BIOGRAPHY
CONCERTS IN THE 2009/2010 SERIES
ALL AT THE SHERWELL CENTRE AT 7.30PM
Sarah-Jane Brandon (soprano)
Winner of the 2009 Kathleen Ferrier Competition, Sarah-Jane Brandon was born
in Johannesburg and is currently a student at the Benjamin Britten International
Opera School at the Royal College of Music. She was previously a student at
the South African College of Music at the University of Cape Town, where she
performed frequently with the Kwa-Zulu Natal Philharmonic Orchestra and, in
collaboration with Cape Town Opera, sang the roles of Pamina (Die Zauberflöte)
and Countess (Le nozze di Figaro). Recent operatic appearances include Sandrina
(La finta giardiniera) at the RCM, and Lisaura (Alessandro) at the London Handel
Festival.
Her recent engagements have included Maddalena in Handel’s ‘La Resurrezione’
at the London Handel Festival, Vivaldi's ‘Gloria’ at the Bridgewater Hall with the
Choir of King’s College, Cambridge and Stephen Cleobury, a tour of China with
the Amadeus Orchestra, and appearances at the Wigmore Hall and in the Crush
Bar of the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden. Her engagements this season
include ‘Elijah’ with the London Philharmonic Orchestra and Kurt Masur, and
Maddalena in ‘La Resurrezione’ with the Gabrieli Consort and Paul McCreesh.
Her many awards include the Maggie Teyte Prize and Miriam Licette Scholarship
administered by the Musicians Benevolent Fund, the Overseas Trophy and
the Lorna Viol and Audrey Strange Prizes in the 2008 Royal Over-Seas
League Competition, and the Cuthbert Smith Prize in the RCM’s Lies Askonas
Competition. She was also awarded second place in the 2008 Richard Tauber
Competition. Sarah-Jane studies with Janis Kelly.
James Baillieu (piano)
James Baillieu was also born in South Africa and graduated with distinction from
the University of Cape Town in 2004, where he won all the piano prizes. In 2005
he received a full scholarship, the Avery Picker Award, from the Royal Academy of
Music in London, where he studied with Michael Dussek, Malcolm Martineau and
Kathryn Stott. He graduated with a Dip. RAM and the Christian Carpenter Award,
and was the 2007-2008 Hodgson Junior Fellow.
In 2004 he participated in the International Russian Music Piano Competition
in California at which, as a laureate, he was awarded a scholarship to study in
Vienna. At the Vienna International Pianists Academy, James was awarded the
prestigious Rosario Marciano Prize. At the Royal Academy he has won the Flora
Nielsen Song Prize, the Ludmilla Andrew Prize for Russian Song, the Major V
Someren-Godfrey English song award, and the Helen Eames and Brenda Webb
accompaniment prizes. In 2006 James was awarded the Elias Fawcett Award
at the Royal Overseas League Competition, the MBF accompanist’s prize at the
Kathleen Ferrier Competition, and the Ferdinand Rauter Accompanists award at
the 2008 Richard Tauber Prize.
BADKE STRING QUARTET
Saturday 3 October 2009
Sarah-Jane
Brandon
AQUINAS PIANO TRIO
Saturday 24 October 2009
MAGGINI STRING QUARTET
Saturday 14 November 2009
FRITH PIANO QUARTET
Saturday 5 December 2009
(Soprano)
SAM HAYWOOD (Piano)
ARISA FUJITA (Violin)
RICHARD BAYLISS (Horn)
Saturday 30 January 2010
James
Baillieu
BARBIROLLI STRING QUARTET
SIMON CRAWFORD-PHILLIPS (Piano)
Saturday 27 February 2010
SARAH-JANE BRANDON (Soprano)
JAMES BAILLIEU (Piano)
Saturday 20 March 2010
(Piano)
WIHAN STRING QUARTET
Saturday 17 April 2010
Concert details can be found on the website:
www.plyclassical.co.uk and also on www.plymouth.ac.uk/events to which programme notes will be added prior to each concert.
7.30pm Saturday 20 March 2010
at the University of Plymouth Sherwell Centre
Sponsored by the Countess of Munster Musical Trust
Plymouth Chamber Music Trust ...the ‘Wigmore Hall Experience’ without the hassle!
