera and oratorio. A versatile and sought-after concert artist performing predominantly in Australia and the UK, Lotte has performed with many leading ensembles including the ACO, Victorian Opera, La Compañia, Manchester Collective and English Chamber Orchestra, and has appeared at major festivals including Buxton, Cheltenham, Dark Mofo, and Adelaide Festival. Her varied career has taken her to venues including Wigmore Hall, Barbican Centre, Sydney Opera House and Melbourne Recital Centre.

tenor

Last season marked Groves’ 25th season at the Metropolitan Opera since his debut as Steuermann in The Flying Dutchman. Concert performances throughout the season include Britten’s War Requiem with Opera de Lyon and Haydn’s Creation with the Prague Philharmonia. Recent highlights include singing Alessandro Cesare in Cavalli’s Eliogabalo with the Opéra national de Paris and his first performances in the title role of Wagner’s Parsifal with the Lyric Opera of Chicago led by Sir Andrew Davis.

THE RITE OF SPRING | 18 & 20 July

Paul Groves

narrator

Lotte is Associate Artist with Southbank Sinfonia and new music group Ensemble x.y, and is a Young Artist with City Music Foundation, Samling Institute and Oxford Lieder. Lotte is a graduate of the Royal Academy of Music, ANAM, and VCA-MCM. Her performances have been broadcast on radio worldwide including BBC Radio 3, ABC Classic FM and WQXR NY.

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THE RITE OF SPRING | 18 & 20 July

Australian Girls Choir

National Boys Choir

The Australian Girls Choir (AGC) was founded in 1984 by Judith Curphey OAM and has blossomed to an organisation with 6,500 choristers in Adelaide, Brisbane, Canberra, Melbourne, Perth and Sydney.

The National Boys Choir of Australia has been singing for over 50 years, and has a current enrolment of more than 200 treble-voiced choristers, who develop vocal production based on the traditional Italian bel canto style.

The vibrant performances of the AGC have been embraced by millions worldwide. Singing for Nelson Mandela, Queen Elizabeth II and President Obama, and at major events including the Broadway to Oz Tour with Hugh Jackman, Australian Open Final and with the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra just a few of their crowning achievements. Further afield, the AGC has toured on 43 occasions with their voices reaching almost every corner of the globe. Performances for Pope Benedict XVI and the King of Tonga, and appearances at the Shanghai World Expo and G’Day USA are just a few of their international accomplishments.

Boys present a challenging repertoire, including commissioned works and fully-staged children’s operas, musical comedy, art and folk songs.

The AGC is proud of their 20 year relationship with Qantas singing at live events and in the ‘I Still Call Australia Home’ advertising campaigns.

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The Choir is regularly called upon to perform with the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra, Opera Australia and Victorian Opera, and has also performed at Carols

by Candlelight at the Myer Music Bowl annually since 1988. The Choir is also well-known for its participation in the acclaimed ‘I Still Call Australia Home’ advertising campaigns for Qantas.

The National Boys Choir of Australia is one of a small number of superb cultural organisations in Melbourne presenting high-quality performances, locally and internationally, proudly contributing to Australia’s rich and diverse cultural identity.

IGOR STRAVINSKY

(1882–1971)

Perséphone Perséphone ravie (The Abduction of Persephone) Perséphone aux enfers (Persephone in the Underworld) Perséphone renaissante (The Rebirth of Persephone) Paul Groves tenor Lotte Betts-Dean narrator Australian Girls Choir National Boys Choir of Australia MSO Chorus The text for this work will be displayed as surtitles.

THE MYTH: The divine being who is sacrificed and brought back to life as a symbol of spring-time regeneration is a staple of world mythologies; examples can found in ancient Mesopotamia, Egypt, across Europe and in meso-America. Stravinsky had, of course, essayed this in his ballet The Rite of Spring, where the sacrifice is that of a pure virgin who dances herself to death, but two decades later he returned to this mythical motif, approaching it from quite a different angle.

The earliest version of the story of Persephone is found in the Homeric Hymn to Demeter. The Homeric Hymns were attributed to the poet of the Iliad in antiquity, but were in fact written anonymously on the 7th and 6th centuries BC. The Hymn to Demeter is a long epic poem in which Zeus, king of the Gods, allows his brother Pluto, king of the Underworld, or Hades, to carry off Persephone (whom the Romans called Proserpina), daughter of Demeter, the goddess of the harvest. Bernini’s

sculpture The Rape of Proserpina (in Rome’s Galleria Borghese) captures the terror of the moment. Demeter, in her grief and fury, visits a devastating famine on the earth. Eventually, seeing the suffering of humanity, Zeus agrees that Persephone should be allowed to return to earth; Pluto, however, persuades her to eat a few pomegranate seeds before she leaves. Having tasted the food of the dead, Persephone must return to the Underworld for a third part of each year, creating winter, which is dispelled when she returns each spring.

THE RITE OF SPRING | 18 & 20 July

Program Notes

THE COMMISSION: In 1933 Stravinsky was commissioned

by Ida Rubinstein to create a hybrid work based on the Persephone story.

Rubinstein had been a dancer in the Ballets Russes (for whose director, Sergei Diaghilev, Stravinsky had provided The Firebird, Petrushka and The Rite of Spring), but using her own talents and significant personal wealth had begun staging her own shows and eventually forming her own company.

She presented, and starred in, numerous new works – Debussy’s The Martyrdom of St Sebastian, Ravel’s Boléro, Honegger’s Joan of Arc, and in 1928 had commissioned Stravinsky’s great love-letter to Tchaikovsky, The Fairy’s Kiss. Perséphone would feature her in a speaking and dancing role, while a tenor, named as the priest Eumolpus, acts as narrator and protagonist. In addition to a large chorus of nymphs, shades and humankind, the roles of Pluto, Demeter, Mercury, and Demophoon/ Triptolemus were to be danced. The use of mélodrame makes it a curiosity, though Paul Griffiths argues that there is ‘a certain aptness in having Persephone sounding as if from another world, in having her the subject of a pageant which she can only observe.’

The libretto was by André Gide, who had been a notorious pederast and card-carrying Communist, but was in

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THE RITE OF SPRING | 18 & 20 July

the process of reverting to the Calvinist puritanism of his Huguenot background.

His take on the Persephone myth, originally in a long poem written some decades earlier, was as a Christian allegory, an idea to which, in itself, Stravinsky had no objection: this was a period in which he experienced intense religious feeling, expressed in such works as the Symphony of Psalms, and was strongly influenced by the Catholic philosopher Jacques Maritain, who proposed what Stephen Walsh calls ‘a theory of art which combined the honesty and humility of the work of the artisan with the idea of art as an intellectual virtue or “habit”.’ So, Stravinsky was happy with Gide’s portrayal of Persephone as willingly sacrificing herself to Pluto, out of compassion for the souls of the dead in the Underworld; after all, his collaboration with Jean Cocteau on Oedipus Rex had likewise added a Christian gloss to Sophoclean tragedy.

The relationship between Stravinsky and Gide rapidly deteriorated, owing partly to the latter’s habit of making suggestions in the libretto about how he thought the music should go, for example ‘an unfamiliar disquiet has slipped into the orchestra, which was hitherto expressing a pure joy’.

