MASTER 8
Violin got
Soul
FRIDAY
19 AUGUST 7.30PM
FEDERATION CONCERT HALL
HOBART
Marko Letonja conductor
Baiba Skride violin
RAVEL
Tzigane
JANÁČEK
Lachian Dances
Duration 9 mins
Duration 20 mins
PROKOFIEV
Violin Concerto No 1
Andantino – Andante assai
Scherzo (Vivacissimo)
Moderato – Allegro moderato –
Moderato – Più tranquillo
Duration 22 mins
INTERVAL
DVOŘÁK
Slavonic Dances (selections)
Op 46 No 1
Op 46 No 2
Op 46 No 7
Op 72 No 1
Op 72 No 2
Op 46 No 8
Duration 30 mins
This concert will end at approximately
9.30pm.
Duration 20 mins
50
1253
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.
51
ˇ
LEOŠ JANÁCEK
(1854–1928)
52
MARKO LETONJA
BAIBA SKRIDE
Marko Letonja is Chief Conductor
and Artistic Director of the Tasmanian
Symphony Orchestra and Music Director
of the Orchestre Philharmonique de
Strasbourg. Born in Slovenia, he studied at
the Academy of Music in Ljubljana and the
Vienna Academy of Music. He was Music
Director of the Slovenian Philharmonic
Orchestra from 1991 to 2003 and Music
Director and Chief Conductor of both the
Symphony Orchestra and the Opera in
Basel from 2003 to 2006. He was Principal
Guest Conductor of Orchestra Victoria in
2008 and made his debut with the TSO
the following year. He took up the post
of Chief Conductor and Artistic Director
of the Tasmanian Symphony Orchestra
at the start of 2012. He has worked with
many orchestras in Europe including the
Munich Philharmonic, Vienna Symphony,
Berlin Radio Orchestra, Mozarteum
Orchestra and the Orchestra Filarmonica
della Scala, Milan. He has also worked in
many renowned opera houses such as the
Vienna State Opera, Berlin State Opera,
La Scala Milan, Semper Oper Dresden,
and the Grand Théâtre de Genève.
Additionally, he has conducted at the Arena
di Verona. Future engagements include
the Mozarteum Orchestra Salzburg, Berlin
Radio Orchestra, Bavarian State Opera
in Munich and Wagner’s Der Ring des
Nibelungen for the Royal Swedish Opera
with Nina Stemme as Brünnhilde.
The list of prestigious orchestras with which
Baiba Skride has worked include the Berlin
Philharmonic, Boston Symphony Orchestra,
Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra,
Orchestre de Paris, London Philharmonic,
Royal Stockholm Philharmonic, and NHK
Symphony Orchestra, Tokyo. Conductors with
whom she collaborates include Christoph
Eschenbach, Sakari Oramo, Yannick
Nézet-Séguin, Jukka-Pekka Saraste and
John Storgårds. Recent concert highlights
include her return to the Berlin Philharmonic
playing Shostakovich’s Violin Concerto No 1
(Andris Nelsons conducting) and her debut
with the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra
Amsterdam in Britten’s Violin Concerto
conducted by Paavo Järvi. Baiba Skride is
this season’s Artist in Residence with the City
of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra, giving
concerto and chamber music performances.
In August 2015 she released her latest
disc, featuring the Nielsen and Sibelius
concertos and Sibelius’ Serenades (Tampere
Philharmonic conducted by Santtu-Matias
Rouvali). Her Szymanowski concertos CD
received the Award of the German Record
Critics and was nominated for the BBC
Music Magazine Award. Skride was born
into a musical Latvian family in Riga where
she began her studies, transferring in 1995
to the Conservatory of Music and Theatre in
Rostock. In 2001 she won First Prize in the
Queen Elisabeth Competition. Skride plays
the Stradivarius “Ex Baron Feilitzsch” violin
(1734), which is generously on loan to her
from Gidon Kremer.
Lachian Dances
1 Starodávný I (Old-time Dance)
2 Požehnaný (Blessed)
3 Dymák (Blacksmith’s Dance)
4 Starodávný II
5 Čeladenský (From Celadra)
6 Pilky (Saw Dance)
When music is folk-related a little
geography helps. Janáček’s original title
was “Valachian” Dances. He considered
his native Hukvaldy region, in Moravia, was
the northern mountain range of Valachia.
