About the music

George Benjamin is a British composer, pianist and conductor. He was one of the youngest ever composers to have a work performed at The Proms, and in recent years has become known for several successful operas. Flight for solo flute is an early work, composed in 1979, and was first performed in 1980 by David Lodeon for Radio France. The composer has said that the work was inspired by ‘the sight of birds soaring and dipping over the peaks of the Swiss Alps’, but that he was also concerned to create a satisfactory dramatic structure using the limited resources of a single melody-line instrument. The piece is physically demanding to play and exploits the extreme limits of the instrument’s capabilities, but ultimately conveys a mood of joyful exuberance.

harp). This work attracted much admiration at its first performance, and is significant for its move away from the predominant Romantic style of the late 19th century, towards a more delicate technique and an emphasis on the evocation of moods and scenes through the use of non-traditional scales and harmonies. Estampes is among those works of Debussy that may most appropriately be described as ‘Impressionist’ – a label frequently applied to the music of composers such as Debussy and Ravel, by analogy with the Impressionist painters, although with varying degrees of justification. (Debussy himself rejected the term). The title Estampes, meaning ‘prints’, certainly invites an association with the visual arts, and each movement vividly depicts a particular scene or landscape. Jardins sous la pluie is believed to have been inspired by a violent rainstorm experienced by Debussy during a visit to Normandy. Musical effects depicting wind and rain are interwoven with the melodies of two French folk songs, Nous n’irons plus aux bois and Dodo, l’enfant do

Jardins sous la pluie (‘Gardens in the Rain’) is the final movement from French composer Claude Debussy’s set of three pieces for piano, Estampes, published in 1903 (played here on

The 18th-century German composer Georg Philipp Telemann was one of the most respected musicians of his time and is renowned today as one of the most prolific of all composers, with some 3,000 works to his name, of every conceivable vocal and instrumental genre. A multi-instrumentalist himself, his collections of fantasias for solo instruments, including for flute, violin and harpsichord, are among his most admired and imaginative instrumental works. The Twelve Fantasias for solo violin were composed in 1735 in Hamburg, where Telemann was employed for the latter half of his life as the director of music at five of the city’s most important churches, and were published by his own publishing house. The title ‘fantasia’ implies a composition without a strict formal structure. The Fantasia No. 7 in E-flat major, performed here on viola, consists of three short sections of contrasting character.

The title comes from lines by Russian writer Iv Oganov, referring to the work of 18th-century Armenian poet Sayat Nova, which invoke images of an exotic garden. Gubaidulina says that she was compelled to create ‘a concrete aural perception of this garden’. The score also invites a recitation ‘ad lib’ of an unrelated poem by modern German poet Francisco Tanzer. The composer has written that she was drawn to this poem for its reflections on ‘the world and its wholeness’, and that she sought through musical means to highlight the similarities between the two texts, despite their ‘contradictory’ Eastern and Western sensibilities.

Sofia Gubaidulina was born in Soviet Russia and received her musical education during the post-war period, when ‘degenerate’ contemporary Western music was largely outlawed by the Soviet regime. She managed to develop a unique modernist style, secretly accessing forbidden scores and receiving encouragement from established composers such as Shostakovich, but was blacklisted for much of her career. Since contact with the West became more possible, Gubaidulina has earned an international reputation and has been commissioned by many of the world’s leading orchestras.

Interested in spiritual ideas from a young age, Gubaidulina developed a concept of music as a vehicle for transcendence, and her music is loaded with mystical and symbolic elements. She has also long been preoccupied with non-traditional means of sound production and unusual instrumental combinations. These interests are apparent in The Garden of Joy and Sorrow, composed in 1980. Predominantly contemplative in tone, the work is inspired by two literary sources.

French composer, organist and teacher Olivier Messiaen influenced a generation of composers with his unique harmonic and rhythmic language. Le Merle noir (‘The Blackbird’), for flute and piano, was composed in 1952 as a test piece for the Premier Prix examinations at the Paris Conservatoire, joining a long list of significant flute works created for that purpose. Messiaen’s music reflects his deeply felt Catholic spirituality, and he frequently drew on birdsong as a major source of inspiration, believing that the natural music of birds offered a direct link to the divine. The work alternates cadenzas for the flute, based on the blackbird’s song, with static, crystalline melodic passages, and ends with a brilliantly virtuosic display by both instruments.

Japanese composer Tōru Takemitsu stands out as one of the most distinctive compositional voices of the late 20th century, and is credited with achieving a synthesis of Japanese musical aesthetics with Western art music. And then I knew ’twas Wind was commissioned in 1992 by Swiss flautist Aurèle Nicolet, who sought a new work that could be performed together with Debussy’s Sonata for Flute, Viola and Harp. Takemitsu identified Debussy as a significant influence, and while direct links between the works are not obvious, a brief quotation suggests that Takemitsu intended his work to be heard as a personal homage to Debussy’s sonata. There are strong affinities in the work’s exploitation of subtle instrumental colour, and parallels with the fragmentary structure and languid melodic lines of certain other works by Debussy, such as Prélude à ‘L’après-midi d’un faune’ and the ballet Jeux. composer for publication in 1905, to reflect the maturation of his style. The title Clair de lune (originally to be called Promenade sentimentale in an earlier version) was inspired by a poem of the same name by Paul Verlaine, which evokes a scene of a moonlit masked ball, and describes ‘the calm moonlight, sad and beautiful’. Debussy derived the title of the suite from the poem’s reference to ‘bergamasques’, a type of rustic dance thought to have originated in Bergamo in Italy, which is also associated with the characters of the commedia dell’arte tradition. This poem evidently held strong appeal for Debussy, since he composed two settings of the same text for voice and piano.

The work takes its title from a poem by Emily Dickinson, the meaning of which is rather obscure; however, comments by Takemitsu himself suggest a reference to the interconnectedness of wind, breath and spirit. Such a theme is typical of Takemitsu’s preoccupation with music as a means of forming a bridge between the natural world and subjective human experience. Takemitsu was fond of musical ciphers, or short musical ideas that he invested with personal symbolic meaning, so it is noteworthy that he used a prominent melody from the latter part of the work in another wind-related work, How Slow the Wind, which also derives its title from an Emily Dickinson poem.

Among Claude Debussy’s final works are three sonatas for different instrumental combinations, part of an intended set of six of which the remainder were never completed. Composed during the First World War, these sonatas were partly intended as an expression of Debussy’s French patriotism, in their pointed rejection of Germanic grandeur and excess (and especially of the influence of the music of Wagner) in favour of the elegance and clarity of earlier French composers, such as Rameau and Couperin.

The Sonata for Flute, Viola and Harp, written in 1915, was one of the first pieces to employ its unusual instrumental combination, although many composers since have imitated it. This three-movement work shares with the other sonatas in the set an improvisatory quality, a lightness of touch and a pervasive air of melancholy that is perhaps indicative of Debussy’s state of mind at the time. He was not only distressed at the tragic effects of the war, but was also experiencing considerable suffering from the cancer that would cause his death a few years later. After first hearing the sonata performed, Debussy expressed his own somewhat ambivalent response to the work’s mood in a letter to his friend Robert Godet:

Claude Debussy’s Clair de lune (‘Moonlight’), the third movement of his four-movement Suite bergamasque for piano, is undoubtedly his best-known work. The suite was originally composed around 1890, when Debussy was in his 20s, but was substantially revised by the

‘It’s terribly sad, and I don’t know whether one ought to laugh at it, or cry? Perhaps both?’