Stephen Walsh has also suggested that Gide’s (albeit waning) Communism, which saw Persephone as a champion of the oppressed, was at odds with Stravinsky’s right-wing view of order imposed from above. In later life Stravinsky suggested that a completely new text could be commissioned – from W H Auden! Nevertheless, Stravinsky produced the whole score in a mere eight months, working, as Paul Griffiths puts it ‘like a film composer, writing to a plan of the stage action, and willing to sacrifice a purely musical coherence.’

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The piece wasn’t a huge success: Gide’s dramaturgy is leisurely, and Stravinsky’s

music is almost too euphonious, rarely straying from diatonic consonance. But its beauties are many: the score is full of strikingly colourful touches.

THE WORK: The work falls into three sections. After a terse two-note motif that punctuates the whole work, The Abduction of Persephone begins with hieratic music (Eumolpus is, after all, a priest), which, for Stravinsky, means a texture dominated by spacious, slow-moving woodwind chords: in it this section Eumolpus addresses the goddess Demeter, and in passing mentions that she has given her daughter Persephone into the care of nymphs.

Much of what follow is given over to a dialogue, couched in dance-like ostinato figures which nevertheless recall the last movement of the Symphony of Psalms. The chorus of nymphs, joined

by Persephone, celebrate the joy of a flower-carpeted meadow and an innocent time described as the ‘first morning of the world.’ That prelapsarian freshness begins to crumble when Eumolpus tells Persephone that if one gazes into the calyx of a narcissusflower, she will see the ‘mysteries of Hades.’ Persephone does so, and sees the souls of the dead, a ‘people without hope’. The music takes on a harder edge as Eumolpus tells her that her compassion has betrothed her to Pluto, and reaches a stern climax on ‘Come!

You will be their queen!’ Persephone bids farewell to her friends, with whom she can no longer enjoy the meadows while she knows of human suffering.

Stravinsky’s Underworld is clearly in the same neighbourhood as Gluck’s, and Persephone descends into it to the ceremonial dotted rhythms of French Baroque music and a plangent but restrained oboe solo. As in the first, the second section, Persephone in the Underworld, begins with an extended dialogue between Persephone and

Eumolpus and an accompanying trumpet break the spell with a Calvinist reminder that Persephone is there to do her duty, which is to rule, not to pity. Then in one of the few sustained passages of purely instrumental music, Persephone is offered the treasures of the underworld (Pluto is, after all, ‘the rich one’). This is a kind of march characterised by an insistent shortshort-long rhythm, with a central trio section dominated by a more acrobatic flute solo. Persephone refuses all – food and treasure – as Eumolpus explains in a busily contrapuntal aria, but the trickster god, Mercury (Gide for some reason prefers the Roman name to the Greek Hermes) arrives and persuades Persephone to eat the pomegranate. This awakens her desire for the earth she has left, and at the chorus’ advice (delivered in a Russian Orthodox-style chant), she looks again into the narcissus, seeing the desolation of winter that her absence has caused.

Eumolpus reminds the Shades that not even winter is eternal.

Demeter, meanwhile, has transformed herself into an old woman and has entered the court of Eleusis (which will become the centre of her cult), where she acts as wet-nurse to the queen’s son, Demophoon, whom she attempts to make immortal. This goes horribly wrong in the Homeric Hymn, but in Gide’s version the successful operation facilitates Persephone’s return to earth.

Stravinsky conveys this in a Baroque style finale with alternating speech and choral interpolations, and a tracery of

woodwinds as Persephone prepares to leave the underworld.

Her resurrection in the final section, The Rebirth of Persephone, is presaged by what Walsh describes, not unkindly, as a ‘Lisztian epic theme that would not be out of place in a B-feature movie thriller’. Eumolpus sets the scene Demeter’s temple, where a chorus of nymphs and mortals (humanity is represented by the sound of children’s voices) waits for Persephone to emerge from her tomb. The chorus passes through a sequence of increasingly urgent sections, as Persephone appears, urging her to regain her liveliness. Gide rather confusingly conflates Demophoon and his brother Triptolemus; Persephone marries this ‘tiller of the soil’, who will teach humanity to farm, on the understanding that she must return to her role as queen of the Underworld to alleviate the suffering of the shades each winter.

Eumolpus’ and the chorus’ peroration reminds us that for a new harvest the seed must die.

THE RITE OF SPRING | 18 & 20 July

the chorus – here representing the Shades. Eumolpus notes that ‘here the death of time makes lives immortal’, and Stravinsky responds with a music of gentle ostinatos like tinkling bells, and simple hypnotic vocal lines that are saved from tedium by his deft use of metrical irregularity. The Shades, as they insist, are not unhappy.

Gordon Kerry © 2019 This is the first performance of Perséphone by the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra.

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IGOR STRAVINSKY Le Sacre du printemps (The Rite of Spring) Part 1 L’Adoration de la terre (Adoration of the Earth) Introduction Danse des adolescentes (Dance of the Young Girls) Jeu du rapt (Ritual of Abduction) Rondes printanières (Spring Rounds) Jeux des cités rivales (Games of the Rival Tribes) Cortège du sage (Procession of the Sage) L’Adoration de la terre (Adoration of the Earth) Danse de la terre (Dance of the Earth) Part 2 Le Sacrifice Introduction Cercles mystérieux des adolescentes (Mystic Circles of Young Girls) Glorification de l’élue (Glorification of the Chosen Virgin) Evocation des ancêtres (Evocation of the Ancestors) Action rituelle des ancêtres (Ritual of the Ancestors) Danse sacrale – L’élue (Sacrificial dance – The Chosen Virgin)

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The trouble started as soon as the solo bassoon began its plaintive version of a Lithuanian folksong. Heckling from the gallery of the new Théâtre des ChampsÉlysées spread down into the stalls. The noise soon became so loud that when Stravinsky fled backstage he found the choreographer Nijinsky standing on a chair in the wings shouting directions at the dancers who could no longer hear the orchestra. The theatre’s electrician frantically flicked the house lights on and off to try and settle the audience; there was a brawl and the police had to be called. The orchestra – which

had had 16 rehearsals under conductor Pierre Monteux – soldiered on and gave what those who could hear it describe as a fine performance.

The riot that attended its first performance in 1913 made The Rite of Spring into the stuff of legend – scholar Richard Taruskin says that Stravinsky ‘spent the rest of his long life telling lies about it’! But while the event has been variously described as modern music’s ‘heroic moment’ it was not a simple matter of the score’s being so wonderfully radical that it caused a fracas among Philistines.

Debussy’s Jeux – also premiered by Sergei Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes – had been booed a couple of weeks before, and Nijinsky, still suspect for his erotic dancing of Debussy’s Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun, was the choreographer despite the task being clearly beyond him. The writer Jean Cocteau, for instance, described the choreography as ‘automaton-like monotony’ and it was this that seems to have caused the most offence. A year later Monteux conducted a concert performance of the music in Paris, and Stravinsky experienced the success ‘such as composers rarely enjoy’ as he was carried through the streets like a sporting hero on the shoulders of his audience.

