Programme Notes

Roger Cann (1938-2005)

"I am honoured to have been asked to compose a short piece for the Jubilee season. The commission was for a five minute work that must not be difficult! That in itself seemed straightforward, if limiting, but I also felt it important to provide interesting touches for all sections of the orchestra. This became something of a challenge in terms of organising my musical ideas within such a tight framework. From this preoccupation with structure emerged that rather unexpected title of the piece.

The title refers to the control of perspective and balance of forms in classical drawing and painting, by which apparently parallel lines actually converge on a distant 'vanishing point'. The title is meant to indicate that the piece is purely concerned with placing musical ideas together in a harmonious balance and does not describe anything at all. It does, however, have a spirited feel - and a tune! - which are also fundamental elements.

Astor Piazzolla (1921 - 1992)

Astor Piazzolla was an Argentine composer, band leader and a famous bandoneón player. The bandoneón is a square-built button accordion developed in the 1840s. Piazzolla was born in Buenos Aires in 1921 and his family emigrated to New York in 1924, returning to the Argentine capital 13 years later in 1937. He gave many concerts in the city on his return and he also arranged tangos for a popular band leader called Aníbal Troilo.

In 1944 Piazzolla founded the Orquesta del 46 as a vehicle for his own compositions and his symphony completed in 1954 won him a scholarship to Paris where he was encouraged to write tangos. He resettled in Buenos Aires in 1955 and formed an octet and quintet which played his nuevo tango genre. 1974 saw him return to Paris where he composed a bandoneón concerto.

Piazzolla was passionate about the tango and he took it away from the traditional concert halls and drawing rooms and slapped it on the streets of Buenos Aires. He also studied classical music but the music that he forged was a fusion of folkloric beauty and contemporary tensions that later became known as nuevo tango. Piazzolla used a concoction of fugue, extreme chromaticism, dissonance, elements of jazz and expanded instrumentation and initially this new music was not well received in South America. However, it was widely approved outside Argentina especially in the USA. The classical tango, if one is permitted to call it by this name, had lost its popularity in Argentina in the 1950s and 1960s but by the time the 1980s came it became more widely accepted. “Traditional tango listeners hated me”, he recalled. “I introduced fugues, counterpoints and people thought I was crazy. All the tango critics and radio stations in Buenos Aires called me a clown. They said my music was 'paranoiac'. And they made me popular. The young people who had lost interest in the tango started listening to me. It was a war of one against all, but in ten years, the war was won”.

Astor was now the contemporary 'King' of the tango. In the late 1980s his works were taken up by more classical performers such as the Kronos Quartet. All in all, Piazzolla composed about 750 works including concerti, operas, film and theatre scores, and made over seventy records.

His ballad Oblivion was written for the 1984 Marco Bellocchio film Enrico IV and was nominated for a Grammy Award for best instrumental composition in 1995. There are many arrangements of the piece but the one that is being played tonight is arranged for strings and violin solo. There is a 'gypsy' song feel to the violin melody with hints of jazz and blues which are particularly noticeable in the glissandi (sliding up the string) in the cellos. The tango rhythm and syncopation of the accompaniment are not over emphasized but identifiable. Indeed, the work as a whole has a sort of sweetness to it.

Manuel de Falla (1876 - 1946)

Falla was a Spanish composer who loved everything French, especially the culture and Debussy. Some of his harsh critics say that his music had too much foreign influence and this could be said of El Amor Brujo. A further criticism of the work was that it lacked Spanish soul. However, this takes nothing away from the orchestral colouration and the ‘impressionist’ paint brush.

El Amor Brujo (Love, the Magician) was originally written in 1915 and got a mixed reaction. Falla decided to go away and make amendments and the 1925 version is considered the definitive version. The most striking feature of the work is the novel and sympathetic treatment of gypsies, which Falla acknowledged to La Patria (the Madrid daily newspaper) declaring “we have created an unusual new work whose effect on the public we don’t know.” What was particularly remarkable was that at its 1915 performance Falla asked a musically illiterate gypsy ballerina by the name of Pastora Imperio to sing the vocal line! The composer claimed to have tried to live as a gypsy himself so as to immerse himself in his composition.

