August 2024

CONCERT PROGRAM

AUGUST 2024

FOUR SEASONS RECOMPOSED / HIDDEN THOUGHTS III MOZART AND BRAHMS FAURÉ’S REQUIEM

THE MEASURE OF

A FUN NIGHT OUT IS SLEEPING IN AS LONG AS YOU LIKE TOMORROW Go out with new friends to one of our dining rooms, or have a big night out on the town. Then spend the next morning in your luxurious Ryman apartment, knowing it’s nothing but you and 1000 thread count cotton for as long as you like.

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CONTENTS MELBOURNE SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA

04

Acknowledging Country Your MSO Guest Musicians

MAX RICHTER: THE FOUR SEASONS RECOMPOSED

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MOZART AND BRAHMS

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FAURÉ’S REQUIEM

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SUPPORTERS

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These concerts may be recorded for future broadcast on MSO.LIVE.

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

ACKNOWLEDGING COUNTRY In the first project of its kind in Australia, the MSO has developed a musical Acknowledgment of Country with music composed by Yorta Yorta composer Deborah Cheetham Fraillon AO, featuring Indigenous languages from across Victoria.

Generously supported by Helen Macpherson Smith Trust and the Commonwealth Government through the Australian National Commission for UNESCO, the MSO is working in partnership with Short Black Opera and Indigenous language custodians who are generously sharing their cultural knowledge.

The Acknowledgement of Country allows us to pay our respects to the traditional owners of the land on which we perform in the language of that country and in the orchestral language of music.

About Long Time Living Here As a Yorta Yorta/Yuin composer the responsibility I carry to assist the MSO in delivering a respectful acknowledgement of country is a privilege which I take very seriously. I have a duty of care to my ancestors and to the ancestors on whose land the MSO works and performs.

As MSO continues to grow its knowledge and understanding of what it means to truly honour the First people of this land, the musical acknowledgment of country will serve to bring those on stage and those in the audience together in a moment of recognition as as we celebrate the longest continuing cultures in the world.

– Deborah Cheetham Fraillon AO Our musical Acknowledgment of Country, Long Time Living Here by Deborah Cheetham Fraillon AO, is performed at MSO concerts.

Australian National Commission

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for UNESCO United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization

MELBOURNE SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA

Committed to shaping and serving the state it inhabits, the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra is Australia’s preeminent orchestra and a cornerstone of Victoria’s rich, cultural heritage.

Each year, the MSO and MSO Chorus present more than 180 public events across live performances, TV, radio and online broadcasts, and via its online concert hall, MSO.LIVE, engaging an audience of more than five million people in 56 countries.

In 2024 the organisation will release its first two albums on the newly established MSO recording label.

With an international reputation for excellence, versatility and innovation, the MSO works with culturally diverse and First Nations artists to build community and deliver music to people across Melbourne, the state of Victoria and around the world.

In 2024, Jaime Martín leads the Orchestra for his third year as MSO Chief Conductor.

Maestro Martín leads an Artistic Family that includes Principal Conductor Benjamin Northey, Cybec Assistant Conductor Leonard Weiss CF, MSO Chorus Director Warren Trevelyan-Jones, Composer in Residence Katy Abbott, Artist in Residence Erin Helyard, MSO First Nations Creative Chair Deborah Cheetham Fraillon AO, Young Cybec Young Composer in Residence Naomi Dodd, and Artist in Association Christian Li. The Melbourne Symphony Orchestra respectfully acknowledges the people of the Eastern Kulin Nations, on whose un‑ceded lands we honour the continuation of the oldest music practice in the world.

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AUGUST PROGRAM

YOUR MSO

VIOLAS Christopher Moore Principal Di Jameson OAM and Frank Mercurio#

FIRST VIOLINS

SECOND VIOLINS

Tair Khisambeev

Matthew Tomkins

Acting Associate Concertmaster Di Jameson OAM and Frank Mercurio#

Anne-Marie Johnson

Acting Assistant Concertmaster David Horowicz#

Peter Edwards

Assistant Principal Margaret Billson and the late Ted Billson#

Sarah Curro

Dr Harry Imber#

Peter Fellin Deborah Goodall Karla Hanna Lorraine Hook Kirstin Kenny Eleanor Mancini Anne Neil#

Mark Mogilevski Michelle Ruffolo Anna Skálová Kathryn Taylor

Principal The Gross Foundation#

Monica Curro

Assistant Principal Dr Mary-Jane Gething AO#

Mary Allison Isin Cakmakçioglu Tiffany Cheng Glenn Sedgwick#

Freya Franzen Cong Gu

Lauren Brigden Katharine Brockman Anthony Chataway William Clark Aidan Filshie Gabrielle Halloran Jenny Khafagi Fiona Sargeant

CELLOS David Berlin Principal

Rachael Tobin

Newton Family in memory of Rae Rothfield#

Associate Principal Anonymous#

Andrew Hall Robert Macindoe Isy Wasserman Philippa West

Elina Faskhi

Andrew Dudgeon AM#

Patrick Wong Roger Young

Shane Buggle and Rosie Callanan#

Assistant Principal Di Jameson OAM and Frank Mercurio#

Rohan de Korte

Andrew Dudgeon AM#

Sarah Morse Rebecca Proietto

Peter T Kempen AM#

Angela Sargeant Caleb Wong Michelle Wood

Andrew and Judy Rogers#

DOUBLE BASSES Jonathon Coco Principal

Stephen Newton

Acting Associate Principal Sophie Galaise and Clarence Fraser#

Rohan Dasika

Acting Assistant Principal

Benjamin Hanlon

Di Jameson OAM and Frank Mercurio#

Suzanne Lee

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Learn more about our musicians on the MSO website. # Position supported by

BASSOONS

TROMBONE

Prudence Davis

Jack Schiller

Richard Shirley

Wendy Clarke

Elise Millman

Sarah Beggs

Natasha Thomas

Principal Jean Hadges#

Associate Principal

PICCOLO Andrew Macleod Principal

OBOES

Principal Dr Harry Imber# Associate Principal

BASS TROMBONE Michael Szabo Principal

Patricia Nilsson and Dr Martin Tymms#

TUBA

CONTRABASSOON

Principal

Brock Imison

TIMPANI

Principal

Timothy Buzbee

Matthew Thomas

Johannes Grosso

HORNS

Principal

Michael Pisani

Nicolas Fleury

PERCUSSION

Principal

Acting Associate Principal

Ann Blackburn

COR ANGLAIS Rachel Curkpatrick Acting Principal

CLARINETS David Thomas Principal

Philip Arkinstall

Associate Principal

Craig Hill

Rosemary and the late Douglas Meagher#

BASS CLARINET Jonathan Craven Principal

Principal Margaret Jackson AC#

Saul Lewis

Principal Third The late Hon Michael Watt KC and Cecilie Hall#

Shaun Trubiano Principal

John Arcaro

Tim and Lyn Edward#

Robert Cossom

Abbey Edlin

Drs Rhyl Wade and Clem Gruen#

Josiah Kop Rachel Shaw

HARP

The Hanlon Foundation#

Gary McPherson#

AUGUST PROGRAM

FLUTES

Yinuo Mu Principal

TRUMPETS Owen Morris Principal

Shane Hooton

Associate Principal Glenn Sedgwick#

Rosie Turner

John and Diana Frew#

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MAX RICHTER: THE FOUR SEASONS RECOMPOSED 9–10 AUGUST ARTS CENTRE MELBOURNE, HAMER HALL ARTISTS Melbourne Symphony Orchestra Benjamin Northey conductor Sophie Rowell violin Sunny Kim vocalist Andrew O’Connor bass-baritone Pamela Rabe narrator

PROGRAM KATY ABBOTT* Hidden Thoughts III: Stories of Awe** [45'] – Interval – MAX RICHTER The Four Seasons Recomposed [44'] *MSO Composer in Residence **World premiere of an MSO Commission

For a list of musicians performing in this concert, please visit mso.com.au/musicians

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Duration: 2 hours including interval. Timings listed are approximate.

