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60th SEASON Britten Gloriana (Symphonic Suite) Interval – 20 minutes Shostakovich Symphony no.10 Michael Seal conductor Alan Tuckwood leader Saturday 12 March 2016, 7.30pm St John’s Smith Square Cover image: The Rainbow Portrait, attributed to Marcus Gheeraerts the Younger In accordance with the requirements of Westminster City Council persons shall not be permitted to sit or stand in any gangway. The taking of photographs and use of recording equipment is strictly forbidden without formal consent from St John’s. Smoking is not permitted anywhere in St John’s. Refreshments are permitted only in the restaurant in the Crypt. Please ensure that all digital watch alarms, pagers and mobile phones are switched off. During the interval and after the concert the restaurant is open for licensed refreshments. Box office tel: 020 7222 1061. Website: www.sjss.org.uk. St John’s Smith Square Charitable Trust, registered charity no: 1045390. Registered in England. Company no: 3028678. TONIGHT’S PROGRAMME BENJAMIN BRITTEN 1913–1976 Gloriana (Symphonic Suite) The Tournament Lute Song The Courtly Dances Gloriana Moritura ‘One of the great disasters of operatic history’, wrote Lord Harewood after the Royal Gala first performance of Gloriana at Covent Garden on 8 June 1953, six days after the coronation. He was a close friend of Britten, and, as the Queen’s cousin, had been responsible for the royal commission of the work. He had also arranged for Britten and his librettist, William Plomer, to play over the score to the Queen and Prince Philip less than a month before the premiere. So what went wrong? Firstly, it was disliked and misunderstood by an audience made up of grandees, courtiers, diplomats and civil servants, for whom any opera would have been a tedious experience, let alone a new one by a twentieth-century composer. Secondly, there was Benjamin Britten intense jealousy of Britten in musical circles. Since Peter Grimes his reputation had been growing and he had almost become an official artist. As the music critic David Cairns put it: ‘The particular nastiness of the Gloriana episode lay in the unholy alliance that was forged between traditional British philistinism, in one of its most reactionary periods, and forces within the music profession activated by prejudices of a scarcely superior kind.’ But there was also the unwritten subtext of Britten’s homosexuality, which was still illegal. Plomer was gay too, as was Peter Pears, who sang the role of the Earl of Essex. A common attitude is summed up by the composer William Walton’s comments about Covent Garden: ‘There are enough buggers in the place already, it’s time it was stopped… Everyone is queer and I’m just normal, so my music will never succeed.’ No wonder Britten decided to retreat to his home in Aldeburgh on the Suffolk coast, writing his next full-scale opera, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, for the festival there, and the one after that, Owen Wingrave, for television. The Symphonic Suite was made between September and December 1953 when Britten had severe bursitis in his right arm, forcing him to write with his left hand for several weeks. So Imogen Holst, daughter of the composer Gustav Holst, made all the principal adjustments under Britten’s direction. It was first performed in September 1954 at Birmingham Town Hall with Peter Pears and the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Rudolf Schwarz. 4 TONIGHT’S PROGRAMME Gloriana isn’t a sycophantic portrait of Elizabeth I, but focuses on the relationship between the Queen and the Earl of Essex, exploring the conflicts between personal and public life. As the librettist put it: ‘Queen Elizabeth, a solitary and ageing monarch, undiminished in power, statesmanship and understanding, sees in an outstanding young nobleman a hope both for the future of the country and of herself.’ The Tournament The opera opens outside a tilting ground and the rhythmic brass chords depict the jousting tournament taking place inside. Eventually the bustle and excitement give way to a haunting hymn-like tune, sung by the crowd in the opera, in praise of the Queen. Lute Song One of Britten’s finest inspirations and probably the most famous number in the opera, it is the second of two lute songs which Essex sings to the Queen in her anteroom at Nonsuch Palace. Although it begins with a quotation from a madrigal by John Wilbye, it recreates the spirit of the Tudor composers rather than the letter. The vocal line may be played by a solo oboe, as it is this evening. The Courtly Dances These come from the end of Act Two, which takes place at a grand ball in the great room of Whitehall Palace. Britten was mystified about the speeds and lengths of Elizabethan dances, so Imogen Holst went to Oxford to have lessons on the various steps. On her return she spent two hours demonstrating what she had mastered to Britten, which included whirling Peter Pears round the breakfast table in a vigorous Lavolta. The dances required the most rescoring, as in the opera they are played by a small group of instruments on the stage. Britten also altered their order for the suite. Gloriana Moritura Essex has led a rebellion against the Queen and she has reluctantly had to sign his death warrant. In this final scene the great Queen, near to death, surveys her past against the poignant music of the Lute Song. As her life draws to a close the music of the hymn-like tune from The Tournament returns softly. 