MASTER 10
SATURDAY
10 SEPTEMBER 7.30PM
FEDERATION CONCERT HALL
HOBART
Otto Tausk conductor
Lorina Gore soprano
Steve Davislim tenor
Derek Welton bass-baritone
TSO Chorus
HAYDN
The Creation
Part One: First, Second, Third and
Fourth Days of Creation
Part Two: Fifth and Sixth Days of
Creation
INTERVAL
Duration 20 mins
Part Three: Seventh Day of Creation
Duration 29 mins
This performance will be sung in
English.
This concert will end at approximately
9.45pm.
Duration 80 mins
Tasmanian Symphony Orchestra concerts are broadcast and streamed throughout
Australia and around the world by ABC Classic FM. We would appreciate your cooperation
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OTTO TAUSK
LORINA GORE
STEVE DAVISLIM
DEREK WELTON
Music Director of the Symphony Orchestra
and Opera Theatre St Gallen (Switzerland),
Otto Tausk works with all the major
orchestras in his native Netherlands. Recent
appearances have included Amsterdam’s
Concertgebouw Orchestra. In St Gallen Otto
Tausk conducts the major concert series as
well as operas. In previous seasons he has
conducted Eugene Onegin, The Abduction
from the Seraglio, Korngold’s Die tote Stadt
and the Swiss première of George Benjamin’s
Written on Skin. Guest appearances
have included the Stuttgart Philharmonic,
Symphony Orchestra of Porto da Música and
BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra. Outside
Europe Tausk has conducted the Los Angeles
Philharmonic. He most recently appeared
with the Tasmanian Symphony Orchestra
in 2014. In 2011 Otto Tausk was presented
with the “de Olifant” prize by the city of
Haarlem for his contribution to the arts in
The Netherlands, particularly his work with
the Holland Symfonia. His recording of Hans
Pfitzner’s Orchesterlieder with the Northwest
German Philharmonic won Classica France’s
Choc du mois. Tausk was born in Utrecht
and studied violin with Viktor Liberman
and István Párkányi and conducting with
Jurjen Hempel and Kenneth Montgomery.
He continued conducting studies in Vilnius
with Jonas Aleksa. Between 2004 and 2006
he was assistant to Valery Gergiev at the
Rotterdam Philharmonic and later worked at
the Mariinsky.
Lorina Gore is a regular performer with
Opera Australia where her roles include
Violetta (La traviata), Queen of the Night
(Die Zauberflöte), Die Fiakermilli (Arabella),
Amina (La sonnambula), Leïla (The
Pearlfishers), Tytania (A Midsummer Night’s
Dream), Honey B (Bliss), Marzelline (Fidelio),
Oscar (Un ballo in maschera), Yum-Yum
(The Mikado), Despina (Così fan tutte),
Musetta (La bohème), Nanetta (Falstaff),
and Woglinde (Der Ring des Nibelungen).
In 2010 she performed as Pip in Moby-Dick
for the State Opera of South Australia, for
which she received a Helpmann Award
nomination. International performances
have included the title role in Lucia di
Lammermoor for Iford Arts, Fiakermilli
for Garsington Opera, Giulia (La scala di
seta) for Independent Opera, Blonde (Die
Entführung aus dem Serail), Agilea (Teseo)
and Sandrina (L’infedeltà delusa) for English
Touring Opera, and Norina (Don Pasquale)
and Violetta (La traviata) for New Zealand
Opera. She studied at the Australian National
University and at the National Opera Studio
in London, and has been the recipient of
numerous prestigious opera awards. ABC
Classics recordings include highlights from
Strauss’s Der Rosenkavalier with Yvonne
Kenny, selections from Handel’s Rodelinda
with Richard Bonynge, and Bliss with Opera
Australia. Her engagements in 2016 include
La bohème and Der Ring des Nibelungen for
Opera Australia.
Twice awarded the Queen Elizabeth II
Silver Jubilee award, Australian tenor Steve
Davislim began as a horn player, then
studied voice at the VCA under Dame Joan
Hammond. After attending Zurich Opera’s
Opernstudio, he started his career as an
ensemble member of the Zurich Opera.