Australian conductor Benjamin Northey is the Chief Conductor of the Christchurch Symphony Orchestra and the Principal Conductor and Artistic Advisor—Learning and Engagement of the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra.

MAX RICHTER: THE FOUR SEASONS RECOMPOSED | 9–10 August

BENJAMIN NORTHEY CONDUCTOR

Northey studied conducting at Finland’s Sibelius Academy with Professors Leif Segerstam and Atso Almila and completed his studies at the Stockholm Royal College of Music with Jorma Panula in 2006.

Northey appears regularly as a guest conductor with all major Australian symphony orchestras, Opera Australia (La bohème, Turandot, L’elisir d’amore, Don Giovanni, Così fan tutte, Carmen), New Zealand Opera (Sweeney Todd) and the State Opera South Australia (La sonnambula, L’elisir d’amore, Les contes d’Hoffmann).

His international appearances include concerts with the London Philharmonic Orchestra, the Tokyo Philharmonic Orchestra, the Mozarteum Orchestra Salzburg, the Hong Kong Philharmonic, the National Symphony Orchestra of Colombia, the Malaysian Philharmonic and the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra.

An Aria Awards, Air Music Awards, and Art Music Awards winner, he was voted Limelight Magazine’s Australian Artist of the Year in 2018. Northey’s many recordings can be found on ABC Classics.

In 2024, he conducts the Melbourne, Sydney, Adelaide, Queensland and Christchurch Symphony Orchestras and the Hong Kong Philharmonic.

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MAX RICHTER: THE FOUR SEASONS RECOMPOSED | 9–10 August

SOPHIE ROWELL VIOLIN

SUNNY KIM VOCALIST

Former Concertmaster of the MSO, Sophie Rowell has had an extensive performing career as a soloist, chamber musician and principal orchestral violinist both in Australia and abroad. She is currently the Artistic Director of the Melbourne Chamber Orchestra.

Sunny Kim is a Korean-born vocalist, improviser, composer, and educator based in Australia. A two-time winner of Jazz People’s Magazine’s Reader’s Poll Awards in the Best Vocalist category (2012–13) and the recipient of the LIG Artist grant (2011), Sunny Kim has released five albums as a leader, Android Ascension (2008), Painter’s Eye (2012), The Shining Sea: Live at the Olympus Hall (2014), The Dream of the Earth (2016), and Tribute (2019), three of which have been nominated for the Korean Music Awards in the Best Jazz Record category.

After winning the ABC Young Performer’s Award in 2000, Sophie founded the Tankstream Quartet, which won string quartet competitions in Cremona and Osaka. Having studied in Germany with the Alban Berg Quartet, the quartet returned to Australia in 2006 when they were appointed to the Australian String Quartet. Since 2012 Sophie has traveled the world playing in principal violin positions with orchestras including the Scottish & Mahler Chamber Orchestras and the Vancouver, Sydney & Tasmanian Symphony Orchestras, as well as participating in many chamber music festivals in Australia.

Sophie studied with Alice Waten in Sydney and participated in numerous master classes with musicians such as Sir Yehudi Menuhin, Norbert Brainin (Amadeus Quartet) and Walter Levin (LaSalle Quartet). She now teaches at the Australian National Academy of Music having previously taught at the Elder Conservatorium in Adelaide and the Australian Institute of Music in Sydney.

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After completing her studies in jazz at Boston’s New England Conservatory, Sunny went on to work closely with hundreds of improvising musicians including luminaries such as Roswell Rudd and Ben Monder. She has toured internationally and has performed at various venues around the world including Carnegie Hall.

Since 2007, Sunny has lectured at Hanyang University, Seoul Institute of the Arts, Soongshil University, and Dankuk University (Korea). A former Assistant Professor at Dong-Ah Institute for Media and Arts, Sunny currently lectures at the University of Melbourne in Jazz and Improvisation.

PAMELA RABE NARRATOR

For more than a decade Perth-born Andrew O’Connor has maintained a busy freelance career encompassing opera, the concert platform, vocal chamber music, and the classroom. Praised for his ‘remarkable musicianship’ (Limelight Magazine) and ‘textured, fine-wine bass baritone’ (Arts Hub) he appears regularly with many of Australia’s leading music organisations.

Pamela is one of Australia’s most prolific and highly awarded actors.

She last appeared with The Melbourne Symphony Orchestra in 2021 narrating Melody Eötvös’ The Ruler of The Hive, which she premiered with the Tasmanian Symphony Orchestra. Notable musical collaborations include performing with the Kronos Quartet at the inaugural Womad Earthstation in 2012.

Formerly a permanent member of The Song Company from 2015–2019, he is a Lay Clerk at St Mary’s Cathedral, was an Associate Artist with Pacific Opera in 2019, winner of the Royal Melbourne Philharmonic Prize in 2020. In 2022 he made his international debut with the VOCES8 Foundation and in 2023 joined the American Bach Soloists Academy in San Francisco.

Her work in television includes The Secret Life of Us, Mercury and Wentworth, for which she won a 2018 Silver Logie award for Most Outstanding Actress and the 2015 AACTA award for Best Lead Actress in a Television Drama. Pamela has appeared in feature films including Sirens alongside Hugh Grant and Sam Neill, and The Well, for which she won the 1997 AFI, Stockholm Film Festival and Variety Club awards for Best Actress.

In 2024 Andrew makes important solo debuts with the Adelaide Symphony Orchestra singing Handel’s Messiah and this premiere with the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra. Other projects include the entirety of Pinchgut Opera’s 2024 Season including the role of Achilla in Handel’s Giulio Cesare, three projects with The Song Company as part of their 40th Anniversary Season, further touring, recording, and creative development with AVÉ—Australian Vocal Ensemble, and numerous projects with Bach Akademie Australia, Salut! Baroque, Moorambilla Voices and more.

MAX RICHTER: THE FOUR SEASONS RECOMPOSED | 9–10 August

ANDREW O’CONNOR BASS-BARITONE

For her work in theatre and musicals, she has received 3 Helpmann Best Actress Awards for The Children, The Glass Menagerie and Grey Gardens, 8 Green Room Awards, a Sydney Critics’ Circle Award and a “Mo” Award. Pamela has also directed plays for the Sydney Theatre Company, Melbourne Theatre Company and the Malthouse Theatre.

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MAX RICHTER: THE FOUR SEASONS RECOMPOSED | 9–10 August

KATY ABBOTT COMPOSER

MAUREEN JOHNSON LIBRETTIST

Composer and Artist Mentor, Dr Katy Abbott illuminates and inspires the heart of us.

Maureen writes for joy and pleasure.

A communications and engagement professional by day and a closet creative by night, Maureen writes both poetry and prose, relishing in the sound and rhythm of language and words.

Katy’s work explores ‘connection’ and resonance with the intention of meaningfully impacting the daily lives of her audience. She’s especially curious about the audience–performer–composer dynamic. Her work looks at the macro (societal) human connection as well as the intimate (one-to-one connections within relationships, families, friendships, and connection to self).

As a musical master story-teller, Abbott’s compositions are performed, published and recorded around the world. She has five solo albums on ABC Classics and MOVE records and highly awarded for composition (including Paul Lowin Award for Composition (songcycle) and a 2-year Fellowship with Australian Council for the Arts in 2018.

