23 October City Recital Hall
Total Page:16
File Type:pdf, Size:1020Kb
23 October City Recital Hall Principal Partner MUSICIANS OF THE SYDNEY SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA Simone Young AM Chief Conductor Designate Donald Runnicles Principal Guest Conductor Vladimir Ashkenazy Conductor Laureate Andrew Haveron Concertmaster Chair supported by Vicki Olsson FIRST VIOLINS VIOLAS FLUTES TRUMPETS Andrew Haveron Tobias Breider Carolyn Harris David Elton Concertmaster Principal Joshua Batty Principal Fiona Ziegler Jane Hazelwood Principal David Johnson° Assistant Concertmaster Justine Marsden Emma Sholl Anthony Heinrichs Brielle Clapson Leonid Volovelsky Associate Principal Sophie Cole Anne-Louise Comerford TROMBONES Alexander Norton Associate Principal OBOES Ronald Prussing Anna Skálová Justin Williams Diana Doherty Principal Harry Bennetts Acting Associate Principal Principal Scott Kinmont Associate Concertmaster Sandro Costantino Shefali Pryor Associate Principal Sun Yi Graham Hennings Associate Principal Nick Byrne Associate Concertmaster Stuart Johnson Callum Hogan† Christopher Harris Lerida Delbridge Felicity Tsai Alexandre Oguey Principal Bass Trombone Assistant Concertmaster Amanda Verner Principal Cor Anglais TUBA Kirsten Williams CELLOS David Papp Associate Concertmaster Steve Rossé Emeritus Umberto Clerici CLARINETS Principal Jenny Booth Principal James Burke TIMPANI Claire Herrick Leah Lynn Principal Acting Associate Principal Georges Lentz Francesco Celata Mark Robinson Nicola Lewis Timothy Nankervis Associate Principal Acting Principal Alexandra Mitchell Elizabeth Neville Christopher Tingay PERCUSSION Léone Ziegler Catherine Hewgill Principal Alexander Morris Timothy Constable SECOND VIOLINS Principal Bass Clarinet Kristy Conrau Rebecca Lagos Marina Marsden Fenella Gill BASSOONS Principal Principal Christopher Pidcock Matthew Wilkie Emma Jezek Adrian Wallis THEORBO Principal Emeritus Assistant Principal Simon Martyn-Ellis* Todd Gibson-Cornish Alice Bartsch DOUBLE BASSES Principal Monique Irik Kees Boersma * = Guest Musician Benjamin Li Principal Fiona McNamara ° = Contract Musician Nicole Masters David Campbell Noriko Shimada † = Sydney Symphony Fellow Principal Contrabassoon Kirsty Hilton Alex Henery Grey = Permanent member Principal of the Sydney Symphony not Principal HORNS Marianne Edwards Steven Larson appearing in this concert Ben Jacks Associate Principal Richard Lynn Principal Victoria Bihun Jaan Pallandi Emma Hayes Geoffrey O'Reilly Shuti Huang Principal 3rd Wendy Kong Euan Harvey Maja Verunica Marnie Sebire Rachel Silver 2020 RECORDING SESSION Wed 23 October BY INVITATION City Recital Hall BACH AND TELEMANN ERIN HELYARD harpsichord-director APPROXIMATE DURATIONS 21 minutes, 7 minutes, JOHANN SEBASTIAN BACH (1685–1750) 21 minutes. Suite (Ouverture) No.1 In C major, BWV1066 Ouverture Courante Gavotte I and II Forlane Menuet I and II Bourrée I and II Passepied I and II JOHANN GEORG PISENDEL (1687–1755) Fantasie: Imitation des caractères de la danse Loure Rigaudon Canarie Bourrée Musette: Langsam Passepied: Fröhlich Polonaise: Majestätisch Concertino: Presto GEORG PHILIPP TELEMANN (1681–1767) Suite (Ouverture) in D, TWV55:D18 Ouverture Menuet 1 & 2 Gavotte en Rondeau Passacaille Air (Lentement) Les Postillons Fanfare (Très viste) PRINCIPAL PARTNER ABOUT THE ARTIST ERIN HELYARD harpsichord-director Erin Helyard has been acclaimed as an inspiring music director, a virtuosic and expressive performer of the harpsichord and fortepiano, and as a lucid scholar who is passionate about promoting discourse between musicology and performance. As Artistic Director and co-founder of the celebrated Pinchgut Opera and the Orchestra of the Antipodes (Sydney) he has forged new standards of excellence in historically informed performance in Australia. The company recently won Best Rediscovered Opera (2019) for Hasse’s Artaserse at the International Opera Awards in London. Erin has received two Helpmann Awards for Best Musical Direction: one for a fêted revival of Saul (Adelaide Festival) in 2017 and the other for Hasse’s Artaserse (Pinchgut Opera) in 2019. Erin has conducted Erin Helyard from the keyboard operas by composers as varied as Handel, Vivaldi, Cavalli, Monteverdi, Rameau, Vinci, Hasse, Charpentier, Salieri, and Grétry. As a conductor and soloist Erin has distinguished himself in dynamic performances with the Adelaide, Tasmanian, and Queensland Symphony Orchestras, the Australian Haydn Ensemble, and the Australian Chamber Orchestra. ABOUT THE MUSIC From 1729 Bach was music director of the Leipzig Collegium musicum, a pro-am orchestra of up to 40 players that had been founded by Georg Philipp Telemann 20 years before. But there is evidence that Bach conducted ‘a good many’ of its regular concerts at Zimmermann’s coffee house (a major venue