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Saturday INTERVAL 1 September 7.30pm Federation Concert Hall Duration 20 mins Hobart POULENC

Sinfonietta MASTER 10 Kazuki Yamada conductor Allegro con fuoco Cédric Tiberghien piano Molto vivace Andante cantabile HOSOKAWA Finale Blossoming II Duration 29 mins Duration 12 mins This concert will end at approximately 9.30 pm. RAVEL in G Allegramente Sponsored by Adagio assai Presto Duration 21 mins Two Course Set Menu Two Course Set Menu with a Shared Side Dish $65pp with a Glass of Wine $90pp

33 HUNTER STREET HOBART 23 HUNTER STREET HOBART Tasmanian Symphony Orchestra concerts are broadcast and streamed throughout Australia PEACOCKANDJONES.COM.AU LANDSCAPERESTAURANT.COM.AU and around the world by ABC Classic FM. We would appreciate your cooperation in keeping coughing to a minimum. Please ensure that your mobile phone is switched off. 1800 375 692 1800 436 797 3 Toshio Hosokawa (born 1955)

Blossoming II 2011 by the Scottish Chamber Orchestra. Its single, 12-minute movement begins at the edge of the audible, gradually Born in Hiroshima, Toshio Hosokawa producing a soft unison that is decorated studied in Japan and, from 1976, in with ephemeral, fugitive figures. Rather Germany with Isang Yun and Klaus like some of György Ligeti’s ‘sound Kazuki Yamada is Artistic and Musical Cédric Tiberghien has performed with Huber. He has since established himself pieces’ – Atmosphères or Lontano Director of the Orchestre Philharmonique orchestras such as the Boston Symphony, as an important voice in both European – Hosokawa’s gradually adds long- de Monte Carlo. He has also been named Dresden Philharmonic, Czech Philharmonic, and Japanese music, with many held notes, each a step away from its as Principal Guest Conductor of the City of and New Japan Philharmonic, and commissions and awards from prestigious predecessor, creating soft bands of mild bodies such as the Salzburg Festival and Birmingham Symphony Orchestra from the conductors such as Christoph Eschenbach, dissonance. The relaxed pace at which the Tokyo Symphony, Berlin Philharmonic events unfold may reflect the inexorably 2018-19 season and has been Principal Guest Yannick Nézet-Séguin, Simone Young and and Cleveland orchestras. Music for the glacial-seeming progress of No– drama. Conductor of the Orchestre de la Suisse Kurt Masur. Recent performances have stage includes the operas Vision of Lear, Against a shimmering background Romande, having debuted with the orchestra included Bernstein’s Symphony No 2 which fuses elements from Shakespeare these semitonal motifs begin to sound – in 2010 in one of his first appearances in The Age of Anxiety at the Aldeburgh Festival and traditional Japanese No theatre, in different registers, creating real and Hanjo, which has been performed polyphony that gathers into a moment of Europe. In Japan, he is Principal Conductor with the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra worldwide. traditional diatonic harmony – something of the Japan Philharmonic, Music Partner conducted by John Wilson, the recital like, in fact, a dominant seventh chord, Much of Hosokawa’s work reflects the with both Sendai Philharmonic and Ensemble creating a sense of expectation in Chopin’s Piano at the Brighton Festival, complementary influences of the postwar the listener. Hosokawa’s orchestra is Orchestral Kanazawa, Music Director of Debussy’s Fantasie for Piano and Orchestra German avant-garde and Japanese Tokyo Philharmonic Chorus and Music small, but the palette expanded by the with the