The Plot

Introduccion y Escena (Introduction and Scene)
En la Cueva (la noche) (In the Cave at Night)
The music evokes a quest of eternal mystery and the sustained strings provide a deceptive calmness.

Canción del amor dolido (The Song of Unrequited Love)
This song was inspired by popular gypsy music. Candela, the tragic gypsy wails with insistent ¡ays! accompanied by repeated down bows in the strings imitating the downward strumming of the 'gypsy' guitar.

El Aparecido (The Apparition)

Danza del Terror (The Dance of Terror) This is particularly sharp and biting and is a well known orchestral excerpt.

El Circulo Mágico (The Magic Circle)
The Magic Circle summons timeless wonderment with a medieval sound.

A Media Noche (Los Sortilegios) (Midnight) (The Spells)
In this short section we hear the 12 strokes of bells to mark the midnight hour.

Danza Rituel del Fuego (Para ahuyentar los malos espíritus) (The Ritual Fire Dance) (To chase away the bad spirits)
The Ritual Fire Dance is extremely intense, energised by a huge blazing night-time bonfire. It is written in an ABAB form interrupted four times with a trill. The second theme is 'lush' and 'symphonic' and the consistent four bar phrases sound oddly balanced.

Escena (Scene)

Canción del Fuego Fatuo (The Song of the Will-o'-the-Wisp)
This song is hypnotic and based on the two popular 'gypsy' genres, the vito and the malagueña. The music here moves away from the popular Spanish folklore music, andalucismo - repeated chords, strummed downward where all 5/6 notes are seldom changed with a pedal point present, often resulting from open strings.

Pantomima (Pantomime)
This conjures up a beautiful dream in 7/8 time, graced with a charming countermelody.

Danza del Juego de Amor (The Dance of the Game of Love)

Final (Las Campanas del Amanecor) (The Bells of Dawn)
The brusque finale leaves audiences wanting more, as the two lovers, at last freed from the burdens of their past, emerge from a night of sorcery to face the hope of a beautiful new dawn, as morning bells peal in the background.

Falla's ultimate gift, fully evident in El Amor Brujo, is to suggest many distinctive sounds rather than depicting them precisely. Perhaps the most magical moment is a passing scene that clearly evokes the chimes of midnight, but without a single chime used. The effect is produced entirely with a resourceful combination of brass, strings and piano. Indeed, despite the essential Spanish character of the work, nowhere do we hear an actual tambourine, castanet, hand clap, foot stomp, flamenco tap, or even a guitar, yet in a sense they all are present and deeply felt throughout.

Ottorino Respighi (1879 - 1936)

Respighi learnt both the piano and the violin as a child and in 1900 and 1902 he was taught by Rimsky-Korsakov. He attended Bruch's composition classes in Berlin in 1908-1909. In 1913 he became professor of composition at the Academia di S. Cecilia and director 11 years later. In 1926 he resigned so as to spend more time composing, teaching and accompanying his wife who was a singer and composer in her own right.

His early works were chamber and vocal songs with piano or orchestra and some operas. The colourful inventiveness of his most successful works won him popularity unmatched by any other Italian composer since Puccini.

Il Tramonto (The Sunset) was composed in 1914 for a mezzo-soprano and orchestra. The work is an Italian translation of a Shelley poem which concerns a maiden whose lover died in her arms one night and who grows old longing for death and reunion. It combines lyricism and restrained dramatic expression in a hauntingly eloquent single movement cantata. Only the strings accompany the voice and the accompaniment shows many signs of Respighi's flair for imaginative textures. He subtly varies the accompaniment to sustain the interest of the monochromatic ensemble. The string writing becomes particularly interesting toward the end where the maiden is forlorn.

