Concerts & Tickets

2009
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Thu 3rd Oct

Tickets: £10 - £30

Berlioz
Beatrice and Benedict

Print

Programme note

Programme note to follow.

Robin Ticciati
conductor
Karen Cargill
Beatrice
Sally Matthews
Hero
Kathleen Wilkinson
Ursula
John Tessier
Benedict
Brindley Sherratt
Don Pedro
Lionel Lhote
Somarone
Ashley Riches
Claudio
SCO Chorus
-

Opening the Season with an operatic extravaganza has become something of a Ticciati tradition. Following on from Don Giovanni in 2010 and Così fan tutte in 2012, he offers a feast for anyone who loves that perfect marriage of drama to exquisite singing and playing. A world-class cast (featuring Karen Cargill, fresh from her triumph in Berlioz’s Les Troyens at The Met) assembles for Berlioz’s affectionate take on Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing. A labour of love for the composer, this was also his last opera. It has plenty of ‘hits’ including the witty overture and the ravishing duet ‘Vous soupirez, madame!’.

Pre-concert Talk: David Cairns

Beatrice and Benedict

Fri 4th Oct

19:30, City Halls, Glasgow

Tickets: £14 - £28

Berlioz
Beatrice and Benedict

Print

Programme note

Programme note to follow.

Robin Ticciati
conductor
Karen Cargill
Beatrice
Sally Matthews
Hero
Kathleen Wilkinson
Ursula
John Tessier
Benedict
Brindley Sherratt
Don Pedro
Lionel Lhote
Somarone
Ashley Riches
Claudio
SCO Chorus
-

Opening the Season with an operatic extravaganza has become something of a Ticciati tradition. Following on from Don Giovanni in 2010 and Così fan tutte in 2012, he offers a feast for anyone who loves that perfect marriage of drama to exquisite singing and playing. A world-class cast (featuring Karen Cargill, fresh from her triumph in Berlioz’s Les Troyens at The Met) assembles for Berlioz’s affectionate take on Shakespeare’ s Much Ado About Nothing. A labour of love for the composer, this was also his last opera. It has plenty of ‘hits’ including the witty overture and the ravishing duet ‘Vous soupirez, madame!’.

Pre-concert Talk: David Cairns

Vienna to Prague

Thu 10th Oct

19:30, Queen's Hall, Edinburgh

Tickets: £10 - £30

Dvořák
Notturno

Print

Programme note

Antonín Dvořák (1841-1904)
Nocturne in B major for String Orchestra, Op 40

Dvořák was not content with the original version of this piece, for string quartet; nor the next, for string quintet; nor the next for violin and piano. But he championed this final version for orchestral strings. The earliest versions were called Andante religioso, and something of a spiritual quality surrounds the music. Dvorak relishes darker colours, which gives the music a kinship with the Wagner of Parsifal - undoubtedly one of the most discussed works of the period.

© Svend Brown
Mozart
Piano Concerto No 23 in A K488

Print

Programme note

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756-1791)
Piano Concerto in A major, K488 (1786)

Allegro
Adagio
Allegro assai

There was a time - not much more than half a century ago - when K488 was one of the few Mozart piano concertos regularly played in Britain. Today it remains a special favourite, adored for the poise and beauty of its first movement, the forlorn expressiveness of its adagio, the inspired prattle of its finale. Composed in tandem with The Marriage of Figaro in 1786, it is the product of one of Mozart’s greatest Viennese years, during which he wrote two other piano concertos, the ‘Prague’ symphony, much fine chamber music and, for a celebration at the palace of Schonbrunn, his pithy operatic send-up entitled The Impresario.

Innovatively, the concerto’s orchestration, though lightweight, included a pair of clarinets, instruments Mozart associated with Vienna and his friend Anton Stadler and had employed in only one previous concerto. Apprehensive that orchestras might not have clarinets available, he interestingly suggested that a solo violin and viola could substitute for them. Yet much of the mellifluous sweetness of the music is dependent upon their presence and on the absence here of more nasal oboe tone. Sweetness, however, does not preclude sadness, which sometimes darkens the pearly melodic interplay between soloist and orchestra in the first movement.

