Autumn 2020 Season

1. Overture
2. Minuet
3. The Fencing Master
4. Entrance and Dance of the Tailors
5. The Minuet of Lully
6. Courante
7. Entrance of Cléonte
8. Prelude to Act II
9. The Dinner

Richard Strauss’ most successful partnership was with Hugo von Hofmannsthal – the man who wrote the words to Strauss’ best operas. That partnership was tested when Hofmannsthal insisted Strauss collaborate with him on an opera based on Molière’s play Le bourgeois gentilhomme, written for the court of Louis XIV in 1670. Hofmannsthal was fired up by the comic potential of the play, which lampooned Monsieur Jourdain – a middle-class man with aristocratic aspirations. But the opera never came. What emerged, in 1912, was a stilted play with incidental music by Strauss. It proved a flop.

All was not lost. The project led to one of Strauss and Hofmannsthal’s best operas, Ariadne auf Naxos, which was written as support to the play but later revised to stand on its own. In 1920, Strauss revisited all the music he’d written for various incarnations of the play, and plucked-out the best bits to form a suite.

The music is filled with the spirit of the 17th century, and some of its actual music: 'Minuet' and 'Entrance of Cléonte' reupholster music for Molière’s original production written by Louis XIV’s pet composer, Jean-Baptiste Lully.

Strauss reinvents 17th-century dance forms with very 20th-century harmonic and dramatic alterations. He makes the 'Courante' far more complicated than it needs to be – a reflection of Jourdain’s aspirations – and sends-up a ‘gavotte’ in 'Entrance and Dance of the Taylors'.

We hear Jourdain in the Overture – all pretentious and uptight on the trumpet – and in 'The Fencing Master' – prone to bombast on the trombone.

To finish, Strauss delivers a critique of the entire aristocratic class. 'The Dinner' originally accompanied a feast. It tosses quotes from musical history around like a dinner party bore. Among them is a morsel from Strauss and Hofmannsthal’s biggest hit: the opera Der Rosenkavalier.

^{Programme note by Andrew Mellor}

Richard Strauss
^1864–1948

Richard Strauss was born in Munich in 1864, the son of Franz Strauss, a brilliant horn player in the Munich court orchestra; it is therefore perhaps not surprising that some of the composer’s most striking writing is for the French horn. Strauss had his first piano lessons when he was four, producing his first composition two years later, but he did not attend a music academy. His formal education ended at Munich University, although he continued with his musical training at the same time. Following the first public performances of his work, he received a commission from Hans von Bülow in 1882 and two years later was appointed Bülow’s Assistant Musical Director at the Meiningen Court Orchestra, the beginning of a career in which Strauss was to conduct many of the world’s great orchestras, in addition to holding positions at opera houses in Munich, Weimar, Berlin and Vienna. While at Munich, he married the singer Pauline de Ahna, for whom he wrote many of his greatest songs.

Strauss’ legacy is to be found in his operas and his magnificent symphonic poems. Scores such as Till Eulenspiegel, Also Sprach Zarathustra, Don Juan and Ein Heldenleben demonstrate his supreme mastery of orchestration; the thoroughly modern operas Salome and Elektra, with their Freudian themes and atonal scoring, are landmarks in the development of 20th-century music, and the neo-Classical Der Rosenkavalier has become one of the most popular operas of the century. Strauss spent his last years in self-imposed exile in Switzerland, waiting to be officially cleared of complicity in the Nazi regime. He died at Garmisch Partenkirchen in 1949, shortly after his widely celebrated 85th birthday.

^{Composer profile by Andrew Stewart}

Where the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park now stands in London, there was once a factory owned by the match manufacturers Bryant & May. In celebration of the 2012 Olympics, Lemn Sissay wrote the poem The Spark Catchers. It reflects on the women who were employed to catch stray sparks – stopping them from setting the factory and its contents alight – imagining them as athletes.

Hannah Kendall’s piece of the same name was written for the 2017 BBC Proms. It doesn’t try to recreate the poem in sound. Instead, each of its four parts are inspired by specific lines from the poem to act as structural markers.

The vigorous, displaced rhythms of 'Sparks and Strikes’ set up the momentum that is carried into the darker atmosphere of ‘Molten Madness’, from which a soaring melody on horns and violins emerges. ‘Beneath the Stars/In the Silver Sheen’ is a crystalline nocturne of interweaving lines on high pitches.