There had, though, never been anything like it. In his two previous ballets for Diaghilev’s company Stravinsky had mined Russian folklore and fairytale: The Firebird was a story of enchanted princesses, ogres and a magic phoenix; Petrushka’s protagonists are fairground puppets. Certainly since the political upheavals of 1905, and arguably well before, folklore had been a powerful force in Russian art. But in 1910, Stravinsky had a vision of ‘wise elders, seated in a circle watching a young girl dancing herself to death…to propitiate the god of spring’. In due course he

The great Marxist philosopher Theodor Adorno was appalled. That the Rite presents pagan Russia as a utopia was reprehensible; that a young girl dances herself to death before the elders was unforgivable. Musicologist Paul Griffiths argues that ‘The Rite is, simply in its musical operation, a dance of selfextinction.’ He quotes Stravinsky’s longtime assistant Robert Craft’s assertion that the composer ‘repeatedly said that he wrote The Rite of Spring in order “to send everyone” in his Russian past, Tsar, family, instructors, “to hell”’.

This suggests that the Rite attempts to be a ‘clean slate’ untouched by the corruptions of musical ‘civilisation’.

The composer later said that he was ‘the vessel through which the Rite passed’, and the sketches do show that many of his ideas sprang fully formed onto the page. At the same time Stravinsky’s sumptuous orchestration and harmony (here and in the earlier ballets) could not have existed without the music of Glinka and RimskyKorsakov; Debussy was right to call the score ‘primitive music with all modern conveniences’. Moreover, Stravinsky long maintained that the opening bassoon melody, whose timbre suggests traditional dudki or reed pipes, was the only folk tune in the score but the publication of the composer’s sketchbooks in 1969 showed that he

had copied out a number of tunes which found their way, if often disguised, into the score. Taruskin has shown that the tunes are usually relevant in subject matter to the events of the ballet, and as Walsh puts it, Stravinsky reduces them to ‘simple essences which could then be used as motives of rhythmic and ostinato treatment’.

And it is there that we see the novelty and genius of this work. As Walsh goes on to say, ‘What nobody seems to have done before The Rite of Spring was to take dissonant, irregularly formed musical “objects” of very brief extent and release their latent energy by firing them off at one another like so many particles in an atomic accelerator.’

The ‘cells’ that Stravinsky creates out of the simple rhythmic essences of folk tunes are repeated, distorted by the addition of extra beats, interrupted by contrasting cells. The Rite, then, is the ultimate abstraction of Stravinsky’s early ‘Russian’ style, and the foundation for much of his subsequent music.

THE RITE OF SPRING | 18 & 20 July

drafted a scenario (based on this simple idea) with the designer Nicholas Roerich. (They later fought over whose idea it was.) The work is, as scholar Stephen Walsh puts it, ‘hardly a “story” ballet with characters [but] a strict “liturgical” sequence, a sequence which, we understand, will always happen this way, with different participants but the same meaning’. Incidentally, Stravinsky’s Russian title for the work is better translated as Holy Spring rather than The Rite of Spring and its subtitle is ‘Scenes from Pagan Russia’.

Gordon Kerry © 2005 The Ballets Russes gave the first performance of The Rite of Spring on 29 May 1913 at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées in Paris. The conductor was Pierre Monteux and the choreographer, Vaslav Nijinsky. The principal dancers were Maria Plitz (Chosen Virgin), Ludmila Guliuk (Old Woman) and Alexander Vorontzov (Sage). The Melbourne Symphony Orchestra first performed the work in July 1952 with Juan José Castro, and most recently in December 2018 with Markus Stenz.

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MSO Symphony Orchestra Chorus | Perséphone REPETITEUR

ALTO

TENOR

Jacob Abela Calvin Bowman

Ruth Anderson Catherine Bickell Cecilia Björkegren Kate Bramley Jane Brodie Serena Carmel Alexandra Chubaty Nicola Eveleigh Jill Giese Natasha Godfrey Jillian Graham Debbie Griffiths Ros Harbison Sue Hawley Jennifer Henry Kristine Hensel Helen Hill Joy Lukman Helen MacLean Christina McCowan Stephanie Mitchell Sandy Nagy Catriona Nguyen-Robertson Nicole Paterson Natasha Pracejus Alison Ralph Kate Rice Mair Roberts Maya Tanja Rodingen Helen Rommelaar Kerry Roulston Lisa Savige Julienne Seal Emma Warburton

Kent Borchard Steve Burnett Matthew Castle John Cleghorn Keaton Cloherty Geoffrey Collins James Dipnall Simon Gaites David Henley Lyndon Horsburgh Wayne Kinrade Jessop Maticevski Shumack Michael Mobach Jean-Francois Ravat Nathan Guan Kiat Teo Tim Wright

SOPRANO Philippa Allen Emma Anvari Julie Arblaster Anne-Marie Brownhill Eva Butcher Jessica Chan Samantha Davies Michele de Courcy Maureen Doris Laura Fahey Catherine Folley Susan Fone Camilla Gorman Georgie Grech Aurora Harmathy Juliana Hassett Penny Huggett Anna Kidman Maya Kraj-Krajewski Judy Longbottom Charlotte Midson Tian Nie Caitlin Noble Karin Otto Natalie Reid Janelle Richardson Jo Robin Jodi Samartgis Jillian Samuels Lydia Sherren Freja Soininen Emily Swanson Christa Tom Fabienne Vandenburie Julia Wang Ivy Weng

BASS Alexandras Bartaska Richard Bolitho Ted Davies Peter Deane Andrew Ham Andrew Hibbard Joseph Hie Jordan Janssen Evan Lawson Gary Levy Douglas McQueen-Thomson Steven Murie Vern O’Hara Stephen Pyk Nick Sharman Liam Straughan Tom Turnbull Foon Wong Ned Wright-Smith Maciek Zielinski

ARTISTIC DIRECTOR Vicki King PERFORMERS Keeley Abrahamson Piper Adeney-Tasker Lotus Brown Sophie Cowall Kathryn Desmier Jasmine Devlin Jacqueline Dyson Jericha Edillon

Laura Elefano Emma Howlett Holly Hudson-Thompson Mary Lazar Annabel Major Madeleine Major Mia Mazzarella Evie Murugasu Emily Napolitano Isuli Perera Anastasia Polesskiy Sophie Robertson

Grace Robertson Isabella Schneider Katherine Semenov Natalie Symonds Claire Tay Eliza Thawley Pia Tripathi Clare Wever Olivia White Tianna Zhao

THE RITE OF SPRING | 18 & 20 July

Australian Girls Choir

National Boys Choir of Australia CO-ARTISTIC DIRECTORS Andrew Bainbridge Philip Carmody PERFORMERS Shilah Brown Liam Browne Oliver Blanchard Wilson Cai Caelan Chong Oliver Dean

Joshua Doan Daniel Elias Hunter Greco Cameron Heath Harry Hendel Mitchell Laurie Alexander Lee Riki Lethbridge Jonathan Liew Noah Liu Santiago Merchant William Morrison

Joshua Ng Ryan Ong Isaac Pearson Oliver Richardson Matthew Risson Natsuki Rogers Tom Saro Patrick Schneider Robin Soeradinata Robert Strangward Aaron Tan

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AN INTERVIEW WITH

STEPHANIE

MITCHELL MSO Chorus member

Stephanie Mitchell is a multi-instrumentalist, singer, and composer who is vision-impaired. She joined the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra Chorus in August 2018, and recently sat down with Lucien Fischer, MSO Chorus Coordinator, to discuss her experience.