On the other hand, the stark simplicity of the adagio, Mozart’s last of its kind in a minor key (not, it must be said, that he wrote many such), sounds like uninterrupted tragedy. The pulse is that of a very slow siciliano, the Sicilian rhythm of a gently rocking boat, much used in baroque operas and concertos, but greatly savoured by Mozart also, especially in this work. Yet the music looks forward, as well as backwards, anticipating Pamina’s lament in The Magic Flute, though containing none of that aria’s elaborate decorations. Whether or not the soloist chooses to insert any of his or her own, or to leave Mozart’s bare lines and huge, slow leaps to speak for themselves, the music has an operatic intensity highlighted by the closing bars, with their softly insistent, curiously disturbing pizzicato strings.

To this mood of desolation, the mercurial wit and audacious modulations of the finale are the perfect antidote. The scale passages here are no ordinary scale passages, but Mozartian comedy at its most sublimely zany and merrily audacious. At the same time, the entire work has a strangely spectral quality. In the words of one observer, it is a fragile structure of glass, through which the piano itself is often heard only faintly.

© Conrad Wilson
Janáček
Concertino

Print

Programme note

Programme note to follow.
Mozart
Symphony No 38 in D major, K504 'Prague'

Print

Programme note

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756-1791)
Symphony No 38 in D major, K504 'Prague (1786)

Adagio - Allegro
Andante
Finale - Presto

Though Mozart’s European travels never brought him to Scotland, he did reach London in his childhood and during his adult years he went more than once to Prague – one of his journeys being fascinatingly chronicled by Eduard Morike in a short novel on the subject. In Prague, Mozart was more appreciated than in his native Salzburg or adopted Vienna. The Marriage of Figaro, which failed to please the Viennese in 1786, was a smash hit when it reached the Bohemian capital later that year. When Mozart arrived in Prague in January 1787 he reported that “here they talk about nothing but Figaro; nothing is played or sung or whistled but Figaro, nothing, nothing but Figaro”. It was the Prague Opera which commissioned him to write Don Giovanni, and it was for the coronation of Leopold II as King of Bohemia that he later composed La Clemenza di Tito. As for the Symphony No 38 in D, though it was written in Vienna, it had what was almost certainly its premiere at a concert during Mozart’s visit to Prague in January 1787, when his mind must already have been reaching towards Don Giovanni – the two works share the same key, and the slow dramatic introduction to the symphony contains more than a whiff of the opera to come.

Mozart’s last three symphonies (Nos 39-41) are widely held to represent the high watermark of his achievement in the form, but their immediate predecessor is equally great. It is a work of profound animation, radiance and tension, its three movements being so self-sufficient that Mozart felt able to dispense with the inclusion of a minuet. The big introduction to the first movement is balanced by an intricately wrought Allegro – “saturated with polyphony”, as Einstein eloquently put it – grand and gracious in design, with a theme that was later to appear in a different guise as the fugato of The Magic Flute overture. In the Andante the writing remains contrapuntal, and the stabbing discords and chromaticisms give the music an intensity not found in Mozart’s previous symphonic slow movements. After this the final Presto may seem disconcertingly brief, but its taut rhythms and concentrated layout make it a match for the other movements, especially if the exposition repeat is included, as Mozart wanted.

© Conrad Wilson

Alexander Janiczek
violin/director
Llŷr Williams
piano

In 1786, when Mozart was writing Symphony No 38, he was neglected, even scorned in Vienna. Yet he found a more appreciative and understanding audience in Prague, a mere 200 miles away – so much so that he dedicated the symphony to “the good people of Prague”.

Llŷr Williams eloquently draws the two cities together with Mozart’s Piano Concerto No 23, written in Vienna shortly before Mozart left for Prague and Janáček Concertino, written in Prague shortly after his opera, The Cunning Little Vixen.

