SSO 19 Nov Glasgow.Indd

CHIEF CONDUCTOR: DONALD RUNNICLES LEADER: ELIZABETH LAYTON THE THURSDAY NIGHT SERIES City Halls, Glasgow Thursday, 19 November 2009 at 7.00pm BOHEMIAN RHAPSODIES 2 JANÁCˇEK THE FIDDLER’S CHILD MARTINU˚ PIANO CONCERTO NO.1 interval DVORˇ ÁK SYMPHONY NO.8 Piers Lane piano Petr Altrichter conductor Tonight’s concert is being broadcast live on BBC Radio 3. PLEASE ENSURE ALL MOBILE TELEPHONES AND DIGITAL ALARMS ARE SWITCHED OFF. Please keep coughs and sneezes well muffl ed ~ thank you. The use of cameras, video or sound-recording equipment is prohibited. Latecomers will be admitted at a suitable break in performance. Welcome to City Halls and More than half of BBC Radio 3’s music output is live or specially recorded. The station broadcasts a huge range to the second concert in the of classical, jazz and world music from festivals and events including the Edinburgh International Festival, BBC SSO’s four-concert series the BBC Proms and WOMAD, bringing the excitement Bohemian Rhapsodies, featuring of live music-making into homes throughout the UK every day. Radio 3 also shapes the country’s cultural the piano concertos of Bohuslav activity, being the most signifi cant commissioner of Martinu˚ – all the concerts will be new music in the world and regularly commissioning new drama. broadcast live on BBC Radio 3. For classical music, tune in weekdays and enjoy The presenter this evening is programmes like our Breakfast Show with Rob Cowan,Cowan, Petroc Trelawny. In Tune, keeping you informed with news, interviews and live performance, or Performance on 3 for classical concerts in the evenings at 7.00pm. In the afternoon you will regularly be able to hear the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra. I hope you can join over two million listeners who tune in to Radio 3 every week for the very best of the UK’s live music-making and culture. Roger Wright, Controller BBC Radio 3 and Director BBC Proms bbc.co.uk/radio3 TONIGHT’S POST-CONCERT CODA (beginning approximately 10 minutes after the end of the main concert) Why not stay on to hear pianist Piers Lane and Elizabeth Layton, the BBC SSO’s leader, perform the Allegro moderato from Dvorˇák’s Four Romantic Pieces, Op.75 and the Andantino from Smetana’s Aus der Heimat (From the Native Country). 2 BOHEMIAN RHAPSODIES The rich vein of Czech music that fl owered with Smetana In this series we’ll encounter all the main phases of Martinu˚’s and Dvorˇák in the mid 19th century and continued into musical development through the fi ve piano concertos, from the early 20th century with Leoš Janácˇek came to an end the early First Concerto (1925) to the Fifth, one of his last 50 years ago with the death of Bohuslav Martinu˚. At least major works. Alongside Martinu˚’s absorbing adventures in three of Martinu˚’s most talented contemporaries – Viktor sound, we’ll delve into some of the enduring masterpieces Ullmann, Pavel Haas and Ervin Schulhoff – perished in the of his predecessors, headed by the fi gure whose music holocaust, and so far no successor of comparable stature towers over Czech culture – Antonín Dvorˇák. seems to have emerged. So Martinu˚, this fascinating and original musical thinker, most of whose huge output of operas, orchestral and chamber music is hardly known to To the best of our knowledge, the BBC SSO’s most modern listeners, was the last representative of the presentation of all fi ve of Martinu˚’s piano concertos great Czech tradition. He deserves to be celebrated. in this Glasgow series is the fi rst time the concertos have been performed in the UK as a complete set. The great Czech composers, all proudly steeped in the traditional folk culture of their Bohemian and Moravian roots, were equally proudly individualistic. In Martinu˚’s case, his unusual upbringing undoubtedly had an infl uence on his artistic outlook. Born high up in a church tower from which THE FIDDLER’S CHILD – BALLAD FOR SOLO he seldom ventured until his teenage years, he grew up used VIOLIN AND ORCHESTRA (C.12’) to seeing the world laid out beneath him like a living map – a LEOŠ JANÁCˇEK (1854–1928) great, rolling, open landscape with distant horizons and men and women toiling small and insignifi cant on the ground below. And indeed, he himself said that a sense of “vast and Elizabeth Layton solo violin boundless space” was what he was always trying to recreate in his music. That exhilarating, almost ecstatically uplifting Czech peasant culture and the rolling Bohemian landscape sense of the open air is one of the defi ning characteristics were an abiding artistic stimulus for Dvorˇák and his successors,successors, of Martinu˚’s best music, rather as it is with the music of as we’ll see in his Eighth Symphony at the end of tonight’s Janácˇek. As