56th SEASON Tonight’s performance is dedicated to KSO’s founder, Leslie Head, to celebrate his 90th year Leslie Head was born in Hove in 1922. In the days when even the most unmusical family, as was his, had a piano in the front room, he took lessons, soon developing a flair for improvising the popular music of the day, and at 15 he set up a school dance band. Further musical study was delayed by over five years spent outside London in the war as a radio operator. Afterwards he managed, in his own words “on only the smallest amount of evidence and a great deal of luck” to gain entry to the Guildhall School of Music. Here he focussed on conducting and (as the orchestra was short of players) the French horn, never having played one before. This led to various positions as an orchestral player with the Carl Rosa Opera Company, the CBSO, the Scottish National Orchestra, and the RPO under Beecham. By 1955 Leslie had become the Co-Founder and Conductor of Morley College Symphony Orchestra and in the following year he founded Kensington Symphony Orchestra. In 1963 he took on the additional roles of music and artistic director of Opera Viva and, later, Pro Opera, KSO being the house orchestra for both enterprises. The repertoire covered was considerable by any standards. KSO was primarily, until the 1980s, a “rehearsal” orchestra—which is to say each week would focus on different music, honing the sight-reading skills of would-be professionals and keen amateurs alike. The concert and opera programmes themselves were then slotted into this schedule with relatively little rehearsal. Nevertheless, the KSO archives capture many glowing reviews of Leslie’s work from this era: “A true Verdian to the tip of his baton.” The Times. “His performances have an instinctive rightness of tempo. He knows when and how to broaden; when and how much to press on towards a climax. He breathes with the singer, inspiring them to eloquent phrasing.” Financial Times. “Leslie Head infected … KSO with his own obvious enthusiasm of the score … and his lively conducting made us realise La Rondine is a work we have neglected to our loss.” Music and Musicians. Many leading singers including Sarah Walker, John Tomlinson, Elizabeth Connell and Della Jones were provided with early opportunities by Leslie Head, and the list of first or revival UK performances of opera, choral and orchestral works is remarkable. It’s a tremendous legacy, the spirit of which lives on today and shows every sign of continuing. Puccini Tosca An opera in three acts Libretto by Luigi Illica and Giuseppe Giacosa Floria Tosca: Naomi Harvey Mario Cavaradossi: Geraint Dodd Il barone Scarpia: Nicholas Folwell Il Sagrestano: William Robert Allenby Spoletta: David Newman Cesare Angelotti: Matthew Hargreaves Sciarrone/Il carceriere: Simon Lobelson Un pastore: Dominic Williams Twickenham Choral Society Trinity Boys Choir Kensington Symphony Orchestra (leader Alan Tuckwood) Conductor: Russell Keable There will be an interval of 20 minutes after Act I Monday 14 May 2012, 7.30pm St. John’s, Smith Square Cover taken from Zocchi’s “View of the Tiber looking towards the Castel Sant’Angelo, Saint Peter’s in the distance” 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. During the interval and after the concert the Restaurant in the Crypt is open for licensed refreshments. Please ensure that all digital watch alarms, pagers and mobile phones are switched off. Box office tel: 020 7222 1061. Website: www.sjss.org.uk. For details of future events at St. John’s please send £8.00 annual subscription to the box office. St. John’s, Smith Square Charitable Trust, registered charity no: 1045390. Registered in England. Company no: 3028678. General Manager: Paul Davies. TONIGHT’S PROGRAMME GIACOMO PUCCINI 1858–1924 Tosca Puccini was born into music. He represented the fifth generation of a tradition stretching back to his namesake and great-great-grandfather, who was composer, organist and choirmaster at the San Martino Cathedral in Lucca in the early 18th century. When Giaocomo was only five his father died, and so it was his uncle who gave him his musical education. By the time he reached his teens he was making a living as a musician, playing and teaching organ and writing pieces for his organ pupils. Rumour has it that he also had a subsidiary income from stealing and selling the organ pipes; this apparently had the side effect of forcing him to improvise new harmonies for the music he played in church. At 17, he walked 30 miles from Lucca to Pisa to see a production of Verdi’s Aïda. Giacomo Puccini This