AN DIE UNTERGEHENDE SONNE (To the Setting Sun)
DIE JUNGE NONNE (The Young Nun)
NACHT UND TRÄUME (Night and Dreams)
Franz Schubert (1797 – 1828)
An die untergehende Sonne, of May 1817, was nearly the last of Schubert’s
settings of works by the then-popular poet Ludwig Kosegarten, and it is his only
Kosegarten setting that is not strictly strophic. Indeed, it is neither strictly strophic
(setting each stanza of the poem to the same music) nor through-composed
(setting each stanza to different music), but is rather a hybrid of the two song
structures, a sort of rondo-formed construction. Die junge Nonne was apparently
composed on or about March 3, 1825, because on that day the soprano Sophie
Muller wrote of it in her diary: ‘After lunch Schubert came downstairs and brought
a new song, Die junge Nonne.’ She also noted that the song was ‘splendidly
composed’ and it is in fact one of the composer’s most powerful and dramatic
Lieder. Conflating two poems by Matthaus von Collin, Nacht und Träume is
twenty-nine bars of pure musical bliss, moving at a very slow tempo, and dynamic
level that never rises above pianissimo.
IMPROMPTU IN B FLAT MAJOR, D 935
Franz Schubert (1797 – 1828)
Allegro calmo senza rigore
Vivace
Chacony
Schubert wrote two sets of Impromptus, D 899 and D 935 respectively. The third
of the latter set, a Theme and Variations, uses the same Rosamunde theme,
extracted from Schubert’s ill-fated stage-work of the same name, and also heard
in the A minor String Quartet, D 804. There are five variations, the first two purely
decorative, but the third modulates to the tonic minor (B flat minor) for a melody in
octaves over a pulsating accompaniment. The fourth, in G flat major, investigates
the theme’s underlying harmonies, rather than its melodic line, whilst the final
variation is a delicate display-piece with a more elaborate working of Variation
II, and largely relies on leggiero (‘light’) scale-passages in triplet semiquavers.
However, Schubert characteristically brings the proceedings to a quiet end with a
coda, referring back to the theme, now slower and with some more unexpected
harmonic changes.
KENNST DU DAS LAND? (Know you the land?)
Hugo Wolf (1860 – 1903)
Goethe’s Kennst du das Land? from Wilhelm Meister attracted the interest of
many composers before Wolf attempted his setting, with Beethoven, Schubert,
Schumann, and Liszt each writing songs to the original German text. Goethe’s
strophic form is kept intact, although Wolf’s complex harmonies, and beautiful and
evocative melodies are exquisitely elaborate.
SILENT NOON
LOVE’S LAST GIFT
Ralph Vaughan Williams (1872 – 1958)
GRAND SCHERZO
TOURNAMENT GALOP
Louis Moreau Gottschalk (1829 – 1869)
Vaughan Williams’s early song cycle, The House of Life, contains six songs on
texts from Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s 101 sonnets of the same title. Here, the poetpainter traces the course of an intimate relationship, seeking with each sonnet
to create a ‘moment’s monument’ to his love for his dead first wife, Elizabeth
Siddal, and his infatuation with Jane Morris, the wife of his Pre-Raphaelite
fellow-artist, William Morris. In sonnet 19, Silent Noon, the persona captures in
words the spiritual communion between lovers in the midst of summer’s beauty,
a communion that goes beyond the physical raptures celebrated elsewhere
in the anthology. Love’s Last Gift, which ends the cycle, shows the composer
responding sensitively to the verbal imagery, with a recurring figure that leaves a
familiar fingerprint.
Gottschalk was born in New Orleans, the son of an English Jew and a French
Creole. At the age of fifteen he performed in Paris, and thereafter toured the world
as a virtuoso pianist. Gottschalk’s music was very popular during his lifetime, and
his earliest compositions created a sensation in Europe. Many early pieces like Le
Bananier and Bamboula were based on memories of the music he heard during
his youth in Louisiana. The Grand Scherzo is a late piece in which Gottschalk
reverts to his European style and writes in the dark key of D minor, which he
employed rarely. Here it is used in a Chopinesque first subject, an impression
that is underlined by the frequent emphasis on the third beat of the bar in the
3/4 metre, whereas the trio is pure Gottschalk – his sentimental side that is – a
tender song in the relative major with many ‘tranquillo’ and ‘misterioso’ requests
to the player. The end, though, is an unbridled tour de force. Tournament Galop
is a high-spirited circus galop ‘as played by Gottschalk at all his Concerts [sic ]
throughout the United States’, and guaranteed to bring the house down!
