ACCOMMODATION BAR RESTAURANT EVENTS VENUE THE The Old LARK Woolstore ASCENDING Apartment Hotel Saturday 9 December 7.30pm Federation Concert Hall PROUD PARTNER OF THE Hobart MASTER 12 MASTER Marko Letonja conductor BRAHMS Emma McGrath violin Symphony No 4 BEETHOVEN Allegro non troppo Symphony No 4 Andante moderato Adagio – Allegro vivace Allegro giocoso Adagio Allegro energico e passionato Menuetto (Allegro vivace) – Trio Duration 40 mins (Un poco meno allegro) This concert will end at Allegro ma non troppo approximately 9.30pm. Duration 34 mins VAUGHAN WILLIAMS The Lark Ascending Duration 13 mins INTERVAL Duration 20 mins 1 Macquarie St Hobart, Tasmania 03 6235 5355 Tasmanian Symphony Orchestra concerts are broadcast and streamed throughout www.oldwoolstore.com.au Australia and around the world by ABC Classic FM. We would appreciate your cooperation in keeping coughing to a minimum. Please ensure that your mobile phone is switched off. 64 65 Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827) Symphony No 4 in B flat, Op 60 Sudden fortissimo chords accelerate toward Adagio – Allegro vivace it almost like a cavalry division being spurred Adagio into action. As this ebullient movement Menuetto (Allegro vivace) – Trio (Un poco proceeds there are some especially beautiful meno allegro) solos, notably for the flute and bassoon, and Marko Letonja Emma McGrath Allegro ma non troppo unexpectedly too for the kettledrums. Beethoven had begun composing the The Adagio encompasses a typically Symphony No 4, and possibly completed Beethovenian “dove and crocodile” mix Marko Letonja is Chief Conductor and Heralded as a “first-magnitude star most of it, during the summer of 1806, while of moods: serene and sentimental one Artistic Director of the Tasmanian Symphony in the making” by the Seattle Times, also working on his Fourth Piano Concerto moment, heroic and even bellicose the next. Orchestra and Music Director of the British violinist Emma McGrath became and revisions of his opera, Fidelio. He had The orchestral textures vary accordingly, been staying near the modern Czech-Polish Orchestre Philharmonique de Strasbourg. Concertmaster of the Tasmanian Symphony from a standard Classical slow movement’s border at the summer residence of Prince Born in Slovenia, he studied at the Academy Orchestra at the start of 2016. She made soft strings, winds and a pair of horns, to full Karl Lichnowsky, when he and his host fanfares for trumpets and drums, instruments of Music in Ljubljana and the Vienna her London debut aged ten in the Purcell almost came to blows over the Prince’s which Beethoven had previously used to insistence that Beethoven (to whom he paid Academy of Music. He was Music Director Room at the Southbank Centre and at such dramatic effect in the Third Symphony’s a handsome annual retainer) play for some of the Slovenian Philharmonic Orchestra age 14 performed Bruch’s Violin Concerto funeral march. visiting Napoleonic army officers. Whether in from 1991 to 2003 and Music Director and No 1 in the Queen Elizabeth Hall with the republican high dudgeon (as some suppose) The third movement looks backward again to Chief Conductor of both the Symphony London Philharmonic Orchestra conducted or simply to accept a welcome invitation, the minuet (still so-called in the first edition), Orchestra and the Opera in Basel from 2003 by Howard Shelley. Emma McGrath has Beethoven then left for the nearby castle of which it is a somewhat hyper-activated to 2006. He was Principal Guest Conductor performed as a soloist throughout the UK, of Lichnowksy’s cousin, Franz Oppersdorff. example; and forward to the scherzo of the of Orchestra Victoria in 2008 and made Europe, South-East Asia, Russia, Israel Oppersdorff commissioned him to compose Fifth Symphony. An innovation is its five- two new symphonies, and Beethoven his debut with the TSO the following year. and the USA. From 2009 to 2016 she was section form, built out of two components: duly received full payment for dedicating He took up the post of Chief Conductor Associate Concertmaster of the Seattle the minuet proper (A), and a contrasting the Fourth to Oppersdorff in 1807, and slightly slower Trio (B) from the winds, with and Artistic Director of the Tasmanian Symphony Orchestra and Seattle Opera part payment toward the Fifth a year later. a little help from the violins. These are Symphony Orchestra at the start of 2012. Orchestra, and was Concertmaster for Responding to Oppersdorff’s enthusiasm for played in the order A-B-A-B-A. He has worked with many orchestras in Seattle’s 2012 production of Wagner’s Der the Second Symphony, the Fourth retreats from the gravity and length of the Third. But Berlioz called the finale “an animated Europe including the Munich Philharmonic, Ring des Nibelungen. She was previously its orchestral brilliance, tonal energy and swarm of sparkling notes, a continual Vienna Symphony, Berlin Radio Orchestra, Assistant Concertmaster of the Colorado thematic focus also prepare for the Fifth. babble; interrupted only by occasional