MASTER 7
& LAUNCESTON 4
FRIDAY
31 JULY 7.30PM
FEDERATION CONCERT HALL
SATURDAY
1 AUGUST 7.30PM
ALBERT HALL
Marko Letonja conductor
Isabelle Faust violin
Duration 20 mins
DEBUSSY arr ZENDER
Five Preludes
Voiles
La danse de Puck
Général Lavine – eccentric
Des pas sur la neige
Les collines d’Anacapri
Duration 13 mins
MENDELSSOHN
Violin Concerto
Allegro molto appassionato –
Andante –
Allegro non troppo – Allegro molto vivace
Duration 28 mins
INTERVAL
DVOŘÁK
Symphony No 9, From the New World
Adagio – Allegro molto
Largo
Scherzo (Molto vivace)
Allegro con fuoco
Duration 40 mins
This concert will end at approximately
9.30pm.
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59
CLAUDE DEBUSSY (1862-1918) ARR HANS ZENDER
(BORN 1936)
Five Preludes
Voiles (Book 1, No 2)
La danse de Puck (Book 1, No 11)
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MARKO LETONJA
ISABELLE FAUST
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. Marko Letonja has
worked with many orchestras in Europe
including the Munich Philharmonic, Vienna
Symphony and the Orchestra Filarmonica
della Scala, Milan; and in many renowned
opera houses, such as the Vienna State
Opera, Berlin State Opera, La Scala, Milan,
and the Semper Oper, Dresden. He has
also conducted at the Arena di Verona. His
engagements in Australia have included
the West Australian Symphony Orchestra
and productions for Opera Australia
and the West Australian Opera. Future
engagements include the Grand Théâtre de
Genève, Mozarteum Orchestra, Salzburg,
Berlin Radio Orchestra and a return
appearance at the Vienna State Opera.
At an early age Isabelle Faust won the
prestigious Leopold Mozart and Paganini
competitions, and was soon invited to
appear with the world’s leading orchestras,
including the Berlin Philharmonic, Orchestra
of the Age of Enlightenment, Boston
Symphony Orchestra and NHK Symphony
Orchestra. She is equally at home as a
chamber musician and soloist, and in
addition to her mastery of the great violin
concertos, she also performs works such
as György Kurtág’s Kafka Fragments with
soprano Christine Schäfer, and the Brahms
and Mozart clarinet quintets on historical
instruments. Over the course of her career
she has worked with renowned conductors
including Frans Brüggen, Mariss Jansons,
Giovanni Antonini, Philippe Herreweghe,
Daniel Harding and Bernard Haitink. In recent
years she developed a close relationship with
the late Claudio Abbado. Their recording of
the Beethoven and Berg violin concertos with
the Orchestra Mozart received a Diapason
d’or, Echo Klassik, Gramophone Award
and a Record Academy Award (Japan). She
has made over a dozen critically acclaimed
recordings, including Bach’s sonatas and
partitas for solo violin, which was awarded
a Diapason d’Or de l’Annee. She also won
a Diapason d’Or and a Gramophone Award
for her recording of the Beethoven sonatas
for piano and violin with recital partner
Alexander Melnikov. She plays the “Sleeping
Beauty” Stradivarius (1704).
Général Lavine – eccentric (Book 2, No 6)
Des pas sur la neige (Book 1, No 6)
Les collines d’Anacapri (Book 1, No 5)
If there was one thing Debussy hated, it
was hearing his music described as “what
imbeciles call impressionism, just about the
least appropriate term possible”. Those
painters with whom Debussy associated,
and from whom he absorbed much that
was useful to his own art, were of a much
younger generation than that of Monet, and
of a different aesthetic orientation. Debussy
preferred his work to be compared with
literature rather than visual arts, especially
Symbolist poetry. Significantly, Debussy put
the titles of his piano preludes at the end of
each piece, in brackets, as if to forestall too
“visual” an interpretation. The two books of
Preludes for piano were composed in 1910
and 1913, respectively. They each contain
works that adhere to certain recurrent ideas
in Debussy’s work – ancient mythology and
“the mysterious correspondences between
Nature and Imagination” which Debussy
found in Symbolist poetry.
