Neil Georgeson & Abby Hayward "In Our Homeland" Programme

2017/2018 Classical Season

Neil Georgeson & Abby Hayward “In Our Homeland” Thursday 7 September

Programme

“In Our Homeland” Programme Edvard Grieg Lyric Pieces: In My Homeland; op 43 no 3 (1886) arranged Neil Georgeson National Song; op 12 no 8 (1866-67)

Norwegian Dance; op 35 no 2 (1881) Slåtter op 72: Knut Larusen’s Halling (1902-3) Nils Rekve’s Halling (1902-03) John Vesafes’ Leaping Dance (1902-03) Peter Sculthorpe

Djilile (1986)

Frédéric Chopin

Polonaise, op 40 no 1; “Military” (1838) Mazurka op 63 no 3 (1846) Etude op 10 no 12 “Revolutionary” (1830-31)

Anton Webern Two Pieces for Cello and Piano (1899)

Three Little Pieces for Cello and Piano op 11 (1914) Cello Sonata (1914) Robert Schumann

Drei Fantasiestucke (1849)

- interval Arvo Pärt

Fratres (1989)

John Cage Apartment House Harmonies 12-18 (1976) arr. Leo Chadburn Johannes Brahms

Sonata for cello and piano, no 1 in E minor (1862-65)

Programme notes It seems topical to think about different forms of nationalism, so we have put together a programme of pieces from the 19th and 20th centuries which explores national and regional identity. The starting point is the 19th century movement of Nationalism in music, during which several European nations had just been formed (Germany and Italy) or were struggling to assert themselves (Norway, Poland and others).

In 1814, Norway had finally declared itself independent after 434 years under Denmark, and the nation was in the process of celebrating, reclaiming and reinvigorating its sense of self. Grieg was one of the leading composers of the century and his enthusiastic use of Norwegian folk music in his own compositions brought the music of Norway to international attention, as well as helping to develop a Norwegian national identity.

Grieg’s “Lyric Pieces”, a collection of 66 solo piano pieces, were published in 10 volumes from 1867 to 1901. They have a very direct and touching sincerity, a winning charm. They are also hugely varied, with several pieces in the style of Norwegian folk dances and songs. “In My Homeland” sounds like a folk song, and is full of sincere sentiment. “National Song”, has in mind a rather more top-down construct of national identity, and sounds appropriately militaristic.

The Norwegian Dances are classics of the piano four-hands repertoire, in the tradition of the Brahms Hungarian Dances, the Dvorak Slavonic Dances, the Janacek Moravian Dances, the Moszkowski Spanish Dances and so on (all sets of Nationalistic dances for piano four hands). The second Norwegian Dance is comic and charming, with a stormy middle section, and has a unique regional link in that it is played by ice cream vans in Norway(!).

“Slåtter” is a name for Norwegian folk dances, and Grieg’s op 72 was a project he had long intended to undertake and finally completed when he was 60 – he worked with three Hardanger-fiddle players who collected and notated the 17 tunes; then he spent more than a year making his masterful piano arrangements. They are astonishing and incredibly inventive, different from anything else Grieg wrote, and they clearly anticipate Bartok and Kodaly’s quasi-ethnographic work.

Title Grieg wrote of the project: “These Norwegian “Slåtter” were written down after an old gleeman in Telemarken. Those who can appreciate such music will be delighted at the originality, the blending of fine, soft gracefulness with sturdy almost uncouth power and untamed wildness as regards melody and more particularly rhythm, contained in them.

This music, which is handed down to us from an age when the culture of the Norwegian peasant was isolated in its solitary mountain-valleys from the outer world, to which fact it owes its whole originality, bears the stamp of an imagination as daring in its flight as it is peculiar.”

Peter Schulthorpe was an Australian composer whose work also drew on regional “folk” music. He wrote that he wanted his music to make people feel better and happier for having listened to it, and typically avoided the dense, atonal techniques of many of his contemporaries. He wrote several works evoking the atmosphere and sounds of the Australian outback, and was driven by an impulse to bring together aspects of indigenous Australian music with the European classical tradition.

