Come and Play with the Hallé Strictly Hallé
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COME AND PLAY WITH THE HALLÉ CONCERTS FOR SCHOOLS STRICTLY HALLÉ CONDUCTED BY JONATHON HEYWARD PRESENTED BY TOM REDMOND SUMMER 2018 THE BRIDGEWATER HALL, MANCHESTER RESOURCE PACK FOR TEACHERS Supported by: © Hallé Concerts Society 2018 COME AND PLAY WITH THE HALLÉ 2018 STRICTLY HALLÉ CONDUCTED BY JONATHON HEYWARD PRESENTED BY TOM REDMOND TCHAIKOVSKY Swan Lake: Prelude to Act II TCHAIKOVSKY The Nutcracker: Waltz of the Flowers * Audience Participation {Instrumental} COPLAND Rodeo: Hoedown * MARY GREEN & JULIE STANLEY Ai Caramba Samba Audience Participation {Song} SAINT-SAENS Danse Macabre PICKETT/BENNISON Charleston Champions Audience Participation {Song} DVORAK Slavonic Dance: (Audience choice) Op 46, No 8 in G minor Op 72, No 2 in E minor PRADO Mambo No. 5 Audience Participation {Instrumental} arr. PICKETT British Folk Dance Suite Audience Participation MARQUEZ Danzón No. 2 *BBC 10 Pieces JONATHON HEYWARD (conductor) Jonathon Heyward is forging a career as one of the most exciting conductors of his generation. Currently Assistant Conductor of the Hallé, alongside Music Director Sir Mark Elder, and also Music Director of the Hallé Youth Orchestra, the young American has also been selected to be part of the Los Angeles Philharmonic’s 2017–18 Dudamel Conducting Fellowship programme. In addition to conducting his first subscription series concerts with the Hallé in Manchester, this season also sees him embark on a number of eclectic projects: five performances premiering Giorgio Battistelli’s new opera, Lazarus, for the Birmingham Opera Company with stage director Graham Vick; a tour of France with the Orchestre de l’Opéra de Rouen, including performances at the festivals in Besançon and La Chaise-Dieu; a series of concerts with the Flanders Symphony Orchestra at the best halls across Belgium; debuts with the Orchestre National de Bordeaux-Aquitaine, Orchestre National des Pays de la Loire and Orchestre de Chambre de Lausanne; and a return invitation to Japan. In 2015 Jonathon Heyward won the 54th International Competition for Young Conductors in Besançon, taking the Grand Prize at the age of only 23. Since then he has conducted the St Petersburg Symphony Orchestra, Basel Symphony Orchestra, Prague Symphony Orchestra, Panda Wind Orchestra (Japan), Philharmonie Zuidnederland, Orchestre National de Lille, Orchestre National de Lorraine, Chineke! Orchestra in the UK and the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra (in a production of Kurt Weill’s Lost in the Stars, as part of his Dudamel Conducting Fellowship, supported by the Kurt Weill Foundation). Originally a cellist, Jonathon Heyward commenced his conducting studies at the Boston Conservatory in the class of Andrew Altenbach. He went on to occupy the position of Assistant Conductor for both the Conservatory’s opera department and the Boston Opera Collaborative, where he worked from 2012 to 2014 on productions including La bohème, Die Zauberflöte and The Rape of Lucretia. In 2013 he became the youngest ever semi-finalist at the Blue Danube International Opera Conducting Competition and furthered his education with postgraduate studies with Sian Edwards at the Royal Academy of Music in London, from where he graduated in June 2016. TOM REDMOND (presenter) Tom Redmond is a broadcaster, presenter, horn player and animateur based in Manchester. He was a member of the Hallé for 13 years before relinquishing his position in 2016 to allow him more time to work in music education and broadcasting. As a horn player he has performed throughout Europe, Japan, Russia, South East Asia and the USA with orchestras including the City of Birmingham and London Symphony orchestras, Hong Kong Philharmonic and the Philharmonia. He is involved with the BBC's Ten Pieces project, leading creative workshops with its celebrity ambassadors, and he was the orchestra consultant for the project's ebook. He has introduced classical music to over 150,000 young people and their families in interactive concerts for schools with the Hallé, CBSO, RTÉ NSO, SCO and Ulster Orchestra. As an animateur he has led creative sessions in a variety of musical environments, from prisons to music hubs and state and public schools. He has recently devised and delivered a series of corporate training workshops to highlight the effects of inspirational leadership in the workplace, using the orchestra as an example of a high performance team. He is also the horn tutor at the Junior Royal Northern College of Music and has a close relationship with the National Youth Orchestra of Great Britain. He works as a consultant with many orchestras, providing resources and training for outreach and creative programmes. Tom is in demand as a presenter of pops concerts and has worked alongside conductors including Stephen Bell, Andrew Gourlay, James Lowe, Jamie Phillips, Timothy Redmond and Neil