The Night Resounded - Music by Schoenberg & Berg

COVER

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Alban Berg Seven Early Songs (arr. Reinbert de Leeuw)

Arnold Schoenberg Piano Concerto Op. 42 Reduced orchestration for 14 players by Hugh Collins Rice interval

Arnold Schoenberg Song of the Wood Dove from Gurre-Lieder

Arnold Schoenberg Chamber Symphony Op. 9 for 15 solo instruments

Programme Notes When Schoenberg wrote his Chamber Symphony in 1906 for 15 players he created an ensemble which was as distinctive as it was unusual. Five solo string players are combined with 10 winds, including a trio of clarinettists and a pair of horns. It makes an interesting comparison with the standard line-up of a group like the London Sinfonietta – similarly sized, but a more ‘balanced’ group of 5 strings, 4 woodwind, 3 brass, piano and percussion.

Schoenberg’s ensemble may not have achieved general currency, but it is especially well suited to his combination of contrapuntal activity and emotional intensity.

for solo piano, by Webern (1923) for the instrumental ensemble of Pierrot Lunaire, and by Schoenberg himself (1936) for full symphony orchestra.)

Presenting reduced orchestrations and piano transcriptions was a major feature of Schoenberg’s Society for Private Musical Performance – a shortlived concert series which sought to perform new works in optimal auditory conditions. The ensemble used for these concerts often comprised solo strings, a few wind instruments, piano and harmonium. The Dutch conductor and composer Reinbert de Leeuw has a long-standing interest in these arrangements and was inspired in 1988 to arrange Berg’s Seven Early Songs for this ensemble, very much in the spirit of Schoenberg’s Society for Private Musical Performance.

Of the works performed this evening, only the Chamber Symphony is not presented ******** in transcription. (It was however frequently transcribed, by both Schoenberg and his pupils. Berg’s Seven Early Songs (1905-8) come from Notable examples include Eduard Steurmann (1920) his period of intensive study with Schoenberg. Of

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Berg’s considerable output of early songs, these seven came to be grouped together and published when the composer revised and orchestrated them in 1928. It is perhaps not surprising that Schoenberg, Webern and Berg all wrote many songs at the beginning of their careers; there were plenty of examples close to hand from composers such as Schubert, Brahms, Wolf and Mahler and song writing also provided an excellent laboratory for experimenting with style and expression. Berg’s early identification with song was so strong that Schoenberg, in a much quoted remark, expressed concern that Berg was incapable of writing genuinely instrumental musical ideas when he first arrived for lessons.

The Seven Early Songs inevitably relate to the tradition of Lied in both tone and subject matter.

They are love songs full of the night, forests, nightingales and other images drawn from nature.

What is very striking about these songs is not so

much their vocal qualities but the interplay of voice and instruments, as we see the first stirrings of the creative mind which would later produce Wozzeck and Lulu. They indicate Berg’s raw talent as a composer but also reflect well on Schoenberg’s teaching with its firm emphasis on the development of musical ideas. The instrumental writing is particularly notable in the third and fourth songs, Die Nachtigall and Traumgerkrönt, but it is the first song with its whole-tone harmonies which usually draws most comment. These were almost certainly influenced by Schoenberg’s Chamber Symphony and found an even more assured realisation in Berg’s remarkable Piano Sonata op.1, a work demonstrating the full impact of his studies with Schoenberg.

Schoenberg wrote his Piano Concerto op.42 (1942) in the United States, where he had been an exile from Nazism for nearly a decade. It is cast in a traditional format with echoes of the concertos

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of Mozart, Liszt and Brahms. It is composed using Schoenberg’s 12-note method and combines modernity and tradition in ways which are simultaneously enriching and challenging. The 12note row is presented clearly as the work’s opening melody and it is this melodic function which permeates the whole composition. Through the serial method, the row creates innumerable pitch relationships (both audible and inaudible), but it is its melodic role which ultimately has the most significant impact on the work.

