Autumn 2020 Season

1. Allegro
2. Andante
3. Vivo

Grażyna Bacewicz was the second Polish female composer to achieve international recognition, after Maria Szymanowska (1789–1831). Along with Witold Lutosławski, Krzysztof Penderecki and Andrzej Panufnik, Bacewicz played a major role in the renaissance of Polish music following World War II. She was a professional violinist as well as a composer, and wrote prolifically for strings. The Concerto for String Orchestra dates from 1948, when she began to prioritise composing over performing. Many musicians regard it as one of her finest works.

Bacewicz was one of several 20th-century composers – including, most famously, Stravinsky – who were strongly influenced by 18th-century musical aesthetics and structures. She is thus often cited as a neo-Classical composer (neo-Classicism being the 20th-century trend of returning to musical concepts typical of the 18th century), though she herself resisted the label. Bacewicz modelled her Concerto for Orchestra on the Baroque form of the Concerto Grosso, in which the musical material is passed between full orchestra and a group of soloists rather than a single soloist.

The first-movement Allegro contains three main themes: a purposeful opening line featuring pulsating rhythms, a graceful interchange for solo violin and cello, and an energetic, folk-like melody for low strings with pizzicato (plucked) violin accompaniment. The wistful Andante contrasts the rich textures of full orchestra (at one point the strings divide into 17 parts) with the delicacy of solo instruments, and includes a lyrical cello melody. The dance-like, rhythmically intricate Vivo – with its unexpectedly haunting episodes for solo viola and violin – brings the piece to a spirited conclusion.

^{Note by Kate Hopkins}

Grażyna Bacewicz
^1909–69

Born to a Polish mother and Lithuanian father in 1909, Grażyna Bacewicz started her musical studies from an early age with violin, piano and theory lessons taken at home alongside her siblings. She showed prodigious talent, giving concerts from the age of seven – accompanied by her brothers – and writing her first piece Preludes for Piano at 13.

In 1928 Grażyna went to Warsaw to study violin, piano and composition. On graduating, Karol Szymanowski, a professor at the Conservatory, encouraged her and other young Polish composers to go to Paris to further their studies under the leading teacher and composer Nadia Boulanger. Splitting her time between France and Poland, she developed as both a composer and a performer. In 1936 she became Principal Violin of the Polish Radio Orchestra, using the opportunity to hear many of her own works performed.

During World War II, Bacewicz remained in Warsaw looking after her young family and continuing to compose, sometimes giving secret underground concerts in the occupied city to premiere her works. After the war she returned to her birthplace of Łódź and became a professor at the State Conservatory of Music.

Bacewicz was still performing and recording as both a violinist and pianist at this time, however her own music was getting more and more attention through a series of significant prizes and commissions. The decision to focus solely on composing was all but made for her following serious injuries she suffered in a car accident 1954.

The awards continued and she became an established musical figure in Poland and beyond, including becoming the first woman vice-president of the Union of Polish Composers and serving on many international competition juries, before her death in 1969.

1. Allegro
2. Andante
3. Finale: Allegro con spirito

Roman Simovic violin
Olivier Stankiewicz oboe
Rebecca Gilliver cello
Daniel Jemison bassoon

Haydn wrote his Sinfonia Concertante Op 84 for performance on his London concert tour of 1792. He intended it in part to be a challenge to his former pupil Ignaz Pleyel, who had written many works of this kind, and who considered himself Haydn’s rival. The form of the Sinfonia Concertante evolved from the Baroque Concerto Grosso and is essentially a concerto for a group of soloists. Haydn scored his piece for small orchestra with a solo quartet of violin, oboe, cello and bassoon. This enabled him to enjoy combining and contrasting a variety of musical sonorities.

The Sinfonia Concertante was commissioned by the violinist and impresario Johann Peter Salomon for his London concert series. The premiere on 9 March 1792 at the Hanover Square Rooms in London – with Salomon as the violin soloist – was a great success, and repeat performances took place the following week, in May 1792 and during Haydn’s subsequent London visit in 1794.

The piece opens with a buoyant Allegro in which the soloists unconventionally join in the initial orchestral material. They go on to dominate the ensuing music, which culminates in an elegant extended cadenza for all four. The orchestra plays a minimal role in the pastoral Andante, which has the intimacy of chamber music, and features gracefully embellished melodic material passed between the soloists. The Finale is a spirited interchange between the orchestra and the solo group, in which the violin plays a prominent role, more than once interrupting the orchestra in mock-operatic style. The mood throughout the work is one of playful good humour, perhaps a reflection of Haydn’s happiness during this period.

^{Note by Kate Hopkins}

Franz Joseph Haydn
^1732–1809

Most general histories of music emphasise Joseph Haydn’s achievements as a composer of instrumental works, a pioneer of the string quartet genre and the so-called ‘father of the symphony’. In short, he was one of the most versatile and influential composers of his age. After early training as a choirboy at Vienna’s St Stephen’s Cathedral and a period as a freelance musician, Haydn became Kapellmeister to Count Morzin in Vienna and subsequently to the music-loving and wealthy Esterházy family at their magnificent but isolated estate at Eszterháza, the ‘Hungarian Versaillles’. Here he wrote a vast number of solo instrumental and chamber pieces, masses, motets, concertos and symphonies, besides at least two dozen stage works.

