Landscape and Wonder

Dane Lam
Conductor

Australian-Chinese conductor, Dane Lam, is Principal Conductor of the Xi’an Symphony Orchestra. He was recently appointed Resident Conductor and Associate Music Director of Opera Queensland.

Dane made his debut, aged eighteen, with the Sydney Symphony and has since conducted: Münchner Rundfunkorchester, City of London Sinfonia, Manchester Camerata, Liverpool Philharmonic Ensemble 10/10, RTÉ Concert Orchestra, Beethoven Orchester Bonn, Verbier Festival Orchestra and all the major Australasian symphony orchestras.

Recent engagements include La bohéme and Don Giovanni at Opera Australia, L’arlesiana and Così fan tutte for Opera Holland Park, Orfeo ed Euridice for Opera Queensland and The Rake’s Progress and La traviata for Scottish Opera.

In 2021, Dane Lam will lead seasons of Le nozze di Figaro in Brisbane, La clemenza di Tito and La rondine in Canberra and will conduct the Sydney, Melbourne, Queensland and Adelaide Symphony Orchestras.

© Patrick Togher Artists’ Management 2021.

Sergei Prokofiev (1891-1953)

Classical Symphony
(Symphony No.1 in D), Op.25

Allegro
Larghetto
Gavotte (Non troppo allegro)
Finale (Molto vivace)

A 20th-century composer writes in a style much simpler, and less obviously modern, than his other music, and calls his piece Classical Symphony, harking back to the music of Mozart and Haydn. What is going on? After Prokofiev wrote this symphony in 1917, audiences everywhere thought they knew. This time, at least, he had written music which was easy to understand and enjoy. It quickly became one of Prokofiev’s best-loved works, second in popularity only to Peter and the Wolf. But the composer was really up to some harmless mischief when he gave this piece its title. He admitted later he wanted to ‘tease the geese’, and he laughed at the critics’ complicated discussions about his ‘Neo-classical’ style, of which the Classical Symphony was supposed to be so striking an example.

Prokofiev chose the style of the Classical composers, but not as a tribute to their music. He later told his friends he had set himself an exercise, in the summer of 1917, between the February and October Revolutions. He had gone to stay in a country house where there wasn’t a piano. Having noticed that ‘thematic material composed without the piano was often better’, he wanted to see whether he could compose a whole work in his head, without using the piano as he usually did. He thought this ‘difficult journey’ would be easier if he deliberately adopted a simpler style and form.

Prokofiev loved playing musical games (he was also a champion chess player), and the Classical is a cheerful, humorous symphony.

Haydn’s music is often like this too, and Prokofiev mentioned that 18th-century symphonist as his model. He had heard and studied Haydn’s symphonies in Tcherepnin’s conducting classes, and it was for a ‘Haydn’ or Classical orchestra that he wrote – pairs of wind instruments, horns, trumpets, timpani and strings. Prokofiev knew the ‘rules’ of musical language which had been codified from the procedures of ‘Classical’ symphonists such as Haydn. But he didn’t imitate Haydn slavishly: ‘It seemed to me,’ he wrote, ‘that if Haydn had lived to our day he would have retained his own style while at the same time absorbing something of the new. This was the kind of symphony I wanted to write.’

With hindsight we can see that the Classical Symphony has much the same characteristics as all Prokofiev’s best music. He plays similar games, such as taking a conventional melody and shifting it into a harmonic frame which seems disconnected. This produces the feeling, as Prokofiev’s friend Nicholas Nabokov said, that the melody has been refreshed by being harmonically mishandled.

Prokofiev did not feel bound by 18th century harmonic conventions: for instance, at the very beginning he states his subject in the key of D, then without any pretence at modulation, in C. The writing for the strings tends to be high up in the compass of the instruments, which gives the Classical Symphony its elegant, witty sounding texture: as though themes by Haydn were being played an octave higher than he would have written them.

This cheerful style was one way Prokofiev rebelled against the late-Romantic atmosphere, steamy with philosophy, literature and mysticism. This symphony composed in 1917 was part of a musical revolution. But it was also very Russian and traditional, in its somewhat mechanical concept of form as an external structure, since Russian 19th-century composers had tended to pour their music into existing formal moulds. The Gavotte, composed in 1916, before the rest of the music, is an old French dance form. Its inclusion in the symphony, in the place of the Classical minuet, shows that Prokofiev was drawn, whether consciously or not, to an older, even more formal style than is found in the symphonies of Mozart and Haydn. His departure from their formal example comes, significantly, in music based on the dance; which, as Prokofiev’s own ballets show, suited his gifts so well.