for secular concerts) from 1725 on – two years after he arrived in the city as the new Cantor of the Thomaskirche. Most scholars agree that the four orchestral suites, or Ouverturen, date from this time. Like the ‘Brandenburg’ Concertos, the Suites are written for a variety of ensembles: the first features a pair of oboes, bassoon, first and second violins, viola and continuo, which gives the music a pastoral rather than ceremonial air. As works in the ‘French’ style, each adheres to a standard design of an extended overture followed by a series of stylised courtly dances. J.S. Bach, portrait by Elias The French overture typically consists of a stately opening Gottlob Haussman section that contrasts with a faster, more lightly scored music. Here the opening is full of common rhetorical devices – the dotted rhythm, and ornate scale-based passages that flower out of more static chords – and the faster section is a fugal texture that alternates the full body of the ensemble with the trio of reed instruments. This textural contrast pervades much of the rest of the work. After an elegant Courante in 3/2 time, there is a more lively Gavotte, which like three of the subsequent movements is played alternativement, that is, as a pair of dances in which the second features the wind group before the first is repeated. The Forlane is the only example of this vivacious dance, then Zimmermann’s Coffee House, popular in France, in Bach’s work. It contrasts with a more where Bach conducted the aristocratic Menuet, and a perky Bourrée before the work Collegium musicum closes with the genial swing of the Passepied. Born near Nuremberg, Johann Georg Pisendel was almost certainly a student of the violinist composer Torelli, and spent much of his professional life in Dresden (apart from a brief period studying law in Leipzig) where he rose to become concert master of the Dresden Court Orchestra. In that capacity he introduced a range of new music to the city, including numerous works of Vivaldi with whom he undertook further study in Venice. There he coped with being followed by the police (mistaken identity) and triumphantly played a Vivaldi concerto despite the best efforts of the orchestra to derail him by playing the accompaniment too fast. Clearly he was a major star for whom likely Bach wrote his A minor Concerto and the fifth Brandenburg Concerto. Pisendel himself was a composer of great talent, if nowhere near as prolific as his friends Bach and Telemann, leaving us Johann Georg Pisendel several concertos for his own instrument, a pair of sonatas and a small number of other instrumental pieces. Among his works is this gem of a Fantasie, probably written between 1725 and 1735 in Dresden, in which various dances are sketched in miniature and then abandoned. ABOUT THE MUSIC The Loure (originally an evocation of the medieval bagpipe) is a gracious piece in 6/4 characterised by elegant dotted rhythms and the timbre of the oboe. A fragmentary rigaudon – a fast dance in 4/4, here featuring strings – takes us briefly towards C minor (unusually for Baroque music, which typically remains in one key throughout). Oboes return for the gigue-like Canarie (a dance from the Canary Islands), and the sound of the piccolo gives the Bourrée a military flavour. In a rare excursion into G major, and also suggestive of the bagpipe with its drone harmony, the musette features the oboe, while the piccolo Dresden from the left bank of again provides a bright tracery in the Passepied. The stately the Elbe, by Bernardo Bellotto, Polonaise, strikingly, uses groups of three bars to give it a 1748 slightly lopsided feel, though this is dispelled by the simple energy of the final Concertino. Where J.S. Bach was practically unknown outside of the Lutheran German-speaking world, and Handel made his name principally on the London stage, Telemann was extremely famous throughout Europe during his lifetime. Largely self-taught, Telemann was employed at various times in the German cities of Leipzig, Eisenach, Frankfurt and Hamburg (seeing to it that his godson C.P.E. Bach took over in the latter city when the older composer retired) and in the early 1700s at the court of Count Erdmann II of Promnitz in Poland. His duties in those centres were principally as organist and Kapellmeister, so he produced over 1000 cantatas and 46 settings of the Passion. He also, as American writer Sam Morgenstern has pointed out, ‘founded or revived the Collegia musica in Leipzig, Frankfurt and Hamburg, thereby inaugurating concert life as we know it.’ In addition, Telemann wrote some 40 operas for various Georg Philipp Telemann theatres in Germany. Telemann effortlessly assimilated various national styles into his own. (In his Overture of Nations Ancient and Modern, for instance, he recreates German, Swedish and Danish music.) He seems