2021 - 2022 SEASON BROCHURE
Hello! We are the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment (OAE) and we are an historically informed performance orchestra. We play on historic instruments using techniques from the time the composer was writing. This means that every time we perform, you will see a stage of intriguing instruments and hear our passion for making the old feel new. This year, we present The Wilderness Pleases; a series of concerts at Southbank Centre that explore the Enlightenment fascination with nature and its awe-striking beauty. The title of the series, The Wilderness Pleases is inspired by one of the many influential books to come out of the Enlightenment era; Shaftesbury’s controversial, The Moralists. In the book, the main character, Theocles, describes the terror of encountering a group of crocodiles in an Egyptian desert. After escaping the monsters, he is overcome with a desire to admire them as wondrous creatures of the natural world.
‘let us fly to the vast deserts of these parts […] ghastly and hideous as they appear they want not their peculiar beauties. The Wilderness pleases.’
We are greatful for the support of our environmental partner, Oxford Botanic Gardens and Arboretum
MOZART AND BEETHOVEN
Monday 8 November 2021, 7pm, Queen Elizabeth Hall, Southbank Centre Conductor: Bruno Weil Violin: Cecilia Bernardini Cello: Jonathan Manson (pictured right) Oboe: Daniel Bates Bassoon: Peter Whelan
MOZART The Magic Flute Overture HAYDN Sinfonia Concertante for violin, cello, oboe and bassoon BEETHOVEN Symphony No. 6, ‘Pastoral’
Mozart’s The Magic Flute has an iconic overture that at once captures the Enlightenment’s fascination with wisdom, reason and nature. Then follows Beethoven’s Symphony No. 6 ‘Pastoral’ performed on period instruments to paint the full colours of the singing birds, flowing streams and violent thunderstorms that Beethoven’s audience would have experienced, when the piece was first performed in 1808.
DEMONS IN THE BATH: ACI, GALATEA E POLIFEMO
Sunday 23 January 2022, 7pm, Queen Elizabeth Hall, Southbank Centre Director: Steven Devine Soprano: Zoё Brookshaw Mezzo-soprano: Bethany Horak-Hallett (pictured above) Bass: Trevor Bowes HANDEL Aci, Galatea e Polifemo
Handel’s Aci, Galatea e Polifemo is a tragic tale of two lovers, kept as servants by a villainous cyclops creature. The music, with its thrilling and varied scoring, excites a sense of determination and helplessness in confronting the natural world. As Handel’s music so often does, this evening’s concert challenges our understanding of order and fairness and delivers us to a supernatural world of poetic possibilities.
FAUST PLAYS SCHUMANN
Tuesday 15 February 2022, 7pm, Royal Festival Hall, Southbank Centre Conductor: Antonello Manacorda Violin: Isabelle Faust
MENDELSSOHN The Hebrides Overture SCHUMANN Violin Concerto in D Minor SCHUMANN Symphony No. 2 in C Major
Schumann’s enigmatic Violin concerto was purportedly uncovered though a seance and then followed a turbulent, international fiasco as world leaders fought over who should play it first. However, the drama surrounding this work pales in comparison to the evocative power of the music itself. The slow second movement is regarded as one of the most beautiful moments in all of Schumann’s music, giving way to a soundscape of romance, adventure and curiosity.
FISCHER CONDUCTS MAHLER NO. 4
Tuesday 8 March 2022, 7pm, Royal Festival Hall, Southbank Centre Conductor: Ádám Fischer Soprano: Masabane Cecilia Rangwanasha MAHLER Symphony No. 5 - Adagietto MAHLER Des Knaben Wunderhorn Wer hat das Liedlein erdacht? Wo die schönen Trompeten blasen Rheinlegendchen MAHLER Symphony No. 4
Continuing the season theme of The Wilderness Pleases; in this concert we turn our focus to the pleasing wilderness in heaven in Mahler’s Symphony No. 4, conducted by Ádám Fischer. The lyrics of this ethereal symphony present a child’s vision of heaven, complete with gardens brimming with fruits and vegetables and fishes swimming in a pond.
ST JOHN PASSION
Saturday 26 March 2022, 7pm, Queen Elizabeth Hall, Southbank Centre Director and Evangelist: Mark Padmore Soprano: Mary Bevan Alto: Paula Murrihy Bass: Georg Nigl BACH St John Passion
Eminent Evangelist Mark Padmore guides us on the journey of Christ to the cross in the St John Passion. The word ‘Passion’ is rooted in the Latin word for suffering and tonight’s concert is a meditation on suffering and an attempt to make some sense of it.
SIR ANDRÁS SCHIFF PLAYS BEETHOVEN PIANO CONCERTO NO. 2 AND NO. 1 Monday 6 June 2022, 7pm, Queen Elizabeth Hall, Southbank Centre Director and pianist: Sir András Schiff BEETHOVEN Piano Concerto No. 2 HAYDN Symphony No. 93 BEETHOVEN Piano Concerto No. 1
This evening’s performance begins with Piano Concerto No. 2, followed by Piano Concerto No. 1, as this is the order in which Beethoven wrote them. Both of these pieces reflect Beethoven’s skilful play on the styles of his predecessors such as Mozart and Haydn, while the abrupt shifts in harmony reveal Beethoven’s distinct musical personality.