The place name (Wallachia) is almost
synonymous with modern-day Romania.
Villages in Janáček’s neighbourhood
were called Lachian because migrant
Valachs were thought to have settled
there. Janáček’s new title made for more
ethnographic precision.
Janáček is one of music’s great originals.
Since his youthful studies in Vienna, he
had been pulled in opposite directions:
musical Romanticism and folklore. It was
the folk-song collector František Bartoš
who encouraged Janáček to write down
the music of the songs. In 1888 Janáček
went on his first field trip notating songs
in Hukvaldy and the Lachian villages. The
initial versions of the Lachian Dances were
danced on stage in a folkloric pageant. So
enthusiastic was the composer (who did not
dance), that he taught the steps to his wife
and daughter, to help him give his music
the right dance idiom. This approach to
folklore was followed by Bartók and Kodály
in Hungary, with a similarly radical effect on
their own music.
Janáček had conducted Dvořák’s Slavonic
Dances in Brno, and his decision to treat his
Lachian Dances orchestrally was influenced
by the older composer’s example. But
there are notable differences: whereas
Dvořák copies the metre, inflexions and
spirit of traditional dances, but invents his
own tunes, Janáček bases his dances at
least partly on songs and dances he had
notated in the countryside. But as Janáček’s
biographer Jaroslav Vogel states, “In
spite of strictly observing the folk-dance
sequences, the Lachian Dances are far
from being mere interestingly harmonised
orchestral transcriptions of folk music.”
Harmony and colour are varied with
originality, and Janáček is particularly fond
of alternating the original consonant version
of each dance song with a more dissonant
treatment.
The first dance (Starodávný I) combines
an almost majestic polonaise-like nuptial
dance with a “kerchief” or “ribbon”
dance. “Blessed”, another nuptial dance,
repeats note for note a tune Janáček had
transcribed, ending with church bells and
organ. The third dance is a “smoke”,
“anvil” or “blacksmith’s” dance. The
contrasted tempi recall the Ukrainian dumka
(two examples by Dvořák of this type of
Slavonic dance are heard in this concert).
The second “old-time” dance is based on
the song “And I, disheartened”. Celadra
must be the village where Janáček heard
what is variously called “clown”, “miller’s
dance” or “beggar” – according to which
words are sung to the tune. The closing
dance is connected with stocking up
firewood for winter, and swinging rhythms
suggest wood-cutting with a saw.
Although the Lachian Dances were
completed by 1891, they were not
performed in their definitive concert form
until 1926. The reason for the 35-year gap?
Vogel remarks that the work is “typical of
so many of Janáček’s: no one knew of its
existence”.
David Garrett © 2016
The Tasmanian Symphony Orchestra has
performed this work once before, with conductor
János Fürst in Hobart on 4 August 1992.
53
SERGEI PROKOFIEV (1891–1953)
MAURICE RAVEL (1875–1937)
Violin Concerto No 1 in D, Op 19
Andantino – Andante assai
Scherzo (Vivacissimo)
Moderato – Allegro moderato – Moderato
– Più tranquillo
Tzigane, Concert Rhapsody for Violin and
Orchestra
Above the first solo entry in this concerto
stands the word sognando – dreamily. It
describes an exquisite melody, revealing
the often forgotten lyrical aspect of
Prokofiev’s style. But when the concerto
was premièred in Paris in 1923, the musical
avant-garde found the work too lyrical –
shot through, wrote emigré critic Boris de
Schloezer, with “Mendelssohnism”. The
accusation, although malicious, was apt:
the lyricism and pensive mood, and the
absence of ostentatious display, is indeed
reminiscent of Mendelssohn.
There’s another parallel: just as
Mendelssohn had been plagued for years
by the opening theme of his own violin
concerto, so Prokofiev’s meditative opening
had been in his head since he’d developed
it for a concertino in 1915. Two years later,
in the countryside outside St Petersburg (by
then Petrograd), it grew into a concerto.
News of the October Revolution filtered out
from the city, but the music holds no trace
of the upheaval that delayed its première
by six years.
Initially, soloists could see only that the
concerto lacked a cadenza, and some
celebrated violinists declined to learn it. It
was not until 1924 – when Joseph Szigeti
performed it in Prague – that it began to
attract recognition. Even then, acceptance
was not complete. Szigeti thought the
sognando opening was “a clue to the
day-dreaming expression of the ‘the
little boy listening to a story’ feeling” of
the exposition. A short way into the first
movement a second word appears above
the solo part: narrante (in the manner of
a narration). The music is now all sparkle
and bite. No longer is Prokofiev setting
the scene for daydreams – we’re thrown
headlong into a tale, one told in symphonic
54
dialogue between violin and orchestra.
