London Symphony Orchestra

Benjamin Britten’s celebrated work for children was commissioned for a 1946 Ministry of Education film called Instruments of the Orchestra. It was completed at the end of an extraordinary year for the young composer, which had seen the premiere of his opera Peter Grimes, the song cycle The Holy Sonnets of John Donne, his second string quartet and his concert tour of the concentration camps with Yehudi Menuhin. Yet in this clever, playful work Britten was able to revive his childlike sense of discovery. He paid tribute, too, to his beloved predecessor, composer Henry Purcell, by taking his theme from a hornpipe rondeau from the incidental music to Abdelazar or The Moor’s Revenge. It is Britten's use of Purcell’s theme which gives the work its grounded, timeless quality. The poet Montagu Slater wrote a commentary for speaker to elucidate the music, but it is most often played today as a concert piece without narration, its notes speaking more eloquently than words. 

After a tutti (meaning all together) statement of the opening theme, each section of the orchestra, including the percussion, steps forward into the limelight for a reprise before the work splinters into an ingenious series of variations over tremolo strings. From chirruping flutes prompted by harp, ardent oboes, jaunty tuba below acrobatic clarinets, tragic-comic bassoons, dazzling strings, tender violas (the composer’s own instrument) – even the double basses have their moment of glory with an impassioned melody in an outlandishly high register. The harp variation recalls Britten's scintillating Ceremony of Carols and prefaces a brooding episode for horns, which gives way to a typically virtuosic trumpet canon and lordly trombones echoed by tuba.  

Britten, the composer of film and stage, revels in his ability to produce a string of brilliant miniatures, capturing a myriad range of styles, some deadly serious, some delightfully tongue-in-cheek, most inimitably his own. The final, apprehensive variation for percussion is particularly witty. 

Now, when every instrumentalist has had a turn, piccolos begin a tearaway fugue, with winds and then strings joining it in rapid succession, harps followed by horns, trumpets and trombones. Then, as it rises to a terrific climax, there comes what David Hemmings (Britten’s first Miles in his opera The Turn of the Screw) has called ‘the champagne moment’, when the original stately theme glides gloriously in on lower brass, locking perfectly onto the racing fugue and driving through a heart-stopping finale.

^{Note by Helen Wallace}

Benjamin Britten
^{1913–76 (United Kingdom)}

Benjamin Britten received his first piano lessons from his mother, who encouraged her son's earliest efforts at composition. In 1924 he heard Frank Bridge's tone poem The Sea and began to study composition with him three years later. In 1930 he gained a scholarship to the Royal College of Music, where he studied composition with John Ireland and piano with Arthur Benjamin. Britten attracted wide attention when he conducted the premiere of his Simple Symphony in 1934. He worked for the GPO Film Unit and various theatre companies, collaborating with such writers as W H Auden and Christopher lsherwood. His lifelong relationship and working partnership with Peter Pears developed in the late 1930s. At the beginning of World War II, Britten and Pears remained in the US; on their return, they registered as conscientious objectors and were exempted from military service.

The first performance of the opera Peter Grimes in 1945 opened the way for a series of magnificent stage works mainly conceived for the English Opera Group. In June 1948 Britten founded the Aldeburgh Festival of Music and the Arts, for which he subsequently wrote many new works. By the mid-1950s he was generally regarded as the leading British composer, helped by the international success of operas such as Albert Herring, Billy Budd and The Turn of the Screw. One of his greatest masterpieces, the War Requiem was first performed on 30 May 1962 for the festival of consecration of St Michael's Cathedral, Coventry, its anti-war message reflecting the composer's pacifist beliefs.

A remarkably prolific composer, Britten completed works in almost every genre and for a wide range of musical abilities, from those of school children and amateur singers to such artists as Mstislav Rostropovich, Julian Bream and Peter Pears.

_{Composer profile by Philip Reed}

1 Prélude: quasi adagio
2 La Fileuse: andantino quasi allegretto
4 La mort de Mélisande: molto adagio

Maurice Maeterlinck’s tragic play, Pelléas et Mélisande, has inspired a number of major musical works, not least Schoenberg’s tone poem, Sibelius’ incidental music and, perhaps best known of all, Debussy’s opera.

But Fauré’s music for an early London production of the play preceded them all and, despite being second choice behind a busy Debussy, the actress/producer Mrs Patrick Campbell ‘felt sure Gabriel Fauré was the composer needed.’ He was up against it, in the great tradition of incidental music, and called on his pupil Charles Koechlin to help orchestrate his piano score quickly for the premiere at the Prince of Wales Theatre in 1898. Campbell was delighted:

The play itself revolves around a doomed love triangle: Mélisande, lost and childlike; Golaud, who rescues and marries her; and his younger brother Pelléas, who falls in love with Mélisande. Golaud, discovering their affair, kills Pelléas and wounds Mélisande, who dies in childbirth.

The suite, re-orchestrated by the composer himself, begins with the Prelude to Act 1: Mélisande is lost and lonely in the forest and we hear Golaud’s hunting horn in the distance before he discovers Mélisande. The Prelude to Act 3 follows: Mélisande at the spinning wheel, the music capturing her innocence and charm. Tonight's performance moves straight onto the final piece, The Death of Mélisande, which was played at Fauré’s own funeral as his coffin was taken out of the church.

