Farquhar: Three Symphonies

DAVIDFarquhar Three Symphonies

NEW ZEALAND SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA KENNETH YOUNG

massey u n ive r sity TRUST RECOR DS SERIES

Winds that Whisper

TOWer new zealand youth choir DAVID Farquhar karen grylls CONDUCTOR

Three Symphonies

NEW ZEALAND SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA KENNETH YOUNG

Symphony No.1 (1959) 1 Moderato 2 Presto 3 Lento

21:30 8:25 6:06 7:00

4-6 Symphony No.2 (1982)

28:28

Symphony No.3 ...remembered songs... (2002)

19:04

7 Moderato energico 8 Leggiero 9 Alla marcia lento 10 Andante tranquillo

8:37 2:50 3:29 4:08 69:11

Total Time MMT2060 | Digital Stereo Recording  2004 HRL Morrison Music Trust  2004 HRL Morrison Music Trust massey u n ive r sity TRUST RECOR DS Se r i es

Three Symphonies All three symphonies were premiered by the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra or its predecessor, the NZBC Orchestra. The first, written in 1959, was conducted at its premiere in 1960 in the Wellington Town Hall by John Hopkins, a great supporter of New Zealand music. At the time it was the first New Zealand symphony to have had its premiere at a public concert, although regrettably this has been its only public performance to date. Symphonies two and three were both commissioned and first performed by the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra; the second in 1982 under Kenneth Montgomery, and the third in 2003 under James Judd.

Symphony No.1 (1959) Moderato / Presto / Lento The first movement opens quietly with a number of ideas in which the melodic interval of a fifth has some prominence. A faster section follows and the development of

these ideas leads to climaxes with patterns of diverse rhythms superimposed. After the final climax the movement subsides to a quiet ending.

The second movement has the character of a scherzo. Lively rhythms alternating between 6/8 and 3/4 lead to a quieter sustained ‘trio’ tune. The scherzo resumes and takes the music to a climax where these two ideas are presented together – the faster one (violins and trumpets) across the slower (horns and trombones). The music unwinds until all that remains is a fragment of the slower theme, which becomes a link to the third movement.

The finale has the form of a free passacaglia. It grows out of the opening trumpet tune and its accompaniment – the trumpet tune becomes the passacaglia bass, while the stepwise bass takes over as melody.

At the end of the movement a reference back to the melodic falling fifths of the first movement leads to the final chord – fading from brass to wind, and in the end, to strings alone.

Pat Hanly (b.1932), Headland, 1969, oil and enamel on canvas, 1210 x 1190 mm.

Private collection. Reproduced by permission of the artist.

Symphony No.2 (1982) This symphony is in three movements, played without a break. All three start with the same pulse (Œ = 60), and the third movement also ends at this tempo. Both the rhythmic conflicts in the music and its rhythmic connections (changes of tempo within a movement) are related in the ratio 3:2. This ratio also expresses the interval of a fifth, which is throughout an important arrival point and is the music’s final destination. These conflicts and changes are also associated with timbre: very often strings and brass are opposed with wind and percussion acting as mediators.

The first movement is most concerned with conflict. The opening idea announces this very simply with an opposition of two pentatonic modes (black and white keys on a keyboard), and this conflict remains unresolved at the end of the movement.

The second movement combines slow movement and scherzo. The slow beginning presents an unwinding melodic line in the woodwind against a haze of overlapping chords in the brass and strings. The fast scherzo breaks across this and tosses

rhythmic fragments from section to section.

The slow and fast are later combined, but in the end the fast wins, the movement finishing at breakneck speed.

The third movement emphasises connections and resolutions. It is a set of variations on a chorale-like tune, starting at the basic pulse and gradually getting faster until the final variation, a quick waltz, is moving at three times the opening speed. From here the tempo shifts back and the chorale tune is combined with references to the beginning of the first movement.

SYMPHONY NO.3 …remembered songs… (2002) Moderato energico / Leggiero / Alla marcia lento / Andante tranquillo This symphony is dedicated to the memory of my wife, Raydia, who died in 2001, and is based on material from my song-cycle, In Despite of Death, a work with which she had been closely associated.

The symphony follows the emotional shape of the song-cycle, moving from

struggle and resistance towards acceptance.

The first movement is the most substantial, and near the beginning introduces a threenote figure (on horns and trumpet) which permeates the whole work. The three final movements – scherzo, slow march and epilogue – are played without a break.

