Wednesday 19 September 2018
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Wednesday 19 September 2018 LSO SEASON CONCERT A WARM WELCOME TO SIBELIUS SYMPHONY NO 5 TONIGHT’S GROUPS Janáček Sinfonietta Felsted School Szymanowski Violin Concerto No 1 St Albans School Interval Sibelius Symphony No 5 Sir Simon Rattle conductor Janine Jansen violin SIBELIUS London Symphony Orchestra Sibelius Symphony No 5 streamed live on youtube.com/lso and medici.tv 5 Concert ends approx 9.35pm 52 Leoš Janáček Sinfonietta 1926 / note by Jan Smaczny 1 Fanfares: Allegretto fortunes changed completely, engendering his spiritual beauty and joy, his courage, on a telegraphic trumpet figure leads to 2 The Castle, Brno: Andante one of the most extraordinary personal strength and determination to fight for the finale. Starting quietly, as a memory of 3 The Queen’s Monastery, Brno: renaissances in the history of music. victory’. Janáček gave a further hint of the the Town Hall in Brno, this final movement Moderato Self-doubt and depression all but vanished pictorial content of the Sinfonietta with swells toward a triumphant return to the 4 The Street Leading to the Castle: and Janáček produced a succession of titles for each movement, written on his opening fanfares which in turn create the Allegretto masterpieces for the stage and concert hall. programme at the premiere, referring to Sinfonietta’s blazing conclusion. • 5 The Town Hall, Brno: Allegro landmarks in Brno: Fanfares; The Castle; Coincidental with personal artistic success The Queen’s Monastery; The Street; The • KAMILA STÖSSLOVÁ ew composers communicated an was his new-found love for a much younger Town Hall. He added that the whole work drew energetic enthusiasm for life as woman, Kamila Stösslová •, and also the its inspiration from a vision of the growing successfully as Janáček. It is strange rising fortunes for Janáček’s homeland. For greatness of the city of Brno in the days after to reflect, however, that had it not been for nearly 300 years Bohemia and Moravia had the independence of Czechoslovakia. a happy concatenation of circumstances been a political backwater of the Hapsburg the world might have been denied such Empire. World War I made it clear that The immediate musical stimulus for the masterpieces as The Cunning Little Vixen, Austrian power was at an end and, even tremendous fanfares which open and Kátya Kabanová, the Glagolitic Mass, his before 1918, Janáček was turning his hand conclude the Sinfonietta was Janáček’s two string quartets and, perhaps best known to writing the music of a ‘new era’ for recollection of a military band performance and most popular of all, the Sinfonietta. his nation. The first fruit of his growing in a park in the south Bohemian town of enthusiasm was the second part of the Písek. The succeeding movements outline, The early 1910s had seen Janáček increasingly opera, The Excursions of Mr Brouček; set if rather loosely, the shape of a sinfonia gloomy about the prospects for his music; in late medieval Prague, it celebrated the in four movements. But nothing from this Janáček met Kamila Stösslova in 1917, and although he was an important and influential triumphs of the passionately nationalist period in Janáček’s life is conventional, and fell in love with her despite being nearly figure in the Moravian capital Brno, he had Czech religious warriors, the Hussites. the climax of the second movement is an 40 years her senior. His passionate feelings failed to make significant impact in Prague. exhilarating and breezy Maestoso which seemed to encourage a flourishing of Viewed by many in the musical establishment The Sinfonietta started life in 1926 as brass introduces a new theme, albeit one with a musical creativity, and they entered into a in Prague as incomprehensible and hopelessly and percussion fanfares for a gymnastics distant relationship to the fanfares of the correspondence reaching over 700 letters, provincial, performances of Janáček’s music festival, but these soon grew into the introduction. The third movement begins as which inspired Janáček to write his String in the Czech capital were few and far between, work as it exists today. Dedicated to the a reflective idyll, but after some threatening Quartet No 2, ‘Intimate Letters’. and his most important work to date, the Czechoslovak Armed Forces – Janáček often gestures from the trombones the temperature opera Jenůfa, was virtually ignored. However, referred to it as a ‘Military Sinfonietta’ – it rises toward a wild Prestissimo before with the successful premiere of Jenůfa was written to express, in the composer’s the return to the calm of the opening. Interval – 20 minutes in Prague’s National Theatre in 1916 his own words, ‘contemporary free man, A chattering and insistent scherzo based 48 Programme Notes 18 September 2018 Leoš Janáček Sinfonietta 1926 Karol Szymanowski in profile 1882–1937 FULL PROGRAMME NOTES & COMPOSER PROFILE JANÁČEK SINFONIETTA – IN BRIEF • On Pages 46 & 47 Composed in 1926, when the composer 1 Fanfares: Allegretto was 72. He died two years later in 1928. 