© David Garrett

First performance:
21 April 1918, Petrograd. Composer conducting.

Most recent WASO performance:
16-17 March 2012. Nicholas Carter, conductor.

Instrumentation:
two each of flutes, oboes, clarinets and bassoons; two horns, two trumpets; timpani and strings.

Jean Sibelius (1865 - 1957)

Symphony No.5 in E flat, Op.82

Tempo molto moderato
Andante mosso, quasi allegretto
Allegro molto

The pitiless despair of Sibelius’ Fourth Symphony (1911) puzzled many of its first listeners. The work seemed an unlikely sequel to the gentle radiance of the Third (1907), yet its gaze into the abyss gave way, in the Fifth, to one of Sibelius’ most shining, life-affirming creations. While the Fifth is light to the Fourth’s darkness, a progression from doubt to belief (Sibelius’ admiration for Bruckner should not be forgotten here), it represents no shift in Sibelius’ compositional principles. An economy of orchestral resource, the building-up of musical paragraphs by the development of tiny melodic fragments, the determination to create his own solutions to the problems of harmonic language and symphonic form – these were abiding features of his music from the beginning of his composing life. In fact of all the major composers of the last century he was the most solitary, methodical and purposeful in his stylistic development, taking only fitful interest in the work of his contemporaries.

He wrote the Fifth, one of the most popular of all his works, at a time of great personal difficulty. The Great War had broken out and, as a result, Sibelius had lost access to the revenue from his German publishers. To earn some regular income he wrote a great number of salon pieces for domestic performance, and had little time for other composing; the Fifth Symphony is his only major work of the war years.

Sibelius himself conducted the symphony’s first performance, at a concert given on 8 December 1915 to mark his 50th birthday. It was a jubilant event, treated almost as a national holiday, but Sibelius was unhappy with the work and revised it twice. In 1916 he joined the first two of the original four movements together, and he made further revisions before it was published in 1919.

The symphony begins quietly on horns and timpani. The theme we hear at this point is soon elaborated into a woodwind cadenza. At its conclusion the strings enter, and we seem to be moving inexorably into the landscape of the music until we come to the vista presented by a great tolling of the brass and the announcement of a jagged syncopated theme on the strings. Now we have reached the threshold beyond which the heart of the symphony lies. A mysterious, cloudy passage for the strings – over which the bassoon utters a sorrowful version of one of the main themes – leads to a burnished assertion by the trumpets of the very first theme of the symphony, shortly after which the mood changes to one of dancing lightness. Soon the music gathers pace and the strings take up the dance strain with increasing excitement until the brass join in for the final, sudden, invigorating climax.

The second movement is a set of variations not on a theme, but on a rhythmic pattern that Sibelius contrives to behave like a theme. The whole movement is a centre of calm, and even the passionate descending string tune that marks one of the most decisive transformations of the original idea is marked Poco tranquillo. Towards the end of the movement the brass toll out a reminiscence of their earlier, more excitable selves; this leads to a series of cloudy gestures which recall music from the earlier movement. But towards the end the mood changes to one of almost childlike serenity, which is carried through to the short, abbreviated, coda.

The finale throws us into its hurly-burly almost immediately, with a whirlwind passage for the strings leading to one of the best-known of all themes in Sibelius’ music, that in which, as Donald Tovey famously described it, Thor swings his hammer. After some woodwind carolling and a return to the gusty sounds of the movement’s opening, Sibelius prepares us for a return of the swinging horn theme. When this finally reappears, it does so as a chorale that has to struggle through long pedal-points and changes of key before bursting into its sunset glory.

These final minutes of the movement contain the richest orchestration of the whole work, but almost before we can register the fact, the symphony ends with six jubilant, adamant chords.

Abridged from an annotation by Phillip Sametz
© 1995/2004

First performance:
8 December 1915, Helsinki. Composer conducting.

First WASO performance:
26 June 1953. Rudolf Pekarek, conductor.

Most recent WASO performance:
8-9 May 2015. Baldur Brönnimann conductor.

Instrumentation:
two each of flutes, oboes, clarinets and bassoons; four horns, three trumpets, three trombones; timpani and strings.

The final version of Sibelius’ Fifth Symphony was premiered in Helsinki under the baton of the composer on 24 November 1919.