61st SEASON Beethoven Coriolan Overture Brett Dean Testament Interval – 20 minutes Korngold Symphony in F sharp Holly Mathieson conductor Alan Tuckwood leader Saturday 4 March 2017, 7.30pm St John’s Smith Square Cover image: from Coriolan supplié par sa famille by Nicolas Poussin (1594–1665) In accordance with the requirements of Westminster City Council persons shall not be permitted to sit or stand in any gangway. The taking of photographs and use of recording equipment is strictly forbidden without formal consent from St John’s. Smoking is not permitted anywhere in St John’s. Refreshments are permitted only in the restaurant in the Crypt. Please ensure that all digital watch alarms, pagers and mobile phones are switched off. During the interval and after the concert the restaurant is open for licensed refreshments. Box office tel: 020 7222 1061. Website: www.sjss.org.uk. St John’s Smith Square Charitable Trust, registered charity no: 1045390. Registered in England. Company no: 3028678. TONIGHT’S PROGRAMME LUDWIG VAN BEETHOVEN 1770–1827 Coriolan Overture Beethoven’s overtures stand beside the symphonies as statements about the human condition whose significance transcends the particular circumstances of their origin. The impressive Coriolan Overture was written early in 1807 for a play by Heinrich Joseph von Collin, poet laureate to the Viennese imperial court. The three years leading up to it were the most prolific of Beethoven’s career, when he produced an astonishing series of masterpieces, each very different in character. These included the ‘Waldstein’ Piano Sonata, the ‘Eroica’ Symphony, the Triple Concerto, the ‘Appassionata’ Piano Sonata, the Fourth Piano Concerto, the three ‘Razumovsky’ String Quartets, the Fourth Symphony and the Violin Concerto. The first performance of theCoriolan Overture was a private one in March 1807, the first public performance being given in April 1808. The frustrated rage of Collin’s hero, which leads to his own destruction, is expressed by Beethoven in a taut Classical sonata movement shaped into a symphonic picture of a titanic struggle. It is the most explosive and violent expression of his ‘C minor mood’, which caused even Benjamin Britten, not generally an admirer of Beethoven, to declare: ‘What a marvellous beginning, and how well the development in sequence is carried out!’. The overture has one predominating emotional drive, with even the lyrical second subject turning quickly to the minor and then into a fortissimo outburst. Only at the end do the furious syncopated gestures of the coda subside into the symbolic dissolution of the main theme. Coriolan’s defiance is broken and the overture dies away with almost inaudible pizzicati in the strings. 4 TONIGHT’S PROGRAMME BRETT DEAN born 1961 Testament The Australian composer, conductor and viola player Brett Dean was born in Brisbane. He began composing in 1988 with experimental film and radio projects, as well as improvisational performances, and since then has created orchestral and chamber works and an opera. Perhaps his most successful work is Carlo of 1997 for strings, sampler and tape, inspired by the strangely dissonant music of Carlo Gesualdo. Simon Rattle conducted the first performance of his Songs of Joy in Philadelphia in 2008 and in 2013 The Last Days of Socrates was premiered by the Berlin Philharmonic. His Electric Preludes was first performed at the BBC Proms in 2014, conducted by Sakari Oramo. Dean likes shaping musical extremes, from harsh explosions to inaudibility, treating single instrumental parts with complex rhythms. Much of his work draws on literary, political or visual stimuli, carrying a non-musical message. Testament grew out of a work Photo © Pawel Kopczynski Photo © Pawel for twelve violas written in 2002 for the viola section of the Berlin Philharmonic, with whom Dean played for many years. He later expanded this into a work for full orchestra which was first performed in Hobart in March 2008 by the Tasmanian Symphony Orchestra conducted by Sebastian Lang-Lessing. It was inspired by Beethoven’s Heiligenstadt Testament, which he wrote in 1802 on learning of his irreversible hearing loss. Its sense of pathos, despair and self-pity makes the document intensely moving: ‘Ah,’ Beethoven wrote, ‘how could I possibly admit an infirmity in the one sense which should have been more perfect in me than in others, which I once possessed in highest perfection’. But as we have seen, the years following the Heiligenstadt Testament marked one of the most creative periods of his life. As Dean says: ‘His time in Heiligenstadt then was a leave-taking, an acceptance and a fresh start.’ The main material for the work is presented in the opening scherzo-like section. This was inspired by a haunting sonic idea which struck Dean: the quietly feverish sound of Beethoven’s quill writing manically on parchment paper. Each string player has two bows; one with rosin (a solid form of resin rubbed onto the bow hair to ensure grip on the string and to make the sound speak clearly) and one entirely without. First they play with their rosinless bows gliding over the strings whilst the wind players only blow air through their instruments, resulting in much action but little sound. The composer describes the effect of the music ‘as if behind a gauze, or as if itself hampered by a hearing ailment’. A slow section follows with a high melody in the flute, informed by a setting of some words from Beethoven’s text which Dean describes as ‘a kind of song with words, but without voices’. Quotations from Beethoven’s first ‘Razumovsky’ String Quartet then try to establish themselves but keep getting broken off, creating a sense of ‘loss and alienation’. Having taken up their rosined bows, the full strings express the intense anguish that has been lying beneath the surface. A fast section follows which develops the music of the opening, sometimes aggressive, sometimes inward, rather like Beethoven’s music. But as Dean says: ‘The air of ambivalence remains until the end of Testament, suspended between languor and resolve.’ 5 TONIGHT’S PROGRAMME ERICH WOLFGANG KORNGOLD 1897–1957 Symphony in F sharp Moderato ma energico Scherzo: Allegro molto — Trio: Molto meno (tranquillo) Adagio: Lento Finale: Allegro Korngold was not only one of the greatest orchestral composers of the twentieth century, but also its most remarkable musical prodigy, just as Mozart (whose first name he was given and whose music he worshipped like no other) had been of the eighteenth. Korngold’s works all have a tremendous generosity of spirit and are full of some of the most beautiful and touching music ever written. This was why he was such a successful film composer. But a myth which needs thoroughly debunking is that his music sounds like film scores, when in fact it’s the other way round: film scores sound like Korngold, who poured his richest musical invention into them. His style was hugely influential; John Williams’s scores for Star Wars and Superman, for example, wouldn’t sound as they do without the magnificent model of Korngold. In 1947, after a severe heart attack, Korngold returned to concert works after many years of writing for Hollywood. He was encouraged by an offer from the Vienna State Opera to stage his 1930s opera Die Kathrin and to revive his operatic masterpiece Die tote Stadt. His Symphony in F sharp (Korngold didn’t specify major or minor), completed in 1952, had been preceded by concertos for violin and cello and several other instrumental works. It is dedicated to the memory of the great American president Franklin D. Roosevelt, who died in 1945. Korngold clearly admired and respected Roosevelt and the work is also his tribute to the United States, which had saved him and his family from the gas chamber. In reality the work is his second symphony as his earlier Sinfonietta, begun when he was just fourteen, is a full-blown symphony in all but name, having four movements and lasting over forty minutes. Korngold was well aware that musical fashions had changed since his works as a child prodigy, which at the time had been considered new, daring and harmonically innovative. ‘I believe’, he wrote, ‘that my newly completed symphony will show the world that atonality and ugly dissonance at the price of giving up inspiration, form, expression, melody and beauty will result in ultimate disaster for the art of music.’ But conductor after conductor turned down giving the first performance. Even Bruno Walter, an old friend who called it a work of ‘real musical substance, masterfully written, modern in language yet generally accessible’, said he was ‘too old’ to perform it. An American performance in Pittsburgh conducted by William Steinberg fell through and the Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde in Vienna also rescinded their plan to perform it at the Musikverein. Eventually it was premiered on Austrian radio in October 1954 by the Vienna Symphony Orchestra conducted by Harold Byrns. This was a disaster as the work wasn’t given enough rehearsal time; Korngold’s plea to the musical 6 TONIGHT’S PROGRAMME director of the radio station to cancel the broadcast was ignored. So the symphony was never performed in public in Korngold’s lifetime. Sadly his hopes for his operas were also to be dashed. Die Kathrin had only six performances and the theatre was not full; ‘I am forgotten,’ lamented Korngold after the premiere. And when Die tote Stadt was eventually revived in Munich in 1954 the reviews were terrible: ‘Die tote Stadt remains dead,’ announced one newspaper. These must have been bitter blows for one who had been hailed as a genius by Mahler and Strauss and whose works had been admired by composers as diverse as Puccini and Sibelius.