Royal Concertgebouw
Orchestra Amsterdam
16–17 December 2016
Royal Concertgebouw
Orchestra Amsterdam
musicians from the National Youth Orchestra
of Great Britain
Lisa Batiashvili violin
Daniele Gatti conductor
Generously supported by the SHM Foundation
and the Gordon Family
Part of Barbican Presents 2016–17
International Associate Residency
Programme produced by Harriet Smith;
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The Residency
Fri 16 Dec
Sun 18 Dec
7.30pm, Hall
Prokofiev Violin Concerto No 2
11am, Barbican Centre
NYO Inspire Day
interval 20 minutes
Stravinsky Jeu de cartes
Ravel Daphnis et Chloé – Suite No 2
Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra Amsterdam
Daniele Gatti conductor
Lisa Batiashvili violin A collaborative project between the Barbican,
National Youth Orchestra of Great Britain (NYO)
and LSO On Track, in which 100 young people from
Music Education Hubs in East London will be invited
to join musicians from the NYO in peer-to-peer
coaching.
Sat 17 Dec
The day culminates in a public performance with
musicians from NYO and the young musicians from
the Music Education Hubs performing together on
the Barbican stage.
2.30pm, Hall
Wagner Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg –
Prelude (Act 1) *
Götterdämmerung – Dawn; Siegfried’s Rhine
Journey; Siegfried’s Death and Funeral March
interval 20 minutes
Mahler Symphony No 10 – Adagio
Berg Three Orchestral Pieces, Op 6
Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra Amsterdam
Daniele Gatti conductor
* musicians from the National Youth Orchestra
of Great Britain
4.15pm, Hall
Wagner Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg –
Prelude (Act 1)
Sian Edwards conductor
Barbican Classical Music Podcasts
2
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Welcome
Welcome
I’m delighted to welcome you to a residency
by an orchestra that needs no introduction:
the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra
Amsterdam. At the helm is its new chief
conductor Daniele Gatti, who took up the
post at the beginning of this season, 12
years after he first conducted the orchestra.
It says much for the ensemble that Daniele
Gatti is only the seventh figure to hold
this post in a history that stretches back
to 1888. Their tour is part of the ‘RCO
meets Europe’ initiative, which will see the
orchestra visit all 28 member states of the
European Union over the next two years.
for Prokofiev’s Second Violin Concerto,
which forms an upbeat to two vibrant
ballet scores. Stravinsky’s Jeu de cartes
was written for the great choreographer
George Balanchine, while Ravel’s Daphnis
et Chloé – from which we hear the
Second Suite – is a lustrously evocative
take on its Ancient Greek subject matter.
This weekend closes with an NYO Inspire
Day. Having been inspired by their
side-by-side with members of the Royal
Concertgebouw Orchestra, young people
from the National Youth Orchestra of Great
Britain will in turn work with 100 other young
people from across London to introduce
Key to that is the ‘Side by Side’ project,
them to the Prelude from Wagner’s Die
which allows outstanding young musicians
Meistersinger von Nürnberg. Together, the
in each country to work with the orchestra. In young people will perform the piece on the
this instance, it is players from the National
Barbican Concert Hall stage, conducted by
Youth Orchestra of Great Britain, who
Sian Edwards. This project aims to ensure
join the Concertgebouw players in the
that knowledge and learning is shared
Wagner that begins Saturday’s concert.
between young people of different musical
Mahler is a composer with which the
abilities, who are all aspiring and achieving
Concertgebouw is particularly associated
the best they can on their instrument.
so it’s fitting that we should hear the Adagio
from his final, unfinished symphony., the
I hope you enjoy the weekend.
10th. Berg’s Three Orchestral Pieces date
from only a few years later but occupy
Huw Humphreys
an entirely different sound world.
Head of Music
3
Prior to that, on Friday evening, the
Concertgebouw is joined by Lisa Batiashvili
Friday 16 December
Sergey Prokofiev (1891–1953)
Violin Concerto No 2 in G minor, Op 63
(1934–5)
1 Allegro moderato
2 Andante assai
3 Allegro ben marcato
Lisa Batiashvili violin
At once an innovator who delighted to offend
and a traditionalist hankering after simpler,
clearer melodies, Sergey Prokofiev is less easily
pigeonholed than his great Russian
contemporary Igor Stravinsky, the assured,
cosmopolitan, Picasso-like figure of 20thcentury music. He and Stravinsky were
comrades of a sort but the relationship was
never easy and lapsed when the two men lost
direct contact after Prokofiev’s permanent
return to the Soviet Union in 1936. Prokofiev
could always be sure of trumping his old friend
in the role of performer, so it is paradoxical that
his two violin concertos should be at least as
impressive as the five works he composed for
his own instrument, the piano. The First Violin
Concerto, Op 19, was in the main the product of
1917, the year of revolutions, yet its music has no
truck with the spirit of the age – which is
perhaps why Stravinsky had such a soft spot for
it. Despite its cosmopolitan, Western origins, the
Second Violin Concerto has a foot in both
worlds. Prior to relocating his family to Moscow,
Prokofiev here rediscovers compositionally what
it means to be a Russian.
Neither Dushkin nor Soetens were players of the
very front rank but Prokofiev was satisfied
enough to promise to ‘write something’ for the
latter. The present concerto followed in 1935, the
result of a commission by some affluent
associates. Subsequently the composer and
violinist undertook a 40-concert tour in Spain,
Portugal, Morocco, Algeria and Tunisia – the
first time that Prokofiev, as a pianist, had ever
shared a platform with another soloist and a
high point in the career of a violinist who
survived into his 101st year. The composer wrote:
The variety of places in which that concerto
was written is a reflection of the nomadic
concert-tour existence I led at that time: the
principal theme of the first movement was
written in Paris, the first theme of the second
movement in Voronezh, the orchestration
I completed in Baku, while the first
performance was given in Madrid, in
December 1935.
