FOUR
SEASONS
Estate Planning
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Friday
12 May 7.30pm
Princess Theatre
Launceston
Emma McGrath director & violin
Elinor Lea violin
Concerto in A minor, RV356
Allegro
Largo
Presto
VIVALDI
Concerto in G, RV151, Alla rustica
Presto
Adagio
Allegro
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PHOTO OF
Emma McGrath
Concertmaster
Duration 9 mins
INTERVAL
Duration 4 mins
Duration 20 mins
Concerto for Two Violins in A minor,
RV522
Allegro
Larghetto e spiritoso
Allegro
RICHTER
Recomposed: Vivaldi The Four Seasons
Spring 0 - 3
Summer 1 - 3
Autumn 1 - 3
Winter 1 - 3
Duration 11 mins
HOBART BAROQUE 1
LAUNCESTON 2
Thursday
11 May 7.30pm
Federation Concert Hall
Hobart
Concerto in A, RV158
Allegro molto
Andante molto
Allegro
Duration 44 mins
Duration 8 mins
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Antonio Vivaldi (1678-1741)
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Emma McGrath
Elinor Lea
Heralded as a “first-magnitude star
in the making” by the Seattle Times,
British violinist Emma McGrath became
Concertmaster of the Tasmanian Symphony
Orchestra at the start of 2016. She made
her London debut aged ten in the Purcell
Room at the Southbank Centre and at
age 14 performed Bruch’s Violin Concerto
No 1 in the Queen Elizabeth Hall with the
London Philharmonic Orchestra conducted
by Howard Shelley. Emma has performed
as a soloist throughout the UK, Europe,
South-East Asia, Russia, Israel and the
USA. From 2009 to 2016 she was Associate
Concertmaster of the Seattle Symphony
Orchestra and Seattle Opera Orchestra,
and was Concertmaster for Seattle’s 2012
production of Wagner’s Der Ring des
Nibelungen. She was previously Assistant
Concertmaster of the Colorado Symphony
Orchestra and has also performed with
the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra, the
Chicago Symphony Orchestra and the
Australian Chamber Orchestra. She has
also been a Guest Concertmaster for
the BBC Symphony Orchestra and the
BBC Philharmonic Orchestra. Emma is a
graduate of the Royal College of Music in
London and Carnegie Mellon University
in Pittsburgh in the USA. In addition to
her orchestral career, she is a professional
singer, folk musician, and a published and
recorded composer.
An internationally acclaimed artist, Elinor
Lea has played in the world’s great music
centres, performing in the Albert Hall,
Wigmore Hall, the Royal Concertgebouw,
the Berlin Schauspielhaus and the Franz
Liszt Hall. Growing up in Adelaide, her
remarkable musical talents were rewarded
when she was 19 by an offer from the
celebrated Australian String Quartet to
join them as a permanent member. With
the ASQ, apart from the extensive touring,
she recorded frequently for labels such as
Naxos and ABC Classics. The repertoire
represented in these recordings is not only
the standard classics of chamber music
but also an incredible volume of works by
Australian composers. For her contributions
to Australian culture, she has been
awarded the Australian Centenary Medal
for Advancement of Music as well the
Advance Australia Award for Outstanding
Contribution in the Arts. In 2013 she
founded the Huon String Quartet with other
members of the TSO and has continued
to enrich the Tasmanian community with
concerts, broadcasts and recordings. Her
sound, both pure and unaffected, has been
described by Limelight magazine as “...
thrillingly suspenseful...painful in its beauty
and with fantastic textural contrasts”.
Possessing an innate musical versatility
Elinor Lea comfortably shifts from her role
as Associate Concertmaster in the TSO to
soloist and to chamber musician.
Concerto in G, RV151, Alla rustica
Concerto for Two Violins in A minor,
RV522
Concerto in A, RV158
Concerto in A minor, RV356
Antonio Vivaldi hardly needs any
introduction. One of the most influential
composers of the baroque, Vivaldi wrote
more than 500 concertos, of which about
230 are for solo violin and orchestra. He
also composed concertos for solo bassoon,
cello, oboe, flute, viola d’amore, recorder
and mandolin, as well as concertos for
two or more solo instruments. Less well
known is the fact that Vivaldi composed
a significant quantity of operas, of which
21 survive, although not all in complete
form. He also composed sacred music,
such as his setting of the Gloria, which is
nowadays his most popular choral work.
The son of a professional violinist based
at the basilica of San Marco in Venice,
Vivaldi probably learnt the violin from his
father. He trained for the priesthood and
was ordained shortly after he turned 25.
A redhead, Vivaldi was subsequently known
by the nickname “Il prete rosso” (The Red
Priest). Although he remained a padre,
Vivaldi ceased saying the mass a few years
after his ordination, probably because of
chronic bronchial asthma. But his delicate
constitution did not prevent him from
making a name for himself as a violinist,
composer and teacher. Vivaldi enjoyed a
long professional association (nearly 40
years) with the Ospedale della Pietà, a
church-run institution that functioned as a
conservatory for girls, orphanage, nunnery
and school. The great majority of Vivaldi’s
concertos were written for the all-female
orchestra of the Pietà.
All four of the Vivaldi concertos performed
in this concert conform to the standard
three-movement model in which fast
outer movements enclose a slow middle
Church of the Pietà in Venice
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Max Richter (born 1966)
movement. The first, the Concerto in
G, Alla rustica, is one of Vivaldi’s bestknown works. The nickname “rustica”
refers to the boisterous figuration of the
opening movement, which is intentionally
unpolished and rustic. No single instrument
or group of instruments is highlighted
in this concerto; rather, it is a so-called
“ripieno concerto” or “orchestral concerto”.
