Currie Plays Grime – Season 2122 – Programme Note

CURRIE P L AY S G R I M E 7 – 8 Apr 2022

SCO.ORG.UK

PROGRAMME

Season 2021/22

CURRIE P L AY S G R I M E Thursday 7 April, 7.30pm The Queen’s Hall, Edinburgh Friday 8 April, 7.30pm City Halls, Glasgow Eberl Overture, Die Königin der schwarzen Inseln Grime Percussion Concerto Interval of 20 minutes

Haydn Overture, L’isola disabitata Beethoven Symphony No 4 Clemens Schuldt Conductor Colin Currie Percussion Clemens Schuldt

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YOUR ORCHESTRA First Violin Doriane Gable Ruth Crouch Alexandra Lomeiko Siún Milne Fiona Alexander Amira Bedrush-McDonald Catherine James Abigail Young Second Violin Marcus Barcham Stevens Gordon Bragg Rachel Spencer Michelle Dierx Niamh Lyons Wen Wang Viola Jessica Beeston Brian Schiele Steve King Rebecca Wexler Cello Philip Higham Su-a Lee Donald Gillan Eric de Wit Bass Nikita Naumov Adrian Bornet Sophie Butler

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Louise Goodwin Principal Timpani with Percussion

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W H AT YO U ARE ABOUT TO HEAR Eberl (1765-1807) Overture, Die Königin der schwarzen Inseln (1801) Grime (b. 1981) Percussion Concerto (2018) Haydn (1732-1809) Overture, L’isola disabitata (1779) Beethoven (1770-1827) Symphony No 4 (1806) Adagio – Allegro vivace Adagio Scherzo-trio: Allegro vivace Allegro ma non troppo

––––– Far-flung, magical islands form a theme running through tonight’s concert – though the two locations we’ll visit are situated in entirely different continents and at different periods in time.

We’re somewhere in the Middle East, possibly further east, for the Overture from Anton Eberl’s 1801 opera The Queen of the Black Islands, whose storyline is lifted from the medieval Arabian Nights collection that titillated Europe in a French translation from the early 1700s. Eberl was something of a traveller himself, though he didn’t make it quite as far as distant Arabia. Born in Vienna, he was a much-respected figure around the same time as Mozart, working across present-day Austria and Germany and also spending several years providing music to the nobility of St Petersburg.

There’s even a suggestion that the slightly older Mozart may have taught him.

And in many ways, Eberl’s music forms something of a missing link between Mozart and Beethoven, maintaining the refinement and clarity of the former while prefiguring the stormy drama of the latter – of whom he was a close friend, even if his now barely remembered Symphony in E-flat eclipsed Beethoven’s 'Eroica' Symphony when they were both premiered in the same 1805 concert.

Eberl’s opera The Queen of the Black Islands dates from his return to Vienna after his St Petersburg sojourn, and represented an attempt to mark out his territory as an opera composer. It proved unsuccessful, however, at its unveiling at the Vienna Court Opera, and Eberl found greater acclaim in a series of symphonies,

Eberl’s music forms something of a missing link between Mozart and Beethoven, maintaining the refinement and clarity of the former while prefiguring the stormy drama of the latter – of whom he was a close friend Anton Eberl

concertos and chamber works that he turned to instead. That’s no reflection on the opera’s storyline of magic and exotic

Concerto that she wrote for Colin Currie.

Though premiered at London’s Royal Festival Hall in 2019, in many ways it’s a

mystery, however. The young King of the Black Islands marries his cousin, but suspects her of being an enchantress.

He eventually discovers that she’s been sending him to sleep with a herbal brew so that she can spend evenings with her lover – but he tricks her and reveals her infidelity.

thoroughly Scottish affair. Currie grew up in Edinburgh, and Grime, though born in York, moved to Scotland with her parents as a baby, studying at the City of Edinburgh Music School and St Mary’s Music School, as well as taking composition lessons from the age of 12 with Icelandic multi-musician Hafliði Hallgrímsson, for many years the SCO’s Principal Cellist. She’s been associate composer with the Hallé and composer in association at London’s Wigmore Hall, and is currently professor of composition at London’s Royal Academy of Music.

Eberl captures the story’s darkness and drama in his relentlessly stormy Overture, with prominent timpani and swelling figurations for the strings – and ‘Turkish’ cymbals and drums hinting at the story’s oriental origins.

If Eberl used exotic percussion to colour his dramatic Overture, Helen Grime places

Percussion is so much the central focus of her Concerto, that Grime upends percussion instruments' conventional

it centre stage in the 2018 Percussion

orchestral role of providing mere local

Helen Grime

Percussion is so much the central focus of her Concerto, that Grime upends percussion instruments' conventional orchestral role of providing mere local colour and decoration, instead using her soloist’s music to prompt and define what’s played by the orchestra.

colour and decoration, instead using her soloist’s music to prompt and define what’s played by the orchestra. She

interrupted by orchestral interjections), and the orchestra returns in more subdued mood, with low melodies in

also draws attention to the contrasting melodic and rhythmic aspects of percussion, a focus she begins right from the opening gestures she writes for the vibraphone: a quick, cascading flurry of notes, then a stronger, more insistent rhythm on a single pitch.

cellos, basses and bassoons providing a brooding contrast to the soloist’s bright, liquid figurations.