4
A telegram despatched from Algeria 11 days
after the concerto’s first performance conveys
the pace of a whirlwind existence that perhaps
Some months after Samuel Dushkin’s Berlin
could not go on for ever: ‘I expect to return to
premiere of Stravinsky’s Violin Concerto in
Paris on 23 December, in time to grab my fur
October 1931, Prokofiev composed a Sonata for coat and leave for Moscow.’ Some of its writing
two violins, entrusting its first Paris performance has an exploratory, Stravinskyan asperity but
to Dushkin and the Franco-Belgian violinist
this G minor Concerto keeps to established
Robert Soetens, who had unveiled Ravel’s
precedents in matters of structure and mood. In
Tzigane (in the version for violin and piano).
terms of idiom, Prokofiev adheres to the
The concerto’s opening movement is traditional
in design but begins with a stroke of subtle
originality as the soloist enters alone, modestly
without fanfare. Whether or not one finds in this
sombre unaccompanied gesture that ‘image of
the snow‑covered plains of Russia’ perceived by
Israel Nestyev, Prokofiev’s partisan Soviet
biographer, the seductive second theme really is
‘one of the mature Prokofiev’s most felicitous
revelations’ – a perfect demonstration of his sly
way with a tune. Throughout his career, the
composer would often stretch his melodic line
over a harmonic frame which seems arbitrary or
disconnected on the page but invariably
produces the sense that his theme has been
refreshed. This one comes straight out of Romeo
and Juliet, or seems to do so. Another typical
device is the ‘clockwork’ Baroque
accompaniment that underpins the radiant
arioso-like melody of the slow movement. In the
balletic finale, a pungent, irregular version of the
familiar 19th-century peasant rondo, Prokofiev
takes special care to ensure that the soloist is
never swamped. The main theme is a spiky waltz
etched in by the soloist in double- and triplestopping. The addition of castanets provides a
local colour that may or may not be explained
by the fact that the premiere took place in Spain.
Fri 16 Dec
template of his Romeo and Juliet ballet, which he
hoped would affirm the viability of his quest for
a ‘new simplicity’. Apart from a small battery of
percussion, the concerto reverts to the lighter
scoring of the ‘Classical’ Symphony (No 1), while
its melodic content has the magic memorability
of his recent film score for Lieutenant Kijé, music
both accessible and genuinely fresh.
As with Shostakovich, so with Prokofiev there has
been some attempt to dissect the music for
messages of dissent. Those inclined to this
revisionist viewpoint have detected a parody
here of the Stalinist demand for accessibility in
the obstinately ‘simplified’ accompaniment of
the slow movement’s main idea and an
atmosphere of threat in the finale’s culminating
cadenza-like duet for soloist and bass drum. But
Prokofiev was a man for whom work was the
be-all and end-all, the only salvation, and
listeners must make up their own minds. The
music’s final gesture is characteristic, a sardonic
cadential shrug.
Programme note © David Gutman
interval 20 minutes
Igor Stravinsky (1882–1971)
Jeu de cartes – ballet in three deals (1936)
ballet music without knowing the subject
beforehand’. He subsequently told a Paris
interviewer that he had had the idea for the
work in a taxi, and ‘was so delighted that I
stopped the driver and invited him to have a
drink with me’.
There is circumstantial but not solid evidence
that Jean Cocteau, already the librettist of
Stravinsky’s 1927 opera-oratorio Oedipus rex,
may have contributed a draft scenario. In any
case the score, when it arrived, was heavily
encumbered with stage directions – a curious
reversal of Stravinsky’s by-then habitual distaste
for anecdotal ballet music – and it seems safe to
assume that a lot of the more literal detail will
have been filtered out by Balanchine during the
5
Stravinsky’s second American ballet (after
Apollo) was the outcome of a commission by the
newly formed American Ballet in November
1935. The idea seems to have been for a
‘classical’ ballet to follow on from Apollo, which
Balanchine, the company’s choreographer, had
staged for Diaghilev in 1928, and which he
revived to go with the new work in New York in
April 1937. But the origin of the card-playing
scenario has never been fully explained.
Certainly the original proposal did not go so far
as to mention a subject. When, however,
Balanchine wrote, six months later, suggesting
‘a fantastical subject … [perhaps] Andersen’s
tale The Flowered Ball’, Stravinsky, who had
already composed about a third of the music,
replied sternly, ‘I have never before composed
New York rehearsals, which Stravinsky
attended, and at which he quickly realised that
Balanchine could with advantage be left to
chart his own flexible course through a
narrative of this kind.
6
The game-playing motif is common enough in
Stravinsky’s work. The soldier plays the Devil at
cards in The Soldier’s Tale (1918), and so does
Tom in The Rake’s Progress (1951). Nikolay
Roerich even claimed that a chess-game
scenario was one of the two ideas he put
forward for the ballet that eventually became
The Rite of Spring (1913). But Jeu de cartes is
Stravinsky’s only work based on the literal
framework of a particular game, in this case
poker; and it is also his only work that carries
a moralistic epigraph, a quotation from La
Fontaine about peace being all very well, but of
little use ‘with untrustworthy enemies’. Here the
Joker is such an enemy. In the first of the three
‘deals’ (as Stravinsky calls his scenes) his role is
indecisive, but in the second he helps the three
aces to become four and beat the four queens,
and only in the third is he outwitted when his
Spade sequence is defeated by a royal flush in
Hearts.
