elgar

Master 5 Friday 17 April 7.30pm Federation Concert Hall Hobart

Johannes Fritzsch conductor Li-Wei Qin cello

COPLAND IVES Fanfare for the Common Man No 2 Andante moderato ELGAR Allegro Cello Concerto Adagio cantabile Adagio - Moderato - Lento (maestoso) Lento - Allegro molto Allegro molto vivace Adagio Allegro - Moderato - Allegro, ma non troppo Approximate durations (minutes): 4 - 30 - 20 (interval) - 40 INTERVAL This concert will end at approximately 9.30pm.

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53 Fanfare for the Common Man (1900-1990)

n many ways, it was Aaron Copland who invented Ithe American sound. His plucky rhythms and angular melodies are emblematic of the Wild West – Johannes Fritzsch Li-Wei Qin though he himself was an urbane New Yorker – and Johannes Fritzsch was appointed Conductor As one of the most important Chinese-Australian his bold melodies, underscored by sparse chords, Laureate of the Queensland Symphony Orchestra cellists, Li-Wei Qin has appeared all over the typify the ‘American heroic’ expression. in November 2014 a seven-year tenure as world as a soloist and chamber musician, with Fanfare for the Common Man is his most popular QSO Chief Conductor. Since 2018 he has held the Los Angeles, BBC, London and Hong Kong work. It was used at the Atlanta Olympic Games in the position of Principal Guest Conductor of the Philharmonic Orchestras; Berlin Radio Symphony 1996 and President Clinton’s inauguration some years “Goossens invited a dozen Tasmanian Symphony Orchestra. From 2006-2013 and Konzerthaus Orchestra; the , Zurich, earlier. Bands like Emerson, Lake and Palmer and The he was Chief Conductor and Artistic Director of the and Australian Chamber Orchestras; at the composers to write short Rolling Stones have made versions. It originated in a Oper Graz, Grazer Philharmonisches Orchester Wigmore Hall, BBC Proms, Jerusalem, Rheingau patriotic fanfares…Copland commission in August 1942 from Eugene Goossens, (Austria). Prior to his appointment in Graz, he and Mecklenburg-Vorpommern Festivals; then conductor of the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra decided on the Common held the position of Chief Conductor and Artistic at the Lincoln Centre Chamber Music Society (later of the Sydney Symphony). Director of the Staatsoper Nürnberg. He was born New York, with Daniel Hope, Nabuko Imai, Mischa Man: ‘it was the common in 1960 in Meissen, near Dresden, Germany, Maisky, David Finckel, Wu Han and Peter Frankel, America was at war. Goossens invited a dozen man, after all, who was where he completed his musical education. He among many others. Highlights in recent seasons composers to write short patriotic fanfares as ‘stirring doing all the dirty work in has conducted many leading orchestras, both include debuts with the London Symphony, and significant contributions to the war effort.’ Most of within Germany and internationally. He regularly Russian Philharmonic and Brussels Chamber the other composers dedicated fanfares to branches the war and the army...’” conducts the major Australasian orchestras as Orchestras and return visits to the Finnish Radio of the armed services, like the signal corps. Copland well as leading productions for Opera Australia, Orchestra, China Philharmonic, West Australian decided on the Common Man: ‘it was the common Opera Queensland, West Australian Opera and and Melbourne Symphony Orchestras. His man, after all, who was doing all the dirty work in the State Opera of South Australia. In January 2015 he recordings on Universal Music/Decca include war and the army...’ was appointed Adjunct Professor, Conservatorium the complete Beethoven sonatas, Rachmaninov During the 1930s Copland, sensing a danger that of Music, School of Creative Arts and Media with Albert Tiu, Dvořàk Concerto with Singapore new music might end up alienating the public, felt it at the University of Tasmania. In June 2019 he Symphony Orchestra, and Elgar and Walton was ‘worth the effort to see if I couldn’t say what I joined the Queensland Conservatorium, Griffith concertos with the London Philharmonic. His had to say in the simplest possible terms.’ Fanfare University as Professor of Opera and Orchestral 2013 live concert with the Shanghai Symphony for the Common Man is written in such a simple and Studies. In 2017 the Tasmanian Symphony and maestro Yu Long has been released on universal language. and brass are juxtaposed Orchestra invited him to design and lead the Sony Classical. Prior to teaching at Singapore’s ritualistically. The open harmonic texture stems from newly founded Australian Conducting Academy. YST Conservatory, he was a professor at the an emphasis on fourths. The initial solo call of the In 2020 Johannes Fritzsch conducts Lohengrin Royal Northern College of Music, Manchester. is gradually harmonised by the staggered for Opera Australia and leads performances He is a guest professor at Shanghai and Central entries of the brass which round out and strengthen with the Queensland and Tasmanian Symphony Conservatory of Music, China. He plays a 1780 the resolve of the original trumpet. Copland later Orchestras and the Auckland Philharmonia. Joseph Guadagnini cello, generously loaned by Dr incorporated some of the material from Fanfare for and Mrs Wilson Goh. the Common Man in the finale of his Third Symphony. GK Williams, Symphony Australia © 2001