Thomson. As part of the recent Britten centenary celebrations he narrated The Young Person's Guide to the Orchestra at the closing concert of the 2013 Aldeburgh Festival with the Hallé under Sir Mark Elder. This led to a commission from the Hallé to re-write the text, which received its first performances in Manchester and Nottingham in 2015 and which pupils heard in this year’s Hallé for Youth concerts. Recent and future presenting highlights include debuts with the Scottish Chamber Orchestra at the Edinburgh International Festival, Insights at the Royal Opera House, the premier of a new work, Dinosaurumpus, with the Hallé and return visits to the CBSO, RTENSO and Ulster Orchestra. At the Royal Albert Hall he hosts a concert for young people with Lang Lang and in October 2016 presented My First Orchestral Adventure with the RPCO. PROGRAMME NOTES PYOTR ILYICH TCHAIKOVSKY Swan Lake: Prelude to Act II Swan Lake, the first of Tchaikovsky’s ballet scores, is based on various Russian folk tales and tells the tragic story of Odette, a princess who is transformed into a swan by an evil sorcerer. It initially met with failure but after various revivals and revisions rapidly became one of the best-loved ballets of them all. At the opening of the Prelude to Act II, an oboe sings out the yearning Swan theme, the ballet’s central leitmotif. As the theme is taken up by other instruments and eventually the entire orchestra, the mood becomes first impassioned, then tragic. PYOTR ILYICH TCHAIKOVSKY The Nutcracker: Waltz of the Flowers After the success of Tchaikovsky’s The Sleeping Beauty in 1890, St Petersburg’s Imperial Theatres commissioned from Tchaikovsky an ambitious double-bill programme that was to contain both an opera and a ballet. Tchaikovsky’s response was the one-act lyric opera Iolanta and the two-act ballet The Nutcracker. For the latter Tchaikovsky joined up with the renowned choreographer Marius Petipa. The source chosen by Petipa was an adaptation of E.T.A Hoffmann’s story The Nutcracker and the Mouse King by Alexandre Dumas (father of the famous French novelist of the same name) called The Tale of the Nutcracker. With its swirling harp introduction, the gently swaying ‘Waltz of the Flowers’ is one of the most elegant and touching highlights of Tchaikovsky’s great ballet score. AARON COPLAND Rodeo: Hoedown After the United States entered the war in 1941, Copland felt strongly that his music must be socially useful. As a result he wrote a series of works that were highly patriotic to help raise the morale of the American people. ‘Hoedown’ from Rodeo is a classic example of Copland’s outdoor American style and became the blueprint for numerous Western film scores. MARY GREEN AND JULIE STANLEY Ai Caramba Samba The Samba originated in Bahia, Brazil and has its roots in Africa. In fact, it was the African slave trade that brought the dance to South America. Since then Samba has become nothing less than an emblem of Brazilian national identity (even Brazil’s beloved football team are known as ‘The Samba Boys’) and plays a huge part in the annual Rio Carnival, a period of unbridled merry-making and red meat consumption before the more sober and abstemious days of Lent. Mary Green and Julie Stanley’s ‘Ai Caramba Samba’, a mass participation piece, was specially devised to celebrate the 2016 Rio Olympic Games. CAMILLE SAINT-SAËNS Danse Macabre (solo violin: Sarah Ewins) As its title suggests, French composer Saint-Saëns’ Danse Macabre is full of devilment and ghoulish goings-on. A French legend has it that at midnight every Halloween, the devil summons the dead from their graves who then dance until daybreak to the sounds of his fiddle (represented here by a solo violin). Accordingly, in bell-like fashion a harp begins the piece by repeating the same note twelve times – it is midnight. Then the devil appears (the violin specially tuned so it can easily play a dissonant musical interval called a ‘tritone’ or ‘the devil in music’ as it was once called). With the fiend the master of ceremonies, the uncanny dancing begins, gradually building to a great climax. After a short silence, dawn breaks (the cockerel’s crow is imitated by an oboe) and the skeletons return to their graves for another year. During the dance section listen and watch out for the xylophone as it evokes the dry bones of the skeletons. When Saint-Saëns composed Danse Macabre in 1874 the xylophone was a new invention. In the published score Saint-Saëns therefore included details of where orchestras could buy one! CHARLESTON CHAMPIONS Neil Bennison/Steve Pickett Named after the South Carolina harbour city of Charleston, the Charleston was a dance phenomenon of the 1920s, the era of jazz, speakeasies and Flappers. It was a physical expression of youthful rebellion that was banned from some dance halls because of its supposed indecency. The Charleston lives on however, and here’s Steve Pickett and Neil Bennison’s new take on the dance form.