KSO Programme, July 2018, SJSS, Sibelius.Indd
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DELIUS BRIDGE SIBELIUS ND 62 SEASON TUESDAY 3 JULY 2018 2017/18 ST JOHN’S SMITH SQUARE DELIUS A Song of Summer BRIDGE The Sea Interval 20 minutes SIBELIUS Symphony No.6 RUSSELL KEABLE Conductor ALAN TUCKWOOD Leader TUESDAY 3 JULY 2018 7.30PM ST JOHN’S SMITH SQUARE LONDON COVER IMAGE: Edge Movement (1967) by Harry Ousey (1915-85). The Manchester-born artist was inspired by nature throughout his career, painting landscapes from St Ives to Marseilles. Reproduced by kind permission of the estate of Harry Ousey. For more information, visit harryousey.co.uk and Elephantstones Gallery at elephantstones.co.uk 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 the venue. Refreshments are permitted only in the restaurant in the crypt, which is open for licensed refreshments during the interval and after the concert. Please ensure that all digital watch alarms, pagers and mobile phones are switched off. PHONE 020 7222 1061 ONLINE sjss.org.uk ST JOHN’S SMITH SQUARE St John’s Smith Square Charitable Trust: registered charity no. 1045390; registered in England; company no. 3028678. KSO: registered charity no. 1069620 TONIGHT’S PROGRAMME FREDERICK DELIUS 1862-1934 DELIUS return of the opening mood is marked by A Song of Summer (1929-30) very soft chords in the harp, followed by a slow build-up to a magnificent fortissimo climax before the music magically dies away. ALTHOUGH DELIUS WAS BORN in Bradford, he lived most of his life outside Delius would wiggle England, spending his last 30 years in Grez-sur-Loing, a village south of Paris, near ‘about in his armchair, Fontainebleau. After the First World War, he gesticulating wildly became blind and partially paralysed through syphilis; eventually unable to hold a pen, the Eric Fenby, the composer’s amanuensis’ composer could no longer set down on paper the music that still filled his imagination. The mellowness of the work and its masterly sense of form show that Delius’s musical The story of how Eric Fenby, a young powers were not in decline, but it is difficult Yorkshireman, offered his services after to imagine how painstakingly it had been hearing of the composer’s plight is memorably taken down. Fenby described how Delius depicted in Ken Russell’s haunting film A Song “dictated with great rapidity… the mood of Summer, made in 1968 and named after was one of frenzy. He could not keep still, the first piece the pair worked on after Fenby but would wiggle about in his armchair, joined the Delius household in October 1928. gesticulating wildly… until, bathed in A Song of Summer was based on A Poem perspiration, he could go on no longer. Then of Life and Love, a work for large orchestra he would be carried away exhausted.” that Delius had begun in 1918 but had been The piece was first performed at the Proms in forced to abandon. He asked Fenby to select 1931, conducted by Henry Wood, with Delius anything worth salvaging and to develop it into listening to the radio broadcast at home. a new piece with a different title. In August 1929, Delius announced that an entirely new opening had come to him in the night. “I want you to imagine we are sitting on the Delius wrote A Song of Summer in France cliffs, in the heather, looking out over the sea,” he said. “The sustained chords in the high strings suggest the clear sky, and the stillness of the scene… you remember that figure that comes in the violins when the music becomes more animated. I’m introducing it here to suggest the gentle rise and fall of the waves… that flute figure suggests a seagull gliding by.” After this evocative opening, a harp enters and the tempo quickens, the subtle inflections of pulse depicting the uncertainty of the sea’s movement, mixed with breezes. The ARCHIVE/GETTY IMAGES PHOTO: © HULTON 4 KENSINGTON SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA FRANK BRIDGE 1879-1941 BRIDGE the rocky coastline. This led him to build a The Sea (1910-11) house around a mile from Beachy Head, where he lived until his death. He liked to take friends walking over the cliffs with their superb view AS A YOUNG MAN, Frank Bridge of the Channel, and whenever it was fine, he established a reputation not only as a would go prawning before breakfast. composer of chamber music and songs, but also as an outstanding conductor and string player. In 1910, the increased colour-range of the modern orchestra encouraged him to write a descriptive work, and The Sea is the crowning achievement of his early period. Completed in July 1911, in Eastbourne (where Debussy had finished La Mer in 1905), the work was first performed at the Proms in September 1912, conducted by Henry Wood. This was Bridge’s first major orchestral