Clyne & Britten

CLYNE & BRITTEN Thursday 26 November 2020, Perth Concert Hall –––––

PROGRAMME NOTE

SCO.ORG.UK

Season 2020/21

CLYNE & BRITTEN Thursday 26 November 2020, 7.30pm Perth Concert Hall

Clyne Within Her Arms Britten Serenade for Tenor, Horn and Strings Pekka Kuusisto Director / Violin Allan Clayton Tenor Alec Frank-Gemmill Horn

Our Musicians

YOUR ORCHESTRA FIRST VIOLIN Pekka Kuusisto Ruth Crouch Kana Kawashima Aisling O’Dea Fiona Alexander Amira Bedrush-McDonald Wen Wang Catherine James SECOND VIOLIN Marcus Barcham Stevens Gordon Bragg Rachel Smith Sarah Bevan-Baker Niamh Lyons Stewart Webster

VIOLA Felix Tanner Brian Schiele Asher Zaccardelli Rebecca Wexler CELLO Philip Higham Su-a Lee Donald Gillan Niamh Molloy BASS Nikita Naumov Adrian Bornet Ben Burnley

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WHAT YOU ARE ABOUT TO HEAR

––––– Britain and America provide connections between the two pieces in today’s

Clyne (b.1980)

Anna Clyne has ties with both the UK and the USA: born in London, she studied in Edinburgh and has lived in New York for several years, following further studies at the Manhattan School of Music. Her Edinburgh experiences and memories have made her appointment last Season as the Scottish Chamber Orchestra’s Associate Composer feel like something of a homecoming, she’s said. Within Her Arms, however, stresses her US connections: it was commissioned by the Los Angeles Philharmonic, and premiered by that orchestra under EsaPekka Salonen in April 2009.

Within Her Arms (2009) Britten (1913-1976) Serenade for Tenor, Horn and Strings, Op 31 (1943) Prologue Pastoral Nocturne Elegy Dirge Hymn Sonnet Epilogue

programme – alongside the perhaps more evident links supplied by the sheer expressive power of a string orchestra, of course.

Clyne has supplied her own brief programme note for the piece: Within Her Arms is music for my mother, with all my love.

Earth will keep you tight within her arms dear one – So that tomorrow you will be transformed into flowers – This flower smiling quietly in this morning field – This morning you will weep no more dear one – For we have gone through too deep a night.

This morning, yes, this morning, I kneel down on the green grass – And I notice your presence.

Flowers, that speak to me in silence.

The message of love and understanding has indeed come.

Thich Nhat Hanh

destructive war with Germany (a conflict that both men opposed), and concerned that his music wasn’t achieving the recognition he hoped for in his native land, certainly when compared with the warm reception that often greeted it on the other side of the Atlantic.

Anna Clyne

The poem by Vietnamese Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh appears handwritten in the preface to the musical score. From the brevity of her note, it’s clear that Within Her Arms is a deeply personal piece, and that Clyne wants its sensitive, graceful music to speak for itself, which, as is characteristic across Clyne’s works, it does with immediacy and directness. A solo violin begins to weave a simple, folklike melody, which slowly blossoms across the 15-strong string ensemble, gradually transforming into something longer and more contemplative. Towards the middle of the piece, the music’s unhurried unfolding seems to grind to a halt entirely, as though it’s reluctant to emerge from the stasis in which it finds itself.

Nevertheless, the piece builds to a dense, resonant climax with ornate, interweaving lines that seem to look back to both Tippett and the splendours of English Renaissance music, before coming to rest on gently intertwining fragments of melody.

Along with his partner Peter Pears, Benjamin Britten had left Britain for America in 1939, worried about the UK being dragged into a

Yet they returned to Britain in 1942. Britten had discovered George Crabbe’s poetry collection The Borough, which brought him not only a sense of homesickness for his Suffolk birthplace, but also inspiration for the opera that would make his name, Peter Grimes. In preparation for writing the opera, he set about composing a number of vocal works almost as a kind of warm-up: A Ceremony of Carols, the Hymn to St Cecilia, and also the Serenade for Tenor, Horn and Strings.

