Cinematic

Benjamin Northey
Conductor

Since returning to Australia from Europe, Benjamin Northey has rapidly emerged as one of the nation’s leading musical figures. He is currently the Principal Resident Conductor of the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra and was appointed Chief Conductor of the Christchurch Symphony Orchestra in 2015.

His international appearances include concerts with the London Philharmonic Orchestra, the Tokyo Philharmonic Orchestra, the Mozarteum Orchestra Salzburg, the Hong Kong Philharmonic, the National Symphony Orchestra of Colombia, the Malaysian Philharmonic and the New Zealand Symphony and Auckland Philharmonia.

He has conducted L’elisir d’amore, The Tales of Hoffmann and La sonnambula for SOSA and Turandot, Don Giovanni, Carmen and Cosi fan tutte for Opera
Australia.

Limelight Magazine named him Australian Artist of the Year in 2018. In 2022, he conducts the Christchurch and New Zealand Symphony Orchestras and all six Australian state symphony orchestras.

© Patrick Togher Artists’ Management 2022

Image credit: Laura Manariti

Baiba Skride
Violin

Baiba Skride’s natural approach to her musicmaking has endeared her to some of today’s most important conductors and orchestras worldwide. She is consistently invited for her refreshing interpretations, her sensitivity and delight in the music.

Baiba has worked with the Berliner Philharmoniker, Gewandhausorchester Leipzig, Boston and Chicago Symphony Orchestras, New York Philharmonic, Concertgebouworkest, Symphonieorchester des Bayerischen Rundfunks, Orchestre de Paris, London Symphony Orchestra, Royal Stockholm Philharmonic Orchestra and Oslo Philharmonic.

Highlights of Baiba Skride’s 2021/22 season include the season opening of the Gewandhausorchester Leipzig, alongside her return to orchestras such as the Boston\ Symphony Orchestra, Orchester der Komischen Oper Berlin, Orchestre Philharmonique du Luxembourg, RTÉ National Symphony Orchestra, Orchestre National du Capitole de Toulouse, Gothenburg Symphony Orchestra, Residentie Orchestra, Antwerp Symphony Orchestra, Singapore Symphony Orchestra and Sydney Symphony Orchestra, amongst others.

Baiba Skride is a sought-after chamber musician internationally and commits to the long-established duo with her sister Lauma. She is one of the founding members of the Skride Quartet.

Image credit: Marco Borggreve

Nigel Westlake
(b.1958)

Flying Dream - Suite for Symphony Orchestra
from the movie Paper Planes

“My earliest memories of going to the cinema are filled with the emotional impact of the music. As a child I loved experiencing a range of emotions beyond my years, in the hands of great composers, as they guided the audience through each film. As a result, music has always been at the forefront of the creative choices forming each of our films, collaborating early on with a composer who can, through their music, take the audience so much more profoundly into the story than the pictures alone.

Nigel Westlake has composed a score of profound emotional range for Paper Planes, moving through that same range of emotions that dragged me into a life in film and compelled me to return time and time again to the cinema. He has created a narrative work that stands alone outside the film: an epic musical journey taking the listener through intimate personal moments of sadness and loss, exciting insights into friendship and competition, to the grand playful adventure at the heart of the film. Working with Nigel has been one of the great pleasures in making this film: a wonderful creative journey, with the music ultimately evoking with such powerful impact the joy at the heart of childhood.”

Robert Connolly / Film Director

“Armed with a screenplay that held the promise of warmth, joy and emotional depth, Robert Connolly approached me about Paper Planes about three years prior to production. He was in the process of raising capital and enlisting his cast and crew for the journey. I was captivated by the enchantment of the story, and keen to be a part of the adventure.

As if harking back to simpler times, the script was imbued with an innocence and beguiling charm so often missing from modern-day films. Rob wanted a conventional orchestral score to provide the support needed to traverse the rich emotional territory of the picture, from the exuberance of competitive sport, to the harrowing and confronting aspects of bereavement.

It’s always gratifying to engage with a director who sees music as a priority, and is willing to allocate appropriate resources to the task. I can’t thank Rob enough for his support during the writing of the score for Paper Planes.”

Nigel Westlake / Composer

First Performance:
Flying Dream was commissioned by the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra for the 2016 BBC Proms and was first performed by the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra in April 2016 as part of the BBC Proms at Hamer Hall, Melbourne. Conducted by Sir Andrew Davis.

Instrumentation:
two flutes (2nd also piccolo), two oboes (2nd also English horn), two clarinets (2nd also bass clarinet), two bassoons (2nd also contrabassoon); four horns, three trumpets, three trombones, tuba; timpani, percussion, piano, harp and strings.

