60th SEASON Walton Scapino: A Comedy Overture Britten Violin Concerto Soloist: Fenella Humphreys Interval – 20 minutes Elgar Falstaff Russell Keable conductor Alan Tuckwood leader Monday 27 June 2016, 7.30pm St John’s Smith Square Cover image: Robert Smirke’s Falstaff and the Dead Body of Hotspur 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 St John’s. Refreshments are permitted only in the restaurant in the Crypt. Please ensure that all digital watch alarms, pagers and mobile phones are switched off. During the interval and after the concert the restaurant is open for licensed refreshments. Box office tel: 020 7222 1061. Website: www.sjss.org.uk. St John’s Smith Square Charitable Trust, registered charity no: 1045390. Registered in England. Company no: 3028678. TONIGHT’S PROGRAMME WILLIAM WALTON 1902–1983 Scapino: A Comedy Overture A virtuoso composition for a virtuoso orchestra, Scapino is a work of scintillating brilliance and brittle rhythms, commissioned to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra in 1941. Walton first discussed the work with the orchestra’s conductor, Frederick Stock, in 1938 and his initial thoughts were for a suite in five movements. The final idea came from an etching in Jacques Callot’s Les Trois Pantalons of 1619. Scapino was a knavish servant; a note in the score describes him as ‘one of the less familiar characters of the Commedia dell’Arte… we owe him the word “escapade”, which is descriptive of the character’s stock-in-trade’. Walton completed the overture in London in December 1940 whilst he was working as an ambulance driver. It was to be the only ‘serious’ concert work he completed during the Second World War, the rest of his time being dominated by writing film scores. Stock conducted the first performance with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra in April William Walton 1941; Walton himself conducted the first British performance in November that year with the BBC Symphony Orchestra in Bedford, its wartime home. He revised the work in 1950, reducing the orchestration and making some cuts. The overture begins with a rush in the strings and a clatter of percussion. Scapino’s impertinent side is depicted by a bold syncopated trumpet tune followed by a more nonchalant motif in the oboes and violas. The second subject, a yearning theme in the violas and cor anglais, shows his more plausible roguery. These ideas are then tossed around in a continuous stream of whirling melodic fragments. The central section is like a serenade, beginning with a highly suggestive theme (an augmented version of the second subject) on the solo cello accompanied by plucked violins imitating a guitar against mocking comments from the woodwind. But this is soon swept aside by a free recapitulation of the opening, leading to a boisterous ending. 4 TONIGHT’S PROGRAMME BENJAMIN BRITTEN 1913–1976 Violin Concerto Moderato con moto Vivace — Cadenza Passacaglia: Andante lento With its unusual and mesmerising sound-world, unlike anything he had created before, the Violin Concerto is one of Britten’s most haunting and remarkable works. It shares its elegiac mood with the Violin Concerto written in 1935 by Alban Berg, a composer Britten much admired and had wanted to study with. Composition began in November 1938, only four months after the premiere of the Piano Concerto. But it is a very different work, far more symphonic and with less bravura. Britten was still working on it when he left England for North America in May 1939; the score was finally completed in St Jovite, Quebec, in September 1939. The Concerto was written for the Spanish violinist Benjamin Britten Antonio Brosa, whom Britten often partnered in recitals. They had visited Spain together in 1936 and Brosa suggested that the sombre and intense nature of the work had more to do with Britten’s response to the defeats and horrors of the Spanish Civil War than with the Second World War, which broke out as he was completing it. He also recalled that the striking recurring rhythm on percussion at the opening was Spanish in origin. Britten persuaded Brosa to come to America to give the first performances, on two consecutive days in March 1940, with the New York Philharmonic conducted by John Barbirolli. These were a huge success for the twenty-six-year-old composer; Britten told Brosa that ‘the work will never be better played or more completely understood than it was by you on Thursday and Friday, and I am more than grateful to you for having spent so much time and energy learning it’. The American composer Elliott Carter was in the audience and heard it as ‘an English counterpart