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An Educator and Mentor for 30 years, she has a holistic approach to her composing and Artist Mentoring. She is an Honorary Senior Fellow at Melbourne Conservatorium of Music where she also was Senior Lecturer in Composition. Katy founded The Artists’ Mentor: Illuminate.

Challenge. Change in 2020 which supports mid-career, established artists and arts leaders, across disciplines, to build long-term, vibrant practices with capacity and impact.

Dialogue, stories and the way people express themselves are a source of curiosity and creativity. Maureen jumped at the chance to collaborate with Katy on her Hidden Thoughts™ Series; to tell stories through music and narrative as equal mediums, rather than one supporting the other. In Hidden Thoughts II: Return to Sender, the writer and composer trawled through hundreds of letters, finding the individual and universal voices of Australians who were driven to write to refugees in detention. Following the success of this collaboration, Maureen joined Katy to consider the idea of awe, what it is and how it sits in our daily experiences, how it changes us if at all. Hidden Thoughts III: Stories of Awe is a piece born of a truly “awesome” friendship—hours of walking the streets of Melbourne, exploring the shapes, sounds and stories.

KATY ABBOTT

(b.1971)

Hidden Thoughts III: Stories of Awe Soloists Sunny Kim vocalist Andrew O’Connor bass-baritone Pamela Rabe narrator Dedicated to Kipling and Finnegan Abbott on the occasion of their 21st birthday (2024).

May you stumble over the sparkling glimmers and seek out the raw unearthing of awe in your lives—and experience and sense the ‘extraordinary’ in the everydayho-hum. Mum x —Katy Abbott I dedicate my contribution to this work to my children, Mabel and Zac, who are a constant source of inspiration, joy and wonder.

And to the lovely Pete, who finds awe in everything.

—Maureen Johnson Hidden Thoughts III: Stories of Awe was commissioned by the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra as part of Katy Abbott’s position as 2024 Composer in Residence.

The composer and author write: This work tells a story. It’s not a linear narrative but rather a collection of stories, words and of course music that captures the idea, the feeling and the impacts of awe.

The structure of this piece was developed in part after a conversation with Professor Dacher Keltner, Head of Psychology at the University of California. Professor Keltner talks about the awe that we find in our everyday lives, referring to them

as the “eight wonders of life”. They are moral beauty which he describes as ‘other people’s courage, kindness, strength or overcoming’. Collective effervescence, the experience of being in a collective or group, a football crowd, a wedding, a protest; the ‘oceanic we’ he says. Nature; both the terrifying (earthquakes) and the everyday (the night sky), the arts; music and visual design and of course spiritual or religious, being close to birth or death.

And finally, epiphanies such ‘philosophical insights, scientific discoveries, personal realisations, metaphysical ideas and the like, that transform life in an instant’.

As with all works in the Hidden Thoughts™ Series, the text comes from stories of anonymous friends and strangers, in this case via an anonymous online survey. The stories are oftentimes vast, rich and beautiful filled with landscapes and wild nature, some are heartbreaking and mystifying and others are very simple, tiny moments; the small purposeful movements of baby’s hand, a smile from a stranger, a dog’s joy as he bounds through a park. Perhaps you were one of the contributors!

MAX RICHTER: THE FOUR SEASONS RECOMPOSED | 9–10 August

PROGRAM NOTES

Together with writer, friend and collaborator Maureen Johnson, the text was pulled from the many surveys to weave a narrative. We focussed on poignant parts of stories; the moments of awe. We also looked at the global voice, the common themes that emerged from the responses when we pulled back from details. Aside from finding the ordinary in the extraordinary, common themes included courage and connection—to ourselves, to each other, to animals or the world around us and the impacts of awe on our sense of time (standing still) and breath (being taken and held).

Sometimes, individual stories are relayed through narration or song, through the sounds, calls and chants but the essence of the stories and themes is also captured musically.

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MAX RICHTER: THE FOUR SEASONS RECOMPOSED | 9–10 August

In the final movement, Juxtaposition, two melodies appear in canonic and layering form. They represent tiredness and hope.

The first theme, I’m So Tired In My Soul, is already known to the audience by then. It is included in the work to create a contrast to the stories of awe. It is also an acknowledgement of the impact of the last few years on all of us and the place of awe in what can often feel like a world of chaos and fear and bleakness.

The second theme is inherently simple yet hopeful, and the interweaving and layering of the two themes speak of the complexity and simplicity of awe. Of course, the two themes also refer to the experience of our own humanity, of how we connect to the physical, mysterious and beautiful world and people around us.

Awe is a gift available to those who notice it, who relish in it, who appreciate all that it brings and all that it offers. To accept the gift is to be transformed by it.

We hope to inspire you with your stories of awe today. © Katy Abbott and Maureen Johnson, June 2024.

MAX RICHTER

(b.1966)

The Four Seasons Recomposed Spring I Spring II Spring III Summer I Summer II Summer III Autumn I Autumn II Autumn III Winter I Winter II Winter III Soloist Sophie Rowell violin Vivaldi knew the value of publishing his music, and his Four Seasons forms part of Il cimento dell’armonia e dell’inventione (‘The Contest of Harmony and Invention’), Opus 8, which was published, using the new technology of engraved plates, in 1725 in Amsterdam. His musical rhetoric exquisitely depicts the seasons’ progress and annual rhythms of life, described also in sonnets (possibly written by him) that he affixed to the score.

Vivaldi also knew the value of not publishing certain works, understanding that anything in print was fair game for other composers to copy—Bach did just that with several of Vivaldi’s pieces.

Baroque composers were accustomed to the notion of ‘parody’ in its original sense: composers might borrow music from their own or others’ instrumental music and set the words of, say, the mass to them.

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Despite the digital electronic element, Vivaldi would, then, have been unsurprised and probably quite comfortable with Max Richter’s ‘recomposition’ of his most popular

I wanted to open up the score on a note-by-note level, and working with an existing recording was like digging a mineshaft through an incredibly rich seam, discovering diamonds and not being able to pull them out.

That became frustrating. I wanted to get inside the score at the level of the notes and in essence rewrite it, recomposing it in a literal way.

In the event, with quasi-minimalist repetition and dramatic elisions of Vivaldi’s music, Richter estimates he retained about one quarter of the original. He begins with a brief sound sculpture that sets the scene for Spring; in the first movement proper he plays with Vivaldi’s birdcalls over a new, slowmoving ostinato of magisterial chords.

Similarly in the other two movements a phrase from the original is repeated and examined from different angles; Vivaldi’s nymphs and shepherds are omitted.

material to decorate more slow-moving ostinatos.

Winter I is characterised by familiar material made strange by slight metrical irregularities. There is no crackling fire in the slow movement, where the violin sings the lonely melody against a frozen backdrop. Similarly, Richter dispenses with Vivaldi’s skaters while still creating a sense of movement through a winter landscape. © Gordon Kerry 2017

MAX RICHTER: THE FOUR SEASONS RECOMPOSED | 9–10 August

work in 2012. The German-born British composer has a distinguished career in electro-acoustic work, including scores for the stage and screen, and the postminimalist aspect of his style makes for a fruitful point of contact between his music and that of the Baroque. But this is no mere arrangement or remix: as the composer has noted:

After a relatively straight version of the introduction, the first movement of Summer drives the ‘cuckoo’ motif relentlessly before Richter adds his own long cantilena. Richter captures the heat-struck lassitude of the second movement, and in the third adds new rhythmic emphases to Vivaldi’s stormy music.