Erich Wolfgang Korngold
(1897-1957)

Violin Concerto in D, Op.35

Allegro nobile
Romance: Andante
Finale: Allegro assai vivace

Leaving most of his family behind, Korngold left Vienna for Hollywood in January 1938 to compose music for The Adventures of Robin Hood, expecting to return in a few months for the premiere of his opera, Die Kathrin. But Germany’s annexation of Austria in March made a return home impossible, and his family escaped Austria on the last unrestricted train.

Films were now Korngold’s only source of income. When his father berated him for not writing absolute music, Korngold replied that if anyone in America wanted to perform his music they knew where to find him. His wife said later: ‘It was almost as if he had made a vow not to write any more until Hitler was defeated.’

The Violin Concerto was to be Korngold’s return to the concert hall. Ideas for this work seem first to have surfaced in 1937. A theme from the film Another Dawn, scored that year, is the principal melody of the concerto’s first movement; and a transformation of the opening title theme for that year’s The Prince and the Pauper forms the basis for the concerto’s finale.

But Korngold did no serious work on the piece until the war in Europe was over. The violinist Bronislaw Huberman revived a joke that dated back to Korngold’s teenage years: ‘Erich, where’s my violin concerto?’ At dinner one night in 1945, Huberman asked the usual question, whereupon Korngold went to the piano and played the opening theme. Huberman cried: ‘That’s it! That will be my concerto…’

When the concerto was ready for performance, Huberman was somewhat vague about when he might get around to performing it, yet was equally anxious that no-one else would play it before him. When Jascha Heifetz expressed interest in it, Korngold did not hesitate. ‘Huberman,’ he told his friend, ‘I haven’t been unfaithful yet, I’m not engaged…but I have flirted.’ Huberman’s death a short time later brought this chapter in the concerto’s life to an end.

For Korngold, the concerto symbolised his re-emergence into a musical mainstream in which he no longer felt completely secure. He remains true to his instincts in the work, and was particularly nervous about the critics’ response to his frankly emotional musical language. In the weeks before the premiere, he wrote of the work: ‘I want a confirmation, an answer to a question of decisive importance for me: is there still a place and a chance for music with expression and feeling, with long melodic themes, formed and developed on the principles of the classic masters – music conceived in the heart and not constructed on paper?’

The premiere, in St Louis with Heifetz, was a triumphant success with critics and public alike. But Korngold was rightly concerned at how it would be received when Heifetz took it to New York a few weeks later. Irving Kolodin’s famous jibe in the New York Sun, ‘More corn than gold,’ hurt the composer deeply. Posterity’s answer to Korngold’s question has been mixed: the work languished on the fringes of the repertoire until the 1980s, by which time the influence of contemporary music’s style police had begun to wane. The concerto is now the most performed of all Korngold’s concert works.

By 1945, Korngold’s enjoyment of the film-scoring process had abated, and he was concerned that some of his best musical ideas were disappearing as each film was taken out of circulation. He had no hesitation in re-casting themes from his films in his concert music.

The first movement is primarily lyrical, and casts the soloist as a storyteller. The violin joins the orchestra from the opening bars, with the theme adapted from the one Korngold first wrote for Another Dawn. The gentle, romantic second subject was first used in the 1938 film Juarez.

The Romance is almost a love scene played between the soloist and the orchestra. The solo violin plays almost continuously, for the most part spinning high, songful phrases over a carpet of gentle string accompaniment. Korngold’s fondness for orchestral keyboards is particularly evident in this movement: the orchestral forces include vibraphone and celeste. For the Romance’s lavish outpouring of melodic ideas, Korngold drew on his Anthony Adverse score, but created anew the brief, haunting misterioso episode at the movement’s core. This highly chromatic idea returns to conclude the movement.

In a similar manner to the last movement of Samuel Barber’s Violin Concerto, Korngold establishes a decisive change of mood in the finale. In effect it is a set of variations on a theme he first created for The Prince and the Pauper.

Phillip Sametz © 2000

First performance:
15 February 1947, St Louis. Vladimir Golschmann conducting. Jascha Heifetz soloist.

Most recent WASO performance:
8-9 October 2010. Renaud Capuçon (violin). Otto Tausk (conductor).

Instrumentation:
two flutes (2nd also piccolo), two oboes (2nd also English horn), two clarinets, bass clarinet, two bassoons (2nd also contrabassoon); four horns, two trumpets, trombone; timpani, bass drum, cymbals, tubular bells, gong, vibraphone, xylophone, glockenspiel, celesta, harp and strings.

