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MASTER 2 Elgar FRIDAY 27 March ELGAR 7.30pm Federation Concert Hall I (C A E) – , the composer’s wife Garry Walker conductor II (H D S-P) – Hew David Steuart-Powell, Nicolas Altstaedt cello pianist in Elgar’s trio III (R B T) – Richard Baxter Townshend, author SCHULTZ August Offensive IV (W M B) – William Meath Baker, nicknamed “the Squire” Duration 8 mins V (R P A) – Richard Penrose Arnold, son of Matthew Arnold ELGAR VI (Ysobel) – Isabel Fitton, viola player Adagio – Moderato – VII (Troyte) – Arthur Troyte Griffith, architect Lento – Allegro molto VIII (W N) – Winifred Norbury IX (Nimrod) – August Johannes Jaeger, Adagio reader for the publisher Novello & Co Allegro – Moderato – Allegro, ma non troppo X (Dorabella) Intermezzo – Dora Penny, Duration 30 mins later Mrs Richard Powell XI (G R S) – Dr G R Sinclair, INTERVAL organist of Hereford Cathedral Duration 20 mins XII (B G N) – Basil G Nevinson, cellist in Elgar’s trio KELLY XIII (***) Romanza – Lady Mary Lygon, Elegy for Strings “In Memoriam Rupert later Trefusis Brooke” XIV (E D U) Finale – Elgar himself Duration 8 mins (“Edu” being his nickname) Duration 29 mins Presented by Tasmanian International Arts Festival and This concert will end at approximately Tasmanian Symphony Orchestra 9.30pm.

Tasmanian Symphony Orchestra concerts are broadcast and streamed throughout Australia and around the world by ABC Classic FM. We would appreciate your cooperation in keeping coughing to a minimum. Please ensure that your mobile phone is switched off. 39 Garry Walker Nicolas Altstaedt

Scottish-born Garry Walker studied cello Nicolas Altstaedt is the winner of the and conducting at the Royal Northern Borletti-Buitoni Trust Fellowship (2009) College of Music in Manchester and won and the Credit Suisse Young Artist Award the Leeds Conductors Competition in (2010). As a BBC New Generation Artist 1999. Previous appointments include (2010-2012) he has performed at the Permanent Guest Conductor with the Proms and , and with all Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, Principal of the BBC Orchestras. Highlights from Guest Conductor of the Royal Scottish previous seasons include concerts with National Orchestra and Principal Conductor the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra; of the Paragon Ensemble. He is now Tonhalle Orchestra Zurich; Tchaikovsky Visiting Professor of Conducting at the Symphony Orchestra; Tapiola Sinfonietta; Royal Conservatoire of Scotland and has Simón Bolívar Symphony Orchestra; a close association with Scottish-based the Berlin, Stuttgart, and contemporary music group Red Note Finnish Radio Symphony Orchestras; Ensemble. He has collaborated with Melbourne Symphony Orchestra; New soloists including Maxim Vengerov, Truls Zealand Symphony Orchestra; Auckland Mørk, Mischa Maisky, James Ehnes, David Philharmonia; Bamberg Symphony; the Geringas and Branford Marsalis. He has Munich, Zurich and Stuttgart Chamber worked with all the BBC orchestras, the Orchestras; Tokyo Metropolitan Symphony Hallé, Philharmonia Orchestra, Royal Orchestra; Czech Philharmonic; Orchestra Liverpool Philharmonic, City of Birmingham della Svizzera Italiana; Netherlands Symphony Orchestra, London Sinfonietta, Philharmonic Orchestra; and Orchestre English Northern Philharmonia and the symphonique de Québec. He feels a deep National Youth Orchestra of Scotland. commitment towards contemporary music, He regularly appears at the Edinburgh having given the Swiss première of Georg Festival and has performed with the Friedrich Haas’ Concerto for Cello, the UK Scottish Chamber Orchestra at the St première of Wolfgang Rihm’s cello concerto Magnus Festival; with the English Chamber Versuchung, and the world première of Orchestra in Lisbon and at the City of Fazil Say’s cello sonata Dört Sehir at the London Festival; and with the Academy Kronberg Cello Festival. In addition, he of St Martin in the Fields at the Barbican’s premièred pieces from Thomas Larcher and Mostly Mozart Festival. Elsewhere he Raphael Merlin for violin and cello at the has appeared with the Nieuw Ensemble, Concertgebouw. Nicolas Altstaedt was one Gothenburg Symphony Orchestra, of Boris Pergamenschikow’s last students Luxembourg Philharmonic, Deutsches in Berlin, where he continued his studies Symphonie-Orchester Berlin, Collegium with Eberhard Feltz. In 2012 he succeeded Musicum in Denmark, Musikkollegium Gidon Kremer as the new artistic director of Winterthur, Utah Symphony Orchestra, and the Lockenhaus Chamber Music Festival. the Melbourne and Adelaide Symphony Orchestras.

