CLOSING TIME East Riding Theatre Sunday 5Th April 7:30Pm – 9:40Pm
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CLOSING TIME East Riding Theatre Sunday 5th April 7:30pm – 9:40pm PROGRAMME LUDWIG VAN BEETHOVEN Sonata for cello and piano No 5 in D major 19’ (1770 – 1827) Op 102 No 2 (i) Allegro con brio (ii) Adagio con molto sentimento d’affetto (iii) Allegro – Allegro fugato BENJAMIN BRITTEN Songs and Proverbs of William Blake 22’ (1913 – 1976) Op 74 (i) Proverb I (ii) London (iii) Proverb II (iv) The Chimney Sweeper (v) Proverb III (vi) A Poison Tree (vii) Proverb IV (viii) The Tyger (ix) Proverb V (x) The Fly (xi) Proverb VI (xii) Ah! Sun-flower (xiii) Proverb VII (xiv) Every Night and Every Morn INTERVAL SIR WILLIAM TURNER WALTON Two Pieces for Violin and Piano 6’ (1902 – 1983) (i) Canzonetta (ii) Scherzetto RALPH VAUGHAN WILLIAMS Two Vocal Duets 7’ (1872 – 1958) (i) The Last Invocation (ii) The Love-Song of the Birds FRANZ SCHUBERT An Schwager Kronos D369 6’ (1797 – 1828) Wandrers Nachtlied D768 RICHARD GEORG STRAUSS Vier letzte Lieder 24’ (1864 – 1949) (i) Frühling (ii) September (iii) Beim Schlafengehen (iv) Im Abendrot Texts & translations for sung works may be found below ARTISTS Ailish Tynan soprano Maria Włoszczowska violin Johnny Herford baritone Torun Stavseng cello James Baillieu piano* Libby Burgess piano** * Britten ** Beethoven, Vaughan Williams, Walton, Schubert, Strauss ABOUT THE MUSIC The passing of time is a fundamental human virtuosity as the third sonata, but it is much preoccupation. We feel it in our pulse; we more taut and economical, the use of small measure it in units of minutes, hours, days, motifs more dense and sophisticated: and years; we count it, we mourn the passing of it, unlike the first and second sonatas, the power we wish it away. As Philp Larkin wrote, ‘Where balance between the two instruments is can we live but days?’. The happening of time absolutely equal. The second movement – the is also what sets music apart from many other only true slow movement from amongst the art forms: sound is created, organised and five cello sonatas – foreshadows the intimacy manipulated in real time to affect its hearer. and introspection, the other-wordliness, and This programme, drawing the time of the the transcendent spirituality which we see in festival to a close, traces a selection of the piano sonatas and quartets of the late relationships to time. period. This movement – solemn and profound, perhaps a response to the Galileo’s discovery in the sixteenth century of composer’s by-then complete deafness – is isochronism (the fact that the oscillation described by Steven Isserlis as ‘the most period of pendulums of equal length is beautiful movement ever written for cello and constant) was adopted over the following piano… [a] glimpse of eternity.’ This gives way centuries by clockmakers, and also in turn by to an exuberant fugue, full of cross-rhythms those looking to design metronomes, to and closely argued, and with a real sense of measure musical time and speed (the principal Beethoven flexing his muscles for his larger challenge being the creation of a sufficiently contrapuntal works of this period, most slow-moving pendulum for slow music). In obviously the gloriously mad Große Fuge. 1814 the German inventor Dietrich Nikolaus Again, in Isserlis’ words: Winkel developed a ‘musical chronometer’; however he failed to patent it, and the design For all its sense of fun – and it is fun – was copied by Johann Nepomuk Mälzel, who the fugue also conveys a strong sense of promptly achieved fame with the success of achievement, of defiant finality; after ‘Mälzel’s Metronome’. Amongst Mälzel’s struggles that would have destroyed a friends was Beethoven (for whom he had lesser being, Beethoven has emerged in previously designed ear trumpets), who thus heroic triumph and we can hear him became the first major composer to give his exulting as he bids farewell to the cello pieces metronome markings. And so we open sonata. this programme with Beethoven, nodding daily to his anniversary year – his final sonata Both Op 102 sonatas are dedicated to Countess for cello and piano, the Sonata No 5 in D Anna Maria von Erdődy, a Hungarian major. A gap of seven years had fallen since noblewoman instrumental in securing the third sonata for this combination, and then Beethoven an annuity from members of the the fourth and fifth were written concurrently Austrian high nobility; she was a generous in 1815, published together as Op 102. These patron, astute advisor, excellent amateur visionary works, along with the Piano Sonata pianist, and among his closest confidantes and No 28, Op 101, are generally seen to mark the friends. When in 1814 the palace of one of beginning of Beethoven’s ‘late’ creative period, Beethoven’s other patrons, Count which saw a quite astonishing group of Razumovsky, burned down, the resident masterpieces. The first movement at first Schuppanzigh Quartet – which had premiered glance exudes the same major-key shining many of Beethoven’s works – had to be disbanded; the