Why did you decide to join the MSO Chorus, and how have you found the experience?

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The church choir that I’d been a member of for many years was brilliant, but I’d always wanted to join a more professional ensemble where I could sing challenging music. I always had a dream of performing with an orchestra and so I decided to join the MSO Chorus in August last year. The singers and administrators of the Chorus are extremely supportive in every way, from adapting the sight-reading portion of the audition, or providing scores to be transcribed, to choristers helping me on

stage during performances. I’ve never experienced such brilliant support from an organisation and am extremely grateful to be a part of it!

What is Braille music is, and how does it work?

Braille music is a system of raised dots which details all the elements of a traditional printed score including notes, expression markings, rehearsal markings, articulations and lyrics. Braille music does not have clefs or lines and spaces but uses a system of octaves for the pitch of the note, and a system for

rhythm. We don’t have key signatures as such, just the number of sharps or flats in the pieces. We also only have our part of the score (which for me is the alto part) and not the full vocal score, and the lyrics are placed above the music rather than below.

Is blindness or low vision a barrier to learning and performing music?

No it is not! There are many successful blind musicians out there, both choristers and soloists.

What is involved with obtaining a Braille score for projects with the MSO Chorus?

Once I’ve received a PDF version of the score from the MSO Chorus Coordinator, I send it onto the transcriber at Vision Australia where we are provided with a free quota of transcribed pages each year. The process is time-consuming as there are only a few transcribers, so I need PDFs of the music as early as possible so I can have the score before the rehearsal period starts. If the score doesn’t arrive in time then I will record my part during rehearsal and learn the music until it arrives.

How do you make changes to your Braille score during rehearsal?

I don’t, as I have not found an effective way of doing so. I will sometimes take notes via recording, or write it in the notes app on my phone. I then memorise the changes. However, I can pick up a lot from listening to people around me. You learn to listen to things like the collective breathing before an entry, a sense of when there will be a cut-off, or a sudden change of tempo or dynamics.

It’s a lot more difficult when we sing with the Orchestra, but by then I can often sing from memory which means I can focus more on listening.

INTERESTED IN JOINING THE MSO CHORUS? We are looking for a variety of voices to join us on stage.

Not only do you get to perform some of the best symphonic choral repertoire ever written, but you get to work with the world's leading conductors and our extraordinary orchestra.

Auditions for new members are held regularly. Register your interest at mso.com.au/chorus

Since joining the MSO Chorus, you’ve sung in many languages including Mandarin, Sanskrit, and most recently, in an Aboriginal language. How have you found the experience of performing in so many different languages?

Singing in different languages is often more challenging than the music itself and is probably the most challenging part of singing in the Chorus, partly because I have a hearing impairment which makes it even harder. I use YouTube a lot to get some of the language when I can, along with recording during rehearsals.

I am currently looking into a speech therapist to help with this through my NDIS funding, which will enable me to improve in this area.

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The Rite of Spring and Firebird 19 July 2019 | 7.30pm Costa Hall, Geelong Melbourne Symphony Orchestra Sir Andrew Davis conductor RAVEL Mother Goose Suite [16'] STRAVINSKY Firebird Suite

[23'] — INTERVAL —

STRAVINSKY The Rite of Spring [35']

Running time: approximately one hour and 50 minutes including a 20-minute interval.

Timings listed are approximate.

A biography for Sir Andrew Davis can be found on page 11.

Pre-concert talk: 19 July at 6.30pm, Costa Hall Learn more about the performance at a pre-concert presentation with Cybec Assistant Conductor, Tianyi Lu.

MAURICE RAVEL

(1875–1937)

Ma mère l’Oye (Mother Goose) – Suite I. Pavane of the Sleeping Beauty II. Tom Thumb III. Laideronnette, Empress of the Pagodas IV. Conversations of Beauty and the Beast V. The Fairy Garden Ravel’s closeness to his family and his friendships with children belied the reputation he acquired among his contemporaries. The critic M.D. Calvocoressi, who became Ravel’s close friend, wrote of him: When one came into contact with him, the first impression was almost sure to be that of dryness and aloofness… He was endowed with a great capacity for indifference and also contempt, but – as one found out quite soon – as great a capacity for admiration; and I was to realise, a little later, that behind the cutting manner, the irony and the aloofness, there lurked an even greater capacity for affection.

The Mother Goose Suite (Ma mère l’Oye, a set of five piano pieces for four hands, subtitled 5 pièces enfantines or ‘5 children’s pieces’) expressed Ravel’s affection for the two young children of his friends the Godebskis, to whom he dedicated the music: ‘…my young friends Mimi and Jean Godebski. My intention of evoking the poetry of childhood in these pieces naturally led me to simplify my style and thin out my writing.’

Geneviève Durony and Jeanne Leleu, aged six and seven respectively, gave the first public performance of the piano duet version at the Salle Gaveau in 1910.

Afterwards Ravel wrote to Leleu (a pupil of Marguerite Long and later a professor at the Paris Conservatoire): Mademoiselle, When you are a great virtuoso and I an old fogy, covered with honours or else completely forgotten, you will perhaps have pleasant memories of having given an artist the rare satisfaction of hearing a work of his, of a rather unusual nature, interpreted exactly as it should be. Thank you a thousand times for your child-like and sensitive performance of Ma mère l’Oye. The music of the suite has the concentrated dimension of a child’s view. Ravel creates the illusion of reading or hearing vivid and gripping stories, lingering on every line, yet eager for the next event.

THE RITE OF SPRING AND FIREBIRD | 19 July

Program Notes

In 1911 Ravel orchestrated the suite, and later turned the music into a ballet, adding a prelude, a new opening scene, and interludes connecting the individual numbers; this was performed in 1912.

In either of these later forms, Ravel’s orchestration brings an even greater sophistication to the music, and in places a certain opulence.

The title Mother Goose, and most of the stories, were taken by Ravel from Charles Perrault’s Contes de ma mère l’Oye (Tales of Mother Goose), published in 1697. Ravel included some quotations from the stories at the relevant points in the music.

Pavane of the Sleeping Beauty is only 20 bars long, and bears no quotation.

We can easily imagine the sleeping princess in the woods, and perhaps the sorrow of the courtiers as they contemplate her. Ravel had already composed a pavane for another princess, and this courtly dance of a slow, stately character, with its modal music, suggests the ‘once-upon-a time’ character of the stories.

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THE RITE OF SPRING AND FIREBIRD | 19 July

Tom Thumb is prefaced with this quotation from Perrault’s tale: He believed that he would easily find his path by means of his breadcrumbs which he had scattered wherever he passed, but he was very surprised when he could not find a single crumb – the birds had come and eaten everything up.

