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DIGITAL CONCERTS FANTASIA ON A THEME OF THOMAS TALLIS This concert was filmed in Symphony Hall, Birmingham on Wednesday 18 November 2020 Mirga Gražinytė-Tyla – Conductor Eugene Tzikindelean – Play/Direct Ireland A Downland Suite 18’ Bartók Divertimento 26’ Vaughan Williams Fantasia on a Theme of Thomas Tallis 15’ Everything old is new again. Béla Bartók roamed the forests of OUR CAMPAIGN FOR MUSICAL Transylvania, listening to the folk songs that he hoped would open LIFE IN THE WEST MIDLANDS a path to the musical future. John Ireland celebrated the landscape of his beloved South Downs, in music as fresh as an English spring Your support of the CBSO’s The Sound of the Future campaign will raise £12.5m over five morning. And Ralph Vaughan Williams took an ancient hymn tune years to: and wove a masterpiece like no other: serene, impassioned and as beautiful now as the day it was first heard – in Gloucester Cathedral, Accelerate our recovery from the 110 years ago. Mirga Gražinytė-Tyla conducts the strings, brass and Covid-19 crisis so that we can get back to percussion of the CBSO in music to refresh mind and spirit, and our enriching people’s lives through music as brilliant new leader Eugene Tzikindelean brings a very personal flair quickly as possible to music close to his heart. Renew the way we work for our second century, opening up the power of music to an even broader cross-section This concert is available to view online only from 6pm on of society whilst securing our tradition Thursday 3 December until Friday 1 January 2021 of artistic excellence. Support your CBSO at cbso.co.uk/donate Presented in association with For a limited time, two members of the CBSO Campaign Board have The CBSO’s digital work has been made possible thanks to generous support from generously committed to David and Sandra Burbidge, Jamie and Alison Justham, Chris and Jane Loughran, John Osborn, and Arts Council England’s Culture Recovery Fund. match all gifts pound for pound, up to a total of £100,000. Support your CBSO today to facebook.com/thecbso double the impact of your gift. Find out more at twitter.com/thecbso cbso.co.uk/future instagram.com/thecbso Supported by Supported by 1 John Ireland (1879-1962) of the BBC Symphony Orchestra – finds a satisfying middle-ground between the traditional brass band and the richer range of colour (arr. C Mowat) that Ireland clearly craved. He gets his trumpets at last! A Downland Suite Programme note © Richard Bratby Prelude Elegy Minuet Béla Bartók (1881-1945) Rondo John Ireland was born near Altrincham in Cheshire, and studied Divertimento at the Royal College of Music – a pupil of Charles Villiers Stanford Allegro ma non troppo (“that great man”). As a mature composer, he would retreat when Molto adagio he could to the Channel Islands and the Sussex Downs. The titles of Ireland’s compositions tell the story: Amberley Wild Brooks, Allegro assai Sarnia, A Downland Suite. He sketched his Piano Concerto in the countryside around the Iron Age hill fort of Chanctonbury Ring, Music has not many finer examples of a composer rising above in the South Downs, and believed that he had seen otherworldly adversity than Bartók’s Divertimento for String Orchestra. This is one beings on the Sussex hills. His creative wellsprings, remembered of the most immediately approachable works to have come from his his pupil Geoffrey Bush, were “English poetry; a feeling for place, or pen, yet it was written at a time when he was beset by troubles. rather places; and that very rare thing, a sense of the immanence of the past”. He felt deeply about the political situation in his native Hungary. A man of liberal outlook and humanitarian principles, his continued So – as a northerner in love with the landscape of the South – protests against political dictatorship made him a target for official Ireland relished the paradox of writing for brass band. “Thirty-four displeasure. He refused to appear in Hitler’s Germany, and as years ago, few people in the south of England had ever heard a Hungarian ties with the Nazis were strengthened in the late 1930s, brass band” he wrote in the Daily Mirror in September 1934. He had so pressure on Bartók became intolerable. He considered emigrating been asked to write a test-piece for the 190 bands competing in to America, but felt tied by his love for his native land, and was the National Band Festival at the Crystal Palace, in South London: disturbed at the prospect of leaving his mother behind. some 4,500 brass players in total. It wasn’t the first time, either; he had written a test-piece for the October 1932 festival, after finding In the first three weeks of