Autumn I is full of subtle rhythmic displacements before the somnolent episode toward the end. The slow movement uses electronics to create a static, echoing sound-world. Vivaldi’s ‘hunting horns’ are absent from Autumn III, the music using the soloist’s first

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MOZART AND BRAHMS | 15 August

MOZART AND BRAHMS 15 AUGUST MELBOURNE TOWN HALL ARTISTS Melbourne Symphony Orchestra Jen Winley conductor Jayson Gillham piano

PROGRAM FAURÉ Suite from Masques et bergamasques [14'] MOZART Piano Concerto No.12 [26'] – Interval – BRAHMS Symphony No.1 [45']

CONCERT EVENTS ORGAN RECITAL

15 August at 6.30pm at Melbourne Town Hall.

Arrive early to enjoy a recital performed by Calvin Bowman on the mighty Grand Organ, free for ticket holders.

BRAHMS 11 Chorale Preludes Op. 122, No.1 ‘Mein Jesu, der du mich’ FAURÉ Pelléas et Mélisande, Op. 80: Sicilienne [arr. Organ] FAURÉ Dolly Suite, Op. 56: Berceuse [arr. Organ] BRAHMS Prelude and Fugue in G minor, WoO 10

For a list of musicians performing in this concert, please visit mso.com.au/musicians

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Duration: 2 hours including interval. Timings listed are approximate.

MOZART AND BRAHMS | 15 August

JEN WINLEY CONDUCTOR

Jen Winley is the Associate Conductor of the West Australian Symphony Orchestra.

Jen began her career in percussion and timpani working principally with the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra and regularly with Orchestra Victoria and the West Australian Symphony Orchestra (WASO). She then spent several years as a classroom music educator and loves being able to combine her passions for music and education when working with young people.

Jen made her professional conducting debut in 2020 with several orchestras in Perth including WASO and the Perth Symphony Orchestra. Jen is a highly versatile conductor and enjoys working on a wide variety of projects. She has conducted WASO in mainstage concerts, Family, Education and Outreach projects, regional tours, Films in concert, and contemporary and recording projects. Jen is also proud to have conducted the WA Youth Orchestra since 2019.

In 2023, Jen made her debut as conductor with West Australian Opera and the Queensland Symphony Orchestra, in addition to continued conducting engagements with WASO. 2024 sees Jen make her debut with the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra and her subscription concert debut with WASO. Outside of music, Jen loves learning French and planning her next trip to Paris, and is obsessed with her little schnoodle Luna that she shares with her partner, WASO cellist, Nick Metcalfe.

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MOZART AND BRAHMS | 15 August

JAYSON GILLHAM PIANO

Described as a ‘story-teller’ (Gramophone) and ‘the ideal romantic’ (Limelight), Australian-British pianist Jayson Gillham is internationally admired for his compelling performances and warm communicative style. After receiving numerous prizes from the leading piano competitions including the Leeds and Van Cliburn, it was Jayson’s win at the 2014 Montreal International Music Competition that brought him to international attention. His outstanding performance of Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No.4 was praised in the Canadian press as being played ‘with absorbing and relentless elegance.’

Performing at the highest level around the world, Gillham’s recent concerto highlights include performances with the London Philharmonic, City of Birmingham Symphony, Royal Philharmonic, the Hallé, English Chamber Orchestra, Bournemouth Symphony, Orchestre Symphonique de Montréal, Nashville Symphony, Wuhan Philharmonic, and Johannesburg Philharmonic. Jayson enjoys performing here in Australia regularly with the Melbourne, West Australian, Adelaide and Tasmania Symphony Orchestras. Conductors include the late Sir Jeffrey Tate, Sir Mark Elder, Asher Fisch, Johannes Fritzsch, Ludovic Morlot, Eivind Aadland, Michał Dworzynski, Arvo Volmer, Dmitri Matvienko, Christian Kluxen, Alexander Shelley, Nicholas Carter, Jessica Cottis, Dane Lam, Benjamin Northey, Joshua Weilerstein, Giordano Bellincampi and Giancarlo Guerrero.

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In recital, Gillham has appeared at some of the world’s most prestigious venues including the Wigmore Hall, Kings Place, Queen Elizabeth Hall, Birmingham Town Hall, Saffron Hall, Royal Nottingham Concert Hall and the Barbican in the UK, Auditorium du Louvre in Paris, Montreal’s Pollack Hall, the Steinway Hall in New York, and the major Australian recital venues including Sydney’s City Recital Hall and Melbourne Recital Centre.

GABRIEL FAURÉ

(1845–1924)

Masques et Bergamasques – Suite, Op.112 I. Ouverture II. Menuet III. Gavotte IV. Pastorale Fauré is not usually thought of as a composer for the theatre. Indeed, there is a cartoon showing him literally weaving the score of his opera Pénélope (1913)—it took him so long to finish, in the time left over from his duties as director of the Paris Conservatoire, that he seemed to be adopting his heroine’s ruse. In fact, Fauré’s numerous plans for a full-scale lyric drama foundered on his inability to find a suitable libretto—like most French composers, he longed for a success in the theatre. He appeased this ‘lyric hunger’, as he explained in a letter to his friend Saint-Saëns, in incidental music for plays, ‘the only kind which suits my modest means’. His scores for plays include Caligula (1888), Shylock (1889) and Pelleas and Melisande, for a London production in 1898. The opera Pénélope was premiered in Monte Carlo; shortly after World War I ended, Fauré received a commission from the Prince of Monaco for the same theatre.

Fauré’s idea was to take up again the Fête galante theme he had already explored in several songs and choruses.

In 1902 an entertainment of this sort using his music had been a great success in the Paris salon of Madeleine Lemaire. Fauré asked the librettist of Pénélope, René Fauchois, to write a lightweight, playful piece in the style of Verlaine’s Fêtes galantes. Fauchois’ own

description of the scenario makes clear that it was little more than a pretext: Harlequin, Gilles and Columbine, the masques who often amused the court, in turn amuse themselves at being the spectators of a fête galante at Cythera; without knowing it, the gentlemen and ladies who applaud them give them the impromptu play of their petty coquetteries and their trivial talk.

The mock 18th-century atmosphere was reinforced by sets in the manner of the paintings of Watteau. The title was Fauré’s own idea, opposed for some reason by Fauchois. He took it from the Verlaine song he had memorably set in 1887, Clair de lune:

MOZART AND BRAHMS | 15 August

PROGRAM NOTES

Your soul is a chosen landscape Bewitched by mummers and maskers [masques et bergamasques] Who play the lute and dance, almost Sad under their crazy fancy-dress.

An orchestrated version of this song is one of the eight numbers of Masques et Bergamasques, which also included the famous Pavane with chorus. The only numbers written especially in 1919 were the four which make up the ‘symphonic suite’ heard tonight, and of those, even the Ouverture is a reworking of the Intermezzo for orchestra Fauré had composed in 1868. Reynaldo Hahn wittily described this Ouverture as ‘Mozart imitating Fauré’.

The rather languid Menuet comes close to pastiche, in the view of JeanMichel Nectoux, the leading Fauré authority. He finds in the Gavotte, with its open gaiety and strong rhythms, an affinity with the music of Fauré’s friend Chabrier, and even with the Rigaudon from his pupil Ravel’s Le Tombeau de Couperin. (Nectoux has discovered Fauré’s original of this movement, too, in a piece from 1869.) By far the most striking and deeply felt movement is the Pastorale, which Fauré was surely right

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MOZART AND BRAHMS | 15 August

to place last in the orchestral suite. It originally came near the beginning, and underlaid a conversation between the three commedia dell’arte characters, but it deserves to be heard on its own, for its distinctive harmonic progressions. It is Fauré’s last orchestral music, and has all the hallmarks of his late style. © David Garrett (no date provided)

WOLFGANG AMADEUS MOZART

(1756–1791)

Piano Concerto No.12 in A, K414 I. Allegro II. Andante III. Allegretto Soloist Jayson Gillham piano The ‘little’ A major concerto of Mozart —so-called to distinguish it from the A major concerto, K488—is held in particular affection by pianists who lean towards musicality over virtuosity.