The changes in direction of the accompaniment, joined by solo oboe, depict Tom Thumb’s lost wandering, and the chirruping of the birds is suggested not only by the woodwind, but by a solo violin playing harmonics – a similarity of sound likely to trick the listener who is not watching the players. (Ravel loved this kind of deception.)

The story Laideronnette, Empress of the Pagodas is from a collection by the Comtesse d’Aulnoy, contemporary and imitator of Perrault. A former princess has been made ugly by a wicked witch – hence her name, which means ‘Ugly Little Girl’. With a Green Serpent who had once been a handsome prince, she has sailed to the land of the Pagodas, tiny peoplelike articulated figurines, with bodies made of jewels and porcelain. Here the two travellers are restored to their former appearance and married. The scene described is the Empress’ bath: She undressed and stepped into the bath. Immediately the Pagodas and Pagodines began to sing and play their instruments: some had theorbos made of walnut shells, others had viols made of almond shells, for the instruments had to be made to their measure.

The music, with its oriental features (use of the pentatonic scale and the gong) brilliantly evokes the exotic scene. The slithering Green Serpent is there, too.

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In Conversations of Beauty and the Beast, the voice of Beauty is represented by the clarinet and that of the beast by the contrabassoon. The conversations

inscribed in the score are taken from the story by Marie Leprince de Beaumont: ‘ When I think how good-natured you are, you do not seem so ugly.’ ‘ Yes, I have indeed a kind heart, but I am a monster.’ ‘ There are many men more monstrous than you.’ ‘ If I had wit, I would invent a fine compliment to thank you, but I am only a beast.’

‘Beauty, will you be my wife?’

‘No, Beast!’ ‘ I die content since I have had the pleasure of seeing you one more time.’ ‘ No, my dearest Beast, you shall not die; you shall live to be my husband.’

The Beast had disappeared and she saw at her feet a Prince more handsome than the God of Love, thanking her for having ended his enchantment.

The slow waltz music which forms the setting of this conversation is a tribute

by Ravel to Erik Satie, composer of the Gymnopédies.

In the scenario of the ballet, the final movement forms an apotheosis: Prince Charming finds the Princess asleep in The Fairy Garden. As the sun rises, she awakens; there is a joyous fanfare as the other characters gather around her and the Good Fairy blesses them all. The final movement of the suite, where only the title tells us that this is the fairy’s magical garden, is remarkable for the way Ravel rises so quickly and tellingly to a resplendent climax, in which his orchestration realises the fanfare imitations of the original piano version. © Symphony Australia The MSO first performed Ravel’s Mother Goose Suite on 3 May 1954 under conductor Sir Bernard Heinze, and most recently in May 2014 with Nicholas Carter.

The Firebird – Suite (1919) Introduction – The Firebird and her Dance – Variation of the Firebird The Princesses’ Round (Khorovod) Infernal Dance of King Kashchei Berceuse Finale The Russian fairy-tale world was irresistibly exotic to European audiences in the early 20th century, so for the 1910 Paris season of the Ballets Russes, artistic director Sergei Diaghilev commissioned Anatoly Liadov to compose a score to Mikhail Fokine’s scenario and choreography.

When Liadov failed to deliver, Diaghilev turned to the 28-year-old Stravinsky.

The ballet would be the largest single piece composed by Stravinsky to date, and would require what the composer in retrospect derided as ‘descriptive’ music, composed to a scenario not of his choosing, and with a deadline that was frighteningly close. But such things concentrate the mind wonderfully, and in The Firebird, Stravinsky emerges as a major composer of the 20th century, while bringing to a radiant close the Russian Romantic tradition.

Fokine’s original scenario for the ballet brings together characters from three strands of Russian folklore: the Firebird – a phoenix; Kashchei the Deathless, a demon attended by monsters, who abducts maidens and turns knights to stone; and Ivan Tsarevich, who personifies a nationalist heroism.

The story begins in the enchanted forest that surrounds Kashchei’s castle.

The Introduction begins in the sepulchral depths of the orchestra, rising to fluttering winds and a plaintive oboe solo. The Firebird’s dance, as she enters pursued

by Ivan Tsarevich, is a spritely waltz clothed in brilliant orchestral colour that dissolves into scurrying flute textures as Ivan captures her. The Firebird begs for freedom and promises to come to Ivan’s aid should he ever require it; as a token of her promise she gives him a plume from her tail. Moving deeper into the forest, Ivan finds himself in the garden of Kashchei’s castle. Thirteen princesses appear and play a game with golden apples; Ivan, enchanted by the thirteenth princess’s beauty, reveals his presence and they all perform a stately round-dance (Khorovod) to a Russian folk-tune.

Kashchei’s monsters appear, capturing Ivan as Kashchei arrives. The monsters attempt to turn Ivan to stone in the face of the princesses’ pleas for mercy. Ivan summons the Firebird, who casts a spell on the monsters. An exhilarating Infernal Dance follows. The Firebird dances a Berceuse, or lullaby, putting Kashchei and the monsters into a magic sleep and telling Ivan that he must destroy the egg in which Kashchei keeps his soul. As Kashchei awakes, Ivan does so, thus destroying the evil demon. In the single-movement finale, a melody passed from solo horn through the full orchestra announces the destruction of evil and the reawakening of the knights whom Kashchei had turned to stone. Ivan, naturally, marries the thirteenth princess in music of great ecstasy.

THE RITE OF SPRING AND FIREBIRD | 19 July

IGOR STRAVINSKY

(1882–1971)

The Firebird was premiered by the Ballets Russes in Paris on 25 June 1910.

The suite featured in this performance is the second of three created by Stravinsky, which he hope would be attractive to concert promoters in its brevity.

Adapted from a note by Gordon Kerry © 2009/13 The MSO first performed the suite from The Firebird on 25 July 1944 under the direction of Eugene Ormandy. Most recently, in October 2018, the Orchestra performed the complete ballet under Jukka-Pekka Saraste.

The program note for The Rite of Spring can be found on page 26.

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Elgar’s Cello Concerto 2 August 2019 | 7.30pm 3 August 2019 | 7.30pm 5 August 2019 | 6.30pm Arts Centre Melbourne, Hamer Hall Melbourne Symphony Orchestra Bertrand de Billy conductor Johannes Moser cello WAGNER Siegfried Idyll [18'] ELGAR Cello Concerto

[30'] — INTERVAL —

R. STRAUSS Also Sprach Zarathustra [33']

Running time: approximately two hours including a 20-minute interval.

Timings listed are approximate.

Pre-concert talk: 2 & 3 August at 6.15pm, Hamer Hall Learn more about the performance at a pre-concert presentation with MSO Artistic Coordinator, Michael Williamson.

Post-concert conversation: 5 August following performance, Hamer Hall Stalls Foyer Join composer and ABC Classic producer, Andrew Aronowicz, for a conversation about the performance.

Johannes Moser

Since 2014–15 Bertrand de Billy has been principal guest conductor of the Dresden Philharmonic. He was First Kapellmeister and Deputy Music Director at the Anhaltian Theatre, Dessau (1993–1995), and between 1996 and 1998 held the same position at the Vienna Volksoper. He has been Music Director at Barcelona’s Gran Teatre del Liceu (1999 to 2004) and of the Radio Symphony Orchestra in Vienna (2002–2010).

