Elgar & Schnittke

Cover and back cover: YELLOW MAGENTA CYAN BLACK Booklet_Carpenter_ODE1153:booklet DADC 15/06/09 15:22 Page 1 Elgar & Schnittke Viola Concertos Philharmonia Orchestra Christoph Eschenbach Booklet_Carpenter_ODE1153:booklet DADC 15/06/09 15:22 Page 2 Christoph Eschenbach & David Aaron Carpenter Booklet_Carpenter_ODE1153:booklet DADC 15/06/09 15:22 Page 3 EDWARD ELGAR (1857–1934) Concerto for Cello and Orchestra in E minor, Op. 85 29’08 arranged for viola by Lionel Tertis / David Aaron Carpenter 1 I. Adagio – Moderato 8’36 2 II. Lento – Allegro molto 4’35 3 III. Adagio 4’37 4 IV. Allegro – Moderato – Allegro, ma non troppo – Poco più lento – Adagio 11’20 ALFRED SCHNITTKE (1934–1998) Concerto for Viola and Orchestra (1985) 35’21 5 I. Largo 5’07 6 II. Allegro molto 13’12 7 III. Largo 17’02 DAVID AARON CARPENTER , viola 3 Philharmonia Orchestra CHRISTOPH ESCHENBACH , conductor [64’40] Publishers : C Novello & Co Ltd. (Elgar), C Hans Sikorski/VAAP (Schnittke) Recording: AIR Studios, London, June 30 & July 1, 2008 Executive Producer: Kevin Kleinmann Recording Producer: Everett Porter – Polyhymnia International Recording Engineer : Erdo Groot – Polyhymnia International P 2009 Ondine Inc., Helsinki C 2009 Ondine Inc., Helsinki Booklet Editor: Jean-Christophe Hausmann Translations from English: Franz Josef Hausmann (German), Régine Hausmann-Manet (French) Ondine Inc. Photos: Akos Simon (David Aaron Carpenter), Jeremy Llewellyn-Jones Fredrikinkatu 77 A 2 (David Aaron Carpenter and Christoph Eschenbach), Mara Eggert (Alfred Schnittke), FIN-00100 Helsinki The Tully Potter Collection (Edward Elgar, Lionel Tertis) Tel.: +358 9 434 2210 Design: Eduardo Nestor Gomez Fax: +358 9 493 956 E-mail: [email protected] This recording was made possible with support from The Rolex Mentor and Protégé Arts Initiative www.ondine.net Booklet_Carpenter_ODE1153:booklet DADC 15/06/09 15:22 Page 4 Eat out thy heart, O Cello proud, And Violin, go don thy shroud. Pray Saint Cecilia’s mercy mild Forgive thy up and downbows wild, For she in sacred restitution, Bless’d Viola’s contribution, Paying it the compliment 4 Of genius’ favoured instrument. Mozart, Schubert, Dvo rˇ ák, Britten, All for orchestras have written. Hear, O Man, and earth rejoice… Viola played they all by choice! Ralph Aldrich Booklet_Carpenter_ODE1153:booklet DADC 15/06/09 15:22 Page 5 he great violist William Primrose once joked, “the difference between a violin and viola is that the viola is a violin with a college education.” As much as I would love to agree, violists have historically been at the receiving end of many musical jokes and stigmas. It is my mission to T change the public’s appreciation for the viola, to elevate the instrument to the same perceived level as its soprano and tenor siblings, and to position it in the light it rightfully deserves. This recording project has been nearly a decade in the making. Growing up as a violinist, my attraction to the viola deepened when I learned that great composers such as Monteverdi, Bach, Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Paganini, Schubert, Mendelssohn, Dvo rˇák, and Hindemith not only performed on the viola but in some cases openly professed it as their preferred instrument. This heightened my curiosity as I became captivated by the sonorous and complex tone of the instrument. Nevertheless, I realized at an early age that there was a historic contradiction: Most of the great composers preferred the viola yet never composed viola concertos. How could one account for this deficit? To take a well-known example: Ludwig van Beethoven was a noted violist whose violin concerto was transcribed for the piano by the composer himself. Bearing in mind that such greats as Schubert, Beethoven, and Dvo rˇák were all accomplished violists and yet did not write major works for that instrument, could this deficiency be attributed to the 5 paucity of prominent viola virtuosos during the 19th century? This is clearly a matter that presents both a challenge and opportunity to contemporary violists. Oftentimes, composers would transcribe works for financial or popular expedience. In 1967, musicologist Joachim Draheim discovered a masterpiece at the 19th century virtuoso violinist Joseph Joachim’s estate. Robert Schumann himself transcribed his famed Cello Concerto in A minor for violin and orchestra and dedicated the work to the violinist. Draheim explains, “Schumann was not at all the oblivious, impractical daydreamer he was often made out to be, unconcerned about whether his works were printed, played and well-received or not. On the contrary, he was ready to arrange his works for different scorings whenever he thought this might increase their sales chances or appeal.” One cannot help but hypothesize that if Joachim had a counterpart on the viola, then