Pärt, Bryars & Beethoven

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PÄRT, BRYARS & BEETHOVEN Thursday 29 April 2021, Perth Concert Hall –––––

SCO.ORG.UK

PROGRAMME

Season 2020/21

PÄRT, BRYARS & BEETHOVEN

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Thursday 29 April 2021, 7.30pm Perth Concert Hall Pärt Cantus in Memoriam Benjamin Britten Bryars The Green Ray Beethoven Symphony No 1 Joseph Swensen Conductor Jess Gillam Saxophone Introduced by Jess Gillam and Joseph Swensen

Jess Gillam appears by kind permission of Decca Classics

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Our Musicians

YOUR ORCHESTRA FIRST VIOLIN Maria Włoszczowska Ruth Crouch Kana Kawashima Aisling O’Dea Siún Milne Fiona Alexander SECOND VIOLIN Marcus Barcham Stevens Gordon Bragg Rachel Smith Amira Bedrush-McDonald Niamh Lyons Stewart Webster VIOLA Nicholas Bootiman Felix Tanner Brian Schiele Steve King CELLO Philip Higham Su-a Lee Donald Gillan Christoff Fourie BASS Nikita Naumov Adrian Bornet

FLUTE Eilidh Gillespie Emma Roche PICCOLO Eilidh Gillespie OBOE Robin Williams Katherine Bryer CLARINET Jean Johnson William Stafford BASS CLARINET William Stafford BASSOON Charlotte Cox Alison Green CONTRA BASSOON Alison Green HORN Patrick Broderick Jamie Shield TRUMPET Peter Franks Shaun Harrold FLUGELHORN Peter Franks TROMBONE Nigel Cox TIMPANI/ PERCUSSION Louise Goodwin

WHAT YOU ARE ABOUT TO HEAR Pärt (b.1935) Cantus in Memoriam Benjamin Britten (1977)

Bryars (b.1943) The Green Ray (1991) Beethoven (1770-1827) Symphony No 1 in C major, Op 21 (1799–1800) Adagio molto – Allegro con brio Andante cantabile con moto Menuetto / Trio. Allegro molto e vivace Adagio – Allegro molto e vivace

––––– If you’ve ever learnt to play a musical instrument, or if you know anybody who has, you’ll probably be more than familiar with scales – simple up-and-down sequences of adjacent notes played one after the other, used to help a player find their way around their instrument.

In today’s first piece, however, Estonian composer Arvo Pärt elevates this humble technical exercise into music of profound spiritual insight. And in our final piece, too, Beethoven has a lot of fun with scales in his first foray into the world of the symphony.

So rich and moving is Pärt’s Cantus in memoriam Benjamin Britten that it’s hard to believe it’s nothing more (or, strictly speaking, almost nothing more) than musical scales superimposed on one another. Pärt wrote the piece in 1977 (the same year as his Fratres, heard in an SCO concert earlier this season), as one of the earliest works in the ‘tintinnabular’ style that he’s been exploring ever since.

As a young composer, Pärt had shocked the then Soviet Republic’s authorities with his avant-garde explorations, before immersing himself in medieval and Renaissance church music, and developing an austere, ascetic musical style he named ‘tintinnabuli’. The name refers literally to the sound of bells – and indeed, there’s a prominent bell that tolls throughout his Cantus – but more figuratively to the clean, clear, ringing harmonies he employs throughout his music.

Despite the work’s title, Pärt never met Britten, who died in December 1976. But the Estonian composer greatly admired the elder man’s music, finding in it a

Pärt creates a dense tangle of constantly shifting lines and harmonies whose devastating emotional impact belies the music’s underlying restraint.

Arvo Pärt

simplicity and a directness that he aimed for in his own works. He later said: “I had just discovered Britten for myself. Just before his death I began to appreciate

material to play: a simple, descending A minor scale (strictly speaking, a descending Aeolian mode on A). But each group plays an octave lower than the one

the unusual purity of his music – I had had the impression of the same kind of purity in the ballads of Guillaume de Machaut.

And besides, for a long time I had wanted to meet Britten personally – and now it would not come to that.”

that precedes it, and twice as slowly: by the end, the double basses are playing 16 times more slowly than the first violins.

Furthermore, each string section repeats its pattern over and over, adding a note each time before it begins all over again: the first violins, for example, start with just a single note but are playing 20 notes by the time they reach their final cycle.

When each group reaches a specific pitch low in its range (designed by Pärt to sound together an A minor chord), they simply stop and hold that note until the end of the piece. For the first violins, that means holding the same middle C for almost half of the piece’s duration.

The Cantus opens with its lone bell tolling three times – perhaps to announce the death, or at least to open a spiritual space in which we’ll contemplate it – before its string orchestra begins working through the music’s slowly unfolding processes. There’s something undeniably mathematical about Pärt’s creation. He retains the string orchestra’s conventional division into five groups – first violins, second violins, violas, cellos and basses – and gives each of them exactly the same

That might well sound rather dry and somewhat academic. The musical results,

Bryars was one of a group of English experimental composers in the 1960s and 1970s who, inspired by John Cage (with whom Bryars worked), created mischievous, quietly pioneering works that seem to question what music is even for.

