DIGITAL CONCERTS PEER GYNT AND THE SEA This concert forms part of the CBSO Symphonic Collection, and was filmed at Symphony Hall, Birmingham Mirga Gražinytė-Tyla – Conductor Klara Ek – Soprano Norman Perryman – Artist CBSO Chorus Čiurlionis The Sea (UK premiere) 35’ Grieg Peer Gynt: Incidental Music 50’ OUR CAMPAIGN FOR MUSICAL LIFE IN THE WEST MIDLANDS Peer Gynt is a prankster, an adventurer and a rogue, and everyone knows some of the wonderfully memorable music that Grieg wrote Your support of the CBSO’s The Sound of the to accompany his exploits. But Mirga Gražinytė-Tyla has another Future campaign will raise £12.5m over five years to: story to tell – a beautiful rarity from her native Lithuania – and another dimension to share, as Birmingham-born artist Norman Accelerate our recovery from the Perryman creates colours and images to complement the music. Covid-19 crisis so that we can get back to This concert was originally filmed in front of a live audience in enriching people’s lives through music as November 2018, and includes unseen footage of The Sea. quickly as possible Renew the way we work for our second century, opening up the power of This concert is available to view online from music to an even broader cross-section Tuesday 30 March to Wednesday 30 June 2021 of society whilst securing our tradition of artistic excellence. The CBSO’s digital work has been made possible thanks to generous support from David and Sandra Burbidge, Jamie and Alison Justham, Chris and Jane Loughran, John Osborn, Support your CBSO at cbso.co.uk/donate and Arts Council England’s Culture Recovery Fund. We are grateful to the Rachel Baker Memorial Charity for its generous support of the concert at which this film was recorded. facebook.com/thecbso twitter.com/thecbso instagram.com/thecbso Supported by Supported by 1 Mikalojus Konstantinas Čiurlionis This bright E major all harmonises well with a sentence in the (1875–1911) opening paragraph of the prose-poem Čiurlionis wrote to accompany his work, reproduced in this programme: ‘the sky The Sea (Jūra), Poem envelops your waves with its blue, while you, full of grandeur, UK Premiere breathe calmly and peacefully…’ Yet Čiurlionis has his own instinctive sea journey to follow. A more mysterious sequel, seeing the depths as it were, could align with ‘you frown, your blue face is as if discontented’. Yet we have a distance to cover before the wind whips up a storm. Here the best thing is to succumb to the rapidly Musically speaking, La Manche/the English Channel as transfigured changing impressionism, and swoon to the ecstatic strings in thirds in the “three symphonic sketches” of Debussy’s La Mer, and the which inevitably remind us of the Night Wanderer’s incandescence North Sea caught in the various moods of Britten’s Four Sea in Zarathustra, until a rocking figure in the bass finally leads to the Interludes from Peter Grimes figure most prominently in the marine shaping of a crucial theme, a descending portion of the scale with stakes of the 20th-century orchestral repertoire. There is room for a triplet figure (a coincidental half-resemblance to the downward other sea-pictures, though, and especially for Čiurlionis’s hugely motion of the ‘night’ theme in An Alpine Symphony). ambitious tone poem of 1903, begun around the same time as Debussy’s but not premiered until 1936, 25 years after his untimely Its rhythms pulse ominously on a single note; chromatic flurries death in a psychiatric hospital at the age of 35, and not performed in tell us a storm is on the way. Like Strauss’ on his way down the its original version until 1990. mountain, this one commandeers an organ for its grandeur, but the real resemblance, and this time the influence, has to be with the Although the sea was a creation of the imagination for Čiurlionis, as it battle sequence of Ein Heldenleben (A Hero’s Life, 1899). Indeed, was for Debussy, and a symbolic presence, in a more literal sense the Čiurlionis’s prose-poem describes the windwhipped waves as row waves in question belong not to the shoreline of his native Lithuania upon row of a self-sacrificing army at the bidding of a capricious but to the much warmer climate of the Black Sea (though a snatch general: ‘the wind has ordered them to crush rocks hundreds of of a Lithuanian folksong, ‘Močiute mano’, appears on the oboes in miles away, and they rush forward, confident, howling, dashing the sea drift following the first big swells). There Čiurlionis apparently their weak chests against solid stone and perishing; new ranks rise received his first inspiration as a guest of his patron Bronislawa behind them and also perish’. Wolman and her family at her Crimean summer residence in Anapa. The Sea was five years in the making, completed in 1907. Yet just as