Musically, Jeu de cartes is unlike any previous
ballet score by Stravinsky. Its extrovert tone may
hark back to Petrushka (1911), but the wellcushioned neo-Classicism, complete with
near-quotations of Rossini, Beethoven,
Tchaikovsky and others, places it firmly as a
late 1930s precursor of such other American
commissions as the Symphony in C and the
Danses concertantes. It is not only in the leaning
towards quotation that the references are made
obvious. The ballet form itself, with its pas
d’action and its solo variations (for the four
queens in the Second Deal), is as studiously
‘correct’ as the later symphonic form, and even
the orchestra scarcely deviates from the
Classical textbook, with its double woodwind,
standard brass, timpani and strings, to which
only the addition of a tuba and bass drum
would have been a surprise to Beethoven.
Programme note © Stephen Walsh
Daphnis et Chloé – Suite No 2 (1913)
Fri 16 Dec
Maurice Ravel (1875–1937)
1 Lever du jour
2 Pantomime
3 Danse générale
The major problem was that Mikhail Fokine’s
scenario – drawn from a 2nd-century Greek
romance about the frustrated passions of an
innocent goatherd and shepherdess on the Isle
of Lesbos – was far from what the composer
would have chosen himself. Even after reducing
its (for him) embarrassing erotic element to
three chaste embraces for Daphnis and Chloé
he was still not ready to set the story to music.
He had never attempted a serious love scene
before and he had no experience of working
on the epic scale required by Fokine’s structural
concept. When, eventually and miraculously, he
had all but completed what he proudly referred
to as his ‘vast musical fresco’, he continued
to despair of being able to devise music wild
enough for the closing ‘Danse générale’.
The Second Suite comprises the whole of the
third and last scene of the ballet. Chloé has
been abducted by pirates and Daphnis has
fallen in a faint in the grotto of the nymphs. He
is still unconscious when a new day dawns:
as the sun rises from the bass of the orchestra
gradually to assume its full melodic shape,
birds sing their dawn chorus on flutes and
violins and shepherds play their pipes in the
distance. As Daphnis is awakened and reunited
with Chloé, who has been rescued through
the intervention of the god Pan, their yearning
love theme is heard on unison strings.
An old shepherd, represented by repetitive
solo oboe, explains that if Pan saved Chloé
it was in memory of Syrinx, a nymph the god
once loved. The lovers re-enact the story,
dancing together for once, but only briefly:
the nymph eludes the god’s advances and
disappears into a reed bed. Daphnis takes a
panpipe fashioned from the reeds to express
the god’s sorrow and frustration while Chloé
reflects his eloquently virtuoso flute solo in an
increasingly animated dance. Exhausted, she
sinks into Daphnis’s arms, provoking a last
full-scale treatment of their romantic theme.
There are glimpses of Daphnis and Chloé in the
final celebrations but they, like everyone else, are
carried away by the ‘Danse générale’ – Fokine’s
‘whirlpool’ choreography propelled by the
quintuple-time impulse which (with some help
from Rimsky-Korsakov) was Ravel’s inspired lastminute solution to the problem of stimulating and
sustaining an authentically orgiastic bacchanal.
Programme note © Gerald Larner
7
Ravel suffered agonies in writing his ballet
score Daphnis et Chloé. Commissioned by
Sergey Diaghilev well before its scheduled first
performance in Paris in 1910, it was only just
completed in time for the Ballets Russes season
at the Théâtre du Châtelet two years later. In the
meantime – to put Ravel’s efforts into context –
Stravinsky had supplied Diaghilev not only with
The Firebird, to replace Daphnis et Chloé in 1910,
but also with Petrushka for his 1911 Paris season
and had got well started on The Rite of Spring.
Saturday 17 December
Richard Wagner (1813–83)
Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg (1861–7) –
Prelude (Act 1)
Götterdämmerung (1869–74) – Dawn;
Siegfried’s Rhine Journey; Siegfried’s
Death and Funeral March
Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg, Wagner’s great
comedy about Renaissance life in Germany, the
guilds of master-craftsmen and their passionate
pursuit of the arts – with the noble interloper
Walther taking part in a contest of song and
thereby winning not only the crown of laurels but
also the daughter of one of Nuremberg’s richest
merchants – was originally conceived as a comic
counterweight to his 1845 opera Tannhäuser. By
the time Wagner returned to the subject, after his
interrupted labours on The Ring, and after
completing Tristan und Isolde in the late 1850s, he
was a very different composer, and one who was
incapable of writing a work without at least
undertones of profundity. Even so, when he took
up the subject again in December 1861, the idea
was to produce an opera that could be relatively
cheaply staged.
8
What eventually emerged, however, was the
longest musical score written up to that time, with
by far the largest cast of any Wagner music
drama, and a work that made immense
demands on all concerned, not least the
audience. Nor did the comic element remain
uppermost. While the work had begun as a tale
of the triumph of love and spontaneity and youth
over convention and rule-bound stuffiness, in the
end it was the figure of the middle-aged
cobbler-poet Hans Sachs who took centre stage,
with his melancholy broodings about the follies
of mankind.