However, the relationship between Australia’s peoples has always been particularly problematic. In the 200 years from the first British landing in Botany Bay in 1788, two thirds of the indigenous population were killed, due to a combination of European diseases, seizure of land and water resources, and tactical wars of extermination - not until 1933 did the indigenous population begin to increase again. There were also extensive programmes of forced assimilation into Western society. The last uncontacted tribe, a group of desertdwelling Pintupi people who were living a traditional hunter-gatherer life, were tracked down in the Gibson Desert in Western Australia and brought in to a settlement in 1984.

Some gestures of reconciliation and atonement have finally been made. In 1985, the Australian government returned ownership of Uluru (formerly known as Ayers Rock) to the Pirjantjatjara Aboriginal people. It wasn’t until 1999 that the Australian Parliament passed a Motion of Reconciliation, naming mistreatment of Indigenous Australians as the most “blemished chapter in our national history”. Still, the Prime Minister at the time pointedly refused to offer any formal apology.

So, Sculthorpe’s “Djilile” (1986) is an surprising and contentious variant on the Romantic Nationalist trope of a composer drawing on the folk music of their country. Sculthorpe’s appropriation of indigenous music would now be seen as a (potentially provocative) neocolonial practise, but his intentions were good, he was critical of colonialism, sympathetic to the indigenous peoples’ plight, and was working in a slightly “more innocent” (i.e. less enlightened) time.

Title Sculthorpe wrote: “The very opening melody of this work is a transcription of an aboriginal chant from Arnhem Land, collected by the anthropologist A P Elkin in the late fifties. Still well-known in the area, the chant is called ‘Djilile’, meaning ‘whistling-duck on a billabong’.

Originally the work was written as a piano solo. I later decided to add a cello melody. As the piano music is modal, it seemed to me a good idea to give the cello a somewhat chromatic line, music that is even a little Romantic, in the European sense. Djilile, then, demonstrates the principle of dualism, a principle that is consistently present in almost all my music since the mid-fifties. Many of my works are also concerned with the environment and social issues. In Djilile for cello and piano, my intention is to suggest that it is possible for the white Australian and the aborigine to live together in harmonious manner.”

Frédéric Chopin, the great Polish composer and virtuoso pianist of the Romantic era, was uniquely associated with nationalism through his support for a free Poland in the 19th century. Poland had been partitioned in the 18th century by Russia, Prussia and Austria, so that the country ceased to exist as an independent political entity. Living conditions worsened, especially in the Russian portion of the country (which included Warsaw, where Chopin was born in 1810) with press restrictions and aggressive Russification, until in 1830-31 there was an attempted revolution, the November Uprising, whose failure caused the oppression to intensify further. Chopin became part of the Great Migration, where thousands of Poles (particularly from the cultural and political elites) fled the country - he settled in Paris right after the November Uprising in 1831, and never returned to Poland.

In Paris he quickly became a famous composer and pianist, met many of the great cultural figures of the day, played concerts with Liszt, and inspired Robert Schumann to declare in the journal Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung (in December 1831), “Hats off, gentleman! A genius!”

Although he never saw Poland again, Chopin’s work was always suffused with his love for his country – he was deeply inspired by Polish folk music as well as the core classical tradition of Bach, Mozart and Schubert, and the Paris salons where he was a frequent guest. In Poland he became a cultural icon and a national hero.

The most quintessentially (and self-consciously) Polish of all his pieces are the 23 Polonaises and 59 Mazurkas – deeply personal and expressive takes on Poland’s most beloved folk dances – and the “Revolutionary Study”, which has special Polish political significance in that it was written (hence its title) in response to political events leading up to the November Uprising (hence its title), which Chopin had supported wholeheartedly.

Chopin’s music and Poland’s nationhood came to be so connected that during the 1939 Nazi invasion of Poland at the outset of World War II, Polskie Radio broadcast the Polonaise op 40 no 1 every day as a nationalistic protest, and to rally the Polish people. Later, in Nazioccupied Warsaw, all Chopin’s Polonaises were banned from being performed due to their powerful symbolic significance.

Title Also banned by the Nazi party, in 1936, the Austrian composer Anton Webern still managed to become one of the greatest composers of his time. Here we present his complete works for cello and piano, which were in fact the two instruments that Webern played. He was a member of the Second Viennese School and a pupil of Schoenberg, inventor of serialism.

