Tippett a Child of Our Time Saturday 21 March 2015, 7.30Pm Bath Abbey
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Bath Choral Society Vaughan Williams Symphony No 5 Tippett A Child of Our Time Saturday 21 March 2015, 7.30pm Bath Abbey Soprano: Alice Privett Mezzo Soprano: Kate Symonds-Joy Tenor: David Butt Philip Bass: Alex Ashworth Conductor: Will Dawes Programme £3 Southern Sinfonia contains full libretto bath-choral-society.org.uk Photos by Richard Hurd and Jo Bryant BATH CHORAL SOCIETY Conductor: Will Dawes Southern Sinfonia Leader: Alexander Hohenthal Ralph Vaughan Williams Symphony No. 5 in D Interval Michael Tippett A Child of our Time Soprano: Alice Privett Mezzo Soprano: Kate Symonds-Joy Tenor: David Butt Philip Bass: Alex Ashworth Ralph Vaughan Williams (1872-1955) Symphony no.5 in D In every one of Vaughan Williams’s nine symphonies, the composer’s evocative style encourages the listener to conjure up mental pictures: the first three even have pictorial titles. ‘A Sea Symphony’ and ‘A London Symphony’ were followed by a ‘Pastoral Symphony’. But the pastoral element in that third work is ultimately ironic. Written while the composer’s personal experiences of the First World War must still have been vivid, it is more a lament for the war’s loss of life and for the loss of a way of life. In many respects the work we will hear tonight is more directly pastoral in its impact. The first performance, conducted by the composer, was held in London in 1943 at the height of the Second World War, but the magical opening immediately transports us far away from chaos and destruction to an Arcadian Forest of Arden. Horn calls emerge mysteriously from this other world, answered by string figurations swirling around in a different key. This unsettling tonal ambiguity keeps the music flowing like some restless river meandering through a very English landscape. Following a gorgeously orchestrated blending of the horn calls and the swirling string figures, the river ‘side-slips’ perilously into rapids. Vaughan Williams dedicated this work to Jean Sibelius and this section has some typically Sibelian writing in the 3 Invest in social housing by refitting empty offices House prices are rising ten times faster than wages (Telegraph 19/9/2014). Millions of people, many in full time work, cannot afford either to buy or to rent. Meanwhile much office space in Bristol and Bath lies unused. Please act generously to help us cure this appalling situation Join us by sharing your resources and help make a real difference. ‘Abolish Empty Office Buildings House People’ (AEOB) is a campaign, registered charity and cooperative which began as a rich-poor reconciliation laboratory in Saint Stephen’s Church Bristol. Support for our community share offer allowed us to buy the disused office at 22 Battens Lane in St Georges, Bristol, in November. It now needs capital to convert it into 6 flats for a model social housing community. Planning permission has been agreed. You can invest long-term in our community share offer: www.aeobhousepeople.org.uk/invest 3% return from year 6. or donate to address below News on www.facebook.com/AEOBhousepeople Charity number EW21214. 3 Windsor Terrace, Clifton, Bristol BS8 4LW Tel: 0117 9265931 cheque payable to ‘AEOBhousepeople’ Thank you for helping! TILLEYS FRIENDLY, FAMILY-RUN BISTRO for service 3 North Parade Passage (only 2 mins walk from the Abbey) Pre-concert dinner two courses 6.00pm - 7.00pm, only £13.95 Ralph Allen Press Limited Lunch from £13.95 1 Locksbrook Court Full à la carte Locksbrook Road menu from 6.30pm Bath BA1 3EN Tel: 01225 461888 Fully licensed Fax: 01225 446239 Tel: 01225 484200 www.ralphallenpress.co.uk 4 strings. Shimmering skeins of sound lead, via pungent comments from the woodwind and brass, to a series of broad and ever broader climaxes before it all subsides back towards the opening material. The horns weave their magic again, beckoning the music off into the far distance. Rhythm is the driving impulse for the short second movement scherzo. Jig-like figures in the woodwind and strings bicker with each other until they are brought to order by vulgar interventions from the trombones. Then, all of a sudden, as the critic Scott Goddard once nicely put it, the movement ends, ‘blown away on a whisper’. The Romanza is the spiritual and emotional heart of the symphony. The composer demonstrates his mastery of orchestral colour in a beautiful idyll initiated by cor anglais and then carried along by delightful permutations of wind band and strings. Distant new horizons constantly open up before us. We might almost be following a youthful Vaughan Williams cycling through tranquil Somerset lanes collecting folk tunes in a more peaceful pre-World War era. The last movement is entitled Passacaglia, a form in which a continuously repeated bass line supports a varied melodic texture above it. But the composer doesn’t let the form