Sibelius Violin Concerto
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Two Course Set Menu $65pp peacockandjones.com.au Sibelius Violin Pre-Concert Dinner Offers Concerto Exclusive to TSO Ticket Holders MASTER 3 Friday 12 April 7.30pm Federation Concert Hall Hobart Alexander Shelley conductor INTERVAL Simone Lamsma violin Duration 20 mins BRAHMS BRAHMS Symphony No 2 Academic Festival Overture Allegro non troppo Duration 10 mins Adagio non troppo SIBELIUS Allegretto grazioso (Quasi andantino) – Violin Concerto Presto ma non assai Allegro moderato – Allegro molto Allegro con spirito Adagio di molto Duration 43 mins Allegro ma non tanto This concert will end at approximately Duration 32 mins 9.30pm. Tasmanian Symphony Orchestra concerts are broadcast and streamed throughout Australia and around the world by ABC Classic. We would appreciate your cooperation in keeping Two Course Set Menu $90pp coughing to a minimum. Please ensure that your mobile phone is switched off. landscaperestaurant.com.au 33 Johannes Brahms (1833-1897) Academic Festival Overture, Op 80 ‘Gaudeamus igitur’, a student song that Brahms had never been a formally- Suppé had also used in Flotte Bursche. enrolled university student, but during Given its grand sense of occasion and the spring and summer of 1853 he’d rousing spirit, it’s the kind of piece which had a rattling good time leading a suggests that Brahms may have written a terrific opera had he ever felt so inclined. Alexander Shelley is currently Music Dutch violinist Simone Lamsma has student-style existence in the university Director of the National Arts Centre appeared with orchestras such as the town of Göttingen. He’d particularly The fun starts right at the beginning, enjoyed gathering with the local student with a pompously-solemn opening in Orchestra, Ottawa (NACO). He has been Concertgebouw, Chicago Symphony and population for a beer and schnapps, and C minor, rapidly giving way to the high Principal Associate Conductor of the Royal Royal Stockholm Philharmonic. Recent to sing drinking songs. spirits which characterise the piece as a Philharmonic Orchestra since January 2015 highlights have included her debut with the Many years later, when at the prompting whole. With rushing scales in the strings, and was Chief Conductor of the Nuremberg of the Breslau Orchestral Society Brahms brass chorales, and cymbals, triangle and New York Philharmonic performing Britten’s drum pounding away, Brahms parodies Symphony Orchestra (2009-2017). The was awarded an Honorary Doctorate Violin Concerto under Jaap van Zweden. the Wagner of the Mastersingers son of celebrated concert pianists Howard at the University of Breslau, the by- Past seasons have also been marked by now-famous composer responded with Overture, and towards the end it seems Shelley and Hilary Macnamara, Alexander Schumann’s Spring Symphony comes in premières of new works, such as the world a concert overture in honour of the Shelley first gained widespread attention occasion. (Breslau is nowadays better for the same treatment. première of a violin concerto by Matijs when he won the 2005 Leeds Conductors known by its Polish name, Wroclaw.) But The work was first performed in Breslau’s de Roo during the ZaterdagMatinee series Competition. Since then he has conducted rather than writing an ‘academic’ work Konzerthaus in January 1881 with the based on dry contrapuntal principles or composer conducting an all-Brahms orchestras around the work. Recent at Amsterdam’s Concertgebouw. In May 2018 Simone Lamsma was invited by King scholastic formulae, Brahms set out to program including the Second Symphony appearances have included debuts with the complete a jovial piece based on the and the Tragic Overture. According to Belgian National Orchestra and Montreal’s Willem-Alexander and Queen Máxima of the convivial aspects of student life which he one report, the Breslau students were Orchestre Métropolitain, and concerts Netherlands to perform during their official had known first-hand. so impressed by the Academic Festival with the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra and state visit to Luxembourg. Simone Lamsma’s In 1880, the year following the award of Overture, they began singing their own obscene versions of the words during the MDR Leipzig Radio Symphony Orchestra. most recent CD features Shostakovich’s his doctorate, Brahms took four of his favourite student drinking songs and première. This year he tours the NACO to Europe First Violin Concerto and Gubaidulina’s worked them into a free sonata structure Martin Buzacott, Symphony Australia in programs including contemporary In Tempus praesens with the Netherlands using the largest and most percussion- © 1997 Canadian composers. He recently conducted Radio Philharmonic under James Gaffigan dominated orchestra that he had ever employed. His working title had been The Tasmanian Symphony Orchestra first the NACO and German National Youth and Reinbert de Leeuw. She is also