Stockport Symphony Orchestra 19 May 2019
Darius Milhaud (1892-1974): Le bœuf sur le toit (1920)
In the early years of the twentieth century, Darius Milhaud and five modernist friends from Montparnasse came to be known as Les six in railing against the old-world romantic decadence of Wagner and Strauss, and the fashionable impressionism of Debussy. Milhaud became one of the century’s most prolific composers, his final work numbered as Opus 443. His eclectic catalogue is characterised by polytonality, with heavy influences from jazz and Brazilian music. After early years in Marseille and conservatoire studies with Charles-Marie Widor in Paris, he spent formative years in Brazil in 1917-19 as secretary to the French ambassador, and subsequently discovered jazz on the streets of Harlem before returning home. Fleeing France in view of his Jewish parentage in 1940, he settled in California, where he counted Dave Brubeck and Burt Bacharach among his students.
Written with lively nostalgia after returning from Brazil, Le bœuf sur le toit (The ox on the roof) became one of Milhaud’s most popular works, along with La creation du monde, which was written post-Harlem. Accordingly, Le boeuf is full of references to and quotations from Brazilian music, its title directly lifted from a samba he heard on his travels. His intention in writing the piece was to recreate the sounds of the Rio Carnival, constructing the piece around a recurring theme of his own creation in rondo form. As he wrote it, he imagined the music accompanying a silent Chaplin film, with tangos, sambas, maxixes and Fado music falling over each other in an outpouring of affection for the music of Brazil. The music’s brashly cheery façade masks a complex formal structure, as does Milhaud’s breezy dismissal of the piece as a mere assembly of a few popular melodies. After the unifying rondo theme is first heard, the parade of dances fly past in key signatures which rise by a minor third with each tune, taking in all twelve notes of the chromatic scale: thus we hear C – Eb – Gb – A, then G – Bb – Db – E, and then D – F – Ab – B.
The original staging of the ballet, by Jean Cocteau, is set in the context of the enactment of the 18th Amendment (the ‘prohibition’) in the United States. A boxer, a dwarf, a cross-dresser, a bookmaker and a punter walk into a speakeasy and enjoy their illicit drinks until a policeman arrives, and suddenly the scene becomes a milk bar. The policeman’s head, carelessly detached from its moorings by an overhead fan, is used by a prostitute for a surreal parody on Strauss’ Salome. The drinkers leave, and the policeman is left to pick up the bar tab.
Guy Woolfenden (1937-2016): Oboe Concerto
-
Allegro moderato
-
Andante espressivo
-
Rondo – Allegro assai
Born in Ipswich and trained in Cambridge and at the Guildhall, Guy Woolfenden is best remembered for his tireless work as head of music with the Royal Shakespeare Company for 37 years. In this time, he wrote incidental music to every play in the repertoire, often inventing new instruments to achieve desired sound effects. He also wrote for orchestras, wind bands and chamber groups, and was awarded the OBE for services to music in 2007.
The premiere of the oboe concerto was given by tonight’s soloist, Simon Beesley, at the 1982 Edinburgh Festival. It is dedicated to the composer’s oboist wife, Jane, whom we are honoured to welcome this evening in the company of Tim Reynish, an old colleague of Guy’s from the National Youth Orchestra horn section and erstwhile SSO conductor. Modest in length and scale, it is simply scored for strings and oboe, and follows a classical three-movement form.
The aspirational but melancholic rising figures of the first movement are cast in a restless G-minor key above skittish, unsettled time signatures. The rising theme reappears in the slow movement, where the battle between major and minor keys is never convincingly settled. There are strong hints of Rimsky-Korsakov’s Scheherazade in the soloist’s descending triplet figures. The finale is an entertaining exercise in exchanges between oboe and orchestra, with a flighty, dancing theme appearing either side of more sombre music. The final pages bring the music to a playfully ebullient close.
Joseph Haydn (1732-1809): Symphony No. 45 in F-sharp minor, ‘Farewell’ (1772) – Finale (Presto – Adagio)
Haydn’s Farewell symphony is one of those works whose genesis has become just as famous as the music itself. Each summer, from May to October, Prince Nikolaus Esterházy would relocate with his court orchestra to the Esterháza palace, around 30 miles south East of Eisenstadt. At the end of a long summer for the court musicians in 1872, their thoughts turned increasingly to their wives and families at home, and so a late request from the Prince for them to defer their return to Eisenstadt until November was received with little enthusiasm.
