Boulogne, Handel & Mozart

BOULOGNE, HANDEL & MOZART Thursday 21 January 2021, Perth Concert Hall –––––

PROGRAMME NOTE

SCO.ORG.UK

Season 2020/21

BOULOGNE, HANDEL & MOZART Thursday 21 January 2021, 7.30pm Perth Concert Hall

Boulogne Overture L’Amant Anonyme Handel arr. Mozart Overture, Acis and Galatea Mozart Aria: Parto, parto ma tu ben mio Laudamus Te (from Mass in C minor) Symphony No 36, ‘Linz’ Peter Whelan Conductor/ Harpsichord/Organ Katie Bray Mezzo-Soprano

Our Musicians

YOUR ORCHESTRA FIRST VIOLIN Benjamin Marquise Gilmore Ruth Crouch Kana Kawashima Fiona Alexander Amira Bedrush-McDonald SECOND VIOLIN Marcus Barcham Stevens Gordon Bragg Rachel Spencer Rachel Smith Niamh Lyons VIOLA Felix Tanner Brian Schiele Steve King CELLO Philip Higham Su-a Lee Donald Gillan

OBOE Robin Williams Mary James CLARINET Maximiliano Martín William Stafford BASSOON Alison Green Gillian Horn HORN Daniele Bolzonella Harry Johnstone TRUMPET Peter Franks Shaun Harrold TIMPANI Louise Goodwin HARPSICHORD/ORGAN Peter Whelan

BASS Adrian Bornet Ben Burnley

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WHAT YOU ARE ABOUT TO HEAR

––––– Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart – as composer, arranger, even as flatmate and as a

Boulogne (1745-1799)

Today’s music, however, begins elsewhere.

When 18th-century Parisian audiences began describing Joseph Boulogne, the self-styled Chevalier de Saint-Georges, as ‘le Mozart noir’, they undoubtedly meant the comparison as a compliment. Today, that nickname feels more problematic, as though drawing attention to the apparently astonishing fact that a Black composer could approach the fame and quality of one of Europe’s most influential figures.

L’Amant Anonyme (ca.1780) Overture

Handel (1685-1759) Acis and Galatea arr. Mozart (1718, arr.1788) Overture

Mozart (1756-1791) Aria: Parto, parto ma tu ben mio (from La clemenza di Tito) (1791) Laudamus Te (from Mass in C minor) (1782/3)

Symphony No 36, ‘Linz’ in C major, K.425 (1783) Adagio - Allegro spiritoso Andante Menuetto e Trio Presto

perhaps unwelcome point of comparison – provides the focus around which today’s concert revolves.

The truth, however, is that Boulogne was very much his own man, with very much his own successes and achievements. Born in the French colony of Guadeloupe in 1745 to a wealthy slave-owning plantation owner and the 16-year-old slave Anne Nanon, who’d been shipped in from Senegal, Boulogne was given a nobleman’s education in Paris, where his father moved with him and his young mother, first making his name as a champion fencer, and later as a violinist, composer and conductor. There was an inescapable sense of fascination that a man of colour could achieve such successes, which no doubt fuelled his fame, but Boulogne quickly became one of the best-known society figures in France, even (almost) being appointed as music director of the Paris Opera, until Marie Antoinette (whom he had tutored at Versailles) received an official complaint and blocked the appointment. He took on his father’s title – Chevalier de Saint-Georges – after the

There was an inescapable sense of fascination that a man of colour could achieve such successes, which no doubt fuelled his fame, but Boulogne quickly became one of the best-known society figures in France.

Joseph Boulogne, Chevalier de Saint-Georges

older man’s death, but as an illegitimate

Boulogne is known, too, to have

child was unable to inherit from him.

Aside from the well-meaning but problematic sobriquet, there’s a more direct connection between Boulogne and Mozart. It’s known that the two men lodged in the same house in Paris for three months in 1778, during Mozart’s third trip to the French capital, though nothing is known about what they might have discussed or done together. Nonetheless, it’s entirely possible that Mozart was inspired to write his Sinfonia concertante K364 for violin and viola, which he did the following year, after time spent with Boulogne: the ‘symphonie-concertante’, a concerto with multiple soloists, was all the rage in Paris at the time, and Boulogne had written many

written six full operas, all but one of which have been lost. What remains is L’amant anonyme, an elaborate comic offering involving lots of dialogue and ballet sections, with a wafer-thin plot concerning the noblewoman Léontine, her close friend Valcour, and her anonymous lover of the title – who turns out to be none other than Valcour in disguise. There’s plenty of wit and sparkle in Boulogne’s lively Overture to the work, and a sense of nobility, too, in its opening section.

After a graceful slow central section, he brings things to a bustling conclusion with a scampering, joyful final section. If that sounds like a miniature symphony rather than an overture – well, Boulogne thought so too, and reused it verbatim as his

of them.

Symphony in D, Op 11 No 2.

What he created from Handel’s clarity and vigour is something richer, darker and more opulent, though he leaves Handel’s distinctively dashing writing untouched.

George Frideric Handel

We jump forward a decade (and also

bizarre. In that sense, with his passion for

backwards by six decades) for the concert’s next piece. Handel’s opera Acis and Galatea was first performed in 1718, and went through several different incarnations before finding its place as one of its time’s most popular stage works, in an English-language, two-act guise.

In 1788, Mozart was commissioned by his friend and patron Baron Gottfried van Swieten to write a more elaborate arrangement for the performing forces available seven decades later. We take it somewhat for granted today that classical music concerts focus predominantly on the great works of the past, with a little of today’s music thrown in for good measure.

