Bernstein, Barbour and Coleridge-Taylor

BERNSTEIN, BARBER & COLERIDGE-TAYLOR Thursday 22 October 2020, The Queen’s Hall, Edinburgh –––––

PROGRAMME NOTE

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SEATING LIST VIOLIN Stephanie Gonley Gordon Bragg VIOLA Felix Tanner CELLO Eric de Wit DOUBLE BASS Adrian Bornet

OBOE Robin Williams CLARINET Maximiliano Martín BASSOON Julian Roberts HORN Jamie Shield PIANO Simon Smith

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WHAT YOU ARE ABOUT TO HEAR Bernstein (1918-1990) Clarinet Sonata (1941) Grazioso – Un poco piu mosso Andantino – Vivace e leggiero

Barber (1910-1981) String Quartet in B minor, Op 11 (1936) Molto allegro e appassionato Molto adagio [attacca] Molto allegro (come prima)

Coleridge-Taylor (1875-1912) Nonet in f minor, Op 2 (1893) Allegro energico Andante con moto Scherzo. Allegro Finale. Allegro vivace

––––– Confined to rooms as they are, and gaining whatever they can from remote online teaching, students of 2020 might find it hard to feel they’re enjoying the ‘best years of their lives’. It’s easy to disregard these restrictions as simply curbing the notorious hedonistic excesses of studenthood. But as the three pieces in today’s concert demonstrate, student years can be among a person’s most ambitious and most productive, and can even define preoccupations that go on to inform entire careers.

Leonard Bernstein was technically still a student when he wrote his Clarinet Sonata in 1941, immersing himself in the hothouse teaching at Massachusetts’ Tanglewood summer school, which Serge Koussevitzky had established a few years earlier. Bernstein learnt all he could from the eminent conductor, also mingling with his friend and mentor Aaron Copland, senior composer Paul Hindemith, and young clarinettist David Oppenheim, the Sonata’s dedicatee, who became a close friend.

The Sonata ended up as Bernstein’s very first work to be published, but even in its ten-minute, two-movement span, it already encapsulates the central issue that would preoccupy so much of the music he produced: the apparently unresolvable collision between cool, intellectual rigour and hot-headed, warm-hearted, jazzy fun.

It was actually another clarinettist, David Glazer, who premiered the work, with Bernstein himself at the piano, in Boston’s Institute of Modern Art in 1943.

And the Sonata played a crucial role in establishing Bernstein’s credentials as a composer. Indeed, he was clearly excited

from an undiscovered sonata by the great German émigré. But Bernstein contrasts that rather cool aloofness with driving, almost minimalist rhythms accompanying his second theme, and lets rip further with the irregular dance beats of his sprightly, Latin-infused second movement. The tranquil, ruminative opening to his second movement functions almost as a miniature slow movement in itself. Listen carefully to it, and you’ll even hear a distinctive two-chord piano figure that Bernstein would later use to great effect in ‘Somewhere’ from West Side Story.

Leonard Bernstein

that it provoked a bidding war between two rival publishers, writing at the time to Copland: ‘The little Hargail Music Co wanted to publish the Clarinet Sonata. Out of professional courtesy I showed it first to Warner’s, and they knocked me over by loving it, and insisting on publishing it. I was downhearted, since Hargail wanted to make a commercial recording of it. Now Hargail is offering me all sorts of fantastic royalty rates if I’ll give it to them. But Warner’s points out that they, as a large firm, can do so much more for it than can a little thing like Hargail. Matters are now suspended by a hair. Warner’s presented me with a five-year contract!’ Perhaps not surprisingly, Bernstein finally accepted Warner’s offer.

Hindemith clearly exerted quite a heavy influence on Bernstein’s writing in the Sonata (even Copland declared the work to be ‘full of Hindemith’), most obviously in its cool, not-quite-atonal opening melody, whose disarming combination of lyricism and detachment could come straight

Samuel Barber was just 14 when he entered Philadelphia’s eminent Curtis School of Music, and later won a Prix de Rome scholarship to study at the American Academy in the Italian capital. It was on a break from his Roman sojourn – when he’d decamped for the summer to the small mountain town of St Wolfgang in Austria with his partner, Gian Carlo Menotti – that he composed his only String Quartet.

This was in 1936, when Barber was just 26.

He knew that his old college friends in the Curtis Quartet would be travelling to Rome that year to perform, and intended his new String Quartet for them. In the end, however, he admitted that he wouldn’t complete the piece in time, and gave the premiere to the Pro Arte Quartet in December that year.

Still not happy with the work, however, he withdrew it immediately after its first performance, planning to replace his original finale. In the end, it took him several years to come to a final decision about how to end the Quartet, and the work as we know it today was only premiered in 1943.