well as that, his music has a restless energy built programme. For him, though, they represented much more on a rhythmic style that owes much to the jazz-infl ected than a bucolic idyll, especially in his folktale-inspired late culture of 1920s Paris. Martinu˚ was indeed a restless man tone poems, where the harshly uncompromising morality who chose to live most of his life away from his beloved of these age-old stories led him to write some strikingly homeland. Had he been of the previous generation of Czech radical music. Leoš Janácˇek carriedcarried on where Dvorˇák left artists, he might have gravitated naturally to Vienna, but after off. Like Sibelius, whose music conjures up the bleak, often the 1914–18 War Paris was the great creative powerhouse violent world of ancient Northern mythology, Janácˇek’s of Europe and it was there that he chose to study and immersion in the history and culture of his native country live, revelling in its intoxicating atmosphere of experiment inspires not a comfortable nostalgia for some golden age, and iconoclasm. The soft-centred romanticism of his early but a powerful music of extremes that can be disturbing works gave way to a harder-edged, more purposeful neo- and exalted in equal measure. classical sound, albeit tinged with the many-coloured palette of French impressionism. As the thirties came to a close The Fiddler’s Child is as radicalradical a piece of orchestralorchestral musicmusic and war began to overwhelm Europe, Martinu˚ moved to as anything he wrote. Based on a folktale-like poem by the United States and lived there until the last six years of the Czech nationalist writer, Svatopluk Cˇech, this ‘ballad his life, not very happily or healthily but still crowning his for orchestra’ describes the tragic story of a poor itinerant career with all six of his symphonies. Towards the end, back fi ddler whose child’s death in his arms is followed by his in Europe at last, his musical language was still developing, own. The sinister, all-powerful mayor of the fi ddler’s village absorbing new infl uences, embracing a world of fantasy looms over the whole episode like a harbinger of death and with ever greater freedom. oppressor of the innocent. In the music, the fi ddler and his love for his child are expressed in the passionately rhapsodic 3 solo violin writing. The mayor is represented by a four-note infl uence, as was the jazz and ragtime that was by now all motive that begins in the bass and seems increasingly to the rage in the French capital. overwhelm the lyricism of the violin as the work moves to its denouement. And from the beginning the music is The fi rst fruit of Martinu˚’s new-found confi dence as he punctuated (punctured, actually) by jagged interventions began to fi nd his compositional feet was a short orchestral from the strings, setting the human warmth of the fi ddler’s piece called Half-time which depicts the atmosphere of music against a backdrop of menacing, disruptive violence. In a hard-fought soccer match. With its jagged, syncopated the world of The Fiddler’s Child, beauty and tender humanity rhythms and clashing polyphonic lines, it’s clearly modelled have little hope of survival. Completed in 1913, The Fiddler’s on the lean, neo-classical scores that Stravinsky had been Child, was premiered by the Czech Philharmonic in 1917. producing over the last few years. For Martinu˚ it was a break with his previous romantic-impressionist style, and he soon programme note by Hugh Macdonald, © BBC 2009 followed it up with the fi rst of his fi ve piano concertos. + First performed in Prague in 1926, the First Piano Concerto, scored for chamber-sized orchestra, is very much in the fashionable neo-classical or neo-baroque manner of the PIANO CONCERTO NO.1 (C.28’) 1920s. Typically, in the outer movements the piano’s role BOHUSLAV MARTINU˚ (1890–1959) is mainly rhythmic and percussive rather than lyrical, the prime source of Martinu˚’s characteristic forward-moving energy. Already in the toccata-like fi rst movement we hear 1. Allegro moderato his instantly recognisable harmonic style, with its piquant 2. Andante juxtaposition of major and minor chords which are also 3. Allegro sometimes combined in clashing dissonance. The grave second movement allows the piano a wider variety of Piers Lane piano expression, building from its deceptively simple, baroque concerto-like opening to a powerful climax topped by a “Paris enchanted Martinu˚. At night, instead of sleeping, he virtuosic solo cadenza. The fi nale romps along, in chattering wandered all over the city, completely fascinated by the bright Stravinskyan semiquavers, and after another cadenza, piano lights and the gay night life of the boulevards.

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