Stockport Symphony Orchestra May 2022

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Frank Bridge (1879 – 1941): The Sea (1910 – 1911)

1. Seascape: Allegro ben moderato

2. Sea Foam: Allegro vivo

3. Moonlight: Adagio non troppo

4. Storm: Allegro energico – Allegro moderato e largamente

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Now best remembered as composer of The Sea, Frank Bridge achieved success in parallel careers as a teacher, quartet violist, and conductor. Born in Brighton as the son of an iron-fisted theatre band director, his formative years in the pit probably served him well in his later studies at the Royal College of Music. Bridge’s early compositional style was born of the late Romantic, despite the best efforts of his composition teacher, Charles Villiers Stanford. His post-war musical voice saw a marked change in outlook, turning instead towards the styles of Alban Berg and Béla Bartók; whether this was due to his pacifist horror at the war or other factors such as his childlessness remain debated. His compositions include a large number of quartets, other chamber works and a handful of symphonic poems, his only symphony left incomplete at his death. Much of his contemporary success was thanks to the patronage of his American friend Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge, who promoted successful performances in the United States. As a conductor, he was frustrated by his own reputation as an ever-reliable last-minute deputy, who could master a complex score at speed.

 

Bridge is also well known as the teacher of Benjamin Britten, who recalled being ‘knocked sideways’ when he first heard The Sea, aged ten, and who would later pay tribute to his teacher in his Variations on a Theme of Frank Bridge and the Four Sea Interludes from Peter Grimes, two movements of which bear identical titles to movements of Bridge’s Sea. Like Britten, Bridge was a man of the coast, writing The Sea in Eastbourne (the same inspiration for Debussy’s La Mer) and dying some thirty years later in the near vicinity.

 

The Sea is scored for a typical Romantic-sized orchestra and falls into four movements. The first bears striking resemblance in sound world to Arnold Bax’s Tintagel (composed eight years later), readily conjuring vivid imagery of rippling, sun-dappled waves and salty winds. In Bridge’s own words, ‘Seascape paints the sea on a summer morning. From high drifts is seen a great expanse of waters lying in the sunlight. Warm breezes play over the surface.’ The second acts as a scherzo, with dancing woodwinds and skittish strings painting eddying currents and sea spray, Bridge describing ‘Froths among the low-lying rocks and pools on the shore, playfully not stormy’. The slow third movement serenely portrays a nocturnal scene by the water: ‘Moonlight paints a calm sea at night. The first moonbeams are struggling to pierce through dark clouds, which eventually pass over, leaving the sea shimmering in full moonlight’. Finally, a storm bursts out with a roar from the timpani and howling strings. ‘Wind, rain and tempestuous seas; with the lulling of the storm an allusion to the first number is heard and which may be regarded as the sea-lover's dedication to the sea’.

 

Sergei Prokofiev (1891 – 1953): Piano Concerto No. 3 in C major (1911 – 1921)

1. Andante – Allegro

2. Tema con variazioni (in E minor)

3. Allegro, ma non troppo

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Prokofiev’s relationship with his native Russia is almost as complex as that of Shostakovich, fifteen years his junior. After leaving for New York via Siberia and Tokyo amid the tumult of revolution in 1918 and achieving stardom in New York and Paris, he returned to the Soviet Union in 1936 and was welcomed as a national hero. Though he never formally joined the Communist Party nor fully embraced socialist realism, Prokofiev largely toed the line, necessarily moderating and simplifying his style in order to suit an agenda of ‘music for the people’. He was a successful dual composer/pianist from his early Suggestion Diabolique to his five great piano concerti. Later works such as Peter and the Wolf (1936) and the fifth symphony (1945) achieved considerable success, but his latter years were nonetheless traumatic: a week after the premiere of the fifth symphony, the composer’s uncontrolled hypertension led him to collapse in his apartment, the resultant head injury confining him to bed for weeks, where he lay slipping in and out of consciousness through a slow convalescence. His fortunes continued to decline, and in 1948 he was unexpectedly denounced by the state. Debts accumulated and his wife Lina was sentenced to twenty years’ hard labour for ‘espionage’. In 1949 his doctors restricted him to an hour of composition per day, and in 1953 his death near Red Square was overshadowed by the death of Stalin on the very same day.

 

The third piano concerto endured a long genesis, and was ultimately constructed from various sketches accumulated over the years. Its first traces are found in notes from 1911, with further material for the second movement originally composed in 1913 and ideas for the finale from 1918. The second concerto had struggled in 1913, with critics exclaiming ‘To hell with this futuristic music! The cats on the roof make better music!'. The third concerto was ultimately completed some years later on the heels of the Classical symphony (1917) and his opera The Love for Three Oranges (1919), while holidaying on the Brittany coast. That region had become a fashionable escape for Parisian artists, facilitated by a new railway link and enjoyed by the likes of Pablo Picasso, Claude Debussy and Victor Hugo. The premiere was given in December 1921 with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. Although the concerto’s reception in America was lukewarm, it fared better Europe, and particularly in London, where one critic gushed that ‘Music entered the room with Mr. Prokofiev. His concerto is of absorbing interest all through’. The third concerto is now the most successful of the pentad.