However, Wagner wrote the Prelude first, and in
it there are no intimations of the pain and
poignancy that lie ahead nor, surprisingly for
Wagner, any allusions to Sachs’s music either. It’s
a wonderfully rich celebration of both community
and youthful ardour, beginning with a long
melody that embodies confidence, vitality and
warmth. The upper woodwinds make a tender
transition to a fanfare-like theme, which is
overwhelming in its grandeur and develops with
all-engulfing majesty. Wagner effects one of his
magical transitions to a stretch of a quite different
character – ardent and evidently erotic – and to
the long melody that will eventually be Walther’s
Prize Song. By now everything is set for rich
development, and in case anyone suspected that
Wagner couldn’t practise the traditional skills of
the German masters, he combines his three main
melodies in lucid counterpoint, triggered by a
crucial ‘ping’ from the triangle. From then on the
Prelude marches to the vast climax that prepares
for the wonderfully rich and varied drama that is
to follow – but not today.
Programme note © Michael Tanner
In the case of the two works from The Ring,
concerts such as these offered Wagner an
opportunity both to hear parts of the great
tetralogy that was not to be mounted complete
for another decade and a half, and to introduce
them to the musical public, which knew him only
by the earlier operas – Der fliegende Holländer,
Tannhäuser and Lohengrin – beyond which he
had now advanced considerably in stylistic
sophistication.
Such concerts were a way of maintaining contact
with the musical world – a problem felt
particularly acutely by Wagner, since not only
was he engaged in a vast project whose
ambition rendered early performance
impracticable, but he had also recently spent
more than a decade in exile, unable to
communicate with the people of the homeland
with which he felt such an affinity.
The need to raise funds was another pressing
consideration that helped him to come to terms
with the practice of presenting ‘numbers’ from
the cycle – a practice which he knew could only
misrepresent the as yet unrealised vision. The
Viennese concerts were successful in both artistic
and public relations terms, but financially less so,
a situation for which Wagner’s characteristically
generous supper parties for the performers must
have been partly responsible. His more cautious
friends were wary of his way of banishing
depression about money: he simply called for
more champagne.
Götterdämmerung, although the last of the music
dramas in The Ring, has been criticised,
accurately enough, for its tendency to revert to
the style of traditional grand opera. Such a
tendency has a lot to do with the fact it was the
first work to be conceived, under the title
Siegfrieds Tod (‘Siegfried’s Death’) when Wagner
Sat 17 Dec
embarked on the tetralogy in 1848. At that time
he had not yet completely thrown off the shackles
of old-fashioned opera and, although the
elaboration of the work dates from much later
(1869–74), Wagner inevitably found that some of
the dramatic situations he had devised – the trio
of conspirators, or Hagen’s summoning of the
vassals in Act 2, for example – propelled him
backwards as much as forwards, in stylistic
terms.
What is surprising, in such circumstances, is not
that there are so many set pieces in
Götterdämmerung, but that there are so few. The
Immolation Scene, occasionally given in
concerts, hardly falls into this category in any
case, since it is a substantial section of the final
act that can be presented unbroken, exactly as it
is in the opera (with a slightly amended opening
to launch it). Apart from Dawn and Siegfried’s
Rhine Journey, and his Funeral March, there is
only one other generally recognised extract that
can be made from the work – Hagen’s Watch
– and that has never achieved the popularity of
the others.
Dawn and Siegfried’s Rhine Journey
This is the substantial interlude that links the
Prologue with the First Act, which gets the action
proper under way in the Hall of the Gibichungs.
The Prologue consists of two parts: the three
Norns, daughters of the earth mother Erda,
endeavouring to determine by means of the rope
of destiny what must befall the world; and, after
a glowing sunrise, a glorious duet for Brünnhilde
and Siegfried. At the end of the previous opera,
he braved the fire encircling her rock to wake her
with a kiss. Now, after their love has been given
(we assume) full expression, she sends him off
down the Rhine in search of deeds of glory to
perform.
From the Hegelian philosophical tradition,
Wagner derived the twin notions that
Brünnhilde’s love for Siegfried can only be
proved by her willingness to grant him his
freedom, while Siegfried’s need to acquire a true
consciousness of himself requires him to enter the
social world to which he was hitherto a complete
stranger (having been brought up in the forest
with only a dwarf and the odd bear for
company).
The Prologue was not part of Wagner’s original
conception for the work: he added it
subsequently in order to show Siegfried and
9
Wagner’s through-composed music dramas,
from Das Rheingold on, depend so heavily for
their momentousness and epic scale on the
seamlessness of their structures that it may come
as something of a surprise to find the composer
sanctioning the performance of selected
highlights from an early stage. In the winter of
1862–3, for example, he gave a series of three
concerts in Vienna devoted mainly to items from
Das Rheingold, Die Walküre and Die
Meistersinger von Nürnberg, none of which had
been performed at that date – indeed, the last of
these pieces was still largely unwritten.
Brünnhilde ‘in their true and calmer relationship’
before they fall out so disastrously. But, once
having decided that a Prologue was necessary,
Wagner had the idea at an early stage that it
should be linked to the main act by an interlude.
The text of Siegfrieds Tod reads at this point: ‘the
orchestra takes up the tune played by the horn
and develops it in a vigorous interlude’.
10
The concert excerpt begins with the music
depicting the ‘red glow of sunrise’, an exquisite
piece of tone-painting that joins the scene of the
three Norns to the duet of Brünnhilde and
Siegfried. Then we leap to the end of the duet
and the exuberant music of Siegfried’s
departure. The excitement gradually abates as
he makes his way down the rock and vanishes
from Brünnhilde’s sight. Siegfried’s characteristic
horn call is heard as he reaches the valley below
and there is a sudden rush of excitement as
Brünnhilde catches sight of him again and waves
in joy. Motifs are then heard in free contrapuntal
combination, notably that of the horn call and the
music of Loge, the fire god, suggesting that the
hero is braving the wall of fire barring the way to
the rock. The motifs of the flowing Rhine burst in
– Siegfried has evidently reached the river – and
the high-spirited music associated with the
Rhinemaidens is also heard. A shadow is cast as
the Rhinemaidens’ music turns into that of the ring
(a minor variant) and the sombre mood is
continued with motifs recalling the renunciation
of love, the gold and the enslavement of the
Nibelungs. The dark colouring of the new tonality
(B minor) and slightly sinister dotted rhythms that
are to characterise the Gibichungs are heard
briefly as the concert excerpt is rounded off.