So begins the first of the Concerto’s three movements, which run together in a single, through-composed arch.

Grime’s separate melodic and rhythmic ideas quickly become spliced together, against a delicate orchestral backdrop that mirrors and amplifies the soloist’s material. A climax is broken by the bright, shimmering sounds of the soloist’s energetic solo cadenza on highpitched glockenspiel and crotales (itself

The pace slackens as the Concerto moves into its slower, quieter, earthier second movement, for which the soloist turns to almost ritualistic music on unpitched bass drum, tom-toms, congas and bongos, later launching fast-moving, breathless figures on the marimba. The music builds up an almost mechanistic energy, and after an intense orchestral interlude in which sustained notes soar ever higher, the soloist returns on the marimba, this time in far more reflective music.

The marimba remains the focus for the virtuosic, fast-moving final movement,

Haydn injects just as much drama and incident into his churning, Sturm und Drang Overture as he did to any of the other thirteen operas he created for Eszterháza.

Franz Joseph Haydn

whose impetuous opening energy slowly transforms into more overtly danceable rhythms, with prominent contributions

characters – four, in fact, when the men make an unexpected reappearance. More significant, however, is the opera’s unusual

from the orchestral timpani – though there’s a brief memory of the opening movement’s glittering glockenspiel and crotales at the Concerto’s brilliant close.

scale: it requires just four singers and a single location (it could even be staged without a set), and comes in around 90 minutes. Haydn himself called it an ‘operetta’, and wrote it to be performed in the Eszterháza court itself, just three weeks after a fire had destroyed the Palace’s theatre.

For our second far-flung island, we’re in the Caribbean, where two couples have been shipwrecked in Haydn’s 1779 opera L’isola disabitata (or ‘The Uninhabited Island’). Even worse, however, the two menfolk spend little time on dry land before being kidnapped by pirates, leaving their partners alone for 13 years, and unaware of their lovers’ fate.

The opera’s plot is pretty thin, admittedly, though its libretto by Pietro Metastasio makes great play of exploring the

Nonetheless, Haydn injects just as much drama and incident into his churning, Sturm und Drang Overture as he did to any of the other thirteen operas he created for Eszterháza. The music falls into an unusual, four-part structure. A slow, brooding opening seems to search for its sense of key, before the music bursts into dramatic, dashing life: might

psychological states of its two central

this be the storm that shipwrecks our

quartet of characters? There’s a sudden, rather disconcerting interruption from an elegant minuet dance, before a burst of the urgent, stormy music brings the Overture to a breathless close.

Both of our far-flung island overtures come from operas that have been rather overlooked. The same can legitimately be said of the closing work in tonight’s concert – however strange it might feel to call a Beethoven symphony neglected.

There’s no denying, however, that the Fourth Symphony is probably his least well known, probably for the simple reason that it sits between his grander and more exuberant Third ('Eroica') and Fifth. None other than Robert Schumann famously described the Fourth as ‘a slender Greek maiden between two Norse giants’. But despite its sunny disposition and its Haydn-esque proportions, might we be wrong to consider it as a musical throwback between two pioneering, heroic masterpieces?

A lot of the Fourth Symphony’s lighthearted mood and modest proportions may come down to the circumstances of its commission.

Beethoven spent the summer of 1806 away from the bustle of Vienna, at the Silesian country estate of his friend and patron Prince Karl Lichnowsky. The Prince invited the composer to visit a nearby friend – and, it turned out, enormous Beethoven fan – Count Franz von Oppersdorff in Oberglogau (now Głogówek in Poland).

So passionate about music was the Count that he not only kept his own private orchestra, but also insisted that everyone in his household learnt an instrument. And he demonstrated his admiration for the visiting composer by asking him to write

Ludwig van Beethoven

a new symphony for his private band, in return for a generous fee.

Given the flattery and the substantial sum involved, Beethoven was hardly likely to decline. He’d already started work on what would become his Fifth Symphony, but sensed that it wouldn’t suit Oppersdorff’s petite, Haydn-loving orchestra. Instead, he offered an entirely different piece, the Fourth Symphony – perhaps written expressly with Oppersdorff’s players in mind, though there’s substantial evidence to suggest that Beethoven had already composed the work, and it was simply good luck that it chimed with the Count’s expectations.