Benjamin Britten played it at the Aldeburgh Festival, and Sydney pianist Laurence Godfrey Smith, in his old age, told of his delight after discovering it by accident half-a-century before, while thumbing through some marked-down music in a London shop. The concerto contains little to gratify the showy kind of pianist; it appeals rather through the intensely personal tone of its gracious discourse—a tone called ‘Mozartian’ by those who know the composer’s work well. As Donald Tovey wrote, ‘it would be difficult to find another work of Mozart in which every single theme is so typical of his style’ (to which we may add: ‘even when he was quoting, consciously or unconsciously’).

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This concerto belongs to a group of three, the first Mozart wrote in Vienna, designed for his subscription concerts of 1783. Mozart, as he pointed out to a

prospective publisher, wrote these three concertos (K413, K414, K415) in such a way that they could be performed without wind instruments: an option, however, which robs them of a great deal. By comparison with many of his concertos to follow (or even with the amazingly rich E flat Concerto K271, composed five years earlier, his most recent concerto for one solo piano), these new concertos are relatively undemanding for the listener, and Mozart explained why in a letter written to his father while composing them: [They] are a happy medium between what is too easy and too difficult...

There are passages here and there from which the connoisseurs alone can derive satisfaction; but these passages are written in such a way that the less learned cannot fail to be pleased, though without knowing why.

The first movement begins with a theme based on nothing more than a procession from the tonic key to the dominant by rising arpeggio and falling scale, a commonplace device of the ‘style galant’, the elegant and decorative style featured by J.C. Bach. Mozart soon puts his personal stamp on the music, in the second subject, with its lilt and stress on the off-beat. To the listener familiar with the Symphony No.29 or the A major Piano Concerto K.488, this immediately says ‘Mozart in A major’. The recapitulation is reached in a way Mozart used in no other concerto—by a vigorous downward scale of the piano followed by a pause (which the interpreter may or may not choose to fill with a cadenza).

As the main thematic material is resumed, the soloist makes more of the second subject than first time round.

The calm solemnity of the slow movement contains a lesson in music history. Based on a theme from an opera overture by Johann Christian Bach, it almost certainly represents Mozart’s tribute to his friend and

The unison second motif in the third movement Rondo turns out to be germinal; appearing first as a contrast to perkiness of the opening subject, it is developed in imitation and counterpoint, justifying Mozart’s comments about passages for the connoisseur.

Another Rondo in A major, K386, was apparently written for this concerto, and may have been its original finale.

Mozart, it has been suggested, replaced it with the Rondo heard in this concert because he found it too similar to the first movement. The Rondo K386 was one of the Mozart manuscripts dismembered after his death. It was reconstructed in the 1930s by Alfred Einstein, and again, after more ‘bits’ had come to light, by Charles Mackerras and Paul Badura-Skoda in the 1960s. A very attractive piece, it confirms the view of the personal character of this concerto.

The fact that Mozart composed two complete sets of cadenzas for the Concerto K414 shows that he kept an affection for it and continued to play it later in his career. © David Garrett (no date provided)

JOHANNES BRAHMS

(1833–1897)

Symphony No.1 in C minor, Op.68 I. Un poco sostenuto – Allegro II. Andante sostenuto III. Un poco allegretto e grazioso IV. Adagio – Più andante – Allegro non troppo, ma con brio The first symphony was a long time coming, largely as a result of Brahms’ paralysing stage-fright when contemplating genres in which the ‘giants’—especially Beethoven—had produced their masterpieces. That is not to say that Brahms had not wanted to compose symphonies, and in the early 1850s was persuaded by Robert and Clara Schumann to turn a D minor sonata for two pianos into such a work; the results have not survived. It was at this time, though, that he began making sketches for what would, eventually, become the first movement of the First Symphony. In 1862, Clara Schumann was surprised to receive a package from Brahms containing ‘the first movement of a symphony’. She wrote to Joseph Joachim that it was ‘rather strong … but full of wonderful beauties’ and noted that ‘the themes are treated with a mastery that is becoming more and more characteristic of him’. Despite the enthusiasm of such colleagues, however, the movement (at this stage it was only the Allegro section) remained an unfinished torso for well over a decade.

The Symphony was only completed and first performed in 1876—the same year as the first production of the completed Ring cycle.

Its impact was such that conductor Hans von Bülow only half-jokingly referred to it as Beethoven’s Tenth. It is certainly Beethovenian in scale, and follows the blueprint of such works as Beethoven’s Third, Fifth and Ninth Symphonies in tracing an epic journey from a state of

MOZART AND BRAHMS | 15 August

mentor, the ‘London’ Bach, who had died on 1 January, 1782. ‘What a loss to the musical world!’, wrote Mozart to his father. It also shows how Mozart took the gracious outlines of the ‘galant’ style, which J.C. Bach represented at its best, and filled them with a deeper and more personal emotion. Tovey perceptively suggests that Mozart’s harmonisation of Bach’s theme shows his ability to make the piano ‘sound like an organ’, an achievement his friends admired in his playing. (A previous use

by Mozart of this tune, as the trio of a minuet, is a reminder that for Mozart ‘Andante’ and ‘Andantino’, which he also wrote on this movement, are not very slow tempos. Mozart wrote to his father ‘Please tell my sister that there is no adagio in any of these concertos—only andantes’.)

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MOZART AND BRAHMS | 15 August

turbulent conflict to one of triumphant resolution.

Clara Schumann may have found the ideas in the 1862 sketch ‘strong’, but they were immeasurably strengthened when Brahms added the overwhelming slow introduction where, over the implacable pounding of the timpani, the full orchestra sounds a harmony that threatens to come apart under the force of its internal tension. That tension is not resolved by a contrasting chirpy Allegro: the remainder of the movement continues to depict a compelling, but abstract, drama of musical processes in Brahms’ now fully-formed orchestral sound.

The Andante shows an equally Brahmsian, if completely different, sound world. After the confused alarms of the previous movement, the rhetoric is much more subdued, and the scoring lighter, allowing for brief, sylvan wind solos and passages of lush string writing.

But the retreat from the Romantic Sturm und Drang of the previous movement is by no means complete, and the music is occasionally taken over in an impassioned outburst. The closing section of the movement, though, is quietly gleaming, with a violin solo and the soft wind chords with which Brahms often concludes a piece. Brahms scholar Karl Geiringer writes that the Allegretto (not a conventional scherzo) ‘seems to smile through its tears’, though it too has moments of frank emotionalism.

Conductor Hermann Levi felt that the inner movements were serenade-like, but as such they provide respite between the two, titanic outer movements.

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Following the Beethovenian model meant that Brahms had to create a finale that balanced if not outweighed the opening movement. Brahms’ solution was essentially that of Beethoven in the finale of the Ninth Symphony—though not, of course, using voices: both begin

with seemingly unrelated passages that return to a state of uncertainty and move through various musical fields before discovering the thematic centre of the piece. Brahms begins with a sombre Adagio introduction that, like the first movement’s, features harmony that moves almost painfully from chord to nearby chord. This gives rise to fragmentary, more troubled music, which in turn is interrupted by a long horn melody; this tune had personal significance for Brahms, in that he wrote it out, with some homemade verse, on a card sent to Clara Schumann when they were estranged.

It is joined by the trombones (making their first appearance in the work), that suggests a sudden view of a spacious landscape. Only now does Brahms bring in his theme, a piece of pure and simple diatonicism.