2 The Castle, Brno: Andante 3 The Queen’s Monastery, Brno: Commissioned for a gymnastics Moderato festival. The composer referred to it 4 The Street Leading to the Castle: as a ‘Military Sinfonietta’, intended Allegretto to express ‘contemporary free man, 5 The Town Hall, Brno: Allegro his spiritual beauty and joy, his courage, strength and determination to fight for victory’. Janáček’s love of musical tradition is evident in the dancing strings and celebratory brass. arol Szymanowski was born in Szymanowski’s output falls loosely into three Tymoszówka (modern-day Ukraine) periods. Before World War I he followed the The five movements refer to landmarks in the former kingdom of Poland. style of Strauss and Wagner, with big, densely in Brno, where the composer grew up, He was first taught music by his father, who chromatic symphonies. By 1914 he was moving and each is scored for a different – often instilled in the young composer an acute towards an exotic aesthetic similar to that unusual – combination of instruments, and ardent sense of patriotic duty which explored by Debussy and Scriabin, which came including twelve trumpets in the first would influence his entire life and career. of his growing fascination with Arabic cultures. and fifth movements. At 19 he began composition and piano When Poland gained its independence in lessons in Warsaw but struggled to find 1918, this rekindled Szymanowski’s patriotic Inspired by Janáček Haruki Murakami’s a suitable outlet in a city that was, by all sentiments and suddenly his works were novel 1Q84 (2009–10) features the accounts, far from a thriving cultural capital. infused with elements of traditional Polish Sinfonietta as a recurring motif. In an Until 1911 Szymanowski published his own folklore – the Stabat Mater, Symphony No 4 interview the writer recalled, ‘I heard works under the auspices of the Young and Violin Concerto No 2 are prime examples. that music in a concert hall … There Polish Composers’ Publishing Company, a The enduring characteristic of his works is were 15 trumpeters behind the orchestra. group founded by him and some friends in undoubtedly their intense expressionism, Strange. Very strange … And that 1905. He supported Polish music throughout tempered by a deep-seated spirituality. • weirdness fits very well in this book.’ his life and served as Director of the Warsaw Conservatoire from 1927 to 29. Composer Profile by Fabienne Morris Programme Notes & Composer Profile 53 Karol Szymanowski Violin Concerto No 1 Op 35 1916 / note by Adrian Thomas violin cultures. Coupled with his new-found love of companionship, now mischievous and fast Janine Jansen SZYMANOWSKI VIOLIN CONCERTO NO 2 contemporary French music, this experience moving, now introverted, now impassioned. efore his death, Polish composer sustained him through the dark months Thursday 25 October 2018 7.30–9.35pm Karol Szymanowski had of the war and he produced over a dozen A substantial reflective section occurs Barbican Hall commented bitterly how he felt luminous compositions in rapid succession. after the first proper orchestral tutti and isolated from and neglected by Polish features not only a part-stepwise, part-triadic Mussorgsky Night on the Bare Mountain culture, although he rightly predicted that One of these was his First Violin Concerto melodic figure, which subsequently informs Szymanowski Violin Concerto No 2 he would have a magnificent funeral. He (1916). This is no ordinary concerto. It is cast the Concerto’s major tuttis, but also an Interval died of tuberculosis in Lausanne on the in a single span, lasting some 25 minutes. accompanied improvisation for the soloist. Tchaikovsky Symphony No 5 night of 28/29 March 1937 and was accorded Rather than follow any familiar structural Here, as elsewhere, the interplay between two funerals, one in Warsaw and one in pattern, it weaves a fantasy-like web of solo violin and solo orchestral instruments is Philippe Jordan conductor Kraków, where he was buried in the Crypt of associated themes in a way which defies intimate and recalls his chamber music of the Nikolaj Znaider violin the Distinguished in St Stanisław’s Church conventional analysis. A strong influence time, such as ‘The Fountain of Arethusa’ from London Symphony Orchestra alongside other Polish luminaries. may well have been a poem by his near- Myths for violin and piano. The moments contemporary Tadeusz Miciński, whose of deepest intimacy come after the central Twenty years before that, he had been poetry he had first set a decade earlier. climax, in a second reflective section led off isolated in a quite different way. He and The poem in question is ‘May Night’, a by a repeated-note figure. This culminates in his family had been cut off in their home fantastical evocation of faeries, ephemerae a sweet lullaby motif in solo violin harmonics in Ukraine by the events of World War I and nereids, with ‘Pan playing his pipes in which also concludes the work.