David Farquhar

David Farquhar was born in 1928 in Cambridge, New Zealand and educated at Canterbury, Victoria and Cambridge universities, and the London Guidhall. In 1953 he joined the Music Department of Victoria University, where he was appointed professor in 1976. A committed advocate of New Zealand music, Farquhar was founderpresident of the Composers Association of New Zealand (CANZ) and a long-serving member of the board of the New Zealand Composers Foundation. The composer of over 100 works, Farquhar established his reputation in the realm of theatre music, especially the incidental pieces for Anouilh’s play Ring Round the Moon

(original version 1953-7, suite 1975) and the 1962 opera A Unicorn for Christmas with libretto by Ngaio Marsh, which enjoyed a royal performance during the visit of Queen Elizabeth II to New Zealand in 1963.

The dance-suite Ring Round the Moon is Farquhar’s classic: it is populous, unpretentious and seemingly effortless, yet each movement is actually a triumph of compression that manages to combine the shapeliness of dance-tunes with the plashier riches of harmony and sonority.

Indeed, that which is special and unique about much of Farquhar’s music is its lambency, its skim-factor, its prancing unencumbered motion. The persistent Stravinskian theme of the Scherzo for orchestra (1992), for example, appears harlequin-like under many guises, in different styles and scenes – here Sibelian with the northern forest, there Brittenesque with the glimmering sea, and elsewhere with echoes of Gabrieli’s ceremonial brass. In Magpies and Other Birds (1976), Farquhar’s interpretive use of Glover’s ballad stanza subtly opens the channels of personal as well as communal experience:

Raydia d’Elsa, (1922-2001), Colour rhythms, 2000, pastel, 270 x 390 mm. Private collection.

Reproduced by permission of the estate of the artist.

the lament for a dead albatross at Karehana Bay is expressed most pungently and the caustic laughter of those magpies somehow signals the helplessness of us all.

Farquhar’s four string quartets, three symphonies and other extended works reveal a greater rhetorical sweep and more sustained intellectual purpose. What makes his String Quartet No.1 (1989), for instance, a work of classical force is the perfect posture it maintains as it moves inexorably through the demands of three densely compact dramatic movements; there is something reminiscent of Shostakovich in its frontal intensity. In the opening paragraphs of Evocation for violins (1957), we recognize immediately that Farquhar’s voice is in a deep old groove – one shared by Bartók’s ‘night music’ – and that he is hauling into sound an awareness sanctioned by bleak folk wisdom and by a high tragic understanding of life. And what constitutes the true originality of the composer’s Symphony No.1 is the combined sensation of strangeness and at-homeness which the sounds create: each expression is as surely and reliably in place as tussock on a hillside.

In the String Quartet No.4 (1998) and Symphony No.3, …remembered Songs…, Farquhar shifts from the cerebral towards a sustained lyrical expression, distinguished by the purity and strength of composition along with a pronounced linearity. These are wonderfully resolved mature works – sensual landscapes where curves of swelling forms and velvet recesses are accentuated by his strong bright instrumental palette and expressive tonal modulations. This symphony, which retraces material from an earlier song cycle, articulates the composer’s grief for his wife Raydia d’Elsa, who died in 2001.

Robert Hoskins

Pat Hanly (b.1932), Suburbia Afternoon (Energy series), 1974, acrylic on panel, 900 x 900 mm. Private collection.

Reproduced by permission of the artist.

New Zealand Symphony Orchestra The New Zealand Symphony Orchestra enjoys a high profile as the country’s leading performance arts organisation. It gave its first public performance in March 1947 and its first – and current – Music Director, James Judd, was appointed in 1999. The orchestra attracts leading international conductors and soloists and gives over a hundred performances each year. These include seasons of major symphonic repertoire in seven centres, ‘Heartland’ and ‘Mainland’ tours to smaller centres, and a wide range of special programmes. It is involved in education programmes, performs family and schools concerts, accompanies major opera and ballet productions, and records for television, movies and for Radio New Zealand. It commissions and performs New Zealand music and has a long recording history, which has seen it move into the world market and win international awards. The orchestra’s profile has been considerably heightened recently with its acclaimed recordings of Lilburn’s Three Symphonies and Bernstein’s Symphony No.1, Jeremiah. The NZSO also administers the NZSO Chamber Orchestra, which has its own concert series, and the NZSO National Youth Orchestra.

Kenneth Young Kenneth Young is one of New Zealand’s leading conductors. He has established himself as a passionate and skilled interpreter of the Romantic and 20th-Century repertoire, and twenty years of practical orchestral playing have given him a specialised rapport with his colleagues. Himself a composer, he has a particular interest in post-Romantic repertoire, and he has received recognition for his recordings of New Zealand orchestral music.