Gavin Bryars

however, are anything but. Using these very simple ideas, Pärt creates a dense tangle of constantly shifting lines and harmonies whose devastating emotional

it rings on – perhaps a sense of hope and light after the strings’ inexorable descent into darkness.

impact belies the music’s underlying restraint. And in doing so, he generates some fascinating aural effects, too. The piece remains at exactly the same tempo throughout, but seems to slow down at an ever increasing rate as it descends from its stratospheric opening to its sepulchral close, simply as a result of the faster-moving layers stopping. As a result, it seems almost to offer a glimpse of eternity in a piece that lasts barely ten minutes, giving a sensation that the music could stretch on forever as its sounds grow darker and darker. By contrast, however, listen closely to the piece’s final bell tolling: its initial strike is masked by the strings’ loud final chord, but you might just about be able to discern a bright

The saxophone concerto The Green Ray by Gavin Bryars at times occupies a similarly thoughtful, contemplative world, though it’s far richer in its harmonies – perhaps not surprisingly, since its composer is also an accomplished jazz bassist. Bryars was one of a group of English experimental composers in the 1960s and 1970s who, inspired by John Cage (with whom Bryars worked), created mischievous, quietly pioneering works that seem to question what music is even for. Bryars himself was a founder member of the notorious Portsmouth Sinfonia, an orchestra whose players were often entirely unable to play their instruments. He had early successes with The Sinking of the Titanic, which supplies its players with various musical

sense of A major among its overtones as

ideas and sources so that they can create

The Symphony has been called a farewell to the 18th century, and in it, there’s an undeniable sense of Beethoven clearing the air and making space for something distinctive and new.

Ludwig van Beethoven

their own interpretation of the infamous maritime cataclysm, and Jesus’ Blood Never Failed Me Yet, a deeply moving minimalist piece based around Bryars’s

change of tempo, or by a substantial shift of texture. For example, shortly before the end, there is a passage where the saxophone is accompanied by 21 solo

own recording of a song sung by an elderly homeless man. His later music, however, is more conventional: often slow, intimate, deeply lyrical, and shot through with lush harmonies that wouldn’t be out of place in a jazz club. Bryars writes about The Green Ray:

strings – the entire string section playing divisi – followed by a coda, which contains simultaneous ‘laments’ (for saxophone, cor anglais, French horn and solo violin).

“The piece is dedicated to John Harle and the Bournemouth Sinfonietta, who commissioned it with funds made available by South West Arts. It makes use of the saxophone’s ability to play long expressive melodic passages, and was written too, having seen the Sinfonietta perform, with some of its individual players in mind. Although played without a break, the piece does fall into a number

“The Green Ray is the title of a romantic novel by Jules Verne, set in the West of Scotland, in which a peculiar atmospheric phenomenon plays the key part. A ‘green ray’ is seen at sunset in certain latitudes, and in certain coastal conditions, just as the sun touches the horizon and, for a brief moment, the orange sun emits a green ray of light. In the Verne story the simultaneous sighting of the ray will seal a couple’s love, and the attempts of a young man to do this are constantly frustrated (by sudden clouds, by a yacht

of recognisable sections delineated by a

passing along the horizon, and so on).

This part of Western Scotland is also the place where certain piping traditions originated. Male pipers practised in one

The Symphony has been called a farewell to the 18th century, and in it, there’s an undeniable sense of

cave on the seashore, females in another (the ‘piper’s cave’ and the ‘pigeon’s cave’).

As they played their laments at twilight a triangulation, similar to that in the Verne story (male-ray-female) may well have occurred without the knowledge of the innocent participants, hence the sequence of simultaneous laments in the coda.

Beethoven clearing the air and making space for something distinctive and new. Nonetheless, it still sits very much within the Viennese Classical tradition embodied by the two eminent earlier composers. Indeed, its dedicatee, Vienna-based dignitary Baron Gottfried van Swieten, had also been a patron to Mozart and Haydn, so Beethoven knew his new work would be judged by their standards.

“On one occasion I witnessed the green ray in Southern California. I was returning along the coast after having climbed up Mount Tecate, on the top of which is a house, now empty, where Evans-Wentz translated The Tibetan Book of the Dead.”

The tempo picks up and the mood brightens considerably, however, in the final piece in today’s concert. It was in 1792 that Beethoven left his birthplace of Bonn to settle in Vienna, then musical capital of the world, and he quickly set about composing prolifically across many genres: chamber music, piano sonatas, and his first two piano concertos. His First Symphony, however, had to wait until 1800 for its premiere, at a concert in Vienna’s Burgtheater on 2 April.

It’s also a work in which – to return to today’s perhaps rather tenuous theme – musical scales abound, often put to very witty use by the composer. He begins, however, with a notoriously ‘forbidden’ chord as the first movement’s slow introduction searches for its home key, before the spry energy of its faster main section takes over.

Such is the second movement’s sense of

That eight-year delay was perhaps understandable, however, when the composer had such intimidating figures as Haydn and Mozart peering over his shoulders. Mozart had died about a decade earlier, but Haydn was very much alive: Beethoven had ostensibly moved to the Austrian capital to study with him, though the lessons didn’t go well and Beethoven quickly realised that he’d need to establish himself in the city very much

constant motion that it hardly counts as a slow movement, its graceful, even dance-like melody returning in more elaborate guises following its richer central section. Beethoven calls his third movement a minuet, but with a tempo marking of ‘very fast and lively’, it feels more like the first of his playful scherzos, and its surging opening theme is so urgent that you’d hardly notice it’s simply a rising scale. Another rising scale launches his finale, tentatively and teasingly in the violins, as if they’re cautiously feeling their way towards the movement’s scampering main melody, which returns after its stormier central section to bring the Symphony to an irrepressibly sunny conclusion.

on his own terms.

© David Kettle

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