The original English version of the poem reads as follows:

The Sunset

There late was One within whose subtle being,
As light and wind within some delicate cloud
That fades amid the blue noon's burning sky,
Genius and death contended. None may know
The sweetness of the joy which made his breath
Fail, like the trances of the summer air,
When, with the lady of his love, who then
First knew the unreserve of mingled being,
He walked along the pathway of a field
Which to the east a hoar wood shadowed o'er,
But to the west was open to the sky.

There now the sun had sunk, but lines of gold
Hung on the ashen clouds, and on the points
Of the far level grass and nodding flowers
And of the dandelion's hoary beard,
And, mingled with the shades of twilight, lay
On the brown massy woods - and in the east
The broad and burning moon lingeringly rose
Between the black trunks of the crowded trees,
While the faint stars were gathering overhead.
“Is it not strange, Isabel”, said the youth,
“I never saw the sun? We will walk here
Tomorrow; thou shalt look on it with me.”

That night the youth and lady mingled lay
In love and sleep- but when the morning came
The lady found the lover dead and cold.
Let none believe that God in mercy gave
That stroke. The lady died not, nor grew wild,
But year by year lived on - in truth I think
Her gentleness and patience and sad smiles,
And that she did not die, but lived to tend
Her aged father, were a kind of madness,
If madness 'tis to be unlike the world.
For but to see her were to read the tale
Woven by some subtlest bard, to make hard hearts
Dissolve away in wisdom-working grief;
Here eyes were black and lustreless and wan:
Here eyelashes were worn away with tears,
Her lips and cheeks were like things dead- so pale;
Her hands were thin, and through their wandering veins
And weak articulations might be seen
Day's ruddy light. The tomb of thy dead self
Which one vexed ghost inhabits, night and day,
Is all, lost child, that now remains of thee!

“Inheritor of more than earth can give,
Passionless calm and silence unreproved,
Where the dead find, oh, not sleep! but rest,
And are the uncomplaining things they seem,
Or live, or drop in the deep sea of Love;
Oh, that like thine, mine epitaph were- Peace!”
This was the only moan she ever made.

Felix Mendelssohn (1809 - 1847)

The Italian Symphony is often mentioned in conjunction with the Scottish, when it was actually commissioned by the English! On a trip to Italy Felix Mendelssohn experienced the wet, wild northern landscapes with the contrast of the sunlit south and the latter provided his inspiration to write the symphony. Indeed, the work is bright and full of warmth and it has been described as 'a blue sky in A major.' According to the composer a variety of impressions are depicted, from art and nature as well as the energies and vitality of the Italian people. What was unusual, though, was that Mendelssohn did not know any Italian people and it has been suggested that he was unaware of the cultural aspirations of the Italians and the secular struggles of the Papacy. Mendelssohn endeavoured to paint Italy as an Englishman might see it - idyllic.

Allegro vivace
The first movement is very sunny in character and there is no opposition to the major mode at all. The beautiful second theme enters depicting the Italy seen by an Englishman who never left the terrace of his hotel unless going on an outing in a carriage.

Andante con moto
The second movement's minor mood dims the blue sky and in come a group of pilgrims. There is great melancholy depicted by the mournful, subdued melody in the violas, oboes and bassoons. The monotony of the quaver line depicts the weary steps of the pilgrims as they make their way along the stony road. So strong is the sense of a choral work that it is hard to feel that a symphony is being performed. The pilgrims' chorus fades away as the procession disappears in the distance.

Con moto moderato
It has been suggested that Mendelssohn became a little bored with the 'Italianate' style of the first two movements and if he added a few horn fanfares he could be back in the German forest - after all, in Italy there were no real forests.

Saltarello - presto
A lively dance of Spanish/Italian provenance prevails in this final movement which is in A minor. It is characterized by its jumping movements that form part of the steps to the dance. The orchestration is well-mastered, with a controlled crescendo that forms the development section and then finally brings the 'blue sky' to an end'.

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