Siegfried’s boat has brought him to the portals of
the Gibichung Hall, where the next stage of the
tragedy will unfold.
Siegfried’s Funeral March
Siegfried’s contact with the social world, in the
shape of the Gibichung court, causes him,
admittedly under the influence of a magic potion,
to forget and ultimately betray Brünnhilde. In a
vengeful fury she tells Hagen the only way he can
kill Siegfried – by striking at his back: she gave
him no protection there as he would never turn it
on an enemy. Hagen duly spears the hero while
the men are out hunting, and he dies with
Brünnhilde’s name on his lips. To the noble strains
of the Funeral March, Siegfried’s body is carried
in a solemn procession over a rocky height, the
moon breaking through the clouds and shining
more and more brightly as the summit is reached.
The March is both a grandiloquent reflection of
the ideals for which Siegfried, the free hero,
stood and a moving lament for the laying low of
those ideals. In musical terms it is a
representation of the life and ancestry of
Siegfried which are traced in a kind of motivic
pageant. It opens with a military tattoo figure
that is heard throughout. Then come themes
associated with Siegfried’s parents, Siegmund
and Sieglinde, and their love. The music starts to
build to a climax, and the unmistakable motif of
the Sword (built on the common chord of
C major) rings out on a trumpet. The tension is
raised to a further climactic point, drawing on the
motifs of Siegfried and his heroism, and resolved
with a triumphant metamorphosis of a version of
Siegfried’s horn call.
Programme note © Barry Millington
interval 20 minutes
Symphony No 10 in F sharp major –
Adagio (1910)
Then came the discovery that Mahler had
begun another symphony in 1910. The
composer’s widow, Alma, kept a tight hold on
the sketches for another 13 years. But when she
finally released them (or, rather, some of them),
in 1924, it became clear that two movements
– the opening Adagio and a short central
movement, at one stage subtitled ‘Purgatorio’
– were near enough to completion to be
presented in full score. The ‘Purgatorio’ third
movement was, in isolation, baffling – context
was needed to make sense of it, and the
sketches for the second, fourth and fifth
movements seemed too confused and
disconnected to offer any kind of explanation.
Thanks to the painstaking work of the British
musicologist Deryck Cooke, it was eventually
shown that Mahler was far closer to completing
his 10th Symphony than anyone had guessed.
Cooke’s ‘performing version’ of the sketches
revealed – at the very least – that Mahler had
begun to progress beyond the confrontation
with mortality in Das Lied von der Erde and the
Ninth Symphony. Despite the weakness of his
heart, diagnosed in 1907, Mahler might well
have lived to complete the 10th (and perhaps
more symphonies) if it hadn’t been for the
emotional thunderbolt that struck him in the
summer of 1910 – the discovery that his adored
Alma had been having an affair with the
handsome young architect Walter Gropius.
Whatever one’s feelings about Cooke’s
‘performing version’ of the complete 10th
Symphony, the opening Adagio stands by itself
as a remarkable statement, even if one knows
that for Mahler it was only the first stage of a
long, cathartic musical journey. It begins with a
lengthy, painfully searching, entirely
unaccompanied melodic line for the violas.
Throughout the movement this idea alternates
with two other kinds of music: a warmly
expressive theme led by violins with fabulously
rich harmonies and a wintry dance tune in a
faster tempo, with occasional touches of acid,
seemingly nihilistic humour.
Eventually the movement seems to reach a kind
of stasis, with high first and second violins
brooding quietly on the original viola melody. A
colossal full-orchestral outburst leads to an
agonised climax, with a penetrating high
sustained trumpet ‘A’ sounding through massive,
piled-up dissonances. But from this the music –
miraculously – begins to find its way towards a
new peace. The answer to the climactic massive
discord is provided by another slowly piled-up
chord, this time soft-toned, on harp and strings,
warmly confirming the home key. A final sigh
from high strings, a pizzicato chord in the bass,
and the Adagio is over. In the overall scheme of
the 10th Symphony it is only a provisional
ending, but it is still a remarkably effective one.
Programme note © Stephen Johnson
11
When Gustav Mahler died in May 1911, a few
weeks short of his 51st birthday, it was
presumed that his musical ‘last will and
testament’ was contained in the two most recent
works he had left complete, but as yet
unperformed: the ‘song-symphony’ Das Lied
von der Erde and the Symphony No 9 (both
1908–9). The former ends with a long and
exquisite ‘Farewell’, the latter with an Adagio
which, ultimately, melts into silence. Surely there
was no more to be said after such plainly
valedictory utterances as these?
Sat 17 Dec
Gustav Mahler (1860–1911)
Alban Berg (1885–1935)
Three Orchestral Pieces, Op 6
(1914–15, rev 1929)
12
1 Präludium [Prelude]
2 Reigen [Round Dance]
3 Marsch [March]
Between 1912 and 1913 Berg was at work on a
symphony in four connected movements, of
which the last was to have a boy singing a
mystical text from Balzac’s Séraphita.