Johannes Moser has performed with many of the world’s leading orchestras including the Berlin Philharmonic, Chicago Symphony, London Symphony, and Tokyo’s NHK Symphony, and under conductors such as Muti, Maazel, Jansons, Mehta, Gergiev, Boulez, Bychkov, and Dudamel.

Recent engagements have included the Lutosławski concerto with the Dortmund Philharmonic and a residency with the Berlin Radio Symphony.

Recent appearances have included concerts in the Elbphilharmonie Hamburg, and with the Belgian National Orchestra, Royal Danish Orchestra, Iceland Symphony, Vienna Symphony, Hungarian National Philharmonic and Choir, and the Middle-German Radio Symphony Orchestra, Leipzig.

He has recently conducted Otello at the Bastille and Puccini’s Il trittico in Japan and at the Metropolitan Opera.

Possessing a broad repertoire, his extensive discography includes the 2017 release Jonas Kaufmann L’Opera with the Bavarian State Orchestra. Among his awards is France’s Chevalier of the National Order of the Legion of Honour.

Johannes Moser has recorded the Elgar concerto with the Orchestre de la Suisse Romande. Bernard Rands’ Chains Like the Sea (with the BBC Philharmonic conducted by Clark Rundell) was released in February.

conductor

cello

ELGAR’S CELLO CONCERTO | 2–5 August

Bertrand de Billy

Born into a musical family, Johannes began studying the cello at the age of eight and became a student of Professor David Geringas in 1997. He was the top prize winner at the 2002 Tchaikovsky Competition, in addition to being awarded the Special Prize for his interpretation of the Rococo Variations. In 2014 he was awarded with the prestigious Brahms prize.

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ELGAR’S CELLO CONCERTO | 2–5 August 38

Program Notes RICHARD WAGNER

(1813–1883)

Siegfried Idyll The Siegfried Idyll reveals a touchingly gentle and domestic side of a composer who often displayed the opposite.

Wagner’s full title for the piece was Tribschen Idyll, with Fidi’s Birdsong and Orange Sunrise, as a Symphonic Birthday Greeting from Richard to Cosima.

Tribschen is the villa near the Swiss town of Lucerne where Wagner was living with his wife, Cosima, whom he had recently married when her divorce from Hans von Bülow was finalised. She already had two daughters by Wagner, and in 1869 a son was born, Siegfried, known in the family circle as Fidi. On Christmas Day 1870, which was also Cosima’s birthday, she awoke to the strains of music. As the music died away, Richard came into the room and offered Cosima the score of the ‘symphonic birthday poem’. The 13 musicians stood on various levels of the staircase of Tribschen. They were rehearsed secretly by the young Hans Richter, who played horn, and also the brief trumpet part.

Richter, later to become famous as a conductor, was at that stage living in the Wagner household. He had almost given the game away to Cosima, who wondered why he was disappearing every evening, and what on earth he was doing practising the trumpet!

The Siegfried Idyll is a kind of pendant to the music drama Siegfried, on which Wagner had been working, and many of its themes are to be found in the opera. The peaceful melody with which it begins is associated in the opera’s last act with Brünnhilde’s yielding, her giving up of memories of immortality for love of Siegfried. Another theme, appearing in counterpoint with it, is that

of Brünnhilde’s sleep. There is a second theme, not from the opera, based on an old German lullaby, and later the wind instruments present the theme associated with the words ‘Siegfried, Treasure of the World’, from the opera’s love duet. We hear the horn melody associated with the young Siegfried as hero, and the theme of the woodbird who leads Siegfried to Brünnhilde’s fire-surrounded rock.

Although it began as private chamber music (Wagner later sanctioned its publication and performance with orchestral strings), the Siegfried Idyll is really an early example of the symphonic poem. Liszt invented this genre and Richard Strauss developed it: Wagner here depends less on an extraneous program than either of these composers. The Siegfried Idyll (which Wagner originally planned to call ‘Symphony’) can be heard as a single movement in a kind of expanded sonata form. The first theme, in fact, comes from a planned string quartet Richard had promised to Cosima in the days of their first love. Only later was it incorporated into the opera Siegfried.

The second group of themes ends with the lullaby, played by the oboe and accompanied by string figures which, Wagner explained, represent sheep.

The surprise performance of this piece was the most ambitious of a number of pantomimes mounted in the Wagner household. Although containing many private meanings for the family, the Siegfried Idyll is an application to instrumental music of a method Wagner developed in his music dramas – the building of broad melodies out of constantly repeated single phrases.

As Donald Tovey has written, the Siegfried Idyll is ‘a gigantic though intensely quiet piece of purely instrumental music, connected with the opera only by a private undercurrent of poetic allusion’.

Cosima herself recalled Richard telling

David Garrett © 1991 The Melbourne Symphony Orchestra first performed this work on 25 August 1939 under Sir Malcolm Sargent, and most recently in August 2018 with Sir Andrew Davis.

EDWARD ELGAR

(1857–1934)

Cello Concerto in E minor, Op.85 Adagio – Moderato – Lento – Allegro molto Adagio Allegro – Moderato – Allegro, ma non troppo Elgar’s compositional career reached its last zenith with the appearance of his Violin Concerto in 1910 and Second Symphony in 1911, works into which he claimed, ‘I have written out my soul… shewn myself.’ Between them and this 1919 Cello Concerto, his last major work, Elgar faced steadily worsening prospects in almost every aspect of his life, from the personal challenges of aging, ill-health and bereavement, to the professional affronts of being elbowed aside as a conductor and composer by younger colleagues. And there was also the war. While the youth of Britain marched into France in August 1914 singing a music-hall hit, ‘It’s a Long Way to Tipperary’, Elgar’s Land of Hope and Glory – which had originated a decade earlier during the second Boer War as the trio of his first Pomp and

Circumstance March (1901) – was mobilised again by their parents as a patriotic anthem. Rendered superfluous by his own old tune at home, and his music having little appeal to the average soldier at the front, Elgar, at 57, struggled to find a new wartime voice in works like Carillon, a musically slight but sentimentally eloquent response to the tragedy in Belgium, which he recorded for gramophone in 1915, and which here in Australia became his nextmost-popular contribution to the war effort. His artistically and emotionally more substantial choral score The Spirit of England, settings of war poems by Laurence Binyon first heard in 1916 and 1917 in a Britain still deep in the hostilities, had more hopeful first performances in Melbourne and Sydney in July-August 1918, just as public confidence in an Allied victory exploded. But it was Binyon’s lines commemorating the millions fallen (‘They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old; Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn’) – not Elgar’s music for them – that everyone remembered.

Binyon, who wrote these lines in the war’s first month, worked at the British Museum under Elgar’s close friend Sidney Colvin, the keeper of prints and drawings, and it was Colvin who first suggested Elgar turn them into ‘a wonderful Requiem for the slain’.