Whereas Schoenberg’s other famous student Berg adapted the concise, experimental style of his teacher to his broader, more lyrical sensibility, Webern sought an even more compact, crystalline, aphoristic and abstract means of expression.

It is especially interesting therefore to witness his earliest known work, the Two Pieces for Cello and Piano (1899), which are pure German Romanticism, paying homage to Schumann and Brahms, as well as Wagner and Strauss, with luscious expressive melody.

The Three Little Pieces for Cello and Piano op 11 (1914), by contrast, exemplify his mature style - exceptionally brief, restrained yet expressive, marked by softness and silence. This set is thought of as perhaps the most extreme of Webern’s aphoristic style, and one of his greatest masterpieces. The Cello Sonata, on the other hand, is the work that Webern felt he ought to be writing at that time – a substantial multi-movement piece; however, he soon broke off working on it to write the Op 11 pieces, and after the First World War broke out in 1914, he never returned to the Cello Sonata - it therefore ended up being very short like all his other works, remarkable for its meticulous concision.

All Webern’s music (along with the rest of the Second Viennese School) was banned from being published or performed after the Nazi annexation of Austria in 1936, due to its intellectual and avant-garde nature. Webern had liked the notion of a pan-German nation, but was definitely not a racist and was firmly against the Nazi regime. His conducting and teaching career also ultimately went nowhere due to his associations with Jews (notably his teacher Schoenberg). He survived the war, but in 1945, during the Allied occupation of Austria just after the war had ended, he stepped outside his house (45 minutes before a curfew) to smoke a cigar, so as not to disturb his sleeping grandchildren, and was shot and killed by a US soldier.

Schoenberg noted of Webern’s works during this period: “One has to realize what restraint it requires to express oneself with such brevity. You can stretch every glance into a poem, every sigh into a novel. But to express a novel in single gesture, a joy in a breath - such concentration can only be present in the absence of self-pity.” Subsequently his music became the most revered of the Second Viennese School, especially amongst musicians and composers, and he became one of the most influential composers of the 20th Century.

Title The German composer Robert Schumann exemplifies the exalted spirit and character of German Romanticism as well as any creative artist. He had intended to become a virtuoso pianist (leaving law school to do so) but an injury meant he focused his energies on composition. He was also an influential music critic and essayist, inaugurating Die Neue Zeitschrift fur Musik (“The New Journal for Music”) in 1834. Schumann published most of his critical writings in the journal, often decrying the popular taste for flashy technical displays from inferior composers. He campaigned to revive interest in the major (Germanic) composers of the past, such as Bach, Mozart and Beethoven, while also promoting the work of some contemporary composers, like Chopin and Brahms.

In his own music, he juxtaposed intense contrasts of mood and motion with wonderful spontaneity. Schumann’s penchant for favouring expression over form reflects the Romantic foregrounding of emotion and individual subjectivity, and he often used the title “Fantasiestücke” or “Fantasy Pieces” to suggest short, free-form character studies. The three Fantasiestücke op 73, which can also be for French horn or clarinet instead of cello, were rapidly composed over just a few days in 1849 and they have become some of the most frequently performed of Romantic chamber music works. The three movements move from intensely introverted contemplation to obstreperous excitement and joy, with many dramatic and sudden mood swings along the way.

Fratres was one of the first works to come out of Estonian composer Arvo Pärt’s nowfamous “creative silence” of the mid-1970s, partially caused by Soviet censorship. Part had developed a completely unique triad-based style of music which he called “tintinnabuli” – meaning a ringing or tinkling sound, or the lingering sound of a bell after it has been struck.

“I have discovered that it is enough when a single note is beautifully played,” Part remarked, “This one note, or a moment of silence, comforts me. I work with very few elements - with one voice, with two voices. I build with the most primitive materials - with the triad, with one specific tonality. The three notes of a triad are like bells. And that is why I call it tintinnabulation.”

Fratres (“Brothers”) is one of Part’s most important tintinnabuli pieces, seemingly simple, but ultimately very powerful. It is essentially a set of variations on a theme, the theme’s very simple melodic structure developed by successive incremental extensions to its range.

There is a characteristic minimalist emphasis on patterning, so that the whole piece can be generated by the composer making just a few far-reaching decisions. The materials are clear and the mechanism transparent, but an alchemical musical process somehow creates an ineffable spiritual quality, wherein the influence of Franco-Flemish Gothic and Renaissance polyphony becomes apparent.

