SSO Mar 5 v5 26/2/09 13:03 Page 1 CHIEF CONDUCTOR: ILAN VOLKOV LEADER: ELIZABETH LAYTON THE THURSDAY NIGHT SERIES City Halls, Glasgow Thursday, 5 March 2009 at 7.30pm THE SYMPHONIC COLLECTION JONATHAN HARVEY SPEAKINGS interval BRUCKNER SYMPHONY NO. 9 Jonathan Harvey sound projection Jérémie Henrot and Clément Marie IRCAM sound projection Ilan Volkov conductor Tonight’s concert is being recorded for broadcast tomorrow night in Performance on 3 at 7.00pm PLEASE ENSURE ALL MOBILE TELEPHONES AND DIGITAL ALARMS ARE SWITCHED OFF. Please keep coughs and sneezes well muffled ~ thank you. The use of cameras, video or sound-recording equipment is prohibited. SSO Mar 5 v5 26/2/09 13:03 Page 2 WELCOME TO THIS More than half of BBC Radio 3's music output is live or specially recorded. 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Roger Wright Controller BBC Radio 3 and Director BBC Proms bbc.co.uk/radio3 TONIGHT’S POST-CONCERT CODA (beginning approximately 10 minutes after the end of the main concert) Why not stay on as Mark O’Keeffe, principal trumpet BBC SSO, performs Jonathan Harvey’s Other Presences, with sound projection by Alistair Macdonald. 2 SSO Mar 5 v5 26/2/09 13:03 Page 3 TONIGHT’S PROGRAMME THE SYMPHONIC COLLECTION 5 The orchestral discourse, itself inflected by speech structures, is electro-acoustically shaped by the envelopes The BBC SSO has been privileged to work closely in of speech taken from largely random recordings.The vowel recent years with one of the world’s leading and consonant spectra-shapes flicker in the rapid rhythms composers, Jonathan Harvey.Tonight we are able to and colours of speech across the orchestral textures. A hear the Scottish premiere of the last work that process of 'shape vocoding', taking advantage of speech's Harvey wrote specially for the orchestra during his fascinating complexities, is the main idea of this work. time as its Composer in Association.In Speakings the The first movement is like an incarnation, the descent into orchestra and electronics describe in musical terms human life, with baby sounds. the emergence of human speech from sound, something that takes us back to the very birth of The second is concerned with the frenetic chatter of humanity. The music of Bruckner, too, seems in a human life in all its expressions of domination, assertion, continuous state of ‘becoming’ – the journey of a fear, love, etc. It expands the work 'Sprechgesang' lost soul towards redemption. composed just before. Finally it moves, exhausted, to mantra and a celebration of ritual language.The mantra is orchestrated and treated by shape vocoding. SPEAKINGS – FOR ORCHESTRA AND LIVE The third movement is shorter, like the first. Here speech ELECTRONICS (2007–8) (c.30’) has a calmer purpose; it is married to a music of unity, a JONATHAN HARVEY (born 1939) hymn which is close to Gregorian chant. There is often a GILBERT NOUNO AND ARSHIA CONT, single monodic line reverberated in a large acoustic space. IRCAM COMPUTER MUSIC DESIGNERS There is little division of line against line, or music against listener, as the reverberation eliminates the sense of BBC co-commission with IRCAM-Centre Pompidou separation between listener and musical object. The and Radio France: Scottish Premiere paradise of the sounding temple is imagined. Jonathan Harvey sound projection The movements are played without a break. Jérémie Henrot, Clément Marie IRCAM sound projection programme note, © Jonathan Harvey, 2008/2009 Speakings was written in 2007-8. It is the third in my trilogy referring to the Buddhist purification of body, mind and speech, which the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra The World Premiere of Speakings was given by the commissioned. Speakings is also commissioned by IRCAM- BBC SSO, conducted by Ilan Volkov, at the BBC Proms Centre Pompidou/Radio France and involves electronics (Royal Albert Hall, London) on 19 August 2008. which I realised with the help of Gilbert Nouno, Arshia Cont and also Grégoire Carpentier.The work is gratefully dedicated to Ilan Volkov, the BBC SSO and Frank Madlener. + Speech and music are very close and yet also distant. In Interval (c.20 minutes) Speakings I wanted to bring together orchestral music and human speech. It is as if the orchestra is learning to speak, + like a baby with its mother, or like first man, or like listening to a highly expressive language we don't understand. The rhythms and emotional tones of speech are formed by semantics, but even more they are formed by feelings - in that respect they approach song. In Buddhist mythology from India there is a notion of original, pure speech, in the form of mantras - half song, half speech.The OM-AH-HUM is said to be the womb of all speech. 