40 Andrew Schultz (born 1960)

August Offensive, Op 92 August Offensive had its premiere at the Anzac Day dawn service at Gallipoli, Turkey, on 25 April 2013. It was commissioned by the Australian Government’s Department of Veterans’ Affairs as part of the Gallipoli Symphony project, which has entailed the commissioning of works by Australian, New Zealand and Turkish composers to eventually form a ten-movement symphony for performance in 2015 – the centenary of the Anzac landing. In terms of Australia’s First World War observances, the date that stands out is 25 April, the day on which Australian and New Zealand troops first landed on Turkey’s Gallipoli Peninsula in 1915. But Andrew Schultz’s August Offensive takes its subject Andrew Schultz matter from events later that year. By August, Anzacs and other British costly and ultimately fruitless attempts to imperial troops remained dug-in to the cliff break out of Suvla, and these were the last sides at Gallipoli, whilst British and French major battles of the Gallipoli campaign. troops had a toe-hold on Helles Point on Adelaide-born composer Andrew Schultz the southern tip of the peninsula. The has written a number of works expressing Turkish Offensive of 19 May had failed to horror at war and violence. His 2001 opera push the Anzacs “back into the sea”, and it Going into Shadows deals with terrorism. was decided that the Allies should hazard Beach Burial is a choral setting of Kenneth another push inland. The plan included Slessor’s great World War II poem about the diversions at Lone Pine and Helles Point makeshift burial of bodies washed ashore and an attack at The Nek (the climax of a great sea battle. A lot is wound Peter Weir’s film, Gallipoli). The main force into August Offensive’s unremitting was to take Chunuk Bair (Çonk Bayırı) and minutes. You might note the sound of the Hill 971 and secure the Turkish heights suspended cymbal – dry and crisp “like while the British landed reinforcements and the sound of diggers digging on hard, dry began climbing up from Suvla Bay. The ground”. Having read the military history plan failed dismally. The attacks became of the events, Schultz was struck by the uncoordinated; some troops even got lost constant digging that went on during the in the ravines leading up to the heights. At months on Gallipoli. The piece also begins the Nek within half an hour on 7 August, and ends with a whistle blast – an idea 234 men lay dead and 138 wounded in “an taken from the trench whistles used to area no longer than a tennis court”. While signal attack. So the piece is in some ways New Zealanders, with British units, captured the battle scene. The technically minded Chunuk Bair, the Turks forced the Allies may hear polymetres, but there is violence off. Churchill, First Lord of the Admiralty, as well as lament for those events in August had predicted “a military episode not 1915 that cost so many young lives. inferior in glory to any that the history of war records…”. By 17 August, General Gordon Kalton Williams © 2015 Hamilton had to admit that this offensive This is the first performance of this work by the had failed. Later in the month there were Tasmanian Symphony Orchestra

41 (1857-1934)