Unusually, the concerto inverts the usual
tempo sequence so that two slow lyrical
movements surround a fast, rhythmic one.
The Scherzo is a catalogue of violin trickery:
extreme leaps, double-stopping, slides,
harmonics and rapid figuration alternating
with accented rhythms. Remarkably,
Prokofiev’s capricious exposition of
technical effects draws attention to their
expressive possibilities – from the buoyant
ascent of the opening theme above a
clockwork accompaniment to sinuous
passage work in the violin’s low register.
The mercurial Scherzo with its abrupt
ending has been cited as an example of
the “grotesque” or “sarcastic” aspect of
Prokofiev’s style. But the composer himself
preferred that it be described as “‘scherzoish’ in quality, or else by three words
describing various degrees of the scherzo –
whimsicality, laughter, mockery”.
The third movement begins with a theme
on the bassoon, developed by each of the
woodwind instruments in turn. This sets
the scene for the soloist’s combination of
staccato and sustained ideas, suspended
above scoring of the utmost economy.
In the coda, the opening theme from
the first movement returns in the violins
above a shimmer of tremolos and harp
arpeggios. The soloist traces the melody
with “altitudinous trills” before coming to
rest – exactly as it had at the end of the first
movement – on a top D in unison with the
piccolo.
Abridged from a note by Yvonne Frindle,
Symphony Australia © 1997/2016
The Tasmanian Symphony Orchestra first
performed this work with conductor Thomas
Matthews and soloist Ernest Llewellyn on
23 September 1963 and, most recently, with
Arvo Volmer and Cameron Hill in Hobart and
Launceston on 14 and 16 November 2007.
In 1922 Ravel heard the Hungarian violinist
Jelly d’Aranyi play his Sonata for Violin
and Cello at a London soirée. Afterwards
she entertained him by playing Hungarian
gypsy melodies in a recital that lasted until
the early hours of the morning. Two years
later he told her about the piece he was
writing “especially for you… the Tzigane
must be a piece of great virtuosity, full of
brilliant effects, provided it is possible to
perform them, which I’m not always sure
of”. When d’Aranyi gave Tzigane its first
performance, in London later that year, in
the version with piano, Ravel is reported to
have told her afterwards that if he’d known
she could master the difficulties so well he
would have made it even harder!
Tzigane means “Gypsy” and the music
to which Ravel gave this title is “a
virtuoso piece in the style of a Hungarian
Rhapsody”. In Tzigane Ravel set himself
the kind of challenge he loved – to make
a musical virtue of extreme technical
difficulties. He asked his publisher to send
him a copy of Liszt’s Hungarian Rhapsodies
for piano, and his friend Hélène JourdanMorhange to bring her copy of Paganini’s
Caprices for solo violin. Both these
composers represented the ne plus ultra of
virtuosity on their instruments, and Ravel
outdid them. The technical feats Ravel
asks of the violinist in the long opening
unaccompanied section (which takes up
almost half the piece; a sign perhaps of
the haste with which Ravel composed it)
include playing in high positions on the G
string, octaves, multiple stops, tremolos,
arpeggios and glissandos. Harmonics and
left hand pizzicato are saved for after the
entrance of the piano.
which enabled it to imitate the plucked
and hammered sounds of the harpsichord,
guitar, and Hungarian cimbalom. By 1924,
however, this anticipation of the prepared
piano was already almost obsolete, and in
the orchestral version of Tzigane Ravel finds
a substitute in the colours of harp, celesta,
and the string section playing pizzicato
and with harmonics. Probably Ravel, with
the luthéal, had been trying to make the
accompaniment sound more Hungarian,
but his parodistic pastiche of Hungarian
gypsy music makes no attempt at the
ethnographic authenticity of Bartók (whose
work Ravel admired), and probably owes
more to the gypsy fiddlers Ravel heard in
Paris cafés and cabarets.