Brahms, who never suffered fools, would snap at people who noted the similarity of the theme to Beethoven’s ‘Freude’ tune: ‘Any jackass can see that!’ And of course it may be a Beethovenian tune but its scoring, and the development to which it is subjected, are purely and masterfully Brahmsian. © Gordon Kerry 2015

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FAURÉ’S REQUIEM | 29–31 August

FAURÉ’S REQUIEM 29–31 AUGUST ARTS CENTRE MELBOURNE, HAMER HALL ARTISTS Melbourne Symphony Orchestra Lawrence Renes conductor Siobhan Stagg soprano Roderick Williams baritone MSO Chorus Warren Trevelyan-Jones chorus director

PROGRAM ELENA KATS-CHERNIN Mythic [11'] SIBELIUS Symphony No.7 [22'] – Interval – FAURÉ Requiem [38']

CONCERT EVENTS PRE-CONCERT TALK

Want to learn more about the music being performed? Arrive early for an informative and entertaining pre-concert talk with Taj Aldeeb.

29 August at 6.45pm in the Stalls Foyer on Level 2 at Hamer Hall.

31 August at 1.15pm in the Stalls Foyer on Level 2 at Hamer Hall.

For a list of musicians performing in this concert, please visit mso.com.au/musicians

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Duration: 1 hour and 40 minutes including interval. Timings listed are approximate.

FAURÉ’S REQUIEM | 29–31 August

LAWRENCE RENES CONDUCTOR

Dutch-Maltese conductor Lawrence Renes has garnered acclaim in both operatic and symphonic realms for his remarkable talent in balancing orchestra and singers, delivering performances brimming with passion, nuance, and style.

The 23/24 season takes Lawrence Renes around the world, with engagements with the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra, Tokyo Metropolitan Symphony Orchestra, Residentie Orkest, the Swedish Radio Symphony Orchestra, Hangzhou Philharmonic, Orchestra Filarmonica del Teatro Regio di Torino, Melbourne Symphony Orchestra, and the Auckland Philharmonic.

Formerly Music Director of the Royal Swedish Opera, his repertoire there ranged from Mozart through to the 21st century. An energetic champion of contemporary repertoire, he is particularly associated with the music of John Adams (having conducted productions of Nixon in China at San Francisco Opera and Doctor Atomic at both English National Opera and De Nederlandse Opera and orchestral works with the London and Hong Kong Philharmonic Orchestras, Mahler Chamber Orchestra and Royal Stockholm Philharmonic Orchestra) but also with George Benjamin, Mark Anthony Turnage, Guillaume Connesson and Robin de Raaff.

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FAURÉ’S REQUIEM | 29–31 August

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SIOBHAN STAGG SOPRANO

RODERICK WILLIAMS BARITONE

Siobhan Stagg was an ensemble member of the Deutsche Oper Berlin from 2013–19, where her roles ranged from Pamina in Die Zauberflöte to Waldvogel and Woglinde in The Ring Cycle. Elsewhere, she has sung the title roles of Cendrillon (Lyric Opera of Chicago); Pamina (Royal Opera House Covent Garden, Deutsche Oper Berlin); Susanna in Le nozze di Figaro (Covent Garden, Komische Oper Berlin), Sophie om Der Rosenkavalier (Opernhaus Zurich, Staatsoper Berlin); Mélisande (Opera de Dijon), Gilda in Rigoletto (Hamburgische Staatsoper); Najade in Ariadne auf Naxos (Bayerische Staatsoper), Morganain Alcina (Grand Théâtre de Genève) and Eritea in Eliogabolo (Opernhaus Zurich).

Roderick Williams is one of the most sought-after baritones of his generation with a wide repertoire spanning baroque to contemporary. He enjoys relationships with all the major UK and European opera houses and performs regularly with leading conductors and orchestras throughout the UK, Europe, North America and Australia. Festival appearances include the BBC Proms, Edinburgh, Cheltenham, Aldeburgh and Melbourne. As a recitalist he appears regularly at venues including the Wigmore Hall, Concertgebouw and Musikverein and at song festivals including Leeds Lieder, Oxford International Song and Ludlow English Song.

In concert, Siobhan revisits her relationship with Symphonieorchester des Bayerischen Rundfunks for Schubert’s G Major Mass conducted by Riccardo Muti; opens the season with Gürzenich Orchester Köln with François-Xavier Roth in Mahler’s Symphony No.4; embarks on a multi-concert tour with Pygmalion Ensemble in Mendelssohn’s Elijah; makes her debut with Orchestre de Chambre de Lausanne in Fauré’s Requiem and returns to Australia for multiple solo recitals across the country and solo collaborations with the Melbourne and Queensland Symphony Orchestras.

Roderick was awarded an OBE in June 2017 and was Artist in Residence with the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra from 2020–22, Artist in Residence at the 2023 Aldeburgh Festival and Singer in Residence at Music in the Round. He was also one of the featured soloists at the coronation of King Charles III in 2023.

Also a composer, he won Best Choral Composition at the British Composer Awards in 2016 and from 2022/23 he holds the position of Composer in Association of the BBC Singers.

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, Manfred Honeck, Xian Zhang and Nodoko Okisawa, and is committed to developing and performing new Australian and international choral repertoire.

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 the Anzac Day commemorative ceremonies.

FAURÉ’S REQUIEM | 29–31 August

MSO CHORUS

The MSO Chorus is always welcoming new members. If you would like to audition, please visit mso.com.au/chorus for more information.

WARREN TREVELYAN-JONES CHORUS DIRECTOR Warren Trevelyan-Jones is regarded as one of the leading choral conductors and choir trainers in Australia. He is Head of Music at St James’, King Street, Sydney, a position he has held since relocating to Australia in 2008. Under his leadership, The Choir of St James’ has gained a highprofile international reputation through its regular choral services, orchestral masses, concert series and a regular program of recording and both interstate and international touring.

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.

He is also a co-founder of The Consort of Melbourne and, in 2001 with Dr Michael Noone, founded the ‘Gramophone’ award-winning group Ensemble Plus Ultra. In September 2017 he was appointed Chorus Director of the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra and has recently been appointed Chorus Master of the Tasmanian Symphony Orchestra. He is also an experienced singing teacher and qualified music therapist.

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FAURÉ’S REQUIEM | 29–31 August

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MSO CHORUS PERFORMING IN THIS CONCERT SOPRANO

ALTO

TENOR

Shirin Albert Philippa Allen Emma Anvari Julie Arblaster Helena Balazs Giselle Baulch Anne-Marie Brownhill Eva Butcher Aliz Cole Clarissa Dodawec Laura Fahey Rita Fitzgerald Catherine Folley Susan Fone Carolyn Francis Nicole Free Karina Gough Juliana Hassett Penny Huggett Gina Humphries Gwen Kennelly Ingrid Kirchner Theresa Lam Natasha Lambie Judy Longbottom Caitlin Noble Amanda Powell Tanja Redl Jo Robin Jillian Samuels Fiona Seers Jemima Sim Elizabeth Tindall

Judy Anderson Ruth Anderson Margaret Arnold Tes Benton Marie Connett Nicola Eveleigh Dionysia Evitaputri Lisa Faulks Jill Giese Natasha Godfrey Debbie Griffiths Sophia Gyger Ros Harbison Helen Hill Yvonne Ho Julie Lotherington Helen MacLean Rosemary McKelvie Charlotte Midson Penelope Monger Nicole Paterson Alison Ralph Annie Runnalls Julienne Seal Helen Staindl Libby Timcke

Adam Birch Kent Borchard Steve Burnett Allan Chiang James Dal-Ben Jose Diaz James Dipnall Simon Gaites Lyndon Horsburgh Fergus Inder Michael Mobach Jean-Francois Ravat Linton Roe Robert Simpson Cameron Tait Brad Warburton Elliott Westbury Stephen Wood

Correct as of 1 August 2024.