was a revelation: “I felt that a musical window had opened for me,” he later said. “Almighty God touched me with his little finger and told me to write for the theatre—mind, only the theatre.” His mother, determined that her son should achieve the greatness that she was convinced was his destiny, persuaded a rich uncle of hers to contribute towards the fees for him to study in Milan. For the rest of the money, she wrote to Queen Margherita of Italy. Her melodramatic letter emphasised her son’s position as the youngest of “a dynasty of musicians” and asked the queen to help “a poor mother and an ambitious boy”. Her nerve paid off, and Puccini duly received a royal scholarship of one hundred lire per month for a year—not much, but enough for him to enroll at the Milan Conservatory in 1880. Puccini’s career as an opera composer began three years later, when he wrote Le Villi for a competition organised by the publisher Edoardo Sonzogno. The score was delivered at the last minute and rejected as illegible. Puccini was a fastidious man but this did not extend to his handwriting, which would remain notoriously bad throughout his career. Fortunately, another publisher, Ricordi, agreed to publish the opera and organise three performances. By the mid 1890s Puccini was established as a leading light of Italian opera, with both Manon Lescaut and La Bohème under his belt. Even before La Bohème was completed he was planning to adapt a play by the French dramatist Victorien Sardou, La Tosca. This had premiered in 1887 with Sarah Bernhardt in the title role. Its reviews were not good; many critics denounced it for its lurid plot. Despite (or perhaps because of) this it rapidly became Sardou’s most popular play. It is a melodramatic tale liberally laced with sex and sadism, and so a natural candidate for 4 TONIGHT’S PROGRAMME transformation into an opera. Puccini had seen Bernhardt in the play in 1895, although he was not impressed with her performance. However, unlike the authors he had previously adapted, Sardou was still very much alive, and Puccini needed to obtain the rights to adapt the play. His publisher Ricordi managed to negotiate an agreement with Sardou. Unfortunately Puccini then heard that Sardou had expressed a dislike of his music and misgivings as to whether he was the best composer to adapt La Tosca. Piqued, Puccini withdrew from the project. He turned his attention to another play, Maeterlinck’s Pelléas et Mélisande, but discovered that the rights had already been granted to Debussy. In the meantime, Ricordi had contracted Alberto Franchetti to compose Tosca, and Luigi Illica had begun work on a libretto. What happened next is a matter of dispute. Puccini apparently persuaded Franchetti that Tosca was a thoroughly unsuitable tale for an opera due to its unsavoury plot and emphasis on rape, murder and execution. The gullible Franchetti relinquished the project, and Ricordi promptly signed Puccini up to write it instead. However, some commentators assert that Franchetti had already tired of the project and relinquished it before Ricordi asked Puccini to take it on. Franchetti’s own family, meanwhile, hold that he selflessly gave the project back to Puccini, recognising the greater talent. Having secured the work, the composition of Tosca proved to be one of the least problematic jobs of Puccini’s career. The premiere in January 1900 was eventful: a bomb threat was made, which had to be taken seriously given that Queen Margherita had been invited. In the event there was no explosion, but the performance had to be restarted after an unruly group of latecomers were mistaken for anarchists. In the ensuing confusion the conductor, who had previously performed in a theatre where a bomb had in fact been detonated, panicked and fled. Once the conductor had been persuaded back the performance resumed, and the opera proved a popular success, notwithstanding the usual mixed reviews. Its place in the repertoire has been assured ever since. Puccini’s gift for a memorable tune and ability to handle large set pieces is of course a factor in his popularity, but it is in his extraordinary attention to detail that the deeper key to Tosca’s durability is to be found. Realism is inevitably a relative concept in opera, but Puccini took great pains to produce a credible evocation of the era and setting. He travelled to Rome to hear for himself the church bells that are evoked at the beginning of the final act, to ensure an accurate representation of how they would sound from the Castel Sant’Angelo where the opera’s denouement takes place.