Just what concerned Barber about his String Quartet boils down to one of the most

Easier said than done. There’s no getting away from the fact that the long, chant-like melodies, creeping gradually ever higher, and the continual denial of harmonic resolution – even right at the end – all give Barber’s Adagio an uncanny power. His challenge was to find something suitable to come after it, and that’s what took him years to figure out.

Samuel Barber

famous, most admired and most powerful works in all of classical music: his famous Adagio. Later played at the funerals of Franklin D Roosevelt, Albert Einstein and John F Kennedy, as a memorial to the dead of 9/11, and probably most famously in the soundtrack to Oliver Stone’s 1986 Vietnam War epic Platoon, Barber’s Adagio is synonymous with mourning – the raw, impassioned US equivalent to the restraint and nobility of ‘Nimrod’ from Elgar’s Enigma Variations for us more uptight Brits.

In its original form, the Adagio forms the second movement of Barber’s Quartet – it was only later that he created the version for string orchestra that’s more widely known today, and even went on to transcribe it for choir. In St Wolfgang in 1936, Barber was astonished at how easily the movement came to him, and he knew he’d created something special, writing to Curtis Quartet cellist Orlando Cole: ‘I have just finished the slow movement of my Quartet today – it is a knockout! Now for a Finale.’

Barber tried several endings. His solution, finally, was a straightforward one: simply to return to some of the music of the opening movement as a brief, brusque sign-off.

And with its bold, spiky main theme and its stormy, ever-changing moods, Barber’s first movement couldn’t be more different from his Adagio. It shows the distinctive lyrical side to Barber’s music in its later themes – the first a glowing, chorale-like melody in violins and viola, the second an impish theme in the viola, accompanied by a pizzicato cello. But the return of this jagged, angular material after the cathartic emotion of the central Adagio comes inevitably as something of a shock – and propels the Quartet to a gruff, no-nonsense conclusion.

If you might argue that Bernstein and Barber were somewhere between study and professional work when they wrote the concert’s two opening works, Samuel Coleridge-Taylor was very much a student when he composed his Nonet about half a century earlier. Born in London to an English mother and a father from Sierra Leone, he gained his unusual name because of his mother’s love for the poetry of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and entered the Royal College of Music at the age of just 15, where he studied composition under Stanford.

In his time he was a widely celebrated figure, admired by Elgar and also Elgar’s editor

time at the Royal College of Music, and was first performed there in July 1894. Indeed, the score bears the heading ‘Gradus ad Parnassum’, indicating that he perhaps viewed the piece as a stepping stone to more ambitious future works, and if the Nonet displays the clear influence of Brahms, that’s no doubt down to the admiration of Coleridge-Taylor’s teacher Stanford for the great German composer.

Samuel Coleridge-Taylor

August Jaeger (immortalised as ‘Nimrod’ in the composer’s Enigma Variations), who called Coleridge-Taylor a genius. In later works, he set out to draw on traditional African music and integrate it into Western classical music – as he felt Brahms had done for Hungarian music, and Dvořák for Bohemian. He held, too, a fascination for Native American culture, at least as evoked by poet Longfellow, whose Song of Hiawatha he transformed into a trilogy of cantatas that packed out the Royal Albert Hall for ten seasons in extravagant ballet versions conducted by Malcolm Sargent. That acclaim led to three successful tours of the USA, including an invitation to visit President Theodore Roosevelt at the White House. But Coleridge-Taylor’s life was cut tragically short by pneumonia in 1912, when he was just 37.

Coleridge-Taylor’s first movement contrasts an expansive opening theme on clarinet with a sprightly second main theme introduced by the piano, balancing the almost orchestral richness that the composer conjures from his large ensemble with passages of pared-back chamber intimacy.

There’s still a fair amount of vigour to his song-like second movement, with a nostalgic melody passed between choirs of strings, winds and piano, and his third movement is a quicksilver scherzo whose perky theme darts across the ensemble. He brings things to a rousing, good-humoured conclusion with his richly scored finale.

Inevitably, he struggled with racial discrimination, but nonetheless achieved remarkable things, even if his music has been largely neglected until recent years.

‘It is quite unnecessary to find fault with Mr Taylor’s ambition,’ read a review of the Nonet’s premiere in the Musical Times, ‘both because experience will soon correct that failing and because there is such striking merit in his work as furnishes an excellent excuse. The whole Nonet is most interesting, its themes are fresh and vigorous, and their treatment proves that the writer has learnt to compose with freedom and to treat with skill. The scherzo is unquestionably the most striking movement, and few would guess it to be the work of one still a student.’ Perhaps we should be celebrating the creativity and expertise that can come from one’s student years after all.

His bold, expansive Nonet dates from his

© David Kettle

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