‘The Matchgirls’ March’ then takes root, a strident dance, before a final section reprises music from all four sections, exploding in sparks of its own. 

^{Programme note by Andrew Mellor}

Hannah Kendall
^{b 1984}

Described as ‘… intricately and skillfully wrought’ by The Sunday Times, Hannah’s music has attracted the attentions of some of the UK’s finest groups including the London Philharmonic Orchestra, Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra, BBC Singers and Philharmonia Orchestra, with performances at the Royal Festival Hall, Queen Elizabeth Hall, Purcell Room, The Royal Opera House's Linbury Studio Theatre, The Place, Westminster, Canterbury, Gloucester and St Paul’s Cathedrals, Westminster Abbey and Cheltenham Music Festival. Hannah's works have also been broadcast on BBC Radio, including 'Composer of the Week' in March 2015, and 'Hear and Now' in October 2016. In 2015, Hannah won the Women of the Future Award for Arts and Culture.

Born in London in 1984, Hannah graduated from the University of Exeter with First Class Honours in Music, having studied composition with Joe Duddell. Hannah also completed a Masters in Advanced Composition with Distinction from the Royal College of Music, studying with Kenneth Hesketh and funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council, the Royal College of Music Study Award and the RVW Trust. Hannah is currently based in New York City as a Doctoral Fellow in composition at Columbia University.

1. Moderato
2. Allegro molto
3. Allegro vivace
4. Molto tranquillo
5. Commodo
6. Finale
7. Allegro

After decades researching and documenting Hungarian folk tunes, Béla Bartók started to let the shape, spirit and rhythms of those tunes infiltrate the music he wrote. He referred to the results as ‘invented peasant music.’

Bartók coined that phrase to describe his own Dance Suite. It was written in 1924 to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the unification of Buda and Óbuda on the north side of the Danube with Pest on the south side – creating Budapest.

There were extra political complications in the 1920s. Since 1918, Hungary had itself been divided. Many of the territories from which Bartók had harvested his tunes now found themselves in different countries.

In reaction, Bartók conceived his Dance Suite as an act of unification. Its sections are linked by a recurring tune he described as ‘a true imitation of Hungarian folk tunes’.

The music then travels through specific geographical characters: Arabic (movements 1 and 4), Hungarian (movement 2), Hungarian and Romanian (movement 3) and ‘simple peasant’ (movement 5). In the sixth and final movement, each theme is recalled in an embracing cosmopolitan dance.

^{Programme note by Andrew Mellor}

Béla Bartók
^1881–1945

Béla Bartók’s family boasted how the boy was able to recognise different dance rhythms before he could speak. Born in 1881 in Nagyszentmiklós, Hungary (now Sinnicolau Mare, Romania), he began piano lessons with his mother at the age of five.

From 1899 to 1903 he studied piano and composition at the Royal Academy of Music in Budapest, where he created a number of works that echoed the style of Brahms and Richard Strauss. After graduating he discovered Austro-Hungarian and Slavic folk music, travelling extensively with his friend Zoltán Kodály and recording countless ethnic songs and dances which began to influence his own compositions.

His music was also influenced by the works of Debussy, to which he was introduced by Kodály in 1907, the year in which he became Professor of Piano at the Budapest Conservatory. Bartók established his mature style with such scores as the ballets The Wooden Prince (1914–16, completed 1917) and The Miraculous Mandarin (1918–19, completed 1926–31), and his opera Duke Bluebeard’s Castle (1911, completed 1918). He revived his career as a concert pianist in 1927 when he gave the premiere of his First Piano Concerto in Mannheim.

Bartók detested the rise of fascism and in October 1940 he quit Budapest and travelled, via Lisbon, to the US. At first he concentrated on ethnomusicological researches, but eventually returned to composition and created a significant group of ‘American’ works, including the Concerto for Orchestra, his Third Piano Concerto and the draft of a Viola Concerto.

His character was distinguished by a firm, almost stubborn refusal to compromise or be diverted from his musical instincts by money or position. Throughout his working life, Bartók collected, transcribed and annotated the folk songs of many countries, a commitment that brought little financial return or recognition but one which he regarded as his most important contribution to music. He also declined the security of a composition professorship during his final years in America, although he did accept the post of visiting assistant in music at Columbia University from March 1941 to the winter of 1942 until ill health forced his retirement.

^{Composer profile by Andrew Stewart}