a keen Viadrina (the Latin name for the University performed this work with conductor Sir Bernard Orchestra in a performance of Britten’s War Heinze in Hobart and Launceston on 28 February recitalist. Simone Lamsma began studying of Breslau), but he soon changed it to the Requiem to mark the centenary of the end of and 2 March 1951 and, most recently, with violin at the age of five and moved to the title by which it is known today, noting Brett Dean in Hobart on 9 November 2013. World War I. Operas he has led range from UK at age 11 to study at the Menuhin that it was ‘a very boisterous potpourri of The Merry Widow to Così fan tutte. Among student songs à la Suppé’ – a reference School. She made her debut with the his recordings is Deutsche Grammophon’s to Suppé’s opera Flotte Bursche of 1863, North Netherlands Orchestra performing which is constructed in the same way. Peter and the Wolf in Hollywood with Paganini’s Violin Concerto No 1 and Alice Cooper and the German National The four songs on which the work is continued her studies at the Royal Academy based are ‘Wir hatten gebauet ein Youth Orchestra and a recent recording of stattliches Haus’ (We had built a stately of Music with Hu Kun and Maurice Hasson. Walter Boudreau’s Concerto de l’asile with house), which is introduced in chorale-like Alain Lefèvre and the NACO. Active in Among her honours is an Associate of the fashion by the brass; ‘Der Landesvater’ several projects designed to inspire future RAM, for significant contribution to her (The father of our country), heard first on the second violins; the undergraduate field. Simone Lamsma plays the ‘Mlynarski’ generations of musicians and audiences initiation song ‘Was kommt dort von he is Founder and Artistic Director of the Stradivarius (1718) on loan to her from an der Hoh’, introduced by bassoons over Schumann Camerata’s 440Hz series. anonymous benefactor. pizzicato figures in the violas and cellos; and finally, a full orchestral version of 34 35 Jean Sibelius (1865-1957) Johannes Brahms Violin Concerto in D minor, Op 47 The great violinist Joseph Joachim, on Symphony No 2 in D, Op 73 happy, Apollonian work in a major key Allegro moderato – Allegro molto hearing the Berlin première, damned it. Allegro non troppo with certain elements that we might Adagio di molto ‘Joachim seems no longer in tune with Adagio non troppo describe as pastoral. Brahms sneered Allegro ma non tanto the spirit of our time,’ wrote Sibelius. The Allegretto grazioso (Quasi andantino) – at such suggestions (which is not to A ‘show-off’ work for soloist was press was rather more enthusiastic. Even Presto ma non assai say they have no merit), and it is true anathema to Sibelius, who increasingly so, the work didn’t really establish itself Allegro con spirito that his orchestration in this work relies throughout his career sought the in the repertoire until the 1930s, when Defending Brahms against a common more than usually heavily on wind purest, most unselfconscious forms of Jascha Heifetz began to perform it. Since charge, American composer Charles Ives solos – particularly the bucolic sounds musical expression. And yet for all that that time it has been a yardstick by which observed that of oboe and horn, and that in the third aversion to merely ‘gestural’ instrumental violinists are measured. movement, in particular, there is that to think hard and deeply and reliance on vernacular music which effects, Sibelius harboured ambitions The opening of the concerto is one of say what is thought, regardless of becoming a violin virtuoso (and the most unmistakable in all music. Over reminds us of the peasants’ merry-making of consequences, may produce in Beethoven’s Sixth. occasionally appeared as second violin in the murmur of muted violins, the soloist a first impression either of great a string quartet at Helsinki Conservatory). enters immediately with an intense and translucence or of great muddiness, But as Brahms well knew, ‘et in Arcadia His frustrated ambitions must have been brooding first subject, soon echoed but in the latter there may be hidden ego’: he joked to his publisher that compensated in part by composition and developed in the woodwind. This possibilities…The mud may be a form this was the saddest piece he had ever in 1903 of his only concerto, the Violin Allegro moderato theme is set against a of sincerity. written, and it is significant that the Concerto now acknowledged as one of series of fragmentary figures which form symphony begins, and ends, with the In fact, Brahms’ music sounds ‘muddy’ the greatest ever written in the form. a kind of second subject emerging out sound of trombones, instruments only only where we move too far from the In this work, written between the second of the depths of cellos and bassoons. dragged out of the church by Mozart (in original disposition of the orchestra he and third symphonies, Sibelius managed The movement itself doesn’t sit well with Don Giovanni) and into the concert hall used.