In Mozart’s time, novelty was everything, and focusing on works that had already

the earlier Baroque style, van Swieten was something of an oddity, and aimed to sweeten the pill for his audience members by at least updating the orchestra to one of their own times. Mozart had been fascinated by the contrapuntal wonders of Bach and Handel for several years – as we’ll come back to below. And what he created from Handel’s clarity and vigour is something richer, darker and more opulent, though he leaves Handel’s distinctively dashing writing untouched – even if it’s somewhat startling to hear rather jazzy contributions from a clarinet, an instrument not invented until several decades after Handel’s death.

been and gone was seen as somewhat

penultimate opera, La clemenza di Tito,

We jump forward again to Mozart’s

Despite the hasty turnaround, what Mozart created is one of his most assured, outgoing symphonies, and one that would kick off his remarkable quintet of last symphonies that include the ‘Prague’, the great No. 40 in G minor, and the ‘Jupiter’.

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

for the aria ‘Parto, parto ma tu ben mio’.

'Parto, parto’ is one of the opera’s most

He wrote the opera in just 18 days in 1791 to an urgent commission for the Prague celebrations of the coronation of Leopold II, Holy Roman Emperor, as King of Bohemia (and only after Salieri had turned down the project), interrupting work on The Magic Flute in the process. It’s a fitting work for an incoming monarch, however. Telling of the apparently bottomless capacity for forgiveness of the Roman Emperor Titus – who pardons even the duplicitous Sesto, who had planned to assassinate him – its message was clearly that Titus’s sense of compassion and humanity was also what was expected from Leopold II. (It wasn’t much of a success at its premiere: Leopold’s Empress summed up her opinions in a succinct, two-word review:

famous arias, sung by the young patrician Sesto, at this stage apparently a friend of Titus, who harbours such passion for the deceitful Vitellia that he agrees to kill Titus for her. Beginning with a slower, more refined section in which Sesto considers the request, it soon flowers into a dashing, volatile conclusion in which he seems aroused and excited by both the crime and the beauty that compels him to commit it.

Mozart wrote an on-going commentary on Sesto’s vocal fireworks in an obbligato clarinet line, originally conceived for his friend Anton Stadler, first performer of both the Clarinet Concerto and Clarinet Quintet.

"German rubbish".)

Mozart’s early years in Vienna, in 1782-3,

The grandiose C minor Mass comes from

but the composer took the score with him on his first return trip to his birthplace of Salzburg in the autumn of 1783, when he aimed to introduce his new bride Constanze to his father Leopold, who was furious he hadn’t been consulted over Wolfgang’s wedding plans. (We don’t know Leopold’s reaction to Constanze, but Mozart’s sister Nannerl was apparently deeply unimpressed.)

Mozart had been immersing himself in studying the music of Bach and Handel – which no doubt informed his arrangement of Acis and Galatea for van Swieten six years later. Those two earlier composers are very much present, too, in the rather otherworldly, solemn C minor Mass, not least in its elaborate contrapuntal invention. The ‘Laudamus Te’ movement, however, stands apart as a moment of relative simplicity and directness, despite the considerable (and distinctly operatic) vocal demands it makes of its soloist, and the extremes of the vocal range that Mozart explores.

He was on his way back home to Vienna from that trip to Salzburg when he wrote his ‘Linz’ Symphony, No 36, in the northern Austrian town of the same name. He’d been invited by Count Johann Joseph Anton Thun-Hohenstein, an old friend of the Mozart family, and a dedicated music

lover who kept his own court orchestra.

"When we reached the gates of the city, we found a servant waiting there to drive us to Count Thun’s, at whose house we are now staying," Mozart wrote to his father.

"I really cannot tell you what kindnesses the family is showering on us. On Tuesday, 4 November, there will be a concert in the theatre here and, as I have not a single symphony with me, I am writing a new one at breakneck speed." Despite the hasty turnaround, what Mozart created is one of his most assured, outgoing symphonies, and one that would kick off his remarkable quintet of last symphonies that include the ‘Prague’, the great No 40 in G minor, and the ‘Jupiter’.

Following its expectant slow introduction (which is reputed to have fascinated Beethoven), the first movement blazes with confidence, and has a distinctively martial feel with its trumpets and drums.

Those instruments transform the second movement, which begins as a gentle Sicilienne, into something far richer and darker, while the jolly third movement Minuet showcases the oboe and bassoon in its witty central Trio section. Mozart brings the Symphony to a dazzling conclusion in his breakneck finale, full of impetuous energy. © David Kettle

LIBRETTO Mozart  La clemenza di Tito: Parto, parto ma tu ben mio (1791)

SESTO

SEXTUS

Parto, ma tu ben mio, Meco ritorna in pace; Saro qual piu ti piace; Quel che vorrai fato.

I go, but, my dearest, make peace again with me.

I will be what you would most have me be, do whatever you wish.

Guardami, e tutto oblio, E a vendicarti io volo; A questo sguardo dolo Da me si pensera.

Ah qual poter, oh Dei! Donaste alla belta.

Look at me, and I will forget all and fly to avenge you; I will think only of that glance at me.

Ah, ye gods, what power you have given beauty!

Mozart  Mass in C minor: Laudamus te (1943)

Laudamus te Benedicimus te Adoramus te Glorificamus te.

We praise You, We bless You, We adore You, We glorify You.

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