BASS Maurice Amor David Bennett Roger Dargaville Ted Davies Michael Gough Elliott Gyger Andrew Ham Andrew Hibbard John Hunt Gary Levy Vern O’Hara Douglas Proctor Stephen Pyk Caleb Triscari

ELENA KATS-CHERNIN

(born 1957) Mythic

Elena Kats-Chernin was born in the Uzbekistan capital, Tashkent. In 1975, she and her family emigrated from the Soviet Union to Australia. She studied composition with Richard Toop, graduating in 1980, and then studied with Helmut Lachenmann in Hanover, West Germany, with the assistance of a DAAD Fellowship.

While in Europe she became active in theatre and ballet, composing for state theatres in Berlin, Vienna, Hamburg and Bochum. Her music attracted the attention of the Ensemble Modern and in 1993 she wrote her breakthrough work Clocks for them. It has since been performed around the world, including Denmark, the Netherlands, Finland, the USA and Australia.

Kats-Chernin remained in Germany for 13 years, returning to Australia in 1994.

Since her return, she has written two operas, two piano concertos and works for many performers and ensembles, including The Song Company, Sydney Alpha Ensemble, Evelyn Glennie, Bang on a Can All-Stars, Australian Chamber Orchestra, Sydney Symphony and also for the ‘Deep Sea Dreaming’ segment of the opening ceremony of the Sydney Olympic Games. In 1996 she received the Jean Bogan Award for her solo piano piece Charleston Noir and the Sounds Australian Award for Cadences, Deviations and Scarlatti. Her collaboration with choreographer Meryl Tankard, Wild Swans, was premiered by the Australian Ballet last year in its Sydney and Melbourne seasons and earned the composer the 2004 Green

Room Award in the Original Music for Dance category.

Recently, Kats-Chernin has received an Ian Potter Foundation Commission to write a piece for the Macquarie Trio and soprano. She has also been awarded a two year Fellowship from the Australia Council for 2004–05.

Three portrait CDs of her music have been released so far (Clocks, ABC Classics, Unceremonious Processions, Wergo, and Purple Black & Blues, Tall Poppies).

FAURÉ’S REQUIEM | 29–31 August

PROGRAM NOTES

The composer writes: A few years after my return to Australia, the Tasmanian Symphony Orchestra commissioned me to write a lively orchestral work that they could premiere and play on tour. The resulting piece, Heaven Is Closed, is a quick, energetic, rhythmically driven work.

Thus, when the Orchestra asked me for a new piece, my instinct was to write something totally different. It grew out of a passacaglia-like chordal progession which had grabbed hold of me and wouldn’t let go. I wanted to attempt a direction I had not explored previously, and that was to stay in a slow, dark mood for a lengthy period and to see where that took me. Eventually it grew into a kind of a hymn with variations, sometimes almost Romantic, that made extensive use of the Orchestra’s brass section. The title Mythic refers to the mental image I had of musically entering into a large, mythical cave.

For the 2000 Sydney Olympic Games, I wrote a work called Deep Sea Dreaming which was very much about Sydney and the sea. For this work, which will be premiered at the time of the Athens 2004 Olympics, I decided to reflect on the Olympics in a more internal way. It seems that so much has changed and so dramatically since those innocent days of the 2000 Olympics. © Elena Kats-Chernin 2004

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FAURÉ’S REQUIEM | 29–31 August

JEAN SIBELIUS

poetry found its way into his rhythmic and melodic writing.

Symphony No.7 in C, Op.105 in one movement

Sibelius’ most obviously nationalistic works are those based on the Kalevala and the celebrated Finlandia, written at a time of severe Russian repression. By the time of the last three symphonies and the tone poem Tapiola, Sibelius’ interest in mythology seems less to do with simple nationalism than with a nature-based mysticism. Since 1904 Sibelius and his family had lived among the conifers and lakes of rural Finland, some 40 kilometres from Helsinki. ‘Here,’ said Sibelius, ‘the silence speaks.’ And through his music it spoke of the cosmos.

(1865–1957)

In 1907, Jean Sibelius met Gustav Mahler in Helsinki. During their conversation, Sibelius that the essence of symphonic composition was a ‘severity of style and the profound logic that creates an inner connection between all the motifs’. Mahler’s famous retort was, ‘No! The symphony must be like the world. It must embrace everything.’

Indeed, Mahler’s symphonies become progressively more expansive, while Sibelius’, broadly speaking, become increasingly compressed and economical, culminating in the single-movement, 22-minute Seventh Symphony composed in 1924.

While Sibelius and Mahler both explored questions of existence, Sibelius expresses his world view through an increasing sense of unity, where Mahler’s theme is the broken nature of human experience.

In this respect, Sibelius’ music is much closer to that of Anton Bruckner.

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As a student in Vienna in 1890 Sibelius heard the Third Symphony of Bruckner, whom he declared ‘the greatest living composer’. From Bruckner, Sibelius learnt about structuring orchestral music on a large scale and the use of ostinati, or repeated rhythmic patterns.

While he was in Vienna, paradoxically, Sibelius also became more and more interested in the folk history of his native country. A member of Finland’s Swedish-speaking minority, Sibelius had had little contact with Finnish literature and mythology until his engagement to Aino Järnefelt, whose family were very pro-Finnish, in the same year. In the collection of myths and legends known as the Kalevala, Sibelius found great inspiration: the stories themselves fired his imagination in works such as The Swan of Tuonela, and the diction of the

This nowhere truer than in the Seventh Symphony, which, as Donald Tovey said of Beethoven’s Eighth, is ‘tiny but vast’.

It was to have been a three-movement piece culminating in a ‘Hellenic’ rondo, though what we hear is decidely more Nordic than Greek. Having decided on the one-movement form, Sibelius himself was diffident about calling it a symphony at first, preferring ‘Symphonic Fantasia’ which also suggests some extra-musical intention. In some respects, it is tempting to see the piece as a symphony in miniature, and we can isolate elements which correspond to a Classical symphony’s exposition, development and recapitulation of themes, as well as sections which stand in for slow introduction, scherzo and so on. But the measure of Sibelius’ genius and craft is that it is almost impossible to tell where one section ends and another begins, and his technique, termed ‘rotational form’ by one writer, of exactly repeating thematic material gives the music a sense of potentially endless invention.

There are, nonetheless, a few signposts.

The piece begins slowly with a simple, unaccompanied rising scale which is topped by an unexpected chord.

The ensuing section is dominated by ‘blurred’ chords and short motifs

English composer Robert Simpson once wrote that Sibelius’ Seventh Symphony ‘is like a great planet in orbit, its movement vast, inexorable, seemingly imperceptible to its inhabitants.’ As it happens, a version of the trombone melody appears in Sibelius’ sketch for another, unfinished work, labelled ‘Where the stars dwell’, but even without that ‘clue’ it is hard not to hear this work as cosmic in its endlessly changing details and underlying unity.

Gordon Kerry © 2002

GABRIEL FAURÉ

(1845–1924)

Requiem, Op.48 I. Introit and Kyrie II. Offertorium III. Sanctus IV. Pie Jesu V. Agnus Dei VI. Libera me VII. In paradisum

FAURÉ’S REQUIEM | 29–31 August

(notably from the woodwinds) as the music gradually gains momentum for the next four or so minutes. A spacious passage for divided strings introduces the main theme of the work, a majestic and extended melody for trombone.

This gives way, imperceptibly yet again, to a kind of scherzo, dominated by terse rhythmic fragments passed back and forth from woodwinds to strings; suddenly there appears an oceanic swell in the lower strings above which the trombone theme returns in the minor mode. This galvanising moment marks the halfway point of the symphony.

