Mahler with Emma Matthews
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Mahler With Emma MattheWS Thursday 14 June and Friday 15 June at 8pm Melbourne Town Hall Melbourne Symphony Orchestra Benjamin Northey conductor Julian Rachlin violin Emma Matthews soprano Shostakovich Violin Concerto No.1 INTERVAL Mahler Symphony No.4 twitter.com/melbsymphony MASTER SERIES PROUDLY PRESENTED BY facebook.com/melbournesymphony Download our free app from the MSO website. www.mso.com.au/msolearn SPONSORS PRINCIPAL PARTNER MSO AMBASSADOR Geoffrey Rush GOVERNMENT PARTNERS PARTNER – MAESTRO LEVEL MSO POPS SERIES PRESENTING PARTNER PARTNERS – CONCERTMASTER LEVEL REGIONAL TOURING PARTNER PARTNERS – ASSOCIATE LEVEL MONASH SERIES PARTNER SUPPORTING PARTNERS SUPPLIERS The Crock Group Kent Moving and Storage Lindt & Sprüngli Quince’s Scenicruisers Melbourne Brass and Woodwind Nose to Tail ABOUT THE MUSIC concerto that he began in 1947 under DMITRI wraps until 1955 when Stalin was ShostaKovich safely embalmed. (1906–1975) The impetus for the work was almost certainly the series of concerts given Violin Concerto No.1 in A minor, by David Oistrakh in 1947 entitled Op.99 ‘The Development of the Violin’, and I Nocturne (Moderato) Shostakovich’s response to Oistrakh’s II Scherzo (Allegro) amazing artistry was to compose III Passacaglia (Andante this big, four-movement, essentially Cadenza – symphonic work and dedicate it to IV Burlesque (Allegro con brio – him. Oistrakh said: Presto) This composition sets before the violinist a Julian Rachlin violin fascinating and noble task…enabling him not only to display his virtuosity, but, in With the defeat of the Nazis in 1945, the first place, to give utterance to the most Stalin’s administration returned profound feelings, ideas and emotions. to the business of enforcing its The music weaves its spell gradually. values on the Soviet people, and The opening Nocturne – and how initiated a series of crackdowns on seemingly perverse to begin a artistic life. By February 1948 a Party bravura work with a nocturne – is Decree attacked the proponents of neither symphonic sonata-allegro nor ‘formalism’ in music. Shostakovich, virtuosic display. Rather the soloist despite publicly acknowledging is presented as a lyrical, meditative his ‘errors’, was relieved of his character, tentatively exploring a teaching duties. A first draft of the sombre landscape and rising by Decree included the resolution ‘to degrees to more impassioned, double- liquidate the one-sided, abnormal stopped gestures before retreating deviation in Soviet music towards slowly. The comparison with the textless instrumental works’. In the Scherzo could hardly be greater. event, ‘liquidate’ was replaced with Here the music is, in Oistrakh’s ‘censure’, but the intention is plain: words, ‘malignant, demonic, prickly’. textless works are susceptible to The solo part, often playing in many interpretations, and therefore counterpoint with solo woodwinds, less easy to censor. Perhaps for that requires all the virtuosity apparently COVER PHOTO reason, Shostakovich kept the violin lacking in the first movement. Paul Gosney © ABC Classics Universal Music Australia CONCERT INFORMATION This concert has a duration of approximately two hours Donald Runnicles, who was to have conducted and ten minutes, including an interval of 20 minutes. this program, recently cancelled his Australian engagements. Maestro Runnicles asked that the Friday evening’s performance will be broadcast live following message be conveyed to you: around Australia on ABC Classic FM (on analogue and digital radio), and will be streamed on its website. “With great regret, Donald Runnicles has asked the Melbourne Symphony and Sydney Symphony Please turn off your mobile phone and all other orchestras to release him from performances later this electronic devices before the performance commences. month, due to personal family reasons. He is grateful If you do not need your printed program after the to both institutions and to their audiences for their concert, we encourage you to return it to the program understanding and acceptance.” stands located in the foyer. MSO management and musicians express their thanks Melbourne Symphony Orchestra programs can be to Benjamin Northey for stepping in to conduct this read on-line or downloaded up to a week before each program at short notice. concert, from www.mso.com.au. ABOUT THE MUSIC The movement reaches a grim climax with the bone-rattling timbre of the Gustav MAHLER xylophone. (1860–1911) While there is some gallows humour I Bedächtig – Recht in the Scherzo, and references to the gemächlich [Deliberately – DSCH motive (D-E-C-B natural) Really unhurried] which Shostakovich uses as his II In gemächlicher Bewegung, musical signature, the Passacaglia ohne Hast [In a leisurely is unapologetically baleful. Its tempo, without haste] theme, hinted at in the Scherzo but III Ruhevoll [Peacefully] fully stated here by low strings and IV Sehr behaglich [Very homely timpani, has an ominous tread to and comfortable] which the violin replies with long, heart-rending melodies. Like the Emma Matthews soprano Nocturne, the Passacaglia emphasises the melodic, rather than the bravura, ‘It is too beautiful: one shouldn’t aspects of the solo instrument, but allow oneself such a thing!’ exclaimed as the movement dissolves into the Mahler one day in 1900. He was concerto’s cadenza, there can be no standing on the balcony of his doubt that this is music conceived for David OISTRAKH newly-built summer residence at a prodigiously talented performer. Maiernigg, surrounded by forest The cadenza leads without a break on the shores of the Wörthersee. into the Burlesque. Mahler’s career as a conductor usually left him only the summer It is only here, where the orchestra months for composition; when he plays the introductory bars without became Director of the Vienna Court the soloist, that we realise how Opera in 1897 and conductor of the constant a presence the violin has Vienna Philharmonic in 1898 the been until now, and what stamina intensity of the workload meant that is required to play a work of such he composed nothing during those dimensions. But it’s not long before years. The house at Maiernigg was a the violin is drawn back into the perfect retreat, and the perfect place maelstrom. There is black humour, to complete his Fourth Symphony, and acid energy, and ever more which he had begun in the summer impossible-seeming gestures for the of 1899. soloist before a brief reminiscence of the Passacaglia is peremptorily shostaKovich COMPOSING IN HIS HUT The symphony is at once the dismissed by a sudden cadence. culmination of certain aspects of the previous two and their complete Oistrakh gave the first performance antithesis. The Second Symphony in Leningrad in 1955 and a few is Mahler’s musical dramatisation months later introduced it to the West of nothing less than death and in a concert at Carnegie Hall. The resurrection, while in the Third, as he US press went wild; Stalin would have put it, ‘all nature finds a voice’. turned in his mausoleum. The Fourth, by contrast, is on an Abridged from a note by Gordon altogether more modest scale: Kerry © 2002 it consists of the ‘standard’ four The Melbourne Symphony Orchestra first movements (the first time Mahler performed this concerto on 9 May 1970 with adhered to that pattern), plays for a conductor Moshe Atzmon and soloist Nelli comparatively short 55 minutes or Shkolnikova, and most recently on the orchestra’s 2007 European tour, with Oleg Caetani and so, and is scored for a much smaller Sarah Chang. orchestra. What it shares with its two predecessors is a preoccupation with ideas of life and death, and a relationship to the collection of folk INTERVAL poetry, Des Knaben Wunderhorn (The Youth’s Magic Horn), which Mahler mined for various song settings. The ABOUT THE MUSIC final movement – which Mahler first One ‘bogeyman’ is ‘Freund Hain’, set in 1892 and which was originally a devilish fiddler such as we also planned for inclusion in the Third meet in Saint-Saëns’ Danse macabre. Symphony – is taken from the In an early sketch for his scherzo Wunderhorn collection, and describes Mahler wrote ‘Freund Hain spielt a child’s vision of heaven. auf’ (Our friend Hain strikes up). In the final version of this movement Commentator Paul Bekker has with its ländler (a peasant dance in suggested that the whole symphony triple time) Trio section, there is a was germinated by the song, and prominent solo for a violin which Michael Kennedy has noted that all is tuned higher than normal to the movements are ‘thematically make it sound like ‘ein Fiedel’ (a interconnected’. Dramatically, too, fiddle). Kennedy argues that Hain is the work is unified by a pervasive ‘picturesque rather than macabre’, sense of innocence: Mahler’s music but quotes Mahler who compared is never naïve, and its simplicity composing this work with ‘wandering is deceptive given the formal through the flower-scented garden of sophistication of its structure and Elysium and it suddenly changes to elaboration of its counterpoint, a nightmare of finding oneself in a but the work is careful to avoid Hades full of horrors’. the obtuse, the rhetorical and the MAHLER IN 1907 monumental. The philosopher There is no horror in the opening Theodor Adorno points out that of the work’s central adagio, by far After hymning St Cecilia, the the whole work’s ‘image-world the longest movement in the work. work ends quietly. For Cooke it is a is of childhood. The means are A set of variations, it is unified by ‘peaceful close’, for Adorno this ‘fairy- reduced, without heavy brass; horns the device of the pizzicato double tale symphony is as sad as the late and trumpets are more modest bass which plays a repeated figure or works… Joy remains unattainable, in number. No father figures are ostinato. There is a violent passage and no transcendence is left but admitted to its precincts.’ towards the end of the movement, yearning’.