Early religious music is also revisited and reworked in John Cage’s Apartment House Harmonies, part of the large-scale work Apartment House 1776, commissioned jointly in 1976 by the orchestras of Boston, Chicago, Cleveland, Los Angeles, New York and Philadelphia to commemorate the 200th anniversary of the US Declaration of Independence and the forming of the nation. Being one of the most important avant-garde composers of the 20th century and still considered radical many years after his death (since notions of “radical” and “avant-garde” in art and culture are no longer to do with “forward progress” so much as with one’s personal attitude and outlook), Cage took a startlingly original approach.

As well as a large orchestra, the work calls for four solo singers, representing the four religious traditions practised in the United States at its founding: Protestant, Sephardic, Native American, and African American. They are to select authentic songs from their respective traditions and sing them without attempting to match them to those of the other singers. The concept of the piece seems to celebrate difference and tolerance. The title “Apartment House” refers to the idea that at any given time in any apartment house many things may happen at once.

The Apartment House Harmonies, which may be performed as a separate piece, is part of the orchestral music for the original work, and consists of versions of Protestant anthems and congregational music written by composers who were at least 20 years old at the time of the American Revolution (such as William Billings, James Lyon and Jacob French) which Cage recomposed. The brilliant English composer Leo Chadburn has chosen a sequence of 8 from the 44 Harmonies and arranged them for cello and piano.

To recompose the hymns, Cage added nothing, but apparently used I Ching chance operations to take most of the notes away, leaving pregnant silences. Silence plays an important structural and conceptual role in several of Cage’s other works such as Sonatas and Interludes (1946-48), Music of Changes (1951) and of course 4’33” (1952), in which the performer makes no sounds. Cage was fascinated by the physical impossibility of absolute silence in music – there is always ambient noise, which in some sense then becomes the music. He was also influenced by his painter colleague Robert Rauschenberg’s 1951 series of seemingly blank canvases which were actually all painted white – Cage said they forced him to make analogous daring gestures of emptiness and silence in his music “otherwise I’m lagging, otherwise music is lagging” - and that instinct, that attitude, is why Cage will always be avant-garde.

In 1853, Robert Schumann, writing in the journal Neue Zeitschrift für Musik, sensationally hailed the 20-year-old Johannes Brahms as the future of German music, the successor to Beethoven and the one who was “fated to give expression to these times in the highest and most ideal manner”. Brahms had not published anything at this time, and felt the weight of history heavier than most – his self-critical standards of perfection actually led

him to destroy many of his works before they were published. He wrote to Schumann in November 1853 that his praise “will arouse such extraordinary expectations by the public that I don’t know how I can begin to fulfil them”.

It was not until a decade later that he could begin to fulfil this prophecy, but he eventually became one of the greatest composers of the century, always writing with immense and visible respect for the composers of the past whilst creating a beautifully idiosyncratic music that no other composer could have written. His great Sonata for Cello and Piano Op 38, composed when he was around 30, is known for its sombre, profound character and consciously archaic elements - the principal themes of the first and third movements are in fact based on subjects from Bach’s The Art of Fugue: Contrapuncti 4 and 13 respectively.

Brahms emphasized the equality of the two instruments (as Beethoven had) by publishing it as “Sonata for Piano with Violoncello.” He remarked that the piano “should be a partner - often a leading, often a watchful and considerate partner - but it should under no circumstances assume a purely accompanying role”. In the course of a private performance for an audience of friends, Brahms played the piano so loudly that his cellist Gänsbacher complained that he could not hear his cello at all - “Lucky for you”, growled Brahms (apparently).

The contemplative opening movement foregrounds the cello’s lowest register, especially in the very warm opening melody, a broad, brooding eight-bar theme set against a simple but insistent off-beat accompaniment which belies an inner agitation. Throughout the first movement, Brahms makes a virtue of the inherent problems of sonic balance in pairing cello with piano, often pitting the two instruments fornenst each other in a contentious dialogue, before concluding the movement with a glorious and expansive sunset coda.