Despite Beethoven giving Oppersdorff exclusive performance rights for six months, the Count graciously allowed the private premiere to take place in

The public first heard the Fourth Symphony in April 1808 at Vienna’s Burgtheater, though it wasn’t much of a success, despite its relatively listener-friendly, conservative tone. Even fellow composer Carl Maria von Weber found it far too radical and outlandish for his personal tastes, writing sarcastically that Beethoven, ‘above all things, throws rules to the winds, for they only hamper a genius’.

Vienna, at the city mansion of Prince Lobkowitz, another of the composer’s patrons, in March 1807. The public first

avoid the Symphony’s ‘home’ key of B-flat for all of 42 bars, and when its main faster section bursts into life, it represents a

heard the Fourth Symphony in April 1808 at Vienna’s Burgtheater, though it wasn’t much of a success, despite its relatively listener-friendly, conservative tone. Even fellow composer Carl Maria von Weber found it far too radical and outlandish for his personal tastes, writing sarcastically that Beethoven, ‘above all things, throws rules to the winds, for they only hamper a genius’.

wholesale change of mood. The slower second movement pulls a characteristically Beethovenian trick of contrasting a long, slowly unfolding melody against an accompaniment of almost militarystyle precision. The third movement – apparently a minuet, but really more of a scherzo – flickers constantly between lightness and dark, with prominent woodwind writing in its central trio section.

Beethoven closes with a dose of infectious jollity in his dashing finale – though spare a thought for the orchestra’s principal bassoonist, thrust unexpectedly into the spotlight alone towards the end of the movement, when its opening material returns.

To modern ears, the Fourth might sound far more Haydn-esque than the 'Eroica' or Fifth Symphony that stand either side of it. But that’s to disregard Beethoven’s continuing innovations, in terms of its power, its tautness, and its ruthlessly rigorous structures. The first movement’s slow, brooding introduction manages to

© David Kettle

Conductor CLEMENS SCHULDT

––––– Clemens Schuldt is one of the most exciting young conductors emerging from Germany today, and is the Principal Conductor of the Münchener Kammerorchester. He is widely praised for his innovative interpretations of classical and romantic Germanic repertoire, often using his creativity to include lesser-known and contemporary repertoire in his programmes. Highlights of this season with the Münchener Kammerorchester include a recording of Márton Illés’ Violin Concerto with Patricia Kopatchinskaja, a collaboration with Jazzrausch Bigband, and appearances at Dresdner Musikfestspiele as well as Festspiele Herrenchiemsee. Further soloists he works with include Nikita Boriso-Glebsky, Vilde Frang, Ilya Gringolts, Steven Isserlis, Mischa Maisky, Baiba Skride, Kian Soltani, Christian Tetzlaff and Alisa Weilerstein.

The 2021/22 season sees Clemens Schuldt make his debuts with BBC Symphony Orchestra, Copenhagen Philharmonic, Orquestra Sinfónica do Porto Casa da Música, Konzerthausorchester Berlin and Staatskapelle Weimar. He will also make his Canadian debut with the Orchestre Symphonique de Québec. Further highlights include returns to the BBC Philharmonic, Stavanger Symphony Orchestra, Trondheim Symphony Orchestra and Turku Philharmonic Orchestra.

For full biography please visit sco.org.uk

Percussion COLIN CURRIE

––––– Colin Currie is a solo and chamber artist at the peak of his powers. Championing new music at the highest level, he is hailed as being “at the summit of percussion performance today” (Gramophone). Currie is the soloist of choice for many of today’s foremost composers and conductors and he performs with the world’s leading orchestras, including the New York Philharmonic, Royal Concertgebouw, Royal Stockholm Philharmonic, London Philharmonic and Minnesota Orchestras.

A dynamic and adventurous soloist, Currie’s commitment to commissioning and creating new music was recognised in 2015 by the Royal Philharmonic Society who awarded him the Instrumentalist Award. From his earliest years Currie forged a pioneering path in creating new music for percussion, winning the Royal Philharmonic Society Young Artist Award in 2000 and receiving a Borletti-Buitoni Trust Award in 2005. Currie has premiered works by composers such as Steve Reich, Elliott Carter, Louis Andriessen, HK Gruber, Mark-Anthony Turnage, Sir James MacMillan, Brett Dean, Sir Harrison Birtwistle, Einojuhani Rautavaara, Helen Grime, Jennifer Higdon, Kalevi Aho, Andy Akiho, Rolf Wallin, Kurt Schwertsik, Andrew Norman, Julia Wolfe and Nico Muhly.

The major highlight of Currie’s 2021/22 season is the world premiere of a significant new work by Steve Reich, Traveler’s Prayer, written for the Colin Currie Group. Throughout October and November 2021 the Colin Currie Group toured the premiere performances to The Concertgebouw, Royal Festival Hall, Elbphilharmonie and Philharmonie de Paris with subsequent co-commissioned premieres to follow at Tokyo Opera City, Carnegie Hall and CAL Performances.

For full biography please visit sco.org.uk

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