Vienna to Prague

Fri 11th Oct

19:30, City Halls, Glasgow

Tickets: £14 - £28

Dvořák
Notturno

Print

Programme note

Antonín Dvořák (1841-1904)
Nocturne in B major for String Orchestra, Op 40

Dvořák was not content with the original version of this piece, for string quartet; nor the next, for string quintet; nor the next for violin and piano. But he championed this final version for orchestral strings. The earliest versions were called Andante religioso, and something of a spiritual quality surrounds the music. Dvorak relishes darker colours, which gives the music a kinship with the Wagner of Parsifal - undoubtedly one of the most discussed works of the period.

© Svend Brown
Mozart
Piano Concerto No 23 in A K488

Print

Programme note

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756-1791)
Piano Concerto in A major, K488 (1786)

Allegro
Adagio
Allegro assai

There was a time - not much more than half a century ago - when K488 was one of the few Mozart piano concertos regularly played in Britain. Today it remains a special favourite, adored for the poise and beauty of its first movement, the forlorn expressiveness of its adagio, the inspired prattle of its finale. Composed in tandem with The Marriage of Figaro in 1786, it is the product of one of Mozart’s greatest Viennese years, during which he wrote two other piano concertos, the ‘Prague’ symphony, much fine chamber music and, for a celebration at the palace of Schonbrunn, his pithy operatic send-up entitled The Impresario.

Innovatively, the concerto’s orchestration, though lightweight, included a pair of clarinets, instruments Mozart associated with Vienna and his friend Anton Stadler and had employed in only one previous concerto. Apprehensive that orchestras might not have clarinets available, he interestingly suggested that a solo violin and viola could substitute for them. Yet much of the mellifluous sweetness of the music is dependent upon their presence and on the absence here of more nasal oboe tone. Sweetness, however, does not preclude sadness, which sometimes darkens the pearly melodic interplay between soloist and orchestra in the first movement.

On the other hand, the stark simplicity of the adagio, Mozart’s last of its kind in a minor key (not, it must be said, that he wrote many such), sounds like uninterrupted tragedy. The pulse is that of a very slow siciliano, the Sicilian rhythm of a gently rocking boat, much used in baroque operas and concertos, but greatly savoured by Mozart also, especially in this work. Yet the music looks forward, as well as backwards, anticipating Pamina’s lament in The Magic Flute, though containing none of that aria’s elaborate decorations. Whether or not the soloist chooses to insert any of his or her own, or to leave Mozart’s bare lines and huge, slow leaps to speak for themselves, the music has an operatic intensity highlighted by the closing bars, with their softly insistent, curiously disturbing pizzicato strings.

To this mood of desolation, the mercurial wit and audacious modulations of the finale are the perfect antidote. The scale passages here are no ordinary scale passages, but Mozartian comedy at its most sublimely zany and merrily audacious. At the same time, the entire work has a strangely spectral quality. In the words of one observer, it is a fragile structure of glass, through which the piano itself is often heard only faintly.

© Conrad Wilson
Janáček
Concertino

Print

Programme note

Programme note to follow.
Mozart
Symphony No 38 in D major, K504 'Prague'

Print

Programme note

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756-1791)
Symphony No 38 in D major, K504 'Prague (1786)

Adagio - Allegro
Andante
Finale - Presto

Though Mozart’s European travels never brought him to Scotland, he did reach London in his childhood and during his adult years he went more than once to Prague – one of his journeys being fascinatingly chronicled by Eduard Morike in a short novel on the subject. In Prague, Mozart was more appreciated than in his native Salzburg or adopted Vienna. The Marriage of Figaro, which failed to please the Viennese in 1786, was a smash hit when it reached the Bohemian capital later that year. When Mozart arrived in Prague in January 1787 he reported that “here they talk about nothing but Figaro; nothing is played or sung or whistled but Figaro, nothing, nothing but Figaro”. It was the Prague Opera which commissioned him to write Don Giovanni, and it was for the coronation of Leopold II as King of Bohemia that he later composed La Clemenza di Tito. As for the Symphony No 38 in D, though it was written in Vienna, it had what was almost certainly its premiere at a concert during Mozart’s visit to Prague in January 1787, when his mind must already have been reaching towards Don Giovanni – the two works share the same key, and the slow dramatic introduction to the symphony contains more than a whiff of the opera to come.

