Alan Adler Memorial Concert Alan Adler

The inaugural Alan Adler concert took place in 1968 in the Aisher Hall at Sevenoaks School. It was conceived as a concert in memory of a past Master of the Worshipful Company of Tobacco Pipe Makers and Tobacco Blenders, Alan Adler, who died in 1966. Funded by the Livery Company, the earliest concerts were given by professional musicians for the benefit of the pupils. Over time the nature of the event changed, and it became a concert given by pupils. In recent years it took place at St John’s Smith Alan Adler Square, returning to the school in 2011, when it was Memorial Concert held in the Pamoja Hall in the newly built performing arts centre, The Space.

Monday 19 March 2018 Pamoja Hall Programme

Brandenburg Concerto No 4 in G JS Bach (1685-1750) Allegro Andante Presto

Sevenoaks School Chamber Conducted by Mr Christopher Potts

Overture: The Pirates of Penzance Arthur Sullivan (1842-1900) Sevenoaks School Symphony Orchestra Conducted by Mr Christopher Dyer

Interval

Symphony No 8 in B minor Franz Schubert (1797-1828) Allegro moderato Andante con moto

Rákóczi March from The Damnation of Faust Hector Berlioz (1803-1869) Sevenoaks School Symphony Orchestra Conducted by Mr Christopher Dyer Soloists Programme notes

Mika Curson studies the recorder with Barbara Law at the Junior Academy, Royal Academy of Music. Brandenburg Concerto No 4 in G She also plays the cello and the , recently achieving distinctions in both. She has taken part in J S Bach (1685-1750) local and international festivals, winning the Royal Academy’s intermediate woodwind prize and ORDA (Amsterdam) prize for composition and harpsichord performance. Mika especially enjoys composing Bach’s six Brandenburg concertos represent some of the finest concerto writing for a group of solo and plans to expand her range of compositional styles with a view to studying composition at university. instruments ever written. These concertos for large forces, ‘concerti grossi’ as they were known in baroque times, are really an expansive form of chamber music and not at all symphonic, as 19th century concertos Amelia Ross studies the recorder with Barbara Law at the Junior Academy, Royal Academy of Music, were to become. They do, however, share with the later solo concertos a pronounced degree of virtuosity. where she also studies the cello and piano. She was a recent winner at the Tunbridge Wells Arts Festival, Sometimes, as in the case of No 3, all of the instruments are virtuosos and sometimes, as in the case of being awarded woodwind category prizes and the prize for the most promising festival musician. She is No 5, it is a select trio of harpsichord, flute and violin. In No 6, even the viola gets to be a solo instrument a member of the National Youth Recorder Orchestra. Although considering a career in medicine, Amelia (and two are called upon). The reason for the choices of instruments is simple; these were the instruments intends to continue specialising in performance on the entire family of recorder instruments. She also has Bach had at his disposal at the court in Köthen. They would have been players he knew and instruments he a strong interest in early music both as a recorder player and a cellist. understood so very well.

Mervyn Tong joined Sevenoaks School in the Sixth Form and has been actively involved in the Music No 4 in G calls for ‘uno Violino Principale, due Fiauti d’Echo, due Violini, una Viola è Violone in Ripieno, department throughout the past two years. He attained the LTCL Diploma in the violin and was appointed Violoncello è Continuo’. This has led to a lot of questions about what a Fiauti d’Echo actually is; nowadays we leader of the Symphony Orchestra and violin soloist in the Chamber Orchestra this year. He also plays in a settle on treble recorder in order to distinguish the writing from that of the flute in No 5, which is definitely piano trio and is a member of the Choral Society and Sennocke Consort. He hopes to read Mathematics at more like transverse flute you would find in today’s . Both violin and recorder(s) are most definitely Cambridge but will undoubtedly continue to make music whenever possible. put through their paces.

The concerto is set in the traditional three movement fast – slow – fast format. All three movements are contrapuntal and all three find different ways to explore this. The first movement revels in the recorders playing together usually in thirds and sixths, but weaving in and out of each other and other players, too. There’s even more interaction between the soloists in the second movement and the accompanying instruments, called the ‘ripieno’, are considerably more subservient in this movement. A measure of equality returns in the last movement, which is an out and out fugue. The cut time signature (2/2) and avoidance of something more dance-like (which characterises the fugal endings to the concertos either side of No 4) suggest something a good deal more ‘learned’ in its contrapuntal nature, as Bruce Lamott has suggested.