Schoenberg expressed his disapproval of this
project and Berg eventually abandoned it to
take up his teacher’s suggestion that he should
write instead a suite of ‘character pieces’. Op 6
duly followed, with a dedication to Schoenberg
that was the acknowledgment paid by a pupil
who felt he had now achieved an independent
voice.
often imbued with that Bergian combination of
menace and pathos that was to be expressed
again – quoting Op 6 almost literally – in his first
opera, Wozzeck (1917–22). Another typically
Bergian characteristic is the symmetry displayed
by the first two of the three pieces.
He had indeed, but curiously the main musical
debt repaid in the work was not to Schoenberg
but to Mahler. If Schoenberg was its godfather,
by advice and by the example of continuously
developing orchestral polyphony provided by
his Five Orchestral Pieces, Op 16, then Mahler
was a direct ancestor. The orchestra is a
Mahlerian one, right down to the large hammer
that strikes its fateful blows in the ‘Marsch’, as in
the finale of Mahler’s Sixth Symphony. Equally
Mahlerian is Berg’s use of particular genres in
reference to the world outside: the café waltz in
the ‘Reigen’ (Round Dance), and the military
march in the final piece. Then again, the work
shows clearly how Berg’s harmony grew out of
Mahler’s, with tonal principles struggling for
control of its dense textures. There is, however,
no precedent in Mahler or anywhere else for the
complexity of those textures in the ‘Marsch’, an
achievement all the more remarkable given that
this was the first purely orchestral composition
by the composer, in his late twenties. The work’s
individuality is also clear in its fierce drama,
In the following ‘Reigen’, the waltz runs as a
connecting thread through a variety of musical
situations, emerging from a diffuse introduction
and finally disappearing into a return of this
opening music.
Starting out from the undifferentiated noise of
tam-tams, cymbals and drums, the ‘Präludium’
moves gradually into melodic development by
way of little ostinatos and repeated notes, and
then returns similarly to noise and final silence.
The ‘Marsch’ balances the other two
movements, in terms not only of duration but
also of musical weight. Though it lasts for no
more than nine minutes, it was the longest
instrumental movement yet written by any of the
Schoenberg circle in the years of non-serial
atonality, and Berg was justifiably proud of
having maintained a continuous development
for this span. The real surprise, perhaps, is that
he could compress so much malignity and might
into so short a time. It is always hazardous to
attempt to account for works of art in terms of
general history, but it is hard to overlook the
fact that this catastrophe in sound is dated
August 1914.
Programme note © Paul Griffiths
of Parsifal, the DVD of which was
released in spring 2014.
He made a highly acclaimed debut with the
Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra in 2004
and has regularly conducted the orchestra
ever since. During his first seasons as chief
conductor he plays an important part in the
‘RCO meets Europe’ tour programme.
Daniele Gatti is a Grande Ufficiale al Merito
della Repubblica Italiana and Chevalier
des Arts et des Lettres de la République
Française, and was awarded the prestigious
Franco Abbiati Prize in both 2005 and 2016.
Earlier this year, the French Republic named
him a Chevalier de la Légion d’Honneur.
Daniele Gatti
Daniele Gatti conductor
He has conducted many new productions at
leading opera houses all over the world and
has close ties with Milan’s La Scala and the
Vienna Staatsoper. He is one of the few Italian
conductors to have been invited to the Bayreuth
Festival, where he conducted Parsifal in 2008,
2009, 2010 and 2011. At the Metropolitan
Opera, New York, he made his debut in
Madama Butterfly in 2004 and returned in
2013 for an acclaimed new production
Lisa Batiashvili
Lisa Batiashvili violin
Lisa Batiashvili, Musical America’s 2015
Instrumentalist of the Year, is this season’s Artistin-Residence with the Royal Concertgebouw
Orchestra, as well as a Portrait Artist with the
Bamberg Symphony Orchestra. Praised by
audiences and fellow musicians for her virtuosity
and profound sensitivity, the German-based
Georgian violinist has developed long-standing
relationships with some of the world’s leading
orchestras, including the Berlin and New York
Philharmonic orchestras, Staatskapelle Berlin,
Zurich Tonhalle Orchestra and the Chamber
Orchestra of Europe.
13
As a guest conductor, Daniele Gatti regularly
leads the Berlin and Vienna Philharmonic
orchestras, the Mahler Chamber Orchestra
and the Orchestra Filarmonica della Scala.
Anja Frers
Born in Milan, Daniele Gatti studied piano
and graduated in composition and conducting
at the city’s Verdi Conservatory. He became
chief conductor of the Royal Concertgebouw
Orchestra at the beginning of this season.
Between 2008 and 2016, he was the music
director of the Orchestre National de France.
Prior to this, he was music director of the Royal
Philharmonic (1996–2009), principal conductor
of the Orchestra dell’Accademia Nazionale
di Santa Cecilia in Rome (1992–7), principal
guest conductor at the Royal Opera House,
Covent Garden (1994–7), music director of the
Teatro Comunale in Bologna (1997–2007) and
principal conductor at the Zurich Opera House
(2009–12). In 2016 he was appointed artistic
adviser to the Mahler Chamber Orchestra.
About the performers
About the performers
Highlights this season include performances with
Staatskapelle Dresden (with Gautier Capuçon
and Christian Thielemann), hr-Sinfonieorchester
Frankfurt (Andrés Orozco-Estrada), Los Angeles
Philharmonic (Gustavo Dudamel), London
Symphony Orchestra (Michael Tilson Thomas),
Berlin Philharmonic (Sir Simon Rattle) and Paris
Chamber Orchestra (François Leleux). She recently
gave the world premiere of Anders Hillborg’s
Violin Concerto No 2 with the Royal Stockholm
Philharmonic Orchestra under Sakari Oramo,
followed by a performance with the Leipzig
Gewandhausorchester under Alan Gilbert.