Richard Strauss
(1864-1949)

Also sprach Zarathustra (Thus Spake Zarathustra) – Symphonic poem, Op.30

Introduction: Sunrise –
Of the Back-worlds-men –
Of the Great Longing –
Of Joys and Passions –
The Funeral Song –
Of Science –
The Convalescent –
The Dance Song –
Night Wanderer’s Song

In 1891-92 the usually robust Strauss suffered a period of serious illness. In the summer of 1892 he took leave of his duties at the Weimar Opera and travelled extensively through Italy, Greece and Egypt, soaking up the sun, but more importantly enjoying the awesome physical remains of the ancient pagan civilisations. It was at this time that he began to think about a musical response to some of the ideas of the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, particularly those expressed in his poem Also sprach Zarathustra (Thus spake Zarathustra), though the work’s composition had to wait until 1896.

Zoroaster (as he was known to the ancient Greeks) was a Persian prophet living in the sixth century BCE who taught that the universe, and humankind in particular, is subject to the eternal struggle of two gods, represented by light and darkness; his religion survives among the Parsees of modern India. Nietzsche’s relationship to Zoroastrian ideas is fairly loose, and as Norman Del Mar puts it, he used these ‘as a prop on which to clothe his own ideas on the purpose and destiny of mankind’. The most famous – indeed, notorious – of these is the idea of the Übermensch or Superman. While Nietzsche (and, it must be admitted, the younger Strauss) were disdainful of Christianity’s compassion for weakness, it is drawing a long bow to make Nietzsche responsible for the atrocities of Nazism. Indeed, Nietzsche scholar Joachim Köhler argues that Also sprach Zarathustra, with its celebration of the individual will, partly grew out of the poet’s freeing himself from the dominating personality of the composer Richard Wagner. And Wagner’s widow, Cosima, writing to her son-in-law Houston Stewart Chamberlain (whose racist ideas definitely did influence Hitler), condemned Nietzsche’s book for its ‘Jewishness’.

Strauss’ work is, as he said, ‘freely after Fr. Nietzsche’ which afforded him ‘much aesthetic enjoyment’ rather than any profound philosophical conversion. Strauss takes some of the chapter headings of the poem as the defining images for each section of his tone-poem. It begins with the famous invocation to the sun, with low rumbling accompanying the trumpets’ simple C-G-C theme (which in much of Strauss represents primeval nature). The increasing blaze of full chords establishes C major as one pole of the work (and as Del Mar notes, the sound of the organ at the end of the section adds a liturgical note). Of the Back-worlds-men depicts humanity in its primitive, or rather naïve, 11 state (in B minor, significantly – B being the other tonal pole of the piece). Strauss includes those who profess Christianity in this category, quoting a fragment of the plainchant for the Credo to underline his point, but the movement still reaches a gorgeous climax for multi divided strings.

Of the Great Longing is a depiction of humanity’s search for something beyond mere superstition, but Strauss’ music dramatises the conflict between nature (the trumpet theme) and humanity’s tendency to create dogma with more hints of plainchant and the unresolved conflict between the keys of C and B. A new chromatic motif leads into Of Joys and Passions with a theme that Strauss described as ‘A flat (brass: dark blue)’. Actually the section tends to be in C minor, linking it to the idea of nature, whereas the following Funeral Song is in B minor, and therefore linked to the idea of man.

Of Science is based on a deeply-voiced fugue that Strauss described as ‘spine-chilling’ and Del Mar regards as having a ‘strangely mysterious quality’ despite its dour timbre. In The Convalescent, Nietzsche describes Zoroaster’s spiritual and physical collapse, after which he emerges as the Superman. The Dance Song of the Superman is, like the ‘Dance of Seven Veils’ in Salome, a Viennese waltz – a Straussian joke, perhaps. Here poet and composer part company: Strauss’ Zoroaster displays none of the triumphalism that Nietzsche’s does, and the work closes with a mysterious and tranquil Night Wanderer’s Song in which the keys of nature and man still quietly contend.

After the final rehearsal for the premiere, Strauss, with characteristic modesty, wrote to his wife: ‘Zarathustra is glorious … of all my pieces, the most perfect in form, the richest in content and the most individual in character … I’m a fine fellow after all, and feel just a little pleased with myself.’

Gordon Kerry © 2004

First performance:
27 November 1896, Frankfurt. Richard Strauss, conductor.

First WASO performance:
1-2 August 1969. Thomas Mayer, conductor.

Most recent WASO performance:
18-19 March 2016. Asher Fisch, conductor.

Instrumentation:
piccolo, three flutes (third doubling second piccolo), three oboes, cor anglais, two clarinets, bass clarinet, E flat clarinet, three bassoons, contrabassoon, six horns, four trumpets, three trombones, two tubas, timpani, percussion, two harps, organ and strings.