The second movement, a charming minuet and trio, references the Classicism of the First Viennese School (Mozart, Haydn, Beethoven), and its austere modal elements, reminiscent of Renaissance harmony, give it an archaic, historical feel. The Romantic heart of the movement is the mysterious and searching middle section, where the cello offers a swooping, lyrical melody which is doubled by a shimmering accompaniment in the right hand of the piano. The last movement is an adventurous and original fusion of fugue and sonata form, and an early example of “the Romantic Baroque”, taking its fugal subject from Bach. The mood moves from incredibly intense and driven to tranquil and pastoral, and back again, leading to a restless rousing finish.

It was in fact with this sonata and other works of the 1860’s that Brahms began to fulfil Schumann’s prophecy of greatness, and of course he eventually became one of the most important composers of the century, always writing with immense and visible respect for the composers of the past whilst creating a beautifully idiosyncratic music that no other composer could have written.

Biographies

Neil Georgeson

Neil Georgeson is a pianist, writer, composer and director who grew up in Shetland and is now based in London. He appears regularly and widely as a solo pianist and a chamber musician, and has performed as a soloist all over the world, and at UK venues such as the Queen Elizabeth Hall, King’s Place, the Barbican, St David’s Hall in Cardiff, the Colston Hall in Bristol and the Queen’s Hall in Edinburgh, as well as more unconventional venues like the Glastonbury Festival and the Village Underground, and at London contemporary music nights Kammerklang and Nonclassical, and live on BBC Radio 3. He has appeared at festivals such as ‘Soundings’ at the Austrian Cultural Forum, the York Late Music Festival, Sounds New in England and France, and the Johnsmas Foy in Shetland, for which he was commissioned as a composer. He codirected, wrote and produced “Piano Theatre”, a inter-disciplinary tour of Taiwan with Veronica Yen. He has worked with a great many illustrious composers on performances of their music such as Sir Peter Maxwell Davies, Martin Bresnick, Diana Burrell, Bent Sørensen, Thomas Ades and Jonathan Harvey. ​ Neil is Artistic Director and pianist for new-music group the Ossian Ensemble, a member of the renowned original six-piano group Piano Circus and has performed with the Kammerklang Ensemble, the Arcomis Ensemble, the Continuum Ensemble, the Riot Ensemble and the London Contemporary Orchestra.

Neil has written three opera libretti, produced in London over the last few years: KETTLEHEAD for composer Darren Bloom, Angela for Corin Buckeridge, and Njogel – an folkloric tale set in Shetland – for James Young, with whom he also created the semiimprovised music-theatre show Event001.

Neil enjoyed a prize-winning academic career on scholarship at the Royal Academy of Music, where he studied with Patsy Toh and Ian Fountain. He completed a Masters degree with a highly-acclaimed thesis on the role of the performer in classical music, which became the exemplar dissertation for Masters students, then became a Fellow at the Academy working with composers on new music.

Upcoming engagements include appearances at the Royal Festival Hall in September and October this year playing solo contemporary repertoire and chamber music as part of the Nordic Days festival, a tour of Eight Songs for a Mad King with the Ossian Ensemble, and an Aldeburgh residency with Piano Circus.

Abby Hayward Abby Hayward grew up on Shetland and graduated from the Royal Scottish Academy with first class honours and from the Guildhall School of Music with a Masters in Performance with distinction in 2013. During her studies she was generously supported by the Countess of Munster, Leverhulme and Help Musicians UK trusts. Currently cellist of the Aurea Quartet, with whom she won the St Martin-in-the-Fields Chamber Music Competition, she plays frequently throughout the UK and Europe and has given several performances for BBC Radio 3 and Radio Scotland. Abby has also played chamber music in the Barbican, Wigmore and Queen Elizabeth halls, won an Ian Fleming Award and played in the City of London music festival and East Neuk Festival among others. As an orchestral musician, she has performed with the Halle, Manchester Camerata, Royal Philharmonic Orchestra and with Spira Mirabilis. Between 2013 and 2015 Abby joined the Sistema Scotland team in Govanhill, Glasgow where she taught over 500 children a week as part of a team working in two nurseries and four primary schools.

Thanks to: Graeme, Lauren, Adam and all at Shetland Arts, as well as Roger Wildman, Evelyn and Jim Georgeson, Kathy Hubbard, Beth Johnston...

2017/2018 Classical Season

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