Britten, MacMillan & Prokofiev

Thursday 4 March 2021, The Queen’s Hall, Edinburgh –––––

PROGRAMME NOTE

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PERFORMERS

With an introduction by Maximiliano Martín

VIOLIN Maria Włoszczowska Amira Bedrush-McDonald VIOLA Felix Tanner

OBOE Amy Turner CLARINET Maximiliano Martín

CELLO Donald Gillan DOUBLE BASS Nikita Naumov

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WHAT YOU ARE ABOUT TO HEAR BRITTEN (1913-1976) Phantasy Quartet, Op 2 (1932) MACMILLAN (b. 1959) Tuireadh (1991) PROKOFIEV (1891-1953) Quintet in G minor, Op 39 (1924) Tema con variazioni Andante energico Allegro sostenuto, ma con brio Adagio pesante

––––– Inviting a solo woodwind player to join a chamber group of strings has a long pedigree. Just think of Mozart or Brahms’s clarinet quintets, now iconic works in the chamber repertoire, or even of the lesser-known flute quartets (four of them) and sole Oboe Quartet by Mozart (or, indeed, several much lesserknown works for similar combinations

by JC Bach, written a few decades earlier). And pairing a wind instrument with a string group sets up an interesting dynamic. Is the resulting piece essentially a pared-down concerto, with the wind player in the spotlight as soloist, and a clutch of string players functioning as a miniature orchestra? Sometimes.

Alternatively, the wind instrument’s line may be woven in and among those of the strings, creating unusual blends of sound and shifting perspectives as to who’s most prominent.

Allegro precipitato, ma non troppo presto Andantino

In Britten’s Phantasy Quartet, the first of today’s three wind-plus-strings chamber works from the 20th century, the oboe is definitely first among equals – sometimes very much a virtuoso soloist, but other times standing back to let the strings share the limelight. And for music written by an 18-year-old student, in his final year at London’s Royal College of Music, it’s an astonishingly assured, mature work, and one in which much of the composer’s later style is already apparent. Britten felt rather stifled by the conservative atmosphere of the RCM (as he later remembered, “when you’re immensely full of energy and ideas, you don’t want to waste your time being taken through elementary exercises in dictation”) – certainly when compared with the creative freedom that had been

Despite its abundant charm and its expressive immediacy, the Phantasy Quartet is a surprisingly intricate and sophisticated work, bringing together elements of 16th-century fantasy with nods to Classical sonata form.

Benjamin Britten

encouraged by his earlier composition teacher, Frank Bridge. Indeed, despite studying with the eminent composer John

“Goossens does his part splendidly. The rest, although they are intelligent players, aren’t really first-class instrumentalists”.)

Ireland at the College, Britten continued to show Bridge all his major creations.

It also proved one of Britten’s first international successes, when it was selected for performance the following year in Florence by the International Society of Contemporary Music.

He wrote the Phantasy Quartet in 1932 for a competition, established in 1905 by the wealthy amateur musician and writer Walter Wilson Cobbett, for singlemovement chamber works in a shifting, multi-mood ‘fantasy’ style. Britten had won the previous year’s contest with his Phantasy string quartet, but his oboe quartet was overlooked – though it went on to be premiered at a BBC broadcast in August 1933, getting its first live concert performance that November, on both occasions by oboist Leon Goossens (its dedicatee) and members of the International String Quartet. (Britten observed rather acidly in his diary:

And despite its abundant charm and its expressive immediacy, the Phantasy Quartet is a surprisingly intricate and sophisticated work, bringing together elements of 16th-century fantasy with nods to Classical sonata form, seeming to cram everything we’d expect from a traditional four-movement sonata into less than 15 minutes, without ever seeming perfunctory or calculated.

Overall, it traces a large-scale arch, beginning and ending with the same solo cello figure, and passing through

Tuireadh is music that you experience rather than simply listen to: its visceral impact is as important, and as powerful, as its musical substance.

Sir James MacMillan

dramatically contrasting material in between. That opening cello idea quickly blossoms into a rather sombre march, before the oboe enters with a more lyrical melody. A cadenza-like flourish on the oboe leads to faster, more urgent material, and almost imperceptibly, Britten guides us into a development section in which he brings together all the material he’s introduced so far. A soulful viola melody kicks off a surprisingly slow, pastoral section that unexpectedly interrupts the development, before a return of the opening themes – of course, in reverse order.

an impassioned soliloquy. MacMillan himself explains the origins of the piece in his own programme note: “This work is dedicated to the victims of the Piper Alpha disaster and their families. On the evening of 6 July 1988, a fire broke out on the Piper Alpha offshore oil and gas platform located in the North Sea. The fire was uncontrollable and evacuation plans inadequate. As a result 167 men died and 62 had to be rescued from the sea.