 

The concerto is outwardly of conservative stock, scored for a modest orchestra and in conventional three-movement form. It even has its moments of searing Romantic decadence, though for all its capricious lurches between impish mischief and explosive tumult, the composer’s keen sense of irony is never far away. After a slow introduction led by clarinet, the first movement pans out with ever more explosive panache. Oboe and castanets make for uneasy bedfellows in a surreal procession which is variously disrupted by tumultuous outbursts, episodes of grotesque puppetry, sudden romantic excursions, and virtuosic fireworks for the piano.

 

The slow movement, in the form of theme and five variations, again centres around a suspiciously idle procession, with further conversation between soloist and orchestra continuing into the finale. The orchestra is always at least equal to the pianist, rather than settling for a meek accompanying role. Much of the finale was written in 1918 as a ‘quatuor blanc’ (that is, a string quartet using only the ‘white’ notes of the keyboard), though here it is worked into a thrilling and breathless dash to the finish line.

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Ralph Vaughan Williams (1872 – 1958): Symphony No. 2, ‘A London Symphony’ (1912-13, revised 1918-1936)​

1. Prologue (Lento) – Allegro risoluto

2. Lento

3. Scherzo (Nocturne) – Allegro vivace

4. Andante con moto – Maestoso alla marcia (quasi lento) – Allegro Epilogue: Andante sostenuto

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Like his lifelong friend Holst, Vaughan Williams was educated at the Royal College of Music under Charles Villiers Stanford. Further study took him to Berlin (under Bruch) and Paris (under Ravel), though more than just about any other composer, Vaughan Williams’ music is instantly identified with the slippery concept of ‘Englishness’. He would become a prolific collector of English folk tunes, but above all it is his nine symphonies, composed over half a century, which define his musical voice. While some listeners instantly hear idyllically bucolic scenes in his music, this does a disservice to a composer who reflected with such bleak honesty the events of the early twentieth century.

 

The impetus to write a symphony came from Vaughan Williams’ friend, the composer Arthur Butterworth. As he recalled, ‘“[Butterworth] said in his gruff, abrupt manner: "You know, you ought to write a symphony." I answered... that I'd never written a symphony and never intended to... I suppose Butterworth's words stung me and, anyhow, I looked out some sketches I had made for... a symphonic poem about London and decided to throw it into symphonic form’. The Sea symphony of 1903-09 was an instant success, and the ‘London Symphony’ soon followed.

 

There are many parallels with Gustav Mahler in the London symphony. Like Mahler, Vaughan Williams edited and revised the new symphony over many years, toyed with its title (considering ‘Symphony by a Londoner’) and, above all, agonised over to what extent the symphony was in any way programmatic. Mahler initially provided comprehensive, literal programme notes for many of his symphonies, before later rejecting these. Vaughan Williams did much the same; although there are many literal musical depictions of the city in his symphony, he later insisted that he didn’t want the symphony to be about London, insisting that ‘The music is intended to be self-expressive, and must stand or fall as ‘absolute’ music’. Whatever the composer’s intentions, this is undeniably a symphony of inescapably graphic imagery.

 

The symphony as we now know it is in four movements. The first opens slowly and mistily, with the Westminster chimes distantly signalling half past the hour. A bustling morning scene abruptly develops, amid wails of ‘Have a banana’ and rowdy brass hijinks. The slow movement was initially described by the composer as depicting ‘Bloomsbury Square on a November afternoon’, with melancholic themes abounding for cor anglais and viola, the latter gently advertising a vendor’s sweet lavender.

 

For the scherzo, Vaughan Williams initially invited the listener to ‘Imagine himself standing on Westminster Embankment at night, surrounded by the distant sounds of the Strand, with its great hotels on one side, and the ‘New Cut’ on the other, with its crowded streets and flaring lights’. The finale is altogether more bleak: after an anguished cry, a solemn procession makes its way steadily through the streets. Tragedy seems to build inexorably. Here, the composer quotes from HG Wells’ novel, Tono-Bungay, to give us the most telling clue as to his (original) intentions behind the music: ‘England and Kingdom…glide abeam, astern, sink down upon the horizon, pass – pass. The river passes, London passes, England passes…’. Wells’ hero sails off to war in a destroyer, looking wearily back upriver at the city, where Vaughan Williams’ distant bells chime forty-five minutes past the hour.