Tzigane is a series of free variations, as
if improvised, but falling broadly into
the “csárdás” structure of the Hungarian
Rhapsody as brought to the concert hall
by Liszt: a slow introduction, lassú, where
the minor key seeks a certain pathos, then
a sometimes wild fast section, a friss. The
modal musical language of both the slow
and fast sections is an imitation of the
Hungarian gypsy style, but Tzigane is above
all a successful experiment in stretching
violin virtuosity to its limits.
David Garrett © 2004/2006
The Tasmanian Symphony Orchestra first
performed this work with conductor Rudolf
Pekárek and soloist Ladislav Jásek on 18
August 1960 and, most recently, with Sebastian
Lang-Lessing and Vadim Gluzman in Sydney on
14 October 2010.
The piano – or rather the piano-luthéal,
as Ravel had intended – became an
orchestra in the second version of Tzigane,
premièred by d’Aranyi in Paris in 1924 with
the Orchestre Colonne. The luthéal was an
attachment to the piano, patented in 1919,
55
ˇ
ANTONÍN DVORÁK
(1841–1904)
Slavonic Dances
Op 46 No 1 in C (Presto)
Op 46 No 2 in E minor (Allegretto
scherzando)
Op 46 No 7 in C minor (Allegro assai)
Op 72 No 1 in B (Molto vivace)
Op 72 No 2 in E minor (Allegretto grazioso)
Op 46 No 8 in G minor (Presto)
In 1878 Brahms’ publisher, Simrock, was
enjoying such success with his publication
of Dvořák’s Moravian Duets that he
commissioned from the Czech composer a
set of Slavonic Dances, hoping to emulate
the success of Brahms’ Hungarian Dances.
Both composers’ sets of dances were
first written for piano duet, the domestic
medium par excellence, but enjoyed even
greater success in their orchestral form.
For Dvořák, dances became the launching
pad to success outside his native Bohemia.
The Op 46 Slavonic Dances achieved huge
international success.
It was a timely commission because
Dvořák, who loved folk songs and dances,
was just then showing more nationalistic
tendencies in his music. He spoke a familiar
musical language, to which he now added
more folkloric spice. The actual tunes
are Dvořák’s own, but in each case he
has captured the rhythm and spirit of his
folk models. His aim, he averred, was “to
preserve, to translate into music, the spirit
of a race as distinct in its national melodies
or folk songs”.
The eight dances of Op 46 were composed
between March and May 1878, and the
orchestral version was completed on 22
August. No 1 is a furiant, a quick Czech
dance with alternating contrasting rhythms
– the liveliest of beginnings! No 2 is akin
to a Czech version of the Ukrainian dumka,
with strongly contrasting melancholic
and cheerful sections – “one moment
lamenting, the next dancing”, said Dvorak.
The mood is nocturnal. No 7 is based on a
Skocná or “Jump dance”, moderate at first,
but gathering considerable energy.
56
Simrock made a great deal of money out of
Dvořák’s Slavonic Dances, as the composer
was well aware. So when eight years later
Simrock was pressuring him to write another
set of eight dances, Dvořák drove a hard
bargain, haggling long and hard, and
eventually settling for ten times more than
the publisher paid him for the first set. “To
do the same thing twice over is damnably
difficult,” Dvořák told Simrock.
He also announced that the dances were
going to be quite different, and so they
were. Whereas the Op 46 set are almost
entirely based on Bohemian dance rhythms,
the Op 72 set draws on dances from all
over the Slav world. Dvořák undertook
the orchestration of the Op 72 Dances
reluctantly, telling Simrock it would be “an
accursed job”, but this could never be
guessed from the outcome, and Dvořák
declared with pride that they “sound like
the devil!”. No 1 is a Slovak dance type
called an odzemek: a gallop with nostalgic
episodes. No 2 is, like its counterpart in
Op 46, a dumka, with richly evocative
harmonies, more melancholy, and here with
less contrast of lamenting and dancing. This
selection concludes with the final dance of
Op 46, a furiant – a perfect counterpoise to
the opening dance.
David Garrett © 2002/2016
Exclusive to Tasmania
Tristan Isolde
&
SATURDAY
19 NOVEMBER
FEDERATION
CONCERT HALL
HOBART
The most acclaimed Isolde of
our times, Swedish soprano Nina
Stemme, and superstar tenor Stuart
Skelton promise a night to remember
when they perform excerpts from
Wagner’s sublime Tristan und Isolde
under the baton of Marko Letonja.
TICKETS NOW ON SALE
TSO.COM.AU | 1800 001 190