The specific impetus for the Serenade came from horn player Dennis Brain, who Britten first met shortly after the composer’s return to the UK. ‘We soon became friends, and it took him no time at all to persuade me to write a special work for him,’ Britten wrote in tribute to Brain following the horn player’s death in 1957. ‘This turned out to be the Serenade.

His help was invaluable in writing the work; but he was always most cautious in advising any alterations. Passages which seemed impossible even for his prodigious gifts were practised over and over again before any modifications were suggested, such was his respect for a composer’s ideas. He of course performed the work on many occasions, and for a period it seemed that no one else would be able to play it adequately. But, as usually happens when there is a work to play and a master who plays it, others slowly develop the means of playing it too, through his example.’

Brain premiered the piece, with Pears and a string orchestra conducted by Walter Goehr, at London’s Wigmore Hall on 15 October 1943.

provides the work’s brightest, most wide-awake setting in the ‘Nocturne’, full of the energy and excitement of nocturnal activities, with cadenzalike fanfares for horn and tenor expressing expectation and optimism.

In the ‘Elegy’, setting William Blake’s The Sick Rose, the mood changes dramatically to one of menace, in one of Britten’s most compact, concentrated but explicit expressions of a theme that would run through his work: the corruption of beauty and innocence. Against an intense, throbbing accompaniment from the strings, the horn wavers unsettlingly between major and minor, sliding unpleasantly between semitones and finishing things off with a quiet snarl.

Benjamin Britten

The horn part that Britten wrote for Brain makes the instrument almost a co-soloist alongside the tenor. For his unusual work for these unusual forces, Britten compiled an eclectic selection of British poetry from across centuries and styles, all on the subject of night: its excitements, its terrors, and the inescapable metaphor of sleep for death itself.

The horn opens the piece with a solo Prologue, in which the player is instructed to use natural harmonics, making certain notes sound sharper or flatter – essentially less ‘in tune’ – than they would if played using the instrument’s valves.

In fact, Britten specifically calls for pitches that sound particularly out of tune as natural harmonics: it’s as if right from the start, we’re being ushered into a strange, dream-like world where nothing is quite as it seems.

His opening song, the ‘Pastoral’, is a setting of the Evening Quatrains by 17th-century poet Charles Cotton, depicting a twilit landscape, gently playful in its musical imagery depicting objects and animals transformed by the rays of the setting sun. Tennyson’s The Splendour Falls

If the ‘Elegy’ showed us darkness, the ‘Dirge’, setting the anonymous 15th-century Lyke-Wake Dirge, plunges us into outright terror amid an advancing funeral procession that Britten conjures from a grotesque fugue in the strings, the tenor remaining relatively impassive as the chaos slowly builds around him. The fugue reaches it climax with the entry of the horn, swooping and whooping its way through the movement’s main theme, before the procession retreats again into the shadows.

Lightness returns, however, in the ‘Hymn’, setting Ben Johnson’s Hymn to Diana, in which horn and voice are united in a sparkling, fleet-footed duet in praise of the goddess of the hunt, the strings nimble and pizzicato throughout. The horn is silent in the Serenade’s penultimate movement, the ‘Sonnet’, a luminous setting of Keats’ To Sleep, with rich, heavily perfumed harmonies, that aims to restore calm contemplation (or perhaps lead us into a darker realm) after the frights and excitement of what’s gone before.

Britten closes with an off-stage reprise of the opening movement as an Epilogue from the horn soloist, bidding farewell from afar. © David Kettle

LIBRETTO Serenade for Tenor, Horn and Strings, Op 31 (1943)

1. Prologue (solo horn) 2. Pastoral The day’s grown old; the fainting sun Has but a little way to run, And yet his steeds, with all his skill, Scarce lug the chariot down the hill.