Like the Chamber Symphony the Concerto is continuous, but divides into sections which relate to the separate movements of a 19th century multimovement work. Its first section is wholly dominated by its opening theme – a melancholic waltz – from which emerges the material for the second section.

This is a lively scherzo which develops passages of quite complex metric irregularity. The third section is a slow movement containing some of

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Schoenberg’s most beautiful writing for the piano, including an extended cadenza passage. The final section begins almost classically in conception with a gavotte-like theme, but brings back material from elsewhere in the work to reinforce the sense of the piece as a single span rather than separate movements.

This transcription for chamber orchestra was made at the request of Pina Napolitano to enable her to programme the work more frequently and also to facilitate a more chamber music relationship in the often intricate interplay between piano and ensemble. Using an ensemble almost identical to that of Schoenberg’s Chamber Symphony (the only difference is the absence of the contra-bassoon) seemed an ideal way to connect this late work with the music of Schoenberg’s earlier period and to draw out some of the continuities that exist between the Schoenberg of 1906 and that of 1942.

The similarity of form, the harmonic use of fourths

and particularly the way in which both the Chamber Symphony and the Piano Concerto saturate the instrumental texture with melody connects the two works strongly. The use of solo players rather than a full orchestra gives a particular character and intensity to these multiplying melodic lines. This is no black and white version of the original but rather one which presents a different set of distinctively Schoenbergian colours.

Pina premiered the transcription in February 2016 with the New Vienna International Symphony Orchestra, with Georgi Nikolov directing, in Vienna’s historic Ehrbarsaal. In this same hall many of Schoenberg’s works were premiered, including many songs from opp. 2, 3 & 6 in 1907 (with Zemlinsky at the piano), a repeat performance (to less scandal) of the 2nd quartet in 1908, and his opp.

11 and 15 as well as the first part of Gurrelieder in 1910 (with the orchestral parts transcribed for a sixhand arrangement made by Anton Webern).

The piece has been performed since then with the Colibrì Ensemble in Pescara, Italy, with Yoichi Sugiyama conducting. These are the first performances in the UK. Gurrelieder (1900-1911) was the great success of Schoenberg’s Vienna years when it was first performed in 1913. It continues to be a spectacular occasion in the modern concert hall with its huge span and vast performing resources. It began life, however, as a set of songs with piano accompaniment and the first nine songs (most of the music which precedes the Song of the Wood Dove) were originally conceived in this form. So when in 1922 Schoenberg arranged the Song of the Wood Dove for a chamber ensemble he was in some sense returning the music to a scale closer to its original conception. This arrangement was prepared specially for a concert Schoenberg was to conduct in Copenhagen, as a companion piece to the Chamber Symphony and using the

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same ensemble with the addition of piano and harmonium.

Part 1 of Gurrelieder tells of the doomed love between King Waldemar and Tove and concludes with The Song of the Wood Dove in which the wood dove tells of Tove’s death. The song is full of recollections from Waldemar and Tove’s songs and inhabits a realm of memories, from earlier in the work and also more generally of the Wagnerian language of the previous century. This chamber version certainly cannot evoke the vast colouristic resources of Schoenberg’s orchestra, but as so often in arranging works for smaller forces, Schoenberg aims for clarity and this has a particular effect on the audibility of the interleaving of melodic motifs.

In writing the Chamber Symphony op.9, Schoenberg was building on his previous instrumental works Verklärte Nacht op.4, Pelleas und Melisande op.5 and particularly his String Quartet

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op.7, in writing what is effectively a multi-movement work in a single span. In the Chamber Symphony there is a much greater level of concentration than in the earlier works and writing later (1949) Schoenberg described the Chamber Symphony as ‘a real turning point’ in which ‘I finally arrived at a style of concision and brevity, in which every technical or structural necessity was carried out without unnecessary extension, in which every single unit is supposed to be functional.’ The multiplicity of details, the level of concentration and the strong colours seem close to the pictures that Kandinsky was to paint in the years just before the First World War. Schoenberg himself felt that ‘I had now found my own personal style of composing’ and the Chamber Symphony had a huge impact on both Webern and Berg. Although Schoenberg began a Second Chamber Symphony almost immediately it was soon set aside and not completed till much later (1939). Schoenberg’s style was destined not to

stay still after the Chamber Symphony but to move on and in many ways the work signalled the end of a compositional phase rather than the beginning that Schoenberg had first thought.