3 SSO Mar 5 v5 26/2/09 13:03 Page 4 SYMPHONY NO. 9 IN D MINOR convoluted.Who knows whether he would have stuck with (UNFINISHED) (c.63’) the ideas he started out with? Most great composers ANTON BRUCKNER (1824–1896) (ED. NOWAK 1951) prune, cut, simplify as they go along. Bruckner never begins a symphony with a clear, unambiguous statement. For him, the journey is a matter of 1. Feierlich, misterioso (Solemn, mysterious) feeling one’s way slowly and sometimes painfully towards 2. Scherzo: Bewegt, lebhaft (With lively motion) – the light. And so it is with the Ninth Symphony: distant Trio: Schnell (Fast) horns call across the dark abyss; fragments of ideas 3. Adagio: Langsam, feierlich (Slow, solemn) compete as the growing torrent of sound leads to a massive brass outburst. Then there’s the contrasting, sunlit “As regards Bruckner, I have very sad news, His mind is balm of a warmly lyrical theme led by the strings. Shadows disintegrating, and the spectre of religious mania holds him cross the picture again as the oboe introduces a third idea. ever faster in its grip. It makes a dreadful impression, and These are the building blocks for the movement, and perhaps a quick end would be the best thing, as recovery Bruckner now develops them as he traces a winding path is out of the question. He is, however, astonishingly through territory that is at times fraught with uncertainty, tenacious of his bodily health”. (Joseph Schalk, quoted in occasionally reassuringly benign, and at other times quite Stephen Johnson’s Bruckner Remembered, Faber & Faber, terrifying. Ultimately, there is a triumphant arrival, but not 1998) one that feels like the end of the road. Joseph Schalk’s distressing picture of Bruckner a few weeks Scherzos in Bruckner’s symphonies are not generally strong before his death in October 1896 suggests that dementia on the skittish humour that composers, from Beethoven had overwhelmed the composer in the last year or so of onward, had tended to give them. They do usually have a his life; the testimonies of other friends bear that out. kind of demonic energy, though, and if there is any humour it tends to be reserved for the trio. In this symphony the For some nine years, his main preoccupation had been his scherzo’s main theme is characterised by a kind of Ninth Symphony. His poor health, however, drained him of diabolical hammering, disturbingly obsessive. The the strength to complete the finale, and it never got beyond contrasting trio theme does have a touch of humour that sketch form. Bruckner wanted to dedicate the symphony to almost resembles Prokofiev in its gossamer lightness of the Glory of God, and sensing that it would never be texture. As with all Bruckner’s scherzos, the traditional finished, he told a number of friends that his Te Deum might pattern of repeating sections is followed religiously. make a suitably laudatory finale. But as Stephen Johnson points out there is no thematic connection between the The finale is one of the most extraordinary movements in well-known Te Deum in C and the symphony - Bruckner’s all of Bruckner. He called it his ‘farewell to life’. Its main ideas symphonic finales habitually bring back themes from earlier seem deeply troubled at first: the opening angst-ridden in the work - and he reminds us that even the keys of the string theme, and the brass outburst that follows it. After two works are not compatible. It has been tried as a those a broad string chorale melody emerges with a sense substitute finale, but it’s not a satisfactory solution. of almost ecstatic release, and in the music that follows Bruckner seems to be searching for a way of resolving the Recent research has unearthed a much earlier Te Deum in tension between these conflicting forces.The eventual, huge D. Since at least it’s in the same key as the Ninth Symphony, climax is one of almost unbearable agony.