There follows a section which sounds like new material but is in fact based on transformations of what has gone before, and which gradually morphs into another scherzo-like section, before a third statement of the trombone theme.

The blurred harmonies of the opening dominate the work’s last pages: even the final C major chord is not achieved without difficulty.

Soloists Siobhan Stagg soprano Roderick Williams baritone Fauré’s Requiem is his one widely popular work, and indeed the only one of his larger-scale works to have found a secure place in the repertory. This is certainly not because of any lack of merit in his other compositions, but their highly civilised, rather private style makes it unlikely they will ever have wide appeal.

Fauré stood somewhat apart from the musical partisanship of his day— independent of the German tendencies of César Franck and his followers, and of the ‘impressionism’ of the Debussyites.

He nevertheless earned wide respect and became Director of the Paris Conservatoire (1905–1920). Ravel was the most famous of his pupils.

The Requiem, first performed in 1888 at a funeral in the Church of the Madeleine in Paris, is a comparatively early work which reflects and sums up many of the features of its composer’s early style.

It makes a memorable impression of serenity and contemplation, and has been praised by many commentators as highly appropriate to the Mass for the Dead.

It has been said that Fauré’s Requiem is suited to liturgical use rather than concert performance. But it is by and large in the concert hall that it has become known, and special permission

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FAURÉ’S REQUIEM | 29–31 August

had to be obtained from the Church for it to be performed at Fauré’s own funeral. This is because of Fauré’s unconventional choice of liturgical texts—he omits the Dies Irae, except for the Pie Jesu, and adds two movements whose words are taken from the order for Burial: the Libera me (also set

by Verdi in his Requiem) and the In Paradisum. It has been suggested that Fauré chose his texts to give greater prominence to the word requiem (rest).

Fauré’s father died in 1885. Then his mother died on New Year’s Eve 188788, and it may have been this event which prompted him to complete the Agnus Dei, Sanctus, and In Paradisum, which, together with other movements of the original version, were the first performed. The most dramatic part of the work, the Libera me was composed much earlier (in 1877), but added later—it is the only part which contains reference to the Day of Judgement.

There has been considerable discussion as to whether Fauré’s Requiem is more pagan than Christian in tone. It has been called (wrongly) ‘a Requiem without the Last Judgement’, and one critic has gone so far as to describe it as ‘a paradisiacal imagining, with no trace of torment or doubt, scarcely even of mourning’.

This goes too far, but Fauré, though a church organist (at the Madeleine), was more drawn to Greek stoical ideals of contemplation and resignation than to the Christian sense of sin, judgement and hope for the afterlife. His is the unperturbed vision, says biographer Norman Suckling, ‘of one whose attention was just then fixed on death, since it was then that he had lost his parents’.

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The musical style of the Requiem shows the influence on Fauré of his training at the École Niedermeier, founded to train organists and choir masters. This school promoted the study of the masters of church music of the past, and even of the ecclesiastical modes used in

Gregorian chant. This musical source is evident throughout the Requiem, most strikingly in the monotoned chant of the solo baritone in the Hostias. These sober passages are contrasted with long phrases of sinuous melodic curve, such as the themes of the Domine, Pie Jesu, Libera me and In Paradisum. The originality of the melodic outline sets Fauré’s Requiem apart from the sacred works of Gounod, which Fauré admired and which influenced his early sacred compositions.

Fauré’s great restraint is particularly evident in his orchestration. Several of the pieces which constitute the Requiem were first conceived as choruses with organ, and even in the final version the organ, with double basses, plays a kind of continuo role.

The versions of Fauré’s Requiem As performed in January 1888, the first version consisted of Introit and Kyrie, Sanctus, Pie Jesu, Agnus Dei and In Paradisum. The choir and treble soloist (in the Pie Jesu) were accompanied by a small orchestra: divided violas and cellos, double basses, harp, organ, and one solo violin in the Sanctus, playing unmuted an octave higher than in the published version of 1900.

In June 1889 Fauré completed the Offertorium, and in 1891 added the Libera me of 1877, with baritone soloist and rescored for an orchestra including trombones. Adding horns and trumpets, and violins in the In Paradisum, this expanded second version of the Requiem was first performed at the Madeleine on 21 January 1893.

Fauré seems then to have given in to his publishers’ suggestion to expand the orchestra still further for the third (concert) version first performed in 1900 at the Trocadéro, and published the same year by Hamelle. The idea was to make the Requiem more suitable for concert performance; it is not certain

whether Fauré or one of his pupils adapted the orchestration. The added parts for woodwinds and violins double other instruments.

As Fauré scholar Jean-Michel Nectoux points out, the version heard tonight, though not the composer’s first idea, was approved by him. Thus there are two equally valid performing traditions for the Fauré Requiem: one stressing its liturgical purpose, the other more symphonic in scale and making the work a quieter example of the tradition of sacred works with orchestra to which the masses of Gounod and Saint-Saëns also belong. © David Garrett 1998

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MSO BOARD

Jaime Martín

Chairman

Chief Conductor

Benjamin Northey

Principal Conductor and Artistic Advisor – Learning and Engagement

Leonard Weiss CF

Cybec Assistant Conductor

Sir Andrew Davis CBE †

Conductor Laureate (2013–2024)

Hiroyuki Iwaki †

David Li AM Co-Deputy Chairs Margaret Jackson AC Di Jameson OAM Managing Director Sophie Galaise Board Directors

Conductor Laureate (1974–2006)

Shane Buggle

Warren Trevelyan-Jones

Andrew Dudgeon AM

MSO Chorus Director

Martin Foley

Erin Helyard

Lorraine Hook

Artist in Residence

Karen Kyriakou

Gary McPherson

Artist in Residence, Learning and Engagement

Farrel Meltzer

Christian Li

Edgar Myer

Young Artist in Association

Mary Waldron

Katy Abbott

Company Secretary

Composer in Residence

Naomi Dodd

Demetrio Zema

Cybec Young Composer in Residence

Deborah Cheetham Fraillon AO First Nations Creative Chair

Artistic Ambassadors Xian Zhang Lu Siqing

The MSO relies on your ongoing philanthropic support to sustain our artists, and support access, education, community engagement and more. We invite our supporters 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:

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$500+ (Overture) $1,000+ (Player) $2,500+ (Associate) $5,000+ (Principal) $10,000+ (Maestro) $20,000+ (Impresario) $50,000+ (Virtuoso) $100,000+ (Platinum)

Join a new generation of giving.

Welcome to Future MSO – an initiative for young philanthropists and music lovers to connect over exclusive opportunities, while supporting the careers of exceptional emerging musicians, conductors and composers at the MSO. Your tax time donation of $1,000 reveals: • A community of like-minded, culturally engaged young professionals.

• An annual calendar of events for you and a guest to connect with patrons, MSO musicians and guest artists.

• The inner world of the Orchestra with experiences that bring you closer to the music.

AMPLIFY YOUR IMPACT BY JOINING FUTURE MSO TODAY. Scan the QR code to join Future MSO today.

Or email philanthropy@mso.com.au to discuss your involvement.

Thank you to our Partners PRINCIPAL PARTNER

PREMIER PARTNER

VENUE PARTNER

INTERNATIONAL LAW FIRM PARTNER

MAJOR PARTNERS

GOVERNMENT PARTNERS

ORCHESTRAL TRAINING PARTNER

EDUCATION PARTNERS

SUPPORTING PARTNERS

Quest Southbank

Ernst & Young

MEDIA AND BROADCAST PARTNERS

TRUSTS AND FOUNDATIONS

Freemasons Foundation Victoria

Flora & Frank Leith Trust, Sidney Myer MSO Trust Fund