The four works in this concert present a distillation of the main strands of Germanic nineteenth-century music: Lied, concerto, music drama and symphony.

Each in its own way combines a progressive nature, a modernity, with a very Viennese sense of nostalgia.

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Pina Napolitano Italian pianist Pina Napolitano made a splash with her debut CD in 2012: Norman Lebrecht featured her recording of Arnold Schoenberg’s complete piano works as his CD of the Week, shortlisting it for his Sinfini Music Album of the Year; Guy Rickards in International Piano Magazine called the CD “outstanding”, citing the “tensile strength to her playing that is distinctly hers”, and Calum MacDonald in BBC Music Magazine gave it five stars for its “rare penetration, understanding, grace and elegance.” This past October saw the release of her second disc with Odradek Records, featuring the Schoenberg Piano Concerto Op. 42 coupled with Bartók’s Piano Concerto No. 3, Sz. 119 with the Liepaja Symphony Orchestra (Latvia) in 2016, with Atvars Lakstigala directing.

Pina Napolitano is, through her teacher Bruno Mezzena, a grand-student of Arturo Benedetti

Michelangeli. Alongside performances of Liszt, Ravel, Bartók, Brahms, and American composers such as Jeffrey Mumford and Elliott Carter, her recent focus has been the music of the Second Viennese School, which she considers not as a primarily intellectual venture, but a highly emotional and expressive one – “wholly saturated with expression” (Österreichische Musikzeitschrift), a “perfect conjunction between microcellular dissection and almost heartbreaking expressive sensitivity” (Ritmo), a “heady romanticism both irresistible and unsettling” (Arts Desk).

Pina Napolitano performs throughout Europe, U.S.A., and Russia. After studying with Giusi Ambrifi in her native Caserta near Naples, she attended masterclasses with Tibor Egly, Bruno Canino, Alexander Lonquich, Giacomo Manzoni, and Hugh Collins Rice. She entered the Pescara Music Academy, where she graduated in Piano Solo Performance and in 20th Century Piano Music with

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Bruno Mezzena.

She also earned two B.A.s from the University of Naples “L’Orientale” in Classical Philology and in Slavistics. In 2010 she received her doctorate in Slavistics with a thesis on the poetry of Osip Mandel’štam, which won the 2011 Italian Slavists’ Association prize. She has translated for the first time into Italian the notebooks of Marina Cvetaeva for Voland Edizioni, awarded the 2014 Premio ItaliaRussia. Attraverso i secoli for best debut translation.

In 2017 a book developed from her thesis will be published by Firenze University Press. Alongside her performance activity, she currently teaches at the Conservatorio Santa Cecilia in Rome. In fall 2017 her next solo CD is scheduled to be published with music of Brahms, Berg, and Webern. www.pina.com

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Rosalind Dobson

Messiah, Mozart’s Mass in C Minor, and Brahms’ Ein deutsches Requiem.

Originally from Oxford, Rosalind is a recent English Literature graduate of Magdalene College, Cambridge and is currently studying at the Royal College of Music under

Rosalind’s scholarship to the RCM is generously supported by a Drapers Company Award.

Sally Burgess.

Whilst an undergraduate, she sang many roles with the university’s Opera Society including Miss Wordsworth (Albert Herring), Cunegonde (Candide), Fiordiligi (Cosí fan Tutte), Susanna (Le Nozze di Figaro), Tytania (A Midsummer Night’s Dream), and Nella (Gianni Schicchi) as well as taking the role of Miss Jessel in the Facade Ensemble’s The Turn of the Screw (Sidney Sussex Arts Festival). Other performances with

the

Facade

Ensemble

include

Stockhausen’s

Stimmung, and Birtwistle’s Cantata for solo soprano.