dictate the music and we soon find ourselves drifting into something looser in structure. The undulating bass tune and the angular melody ambling along beside it, both derived from earlier material, vie for our attention until a sense of resolution starts to develop: a ‘summing-up’. Loud brass statements of the melody gain in confidence until, after an almost inevitable reminder of the opening horn calls and their swirling string accompaniment, everything slowly calms down towards a serene and satisfying conclusion. Tom McCahill Interval: please stay near your seat Michael Tippett (1905-1998) A Child of our Time The inspiration for the oratorio The title of this work* clearly prompts two questions: Who is the child, and what time is being referred to? The child, or more correctly the young man, in question is depicted on the cover of our programme. Herschel Grynszpan was a 17 year- old Jewish refugee living in Paris in 1938. The time links events in August and November of that year, one triggering the other. The connection between the child and the time provided Tippett with the essential mainspring of the oratorio: a particular agent and a particular sequence of events inspiring a universal message about oppression. In August 1938, in Paris, Grynszpan heard that his family, along with several thousand other Polish Jews, were being deported with no prior notice across the German/Polish border. Outraged, Grynszpan obtained a gun, marched into the German Embassy in Paris, and shot and killed a German diplomat, Ernst von Rath. This impulsive action provided the Nazis with the perfect pretext for a vicious anti-Semitic pogrom. In that November, throughout Germany and Austria, hundreds of Jews were killed, many thousands arrested, and many dwellings, synagogues, and businesses were destroyed in what became known as Kristallnacht, ‘the night of shattered glass’. Tippett started composing the work a year later, two days after Britain declared war on Germany. He had recently benefited from a course of Jungian psychotherapy. His related metaphorical ‘journey’ from 5 darkness into light is consonant with the musical and narrative journey evident in the oratorio. In fact, there is a quotation prefacing the score, taken from T.S.Eliot’s Murder in the Cathedral, ‘the darkness declares the glory of light’. The work contains other references to Eliot as well as to Wilfred Owen and the Old Testament. The final Negro Spiritual, reminding us of the biblical Jews crossing the River Jordan, links with the journey of John Bunyan’s Christian and Hopeful across a deep and wide river into heaven. The Messiah-like structure of the work The oratorio’s three-part structure closely and deliberately resembles that of Messiah. The first part prophesies events which are momentous within the context of the oratorio, the second is a narrative telling of those events, and the third part, more tentatively perhaps than in Messiah, offers hope of eventual triumph over oppression. There is also a parallel with the Bach Passions in the resources relied upon in telling the story. We have a narrator, arias, choruses, and recitatives but, in place of Bach’s Lutheran chorales, Tippett included his own arrangements of five well-known Negro Spirituals. He thought that, besides being very appropriate to the theme of oppression, their universality, when compared with standard hymns or chorales would speak to agnostics and atheists as much as to practising Jews and Christians. Part I defines the wintry darkness of rising oppression with a prophecy of looming disaster, ‘The world turns on its dark side. It is winter’. Science and technology have replaced spirituality and religion in men’s hearts and this has enabled autocratic despots to set themselves up as gods (for example, the ‘man of destiny’ in Part III, no. 28). Ordinary people become mere ‘seeds before the wind’. In nos 6 and 7, the average citizen who has ‘no money for his bread’ and the typical mother who asks ‘how can I comfort my children, when I am dead?’ are identified by popular dance-style rhythms in the accompaniment. These arias provide a perfect introduction to the first Spiritual, ‘Steal away’. In Part II, telling the story, Tippett derives the universal from the particular by not naming individual characters or places. We have the ‘mother’, the ‘uncle’, the ‘boy’, and merely ‘a large city’ to represent Paris. However, in no.9, a parallel is drawn between the ‘boy’ and another child. ‘A star rises in mid- winter. Behold the man! The scape-goat! The child of our time.’ That this other child is Jesus is firmly suggested by an almost direct musical quotation of ‘Behold the Lamb of God’ from Messiah. The chorus then splits into the ‘persecutors’ and ‘the oppressed’. A desperate conversation between mother and son leads us into the second Spiritual, which is followed by the only direct reference to the murder responsible for the ensuing crisis.