LSO Summer Shorts

1 Bayou Home
2 If You Should Go
3 Song For the Lonely

Along with nine operas and various choral works, William Grant Still composed some beautiful art songs. Three Songs for Flute and Piano are arrangements of three of these. In Bayou Home (1944) he sets a text by his wife Verna Arvey that expresses anticipatory nostalgia for the American South (bayous being the swampy creeks commonly found there). Grant Still’s love of American folk music is evident in the song’s catchy refrain: ‘I’m leaving my home on the Bayou … got to answer a call from afar’.

If You Should Go comes from the 1949 cycle Songs of Separation. The composer perfectly captures the dreamy tone of US poet Countee Cullen’s poem of the same name through his meditative music, which contains a hint of jazz in its harmonies. Song for the Lonely (1953) sets another text by his wife Arvey, this time about solitude. The falling phrases, simple melody line and slow tempo create a mood of melancholy resignation. Three Songs were arranged by New Zealand flautist Alexa Still, a great champion of Grant Still’s work.

^{Note by Kate Hopkins}

William Grant Still
^{1895 to 1978}

Long known as the 'Dean of African-American Classical Composers', as well as one of the US' foremost composers, William Grant Still has had the distinction of becoming a legend in his own lifetime. He was born in Woodville (Wilkinson County) Mississippi on 11 May 1895, to parents who were teachers and musicians.

Still wrote over 150 compositions (well over 200 if his lost early works could be counted), including operas, ballets, symphonies, chamber works and arrangements of folk themes, especially African-American spirituals, plus instrumental, choral and solo vocal works.

Recommended listening

William Grant Still Afro-American Symphony: IV. Lento con risolutione

Glen Sannox River Song was composer for LSO Soundhub, for a first performance by LSO Principal Flute, Gareth Davies.

This piece is influenced by the landscape and musical traditions of my home on the Scottish Isle of Arran. The structure of the piece follows the undulating shape of the Glen Sannox river which runs between the mountains in the North of Arran. The reinventions of the melodic lines trace the bends and curves in the river as it flows down from its high mountain source.

Glen Sannox River Song is a response to traditional Gaelic singing. Through the piece I experiment with the use of the voice of the flautist over played pitch. The played and sung lines of the flautist reflect the call and response dialogues in Gaelic Psalmody and Hebridean Waulking Songs, as well as the inflection and ornamentation in the voices of precentor and congregation. There is a process of growth through the piece, as the call and response textures become faster with increasing ornamentation and intensity. The central melodic line reinvents itself over these cycles of dialogue, moving between unison calls and the answering lines in the interweaving voices of the congregation.

The constancy of the flowing river and the endless cycles of melodic reinvention and transformation might bring new reflections from the natural surroundings of my home into the urban surroundings of LSO St Luke’s, as the area undergoes a process of reinvention, emerging out of the pandemic.

^{Note by Electra Perivolaris}

Electra Perivolaris
^{b 1996}

Described as a ‘Classical Star of the Future’ in a BBC Introducing article, Electra Perivolaris (b 1996) is a composer and pianist from Scotland of mixed British and Greek heritage.

Following success in the BBC Young Composers’ Competition 2014, Electra has had her music performed across the UK and internationally by musicians of the London Symphony Orchestra, BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra, Hebrides Ensemble, BBC Singers, Scottish Chamber Orchestra and BBC Concert Orchestra. She is Ambassador for the BBC Young Composer Scheme and she is currently writing for the Scottish Chamber Orchestra as part of their New Stories scheme.

1 Allegro
2 Intermezzo: Allegretto vivace
3 Andante tranquillo
4 Finale: Allegro molto agitato ed appassionato, quasi presto

Carl Reinecke’s Undine Sonata is a musical retelling of Friedrich de la Motte Fouqué’s fairytale novella Undine (1811).

The water nymph Undine longs to experience human love. In the opening Allegro, with its virtuoso central section, she leaves her underwater kingdom for a new life on land. The nimble Intermezzo that follows depicts her romance with the knight Huldebrand, introduced in the first of the movement’s two trios by a stately piano solo. In the lyrical Andante tranquillo the couple rejoice in their initial marital happiness – though Undine’s water-goblin uncle briefly disturbs their peace with a warning of imminent danger.

This duly arrives in the fierce Finale, which opens with a tritone interval: the famous ‘devil in music’. Huldebrand rejects Undine, she falls into the Danube, and he, believing her dead, marries a mortal woman. The music is as turbulent as the characters’ emotions. Only at the end – after Undine has delivered the kiss of death to her faithless spouse – does it achieve calm.

^{Note by Kate Hopkins}

Carl Reinecke
^{1824 to 1910 (Germany)}

Carl Reinecke was a pianist, composer, conductor and teacher, who during his lifetime held positions as a professor at the Cologne Conservatory and as director of the Gewandhaus Orchestra, Leipzig.

As a performer he embarked on his first concert tour at the age of 19, and at 80 made recordings on piano roll, making him the earliest born pianist to have his playing preserved in any way.

He started composing from the age of just seven years old, and continued after retiring, resulting in almost 300 published works, the most famous of which is his Undine Sonata.