WHAT YOU ARE ABOUT TO HEAR

Vaughan Williams (1872-1958)

The Lark Ascending (1914, rev. 1920)

Britten (1913-1976)

Variations on a Theme of Frank Bridge (1937)

Introduction and Theme

Variation 1: Adagio

Variation 2: March

Variation 3: Romance

Variation 4: Aria Italiana

Variation 5: Bourrée classique

Variation 6: Wiener Waltzer

Variation 7: Moto perpetuo

Variation 8: Funeral March

Variation 9: Chant

Variation 10: Fugue and Finale

Pärt (b.1935)

Cantus In Memoriam Benjamin Britten (1977)

Beethoven (1770-1827)

Symphony No 1 (1800)

Adagio molto – Allegro con brio

Andante cantabile con moto

Menuetto: Allegro molto e vivace

Adagio – Allegro molto e vivace

Music for calm contemplation, and music for energetic inspiration: the pieces in tonight’s wide-ranging programme might be very different, but there’s a whole web of interconnections – both musical and biographical – between them.

Let’s begin, however, with one of the most otherworldly pieces in the violin repertoire. The nostalgic and very English rural idyll of Vaughan Williams’s The Lark Ascending regularly tops polls as the UK’s best-loved piece of classical music. With its mood of quiet introspection, and its complete absence of a ‘big tune’ to stir the spirits, however, it’s actually quite an unusual work to receive such adulation.

It’s surprising, too, that such a calm, serene piece could have been created during a time of war. Vaughan Williams completed The Lark Ascending in its original version for violin and piano in 1914, then set it aside for the duration of the First World War, during which time he served as an ambulance driver in France and Greece. Upon his return to Britain, he finished the work’s orchestration, and The Lark Ascending was premiered by its dedicatee Marie Hall in June 1921 at London’s Queen’s Hall.

The composer had been inspired by the 1881 poem by George Meredith of the same name, and included these lines from it in his score:

He rises and begins to round, He drops the silver chain of sound, Of many links without a break, In chirrup, whistle, slur and shake.

For singing till his heaven fills, ’Tis love of earth that he instils, And ever winging up and up,

Our valley is his golden cup And he the wine which overflows to lift us with him as he goes.

Till lost on his aerial rings In light, and then the fancy sings.

Meredith’s imagery, and the natural wonders of England that he evokes, are a world away from the brutal reality of conflict into which Vaughan Williams found himself thrown. We can only wonder at the ways in which the bloody destruction of the battlefields that the composer witnessed might have set his nostalgic idyll into stark relief – or, indeed, served to re-emphasise its sublime, peaceful vision in the composer’s mind.

As his violin soloist takes on the role of the eponymous lark, easing us gently into the piece’s subtly perfumed harmonies, and soaring ever higher at the work’s conclusion to sing its bewitching song, what Vaughan Williams offers us is a space for reflection.

There’s a gentle sense of spirituality, too, even a feeling of mysticism, and an underlying sense of sadness – perhaps for the rural world that Vaughan Williams loved so much, and which even in 1914 he could see disappearing.

We make a short jump of a quarter of a century, and from one English composer to another, for tonight’s next piece. But it’s to a far younger man – the 23-year-old Benjamin Britten – out to make his mark on the musical world. Indeed, it’s ironic that the piece that established Britten’s international reputation, and which is now considered one of the indisputable masterpieces of the string-orchestra repertoire, was also a bit of a rush job.

It was in May 1937 that the young Britten was approached by conductor Boyd Neel to write a piece for his virtuoso chamber orchestra, with the performance date set for the following August – a mere three months later, and at no less an occasion than the Salzburg

Festival, which fellow composer Richard Strauss had co-founded in 1920. Of course, Britten accepted, and in the end worked astonishingly quickly, taking little more than a month to complete his Variations on a Theme of Frank Bridge.

It helped that the piece had been in Britten’s mind for some time. He had first thought about writing something based on his former teacher’s music back in 1932, but was forced to put the idea aside because of other commitments. Britten had known and loved Bridge’s music since his childhood – it was the older man’s orchestral suite The Sea that had first inspired him to become a composer.