Debussy on occasion had assistants,
notably the composer and conductor André
Caplet, orchestrate his piano music, and
those works nearly always try to replicate
Debussy’s own sound. The contemporary
German composer Hans Zender has made
what he calls “composed interpretations” of
earlier music, notably a stunning orchestral
version of Schubert’s Winterreise, and
argues that “each note in a manuscript is
primarily a challenge to action and not an
explicit description of sound.” Believing that
“the sensitivity formed by the aesthetics of
[an artist’s] own time is necessary to create
a lively and exciting performance”, his is a
creative response to the music. Zender uses
a small orchestra of double flutes, oboes,
clarinets, single bassoon, horn, trumpet,
trombone, timpani, percussion, harp, two
violins, two violas, cello and double bass
(though a larger string body may be used).
“Voiles” can mean “sails” or “veils” and is
musically as ambiguous, with its extensive
use of the whole-tone and pentatonic scales
that erases any conventional sense of key.
Zender presents the opening arabesque in
pairs of woodwinds set off by glints of high
string sound, with the pentatonic central
section introduced by sweeping harp
glissandos.
Shakespeare’s sometimes malevolent
hobgoblin, Puck, is depicted by suggestively
clumsy dotted rhythms, often treated as
ostinatos, and occasional quiet moments
that suggest the magic of which he is
capable.
From Book 2, Zender selects Debussy’s
portrait of Général Lavine, a music-hall star
of the time who has been described as “a
comic juggler, half tramp and half warrior”.
Here Zender takes his greatest liberties with
Debussy’s score, including some frankly
cartoonish effects.
Returning to Book 1, Debussy’s intensely
private vision of “Footsteps in the Snow”,
with its repeated dragging rhythm, is
embodied in a mournful cor anglais solo
that is joined by a distant trumpet – a
pairing reminiscent of Copland’s Quiet City.
A glittering evocation of the Mediterranean
light and the vibrant and louche Neapolitan
dance rhythms of “The Hills of Anacapri”,
takes the orchestra into its highest collective
register for a thrilling, if shrill, finale.
© Gordon Kerry 2015
This is the first performance of this work by the
Tasmanian Symphony Orchestra.
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FELIX MENDELSSOHN (1809-1847)
Violin Concerto in E minor, Op 64
Allegro molto appassionato –
Andante –
Allegro non troppo – Allegro molto vivace
In 1836 violinist Ferdinand David accepted
Mendelssohn’s invitation to become leader
of the Gewandhaus Orchestra in Leipzig.
There he also performed frequently with
Mendelssohn in chamber concerts, and
when the Leipzig Conservatorium opened
in 1843, David established its violin
department, with 14-year-old Joseph
Joachim among his first pupils. (With David,
Mendelssohn and Schumann on staff, it
must have been quite an institution.)
In 1838 Mendelssohn remarked in a letter
to David that
I would like to compose a violin concerto
for next winter. One in E minor keeps
running through my head, and the opening
gives me no peace.
But for various reasons Mendelssohn was
unable to complete the work that winter
or the next, despite David’s constant
reminders. In 1839 he wrote politely to the
violinist:
It is nice of you to press me for a violin
concerto! I have the liveliest desire to write
one for you and, if I have a few propitious
days, I’ll bring you something. But the task
is not an easy one.
It was made less easy by the sheer amount
of work Mendelssohn had at this time.
As well as duties with the Gewandhaus,
he directed music festivals in Germany
and England, devoted himself to reviving
historical music from Bach to Schubert
and, in 1843, was appointed Kapellmeister
to King Friedrich Wilhelm IV of Prussia.
Additionally, with the establishment of
the new Cathedral choir in Leipzig, and
with various composing and conducting
engagements in Germany and abroad,
Mendelssohn was kept frantically busy
until the summer of 1844. Finally, after
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ANTONÍN DVOŘÁK (1841-1904)
many years, he was able to return to the
Violin Concerto, which was completed in
September 1844. David performed it under
the baton of Niels Gade (Mendelssohn was
ill) in March 1845. Joachim played it soon
after, and the rest is history.
Symphony No 9 in E minor, Op 95, From the
New World
Mendelssohn was averse to virtuosity for its
own sake, likening such effects to “juggler’s
tricks”. Part of his diffidence may have
been a response to the challenge of writing
a genuine concerto that was not emptily
showy. He was no doubt helped by David’s
technical artistry and personality, and
there seems little doubt that David wrote
the first movement’s cadenza. But it was
Mendelssohn’s genius to place the cadenza
before the recapitulation, thus making it
part of the dramatic structure of sonata
form, rather than an “add-on”, as in many
other concertos.
Allegro con fuoco
A long bassoon note at the end of the
first movement briefly holds the music in
suspense before it moves, without a break,
into a classically Mendelssohnian song. The
slow movement is in simple ABA form, with
a contrasting central section. It too passes
into the finale without a pause; here the
music has all the lightness and grace of the
great Mendelssohn scherzos.