to Prokofiev and Shostakovich… nobody could fail to be impressed by the remarkable gifts of the composer, the size and ambition of his talent’. Britten made some slight revisions in 1958, tightening the form and clarifying the textures. He also reduced the complexity of Brosa’s editorial work on the solo part, restoring the original relationship between the virtuosic and symphonic elements of the work. 5 TONIGHT’S PROGRAMME The Concerto has an unusual structure: a single fast movement sandwiched between two slow ones instead of the other way round. It was a form Britten was to use again in his next major work, the Sinfonia da Requiem. The first movement has a sonata structure, the soloist introducing both the haunting and chromatic first subject and the more muscular and rhythmic second subject. The movement reaches its climax at the point of recapitulation when the roles are reversed, the soloist imitating the percussion motif whilst the orchestral strings play the first subject. There is no reprise of the second subject. The aggressive scherzo, a kind of Dance of Death, is driving and spirited, sometimes grotesque in its brilliance. The central trio is more relaxed but the Dance of Death is never far below the surface and engineers its return with a disturbing transition scored for two piccolos and tuba over string tremolandi. After a substantial orchestral tutti a dazzling cadenza forges a link between the scherzo and the finalPassacaglia , a set of variations over a repeating bass line which originated in Spanish dance music. This was Britten’s first use (the one in the Piano Concerto dates from a later revision) of what was to become one of his favourite forms. But instead of a confident finale there is an extended lament. Trombones, heard for first time in the work, introduce the ground bass in a free fugal exposition. There are nine variations in which the soloist maintains a noble supremacy and even dares to invert the ground in the sixth variation. Falling woodwind are pitted against the soloist’s attempt to rise higher and an intense climax is reached in D major. But this cannot last and the orchestra subsides onto an open fifth whilst the soloist hovers inconclusively between major and minor. 6 TONIGHT’S PROGRAMME EDWARD ELGAR 1857–1934 Falstaff In 1913, the year he completed Falstaff, Elgar was at the height of his fame and success. He had become a member of the Order of Merit, one of the highest honours, and now owned a mansion in Hampstead designed by the great architect Richard Norman Shaw. Yet although he was to live for another two decades, it was to be the last major orchestral work he completed. Elgar had been thinking about depicting Falstaff since 1902. He loved Shakespeare and was knowledgeable about him; his analytical note for the first performance shows his scholarship and close acquaintance with the experts. The Falstaff he chose to depict was not the caricature in The Merry Wives of Windsor but the ‘knight, a gentleman and a soldier’ of the history plays, a character with whom he felt a personal affinity. As he remarked to Eric Fenby, Delius’s amanuensis, in 1931: ‘Tell Delius that I get more like Falstaff every day’, adding that he regarded it as his best work. In November that year he made a recording which he Edward Elgar took delight in playing to visitors. Falstaff is indeed one of his great masterpieces, with perhaps his finest orchestration; it is impossible to imagine the music scored in any other way. Yet for many years it was the least performed of his major works. Elgar himself conducted the first performance in Leeds in October 1913, where it was received with cold respect. In Manchester later that month the reception was hardly enthusiastic; when it was first performed in London a few weeks later, conducted by Landon Ronald, to whom it is dedicated, the hall was half empty. It is a long and complex work, episodic and swift moving, which perhaps makes it difficult to take in at a first hearing. Of course Elgar was bitterly disappointed. He even sent the score to the conductor Thomas Beecham, whom he knew didn’t think much of his music, but Beecham didn’t bother to reply. The word ‘symphonic’ in the subtitle (Symphonic Study in C minor with two Interludes in A minor) is justified because the work has an exposition, a development and a recapitulation as well as scherzo-like episodes and the equivalent of a slow movement, ending with a symphonic epilogue of touching simplicity. Although in one continuous movement, the work falls into four main divisions. The opening section is a conversation between Falstaff and Prince Hal, the future Henry V.