In old age Haydn fashioned several of his greatest works, the oratorios The Creation and The Seasons, his six Op 76 String Quartets and his so-called ‘London Symphonies’ prominent among them. ‘I am forced to remain at home … It is indeed sad always to be a slave, but Providence wills it thus,’ he wrote in June 1790. Haydn was by now tired of the routine of being a musician in service. He envied his young friend Mozart’s apparent freedom in Vienna, but was resigned to remaining at Eszterháza Castle. The death of Prince Nikolaus prompted unexpected and rapid changes in Haydn’s circumstances. His son and heir, Prince Anton, cared little for what he regarded as the lavish and extravagant indulgence of music. He dismissed all but a few instrumentalists and retained the nominal services of Haydn, who became a free agent again and returned to Vienna.

Haydn was enticed to England, attracting considerable newspaper coverage and enthusiastic audiences to hear his new works for London. Back in Vienna, Haydn was feted by society and honoured by the imperial city’s musical institutions.

^{Composer profile by Andrew Stewart}

1. Allegro vivace e con brio
2 .Allegretto scherzando
3. Tempo di menuetto
4. Allegro vivace

Beethoven himself called his Eighth Symphony ‘little’, a careless description which over the years has hindered its reputation compared to those of its undeniably grander companions. The suggestion is that this is the composer ‘resting’ after the heroic physical efforts of the Seventh Symphony, ‘relaxing’ (perhaps even ‘lapsing’) into the playful, Haydn-esque musical world of the 18th century.

In truth, its first Viennese audience was not enormously impressed by it. One reviewer noted after its premiere in the Grosser Redoutensaal in February 1814, that ‘it did not create a furore’, its effect weakened as a result of being heard straight after a performance of the more powerful Seventh Symphony. But he also declared that ‘if [the Eighth] Symphony should be performed alone hereafter, we have no doubt of its success’. The style of the music may be essentially conservative, but structurally the work is bursting with ideas. As the 20th-century music writer Hans Keller once put it, ‘when a great composer is complex in one dimension, he tends to be proportionately simple in another, in order to facilitate comprehension’, and the humorous demeanour of the Eighth Symphony does not alter the fact that it is a highly original composition in which Beethoven tries out a number of the formal procedures and concerns that would surface in his later works.

He composed it in the space of a few months in 1812, immediately after completing the Seventh, and right from the start it is clear that he is not in a mood to hang around. The first movement begins without preliminaries, launching in with the first theme and striking off confidently for the second. It takes only 30 seconds or so for the music to lose its way and grind to a standstill before the violins present the rising second theme in what, technically speaking, is the ‘wrong’ key, a faux-pas which the woodwind soon rectify. The central development section is surprisingly stormy and leads to a noisy return of the main theme in which upper strings play tremolando while the theme itself is transferred to the lower instruments. It is the theme’s last appearance however, right at the end of the movement, which is the most delightful and witty.

There is no slow movement as would be expected next; instead, an Allegretto whose monotonous repeated notes are said to have been inspired by the recent invention by one of Beethoven’s acquaintances of the metronome. The veracity of this story is questionable – though it is fun to see in the brusquely scrubbed string interruptions the impatient winding of the mechanism (Beethoven was reportedly not very skilled at operating the new machine).

The Allegretto is followed by an elegantly flowing third movement enriched by touches of graceful counterpoint intertwining multiple melodies and, in the middle section, courtly writing for clarinet and horns. The symphony ends with a scampering, pell-mell finale groaning with jokes, from the startling ‘wrong note’ which interrupts the main theme, to the very sudden, almost accidental arrival at the serene second theme, to any number of stop-start, what-happens-next moments. Formally, this is the most adventurous movement in the symphony, but it is also such a hoot that the listener can be forgiven for neither noticing nor caring.

^{Note by Lindsay Kemp}

Ludwig van Beethoven
^1770–1827

Beethoven showed early musical promise, yet reacted against his father Johann’s attempts to train him as a child prodigy. The boy pianist attracted the support of the Prince-Archbishop, who supported his studies with leading musicians at the Bonn court. By the early 1780s Beethoven had completed his first compositions, all of which were for keyboard. With the decline of his alcoholic father, Ludwig became the family breadwinner as a musician at court.

Encouraged by his employer, the Prince-Archbishop Maximilian Franz, Beethoven travelled to Vienna to study with Joseph Haydn. The younger composer fell out with his renowned mentor when the latter discovered he was secretly taking lessons from several other teachers. Although Maximilian Franz withdrew payments for Beethoven’s Viennese education, the talented musician had already attracted support from some of the city’s wealthiest arts patrons. His public performances in 1795 were well received, and he shrewdly negotiated a contract with Artaria & Co, the largest music publisher in Vienna. He was soon able to devote his time to composition or the performance of his own works.

In 1800 Beethoven began to complain bitterly of deafness, but despite suffering the distress and pain of tinnitus, chronic stomach ailments, liver problems and an embittered legal case for the guardianship of his nephew, Beethoven created a series of remarkable new works, including the Missa solemnis and his late symphonies, string quartets and piano sonatas. It is thought that around 10,000 people followed his funeral procession on 29 March 1827. Certainly, his posthumous reputation developed to influence successive generations of composers and other artists.

^{Composer profile by Andrew Stewart}