Too old to fight, but having meanwhile volunteered as a hospital orderly in France, Binyon himself approached Elgar immediately after the Armistice was declared with a request to set his new ode, ‘Peace’. But by letter on 18 November, Elgar demurred: ‘I do not feel drawn to write peace music somehow…the whole atmosphere is too full of complexities for me to feel music to it.’ Moreover, he found Binyon’s invocations of happy dead and healing spirits ‘cruelly obtuse to the individual sorrow and sacrifice – a cruelty I resent bitterly & disappointedly’. He had

ELGAR’S CELLO CONCERTO | 2–5 August

her that ‘all that he had set out to do was to work the theme which had come to him in Starnberg (where we were living together), and which he had promised me as a quartet, into a morning serenade, and then he had unconsciously woven our whole life into it – Fidi’s birth, my recuperation, Fidi’s bird, etc. As Schopenhauer said, this is the way a musician works – he expresses life in a language which reason does not understand.’

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ELGAR’S CELLO CONCERTO | 2–5 August

anyway, as his wife, Alice, privately recorded in her diary two months earlier, already conceived another ‘lament which should be in a war symphony’, music which evolved over the spring and summer of 1919 into ‘a real large work and I think good and alive’, as he described the ‘nearly completed’ Cello Concerto in a letter to Sidney Colvin and his wife, Frances, on 26 June, asking permission to dedicate it to them. On 27 October Elgar himself, out of duty to soloist Felix Salmond, reluctantly proceeded to direct the premiere, well knowing it was destined for near disaster after his co-conductor, Albert Coates, used up most of the London Symphony’s available rehearsal time preparing Scriabin’s Poem of Ecstasy, which to add insult to injury was greeted by a storming ovation. As to the work itself, even some of his warmest admirers were at a loss what to make of a work that, as one wrote to The Musical Times in 1923, ‘anyhow, in my opinion…does not represent Elgar at his greatest’. And it was not until Elgar and Beatrice Harrison made their stillavailable 1928 recording that a new public, many of them unfamiliar with his earlier successes, began to appreciate the work as a masterpiece in its own right.

The work is laid out on paper in four movements, though listeners tend to hear the first and second movements, played without break, as a single span.

Whereas his Violin Concerto opened into a conventionally spacious orchestral introduction, pending the princely arrival of its soloist, Elgar sets his cello soloist in a more intimate frame. Denied welcoming brass or upper strings, the brief opening cello recitative (Adagio) sets its own unusually pared-back terms – hereinafter will be lyricism, light orchestration, simple layouts.

The violas, completely unaccompanied, announce the dreamy, modal, muchloved main theme (Moderato), its rocking

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rhythm Elgar’s characteristic pastoral lilt. The winds introduce the airy, majortending contrasting theme, which the cello then sets about varying, before the main theme simply returns. A longer, second cello recitative (Lento) inducts into faster, lighter, scherzo-like Allegro molto, the cello driving the music forward with its scrubbing semiquavers.

Elgar anticipated that the Adagio, despite its anticipatory half-close, would often be played without the rest of the concerto, and scored it with just strings and wind sextet. The cello melody gives the uncanny impression of being an internal dialogue between two separate voices, higher and lower, each merging in and out of the countermelodies of the supporting strings.

The finale opens, exceptionally, announcing its fragmentary theme (Allegro) without the cello. The cello then reworks it in a parenthetic recitative and short cadenza (Moderato), before it takes over fully (Allegro, ma non troppo). The soloist sweetly but firmly pulls the music up introducing its arcing subsidiary idea, then carried on by flowing semiquavers into the extensive development. There’s a heady reprise of the fast theme, echoes of earlier quiet asides, and a penultimate throwback to the concerto’s opening gesture, caught up into a rapid, surging close.

Graeme Skinner © 2014 The Melbourne Symphony Orchestra first performed Elgar’s Cello Concerto on 24 October 1945 with conductor Joseph Post and soloist Harold Beck, and most recently in September 2011 with Mario Venzago and Sol Gabetta.

Also sprach Zarathustra (Thus Spake Zarathustra) – Symphonic poem, Op.30 Introduction: Sunrise – Of the Back-worlds-men – Of the Great Longing – Of Joys and Passions – The Funeral Song – Of Science – The Convalescent – The Dance Song – Night Wanderer’s Song In 1891–92 the usually robust Strauss suffered a period of serious illness, including bouts of pneumonia, bronchitis and pleurisy. In the summer of 1892 he took leave of his duties at the Weimar Opera and travelled extensively through Italy, Greece and Egypt, soaking up the sun, but more importantly enjoying the awesome physical remains of the ancient pagan civilisations in those countries. It was at this time that he began to think about a musical response to some of the ideas of the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, particularly those expressed in his poem Also sprach Zarathustra (Thus spake Zoroaster), though the work’s composition had to wait until 1896.

Zoroaster (as he was known to the ancient Greeks) was a Persian prophet living in the sixth century BCE who taught that the universe, and humankind in particular, is subject to the eternal struggle of two gods, represented by light and darkness; his religion survives among the Parsees of modern India.

Nietzsche’s relationship to Zoroastrian ideas is fairly loose, and as Norman Del Mar puts it, he used these ‘as a prop on which to clothe his own ideas on the purpose and destiny of mankind’. The most famous – indeed, notorious – of

these is the idea of the Übermensch or Superman. ‘Man,’ in Nietzsche’s words, ‘is a thing to be surmounted… what is the ape to man? A jest or a thing of shame. So shall man be to the Superman.’ While Nietzsche (and, it must be admitted, the younger Strauss) were disdainful of Christianity’s compassion for weakness, it is drawing a long bow to make Nietzsche responsible for the atrocities of Nazism. Indeed, Nietzsche scholar Joachim Köhler argues that Also sprach Zarathustra, with its celebration of the individual will, partly grew out of the poet’s freeing himself from the dominating personality of the composer Richard Wagner. And Wagner’s widow Cosima, writing to her son-in-law Houston Stewart Chamberlain (whose racist ideas definitely did influence Hitler), condemned Nietzsche’s book for its ‘Jewishness’.

ELGAR’S CELLO CONCERTO | 2–5 August

RICHARD STRAUSS

(1864–1949)

Strauss’ work is, as he said, ‘freely after Fr. Nietzsche’ which afforded him ‘much aesthetic enjoyment’ rather than any profound philosophical conversion. Strauss takes some of the chapter headings of the poem as the defining images for each section of his tone-poem. It begins with the famous invocation to the sun, with low rumbling accompanying the trumpets’ simple C-G-C theme (which in much of Strauss represents primeval nature).

The increasing blaze of full chords establishes C major as one pole of the work (and as Del Mar notes, the sound of the organ at the end of the section adds a liturgical note). Of the Back-worlds-men depicts humanity in its primitive, or rather naïve state (in B minor, significantly – B being the other tonal pole of the piece). Strauss includes those who profess Christianity in this category, quoting a fragment of the plainchant for the Credo to underline his point, but the movement still reaches a gorgeous climax for multi divided strings.