Abridged from a note by Gordon Kerry
© 2009
The Tasmanian Symphony Orchestra first
performed this work with conductor Rudolf
Pekarek and soloist Ricardo Odnoposoff in Hobart
and Launceston on 19 and 21 September 1951
and, most recently, with Sebastian Lang-Lessing
and Kolja Blacher in Launceston and Sydney on
27 September and 4 October 2008.
Adagio – Allegro molto
Largo
Scherzo (Molto vivace)
Czech composer Antonín Dvořák arrived
in New York with his wife and two of his
six children on 26 September 1892. At
the invitation of the wealthy and visionary
philanthropist Mrs Jeanette Thurber, Dvořák
had come to the New World to become
Director of the National Conservatory of
Music in Manhattan.
At the Conservatory, Dvořák struck up a
friendship with a young African American
singing major from Pennsylvania, Harry
T Burleigh. Although not far enough
advanced to be a member of Dvořák’s
classes, Burleigh was invited on many
occasions to sing the spirituals and worksongs of his people, music that caused
Dvořák to write:
In these Negro melodies, I have
discovered all that is needed for a great
and noble school of music. They are
pathetic, tender, passionate, melancholy,
solemn, religious, bold, merry, gay, or
what you will…There is nothing in the
whole range of composition that cannot
be supplied with themes from this source.
By early January 1893, Dvořák began to
jot down sketches for a new symphony.
By 24 May, it was complete. (Confusingly,
he called this E minor symphony his
“eighth”, but crossed that out, calling it
his “seventh”. Initially published as his
“fifth”, today we recognise it in its rightful
chronological place as his “ninth” – a
fateful number for symphonic composers,
post-Beethoven!) As the score was rushed
out of the house, Dvořák hastily scrawled
the famous moniker on its title page: From
the New World. With this New World
Symphony, Dvořák sent greetings to his
friends and colleagues in the Old World.
Its first performance occurred on
16 December that year, Anton Seidl
conducting the New York Philharmonic
Society in Carnegie Hall. The response was
rapturous. Dvořák wrote to his publisher
that “newspapers say no composer has ever
before had such a triumph…I had to thank
[the audience] from the box like a king!”
The debate over the work’s “American”
credentials began almost immediately.
Dvořák was at pains to repeat to his friends
that the New World was “essentially
different from my earlier things – perhaps
a little American – and it would never have
been written just ‘so’ had I never seen
America.” He dismissed as “nonsense”
the notion that he had introduced Native
American or Negro melodies. Even so,
many commentators hear echoes of the
spiritual Swing Low, Sweet Chariot in the
main theme of the first movement; others
hear snippets of Yankee Doodle in the
finale.
The haunting melody in the second
movement poses many problems of
identity. Miss Alice Fletcher, a prominent
collector of Native American music, said
that in 1893 Dvořák told her it sprang from
an Osage Indian song he had heard during
the several summer weeks he spent in the
Bohemian village of Spillville, in north-east
Iowa. (The argument was further muddied
some years later, when William Arms Fisher,
one of his Conservatory students, penned
a text to the melody. From that moment,
Goin’ Home became a favourite “spiritual”
on Paul Robeson’s recitals and in the 1941
movie It Started with Eve, sung by Deanna
Durbin. Thus a melody possibly inspired by
spirituals itself became a “spiritual”.) It was
also quoted by Charles Ives in his Second
Symphony, written between 1896 and 1902.
Harry T Burleigh, who had helped copy
parts for the new symphony, had no doubts
about its origin. “It was my privilege to
sing repeatedly some of the old plantation
songs for Dvořák in his house,” he recalled.
“One in particular, Swing Low, Sweet
63
Chariot, greatly pleased him, and part of
this old spiritual will be found in the second
theme of the first movement.” Indeed,
Dvořák changed his orchestration of the
Largo; he felt that the cor anglais, not the
clarinet he originally used, “most closely
resembled the quality of Burleigh’s voice.”
Dvořák and his wife set sail from New York
on 16 April 1895. He was due to return
but decided to remain in his comfort-zone
of Bohemia for the sake of his family and
close-knit circle of friends. On 17 August,
he sent his letter of resignation to Mrs
Thurber.
Other aspects of Dvořák’s so-called
“American identity” need to be mentioned.