Cello Concerto in E minor, Op 85 Adagio – Moderato – Lento – Allegro molto Adagio Allegro – Moderato – Allegro, ma non troppo Elgar’s career reached its last zenith with his in 1910, and Second Symphony in 1911, works into which he claimed “I have written out my soul… shewn myself.” Between them and this 1919 Cello Concerto, his last major work, Elgar faced down worsening prospects in almost every aspect of his life, from the personal challenges of age, ill-health and bereavement, to the professional Edward Elgar affront of being elbowed aside by younger colleagues. Binyon, by day, was a curator at the British There was also the war. While Britain’s youth Museum under Elgar’s close friend, Sidney marched into France in August 1914 singing Colvin, the keeper of prints and drawings, “It’s a long way to Tipperary”, Elgar’s “Land and Colvin first suggested Elgar turn of Hope and Glory”, composed during them into the “wonderful Requiem for the the Boer War as trio of his first Pomp slain” that The Spirit of became. and Circumstance March (1901), was re- Binyon himself approached Elgar again mobilised at home as a patriotic anthem. immediately the Armistice was declared Rendered semi-superfluous by his own old with a request to set his new ode “Peace”. tune, the 57-year old composer struggled But by letter on 18 November 1918, to find a new wartime voice in works like Elgar demurred: “I do not feel drawn to , a musically slight but eloquent write peace music somehow…the whole response to the tragedy in Belgium, atmosphere is too full of complexities for recorded for gramophone in 1915, that me to feel music to it.” He had anyway, as here in Australia became his next-most- his wife Alice recorded in her diary, already popular contribution to the war effort. His conceived another “lament which should more substantial choral score, The Spirit of be in a war symphony”, music that evolved England, setting war poems by Laurence over the spring and summer of 1919 into Binyon, was introduced to Britons in 1916 “a real large work & I think good and alive”, and 1917, when the nation was deep in the as he described the “nearly completed” hostilities, but reached almost celebratory concerto in a letter to Colvin and his wife first performances in Melbourne and Frances on 26 June, asking permission to in July-August 1918, just as Allied dedicate it to them. victory seemed assured. Still, it was Binyon’s lines commemorating the millions fallen – “I do not feel drawn to write “They shall grow not old… Age shall not peace music somehow…the weary them…” – and not Elgar’s music for whole atmosphere is too full of them, that everyone remembered. complexities for me to feel music to it.”

42 The score is laid out in four movements, The Tasmanian Symphony Orchestra first though listeners tend to hear the first performed this work with conductor Joseph Post and soloist John Kennedy in Hobart on 9 June and second movements, played without 1962 and, most recently, with Marko Letonja and break, as a single span. Whereas his Violin Sue-Ellen Paulsen in Hobart and Launceston on 23 Concerto opened into a conventionally and 24 November 2012. spacious orchestral introduction, pending the princely arrival of its soloist, Elgar sets his cello in a more intimate frame. Denied welcoming brass or upper strings, the brief opening cello recitative (Adagio) sets its own unusually pared- back terms – hereinafter will be lyricism, light orchestration, simple layouts. The violas, eerily unaccompanied, announce the dreamy, modal, much-loved main theme (Moderato), its rocking rhythm Elgar’s characteristic pastoral lilt. The winds introduce the airy, major-tending contrasting theme, which the cello then sets about varying, before the main theme simply returns. A longer, second cello recitative (Lento) inducts into faster, lighter scherzo-like Allegro molto, the cello driving the music forward with its scrubbing semiquavers. Elgar anticipated that the Adagio, despite its anticipatory half-close, would often be played without the rest of the concerto, and scored it with just strings and wind sextet. The cello melody gives the uncanny impression of being an internal dialogue between two separate voices, higher and lower, each merging in and out of the countermelodies of the supporting strings. The finale opens, exceptionally, announcing its fragmentary theme (Allegro) without the cello. The cello then reworks it in a parenthetic recitative and short cadenza (Moderato), before it takes over fully (Allegro, ma non troppo). The soloist sweetly but firmly pulls the music up, introducing its arcing subsidiary idea, then carried on by flowing semiquavers into the extensive development. There’s a heady reprise of the fast theme, echoes of earlier quiet asides, and a penultimate throwback to the concerto’s opening gesture, caught up into a rapid, surging close. © Graeme Skinner 2014