Mozart’s last three symphonies (Nos 39-41) are widely held to represent the high watermark of his achievement in the form, but their immediate predecessor is equally great. It is a work of profound animation, radiance and tension, its three movements being so self-sufficient that Mozart felt able to dispense with the inclusion of a minuet. The big introduction to the first movement is balanced by an intricately wrought Allegro – “saturated with polyphony”, as Einstein eloquently put it – grand and gracious in design, with a theme that was later to appear in a different guise as the fugato of The Magic Flute overture. In the Andante the writing remains contrapuntal, and the stabbing discords and chromaticisms give the music an intensity not found in Mozart’s previous symphonic slow movements. After this the final Presto may seem disconcertingly brief, but its taut rhythms and concentrated layout make it a match for the other movements, especially if the exposition repeat is included, as Mozart wanted.

© Conrad Wilson

Alexander Janiczek
violin/director
Llŷr Williams
piano

Vienna to Prague

Sat 12th Oct

19:30, Music Hall, Aberdeen

Tickets: £10.50 - £22

Dvořák
Notturno

Print

Programme note

Antonín Dvořák (1841-1904)
Nocturne in B major for String Orchestra, Op 40

Dvořák was not content with the original version of this piece, for string quartet; nor the next, for string quintet; nor the next for violin and piano. But he championed this final version for orchestral strings. The earliest versions were called Andante religioso, and something of a spiritual quality surrounds the music. Dvorak relishes darker colours, which gives the music a kinship with the Wagner of Parsifal - undoubtedly one of the most discussed works of the period.

© Svend Brown
Mozart
Piano Concerto No 23 in A K488

Print

Programme note

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756-1791)
Piano Concerto in A major, K488 (1786)

Allegro
Adagio
Allegro assai

There was a time - not much more than half a century ago - when K488 was one of the few Mozart piano concertos regularly played in Britain. Today it remains a special favourite, adored for the poise and beauty of its first movement, the forlorn expressiveness of its adagio, the inspired prattle of its finale. Composed in tandem with The Marriage of Figaro in 1786, it is the product of one of Mozart’s greatest Viennese years, during which he wrote two other piano concertos, the ‘Prague’ symphony, much fine chamber music and, for a celebration at the palace of Schonbrunn, his pithy operatic send-up entitled The Impresario.

Innovatively, the concerto’s orchestration, though lightweight, included a pair of clarinets, instruments Mozart associated with Vienna and his friend Anton Stadler and had employed in only one previous concerto. Apprehensive that orchestras might not have clarinets available, he interestingly suggested that a solo violin and viola could substitute for them. Yet much of the mellifluous sweetness of the music is dependent upon their presence and on the absence here of more nasal oboe tone. Sweetness, however, does not preclude sadness, which sometimes darkens the pearly melodic interplay between soloist and orchestra in the first movement.

On the other hand, the stark simplicity of the adagio, Mozart’s last of its kind in a minor key (not, it must be said, that he wrote many such), sounds like uninterrupted tragedy. The pulse is that of a very slow siciliano, the Sicilian rhythm of a gently rocking boat, much used in baroque operas and concertos, but greatly savoured by Mozart also, especially in this work. Yet the music looks forward, as well as backwards, anticipating Pamina’s lament in The Magic Flute, though containing none of that aria’s elaborate decorations. Whether or not the soloist chooses to insert any of his or her own, or to leave Mozart’s bare lines and huge, slow leaps to speak for themselves, the music has an operatic intensity highlighted by the closing bars, with their softly insistent, curiously disturbing pizzicato strings.

To this mood of desolation, the mercurial wit and audacious modulations of the finale are the perfect antidote. The scale passages here are no ordinary scale passages, but Mozartian comedy at its most sublimely zany and merrily audacious. At the same time, the entire work has a strangely spectral quality. In the words of one observer, it is a fragile structure of glass, through which the piano itself is often heard only faintly.