work, but the scoring is already personal, confident and clear. These are not “impressions” in the LONDON PORTRAIT GALLERY, PHOTO: © THE NATIONAL conventional sense; Bridge sometimes uses Frank and Ethel Bridge in January 1937, Impressionist harmony, but he was never an with Benjamin Britten (centre) in Paris Impressionist, always combining evocative nature poetry with the precise musical argument of his chamber music. In the 1920s, For the first performance, the composer the Romanticism of these early compositions provided the following comments: was to give way to something darker, abstract • Seascape. Seascape paints the sea on a and more daringly experimental. summer morning. From high drifts is seen a Bridge conducted The Sea at the Norwich great expanse of waters lying in the sunlight. Triennial Festival in 1924, when the ten-year- Warm breezes play over the surface. old Benjamin Britten was “knocked sideways” • Sea-Foam. Sea-foam froths among by the piece. A few years later, Bridge taught low-lying rocks and pools on the shore; Britten privately, treating him almost like the playfully, not stormy. son he never had. His impact was enormous, Britten saying that his mentor’s “loathing of all • Moonlight. A calm sea at night. The sloppiness and amateurism set me standards first moonbeams are struggling to pierce dark I’ve never forgotten”. In 1931, Britten made clouds, which eventually pass over, leaving an arrangement of The Sea for two pianos, the sea shimmering in full moonlight. and the work surely influenced the Four Sea • Storm. Wind, rain and tempestuous seas. Interludes in his 1945 opera Peter Grimes. With the lulling of the storm, an allusion to the The Sea reflects both the British fascination first number is heard, which may be regarded with this elemental force and Bridge’s love of as the sea-lover’s dedication to the sea. JULY 2018 5 TONIGHT’S PROGRAMME SIBELIUS Seventh. It is a restrained work, more subtle Symphony No.6 (1918-23) than Sibelius’s other symphonies, and the one that prompted his remark that “while other composers [he probably meant Strauss and Ravel] were mixing cocktails of various SIBELIUS HAS BEEN CALLED “the greatest hues”, he was offering “pure spring water”. master of the symphony since Beethoven” and But although the Fifth and Sixth are very “the aristocrat of symphonists”. Yet he was different in character, it now seems clear always reluctant to discuss his own work. “You that their genesis was interconnected, and know how the wing of a butterfly crumbles it has long been evident that the Sixth and at a touch? So it is with my compositions; the the Seventh were conceived in parallel. very mention of them is fatal,” he said. One of his few revealing remarks was made to Gustav Mahler, when he declared his aim to A butterfly crumbles at be “strictness of style and the deep logic that a touch… so it is with my unites all of the themes by an inner bond”. ‘ compositions; the very Given the austerity of so much of his music, it is perhaps surprising that Sibelius was mention of them is fatal a true epicurean. He dressed fastidiously, Jean Sibelius smoked the best Havana cigars and delighted ’ in good food and wine. His last known work Completed in 1923, the Sixth was dedicated to was completed in 1929. After that, there was the Swedish composer Wilhelm Stenhammar, silence until his death, nearly 30 years later. and it was in Sweden, in Gothenburg, that With their total concentration on a single Sibelius conducted the first performance vision, Sibelius’s late symphonies show a in February of that year. Shortly before the complete disregard for playing to the gallery. concert, however, the composer could not This is particularly true of the Sixth, which be found, alarming his hosts. A search of has never been as popular as the Fifth or the local hostelries found him eating oysters and Mirror (2010) and Icy (2012) by the Finnish photographer Susanna Majuri (b.1978) PHOTO (DETAIL): © SUSANNA MAJURI/DON’T TAKE PICTURES © SUSANNA MAJURI/DON’T TAKE PHOTO (DETAIL): 6 KENSINGTON SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA JEAN SIBELIUS 1865-1957 drinking champagne, unsure whether the performance was a rehearsal or a concert. After the première, he was withdrawn and confused; fumbling in his pocket, he smashed a bottle of cognac he had been carrying. Sibelius’s late symphonies elude conventional analysis because the music is so integrated that it does not fall into clear episodes. The Sixth grows from four descending notes (known as a “kernel-motif”) and is in the Dorian mode; that is, D minor with the seventh note flattened, BOARD OF ANTIQUITIES, FINLAND PHOTO: © NATIONAL the scale most commonly used in Finnish folk Sibelius with his wife, Aino, in October 1955 song.