Geoffrey Lancaster in Recital MOZART ON THE FORTEPIANO MONDAY 2 SEPTEMBER CITY RECITAL HALL CONCERT DIARY SEPTEMBER Music from Swan Lake Wed 4 Sep, 7pm Thu 5 Sep, 7pm BEAUTY AND MAGIC Concourse Concert Hall, ROSSINI The Thieving Magpie: Overture Chatswood RAVEL Mother Goose: Suite TCHAIKOVSKY Swan Lake: Suite Umberto Clerici conductor Star Wars: The Force Awakens Sydney Symphony Presents Thu 12 Sep, 8pm in Concert Fri 13 Sep, 8pm Set 30 years after the defeat of the Empire, Sat 14 Sep, 2pm this instalment of the Star Wars saga sees original Sat 14 Sep, 8pm cast members Carrie Fisher, Mark Hamill and Sydney Opera House Harrison Ford reunited on the big-screen, with the Orchestra playing live to film. Classified M. PRESENTATION LICENSED BY PRESENTATION LICENSED BY DISNEY CONCERTS IN ASSOCIATION WITH 20TH CENTURY FOX, LUCASFILM, AND WARNER/CHAPPELL MUSIC. © 2019 & TM LUCASFILM LTD. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED © DISNEY Andreas Brantelid performs Meet the Music Elgar’s Cello Concerto Wed 18 Sep, 6.30pm Thursday Afternoon Symphony VLADIMIR ASHKENAZY’S MASTERWORKS Thu 19 Sep, 1.30pm VAUGHAN WILLIAMS Tea & Symphony* Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis Fri 20 Sep, 11am *ELGAR Cello Concerto Great Classics *ELGAR Enigma Variations Sat 21 Sep, 2pm Vladimir Ashkenazy conductor Sydney Opera House Andreas Brantelid cello Abercrombie & Kent Holst’s Planets Masters Series VLADIMIR ASHKENAZY'S MASTERWORKS Wed 25 Sep, 8pm MEDTNER Piano Concerto No.1 Fri 27 Sep, 8pm HOLST The Planets Sat 28 Sep, 8pm Vladimir Ashkenazy conductor Sydney Opera House Alexei Volodin piano Sydney Philharmonia Choirs OCTOBER The Four Seasons Meet the Music Thu 10 Oct, 6.30pm VIVALDI AND PIAZZOLLA Kaleidoscope PIAZZOLLA arr. Desyatnikov Fri 11 Oct, 7pm The Four Seasons of Buenos Aires Sat 12 Oct, 7pm VIVALDI The Four Seasons Sydney Opera House Andrew Haveron violin-director Vivaldi’s Four Seasons Sun 13 Oct, 1pm Sun 13 Oct, 2.45pm A SYDNEY SYMPHONY FAMILY EVENT Sydney Opera House VIVALDI The Four Seasons Andrew Haveron violin-director Christian Li violin Donald Runnicles conducts Thursday Afternoon Symphony Bruckner Symphony No.7 Thu 17 Oct, 1.30pm Emirates Metro Series MUSIC OF INSPIRATION Fri 18 Oct, 8pm MESSIAEN Les offrandes oubliées Great Classics (The Forgotten Offerings) Sat 19 Oct, 2pm BRUCKNER Symphony No.7 Sydney Opera House Donald Runnicles conductor WELCOME We are very proud to present the Sydney Symphony‘s International Pianists in Recital series. This four-part series boasts a variety of composers that illustrate each pianist’s individual style and interpretation of these classical masterpieces. We’re thrilled that the pianos being used are in themselves masterpieces of great craft and ingenuity and are delighted that their acoustic beauty supports performances of such brilliance. At Theme & Variations Piano Services we strive for excellence and work with each pianist to deliver perfection, while upholding the highest standard of technical services on the Australian concert stage. With over 40 years’ industry experience, we are internationally renowned for our extensive knowledge and services in acoustic pianos. Our long history with Steinway & Sons has allowed us to work with many notable pianists whose photographs grace our showroom’s wall of fame. Our Willoughby showroom boasts a beautiful range of upright and grand pianos to suit all means and abilities. Our team of experienced technicians are also dedicated to bringing out the best in every piano – great and small – across our musical community. We invite our Sydney Symphony guests to visit us. These recitals will be truly unforgettable, and we hope you will be thrilled by the pianistic brilliance in this year’s program. We look forward to sharing this experience with you and congratulate the Sydney Symphony Orchestra once again for bringing these fine, inspirational artists to our city. Ara Vartoukian OAM Director, Theme & Variations Piano Services 2019 CONCERT SEASON INTERNATIONAL PIANISTS IN RECITAL MONDAY 2 SEPTEMBER, 7PM CITY RECITAL HALL, ANGEL PLACE The Lowy Chair of Chief Conductor and Artistic Director Geoffrey Lancaster in Recital Mozart on the Fortepiano WOLFGANG AMADEUS MOZART (1756–1791) Piano Sonata in B flat, K.570 Allegro Adagio The concert will be broadcast on ABC Allegretto Classic on 15 September at 5pm, and again on 12 November at 1pm. Piano Sonata in E flat, K.282 Adagio Pre-concert talk by Anthony Menuetto I & II Abouhamad in the First Floor Reception Room at 6.15pm. Allegro INTERVAL The concert will conclude at approximately 8.45pm. Rondo in A minor, K.511 Estimated durations: 18 minutes; 13 minutes; 20 minute interval; Piano Sonata in B flat, K.333 10 minutes; 15 minutes. Allegro Andante cantabile n n n n n n n n Allegretto Cover image: Geoffrey Lancaster THE ARTIST Geoffrey Lancaster fortepiano Geoffrey Lancaster is among the world’s most His many career honours and prizes include acclaimed fortepianists. In a career spanning Gramophone and ARIA awards for some of his 40 years, he has profoundly influenced the 55 published recordings, the Australia Council’s