© Conrad Wilson
Janáček
Concertino

Print

Programme note

Programme note to follow.
Mozart
Symphony No 38 in D major, K504 'Prague'

Print

Programme note

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756-1791)
Symphony No 38 in D major, K504 'Prague (1786)

Adagio - Allegro
Andante
Finale - Presto

Though Mozart’s European travels never brought him to Scotland, he did reach London in his childhood and during his adult years he went more than once to Prague – one of his journeys being fascinatingly chronicled by Eduard Morike in a short novel on the subject. In Prague, Mozart was more appreciated than in his native Salzburg or adopted Vienna. The Marriage of Figaro, which failed to please the Viennese in 1786, was a smash hit when it reached the Bohemian capital later that year. When Mozart arrived in Prague in January 1787 he reported that “here they talk about nothing but Figaro; nothing is played or sung or whistled but Figaro, nothing, nothing but Figaro”. It was the Prague Opera which commissioned him to write Don Giovanni, and it was for the coronation of Leopold II as King of Bohemia that he later composed La Clemenza di Tito. As for the Symphony No 38 in D, though it was written in Vienna, it had what was almost certainly its premiere at a concert during Mozart’s visit to Prague in January 1787, when his mind must already have been reaching towards Don Giovanni – the two works share the same key, and the slow dramatic introduction to the symphony contains more than a whiff of the opera to come.

Mozart’s last three symphonies (Nos 39-41) are widely held to represent the high watermark of his achievement in the form, but their immediate predecessor is equally great. It is a work of profound animation, radiance and tension, its three movements being so self-sufficient that Mozart felt able to dispense with the inclusion of a minuet. The big introduction to the first movement is balanced by an intricately wrought Allegro – “saturated with polyphony”, as Einstein eloquently put it – grand and gracious in design, with a theme that was later to appear in a different guise as the fugato of The Magic Flute overture. In the Andante the writing remains contrapuntal, and the stabbing discords and chromaticisms give the music an intensity not found in Mozart’s previous symphonic slow movements. After this the final Presto may seem disconcertingly brief, but its taut rhythms and concentrated layout make it a match for the other movements, especially if the exposition repeat is included, as Mozart wanted.

© Conrad Wilson

Alexander Janiczek
violin/director
Llŷr Williams
piano

Romantic Landscapes

Wed 16th Oct

19:30, Younger Hall, St Andrews

Tickets: £12.50 - £21.50

Dvořák
Romance

Print

Programme note

Programme note to follow.
Saint-Saëns
The Muse and the Poet

Print

Programme note

Programme note to follow.
Dvořák
Silent Woods

Print

Programme note

Programme note to follow.
Mendelssohn
Symphony No 3 'Scottish'

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Programme note

Jaime Laredo
conductor/violin
Sharon Robinson
cello

Old friends return to the SCO in this atmospheric programme that paints Romantic landscapes from Bohemia to Scotland. Husband and wife, Laredo and Robinson have been performing with the SCO for decades; the first half puts each of them in a solo spotlight and also brings them together for Saint-Saëns’s rapturous The Muse and the Poet. It’s a sweeping ecstatic duet – the perfect showpiece!

Pre-concert Talk: Sharon Robinson

Romantic Landscapes

Thu 17th Oct

19:30, Queen's Hall, Edinburgh

Tickets: £10 - £30

Dvořák
Notturno

Print

Programme note

Antonín Dvořák (1841-1904)
Nocturne in B major for String Orchestra, Op 40

Dvořák was not content with the original version of this piece, for string quartet; nor the next, for string quintet; nor the next for violin and piano. But he championed this final version for orchestral strings. The earliest versions were called Andante religioso, and something of a spiritual quality surrounds the music. Dvorak relishes darker colours, which gives the music a kinship with the Wagner of Parsifal - undoubtedly one of the most discussed works of the period.