London Symphony Orchestra and traditions such as Zen Buddhism. He uses inclusion of cor anglais, bass clarinet Director of Yokohama Sinfonietta, an François-Xavier Roth at the Barbican, and an idiosyncratic late-modernist musical and so on. language to embody certain traditional ensemble he founded whilst still a student. a new Chopin CD. Cédric Tiberghien is Japanese ideas, a number of which are After a lapse into quietness, a faster- Yamada has appeared with orchestras such a keen chamber musician. Regular recital expressed in the imagery of growing and moving music takes over, dramatically as the Orchestre de Paris, St Petersburg partners include violist Antoine Tamestit, flowering. Blossoming II is one instance punctuated by colourful gestures and Philharmonic, Royal Stockholm Philharmonic, baritone Stéphane Degout, and violinist of this, as Hosokawa explains: becoming more and more assertive with striving upward-moving motifs. and Orchestra Sinfonica Nazionale della Alina Ibragimova. His discography with Over the last few years I have RAI, and soloists such as Emmanuel Ax, Alina Ibragimova includes complete cycles composed on the theme of ‘flowers’. This, too, is dispelled by eerie quiet sounds that usher in a passage of Nobuko Imai, Vadim Repin, Baiba Skride, of music by Schubert, Szymanowski and My grandfather was a master of Ikebana (the traditional Japanese art of flower varied string textures, preparing the Jean-Yves Thibaudet, and Frank Peter Mozart, and a Beethoven cycle (live from arrangement); Zeami, the original way for emphatic wind gestures based Zimmermann. Kazuki Yamada’s opera Wigmore Hall). Other recent recordings practitioner of the traditional Japanese on falling scales. A brief climax introduces repertoire includes La traviata, Carmen include Histoires naturelles, music of Poulenc theatre form No–, considered the best an imitative section for solo strings that, and Rusalka. In August 2012 he conducted performer a ‘flower’. The deep roots too, dissolves into nothingness. Solo and Ravel, with Stéphane Degout, cellist winds, beginning with clarinet, instigate Xenakis’ opera Oresteia with the Tokyo of flowers in Japanese aesthetics Alexis Descharmes and flautist Matteo a series of slowly rising figures, building Sinfonietta, as well as a televised semi-staged and spirituality led me to them as Cesari. The final disc in his recent Bartók the subject of this work. The flower to a Ligetian cloud of sound that fades production of Honegger’s Joan of Arc, series was released in March 2017. Cédric I’m imagining in this work is a lotus, gradually into the silence out of which the work first emerged. Even the lotus with the Saito-Kinen Orchestra. Recordings Tiberghien studied at the Paris Conservatoire which is the symbolic flower of flower must eventually prove mutable include a recent release of Falla’s dance Buddhism. The flower and I are one; the with Frédéric Aguessy and Gérard Frémy and mortal. blossoming of the flower represents my music. Now resident in Berlin, Kazuki Yamada and was awarded the Premier Prix in 1992. shedding of my skin, my self-discovery. Gordon Kerry © 2018 was born in Kanagawa, Japan. In 2009, He was also a prize winner at several major he won the 51st Besançon International international piano competitions, culminating The piece was commissioned by the This is the first performance of this work by the Tasmanian Symphony Orchestra. Competition. with 1st Prize at the Long-Thibaud Edinburgh Festival and premièred in Competition in Paris in 1998.

4 5 Maurice Ravel (1875-1937)