43 (1881-1916)

Elegy for Strings “In Memoriam ’

Frederick Septimus Kelly, though Australian, won gold for Britain at the 1908 Olympics. He fought and died a decorated Empire loyalist and British hero for all that his father was Irish. Born in Sydney, Kelly attended Sydney Grammar School before studying at Eton and then Oxford, where he was mentored by Sir Donald Francis Tovey. Between 1903 and 1908 he studied piano under Ernst Engesser and composition with at the in Frankfurt. He was to leave a small but substantial legacy: Frederick Septimus Kelly mostly songs and works for piano, chamber groupings and orchestra. He made his public debut as a pianist in to be suggested by the Greek surroundings Sydney in 1911, and the following year in as well as Rupert’s character, some passage London, after years as a grand amateur work by the rustling of the olive tree which heard only in the stately homes of his well- bends over his grave.” connected friends, he turned professional. Wounded at Gallipoli, Kelly completed the He performed recitals at the Aeolian Hall work on 27 June 1915 whilst recuperating and concertos under Sir George Henschel in Alexandria, and wrote: “It is so entirely and Sir Henry Wood, as well as conducting bound up with Rupert Brooke and the concerts by and violinist Jelly circumstances of his burial that in a sense I d’Arányi. Kelly seemed about to launch a feel myself the chronicler of its ideas rather new career as a patron when he became than the composer …The work is a true chairman of the influential Classical Concert portrayal of my feelings on that night – the Society, sponsoring in 1913 passionless simplicity of the surroundings and appearing with him at Bechstein Hall with occasionally a note of personal (now Wigmore Hall). War intervened. anguish.” Kelly enlisted in the Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve’s Hood Battalion, fighting at On leave in London, Kelly played the Elegy Gallipoli and on the Somme where he was as a piano short score on 7 March 1916 shot in the head leading a successful attack at 10 Downing Street and later before on a German machine gun post. He is the Gallipoli commander, General Sir Ian buried in the Martinsart British Cemetery in Hamilton. Some months later he added the France, the only Australian there. harp part at the suggestion of his friend, pianist . The Elegy had its Kelly’s Elegy in Memoriam Rupert Brooke first orchestrally realised performance in the originated in the poet’s tragic death and Rugby School Speech Room on 28 March the composer’s participation in his burial 1919, with Frank Bridge conducting, at a on the Greek island of Skyros on 23 April memorial concert for Rupert Brooke. 1915 as their battalion prepared to land at Gallipoli. With the nine-minute work for Therese Radic © 2015 string orchestra and (later) harp still not committed to paper, he wrote on 21 May: This is the first performance of this work by the “The modal character of the music seems Tasmanian Symphony Orchestra.