© Svend Brown
Saint-Saëns
The Muse and the Poet

Print

Programme note

Programme note to follow.
Dvořák
Silent Woods

Print

Programme note

Programme note to follow.
Mendelssohn
Symphony No 3 'Scottish'

Print

Programme note

Jaime Laredo
conductor/violin
Sharon Robinson
cello

Romantic Landscapes

Fri 18th Oct

19:30, City Halls, Glasgow

Tickets: £14 - £28

Dvořák
Notturno

Print

Programme note

Antonín Dvořák (1841-1904)
Nocturne in B major for String Orchestra, Op 40

Dvořák was not content with the original version of this piece, for string quartet; nor the next, for string quintet; nor the next for violin and piano. But he championed this final version for orchestral strings. The earliest versions were called Andante religioso, and something of a spiritual quality surrounds the music. Dvorak relishes darker colours, which gives the music a kinship with the Wagner of Parsifal - undoubtedly one of the most discussed works of the period.

© Svend Brown
Saint-Saëns
The Muse and the Poet

Print

Programme note

Programme note to follow.
Dvořák
Silent Woods

Print

Programme note

Programme note to follow.
Mendelssohn
Symphony No 3 'Scottish'

Print

Programme note

Jaime Laredo
conductor/violin
Sharon Robinson
cello

The Pity of War

Thu 24th Oct

19:30, Queen's Hall, Edinburgh

Tickets: £10 - £30

Britten
Suite on English Folk Tunes (A time there was)

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Programme note

Benjamin Britten (1913-1975)
Suite on English Folk Tunes: A Time There Was, Op 90

Cakes and Ale
The Bitter Withy
Hankin Booby
Hunt the Squirrel
Lord Melbourne

Britten composed this suite for chamber orchestra, each of its movements a loving and characteristic elaboration of English folk songs or dances, for the Aldeburgh Festival a year before his untimely death. One movement, the delightful Hankin Booby, had already been heard, seven years earlier, at the opening of the Queen Elizabeth Hall in London, with Britten himself as conductor. It was the success of that idiosyncratic little dance – "as pungent and tangy as a Spanish cobla [medieval rhyme]," as one critic remarked at the time – which inspired the composer to give it what he described as four "brothers and sisters.’"

Each movement is a small tribute to the memory of Percy Grainger, Australia's expert in unstable and unpredictable metres. Each is based on a contrasted pair of tunes and named after one of them. The orchestration, though modest, displays all Britten’s brilliance and resourcefulness. Strings, woodwind, and drums are asked to play "fast and rough" in the opening Cakes and Ale. Harp and pizzicato double bass are joined by horns and bells in The Bitter Withy. Wind band, trumpets, and a persistent drum-beat (evocative of a medieval tabor) are required by Hankin Booby. The strains of an American barn dance kindle the start of Hunt the Squirrel and in Lord Melbourne a cor anglais sings the sad melody upon a cushion of string tone. In this long final movement, marked "slow and languid," the sound of a funeral drum is heard, prompting one authority to remark that it was as if Mahler (one of Britten’s favourite composers) had orchestrated an English folk song.

By the time Britten made his arrangement of it, he was mortally ill, still brimming with ideas but finding them a struggle to write down. Every bar, he complained, was "a sweat," adding that it was physically hard to reach to the top of a large page of musical manuscript, "so all the flutes and piccolos tend to get left out." Yet the result is music of touching freshness, shot through with nostalgia, the work’s subtitle a quotation from Thomas Hardy’s poem Before Life and After, which had served as the finale of Britten’s song cycle Winter Words: "A time there was before the birth of consciousness when all went well." Or to put it another way, as Michael Kennedy did in his biography of the composer, "sorrow for what can never be, love for all that has been, is in this music."

© Conrad Wilson
Beamish
Flodden

Print

Programme note

Programme note to follow.
Bridge
Summer

Print

Programme note

Programme note to follow.
Strauss
Metamorphosen

Print

Programme note

Programme note to follow.

Joseph Swensen
conductor
Shuna Scott Sendall
soprano

Music of special power and intensity casts a shadow of war and calamity over all but the first piece. Strauss’s lament is one of the very greatest tragic outpourings in all music, and one that is close to Swensen’s heart. Bridge’s Summer is an utter contrast: an idyllic moment of sunlit serenity on the eve of the catastrophe of World War I preserved forever in rapturous music. 2013 also sees the 500th Anniversary of a dark hour in Scottish history: the Battle of Flodden. Beamish’s new work has been commissioned especially to commemorate the occasion.