Tickets for the WIHAN QUARTET at the Sherwell Centre on
Saturday 17 April will be on sale during the interval.
MORGEN (Tomorrow)
STÄNDCHEN (Serenade)
BEFREIT (Freed)
ALLERSEELEN (All Souls’ Day)
CÄCILIE (Cecily)
Richard Strauss (1864 – 1949)
Morgen is a celebration of love, inspired by the composer’s feelings toward
his wife, soprano, Pauline de Ahna. The text comes from a poem by the
German poet (of Scottish extraction), John Henry Morgan. Providing discreet
harmonic accompaniment and gentle melodic support, the piano part beautifully
complements the voice. Although Ständchen proved to be one of Strauss’s most
popular songs, the composer always claimed it embarrassed him, a perplexing
notion given that the song displays his compositional virtuosity in all its brilliance
and his flirtatious sense of play at its peak. Strauss’s musical setting brings to
life the excitement of the clandestine tryst in Adolf Friedrich von Schack’s poem,
cast in the key of F sharp major, one of magic and dreaminess in the composer’s
system of tonal symbolism. Befreit was written to a text by German expressionist
poet, Richard Dehmel. The subject of the poem is a loving couple – the depth of
their devotion to each other has freed them from suffering despite the troubles
they have seen, and which will even free them from being threatened by death.
Allerseelen, perhaps because of the song’s nostalgic charm and sentimental
warmth, became immediately popular, and a staple in the concert repertory
of Strauss and his wife. Strauss’s rhapsodic approach to Hermann von Gilm’s
text yields a fantasy of poetic imagery bathed in shimmering late-Romantic
sound. The waves of graceful arpeggiated sweeps in the piano accompaniment
throughout the song reinforce Gilm’s interpretation of All Souls’ Day, suggesting
the yearning for the ideal springtime place where love is innocent and lovers are
united in otherworldly bliss. Strauss wrote Cäcilie the day before his wedding,
as a wedding present for his bride-to-be, the song thus standing today as
something of a monument to their long-lived union. Strauss’s song is also a fitting
interpretation of Heinrich Hart’s poem, which was the poet’s declaration of love to
his wife, Cäcilie.
NOW SLEEPS THE CRIMSON PETAL
MUSIC, WHEN SOFT VOICES DIE
LOVE’S PHILOSOPHY
Roger Quilter (1877 – 1953)
Born in Hove, Sussex, Roger Quilter was the third of five sons of Sir Cuthbert
Quilter, a noted art collector, and was educated at Eton. He later became a fellowstudent of Percy Grainger, Cyril Scott and Henry Balfour Gardiner at the Hoch
Conservatory in Frankfurt where, sharing a common dislike of Beethoven, they
became known as the ‘Frankfurt Group’. His reputation in England rests largely on
his songs and his light music for orchestra, such as the Children’s Overture, with
its interwoven nursery rhymes, as well as the incidental music for the children’s
play Where the Rainbow Ends. This was premiered in 1911, and produced by
Italia Conti, who subsequently founded the Italia Conti School, now the Italia
Conti Academy of Theatre Arts. It was immensely successful and, for many years,
Quilter conducted the opening matineé of the season
Now Sleeps the Crimson Petal, the second of Three Songs, Op 3, did much to
further Quilter’s early reputation. The famed English tenor, Gervase Elwes, was
so enamoured of Quilter’s setting of this Tennyson poem that he personally
convinced the Boosey publishing house to print it. Elwes became one of the
composer’s most important champions, but this song actually predated any
creative contact between the two – it was composed well before its publication
date of 1904 and was actually first written when the composer was 20. While it
can be traced to the English tradition of the drawing-room ballad, it is Quilter’s
lush accompaniment that distinguishes it from its less urbane predecessors.
Quilter shared with other English composers a wide knowledge of the literature
of his country, a source of continuing inspiration. for songs like Love’s Philosophy
(1905) and Music, when Soft Voices Die (1927).
Programme Notes by Philip R Buttall