54 55 Cello Concerto in E minor, Op 85 Adagio – Moderato – (1857-1934) Lento – Allegro molto Adagio Allegro – Moderato – Allegro, ma non troppo

lgar’s compositional career reached its last them – that everyone remembered. Harrison made their still-available 1928 recording soloist sweetly but firmly pulls the music up Ezenith with the appearance of his Violin Binyon, who wrote these lines in the war’s first that a new public, many of them unfamiliar with introducing its arcing subsidiary idea, then carried Concerto in 1910 and Second Symphony in 1911, month, worked at the British Museum under Elgar’s his earlier successes, began to appreciate the on by flowing semiquavers into the extensive works into which he claimed, ‘I have written out close friend Sidney Colvin, the keeper of prints and work as a masterpiece in its own right. development. There’s a heady reprise of the my soul…shewn myself’. Between them and drawings, and it was Colvin who first suggested The work is laid out on paper in four movements, fast theme, echoes of earlier quiet asides, and a this 1919 Cello Concerto – his last major work Elgar turn them into ‘a wonderful Requiem for though listeners tend to hear the first and second penultimate throwback to the concerto’s opening – Elgar faced steadily worsening prospects in the slain’. Too old to fight but having meanwhile movements, played without break, as a single gesture, caught up into a rapid, surging close. almost every aspect of his life, from the personal volunteered as a hospital orderly in France, span. Whereas his opened into a Graeme Skinner © 2014 challenges of aging, ill-health and bereavement, Binyon himself approached Elgar immediately the conventionally spacious orchestral introduction, to the professional affronts of being elbowed Armistice was declared with a request to set his pending the princely arrival of its soloist, Elgar The Tasmanian Symphony Orchestra performed this work with aside as a conductor and composer by younger new ode, ‘Peace’. But by letter on 18 November, sets his cello soloist in a more intimate frame. conductor Joseph Post and soloist John Kennedy in Hobart on colleagues. Elgar demurred: ‘I do not feel drawn to write Denied welcoming brass or upper strings, the 9 June 1962 and, most recently, with Garry Walker and Nicolas And there was also the war. While the youth of peace music somehow…the whole atmosphere is brief opening cello recitative (Adagio) sets its Altstaedt in Hobart on 27 March 2015. Britain marched into France in August 1914 too full of complexities for me to feel music to it.’ own unusually pared-back terms – hereinafter singing a music-hall hit, ‘It’s a long way to Moreover, he found Binyon’s invocations of happy will be lyricism, light orchestration, simple Tipperary’, Elgar’s Land of Hope and Glory – dead and healing spirits ‘cruelly obtuse to the layouts. The violas, completely unaccompanied, which had originated a decade earlier during the individual sorrow and sacrifice – a cruelty I resent announce the dreamy, modal, much-loved main second Boer War as the trio of his first Pomp and bitterly & disappointedly’. He had anyway, as his theme (Moderato), its rocking rhythm Elgar’s Circumstance March (1901) – was mobilised again wife, Alice, privately recorded in her diary two characteristic pastoral lilt. The winds introduce by their parents as a patriotic anthem. Rendered months earlier, already conceived another ‘lament the airy, major-tending contrasting theme, which superfluous by his own old tune at home, and his which should be in a war symphony’, music which the cello then sets about varying, before the music having little appeal to the average soldier evolved over the spring and summer of 1919 into main theme simply returns. A longer, second at the front, Elgar, at 57, struggled to find a new ‘a real large work & I think good and alive’, as he cello recitative (Lento) inducts into faster, lighter, wartime voice in works like , a musically described the ‘nearly completed’ Cello Concerto scherzo-like Allegro molto, the cello driving the slight but sentimentally eloquent response to in a letter to Sidney Colvin and his wife, Frances, music forward with its scrubbing semiquavers. the tragedy in Belgium, which he recorded for on 26 June, asking permission to dedicate it to Elgar anticipated that the Adagio, despite its gramophone in 1915, and which here in Australia them. On 27 October Elgar himself, out of duty anticipatory half-close, would often be played became his next-most-popular contribution to the to soloist Felix Salmond, reluctantly proceeded to without the rest of the concerto, and scored war effort. His artistically and emotionally more direct the première, well knowing it was destined it with just strings and wind sextet. The cello substantial choral score , for near disaster after his co-conductor, Albert melody gives the uncanny impression of being settings of war poems by Laurence Binyon first Coates, used up most of the London Symphony’s an internal dialogue between two separate voices, heard in 1916 and 1917 in a Britain still deep in the available rehearsal time preparing Scriabin’s higher and lower, each merging in and out of the hostilities, had more hopeful first performances in Poem of Ecstasy, which to add insult to injury countermelodies of the supporting strings. Melbourne and Sydney in July-August 1918, just was greeted by a storming ovation. As to the The finale opens, exceptionally, announcing as public confidence in an Allied victory exploded. work itself, even some of his warmest admirers its fragmentary theme (Allegro) without the But it was Binyon’s lines commemorating the were at a loss what to make of a work that, as cello. The cello then reworks it in a parenthetic millions fallen (‘They shall grow not old, as we one wrote to The Musical Times in 1923, ‘anyhow, recitative and short (Moderato), before that are left grow old; Age shall not weary them, in my opinion…does not represent Elgar at his it takes over fully (Allegro, ma non troppo). The nor the years condemn’) – not Elgar’s music for greatest’. And it was not until Elgar and Beatrice