While Britten’s oboe might sit as an equal alongside the Phantasy Quartet’s three string players, the clarinettist in Sir James MacMillan’s Tuireadh plays far more of a soloist’s role, almost that

“Tuireadh is Gaelic for a lament (or requiem) for the dead, and the piece was written as a musical complement to the memorial sculpture created by Sue Jane Taylor and unveiled in Aberdeen in 1991.

I was specifically inspired by a letter sent to me by the mother of one of the dead

of a dramatic character delivering

men in which she wrote movingly of her

But rather than being neglected, Max Bruch probably counts as a composer who gained such overwhelming recognition for a single piece – in his case, the Violin Concerto in G minor – that it overshadowed the rest of his output.

Sergei Prokofiev

visit to the scene for a memorial service.

The ceremony became a rite of passage for those whose loved ones had not

ethereal harmonies played on harmonics, the viola introduces an almost folksounding idea amid seagull sounds. The

been found, and the mother described how a spontaneous keening sound rose gently from the mourners assembled on the boat. Tuireadh attempts to capture this outpouring of grief in music and makes allusions to the intervallic and ornamental archetypes of various lament-forms from Scottish traditional music”.

four string players then seem to want to subdue the clarinet’s elaborate flourishes in a long, slow, unremittingly intense section, before those clarinet flourishes transform into something altogether more obsessive, and the ethereal string harmonies return. The piece finally dies away in exhaustion, with seemingly inconsolable sobbing from the viola.

Tuireadh is music that you experience rather than simply listen to: its visceral impact is as important, and as powerful, as its musical substance. The piece begins almost theatrically, with the clarinet intoning long, angry crescendos separated by silences. After an agitated, nervy section from the strings, where

The mood changes entirely, however, with the final work in today’s concert.

And this final piece brings together both of today’s wind players to form what’s almost a miniature orchestra, alongside the unusual string combination of violin, viola and double bass. Indeed, the Quintet is one of Prokofiev’s most

scrubbing tremolos are separated by

unusual pieces – quirky, unapologetically

experimental, and fiercely challenging for its performers.

Prokofiev wrote the music in 1924 in Paris, where he’d settled after fleeing Revolutionary Russia first for the USA, then later for France; he was looking to install himself amid the hot-headed musical culture of the French capital.

Conductor Serge Koussevitzky had commissioned a Second Symphony from him, but he was hoping to gain some additional income when he met young Russian dancer Boris Romanov at the Paris home of impresario Sergei Diaghilev. Romanov suggested that he and the composer collaborate on a ballet about circus life, later to be named Trapeze, and Prokofiev agreed, deciding on his unusual quintet of instruments because of touring necessities.

Trapeze was premiered in Berlin in 1925, and had several more performances in Germany and Italy, but it never properly took off. Part of the problem, Romanov admitted, was that his dancers struggled to follow Prokofiev’s unusual, everchanging rhythms. Undaunted, Prokofiev remodelled the piece into the purely instrumental Quintet you hear today.

And though Prokofiev stated at the project’s outset that he had no intention of creating pastiche circus music, there’s nonetheless something of the big top in the Quintet’s ‘wrong’-note melodies, its gleefully clashing harmonies, and – of course – its restless rhythmic quirkiness.

Indeed, the composer even seems intent on having fun with its strange combination of instruments, producing playfully unblended sonorities with plenty of raw edges and unbalanced

textures, even at points contrasting his abyssal double bass against a quartet of what are quite high-pitched instruments.

The Quintet’s six movements follow a predictably unconventional pattern. The opening theme and variations begins with an oboe melody packed full of ‘wrong’ notes, before a more pensive first variation spotlights individual instruments, and a more skittery second variation sends the violin into the stratosphere. The double bass kicks off the sardonic humour of the second movement with what’s almost a jazz bassline, while the third movement is the most rhythmically tricksy of all: the composer has lots of fun inventing ever more complicated subdivisions of his five-in-a-bar rhythm. No wonder Romanov’s dancers struggled. Following the slow, dramatic procession of the fourth movement, Prokofiev’s fifth movement is a quick march that seems on the verge of breaking into a run. He concludes with what seems a strangely subdued finale, despite a more playful, folk-like central section, but saves his energy for a more raucous few closing bars.

Prokofiev returned to Russia – or the USSR, as it then was – in 1935, but his Quintet had already received its Soviet premiere in 1927 in Moscow. After his return, however, he almost felt the need to apologise for the piece to the Soviet authorities, blaming “the Parisian atmosphere, where complex patterns and dissonances were the accepted thing, and which fostered my predilection for complex thinking”. © David Kettle

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