Pre-concert Talk: Dr Elaine Kelly

The Pity of War

Fri 25th Oct

19:30, City Halls, Glasgow

Tickets: £14 - £28

Britten
Suite on English Folk Tunes (A time there was)

Print

Programme note

Benjamin Britten (1913-1975)
Suite on English Folk Tunes: A Time There Was, Op 90

Cakes and Ale
The Bitter Withy
Hankin Booby
Hunt the Squirrel
Lord Melbourne

Britten composed this suite for chamber orchestra, each of its movements a loving and characteristic elaboration of English folk songs or dances, for the Aldeburgh Festival a year before his untimely death. One movement, the delightful Hankin Booby, had already been heard, seven years earlier, at the opening of the Queen Elizabeth Hall in London, with Britten himself as conductor. It was the success of that idiosyncratic little dance – "as pungent and tangy as a Spanish cobla [medieval rhyme]," as one critic remarked at the time – which inspired the composer to give it what he described as four "brothers and sisters.’"

Each movement is a small tribute to the memory of Percy Grainger, Australia's expert in unstable and unpredictable metres. Each is based on a contrasted pair of tunes and named after one of them. The orchestration, though modest, displays all Britten’s brilliance and resourcefulness. Strings, woodwind, and drums are asked to play "fast and rough" in the opening Cakes and Ale. Harp and pizzicato double bass are joined by horns and bells in The Bitter Withy. Wind band, trumpets, and a persistent drum-beat (evocative of a medieval tabor) are required by Hankin Booby. The strains of an American barn dance kindle the start of Hunt the Squirrel and in Lord Melbourne a cor anglais sings the sad melody upon a cushion of string tone. In this long final movement, marked "slow and languid," the sound of a funeral drum is heard, prompting one authority to remark that it was as if Mahler (one of Britten’s favourite composers) had orchestrated an English folk song.

By the time Britten made his arrangement of it, he was mortally ill, still brimming with ideas but finding them a struggle to write down. Every bar, he complained, was "a sweat," adding that it was physically hard to reach to the top of a large page of musical manuscript, "so all the flutes and piccolos tend to get left out." Yet the result is music of touching freshness, shot through with nostalgia, the work’s subtitle a quotation from Thomas Hardy’s poem Before Life and After, which had served as the finale of Britten’s song cycle Winter Words: "A time there was before the birth of consciousness when all went well." Or to put it another way, as Michael Kennedy did in his biography of the composer, "sorrow for what can never be, love for all that has been, is in this music."

© Conrad Wilson
Beamish
Flodden

Print

Programme note

Programme note to follow.
Bridge
Summer

Print

Programme note

Programme note to follow.
Strauss
Metamorphosen

Print

Programme note

Programme note to follow.

Joseph Swensen
conductor
Shuna Scott Sendall
soprano

Pre-concert Talk: Dr Elaine Kelly

Chamber Concert October 2013

Sun 27th Oct

15:00, Queen's Hall, Edinburgh

Tickets: £12 (concessions available)

Brahms
Sextet No 2 in G major

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Programme note

Programme note to follow.

Joseph Swensen
conductor

Brahms’ Sextets contain especially rich, achingly affecting music: there is a vein of melancholy that runs through them, lifted by stretches of magically folk-like inspiration.

This work echoes his emotional turmoil with themes for both his one-time fiancée Agathe von Siebold and the object of his eternal devotion, Clara Schumann.

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Concerts & Tickets

Thu 3rd Oct

Programme note

Fri 4th Oct

Programme note

Thu 10th Oct

Programme note

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Programme note

Fri 11th Oct

Programme note

Programme note

Programme note

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Sat 12th Oct

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Wed 16th Oct

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Thu 17th Oct

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Fri 18th Oct

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Thu 24th Oct

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Fri 25th Oct

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Sun 27th Oct

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