Engagements include Beethoven’s Ninth
(London Symphony Orchestra and Bernard
Haitink), Das Lied von der Erde (Bordeaux),
Dvořák’s Stabat mater (Basilique Cathédrale
de Saint-Denis, Paris), Tamino in The Magic
Flute (Semperoper Dresden), Mozart’s
Requiem with Thielemann (Salzburg), the
Italian Singer in Der Rosenkavalier (National
Symphony Orchestra, Kennedy Centre and
Christoph Eschenbach), Richard Strauss
Orchestral Songs (the Hallé and Sir Mark
Elder), and Elijah with Hengelbrock. His
extensive discography includes Bach cantatas
with Sir John Eliot Gardiner, Martinu° ’s
Giulietta with Sir Charles Mackerras, Tippett’s
A Child of Our Time with Sir Colin Davis
and the LSO, Brahms’ Rinaldo with Michel
Plasson, and Richard Strauss songs with
Orchestra Victoria and Simone Young.
2015/16 highlights include Beethoven’s
Ninth (Berlin Philharmonic and Sir Simon
Rattle), Bruckner’s Te Deum (Chicago
Symphony Orchestra and Riccardo Muti),
Elijah (Gewandhaus Orchestra, Leipzig),
Baron Kronthal in Lortzing’s Der Wildschütz
(Semperoper Dresden), Tom in The Rake’s
Progress (Finnish National Opera) and, in
Australia, Beethoven’s Ninth (SSO), Haydn’s
Creation (TSO), Mozart’s Requiem (WASO)
and in recital (ANAM).
Derek Welton has performed in concert
at venues across Europe, North America,
Asia and Australasia in repertoire that
includes over 60 choral and orchestral
works as well as a diverse song repertoire.
His many operatic roles include Figaro
in Glyndebourne’s touring production of
The Marriage of Figaro, and Voland in
York Höller’s The Master and Margarita at
Hamburg State Opera. His competition wins
include the Emmerich Smola Förderpreis
and the Australian Youth Aria. He has been
a member of the ensemble of the Deutsche
Oper Berlin since the 2015/16 season. His
roles there for 2016/17 include Saint-Bris in
Les Huguenots under Michele Mariotti, Peter
in Hansel and Gretel under Nicholas Carter,
Klingsor in Parsifal under Donald Runnicles
and Mr Flint in Billy Budd under Moritz
Gnann. Concerts for the 2016/17 season
include A Child of our Time with the Leipzig
Gewandhaus Orchestra under Stefan Asbury
and Martinu° ’s The Epic of Gilgamesh with the
Czech Philharmonic under Jiří Bělohlávek.
Recordings include a solo CD of Vaughan
Williams with Iain Burnside, as Creonte on
Pinchgut Live’s CD of Haydn’s L’anima del
filosofo and on Christian Thielemann DVDs
of Parsifal and Richard Strauss’s Arabella.
Derek Welton is a graduate of the University
of Melbourne and London’s Guildhall School
of Music and Drama.
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JOSEPH HAYDN (1732-1809)
The Creation
TSO CHORUS
The TSO Chorus is an auditioned group
of approximately 80 voices. June Tyzack
has been Chorusmaster since 2001 and
is supported by Assistant Chorusmaster
Andrew Bainbridge. Founded in 1992 to
present concert performances of opera,
the TSO Chorus has since broadened
its repertoire to include the requiems of
Mozart, Cherubini, Brahms, Verdi, Fauré,
and Sculthorpe; masses by Mozart, Haydn,
Schubert and Puccini; and symphonies
by Beethoven, Mendelssohn, Mahler, and
Vaughan Williams. Many performances are
broadcast on ABC Classic FM. In addition
to performing with the TSO and touring
regional Tasmania, the TSO Chorus is
frequently invited to augment interstate
symphonic choirs. Since 2006 the TSO
Chorus has performed at the Sydney
Opera House, the Adelaide Festival and
Perth Concert Hall. In 2012 members of
the TSO Chorus made their international
debut augmenting the WASO Chorus in
performances of Brahms’s Ein Deutsches
Requiem in Hong Kong with Jaap van
Zweden and the Hong Kong Philharmonic
Orchestra. Concerts with the TSO in 2016
include the Gilbert and Sullivan Spectacular,
Haydn’s Creation and, as part of the Festival
of Voices, JS Bach’s St Matthew Passion.
The TSO Chorus welcomes new members.
Interested choristers should contact the
Chorus Coordinator on 6232 4421 or go to
tsochorus.com.au for more information.
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HAYDN’S CREATION
AND HOBART TOWN HALL
“The new Town Hall, Hobart Town, is a
magnificent pile of buildings situated in
Macquarie-street, between Elizabeth and
Argyle-street, on a block of land granted
to the Corporation by the Government…
It consists of a centre and two wings,
containing Town Hall, Court-house,
public library and reading room besides a
multiplicity of ante-chambers and offices.