44 Edward Elgar

Variations on an Original Theme, Op 36 quavers, the melody had great potential for Enigma wide-ranging development. Elgar started I (C A E) – Caroline Alice Elgar, imagining how certain friends might have the composer’s wife varied it. This work, when completed, would single-handedly turn around the composer’s II (H D S-P) – Hew David Steuart-Powell, career. It was premièred at St James’s pianist in Elgar’s trio Hall, London, on 19 June 1899 under the III (R B T) – Richard Baxter Townshend, influential conductor, . author IV (W M B) – William Meath Baker, “One night in October, 1898, Elgar nicknamed “the Squire” started doodling at the piano and V (R P A) – Richard Penrose Arnold, chanced upon a brief theme…the son of Matthew Arnold melody had great potential for wide-ranging development.” VI (Ysobel) – Isabel Fitton, viola player VII (Troyte) – Arthur Troyte Griffith, architect In the variations, Elgar’s friends are VIII (W N) – Winifred Norbury identified only by their initials. Elgar said IX (Nimrod) – August Johannes Jaeger, that their identity should not matter to reader for the publisher Novello & Co the audience-member who “nose nuffin” X (Dorabella) Intermezzo – Dora Penny, (a typical piece of Elgarian humorous later Mrs Richard Powell spelling), but it is enjoyable for modern- day audiences to think how Elgar has XI (G R S) – Dr G R Sinclair, portrayed them. Elgar biographer Michael organist of Hereford Cathedral Kennedy says Elgar chose friends whose XII (B G N) – Basil G Nevinson, idiosyncrasies suggested music to him. cellist in Elgar’s trio Dora Penny, for example, had a stammer. XIII (***) Romanza – Lady Mary Lygon, Pianist H D Steuart-Powell would warm later Trefusis up with a diatonic scale pattern over the keyboard. Variation VII depicts Arthur XIV (E D U) Finale – Elgar himself (“Edu” Troyte Griffith’s drumming fortes. Viola being his nickname) player, Isabel Fitton, “Ysobel”, had trouble The Enigma Variations was a “timely” performing music where the strings had success. Elgar had sought recognition in to be crossed. The Hereford Cathedral London in the late 1880s but there were organist, Dr G R Sinclair, was actually few performances of his works, and he and represented by his dog Dan falling down his wife, Caroline Alice, had returned to the steep bank into the river Wye, paddling Worcestershire. Elgar felt defeated. Self- upstream to a landing-place and barking conscious of his social status and provincial joyously on landing. The cello features origins, he bitterly toyed with taking up a prominently in Variation 12 – a tribute to trade. But things began to look up with Basil Nevinson who would later inspire performances of his cantatas in the 1890s. Elgar’s Cello Concerto. Mendelssohn’s Calm Sea and Prosperous Voyage is quoted One night in October, 1898, Elgar started in Variation 13, said to depict Lady Mary doodling at the piano and chanced upon Lygon’s departure for Australia where a brief theme. It was in G minor, the key her brother, Earl Beauchamp, had been of Mozart’s Symphony No 40 which Elgar appointed Governor of New South Wales. had once reworked bar-for-bar into an The most famous variation, “Nimrod”, original composition. In its almost arbitrary has perhaps the most interesting musical contour and halting mix of crotchets and association. It is a musical portrait of

45 Elgar’s publisher, A E Jaeger, and is called “Nimrod” (“the mighty hunter before the Lord”) because Jaeger means “hunter” in German.

“This work, when completed, would single-handedly turn around the composer’s career.”

During one of Elgar’s regular slumps in morale, Jaeger had taken “Edu” (from “Edoo”, Alice Elgar’s name for him) for a walk and reminded him that whenever Beethoven was troubled he poured his frustrations into still more beautiful compositions. He and Elgar agreed that Beethoven’s slow movements were incomparable and in the opening bars of Nimrod, Elgar quoted the slow movement from Beethoven’s Pathétique Sonata. The final variation is Elgar himself. As for the “enigma”, the word written-in later over the theme, Elgar said “its ‘dark saying’ must be left unguessed…” In his book on the Variations, Julian Rushton says that it’s undoubtedly Elgar himself. He used the theme as signature in letters to Dora Penny. Elgar also hinted that you could play another more familiar tune over the top. Many have tried to guess this implied theme’s identity, but knowing or not knowing doesn’t affect enjoyment of the work. The Enigma Variations, Elgar’s tribute to his friends, was the first work in which Elgar was wholly himself – he had written nothing of sustained originality when he first went to London – and it spawned success. Great works such as the and quickly followed. Gordon Kalton Williams © 2013

The Tasmanian Symphony Orchestra first performed this work with conductor Kenneth Murison Bourn in Hobart on 11 November 1954 and, most recently, with Howard Shelley in Hobart and Launceston on 6 and 7 May 2011.

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