Strauss’ hero reasserts his humanism after a mighty welter, critic-adversaries routed, the full majesty of the sunlit sea Čiurlionis’s roots were as various as his talents (he devoted the breaks forth to dazzle at the climax. The aftermath is masterly, and second half of his all too short creative life to his unique form individual, with hints of Čiurlionis’s description of the sea collecting of painting). Born in Varėna, a village in southeastern Lithuania fragments of waves, mourning as it does so; the composer is very which was then part of the Russian empire, he spoke the language much his own man in the gentle flurries, rockings and trills which most favoured by cultured Lithuanians, Polish, at home; an steer us gently, perhaps under a starlit sky, to a barcarolle (Čiurlionis attempt to learn his mother tongue came with a growing national knew his Chopin, and if his own piano nocturnes are indebted to consciousness in his maturity, encouraged above all by the woman the master’s example, they can be memorable, too). We could be who became his wife in 1907, art critic Sofija Kymantaitė. With the left, contented, to drift in this subtly evolving dream; but Čiurlionis financial support of a Polish prince, he pursued his musical studies in must have his peroration, and so we get a final E major apotheosis. Warsaw from 1894 to 1899 and then for a crucial year (1901-02) at the Leipzig Conservatoire. The Sea was one of only two major orchestral works Čiurlionis completed. Before it, in 1901, he captured what he later described It was in Leipzig, that musical mecca, that he attended the to his fiancée as ‘the mysterious talk of the woods’ with his other Gewandhaus concerts of the great Artur Nikisch, and heard the tone poem In the Forest before he turned to ‘rolling waves’. There’s recent scores of the leading late romantic master Richard Strauss. a tantalising title which crops up in a triptych of 1908, A Sonata of Landlocked Bavarian Strauss only tried to ‘paint’ the sea once, in the Sea, but this turns out to be a series of paintings, respectively the magical Beach at Sorrento movement of his 1889 “symphonic titled Allegro, Andante and Finale. His last years were dominated by fantasia” Aus Italien. The Sea has more in common with An Alpine his visual art before a deep depression led to his being hospitalised Symphony – though that came many years later – and Also sprach in a Polish psychiatric institution. He died there of pneumonia on Zarathustra, Strauss’ poetic response to Nietzsche (whose writings 10 April 1911, having never seen his baby daughter. The shining were also very influential on Čiurlionis while he was in Leipzig). While optimism of The Sea was snuffed out in real life. But this magnificent the fresh breeze of upward-swirling harp and descending ‘nature- testimony to a major figure who until recently didn’t even feature in theme’ intervals of woodwind right at the start of The Sea, met by many musical reference works now has a new lease of life thanks to rising gentle waves from lower strings, make an interesting parallel another inspirational Lithuanian, Mirga Gražinytė-Tyla, who as a child with the dawn of Debussy’s La Mer, the three climactic sunrise studied at the National MK Čiurlionis School of Art in Vilnius and statements are clearly indebted to the opening of Zarathustra. decided at the age of 11 that her future lay in music. Programme note © David Nice 2 The Sea Powerful sea. Great, infinite, boundless. The sky envelops your Look, just look how willingly they are all running with the wind, each waves with its blue, while you, full of grandeur, breathe calmly and and every one, and there are millions of them, and still more coming. peacefully, since you know that there are no limits to your power Hold at least one of your subjects, o queen! and your grandeur, your existence is infinite. The great, powerful, wonderful sea! Half the world is looking at you at night, distant suns What a horrid hoard! Waves, waves and only waves stretch from drown their blinking, mysterious, slumbering glances in your depths, horizon to horizon. while you, eternal queen of giants, breathe peacefully and quietly, you know that there is only you and nobody reigns over you. Look, your giants are rising, but even they are no longer in your power. You are foaming, o great sea! You frown, your blue face is as if discontented. You frown? Could it be wrath? Who could dare, o sea, incomprehensible in infinite grandeur, The wind has ordered them to crush rocks hundreds of miles away, who could dare to go against you? and they rush forward, confident, howling, dashing their weak chests against solid stone and perishing; new ranks rise behind them and And from the sea came the answer, murmuring faintly, swaying the also perish.