It utilises the form, gestures and textures
of the concerto without actually bringing
to the fore a solo instrument or group of
instruments.
The Concerto for
Two Violins in A
minor belongs
to the collection
that made
Vivaldi famous,
L’estro armonico
(The Harmonic
Inspiration).
Published as
Vivaldi’s Op 3 in
Amsterdam in
1711, this volume brought Vivaldi’s music
to the attention of musicians outside Italy,
including JS Bach, who came to know
the ins and outs of the concerto through
close examination of Vivaldi’s music. Bach
even arranged some of the concertos from
L’estro armonico, including this one (which
became the Organ Concerto BWV593).
Vivaldi did more than any other composer
to champion the concerto as a genre,
and through his concertos he made an
enormous contribution to consolidating and
expanding violin technique and establishing
the fundamental harmonic grammar of
Western tonal music (in a nutshell: the
primacy of the cycle of descending fifths).
His influence, therefore, can hardly be
underestimated.
The Concerto in A brings a return to the
ripieno-style concerto of the Concerto in
G, RV151 (works of this type might equally
have been called “sinfonia” in the early
18th century). It illustrates many of the key
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features of Vivaldi’s instrumental writing: a
ritornello announced at the start of the fast
movements (think of it as a “hook”); the
“spinning out” of melodic ideas through
repetition, fragmentation, extension and
the use of sequences; and rhythmic energy
through strong attack and rapid bow
strokes.
We return to the famous collection
L’estro armonico for the final concerto,
the Concerto in A minor. Also known as
Op 3 No 6, this concerto is among the
most well-known of all of Vivaldi’s works.
The opening movement, Allegro, follows
the conventions of ritornello form, while
the middle movement, Largo, offers an
instrumental version of an opera aria (and
a mournful one at that) with the solo violin
taking on the role of the singer. Finally,
the concerto is rounded off with a Presto
in which the soloist delivers some brilliant
flourishes.
Vivaldi’s already significant reputation was
enhanced still further with the publication
in 1725 of what became known as his
Op 8 collection of solo violin concertos,
Il cimento dell’armonia e dell’invenzione
(The Contest of Harmony and Invention).
The first four concertos in this collection
of 12 are Le quattro stagione (The Four
Seasons), the most enduringly popular
of all of Vivaldi’s works.
Despite Vivaldi’s status and influence,
he died in penury in Vienna. His music
remained neglected for the better part
of two centuries but has made a spectacular
comeback in recent decades. Indeed,
The Four Seasons is one of the most
recorded pieces of classical music of all
time. It forms the basis of Max Richter’s
Recomposed, which is heard in the
second half of this concert.
© Robert Gibson 2017
Recomposed: Vivaldi The Four Seasons
Spring 0 - 3
Summer 1 - 3
Autumn 1 - 3
Winter 1 - 3
Vivaldi knew the value of publishing his
music, and his Four Seasons forms part of
Il cimento dell’armonia e dell’inventione
(The Contest of Harmony and Invention),
Op 8, which was published, using the new
technology of engraved plates, in 1725 in
Amsterdam. His musical rhetoric exquisitely
depicts the seasons’ progress and annual
rhythms of life, described also in sonnets
(possibly written by him) that he affixed to
the score.
Vivaldi also knew the value of not
publishing certain works, understanding
that anything in print was fair game for
other composers to copy – Bach did
just that with several of Vivaldi’s pieces.
Baroque composers were accustomed to
the notion of “parody” in its original sense:
composers might borrow music from their
own or others’ instrumental music and set
the words of, say, the mass to them.
Despite the digital electronic element,
Vivaldi would, then, have been unsurprised
and probably quite comfortable with
Max Richter’s “recomposition” of his
most popular work in 2012. The Germanborn British composer has a distinguished
career in electro-acoustic work, including
scores for the stage and screen, and the
post-minimalist aspect of his style makes
for a fruitful point of contact between his
music and that of the Baroque. But this
is no mere arrangement or remix: as the
composer has noted:
I wanted to open up the score on a
note-by-note level, and working with
an existing recording was like digging
a mineshaft through an incredibly
rich seam, discovering diamonds
and not being able to pull them out.
That became frustrating. I wanted to
get inside the score at the level of
the notes and in essence rewrite it,
recomposing it in a literal way.
In the event, with quasi-minimalist
repetition and dramatic elisions of Vivaldi’s
music, Richter estimates he retained about
one quarter of the original. He begins with
a brief sound sculpture that sets the scene
for Spring; in the first movement proper
he plays with Vivaldi’s birdcalls over a new,
slow-moving ostinato of magisterial chords.
Similarly, in the other two movements a
phrase from the original is repeated and
examined from different angles; Vivaldi’s
nymphs and shepherds are omitted.
After a relatively straight version of the
introduction, the first movement of Summer
drives the “cuckoo” motif relentlessly
before Richter adds his own long cantilena.
Richter captures the heat-struck lassitude
of the second movement, and in the third
adds new rhythmic emphases to Vivaldi’s
stormy music.
Autumn 1 is full of subtle rhythmic
displacements before the somnolent
episode toward the end. The slow
movement uses electronics to create a
static, echoing sound-world. Vivaldi’s
“hunting horns” are absent from Autumn 3,
the music using the soloist’s first material to
decorate more slow-moving ostinatos.
Winter 1 is characterised by familiar
material made strange by slight metrical
irregularities. There is no crackling fire in the
slow movement, where the violin sings the
lonely melody against a frozen backdrop.
Similarly, Richter dispenses with Vivaldi’s
skaters while still creating a sense of
movement through a winter landscape.
© Gordon Kerry 2017
This is the first performance of this work by the
Tasmanian Symphony Orchestra.
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