Fun fact: the last time Sevenoaks School performed this work, Emily Hastings performed the 1st solo recorder part; she now works at Sevenoaks School as Head of French. Programme notes

Overture: The Pirates of Penzance Symphony No 8 in B minor Arthur Sullivan (1842-1900) Franz Schubert (1797-1828) Allegro moderato Sullivan’s comic opera The Pirates of Penzance was premiered unusually in New York on New Year’s Eve Andante con moto 1879, before transferring to London a few months later. It nearly didn’t happen at all, since Sullivan decided, for some reason, to compose the music in reverse order, starting with Act 2. He had not really got into Act 1 The question surrounding Schubert’s 8th symphony in B minor has always been ‘Is it really unfinished? And, by the time he sailed for America in November 1879 but had at least put together a collection of sketches if not, why not?’ Schubert did the answer to this question no favours when one considers he completed to make sense of what was to happen later in the show. But shortly into the journey, he realised that he’d the two movements we will perform tonight in 1822 but, barring a few sketches, does not appear to have left the sketches at home. When he landed, he worked furiously, trying to remember what he’d written returned to it by his death in 1828. He also completed a further symphony, the ‘great’ C major, in 1826 and and generally it seems, with much success. But he couldn’t remember it all and he and Gilbert decided had also set about a 10th symphony in D major, in the year of his death. So he was not exactly showing to substitute one or two moments from their unpublished opera Thespis where they couldn’t quite make signs of finishing the 8th symphony. However, it remains the case that he did sketch out a third movement, matters work. The music was finished about two days before the opening night, which would have made for albeit as a piano sketch, and it would have been most odd for a symphonic work in the 1820s to begin in B an interesting opening. In his Oxford biography, Michael Ainger reports that several cast members performed minor and end in E major. Ending with a slow(ish) movement is not unprecedented – Beethoven ends his 6th with music in hand and whatever costumes they could lay their hands on. symphony thus – but ending softly, slowly and in a loosely related key would suggest that when Schubert finished writing the second movement, at that time he probably intended to go further with the symphony but Even more eyebrow-raising would have been Sullivan’s practice of leaving the composition of the overture just lost his motivation and desire to do so. until last. Often he did not actually complete the job totally by himself anyway, sketching out the overture but entrusting the putting together of the musical detail to the company’s music director, in this case Alfred So two movements it is. But, by the standards of 1822, these are no ordinary movements. The opening Cellier. Whilst this was not a totally uncommon practice (however odd it might sound to us today) one movement starts softly, brooding ominously in the lower strings before giving way to shimmering string shudders to think when Cellier actually received the sketches and how much of a Christmas he had in 1879. accompanimental music, melancholic woodwind melodies and angry, fitful chords for the full orchestra, driven by the brass. Nothing quite like this has ever been written before – this is truly a romantic The overture is typical of the 19th century operetta overture. It is a potpourri of tunes from the operetta, all soundscape, one that would lead in time to the concert overtures of Mendelssohn and the programmatic stylishly weaved together (by Cellier), full of light touches, deft orchestral colours and sprinkled all over with symphonies of Berlioz and Schumann. No sooner than we have our first perfect cadence in B minor we find D’Oyly Carte humour. the music melting into the second subject. One of Schubert’s most lyrical melodies and one which shows him to be a songsmith through and through, Schubert conventionally gives the tune to the cellos – but not in the relative major. That would be far too conventional. G major, a third lower than the tonic key, is the chosen key. This is but one of many subtle manipulations of key structure for which Schubert is so rightly famed by analysts of his music. The central section of the music is what Tom Service has called ‘the chilling heart of darkness’, treating the opening material to an almost Gothic reinterpretation before resolving the material in the manner which would have been expected in 1822. But even here, the ghosts of the opening are not fully laid to rest until the final, startling chords are sounded.

