WINE PARTNER Saturday 2 June 7.30pm WALTON Federation Concert Hall Two Pieces for Strings, from Henry V Hobart Passacaglia (The Death of Falstaff) Touch Her Soft Lips and Part MASTER 6 MASTER Duration 4 mins Sir Andrew Davis conductor ELGAR VAUGHAN WILLIAMS Variations on an Original Theme, Enigma Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis I (CAE) Duration 15 mins II (HDS-P) III (RBT) BRITTEN IV (WMB) Four Sea Interludes and Passacaglia, V (RPA) from Peter Grimes VI (Ysobel) Dawn VII (Troyte) Sunday Morning VIII (WN) Moonlight IX (Nimrod) Passacaglia X (Dorabella) Intermezzo Storm XI (GRS) Duration 23 mins XII (BGN) XIII (***) Romanza XIV (EDU) Finale INTERVAL Duration 30 mins Duration 20 mins This concert will end at approximately 9.30 pm. Tasmanian Symphony Orchestra concerts are broadcast and streamed throughout 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. 3 5580 TSO Fine Drop Ad for Program 2015.indd 3 17/07/2015 9:47 am Ralph Vaughan Williams (1872-1958) Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis a far smoother work. He was probably also inspired by the fantasias for string ensembles popular in Tallis’ time (such Vaughan Williams decided at an early as the In nomines of John Taverner). age that the prevailing state of English The form is somewhat similar to such music was not his ideal. Like his near- works, being a series of related themes Chief Conductor of the Melbourne Sir Andrew’s many CDs include a Messiah contemporaries Bela Bartók and Zoltan developed in relatively independent Symphony Orchestra since 2012, Sir Andrew nominated for a 2018 Grammy, Berlioz’s Kodály, he reasoned that a new yet sections. Davis is also music director and principal Roméo et Juliette, Ives’ Orchestral Works, truly national music must derive from conductor of the Lyric Opera of Chicago. vol 2 with the Melbourne Symphony, British Other references to the period are tradition and the past. He looked for He is conductor laureate of both the BBC Violin Concertos with Tamsin Little and the manifest in this fantasia. It is scored these origins not only in folksongs (of Symphony Orchestra and the Toronto BBC Symphony (Coleridge-Taylor and Wood, for three groups: a string quartet, a which he collected and arranged a Symphony, where he has also been named plus Delius’s Suite), a recently-released large string orchestra and a small string great many), but in other places where interim artistic director until 2020. He was recording of Bliss’s The Beatitudes, music of orchestra. This allows for antiphonal communal music-making occurred, such music director of the Glyndebourne Festival York Bowen (nominated for a 2012 Grammy effects such as Tallis regularly used with as churches. He also turned to previous Opera from 1988 to 2000 and holds the for Best Orchestral Performance) and a choirs. It also promotes the echo effects honorary title of conductor emeritus from the recording with the Bergen Philharmonic of Golden Ages of British composition, achieved in the acoustic of a great Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra. Vaughan Williams’ Job/Symphony No 9 notably the Elizabethan and Jacobean cathedral, including Gloucester, where nominated for a 2018 BBC Music Magazine times. the work was premièred, in 1910. Tallis’ In a career spanning more than 40 years, he Award. original setting places the melody in the has conducted virtually all the world’s major Thomas Tallis (c1505-1585) was one tenor part, a common practice. Vaughan orchestras and opera companies, and at Sir Andrew Davis was born in Hertfordshire such ‘Golden’ composer. He served Williams, himself a violist, frequently the major festivals. Recent highlights have and was an organ scholar at King’s College, four monarchs: Henry VIII, Edward VI, assigns the tune to the violas or the inner included Die Walküre in a new production at Cambridge, before studying in Rome Mary I and Elizabeth I. Presumably, parts. His famously distinctive parallel Lyric Opera of Chicago. In the Lyric’s 2018-19 with Franco Ferrara. He became associate he adapted to the various religious chords recall the fauxbourdon technique season he conducts Idomeneo, Siegfried, conductor of the BBC Scottish Symphony requirements of all of these, serving as as used by Tudor composers. and Cendrillon. Orchestra and made his debut with the BBC a Gentleman of the Chapel Royal for Symphony Orchestra in 1970. In 1992, he many years. Tallis worked within the Despite these references to past times, In the concert hall, 2018 has seen Sir Andrew was created a Commander of the British musical customs of his day including here the composer gives Tallis’ theme conduct the Toronto Symphony Orchestra Empire, and in 1999 was designated a Knight using the eight ‘Ecclesiastical’ or ‘Church’ a thoroughly 20th-century treatment. in programs