Rosalind’s recent solo appearances have included Haydn’s Nelson Mass (Choir 2000) and The Creation (St. Martin in the Field’s/Brandenburg Sinfonia). Previous concert work also includes Bach’s Magnificat and John Passion, Handel’s

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Helen Charlston

and the New Paths Festival at Beverley Minster.

Helen Charlston (mezzo-soprano) began singing as head chorister of the St Albans Abbey Girls Choir. She then went on to study music at Trinity College, Cambridge where she held a choral scholarship for four years. Hailed “a rather special mezzo” (Music Web International), Helen appears regularly with orchestras and choirs worldwide.

Recent appearances have included Mozart Requiem at the Three Choirs Festival (Philharmonia Orchestra/Simon Halsey), Bach Matthew Passion (St Paul Chamber Orchestra/Paul McCreesh), Bach Magnificat in D (Auckland Philharmonia Orchestra/ Stephen Layton) and a worldwide tour of Handel’s Messiah, appearing with the Seattle Symphony, the Western Australian Symphony Orchestra and Adelaide Symphony Orchestra. This season Helen will make her debut at a number of UK Festivals, including the London Festival of Baroque Music at St John’s Smith Square, Keble Early Music Festival,

On the stage, Helen’s roles have included Olga/ Eugene Onegin, Florence Pike/Albert Herring, Ino/ Semele, Sara/Tobias and the Angel (Dove) and Dinah/Trouble in Tahiti (Bernstein). She regularly appears with the Facade Ensemble, with whom she has performed Judith Wier’s Consolations of Scholarship and Stravinsky’s Cantata. Fascinated by new music and the work of her generation of composers, Helen created the role of Dido in young composer Rhiannon Randle’s chamber opera Dido is Dead. Based on Virgil’s writings about Dido, the opera was premiered in Cambridge to high acclaim.

Helen is an experienced consort singer, appearing with many of the UK’s finest vocal ensembles including The Gabrieli Consort, Alamire, Fieri Consort, Polyphony, London Choral Sinfonia and her own Amici Voices, which she founded in 2012. www.helencharlston.com

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Benedict Collins Rice

The Facade Ensemble

As a singer and an instrumentalist from a young age, Benedict is at home on the concert platform, the theatre pit and the choir stalls. He has performed throughout Europe and America (from The Royal Albert Hall to Carnegie Hall), recorded for several record labels and the BFI, and broadcast live on Radio 3. He read music at Pembroke College, Cambridge, holding two conducting scholarships and working with all the university’s top ensembles.

It was whilst at university that he founded The Facade Ensemble. He conducts the Cambridge Graduate Orchestra, is a Lecturer at Morley College and a Lay Clerk at Ely Cathedral.

Specialising in chamber music of the 20th century, The Facade Ensemble was founded in 2011 by its conductor and artistic director – Benedict Collins Rice. Drawing its members at the time from the finest singers and instrumentalists at the University of Cambridge, the group has developed as a dynamic collective of young professionals with a passion for bringing new music and exciting programmes to a wide audience. From Maxwell Davies to Miles Davis, concerts provide engaging programming – often involving dramatic elements and the juxtaposition of musics old and new.

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Hugh Collins Rice Hugh Collins Rice read music at Oxford, followed by graduating with both an MA (composition and analysis) at the University of Sussex and an M.Litt (research on Schoenberg’s serial music) at Oxford.

He has taught undergraduates at Oxford for many years, including as college lecturer in music at Hertford College (1989-2008).

As a composer, his work has won awards (1989 PA Composition Award, 1995 Composers’ Guild of Great Britain/MCPS Prize) and been performed across the UK, in Belgium, Netherlands, Italy and Germany, and broadcast on BBC Radio 3. Performers have included The Swingle Singers, Hilliard Ensemble, Britten Sinfonia, Coull String Quartet, Jane Manning, Mediva and the London Schubert Players.

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