By contrast, the second movement is serene. Rather oddly, it proceeds at virtually the same tempo, which is made all the more obvious given that both pieces have three beats in the bar, meaning that contrast has to be found in other ways. Choosing E major is Schubert’s chief means of providing this but the music proceeds to carry on surprising us. The second subject is set in the relative minor, which, as far as I am aware, is unprecedented for second subjects at this time (although, SSC/IB students, let me know if I am wrong as it’s just the kind of thing Mozart might have tried in the odd piano concerto 2nd movement) and which plunges the listener back into the phantasmal world of the 1st movement. The key relationships are too complex to go into, suffice to say that typical of Schubert’s thought is the music of the coda. It falls away, sinking as low as A flat major, then A flat minor, before finally suggesting a key as remote and distant as F flat major. As if like magic, the shopkeeper appears and the same music is reclothed in E major for the final cadence. Apologies to Mr Benn and thanks to Tom Service, whose 2014 article in the Guardian makes for fascinating reading for those who want to learn more about this extraordinary work. Programme notes

Rákóczi March from The Damnation of Faust After the initial fanfare, the music quickly settles into a series of eight-bar tunes, each of which is repeated Hector Berlioz (1803-1869) and organised in a very conventional way. Perhaps it’s unusual for the first of these to be in the minor key, but Berlioz is keeping to Bihari’s original, which would have had a very distinct Hungarian modality to it. The piece with which we end the concert tonight is named after Ferenc Rákóczi, a Hungarian military leader When the music does turn major, listen out for the augmented fourths, the so called ‘Lydian fourth’, with its and politician who was active around 1700. As this was over a century before Berlioz was even born, it is gypsy flavour, and the music is strewn with crushed notes – acciaccaturas – which also help bring out the likely that Berlioz had picked up some folklore about the one-time Prince of Transylvania. However, it is the folk feel. It is interesting, and ultimately significant, that Berlioz chooses the wind instruments to play the Hungarian Gypsy violinist and composer János Bihari to whom we really owe the debt of gratitude, as the main melody and the strings to accompany it. Most unconventional. Just like Berlioz’s own prose style as first and main theme of the piece is almost certainly down to him. If he did not write it himself, he wrote it evidenced by his letters and memoirs, and also his ideas on writing orchestral music as evidenced by his down and published it in 1810. The teenage Liszt made his own arrangement in 1823, thereby increasing its Symphonie Fantastique. popularity, but Berlioz came across the piece almost by accident. And so after we have heard four of these carefully organised and very conventional melodies, the fun Writing in his memoirs, Berlioz recounts a trip to (Buda)Pest in 1846, when he was approached by a local really begins. The music sinks to a deathly hush in a distant, unrelated key. Beneath the timpani roll and musician who advised him that composing a piece using a well-known Hungarian tune would enhance his the second violin shimmer, Bihari’s tune is gradually passed around the orchestra, first in the cellos, then popularity and increase interest in his trip. He handed Berlioz what was probably Bihari’s 1810 publication the … But wait! Is that not a distant cannon blast I hear from the bass drum? The Magyar army and Berlioz chose the Rákóczi March tune for what he called the ‘Marche Hongroise’. The anonymous is approaching. Gradually the music rises in volume until the opening fanfare returns signifying battle is adviser was right on more counts than he bargained for. The march was an instant hit and drew a lot of to commence and indeed it does, exploding into life courtesy of an artillery of percussion. Bass drum, side attention to Berlioz’s trip – from the less-than-happy authorities. Berlioz recounts that following the first drum, cymbals, timpani, tambourine lead this explosive moment. Thundering over the hill are our orchestral performance and the subsequent cheering and shouting that followed it, a man approached him and said, cavalry: the charging cellos and the terrifying . Battle is engaged, the intensity rises until victory ‘If it became known here that I had anything to do with your composing the piece, I should be severely is claimed and the whole orchestra pumps out the main theme in its original, minor key. But battle is not compromised and get into serious trouble.’ yet finished – the enemy must be routed! The music keeps pushing onwards, louder and higher and faster, although strictly speaking, there is not any accelerando actually written in Berlioz’s surviving score. Until, Never one to miss the opportunity to utilise a successful piece further, Berlioz incorporated it into his opera at last and exhausted, the whole orchestra in semibreves pronounces that the battle is won and we enjoy The Damnation of Faust. It has nothing to do with Goethe. As Act 1 draws to a close, Faust sees a troop of one last explosive ending to Bihari’s magnificent tune but in the major key. Programme music at its very Hungarians pass by and thinks to himself: ‘With such fire their eyes blaze! Every heart thrills to their song best. This is an orchestral tour de force and easy to see why it is such a popular encore piece amongst of victory. Mine alone stays cold, indifferent to glory.’ Which is all very well, but probably not quite what he professional orchestras. was thinking when he wrote it for that first, passion-fuelled performance in Pest. I prefer to think of this as a great example of a piece which starts off along the lines of a conventional, Straussian march and turns Christopher Dyer into something very different by the end. This was a period of great musical change and the unconventional Berlioz would have revelled in this. Orchestras and Ensembles