Piano Concerto in G The Adagio – one of Ravel’s most Allegramente sublime achievements – was modelled Adagio assai on the equivalent movement in Mozart’s Clarinet Quintet. Writing painstakingly, Presto two bars at a time, Ravel agonised over this movement for many months, During the 1920s, Ravel became a confessing later that it ‘almost killed him’. frequenter of the late-night jazz clubs Its prevailing mood is that of a nocturne, featuring black American musicians and the piano’s achingly beautiful which had sprang up all over Paris. main theme seems almost hesitant, Among Ravel’s works, the influence of yet somehow inexorable and assured. jazz is most clearly observable in this After the main theme is completed, the one, the G-major piano concerto. Later middle section becomes more agitated in the decade, while on a concert tour and tonally ambiguous. Following some of America, Ravel met George Gershwin strident, stifling chords, the main melody and heard his Rhapsody in Blue, whose is ‘released’ in the woodwinds with the influence is most obvious in the middle piano weaving arabesques and delicate of the first movement. But for all its arpeggios around it. Finally, amidst trills jazziness, Ravel thought of this as a on the piano, this most astonishing of ‘classical’ concerto: slow movements draws to a close. …it is written very much in the same The frenetic pace of the opening spirit as those of Mozart and Saint- movement is exceeded in the finale, Saëns. The music of a concerto should, Presto. Supposedly a rondo (although at in my opinion, be lighthearted and this pace it’s not easy to tell), it is filled brilliant, and not aim at profundity or with jazz sounds and dazzling piano dramatic effects. effects. In the wink of an eye it presents percussive flourishes, trombone glissandi Indeed, Ravel considered calling it a and brief snatches of big band imitations ‘Divertissement’, so keen was he to from brass and woodwind, before racing keep the concerto from self-indulgent on to its sudden but emphatic end. solemnity. In any case, it became a true concerto in which fun, self-parody, and Ravel originally intended to perform the exquisite beauty all play their part; but solo part of the concerto himself, but in there is a ‘brittleness’ in the concerto’s the end his ailing health prevented him high spirits, not to mention a pervasive from doing so. Instead, the concerto was and ‘in-spite-of-itself’ sadness to the slow premièred by Marguerite Long at the movement. Salle Pleyel in Paris in 1932, with Ravel himself conducting. The work begins with the crack-of-a-whip and it barely stops racing during the Abridged from a note by Martin entirety of its first movement. Scored with Buzacott, Symphony Australia © 1997 virtuosic dexterity and lightness, the jazzy rhythm drives on through spiky arpeggios The Tasmanian Symphony Orchestra first performed this work with conductor Vanco in the piano, a piccolo solo, tremolos Cavdarski and soloist Michel Beroff in Launceston and pizzicati in the strings and a and Hobart on 25 and 28 July 1975 and, most solo. Even the harp takes the spotlight. recently, with Marko Letonja and Dejan Lazic’ in Despite the wealth of invention, the Hobart on 5 March 2016. sense of direction and purpose never falters, and before breath can be drawn, the movement hurtles to its abrupt Maurice Ravel conclusion.

6 7 (1899-1963)