In inviting Dvořák to New York, Mrs Thurber
had hoped he would not only help reverse
the brain-drain to Europe but sow the
seeds of a national school of composition
in America. A decade later, Gustav Mahler
was to arrive in New York to conduct. But
no other European symphonic work was to
imprint its American outlook and origins in
the history of music as Dvořák’s New World.
Dvořák arrived in America at the outset of a
welter of celebrations commemorating the
400th anniversary of Christopher Columbus’
so-called “discovery of the New World”.
For the Columbus Celebration Concert in
Carnegie Hall on 21 October 1892, Dvořák
conducted his new Te Deum, Op 103. For
“Czech Day” at the Chicago Columbian
Exhibition, 12 August 1893, he conducted
some Slavonic Dances and his Symphony
No 8, for an audience which included
30,000 Czechs and Moravians. For that
same Exhibition he was also commissioned
to compose music for a pageant
celebrating Columbus; the project was
scrapped, but the ever-resourceful Dvořák
may have recycled some of its music in his
new symphony. One can almost envisage
the “heroic” Columbus in the fanfare
outbursts of the first and last movements.
In the tiny, desolate village of Spillville,
where he composed his String Quartet,
Op 97 (The American) and the piano
miniatures Humoresques, Dvořák saw
several performances of Buffalo Bill’s Wild
West Show in which the “Kickapoo Indians”
danced and sang. He read Theodore
Baker’s dissertation on the music of the
North American Indian. On a side trip to
Minnesota, he stood in awe at the beautiful
Horseshoe Falls of Minnehaha in St Paul.
Without any paper, he wrote on his sleeve
cuff the theme of the Larghetto movement
of his Violin Sonatina, Op 100.
Perhaps the oddest of Dvořák’s manifold
Americanisms is his arrangement of
Stephen Foster’s song Old Folks at Home,
written for a benefit concert sponsored by
the New York Herald in 1894, in which Harry
Burleigh sang one of the vocal solo parts.
64
Indirectly, Mrs Thurber got her wish and her
memorial to boot.
Abridged from a note by Vincent Plush
© 2002
The Tasmanian Symphony Orchestra first
performed this work with conductor Joseph Post in
Hobart on 11 April 1951 and, most recently, with
Sebastian Lang-Lessing in Hobart and Launceston
on 29 and 30 November 2010.
Forty
years on
You might think that after playing in the TSO
for more than forty years, memories of specific
conductors, concerts and events would start
to blur, but for Robert Clark, Principal Bass
Trombone, they remain crystal clear.
Rob, who was born and raised in country
Victoria, joined the TSO in 1974 and can
recall in detail his four-decade career with
the orchestra. “When I arrived the Chief
Conductor was Vanco Cavdarski, whose
areas of interest were Slavic composers
and Tchaikovsky.” He remembers Barry
Tuckwell for his “relentless quest for
perfection”, Dobbs Franks for a very
memorable Spartacus performed with
the Australian Ballet at the foot of the
Acropolis in Athens, and David Porcelijn
for his passion for contemporary music.
Having seen many chief conductors come
and go, Rob praises the current incumbent,
Marko Letonja, for taking the orchestra to
another level in a natural, unforced way.
“Marko puts his personal stamp on the
orchestra while at the same time allows us
the freedom to play instinctively; we’re not
straightjacketed.” Of the various visiting
conductors who have come and gone over
the years, he speaks highly of Chinese-born
maestro En Shao and old-school German,
Kurt Sanderling. He praises the former for
his interpretation of Tchaikovsky and the
latter for his extraordinary way with Brahms.
But Rob’s recollections are not confined
to the big names on the podium. He
remembers fondly the musicians who have
passed through the ranks of the orchestra. “I
joined the TSO at a time when the orchestra
started to recruit conservatory-trained
musicians. It was a time when the TSO was
serious about lifting the quality of its musicmaking.” He cites, for example, Michael
Mulcahy, who was appointed Principal
Trombone in the 1970s and has gone on
to join the Chicago Symphony Orchestra.
Another former colleague, Tim Dowling,
has been with the Residentie Orchestra in
Holland for the past 25 years. Rob likewise
speaks highly of Don Bate, who resigned
recently as Principal Trombone to take up a
position with the ABC, and the orchestra’s
current trombonists, Jonathon Ramsay and
David Robins.
Among the highlights of Rob’s forty years
with the TSO have been the various
tours, both national and international.
“Touring really puts us on our mettle. It’s
very important for the TSO to play before
different audiences in different halls. We
really develop as musicians when we tour.”
Rob is pleased that the TSO is once again
exploring new and challenging repertoire in
its collaborations with MONA. “These are
the things that make my job exciting.”
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