including soloist Ray Chen in Bachelor in the New Year Honours List. modes. Around 1567, Tallis wrote a Vaughan Williams clearly enjoyed Bruch’s Violin Concerto, and harpist Heidi He has an honorary doctorate from Knox series of eight hymn tunes, one in assisting his compositional alter ego, and Van Hoesen Gorton in Glière’s Harp Concerto College in Galesburg, Illinois. each of the church modes, for a psalter not just in the solo passages that suggest (a program that also included Sir Andrew commissioned by Matthew Parker, the the forthcoming The Lark Ascending. Davis’s own suite from Prokofiev’s Romeo and first Anglican Archbishop of Canterbury. The love of strings shows even in simple Juliet), and the BBC Symphony Orchestra in things like the final chord, whose already Finzi’s Cello Concerto (with Paul Watkins) and The theme taken up by Vaughan Williams rich resonances would be amplified by a Shostakovich’s Tenth Symphony. In January was the third of these, based on the cathedral acoustic, reminding listeners of he conducted the Cincinnati Symphony Phrygian mode (corresponding to the the Fantasia’s historical as well as literal Orchestra in a program that included the white notes of the piano beginning on E: echoes. seldom-heard Second Symphony of former e f g a b c d e). Most folksongs are also Cincinnati Symphony music director, Eugene based on modes rather than chromatic scales, so it’s small wonder that much of Goossens (who also played a major role in Adapted from Katherine Kemp, the development of Australian music). In Vaughan Williams’ work sounds modal. Symphony Australia © 1998 December 2017, Sir Andrew conducted Tallis’ original setting of his ‘Third both Puccini’s Turandot and Bizet’s The Pearl Tune’ was for Psalm 2, one version of The Tasmanian Symphony Orchestra first Fishers at the Lyric Opera of Chicago. In which is now best known as ‘Why do performed this work with conductor Thomas Matthews in Hobart on 23 November 1967 and, August 2017, he conducted the Philharmonia the nations so furiously rage together’. at the Edinburgh Festival in Elgar’s cantata, most recently, with Howard Shelley in Hobart and Vaughan Williams instead seized on the Launceston on 23 and 24 May 2014. King Olaf. unusual beauty of Tallis’ harmony and well-balanced melodic form to create 4 5 Benjamin Britten (1913-1976) Four Sea Interludes (Op 33a) and The Four Sea Interludes and Passacaglia The highly effective Storm, from Act I, Passacaglia (Op 33b), from Peter are drawn from various episodes in the is both a natural tempest and a mental Grimes opera. Dawn appears in Act I, after the storm – a musical postscript to Peter’s Dawn Prologue’s coronial inquest, which has outpouring of anguish and lonely established that Peter Grimes cannot be confusion to a sympathetic interlocutor. Sunday Morning held culpable for the death by drowning A minute or so of respite is granted by Moonlight of his young apprentice. The music links the violins’ recollection of the melody Passacaglia this interior scene to a street by the which in the opera accompanied Peter’s Storm sea where townspeople and fisherman words: ‘What harbour shelters peace?... begin their daily work. The high flutes What harbour can embrace terrors and violins suggest, almost uncannily, and tragedies?’ But the return of the It was Peter Grimes which first made the cold glassy greyness of the sea, or storm snuffs out any hope of peace or Britten’s name as a musical dramatist of of a deserted beach; the swirl of harp, happiness. the highest order. In this, his first full- clarinets and violas an encroaching wave, scale opera, the composer in his late 20s while a brass chorale suggests, perhaps, turned out a masterpiece. the swell, with even, at one point, a note Abridged from a note by GK Williams, of menace. Symphony Australia © 1997 Britten was fascinated by the sea, particularly the coast of his native East The tolling of Sunday morning church The Tasmanian Symphony Orchestra first Anglia. He once wrote: ‘My parents’ bells is rendered most effectively performed the Four Sea Interludes with conductor house in Lowestoft directly faced the sea, by the overlapping clashing pairs of Joseph Post in Hobart on 9 June 1962 and, most French horns in Sunday Morning. Violas recently, with Marko Letonja in Hobart on 23 and my life as a child was coloured by March 2013. the fierce storms that sometimes drove and cellos sing the melody which ships on our coast and ate away whole accompanies the words of Peter’s friend stretches of neighbouring cliffs.’ Peter Ellen Orford (‘Glitter of waves and glitter Pears, Britten’s partner, bought a copy of sunlight...’) as the curtain rises, and of the works of poet George Crabbe the interlude extends into what is the (1754-1832) to Britten’s attention in 1941, beginning of Act II in the opera.