Chamber Orchestra Symphony Orchestra Violin 1st Violin Cello Mervyn Tong (leader and soloist) Mervyn Tong (leader) Amelia Irwin (leader) Malek Marar Diego del Ser Jason Leung (co-leader) Thea Beadle Mrs Jackie Hendry Meg Ishimitsu Louisa Child Mika Curson Yasmine Kanagalingam Marcus Choy Jess Downton Horn Louisa Phillips Josie Gibb Ben Hancox-Lachman Catherine Redmayne Tilly Robson Valerie Huang Niky Pasolini Mrs Jane Hanna Meg Ishimitsu Julia Ricketts Miss Raquel Santome Parada Viola Sean Lee Amelia Ross Sophie Littlewood Louisa Phillips Caragh Taylor Anna Power Grace Powell Peter Westbrooke Ronan Hallinan Annabel Stafford Tilly Robson Mr Manuel Capelo Tom Langford Margaretha von Boetticher Kitty Lavercombe Cello Jackson Wen Double Bass Tom Williams Ben Hancox-Lachman Maya Jelf (leader) Mr Matthew Down Julia Ricketts 2nd Violin Jacob Robinson Peter Westbrooke Diego del Ser (leader) Anna Davis Flute Darcy Lambert Double Bass Camille Gontarek Aria Baker Zafar Khan-Bourne Jacob Robinson Nicole John Florence Coumbe Mrs Julia Kiggell Yasmine Kanagalingam Annabel Liu Recorder Solo Christy Liu Martha Reeve /Bass Trombone Mika Curson Eve Mayes Agnes Wu Mrs Alice Yelf Amelia Ross Barkat Mehra Sophie Perry Percussion Harpsichord Anika Sahni Darcey Phillips Christy Chan Mr Michael Heighway Claudia Whaites Meghan Watson Ian Chan Mia Wientgen Tiffany Lau Orissa Welsh Miss Kimberley Chan Mrs Kathryn Ashwell Grace Annetts Mrs Jane Dawson Gabriella FitzGerald Miss Jane Gomm Sachi Gwalani Kai Hayashi Viola James King Sophie Littlewood (leader) Harriet St Pier Thomas Bristow Claudia Dochoda Anna Power Annabel Stafford Vincent Wong Future Events at The Space

Sevenoaks School Jazz Club

Thursday 19 April Sackville Theatre 7.30pm Tickets £7

Join us in the intimate environment of the Sackville Theatre to hear the school’s leading jazz soloists backed by a professional trio of musicians under the leadership of Nicholas Beston.

Royal Opera House Live Screening Bernstein Centenary

Tuesday 27 March Pamoja Hall 7.15pm Tickets £18.50, £17 (£10 Child/Student)

The Royal Ballet celebrates the centenary of Leonard Bernstein’s birth with an all-Bernstein programme. It includes two world premieres by Resident Choreographer Wayne McGregor and Artistic Associate Christopher Wheeldon, marking each artist’s first foray into Bernstein. At the heart of the programme is the first revival of Artist in Residence Liam Scarlett’s The Age of Anxiety, created in 2014 to Bernstein’s soul-searching Second Symphony. Both symphony and ballet are inspired by WH Auden’s masterful modernist poem, itself written in response to the atmosphere of disillusionment and uncertainty that followed the end of the Second World War.

Translunar Paradise

Thursday 3 May Sackville Theatre 4.30pm & 7.30pm Tickets £13 (concession £10)

Theatre Ad Infinitum’s wordless award-winning tale of life, death and enduring love. George Mann, Deborah Pugh and Sophie Crawford tell the story of widower William, who escapes to a comforting world of fantasy and memories rather than confront his grief. From beyond the grave, his wife Rose returns to help him let go. This poignant, life-affirming tale uses intricate and lifelike hand-held masks, created by Madame Tussaud’s senior sculptor Victoria Beaton, to travel back and forth through William and Rose’s relationship, wordlessly conveying a lifetime of memories in 75 minutes. THE SPACE Performing Arts Centre Sevenoaks School, High Street, Sevenoaks, Kent TN13 1HU Telephone +44 (0)1732 467765 www.thespacesevenoaks.co.uk facebook.com/thespacesevenoaks