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ELGAR’S CELLO CONCERTO | 2–5 August

Of the Great Longing, which follows, is a depiction of humanity’s search for something beyond mere superstition, but Strauss’ music dramatises the conflict between nature (the trumpet theme) and humanity’s tendency to create dogma with more hints of plainchant and the unresolved conflict between the keys of C and B. A new chromatic motif leads into the Of Joys and Passions section with a theme that Strauss described as ‘A flat (brass: dark blue)’. Actually the section tends to be in C minor, linking it to the idea of nature, whereas the following Funeral Song is in B minor, and therefore linked to the idea of man.

Of Science is based on a deeply-voiced fugue that Strauss described as ‘spinechilling’ and Del Mar regards as having a ‘strangely mysterious quality’ despite its dour timbre. In The Convalescent Nietzsche describes Zoroaster’s spiritual and physical collapse, after

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which he emerges as the Superman.

The Dance Song of the Superman is, like the ‘Dance of Seven Veils’ in Salome, a Viennese waltz – a Straussian joke, perhaps. Here poet and composer part company: Strauss’ Zoroaster displays none of the triumphalism that Nietzsche’s does, and the work closes with a mysterious and tranquil Night Wanderer’s Song in which the keys of nature and man still quietly contend.

After the final rehearsal for the premiere, Strauss, with characteristic modesty, wrote to his wife: ‘Zarathustra is glorious…of all my pieces, the most perfect in form, the richest in content and the most individual in character…

I’m a fine fellow after all, and feel just a little pleased with myself.’

Gordon Kerry © 2004 The Melbourne Symphony Orchestra first performed this work on 16 July 1955 under the direction of Eugene Goossens, and most recently in May 2013 with Sir Andrew Davis.

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CONDUCTOR’S CIRCLE Current Conductor’s Circle Members Jenny Anderson David Angelovich G C Bawden and L de Kievit Lesley Bawden Joyce Bown Mrs Jenny Brukner and the late Mr John Brukner Ken Bullen Peter A Caldwell Luci and Ron Chambers Beryl Dean Sandra Dent Lyn Edward Alan Egan JP Gunta Eglite Mr Derek Grantham Marguerite Garnon-Williams 47

Supporters

Drs Clem Gruen and Rhyl Wade Louis Hamon OAM Carol Hay Rod Home Tony Howe Laurence O’Keefe and Christopher James Audrey M Jenkins John Jones George and Grace Kass Mrs Sylvia Lavelle Pauline and David Lawton Cameron Mowat David Orr Matthew O’Sullivan Rosia Pasteur Elizabeth Proust AO Penny Rawlins Joan P Robinson Neil Roussac Anne Roussac-Hoyne Suzette Sherazee Michael Ryan and Wendy Mead Anne Kieni-Serpell and Andrew Serpell Jennifer Shepherd Profs. Gabriela and George Stephenson Pamela Swansson Lillian Tarry Dr Cherilyn Tillman Mr and Mrs R P Trebilcock

Michael Ullmer AO The Hon. Rosemary Varty Mr Tam Vu Marian and Terry Wills Cooke OAM Mark Young Anonymous (27) The MSO gratefully acknowledges the support of the following Estates: Angela Beagley Neilma Gantner The Hon Dr Alan Goldberg AO QC Gwen Hunt Audrey Jenkins Joan Jones Pauline Marie Johnston C P Kemp Peter Forbes MacLaren Joan Winsome Maslen Lorraine Maxine Meldrum Prof Andrew McCredie Miss Sheila Scotter AM MBE Marion A I H M Spence Molly Stephens Jennifer May Teague Albert Henry Ullin Jean Tweedie Herta and Fred B Vogel Dorothy Wood

TRUSTS AND FOUNDATIONS

Gall Family Foundation, The Archie & Hilda Graham Foundation, The Gross Foundation, Ern Hartley Foundation, The A.L. Lane Foundation, Gwen & Edna Jones Foundation, Sidney Myer MSO Trust Fund, MS Newman Family Foundation, The Thomas O’Toole Foundation, The Ray & Joyce Uebergang Foundation, The Ullmer Family Foundation

48

MSO BOARD

Life Members Marc Besen AC and Eva Besen AO John Gandel AC and Pauline Gandel AC Sir Elton John CBE Harold Mitchell AC Lady Potter AC CMRI Mrs Jeanne Pratt AC

Chairman Michael Ullmer AO

Artistic Ambassador Tan Dun Artistic Ambassador Geoffrey Rush AC The MSO honours the memory of John Brockman OAM Life Member The Honourable Alan Goldberg AO QC Life Member Roger Riordan AM Life Member Ila Vanrenen Life Member

Supporters

HONORARY APPOINTMENTS

Deputy Chairman David Li AM Managing Director Sophie Galaise Board Directors Andrew Dudgeon AM Danny Gorog Lorraine Hook Margaret Jackson AC Di Jameson David Krasnostein AM Hyon-Ju Newman Glenn Sedgwick Helen Silver AO Company Secretary Oliver Carton

The MSO relies on your ongoing philanthropic support to sustain our artists, and support access, education, community engagement and more. We invite our suporters to get close to the MSO through a range of special events.

The MSO welcomes your support at any level. Donations of $2 and over are tax deductible, and supporters are recognised as follows: $1,000+ (Player)

$20,000+ (Impresario)

$2,500+ (Associate)

$50,000+ (Virtuoso)

$5,000+ (Principal)

$100,000+ (Platinum)

$10,000+ (Maestro) The MSO Conductor’s Circle is our bequest program for members who have notified of a planned gift in their Will.

Enquiries P (03) 8646 1551 | E philanthropy@mso.com.au 49

CALENDAR

OF EVENTS SEASON 2020

FI NA L TI CK E T S

7 August

8 – 10 August

MSO Season 2020 Launch

The Film Music of Nick Harry Potter and the Cave and Warren Ellis Order of the Phoenix™ Arts Centre Melbourne, in Concert

Arts Centre Melbourne, Hamer Hall

15 – 17 August

Hamer Hall

Arts Centre Melbourne, Hamer Hall

21 August

22 – 24 August

Saint-Saëns’ Cello Concerto

Symphonie Fantastique

30 August – 2 September

Arts Centre Melbourne, Hamer Hall

Arts Centre Melbourne, Hamer Hall and Robert Blackwood Hall, Monash University

Sibelius’ Violin Concerto Arts Centre Melbourne, Hamer Hall

Tickets at mso.com.au

Thank you to our Partners Principal Partner

Government Partners

Premier Partners

Premier Education and Research Partner

Major Partners

Venue Partner

Program Development Partner

Education Partners

Supporting Partners

Quest Southbank

The CEO Institute

Ernst & Young

Bows for Strings

The Observership Program

Easts meets West Program Partners Consulate General of the People’s Republic of China in Melbourne

LRR Family Trust

Media and Broadcast Partners

Mr Chu Wanghua and Dr Shirley Chu

Associate Professor Douglas Gin and Susan Gin

BEST SEAT in the house

As Principal Partner of the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra, we know the importance of delighting an audience. That’s why when you’re in Emirates First, you’ll enjoy the ultimate flying experience with fine dining at any time in your own private suite.

*Emirates First Class Private Suite pictured. For more information visit emirates.com/au, call 1300 303 777, or contact your local travel agent.