The centre building was designed on the
example of the celebrated Farnese palace
at Rome…”
Mercury, 25 October 1866
The City of Hobart and Haydn’s Creation
have been entwined ever since the opening
of Hobart Town Hall in September 1866,
with Haydn’s oratorio as the key work in an
accompanying music festival. The inaugural
concert on 27 September 1866 was so
strongly attended – it was reported that
hundreds of patrons had to be turned away
– a second performance of The Creation
was given two days later. Not only were
these the first concerts in Hobart Town Hall,
they were the first complete performances
of Haydn’s oratorio in Tasmania. One would
like to imagine that the quality of the musicmaking was high, but the orchestra was
wildly unbalanced: a reasonably complete
wind, brass and percussion band (that said,
there were no horns) competed with a string
section of only 13 players (including a solitary
viola!). The choral forces must have been
substantial with possibly up to 170 singers
taking part. One of the soloists was Mr Henry
Hunter, the Town Hall’s architect.
Haydn’s The Creation is a masterpiece
and a miracle. As a masterwork, few
would dispute its qualifications: exquisitely
beautiful arias, brilliant use of orchestral
colours, and choruses bursting with delight,
all on a scale both epic and intimate.
What makes it miraculous is that it was
created, like the world it describes,
from nothing.
Haydn in 1797 was an international musical
superstar. The composer who for more than
a decade had been thrilling Europe with
his ground-breaking symphonies and string
quartets while confined to his employer’s
palace at Eszterháza, in the backwoods of
Hungary, had at last appeared in the flesh,
with two immensely successful trips to
London.
Haydn returned from his London seasons
a wealthy man. But money was not all he
had acquired: he had experienced for the
first time the oratorios of Handel – not just
the music, but the overwhelming emotional
effect of Messiah and Israel in Egypt,
performed in Westminster Abbey by more
than 1000 musicians, and not for a small
circle of connoisseurs, but reaching a vast
crowd of ordinary music lovers.
Haydn’s tour manager, Johann Salomon,
must have seen how impressed the
composer was by his Handel experience:
just as Haydn was leaving London for
the second time, Salomon handed him a
libretto that had originally been written for
Handel himself. Nobody could remember
who had written it, but certainly Handel
had never composed any music for it.
The subject was the creation of the world.
Would Haydn be interested in using it for
an oratorio of his own?
Haydn most definitely was. But his English
wasn’t great, so he turned to his friend
Baron Gottfried van Swieten, who created
a German version based very closely on
the original English (which in turn drew very
heavily on the Biblical books of Genesis and
the Psalms, and on Milton’s poem Paradise
Lost). After Haydn had written the music,
Swieten then translated the text back into
English in a version that would fit the same
rhythms as the German – making it the
first large-scale work in music history to be
published with a bilingual text.
Making “singable” translations is always a
difficult task, and Swieten’s English, though
much better than Haydn’s, was by no means
perfect, resulting in some very strange turns
of phrase (“ye finny tribes”, for fish, and
Adam’s forehead described as “the large
and arched front sublime”) and some
German word order that doesn’t work in
English. The real challenge of setting the
text to music, though, was the subject
matter itself – there is basically no story,
in any kind of dramatic sense. Perhaps
this is why Handel had let this libretto lie:
it’s all good news. Three angels, Raphael,
Gabriel and Uriel, tell how over the course
of six days God creates heaven and earth
and all living things – but stopping before
Adam and Eve get expelled from Paradise.
Nothing goes wrong here, and nobody gets
hurt. And this is where Haydn works his
miracle: out of a story with no real drama
in it, which does nothing but get happier
and happier, Haydn creates music that has
direction and shape.
There is, of course, plenty of scope for
musical word painting, and Haydn takes
full advantage of every opportunity. We
hear the surging of the sea in Raphael’s
aria “Rolling in foaming billows” on the
Third Day; the powerful strokes of the
eagle’s wings and trilling of the nightingale
in Gabriel’s aria “On mighty pens” on the
Fifth Day; and the “sudden leaps” of the
“flexible tiger” in Raphael’s recitative “Strait
opening her fertile womb” on the Sixth Day.
One of the tools that Haydn (more so than
Handel) was able to use was the orchestra
itself. Developments in the construction
of wind instruments at the end of the 18th
century had made them much more reliable
members of the orchestra, and so on the
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glorious explosion of sound which is in fact
the simplest of musical resources: a simple
(though very large) C major chord.