August 1939, Paul Sacher, the director of himself seated next to the organiser of the festival, John Iles, at a the Basle Chamber Orchestra, offered Bartók his cottage at Saanen dinner for the Worshipful Company of Musicians. in Switzerland for a holiday. For Bartók, it was a busman’s holiday and the Divertimento was his thanks; he composed it there for That had been his first encounter with the technical challenges Sacher and his orchestra in 14 days. Even this brief respite was to of writing for brass band – and “the inescapable fact that the be clouded. Europe was on the brink of war, and Bartók could not cornet, baritone and euphonium are all instruments of more or regard the prospect as other than one which would bring a tragic less the same type”. “I have often thought that it might be decided curtailment of creative musical activity. The outlook was one of improvement if trumpets are added, but whether this is practical despair for an artist of his beliefs. at the present time is debatable” he added, slightly ruefully. From this limited but characterful palette, he created a set of four musical Yet the Divertimento lives up to its title. Shadows rarely darken its landscape-drawings of the South Downs – as if welcoming this pages, and the opening movement is among the composer’s liveliest northern musical tradition to a world he’d come to love. inventions. In this movement, there are three identifiable episodes. There is an apparent Hungarian atmosphere about the tune with Admirers of the works of Eric Ravilious and Paul Nash will know which the violins begin the first over a pulsating accompaniment. that it’s possible to evoke a powerful sense of place with only a few The following section is discussed by a solo quartet and the body of colours, and the four movements of Ireland’s Downland Suite distil strings, rather in the way in which ideas are argued between similar the contours and atmosphere of folk music (though Ireland never forces in Elgar’s Introduction and Allegro. The third episode is more uses an actual folk tune) into concise classical forms, perfectly varied in rhythm and mood, moments of tranquillity and harshness gauged to show the full technical and expressive range of the alternating. Although string counterpoint has not hitherto been a competing bands. There’s a bracing Prelude (marked Molto energico prominent feature of Bartók’s writing, here it becomes an essential of – very energetically), a hymn-like Elegy, a graceful Minuet and a his texture. Rondo that glances back at the Elegy before bustling to a suitably brilliant finish. Ireland later rewrote the central two movements for The middle movement is really in four sections, the last of which string orchestra, but this version for orchestral brass – created for is closely related to the first. It begins with an air across which a London Brass by Chris Mowat, the long-serving principal trombone sudden single outburst from the violins appears like a flash of light. 2 Bartók is working through a carefully concentrated build-up of both For the form, he took as his basis the Jacobean ‘fancy’ or ‘fantasia’, sound and emotion, which reaches its peak towards the end of the and for his theme he returned to the melody that Tallis wrote in 1567 movement; a series of trills adds to the striking effect of the passage. for Archbishop Parker’s metrical Psalter which he had already The movement then subsides into the close-knit harmonic and incorporated as No.92 of The English Hymnal (1906). As the work melodic pattern out of which it began, with one more flash of light was being written for the Gloucester Three Choirs Festival, he also from the violins. bore in mind another heritage from the past, Gloucester’s great cathedral itself, whose acoustic and space he used to brilliant effect The finale provides the sort of contrast of which Bartók was such in the scoring for string orchestra, an antiphonal one-desk string a master. There is some rhythmic and thematic affinity with the ensemble, and string quartet within the main body of strings. opening of the first movement and a further hint of Hungarian derivation. First one tune and then another is flung at the listener At the first performance on 6 September the Fantasia preceded and blended into the design as Bartók’s counterpoint becomes more The Dream of Gerontius conducted by Elgar. Like so many premieres profuse. There is an occasional slackening of tempo for a lyrical idea, (then as now) the audience was waiting impatiently for the familiar some virtuoso violin playing, and an amusing pizzicato interlude work. Few of the 2,000 people gathered in the cathedral would have before the work rushes on to its cheerful conclusion.