As part of her residency with the Royal
Concertgebouw Orchestra, she will play
Tchaikovsky’s Violin Concerto under Sir Antonio
Pappano, Prokofiev’s Violin Concerto No 2 under
Daniele Gatti and Shostakovich’s Violin Concerto
No 1 under Vladimir Jurowski, while her two
weeks with the Bamberg Symphony Orchestra
see performances of Dvořák’s Violin Concerto
with Ingo Metzmacher; and the Bach and Thierry
Escaich concertos for violin and oboe with Leleux
under Jakub Hrůša. Chamber music projects
include the opening celebration of the Boulez
Saal in Berlin, where she performs with members
of the Staatskapelle Berlin; a series of recitals with
Georgian jazz pianist Beka Gochiashvili; and a
tribute concert to Alfred Brendel in Berlin.
She records exclusively for DG and her
latest album, of the Tchaikovsky and Sibelius
violin concertos with Daniel Barenboim and
Staatskapelle Berlin, has just been released.
Prior to that was a disc of works by J S and
C P E Bach, featuring, among others, Leleux,
Emmanuel Pahud and the Bavarian Radio
Chamber Orchestra. Earlier recordings in her
award-winning discography include concertos by
Brahms, Shostakovich (No 1), Beethoven, Sibelius
and Magnus Lindberg.
14
A student of Ana Chumachenco and Mark
Lubotsky, she gained international recognition at
the age of 16 as the youngest-ever competitor in
the Sibelius Competition. She has been awarded
two ECHO Klassik awards, the MIDEM Classical
Award, the Choc de l’année, the Accademia
Musicale Chigiana International Prize, the
Schleswig-Holstein Music Festival’s Leonard
Bernstein Award and the Beethoven-Ring.
Lisa Batiashvili plays a Joseph Guarneri ‘del
Gesù’ from 1739, generously loaned by a private
collector.
Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra
The Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra is one of the
world’s finest orchestras. It has been consistently
lauded for its unique sound. While the exceptional
acoustics of the Concertgebouw play an
important role in this respect, no other orchestra
sounds like the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra
in the Main Hall. Equally important is the quality of
the musicians themselves and the influence exerted
on the orchestra by its chief conductors, of which
there have been only seven since the orchestra
was founded in 1888: Willem Kes (1888–95),
Willem Mengelberg (1895–1945), Eduard van
Beinum (1945–59), Bernard Haitink (1961–88),
Riccardo Chailly (1988–2004), Mariss Jansons
(2004–15) and, with effect from the 2016/2017
season, Daniele Gatti.
Leading composers such as Gustav Mahler,
Richard Strauss and Igor Stravinsky conducted
the orchestra on more than one occasion.
The orchestra still regularly collaborates with
contemporary composers, including John Adams,
George Benjamin, Tan Dun and the orchestra’s
three house composers, Michel van der Aa, Detlev
Glanert and Richard Rijnvos.
The Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra is made
up of 120 players hailing from over 25 countries.
Despite its size, the orchestra functions more like a
chamber orchestra in terms of the sensitivity with
which its members listen to, and work in tandem
with, one another. Indeed, this requires both
a high individual calibre and a great sense of
mutual trust and confidence.
In addition to some 90 concerts performed at
the Concertgebouw in Amsterdam, the Royal
Concertgebouw Orchestra gives 40 concerts
at leading concert halls throughout the world
each year. That exposure is further increased
thanks to regular radio and television broadcasts.
The orchestra has made over 1,100 LP, CD and
DVD recordings to date, many of which have
won international distinctions. Since 2004, the
Concertgebouw Orchestra has had its own
in-house label, RCO Live.
In celebration of its 125th anniversary in 2013,
the orchestra undertook a world tour, visiting six
continents in a year. Between 2016 and 2018, in
‘RCO meets Europe’, all 28 member states of the
European Union will be visited. In each EU country
the RCO will perform at least one work together
with a local youth orchestra (‘Side by Side’).
National Youth Orchestra of Great Britain
The National Youth Orchestra of Great Britain
(NYO) is the world’s greatest orchestra of
teenagers. Awarding the Queen’s Medal for
Music 2012 to NYO, the committee stated that
no other orchestra in the world has consistently
achieved such brilliance in performance with such
young musicians. Upon being given the Ensemble
Award at the 2016 Royal Philharmonic Society
Music Awards NYO was described as having
been ‘a beacon of excellence for decades’.
Founded in 1948, NYO provides orchestral
performance opportunities for the brightest and
most committed musicians between the ages of
13 and 19. Many of the UK’s greatest musicians,
past and present, are NYO alumni, including Sir
Simon Rattle, Sir Mark Elder and Thomas Adès.
Drawing its 164 musicians from all backgrounds
and every part of the United Kingdom, NYO
comes together three times a year for residential
rehearsals at which its musicians work alongside
leading conductors, tutors and soloists. Each
residency culminates in a high-profile concert tour,
including an annual televised BBC Prom at the
Royal Albert Hall.
About the performers
Side by Side
In ‘Side by Side’, the first work in a concert is
performed together with a local youth orchestra.
In this case, talented musicians from the National
Youth Orchestra of Great Britain share music
stands with RCO members for the Wagner that
opens Saturday’s concert. This enables the Royal
Concertgebouw Orchestra to share its knowledge
and experience with the younger generation
and to cooperate actively with youth orchestras
throughout Europe.