Mozarteum Orchestra and the Orchestra Symphony Orchestra and has also Instead of launching directly into the Allegro rough and uncouth chords”. That about Filarmonica della Scala, Milan. He has also performed with the Pittsburgh Symphony main theme, Beethoven begins with a sums it up, except to add that it also teems worked in many renowned opera houses Orchestra, the Chicago Symphony dramatic Adagio introduction. This in itself with unexpected sounds. There are short such as the Vienna State Opera, Berlin Orchestra and the Australian Chamber was nothing unusual but here Beethoven solo appearances for bassoon, clarinets State Opera, La Scala Milan, Semper Orchestra. She has also been a Guest was experimenting as he went. Insignificant (who also contribute a “babbling brook” Oper Dresden, and the Grand Théâtre de Concertmaster for the BBC Symphony as it may seem in retrospect, the novelty accompaniment), oboes and flute. At the of beginning an introduction (indeed, a very end, the music stops short, there is a Genève. Additionally, he has conducted Orchestra and the BBC Philharmonic symphony) with a single pizzicato note for coy exchange between violins, bassoons, at the Arena di Verona. Recent and future Orchestra. Emma McGrath is a graduate of the strings, is sure to have registered with violas and cellos, and a rush to the end. engagements include the Mozarteum the Royal College of Music in London and his original audience. And, to 18th-century Graeme Skinner © 2014 Orchestra Salzburg, Berlin Radio Orchestra, Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh ears only recently graduated to the 19th, Bavarian State Opera in Munich and in the USA. In addition to her orchestral the meandering harmonies and Beethoven’s disinclination to find definite cadences The Tasmanian Symphony Orchestra first Wagner’s Der Ring des Nibelungen for the career, she is a professional singer, folk performed this work with conductor Henry Krips must have seemed wilfully perverse. in Hobart on 7 June 1952 and, most recently, Royal Swedish Opera with Nina Stemme as musician, and a published and recorded But there is nothing perverse or obfuscating with Sebastian Lang-Lessing in Hobart on Brünnhilde. composer. about the way the main Allegro breaks. 3 December 2011. 66 67 Ralph Vaughan Williams (1872-1958) Johannes Brahms (1833-1897) The Lark Ascending – Romance for Violin from the poem are printed in the musical Symphony No 4 in E minor, Op 98 sounded in the orchestra’s tenor register, and and Orchestra score and the poetic content is used as a Allegro non troppo again based on sequences of a repeated point of stimulus for the composer’s lyrical The Lark Ascending has undoubtedly Andante moderato rhythmic cell (long, long, short, short, short). reverie. The solo violin clearly embodies the become Vaughan Williams’ most popular Allegro giocoso Fragmentary patterns of thirds provide the spirit of a bird singing and taking flight (with accompaniment. All of which is to say that work. It was fully drafted in 1914 as a work for Allegro energico e passionato violin and piano, but the composition had to occasional bird calls also provided by the Brahms was writing in, to the Viennese, a woodwind instruments), whilst the sustained be set aside due to the outbreak of the First In 1885 Brahms, as was his wont, convened disturbingly abstract and “modern” way. chords, played by the strings, could be World War. Vaughan Williams’ professional a group of trusted friends to listen to a Haydn, of course, and Beethoven – especially musical life ceased completely for the next understood as the aural depiction of a flat play-through of the Fourth Symphony, with pastoral landscape. in the Fifth Symphony – had worked in just four years, as he served as an ambulance the composer and his friend Ignaz Brüll at this way, and it is no accident that such driver during the war, shuttling wounded The form of the work is rhapsodic, with the piano. Feedback from knowledgeable rigorous design attracted the approval of and dying soldiers from the battlefront to lengthy ornamental solo cadenzas beginning people had been invaluable throughout his Schoenberg in his 1933 lecture, “Brahms the temporary field hospitals in France and and concluding the piece. These are notated career, and on this occasion the listeners Progressive”. But it put Brahms out of step Greece. It was only after the war ended that without bar lines and in no strict tempo, included the conductor Hans Richter and with current musical fashion in Vienna. he was able to return home to England and thus giving the interpreter considerable the critic Eduard Hanslick. But this time to his compositional work. freedom and liberty in interpretation. The the response was a baffled silence. Even The piece is frequently intensely contrapuntal floating quality of the harmony is partly due One of his first tasks was to revise The Lark Hanslick, Brahms’ greatest supporter in print, (and thus requires a “Classical” orchestra), to Vaughan Williams’ characteristic use of a Ascending.