The pair first met in 1927 at the premiere in Norwich of Bridge’s Enter Spring, when the 13-year-old Britten approached a reluctant Bridge begging for composition lessons. Seeing the quantity and quality of Britten’s childhood output, Bridge quickly agreed, and went on to nurture the prolific, rather over-enthusiastic young composer into a master craftsman who honed every line and every harmony in his music for maximum expressive effect. Britten later called him ‘my musical father’.

And his set of variations is in many ways a character portrait of his beloved teacher: in the score he gave to Bridge, Britten even indicated that each variation referred to an aspect of the older man’s personality. It’s also been suggested that its wildly contrasting moods – from despair to exuberant joy –may reflect two momentous events in the younger composer’s recent life: the death of his cherished mother in January 1937, and his first meeting with tenor Peter Pears, who would go on to become his life partner, in March of the same year.

Britten took the theme for his work not from one of Bridge’s later, more complex scores, but from second of the wistful Three Idylls for string quartet, making the contrasts between Bridge’s Elgarian language and his own modernist style all the more striking. He fractures the theme into its consistuent parts, disguises it and transforms it radically in a set of variations that conjure a remarkable range of sounds and textures from its small-scale forces, yet remain immediately accessible. 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 dubbed ‘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.

Two dramatic plucked chords kick off the opening Introduction and Theme, followed by a double bass drumroll and fanfares heralding Bridge’s poignant melody, heard in its original quartet arrangement. The Adagio (representing Bridge’s integrity) has dark, pensive harmonies interspersed with yearning melodies in the violins, and the brusque, military rhythms of the March (Bridge’s energy) contrast plucked and bowed playing. The Romance (Bridge’s charm) is a graceful waltz, and the Aria Italiana (Bridge’s humour) shows the Variations at their most parodic, with violins and violas strummed guitar-style and a soaring, extrovert tune on top. The Bourrée Classique (Bridge’s tradition) seems to look back to the Baroque string music of Bach and Vivaldi, and the over-the-top Wiener Waltzer (Bridge’s enthusiasm) is a parody of a Viennese waltz that has something of the barely controlled frenzy of Ravel’s La valse. Scurrying strings characterise the propulsive Moto Perpetuo (Bridge’s vitality), and the achingly tragic Funeral March (Bridge’s sympathy) sets a wailing violin melody against a remorseless bassline. The otherworldly Chant (Bridge’s reverence) precedes the Fugue and Finale (Bridge’s skill and affection), where the older composer’s star pupil shows off his technical abilities before concluding with a glowing return of the opening theme.

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 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 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.’

So rich and moving is Pärt’s Cantus that it’s hard to believe it’s nothing more (or, strictly speaking, almost nothing more) than musical scales superimposed one upon another. It 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.

Britten himself provided the inspiration for a far more recent work from Estonian composer Arvo Pärt. Pärt wrote his Cantus in memoriam Benjamin Britten in 1977, as

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 material to play: a simple, descending A minor scale (or for musical purists, a descending Aeolian mode on A). Each group plays an octave lower than the one 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, then two, then three, up to 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 as a sonorous 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 entire duration.

That’s how the piece ‘works’. And it might well sound rather dry and academic. The musical results, however, are anything but.

Using these very simple ideas, Pärt creates a dense tangle of constantly shifting lines and harmonies whose devastating emotional 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 increasingly dark. By contrast, however, listen closely to the piece’s final bell tolling: its initial strike is (intentionally) masked by the strings’ loud final chord, but you might just about be able to discern a bright sense of A major among its overtones as it rings on – perhaps a sense of hope and light after the strings’ inexorable descent into darkness.

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.

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 on his own terms.

The First 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. 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.

It’s also a work in which – as in Pärt’s Cantus – musical scales abound, often put to very witty use by the composer. Beethoven 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 constant motion that it hardly counts as ‘slow’, 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.

© David Kettle