cellist, Joseph Linke, one of recording). This work marked the beginning of Beethoven’s good friends, took up an association between Fischer-Dieskau and employment as musical tutor to the Erdödy Britten: Britten’s Cantata Misericordium family, and it appears that on his arrival Anna followed for him and Pears in 1963; there were Maria asked Beethoven to write these sonatas detailed discussions about the possibility of an for him (a communication which was intended opera based on Shakespeare’s King Lear, in to heal one of several rifts in friendship which Fischer-Dieskau would have played between the composer and her). On Linke’s Lear alongside Pears as the Fool (though this death in 1837 he was described in an obituary never came to fruition); and then in 1965 in the music magazine Neue Zeitschrift für Britten composed a song cycle for Fischer- Musik: Dieskau. The Songs and Proverbs of William Blake were premiered at the He was a great friend of Beethoven, who Aldeburgh Festival of that year (one of the wrote much for him. His way of greatest piano accompanists of the twentieth presenting Beethoven’s compositions century, Gerald Moore, wrote in his memoirs was unique, and I have never heard any about playing at all the main music festivals other cellists with this interpretation, except for Aldeburgh, because ‘as the which according to circumstances presiding genius there is the greatest could be flattering, aggressive, accompanist in the world, my services are not capricious, passionate etc., in short needed’). Britten had asked Pears to select the expressing himself in the moods texts for the cycle; he turned to the English required, and so rendering Beethoven’s visionary artist and poet, William Blake, essential manner. selecting seven of the Songs of Experience, and interspersing these with extracts from the Exactly 150 years later, in 1965, Britten was at Proverbs of Hell section of The Marriage of what could be thought of as an equivalent Heaven and Hell, in such an imaginative way point in his career; he had a lifetime of success that each proverb seems to foreshadow (albeit and recognition behind him (albeit sometimes enigmatically) the tone or theme of intermingled with insecurity, mixed reviews the song that follows. Fischer-Dieskau wrote and personal issues), and was on the cusp of that he was ‘especially taken with the what became his own ‘late period’: in 1970 terseness, the British understatement, the doctors told him he could work no more intellectual concentration, and the enigmatic without major surgery, and from that point his smile of these dense, linguistically original health declined, his compositions became ever sayings.’ The texts are full of complex and darker, until he died in 1976. During the sixties ambiguous imagery: we see much of Blake’s Britten told the young composer Nicholas preoccupation with the hypocrisy of the Maw, ‘Get as much done now as you can, nineteenth-century church; his contempt for because it gets much, much more difficult as the supposed do-gooders and their lack of you grow older.’ Difficult it may have been, but integrity; his disillusionment with religiosity the results from this period are every bit as but his exploration of the concept of God and compelling as Britten’s earlier music. the Holy Spirit and the power of what exists Rewinding to 1958, Britten was asked to write beyond what we know. In compositional a major work for the consecration of the terms, the proverbs offset declamatory vocal new Coventry Cathedral, Basil Spence’s lines, based always around the same four-note modernist building adjacent to the ruins of the melodic fragment, against chiming piano fourteenth-century cathedral which had been octaves and scurrying flourishes up or down destroyed in 1940’s air raids. Premiered in the keyboard; the two parts are often written 1962, the work’s soloists were intended to in independent rhythm and employ the Curlew be Galina Vishnevskaya (a Russian), Peter sign (as seen in the church parables, including, Pears (an Englishman) and Dietrich Fischer- of course, Curlew River) to indicate how the Dieskau (a German), to demonstrate a spirit of two performers should listen and reconvene. unity between these countries (– however at The songs themselves demonstrate Britten’s the last minute the Soviet authorities did not extraordinary ability to characterise the permit Vishnevskaya to travel to Coventry for various scenes and characters that we the event, so Heather Harper stepped in, encounter, from the homeless exploited little although Vishnevskaya later made the chimney sweep hopping around in the snow (The Chimney-Sweeper), to the carefree little of film scores for many Olivier films). The first fly (The Fly), buzzing insistently, to the awe- movement is based on a troubadour song inspiring growling tiger (the famous poem Amours me fait commencer une chanson, by Tyger, Tyger, Burning Bright, the tiger quite Thibaut de Champagne (1201-1253) – whose wild in Blake’s own painting that accompanies rule as Count of Champagne and King of the poem).