Gabriel Fauré
^{1845–1924 (France)}

The youngest of six children, Gabriel Fauré became preoccupied with music at an early age. He improvised on the harmonium at the École normale graduate school run by his father in Montgauzy in Provence, and later recalled that ‘an old blind lady’ gave him elementary lessons. In 1853 a visiting civil servant heard the young boy play and advised Fauré‘s father to send his son to the recently established École Niedermeyer school in Paris, a centre for religious music and the revival of music from past times. Here Fauré studied organ, absorbed the musical language of plainsong and discovered Renaissance polyphony. After Niedermeyer’s death in 1861 Fauré studied piano with composer Camille Saint-Saëns, who also introduced his talented pupil to contemporary works by, among others, Franz Liszt and Richard Wagner.

Between 1861 and his death, Fauré wrote over 200 works, including a three-act opera, Pénèlope (considered by many as the composer’s masterpiece) and, in the final years of his life, a series of refined, emotionally charged songs, chamber and solo piano pieces that still sound remarkably fresh and original. For much of his career he earned his living as organist at a number of Parisian churches, by giving private piano and harmony lessons, and as choirmaster at the Madeleine. From 1905 until 1920, he served as director of the Paris Conservatoire, and enjoyed public recognition as a composer. Deafness and other serious ailments blighted his final years.

Claude Debussy spoke of his older contemporary as the ‘Master of Charms’, dismissing Fauré’s work as lightweight and branding him as the ‘music-case of a band of snobs’. In truth, the composer transformed the French mélodie into a richly expressive art form, developed a highly personal harmonic language while others were struggling to copy that of Wagner, and created a series of elegant, often sensual works.

_{Composer profile by Andrew Stewart}

No 1 in C major: Furiant
No 2 in E minor: Dumka
No 3 in A-flat major: Polka
No 4 in F major: Sousedská
No 5 in A major: Skočná
No 6 in D major: Sousedská
No 7 in C minor: Skočná
No 8 in G minor: Furiant

Antonín Dvořák was relatively unknown at the time of his Slavonic Dances commission in 1878. The German composer Johannes Brahms had spotted that Dvořák had won several prizes and suggested his publishers contact the younger Czech. They did, requesting he write Bohemian dances in the style of Johannes Brahms’ Hungarian Dances.

Opus 46 was first published as a set of piano duets for the amateur market. Their popularity spread like wildfire, and soon Dvořák orchestrated them and composed a second set in 1886. His seat in the musical firmament was confirmed. At the time of Dvořák’s birth, Czech people had no real country of their own. The regions where they lived – Bohemia, Moravia and Silesia – were part of the Austrian Empire, but it was during his lifetime that regions fought for political independence which filtered through to the arts community. Composers started wanting musical independence, too, overshadowed, as it had been, by German and Italian styles. They began using folk tunes and dance rhythms, the beginnings of musical nationalism.

Dvořák’s life-long passion was the Czech national folk tradition, and while he wrote a lot of Czech-sounding compositions, in fact, he hardly ever used any actual folk melodies in his music. He was a sort of magpie, stealing elements from his native musical heritage, most notably the rhythms, but writing the melodies himself. His Slavonic Dances are no different , but that does not belie their heritage.

The Dances

The set of dances literally flies off the score with an untamed Furiant, for which dancers – and the orchestra – have to be on their toes in more ways than one as it constantly shifts gears. A rocking, yearning Dumka follows, led by soft flutes, with a jaunty mid-section perhaps remembering happy times. The Polka has its roots in Czech culture, originated by peasants, but here the usual ‘quick-quick-slow’ rhythm is heard on occasional blasts, enveloped by a gentle melody. The more sedate Sousedská dance is the longest dance of the set before launching into the first Skočná: a galloping rhythm drives forward this ‘leaping couples’ dance. Trills and delicate steps characterise the second lilting Sousedská (No 6); listen out for a beautiful countermelody on the cellos. The second Skočná (No 7) in keeping with the style of dance has a cocky surety about itself. The finale, a second Furiant (No 8) to bookend the set, does not disappoint with its lurch from major to minor and a gorgeous lilting mid-section led by the oboe, hinted at again before the final definitive flourish.

^{Note by Sarah Breeden}

Antonín Dvořák
^{1841–1904 (Bohemia, now Czech Republic)}

Born into a peasant family, Antonín Dvořák developed a love of folk tunes at an early age. His father inherited the lease on a butcher’s shop in the small village of Nelahozeves, north of Prague. When he was 12, the boy left school and was apprenticed to become a butcher, at first working in his father’s shop and later in the town of Zlonice. Here Dvořák learned German and also refined his musical talents to such a level that his father agreed he should pursue a career as a musician.

In 1857 he enrolled at the Prague Organ School, during which time he became inspired by the music dramas of Richard Wagner: opera was to become a constant feature of Dvořák’s creative life. His first job was as a viola player, supplementing his income by teaching. In the mid-1860s he began to compose a series of large-scale works, including his Symphony No 1, ‘The Bells of Zlonice’ and the Cello Concerto. Two operas, a second symphony, many songs and chamber works followed before he decided to concentrate on composition.

In 1873 he married one of his pupils, and in 1874 received a much-needed cash grant from the Austrian government. Brahms lobbied the publisher Simrock to accept Dvořák’s work, leading to the publication of his Moravian Duets and a commission for a set of Slavonic Dances. The nationalist themes expressed in Dvořák’s music attracted considerable interest beyond Prague. In 1883 he was invited to London to conduct a concert of his works, and he returned to England often in the 1880s to oversee the premieres of several important commissions, including his Seventh Symphony and Requiem Mass. Dvořák’s Cello Concerto in B minor received its world premiere in London in March 1896. His Ninth Symphony, ‘From the New World’, a product of Dvořák’s years in the US from 1892–95, confirmed his place among the finest of late 19th-century composers.

_{Composer profile by Andrew Stewart}