The Creation was first performed in April
1798 in Vienna, in a private performance
for Haydn’s patron Prince Joseph von
Schwarzenberg and his guests; thirty police
officers had to be called to hold back the
crowds trying to get in. At the first public
performance, in March 1799, the theatre
was completely full three hours before the
start of the concert. In London the following
year, poor Salomon missed out on giving
the English première performance when a
rival impresario managed to get hold of a
copy of the score and arrange for copies to
be made of parts for 120 performers, all in
less than one week – this in the days before
photocopiers!
JOSEPH HAYDN
Sixth Day, flute and bassoon together evoke
a tranquil scene of cattle grazing on the
meadows; trombone and contrabassoon
add their earth-shaking resonances to
the roar of the “tawny lion”; and there is
a special magic in Haydn’s use of the low
strings to take us down into the ‘watery
deep’ on the Fifth Day.
The one place in the story where something
decisive does happen is right at the
beginning, and here Haydn gives us a coup
de théâtre which amazed and delighted
his audiences to the point where the music
couldn’t continue for the thunderous
applause. He begins with an extended
musical reflection of the chaos before the
Creation: harmonies that don’t resolve as
we expect, unexpected surges of sound,
individual instruments attempting fragments
of melodies. And then, when God achieves
his first act of creation by calling Light
into being, Haydn dazzles our ears with a
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In 1802, amidst all this acclaim, Haydn
recalled his experience of writing The
Creation: “Often, when I was struggling
with all kinds of obstacles…a secret voice
whispered to me: ‘There are so few happy
and contented people in this world; sorrow
and grief follow them everywhere; perhaps
your labour will become a source from which
the careworn…will for a while derive peace
and refreshment.’” May it be so tonight, and
always.
Natalie Shea © 2016
The Tasmanian Symphony Orchestra first
performed this work with conductor Richard Divall,
soloists Marilyn Richardson, Robert Gard and
Russell Smith, and the Tasmanian Conservatorium
Chorale in Hobart on 14 December 1978 and,
most recently, with Sebastian Lang-Lessing,
Sara Macliver, Jamie Allen, Daniel Sumegi and the
TSO Chorus Hobart on 5 July 2008.
PART ONE
1Introduction
The Representation of Chaos.
Recitative (Raphael, Chorus, Uriel)
In the beginning God created the heaven
and the earth.
2 Aria (Uriel, Chorus)
Now vanish before the holy beams.
17 Trio (Gabriel, Uriel, Raphael)
Most beautiful appear.
18 Chorus (Gabriel, Uriel, Raphael, Chorus)
The Lord is great.
19 Recitative (Raphael)
And God said: Let the earth bring forth.
3 Recitative (Raphael)
And God made the firmament.
20 Recitative (Raphael)
Strait opening her fertile womb, the earth
obey’d the word.
4 Chorus (Gabriel, Chorus)
The marv’lous work beholds amaz’d.
21 Aria (Raphael)
Now heav’n in fullest glory shone.
5 Recitative (Raphael)
And God said: Let the waters under the
heaven be gathered together.
22 Recitative (Uriel)
And God created man in his own image.
6 Aria (Raphael)
Rolling in foaming billows uplifted roars
the boist’rous sea.
7 Recitative (Gabriel)
And God said: Let the earth bring forth
grass.
8 Aria (Gabriel)
With verdure clad the fields appear.
9 Recitative (Uriel)
And the heavenly host proclaimed.
10Chorus
Awake the harp, the lyre awake!
11 Recitative (Uriel)
And God said: Let there be lights.
12 Recitative (Uriel)
In splendour bright is rising now the sun.
13 Chorus (Chorus, Gabriel, Uriel, Raphael)
The heavens are telling the glory of God.
PART TWO
14 Recitative (Gabriel)
And God said: Let the waters bring forth.
15 Aria (Gabriel)
On mighty pens uplifted soars the eagle
aloft.
16 Recitative (Raphael)
And God created great whales.
23 Aria (Uriel)
In native worth and honour clad.
24 Recitative (Raphael)
And God saw ev’ry thing that he had
made.
25Chorus
Achieved is the glorious work (I).
26 Trio (Gabriel, Uriel, Raphael)
On thee each living soul awaits.
27Chorus
Achieved is the glorious work (II).
PART THREE
28 Recitative (Uriel)
In rosy mantle appears.
29 Chorus (Adam, Eve, Chorus)
By thee with bliss, O bounteous Lord.
30 Recitative (Adam, Eve)
Our duty we performed now in off’ring
up to God our thanks.
31 Duet (Adam, Eve)
Graceful consort! At thy side.
32 Recitative (Uriel)
O happy pair, and always happy yet.
33 Chorus with Soloists
Sing the Lord ye voices all!
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