development of the historically inspired Australian Artists Creative Fellowship, the HC performance practice movement. He has featured Coombs Creative Arts Fellowship, elected as soloist on modern and early keyboard with such Fellowships of the Australian Academy of the orchestras as the Leipzig Gewandhausorchester; Humanities, the Australian College of Educators the Royal Stockholm Philharmonic; the Rotterdam and the Royal Society of Arts, the Order of Arts and Philharmonic; the Gürzenich Orchester Köln; Letters, and the Order of Australia. In 2006, he was Tafelmusik of Toronto; La Cetra Barockorchester Australian of the Year for the Australian Capital Basel; Ensemble 415 of Geneva, Concerto Territory. Copenhagen, and with every major Australian Since 2014 Geoffrey has lived in Perth, where orchestra. he is Professor at the Western Australian Academy Dr Lancaster studied fortepiano at the Royal of Performing Arts, Edith Cowan University. Conservatorium in The Hague. He was the first Australian to win a major international keyboard competition, receiving First Prize in the 23rd Festival van Vlaanderen International Mozart Fortepiano Competition, Brugge. Geoffrey is an inspiring teacher and public intellectual, and undertakes regular residencies at significant European conservatoria. Dr Lancaster has held various professorial and emeritus appointments, including at the Royal College of Music in London, the Schola Cantorum Basiliensis, and the Royal Northern College of Music, Manchester. In 2011 Dr Lancaster delivered the inaugural Henry Wood Lecture Recital at the Royal Academy of Music in London. 6 ABOUT THE MUSIC For Mozart and his contemporaries the piano sonata was still very much a genre cultivated for private performance; Mozart’s were composed for soirées in aristocratic or bourgeois salons (for himself to play, or published so that others could) and as material for students (his, or, again, through publication for others). The instrument for which Mozart wrote, the fortepiano, was not yet capable of the heroic rhetorical force that Beethoven would harness in the early 19th century (scholar John Irving goes so far as to say the modern piano ‘falsifies Mozart’s sound-world to a certain extent’, but, as we hear tonight, fortepianos each have their own musical personalities). Much of the music written for the Mozart, 1782 fortepiano in Mozart’s time could be termed ‘galant’, stressing lightness, lyricism and wit. In contrast to this essentially Italianate manner, composers such as Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach developed what came to be known as the Empfindsamer Stil – the ‘most sensitive’ or ‘expressive’ style – which manifested itself in works of highly chromatic minor-key harmony, full of sudden changes of mood and texture. In both ‘public’ works – concerto and symphony – and the private realm for the sonata, composers like Haydn and Mozart brought these complementary musical styles in a dramatic and fruitful tension. The B-flat major sonata, K.570, is Mozart’s penultimate, so is naturally a work of great maturity. It seems to have been composed in 1789, just before Mozart made his famous trip to Berlin (where he may or may not have met the Prussian King, who may or may not have commissioned works such as the ‘Prussian’ Quartets). Its first movement begins with a theme of disarming simplicity, its unharmonised B-flat major arpeggio answered by phrases that culminate in florid ornamentation. Its second subject, announced by an equally simple motif of repeated notes, is soon overtaken by Mozart’s highly affective chromatic harmony, and repeatedly interrupted by stern pairs of chords. Such a pair wrench the music into a distant key for the development section, which is full of elegant hand-swapping two-part counterpoint. Richard Wigmore has said that the slow movement is ‘Masonic’ in tone (it certainly is in Mozart’s Masonic key of E flat), its dignified theme forming the basis of a rondo with an inexhaustibly elaborate succession of eight- or four-bar strains that explore minor-key regions in certain sections. The final movement is also a rondo, that is a form with repeated statements of main material separated by contrasting episodes, though here Mozart bends the ‘rules’ occasionally taking the main material as read, and pressing on. Like many Mozart finales, the main material has the simple, regular cut of Viennese popular music. 7 8 Part of the young Mozart’s frustration with his home town of Salzburg was the limited opportunity to write in certain genres – as Maynard Solomon has said, Salzburg, dominated by the court of the Prince-Archbishop was ‘less receptive to chamber music for strings or to solo piano music’. Mozart’s early piano sonatas, dating from 1773 or 1774, were likely written for performance elsewhere: Solomon suggests a trip to Vienna, while Stanley Sadie thinks Munich. The Sonata in E flat, K.282, is one of a set of six that Mozart tried to sell to the publisher, Breitkopf, as being in the manner of CPE Bach, featuring ‘varied reprises’ or recapitulations of the main themes of their first movements.