SIR ANDRÁS SCHIFF PLAYS BEETHOVEN PIANO CONCERTO NO. 3 AND NO. 4 Wednesday 8 June 2022, 7pm, Queen Elizabeth Hall, Southbank Centre Director and pianist: Sir András Schiff BEETHOVEN Piano Concerto No. 3 HAYDN Symphony No. 99 BEETHOVEN Piano Concerto No. 4
This is the second of our three-night series of Beethoven’s Piano Concertos with Sir András Schiff. The curtain opens with Beethoven’s dark and moody Piano Concerto No. 3, famed for its rhythmic, military-march opening, whereas his Piano Concerto No. 4 is an altogether more joyful and lively piece. In a review in May 1809, Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung describes the work as ‘the most admirable, singular, artistic and complex Beethoven concerto ever’.
SIR ANDRÁS SCHIFF PLAYS BEETHOVEN PIANO CONCERTO NO. 5, ‘EMPEROR’ Thursday 9 June 2022, 7pm, Queen Elizabeth Hall, Southbank Centre Director and pianist: Sir András Schiff
BEETHOVEN Coriolan Overture HAYDN Symphony No. 103 BEETHOVEN Piano Concerto No. 5, ‘Emperor’
We conclude our classical season with Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No. 5, which biographer Maynard Solomon describes as the piece of music that marks both the summit and the end of Beethoven’s ‘heroic decade’. It is rich in inventive flourishes, trills and scales, and yet the drama of the Concerto is often most intense during the moments of silence and dissonance. The triumphant energy of tonight’s programme is directed by OAE Principal Guest Artist Sir András Schiff.
This season, The Wilderness Pleases, is about recognising that the vitality of music is ingrained in our historic instruments. Crafted from trees, strung with sheep guts and bowed with horse hair, these precious gifts from the wild live on in the music we share.
Native to Northern, Central and Eastern Europe, spruce is best when it is grown in cold weather at high altitudes because this makes the tree’s annual rings form tightly together, producing dense wood with an enhanced sound.
The art of turning a tree into a violin is fascinating. We are grateful to Peter Beare of Beare Violins for sharing some 17th century luthier secrets.
Wood is porous and absorbs moisture from the air so it needs to be treated. To prevent cracks from forming, the wood is split into two sections and the ends of the wood are sealed using wax or resin, ready for the drying process. For most wooden items, such as furniture, wood can be dried quickly using a kiln, but this is not the case for musical instruments! The intense heat of a kiln modifies the anatomical cell structure of the wood, reducing its density, which harms the acoustic properties of the finished instrument.
The first thing to know about making a fine violin is that it takes ages. In fact, a typical violin luthier may only produce five or six instruments each year. This is as true today as it was in the 1600s. You can’t rush art.
A luthier may only produce five or six instruments each year. One of the most famous luthiers of the 17th century is Antonio Stradivari. Today, you’ll often hear people refer to his instruments as ‘Strads’. He knew that for a resonant sound, the wood on the front plate of a violin needs to be light. Stradivari’s favourite wood for this purpose was Alpine spruce.
Drying wood in room-temperature conditions is a vital part of violin making. This is called ‘seasoning’. Some woods such as spruce, if cut during a full moon in December when the sap is at its lowest, need only five months of seasoning. Other woods such as maple need a few years and some wood such as ebony may need as much as fifty years to season.
You can tell the age of a tree before it was harvested by the number of grains visible on the instrument. The youngest tree ring is usually placed at the centre of the violin and each surrounding grain indicates one year of the tree’s life. The grains will be wider in some years and narrower in others, depending on the climate that year. The other main parts of a violin, such as the back, ribs and scroll, need to be strong and durable as well as resonant and are usually made from maple. In Baroque times, maple was also used for the fingerboard surface and this coped well with the wear from the gut strings. However, in the first part of the 18th century when metal wound strings were first introduced, a more wear-resistant wood was required and so an ebony veneer was typically used on the fingerboards. Since the late 18th century the more modern styles of neck generally used a fingerboard of solid ebony. For the other parts such as the tailpiece and pegs, many luthiers favour high-density durable wood species such as ebony, rosewood and boxwood.
Luthiers sometimes used the skin of small sharks for sanding.
Although sandpaper has been around since the 13th century, sandpaper is rarely used in violin-making as it can hide the clarity and reflection of the wood under the varnish. Instead, luthiers sometimes used a dried plant called “horsetail” and sharkskin for fine smoothing. Once the violin has been constructed, it needs to be varnished. A zillion recipes exist, but analysis usually shows the main raw ingredients in Cremonese and Venetian instruments to be linseed or walnut oil plus a natural tree resin such as Larch. Violins from the late 1600s often have the addition of a colour pigment such as red madder root. A period violin is not complete without a horsehair bow. Baroque bows were usually made from snakewood or the plainer “amourette”, but pernambuco (aka Brazilwood, after which Brazil was named) has been the wood of choice for bows since the late 18th century and tragically is now endangered due to the deforestation in Brazil. For information about how you can help protect these precious woods, please visit International Pernambuco Conservation Initiative (IPCI) www.ipci-usa.org
Makira Project www.naturalcapitalpartners.com/ projects/project/madagascar-makira-redd
OAE.CO.UK 020 815 9323
boxoffice@oae.co.uk Tickets for The Wilderness Pleases are available in four price bands Premium: £80 Band A: £55 Band B: £30 Band C: £10 We offer the following discounts (excluding premium seats) Book 2 - 3 concerts to save 15% Book 4 - 6 concerts to save 20% Book 7+ concerts to save 25% Student: £5 Under 35s: half price Groups: 20% off (please call 020 815 9323)
Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment Acland Burghley School 93 Burghley Road London NW5 1UH
facebook.com/orchestraofthe ageofenlightenment @theoae YouTube.com/OrchestraEnlighten @oae_photos
If you have access requirements, please contact Southbank Centre directly to arrange your tickets: accesslist@southbankcentre.co.uk We are grateful for the generous support of our corporate sponsors