composers of that century would more readily compose or transcribe works for this instrument. When Edward Elgar sanctioned his famed Cello Concerto for Lionel Tertis in 1930 and conducted the violist in London’s Henry Hall, it marked a critical shift in music history: endless possibilities now emerged Booklet_Carpenter_ODE1153:booklet DADC 15/06/09 15:22 Page 6 for the viola as a solo instrument. With this point in mind, I embarked on this recording project and in the process I discovered that many paramount violin and cello concertos are well suited for the viola. Having built upon Lionel Tertis’s transcription in my own arrangement of the Elgar Cello Concerto, I have kept the sonorities as closely aligned to the original version as possible and endeavoured to preserve the dark, powerful qualities of this monumental work. The juxtaposition of the Elgar with Alfred Schnittke’s monumental Viola Concerto was more than coincidental, as 1934 was both the year Edward Elgar passed away and the year Alfred Schnittke was born. Schnittke begins where Elgar left off, and the impassioned romantic and heroic close that characterizes the Elgar Concerto is replaced by the life cycle, where one comes to the stark realization of one’s own mortality. In Schnittke’s Viola Concerto, we are not only presented with his supreme mastery of polystylism, but also with an introspective study of the human condition. It is my sincere hope to convey to the listener the power and emotional gamut these works have had on my musical development. David Aaron Carpenter 6 Lionel Tertis Booklet_Carpenter_ODE1153:booklet DADC 15/06/09 15:22 Page 7 Edward Elgar (1857–1934) Concerto for Cello and Orchestra in E minor, Op. 85 arranged for viola by Lionel Tertis / David Aaron Carpenter The viola has an enormous repertoire, which peters out in the Romantic era. It has the big obbligato in Berlioz’s Harold in Italy, as well as sonatas by Brahms, Vieuxtemps, and Rubinstein, but lacks a big Romantic concerto. However in the twentieth century this lovely instrument’s destiny was transformed, thanks initially to the English soloist Lionel Tertis (1876–1975) who brought the viola to a new level of acceptance and inspired composers such as Bax, Bowen, and Vaughan Williams to write for him. He would have liked a piece from Edward Elgar but by the time he seriously laid siege to the great man in the 1920s, Elgar was past the point of writing anything substantial: the death of his wife had knocked the stuffing out of him and he felt out of tune with the world that had emerged from the wreckage of the Great War. 7 Tertis played at Lady Elgar’s funeral in 1920 and again at the private celebration of Elgar’s seventieth birthday in 1927. By then he had thought of adapting the composer’s last great work, the Cello Concerto, to the viola. In 1928 he made his transcription and wrote to Elgar “in fear and trepidation”; but Elgar gave his blessing and on 20 June 1929 Tertis and the pianist George Reeves played him the transcription at his Stratford-on-Avon home. That day Elgar wrote to his publishers Novello that “it is admirably done and is fully effective on his instrument. I hope you will see your way to print the solo part”. Tertis tried out the new ‘viola concerto’ twice in Brussels but regarded the performance at Queen’s Hall, London, on 21 March 1930, with Elgar on the podium, as the proper premiere. It was a success, despite Tertis’s breaking a string. He went on to give the work a number of outings and Elgar joined him again for a performance at the Three Choirs Festival on 7 September 1933. Five months later Elgar was dead. Composed in 1919, the concerto has an elegiac quality as if Elgar is weeping for the late Victorian and Edwardian world, now swept away for ever – the time when he was happy and successful. He chose the slow-fast-slow-fast Baroque sonata di chiesa form and lavished all his skill on the music. The result is Booklet_Carpenter_ODE1153:booklet DADC 15/06/09 15:22 Page 8 one of his most succinct creations, packing a lifetime of experience into half an hour. The second and fourth movements are virtuosic, especially the Scherzo which demands pinpoint control of sautillé bowing. Towards the end of the finale Elgar brings back the main theme of the Adagio and the recitative that launches the opening movement. The viola’s plangent tone suits the work and Tertis made adjustments to help certain passages to ‘sound’. He was obsessed with the C string tone of his large viola and said that if he had his time again, he would play an even bigger viola cello-fashion. To get a low note in the Adagio, he tuned his C string down to B flat in the pause between the second and third movements; but David Aaron Carpenter does not emulate that device.

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