Harmoniemusik – Season 2122 – Programme Note

HARMONIEMUSIK 18 – 21 Nov 2021

SCO.ORG.UK

PROGRAMME

Season 2021/22

HARMONIEMUSIK

Thursday 18 November, 1pm Holy Trinity, St Andrews Friday 19 November, 1pm Stevenson Hall, Glasgow Sunday 21 November, 3pm The Queen’s Hall, Edinburgh R Strauss (arr. Nigel Shore) Harmoniemusik from Der Rosenkavalier (UK Premiere) SCO Wind Soloists Royal Conservatoire of Scotland students Alvin Ho Conductor Please note there will be no interval.

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SCO/ RCS WINDS SIDE BY SIDE * Denotes RCS Players FLUTE André Cebrián Matilda Coulton * OBOE Robin Williams Ross Williams * Fraser Kelman CLARINET Maximiliano Martín William Stafford D CLARINET Osian Dance *

BASSOON Charlotte Cox Alison Green CONTRABASSOON Rachel Simmonds * HORN Fabian Van de Geest Jamie Shield Anya Flanagan * Gabi Rodriguez * Matthew Sayers *

BASSET HORN/ BASS CLARINET Aaron Hartnell-Booth*

Alison Green Sub-Principal Bassoon

The orchestra list is correct at time of publication

W H AT YO U ARE ABOUT TO HEAR R Strauss (1864-1949) Harmoniemusik from Der Rosenkavalier (UK Premiere) arr. Nigel Shore (1909 - 1910) 1. Akt 2. Akt 3. Akt

––––– Transforming a three-hour opera into a 45-minute piece for wind ensemble, as British oboist and composer Nigel Shore has done with Richard Strauss’s Der Rosenkavalier, might seem like something of an unconventional enterprise. In fact, it has serious historical precedents, and ones that make Shore’s choice of Strauss’s most Mozartian opera particularly apt.

The Harmonie or wind band was all the rage in central Europe the second half of the 18th century, as nobility and wealthy landowners demanded light music from their house ensemble’s wind players for the purposes of entertainment. At its simplest, it meant simply a few popular opera arias as background music for dinner. At its most sophisticated, however, it was elaborate rearrangements of symphonies or even whole operas, intended as serenades for banquets or garden parties, to charm and delight hunting trips, or even as ‘morning music’ to wake particularly esteemed guests.

Spring 1782 marked quite a turning point for the form: Austrian Emperor Joseph II ordered that an eight-piece wind ensemble from his Vienna court orchestra (which would later become the Vienna Philharmonic) should provide his ‘table music’. It was a group that comprised some of the most illustrious players in Europe at the time, including one Anton Stadler, for whom Mozart had written his Clarinet Quintet and Concerto.

If Joseph II set the trend, then many others across Europe followed, thereby expanding hugely the repertoire for wind groups – and also encouraging some

Strauss, however, vowed that his next opera would be a Mozartian affair, and worked with librettist Hugo von Hoffmansthal on a Molièrean farce about inter-generational intrigues, the value of true love, and the relentless passing of time.

Richard Georg Strauss

unscrupulous money-making. Before any concept of copyright, arrangers might be expected to leap on the latest operatic hit and extract its big tunes for Harmonie

Elektra, both shocking, violent creations that set out Strauss’s credentials as a provocative new musical voice (and the first of which prompted Kaiser Wilhelm

versions, whether the original composer knew about it or not. Mozart, for example, wrote from Vienna to his father in Salzburg that he planned to rearrange the whole of his opera Die Entführung aus dem Serail before anyone else could get their hands on it. It was also Mozart who remembered being serenaded by a sextet of street wind musicians on his way home late one night – playing music that he himself had composed.

to warn the composer that carrying on like that might get him into a lot of trouble). Strauss, however, vowed that his next opera would be a Mozartian affair, and worked with librettist Hugo von Hoffmansthal on a Molièrean farce about inter-generational intrigues, the value of true love, and the relentless passing of time.

Jump forward to 1911, and Richard Strauss looked back directly to Mozart in his opera Der Rosenkavalier, unveiled in Dresden in January of that year, and set in Vienna in the 1740s. It followed the enormous two-fold succès de scandale

The middle-aged Marschallin is carrying on a passionate love affair with the nobleman Octavian (who – scandalously – is young enough to be her son), but her country cousin, the bumbling Baron Ochs, announces his plans to marry the equally youthful Sophie. The Marschallin suggests Octavian as a go-between

of his first two major operas Salome and

for the Baron’s marriage proposal, but

There’s a lot of froth and farce to Strauss and Hoffmansthal’s comic creation, but it’s a sophisticated, bittersweet work too, shot through with a deep vein of melancholy. And those are all emotions reflected in Strauss’s supple, ever-changing music, which not only pays appropriately direct homage to the Harmonie wind groups that would have been so popular at the time the opera’s set, but also nods overtly to Mozart.

the young man quickly falls for Sophie himself, not only robbing the lascivious Baron of the object of his affections, but also forcing the Marschallin to confront

the work is set. Well, Der Rosenkavalier inhabits something of a fairytale Vienna, half real, half imagined.

her own aging as she reluctantly releases Octavian to his new beloved, with grace and not a little sadness.

There’s an obvious logic, then, to transforming Strauss’s Mozartian score into an abridged Harmonie version, in the same manner as happened with operas by Mozart himself. As well as the historical aptness, however, Shore draws attention to the prominence of wind instruments in Strauss’s original score, and his rich, characterful writing for wind. Shore’s arrangement for 15 wind players is in three movements, each one devoted to one of the opera’s acts, received its premiere in April this year – following several Covid-related postponements – by the Musicians of the Australian National Academy of Music in Abbotsford, Australia.

There’s a lot of froth and farce to Strauss and Hoffmansthal’s comic creation, but it’s a sophisticated, bittersweet work too, shot through with a deep vein of melancholy. And those are all emotions reflected in Strauss’s supple, everchanging music, which not only pays appropriately direct homage to the Harmonie wind groups that would have been so popular at the time the opera’s set, but also nods overtly to Mozart. More anachronistically, the opera is famed for its archetypically Viennese waltzes, a musical form that wouldn’t achieve its popularity until more than a century after

© David Kettle

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