Sinfonietta French to their fingertips but they period of his career. To generalise, the Andante cantabile, has the character of Allegro con fuoco belong to the very significant tradition neo-classical ideal rejected the highly a soothing lullaby. The principal theme, Molto vivace of 19th-century French organ music emotive, discursive and grandiose which is introduced by the clarinet, rather than orchestral music. qualities of 19th-century Romanticism in contains faint echoes of the sarabande Andante cantabile (with its emphasis on the second beat of Which brings us to Poulenc’s Sinfonietta, favour of a stripped back, ‘purer’ sound. Finale the bar), but Poulenc throws the metre or ‘little symphony’. Poulenc was Neo-classicism prized music as music, slightly off-kilter by alternating time something of an iconoclast. He had a if you like, rather than music as emotional outpouring. Sentimentality was kept at signatures. As a genre, the symphony didn’t love for and interest in the witty and arm’s length. Harmonically, neo-classicism quite grip the imagination of French subversive, and was open to music which Poulenc rounds off the Sinfonietta tended to retain the grammar and syntax composers to the extent that it did originated in the cabarets and jazz clubs with a high-spirited Finale. Marked of major/minor tonality but chords were Austro-Germans, Czechs and Russians. of Paris. As a young man, he mixed with prestissimo et très gai (very fast and very often spiced up with additional notes. Beethoven blazed a trail with his nine the smart set, rubbing shoulders with cheerful), the last movement crackles Likewise, rhythm was given additional symphonies, particularly those from Apollinaire, Cocteau, Gide, Stravinsky with scurrying passages, off-beat accents piquancy with surprising and pointed the Third (Eroica) onwards, such that and Diaghilev. Together with the and grotesquerie, while also allowing for accents. Full-bodied Romantic textures many composers in the second quarter composers Milhaud, Auric, Honegger, moments of quietude. A brief but broad – colossal string sections and equally of the 19th century were intimidated Tailleferre and Durey, he was a member coda brings the work to a resounding weighty brass divisions – were rejected in by Beethoven’s output and unsure of of the group known as , a circle and ultimately witty close. favour of lean and transparent sonorities. how to build on his legacy. Was the way which didn’t have a manifesto as such, Given the length of the Sinfonietta, The point was not to write pastiche 18th- forward to write choral symphonies in but which maintained a generally anti- which clocks in at 25-30 minutes, it century music (who needs second-hand the manner of Beethoven’s Ninth? Was Romantic bias. Symphonies, of course, could be argued that Poulenc offers us Haydn or Mozart?) but modern music is to look to Beethoven’s Sixth (Pastoral) with their claim to profundity, subjectivity a full-length symphony rather than a that shared with pre-Romantic music a and write symphonies that trace a story and transcendence, were close to the ‘little symphony’. Indeed, it is his longest rational objectivity. or programme of some kind? Was it to heart of the Romantic project, so it is work for orchestra. It certainly doesn’t write purely ‘abstract’ symphonies in the hardly surprising that Poulenc would With two fortissimo statements of a skimp on the demands that it places manner of Beethoven’s Fifth, Seventh have little enthusiasm for the genre. G-minor chord, the Sinfonietta gets off on the performers and it is nothing but and Eighth? In short, Beethoven left But the sinfonietta, on the other hand, to a running start. The principal theme – rigorous in its working out of musical composers with a dilemma. which comes with little or no historical the biting opening chords, a descending content. Perhaps Poulenc, a modest man, baggage, and is not grand or sprawling scale and a series of descending leaps didn’t wish to include himself among the Interestingly enough, it was a Frenchman, lineage of symphonists. He was happy to Hector Berlioz, who was the first to or puffed up, is something that spoke – moves freely between time signatures to Poulenc’s unpretentious taste and (4/4 and 3/4) and comes up short at stand on the sidelines. A wry smile on respond with vigour and imagination his face. to the Beethovenian legacy. No mere outlook. seven bars in length (instead of the imitator of Beethoven (although he was a Commissioned by the British expected eight). Little asymmetries Robert Gibson © 2018 huge fan), Berlioz forged a highly original Broadcasting Corporation in 1947 and such as these deliver playfulness and path in his three symphonies, offering premièred in London the following year, spark. Poulenc takes up various motifs, The Tasmanian Symphony Orchestra first performed this work with conductor Barry three very different perspectives on Poulenc’s Sinfonietta is scored for an extending and developing them, before presenting new themes which Tuckwell in Hobart on 25 September 1981 how to proceed: Symphonie fantastique orchestra only slightly larger than the and, most recently, with Nicholas Braithwaite (1830) is a programme symphony; Harold typical ensemble of Haydn and Mozart’s likewise are developed at length. in Hobart on 1 June 2013. en Italie (1834) is rather like a viola day (Poulenc includes a harp, which The lighthearted tone is put to one side concerto; and Roméo et Juliette (1839), made its symphonic debut in Berlioz’s in the slower middle section, which is which includes vocal soloists and chorus, Symphonie fantastique). In keeping with launched with a poignant theme, ventures very close to opera. French the 18th-century size of the orchestra, marked ‘mélancolique’. This haunting composers after Berlioz responded to the Poulenc emulates the clean textures and theme takes on a range of colours as it is symphony in various ways but, despite clear-cut phrases of 18th-century music. passed around the orchestra, deepening the best efforts of Saint-Saëns, Franck, In this, the Sinfonietta is an example of into a melody of some consequence. Lalo, d’Indy, and Dukas, a strong French 20th-century neo-classicism, which was The feather-light second movement, symphonic tradition failed to take hold. not a movement as such but a stylistic Molto vivace, is a scherzo in which the The ten organ symphonies of Charles- approach adopted by various composers, woodwind and brass are put through Marie Widor, on the other hand, are notably Stravinsky during the middle their paces, while the third movement,

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