56 57 Symphony No 2 Andante moderato (1874-1954) Allegro Adagio cantabile Lento (maestoso) Allegro molto vivace

harles Ives composed his Second movement stems from another lost overture, CSymphony whilst emerging from the long Town, Gown and State. Such titles reveal the shadow of Horatio Parker, his arch-traditionalist impulse of a creator not projecting an imagined composition teacher at . Although future but recalling a simpler past. it became one of his most popular works, Ives Although Ives composed his Second Symphony was ambivalent about the symphony. It was one when he was in his 20s, he would not hear the of his ‘soft’ pieces, he would huff, with too much work for another half-century. It was premièred by genuflection to such Romantics as Dvořák, whose the New York Philharmonic Orchestra, conducted own New World Symphony had been premièred in by the 33-year-old Leonard Bernstein, at a concert New York in 1893, a performance the 19-year-old in Carnegie Hall on 22 February 1951. may well have heard. By then, the 77-year-old composer was frail and Superficially, the Second Symphony has some cranky. He decided not to attend the concert, deal in common with the of the sending his wife Harmony instead. He heard the Romantic masters. Scored for conventional radio broadcast and, according to legend, an orchestra, it almost follows the four-movement elderly relative climbed onto the kitchen table, did symphonic structure, except for the addition of a a little jig and shouted, ‘I always knew there was Lento maestoso, which introduces the finale. But music like this in America!’ it could never be accused of sounding as an echo The reality, according to his biographer Jan of a Romantic symphony. Swafford, is somewhat less exuberant: What sets Ives’ music apart is the ways he (Ives) was dragged next door to the Ryders’ pushes the boundaries of European orthodoxies to hear the broadcast and, unlike similar to recreate memories of the music he heard as occasions, sat quietly through the whole a child in New England: tunes like ‘Columbia, the thing. It was one of his soft pieces, as he Gem of the Ocean’, ‘Camptown Races’, ‘America called them; it was also perhaps the warmest the Beautiful’, hymns, baseball songs, political audience reception of his whole life. As and popular tunes. To non-American ears, these cheers broke out at the end, everybody looked snatches of barely-recognisable tunes will sound his way. Ives got up, spat in the fireplace, quaint and even jejeune, but they are at the heart and walked into the kitchen without a word. of the composer’s ethos. Fundamentally, Ives Nobody could figure out if he was too was creating an American music woven from the disgusted or too moved to talk. home-cloth of 19th-century Americana. Likely it was the latter. Ives revised his Second Symphony several times, maintaining that each movement was derived Vincent Plush © 2013 from earlier compositions, many of which were lost. The second movement was based on a lost This is the first performance of this work by the Tasmanian set of overtures, In These . The third Symphony Orchestra. movement was excised from the First Symphony, at the insistence of Horatio Parker. The fourth

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