NYO exists to give breakthrough experiences
of orchestral music to teenage musicians and
audiences of all backgrounds. In order to increase
the reach and impact of its activity, it has launched
two strands of activity, ‘NYO Inspire’ and ‘NYO
Open’, which target committed young musicians
who lack opportunities to advance their playing.
Named Classic FM’s Orchestra of Teenagers,
NYO will work with Classic FM to inspire a new
generation of young concertgoers. A major focus
of the partnership is a £5 ticket scheme for under25s to all NYO concerts.
Royal Concertgebouw
Orchestra Amsterdam
Conductors Emeritus
Riccardo Chailly
Mariss Jansons
Conductor Laureate
Bernard Haitink
Honorary Guest
Conductor
Nikolaus Harnoncourt
(† 2016)
Violin 1
Vesko Eschkenazy
leader
Liviu Prunaru leader
Tjeerd Top
Marijn Mijnders
Ursula Schoch
Marleen Asberg
Keiko Iwata-Takahashi
Tomoko Kurita
Henriëtte Luytjes
Borika van den Booren
Marc Daniel
van Biemen
Christian van Eggelen
Sylvia Huang
Mirte de Kok
Junko Naito
Benjamin Peled
Nienke van Rijn
Jelena Ristic
Valentina Svyatlovskaya
Michael Waterman
Violin 2
Henk Rubingh *
Caroline Strumphler
Susanne Niesporek
Jae-Won Lee
Anna de Vey Mestdagh
Paul Peter Spiering
Herre Halbertsma
Marc de Groot
Arndt Auhagen
Leonie Bot
Sanne Hunfeld
Mirelys Morgan
Verdecia
Sjaan Oomen
Jane Piper
Eke van Spiegel
Annebeth Webb
Joanna Westers
Viola
Ken Hakii *
Michael Gieler
Saeko Oguma
Frederik Boits
Roland Krämer
Guus Jeukendrup
Jeroen Quint
Eva Smit
Martina Forni
Harold Hirtz
Yoko Kanamaru
Vilém Kijonka
Edith van Moergastel
Vincent Peters
Jeroen Woudstra
Cello
Gregor Horsch *
Tatjana Vassiljeva *
Johan van Iersel
Fred Edelen
Benedikt Enzler
Arthur Oomens
Chris van Balen
15
Chief Conductor
Daniele Gatti
Jérôme Fruchart
Christian Hacker
Maartje-Maria
den Herder
Honorine Schaeffer
Julia Tom
Double Bass
Dominic Seldis *
Pierre-Emmanuel
de Maistre
Théotime Voisin
Mariëtta Feltkamp
Carol Harte
Rob Dirksen
Georgina Poad
Nicholas Schwartz
Olivier Thiery
Flute
Emily Beynon *
Kersten McCall *
Julie Moulin
Mariya
Semotyuk-Schlaffke
Piccolo
Vincent Cortvrint
Oboe
Alexei Ogrintchouk *
Ivan Podyomov *
Nicoline Alt
Kyeong Ham
Cor anglais
Miriam Pastor Burgos
Clarinet
Calogero Palermo *
Olivier Patey *
Hein Wiedijk
E flat Clarinet
Arno Piters
Bass Clarinet
Davide Lattuada
Bassoon
Ronald Karten *
Gustavo Núñez *
Helma van den Brink
Jos de Lange
Contrabassoon
Simon Van Holen
Horn
Laurens Woudenberg*
Peter Steinmann
Sharon St Onge
José Luis Sogorb Jover
Fons Verspaandonk
Jaap van der Vliet
Paulien
Weierink-Goossen
Trumpet
Miroslav Petkov*
Omar Tomasoni*
Hans Alting
Jacco Groenendijk
Bert Langenkamp
Trombone
Bart Claessens*
Jörgen van Rijen*
Nico Schippers
Staff on tour
Managing Director
Jan Raes
Director of Artistic
Administration
Joel Ethan Fried
Planning & Production
Manager
Lisette Castel
Tenor/Bass Trombone
Martin Schippers
Tour Manager
Else Broekman
Bass Trombone
Raymond Munnecom
Assistant Tour
Manager
Manon Wagenmakers
Tuba
Perry Hoogendijk *
Timpani
Marinus Komst *
Nick Woud *
Percussion
Mark Braafhart
Bence Major
Herman Rieken
Harp
Petra van der Heide *
Gerda Ockers
* principal player
Public Relations
Manager
Michiel Jongejan
Personnel Managers
Harriët van Uden
Peter Tollenaar
Librarian
Douwe Zuidema
Stage Manager
Jan Ummels
Stage Hands
Johan van Maaren
Ton van der Meer
National Youth Orchestra
of Great Britain
16
Violin 1
Elodie ChousmerHowelles
Leora Cohen
Katalin Oldland
Sabrina Davis
Leo Appel
Ilai Avni
Harry Kneeshaw
Violin 2
Patrick Bevan
Olivia Ziani
Freddie Flintoff
Alexander Semple
Faye Zhao
Leon Human
Viola
Helena Bartlett
Seehee Lim
Georgia Russell
Elena Accogli
Ynyr Pritchard
Cello
Joe Pritchard
Hugh Mackay
Joshua Mock
Emily Hanover
Double Bass
Harry Atkinson
Alex Jones
Thea Sayer
Flute
Stefan Cunningham
Trumpet
Shannon Harper
Oboe
Helena Mackie
Trombone
Sam Gale
Clarinet
Andrei Caval
Tuba
Charlie Jones
Bassoon
Lucy Dundas
Percussion
Matthew Venvell
Horn
Livi Gandee
Jacob Dean
Harp
Iona Duncan