The shadows now so long do grow, That brambles like tall cedars show; Molehills seem mountains, and the ant Appears a monstrous elephant.

A very little, little flock Shades thrice the ground that it would stock; Whilst the small stripling following them Appears a mighty Polypheme.

And now on benches all are sat, In the cool air to sit and chat, Till Phoebus, dipping in the West, Shall lead the world the way to rest.

Charles Cotton (1630-87)

3. Nocturne The splendour falls on castle walls And snowy summits old in story: The long light shakes across the lakes, And the wild cataract leaps in glory: Blow, bugle, blow, set the wild echoes flying, Bugle blow; answer, echoes, dying, dying, dying.

O hark, O hear, how thin and clear, And thinner, clearer, farther going!

O sweet and far from cliff and scar The horns of Elfland faintly blowing!

Blow, let us hear the purple glens replying: Bugle, blow; answer, echoes, answer, dying, dying, dying.

O love, they die in yon rich sky, They faint on hill or field or river: Our echoes roll from soul to soul, And grow for ever and for ever.

Blow, bugle, blow, set the wild echoes flying; And answer, echoes, answer, dying, dying, dying.

Alfred, Lord Tennyson (1809-92) 4. Elegy O Rose, thou art sick; The invisible worm That flies in the night, In the howling storm, Has found out thy bed Of crimson joy; And his dark, secret love Does thy life destroy.

William Blake (1757–1827)

5. Dirge This ae nighte, this ae nighte, Every nighte and alle, Fire and fleet and candle lighte, And Christe receive thy saule.

When thou from hence away art past, Every nighte and alle, To Whinnymuir thou com’st at last; And Christe receive thy saule.

If ever thou gav’st hos’n and shoon, Every nighte and alle, Sit thee down and put them on; And Christe receive thy saule.

If hos’n and shoon thou ne’er gav’st nane Every nighte and alle, The whinnes sall prick thee to the bare bane; And Christe receive thy saule.

From Whinnymuir when thou may’st pass, Every nighte and alle, To Brig o’ Dread thou com’st at last; And Christe receive thy saule.

From Brig o’ Dread when thou may’st pass, Every nighte and alle, To Purgatory fire thou com’st at last; And Christe receive thy saule.

If ever thou gav’st meat or drink, Every nighte and alle, The fire sall never make thee shrink; And Christe receive thy saule.

If meat or drink thou ne’er gav’st nane, Every nighte and alle, The fire will burn thee to the bare bane; And Christe receive thy saule.

This ae nighte, this ae nighte, Every nighte and alle, Fire and fleet and candle lighte, And Christe receive thy saule.

Lyke-Wake Dirge, Anonymous (15th century)

6. Hymn Queen and huntress, chaste and fair, Now the sun is laid to sleep, Seated in thy silver chair, State in wonted manner keep: Hesperus entreats thy light, Goddess excellently bright.

Earth, let not thy envious shade Dare itself to interpose; Cynthia’s shining orb was made Heav’n to clear when day did close: Bless us then with wishèd sight, Goddess excellently bright.

Lay thy bow of pearl apart, And thy crystal shining quiver; Give unto the flying hart Space to breathe, how short so-ever: Thou that mak’st a day of night, Goddess excellently bright.

Ben Jonson (1572–1637)

7. Sonnet O soft embalmer of the still midnight, Shutting with careful fingers and benign Our gloom pleas’d eyes, embower’d from the light, Enshaded in forgetfulness divine: O soothest Sleep! if so it please thee, close In midst of this thine hymn my willing eyes, Or wait the ‘Amen’ ‘ere thy poppy throws Around my bed its lulling charities.

Then save me, or the passèd day will shine Upon my pillow, breeding many woes, Save me from curious Conscience, that still lords Its strength for darkness, burrowing like a mole; Turn the key deftly in the oilèd wards, And seal the hushèd Casket of my Soul.

John Keats (1795–1821) 8. Epilogue (solo horn – offstage)

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