5 TONIGHT’S PROGRAMME DMITRI SHOSTAKOVICH 1906–1975 Symphony no.10 Moderato Allegro Allegretto Andante — Allegro On 5 March 1953, whilst Britten was feverishly completing the orchestration of Gloriana, in a dacha outside Moscow the cruellest tyrant the world has known (so far) spent twelve hours choking to death after a stroke. Joseph Stalin was responsible for at least fifty million deaths and Shostakovich had come very close to being one of them. In 1936 Stalin had stormed out of a performance of his opera Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk and the work was condemned in the official Soviet newspaper Pravda. The horrified Shostakovich knew that this usually meant execution or, at the least, being sent to one of the Gulags, so he is said to have slept fully clothed with a packed bag in order to Carter Painting © Blake avoid the indignity of having to dress in front of the Dmitri Shostakovich police when they came for him in the night. Happily he survived and the attitude of the authorities towards him began to thaw during the war years. But in 1948 a resolution by the Central Committee of the Communist Party, headed by Stalin’s odious henchman Andrei Zhdanov, strongly criticised Shostakovich, Prokofiev and other leading composers for failing to write what the party thought the people ought to hear. Shostakovich responded by withholding his recently completed Violin Concerto and writing no more symphonies during Stalin’s lifetime. So by the time Shostakovich started work on his Tenth Symphony, during the summer of 1953, it was eight years since its predecessor, the longest gap between any of his symphonies. At times composition was hard and slow. ‘At the moment I am in difficulties finishing off the first movement and I don’t know how things will go after that’, he wrote to a friend on 27 June. But it was ready for its premiere in December 1953 in Leningrad, conducted by Yevgeny Mravinsky. Naturally people were keen to interpret Shostakovich’s first major work after such an important event in Soviet history. Was it a musical monument to the fifty million dead? Did it depict the confrontation between artist and tyrant? Or did it reflect the change from harsh Stalinist winter to an uncertain thaw? But Shostakovich never revealed a programme. When asked he replied that listeners should ‘guess for themselves’. Whatever it was about, it was clear that in the Tenth Symphony he had opened his soul to the world, revealing tragedy and profundity as well as resilience and strength. It gained worldwide acclaim as perhaps the greatest of his symphonies, 6 TONIGHT’S PROGRAMME in both its balance of moods and its technical mastery. The composer Yuri Shaporin even went as far as to write that the spiritual world of Russian man in the twentieth century could not be understood without Shostakovich’s Tenth Symphony. The long first movement is rooted in E minor and forms a vast arch. It is based on three themes which weave in and out of each other. The first appears on cellos and basses, the opening paragraph for strings alone achieving an almost static and expectant effect, whilst keeping the music in motion, like a slow stirring to life clouded by dark memories. The clarinet introduces the folk-like second theme and the third appears on the flute, timid and uncertain over pizzicato strings. Gradually the mood shifts from deep contemplation and lyrical agitation to tragic tension, the central span of the movement forming a massive crescendo leading to an enormous climax. The short second movement is a sinister moto perpetuo. Shostakovich hinted that this malevolent tornado depicted Stalin. It is certainly based on his music for the film The Fall of Berlin, in which Stalin was the main character. And it takes the form of a gopak, a dance from Stalin’s birthplace, Georgia. A study in concentrated fury rarely equalled in music, this raging scherzo is fortissimo almost throughout and the pace never relaxes. The nocturnal third movement, a kind of intermezzo of deceptive simplicity, opens with a gently rocking theme in the strings.

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