Young took up the position of Principal Tuba with the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra in 1976 and his experience as a conductor with the NZSO dates from 1985, culminating in his appointment as the orchestra’s Conductor-in-Residence early in 1993. In 2001 he resigned from the NZSO in order to pursue his conducting and composing career full-time.

Young has worked with all the regional orchestras throughout New Zealand, and his engagements with the NZSO and the New Zealand Chamber Orchestra have included highly acclaimed CD recordings of the orchestral works of Edwin Carr, Gareth Farr, Douglas Lilburn and Lyell Cresswell, and opera excerpts with the New Zealand tenor Keith Lewis. He has also regularly conducted seasons with the Royal New Zealand Ballet.

Outside of New Zealand, Young has worked with the Queensland Orchestra, the West Australian Symphony Orchestra, the Tasmanian Symphony Orchestra, the City of Osaka Sinfonia and the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra.

In addition to his work as a performer and a conductor, Young has become one of New Zealand’s leading composers. Various commissions from Chamber Music New Zealand, the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra, the International Festival of the Arts and Radio New Zealand have been performed nationwide and also in the United States, Europe and Australia. Since 1988 he has also been a member of the music faculty at Victoria University of Wellington.

Pat Hanly (b.1932)

Born in Palmerston North, New Zealand, Hanly studied at the University of Canterbury School of Fine Arts. Ever since graduating in 1957 Hanly painted as a response to political, social and moral concerns, returning to themes as issues arose again to challenge his personal beliefs. Throughout his career he experimented with different media, styles and methods but always with a vibrancy of colour and a singular vision. Hanly announced his retirement from painting in 1994.

Hanly’s paintings of the late 1960s and early 1970s were very much involved with attempts to transcend everyday reality with images that sought to display the very workings of molecular nature – the best of them are almost hallucinatory in their impact.

In terms of the painting techniques used Headland is a primary example – combining as it does, tight stencil-like drawing with an almost dripped aleatory approach to paint application.

Raydia d’Elsa (1922-2001)

Raydia d’Elsa, the wife of David Farquhar, began painting in the late 1960s. From the first she was interested in light and rhythm and in capturing movement. She worked in oil, watercolour and pastel, and also in the 1980s in batik. Towards the end of her life she took up ceramic sculpture. She exhibited in Wellington with the Academy of Fine Arts and with local galleries, and also in Taupo and Napier.

DAVIDFarquhar Three Symphonies

NEW ZEALAND SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA KENNETH YOUNG

MMT2060 Digital Stereo Recording  2004 HRL Morrison Music Trust  2004 HRL Morrison Music Trust

HRL Morrison Music Trust PO Box 1395 Wellington, New Zealand info@trustcds.com

A Massey University Trust Records release

ALL RIGHTS OF THE PRODUCER AND OF THE OWNER

Recorded in the Michael Fowler Centre, Wellington, New Zealand, 28-30 January 2004

OF THE WORK REPRODUCED ARE RESERVED.

Producer Murray Khouri Recording Engineer Keith Warren, Radio NZ Digital Editing and Mastering Wayne Laird Executive Producer Ross Hendy Booklet Notes David Farquhar Design Mallabar Music Ltd Photograph Bruce Harding The HRL Morrison Music Trust was established in March 1995 as a charitable trust to support New Zealand musicians of international calibre. All funds received by the Trust are used to make recordings, present concerts – both in New Zealand and overseas – and assist artists to undertake projects to further develop their talents.

UNAUTHORISED COPYING, HIRING, LENDING, PUBLIC PERFORMANCE AND BROADCASTING OF THIS RECORDING IS PROHIBITED.

The HRL Morrison Music Trust gratefully acknowledges the support of the following people in the making of this recording: Robert Hoskins, Jenny Gibbs.

The Massey University Trust Records series was formed by Trust Records and the Massey University Conservatorium of Music to promote the work of established New Zealand composers in association with the University’s research and performance.

Winds that Whisper

TOWer new zealand youth choir DAVID Farquhar karen grylls CONDUCTOR

Three Symphonies

NEW ZEALAND SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA KENNETH YOUNG

Symphony No.1 (1959) 1 Moderato 2 Presto 3 Lento

21:30 8:25 6:06 7:00

4-6 Symphony No.2 (1982)

28:28

Symphony No.3 ...remembered songs... (2002)

19:04

7 Moderato energico 8 Leggiero 9 Alla marcia lento 10 Andante tranquillo

8:37 2:50 3:29 4:08 69:11

Total Time

massey u n ive r sity TRUST RECOR DS Se r i es