The Kapellmeister, Haydn, tactfully responded with one of history’s more subtle examples of industrial action. He wrote a new symphony which largely followed the general shape of his other 103, but in the unusual and awkward key of F-sharp minor and with a unique finale. After a Sturm und Drang first movement, a slow movement and minuet, a typically lively Presto lands on a dramatic imperfect (unresolved) cadence. An extended slow coda follows in a warmly nostalgic manner, and as the last pages of the symphony unfold, the musicians sequentially stop playing (often after a brief solo), snuff out their music stand candle, and leave the stage. In the end, just the principal violinists remain, and the music dissipates into silence.
The Prince, happily, was an astute employer, and took the hint. Resolving that “If they all leave, we must leave too”, he arranged for the court to return to Eisenstadt the next morning. An entertaining YouTube film of the symphony from the 2009 Vienna New Year’s Day concert shows Daniel Barenboim’s mock outrage (in Oliver Hardy fashion) as his players abandon him.
Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827): Symphony No 5 in C minor (1804-08)
There can be very few pieces of music or literature whose opening lines are as familiar or genre-defining as the beginning of Beethoven’s fifth symphony. When performed in The Simpsons, the audience get up and leave after the first four bars, Chief Wiggum pointing out that “The rest is just filler”. If audiences had been surprised by the dramatic E-flat chords at the opening of the Eroica symphony three years earlier, the beginning of the fifth must have been astonishingly bold at its 1808 premiere.
Beethoven’s life in 1808 was as chaotic as it ever was. He had come a long way from the despair of his ‘Heiligenstadt testament’, in which he resolved to turn away from suicide for the sake of his art, but had only a few more years of any auditory faculty left in the bank. A severe finger infection threatened the decimation of his piano abilities, his relationship with Josephine Brunsvik stalled, and Vienna remained under Napoleonic occupation. Unlike Mahler, though, whose music is rooted in real-life, Beethoven’s symphonies are altogether more abstract, and it is rarely possible to correlate his music with his life.
So familiar is this music that it is now almost impossible to imagine how it sounded in 1808 on a chilly December night in Vienna, when the fifth symphony was premiered alongside performances of the sixth symphony, the fourth piano concerto, the Choral Fantasy, a couple of arias and some excerpts from the Mass in C. While we now hear the opening notes (G, E-flat, F and D) as irretrievably derived from the key of C-minor, they could just as easily be derived from E-flat major. It is also hard to escape the old cliché of this motif representing ‘fate knocking at the door’, an apocryphal explanation with very unconvincing evidence for it being Beethoven’s own. The motif is repeated obsessively in almost every bar of the first movement, though, its stride only ever really disturbed by an occasional sustained chord or a brief oboe cadenza, and so the ‘fate’ idea is a more convenient explanation than most alternatives, including the idea of it representing the song of a Viennese yellow-hammer.
The obsessive rage of the first movement is immediately snuffed out in the Andante, where revolutionary stirrings softly bring a sense of distant optimism in A-flat major. A set of variations follows, dreamily elaborating on the optimistic theme while reference to the ‘fate’ motto is left hidden in an accompaniment figure. The Scherzo opens with an unsettled G-minor arpeggio which rises up from the depths of the double basses, perhaps familiar from Mozart’s Symphony No. 40. The horns cry out “Fools!”, unmistakeably referencing the ‘fate’ rhythm. A middle passage follows, in which low strings scrub furiously around a hesitatingly vigorous theme.
Variously performed with or without an extensive repeated passage (this remains a hotly debated controversy), the Scherzo eventually dissolves into darkness. Through the mists, a soft timpani pulsation emerges. The strings restlessly search for resolution, higher and higher, until the finale blazes into view in triumphant C-major, trombones and piccolo appearing in a symphony for one of the very first times. The remainder of the symphony is a joyous, energetic affirmation of the journey we have experienced from the relentless obsession with ‘fate’ (or whatever the motif represents for us as individuals) in the first movement.