WASO's Four Seasons Tour

It’s our great pleasure to welcome you to the West Australian Symphony Orchestra’s Four Seasons Tour.

Our State Orchestra is one of the finest in the country. As West Australians, we should all feel incredibly proud to have access to a world-class local ensemble playing some of the greatest classical music ever written, right on our doorstep.

This tour is made possible with the support of the McGowan Government through Playing WA, which supports the costs of touring WA-produced shows to regional and remote towns and communities. Playing WA is part of the Regional Arts and Cultural Investment Program administered by the Department of Local Government, Sport and Cultural industries with funding from the Department of Primary Industries and Regional Development.

We would like to congratulate WASO for playing an important role in the cultural vibrancy of Western Australia and enriching lives across our state with music.

Music brings us together and these performances are a wonderful opportunity to gather with loved ones to experience a live symphony orchestra in your local community. Thank you for your support of WASO; may the music play on.

We hope you enjoy tonight’s performance.

Hon David Templeman MLA
Minister for Culture and the Arts

Hon Alannah MacTiernan MLC
Minister for Regional Development

Jen Winley
Conductor

Jen Winley is WASO’s 2022 Assistant Conductor.

Jen began her music career as a percussionist and timpanist working principally with the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra and regularly with Orchestra Victoria and WASO. She then spent over a decade as a classroom music educator and loves being able to combine her passions for music and learning when working with young people.

As a conductor, Jen began her career in 2019 with the WA Youth Orchestra and in January 2020 Jen was a participant in the Australian Conducting Academy and WASO’s Emerging Conductors program.

Jen made her professional conducting debut in 2020 with several orchestras in Perth including WASO and Perth Symphony Orchestra. 2021 saw repeat engagements including her film conducting debut of Home Alone with WASO and 2022 features several WASO engagements including concerts for Perth Festival and mainstage Education and Family Concerts. Jen is also conducting the WA Youth Orchestra in their 3rd season of 2022.

Jen’s position is generously supported by the Simon Lee Foundation.

Image credit: Shea Walshe

Laurence Jackson
Director / Violin

Since making his London debut in 1990, Laurence has forged a highly successful career as a soloist, chamber musician and concertmaster. He was 1st prize winner at the 1990 Vina del Mar Competition, Chile and 3rd prize winner at the 1991 Sarasate Violin Competition, Pamplona, Spain. He is regularly invited to guest lead orchestras throughout the world, including the LPO, Philharmonia, RSNO, BBC Philharmonic, Trondheim Symphony Orchestra and Bergen Philharmonic. In Australia, he has appeared as guest concertmaster with MSO, QSO and the Tasmanian Symphony Orchestra.

Between 1994 to 2006, Laurence was leader of the acclaimed Maggini Quartet, with whom he regularly toured throughout the USA, Canada and Europe and made some 30 discs, receiving numerous awards including two Grammy Award nominations and the 2001 Gramophone CD of the Year for Chamber Music.

Laurence was appointed 1st concertmaster of the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra in 2006, appearing often as soloist and director before coming to WASO in 2016. He plays on a violin by J.B Vuillaume, circa 1850.

Image credit: Nik Babic

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756-1791)

The Marriage of Figaro, K.492: Overture

Mozart’s Opera, The Marriage of Figaro is based on the French writer Pierre Beaumarchais’ comedy La Folle journée (The Madcap Day), the sequel to his Le Barbier de Séville, the basis of Rossini’s opera The Barber of Seville.

Beaumarchais’ original was regarded as almost seditious by an aristocratic audience on the eve of the French Revolution. It is almost a farce with some of the characters like Don Basilio and Dr Bartolo, recognisable from their Commedia dell’arte prototypes. But Beaumarchais brought the class system to the fore and Figaro the servant was cleverer than his master, The Count.

Mozart and librettist da Ponte softened some of the harsher political aspects, but added an emotional warmth, and the music compensated with greater depth of characterisation. The score contains some of the greatest examples of Mozart’s musical characterisation, timing, and structure. In the overture, the motif played by the strings and bassoon in the opening bars is answered by the winds, building up to a fortissimo orchestral tutti that, thanks to Mozart’s brilliant grasp of musical characterisation, gives us a hint of the mad-cap action that is to follow, when the Count pursues his wife’s maid - and Figaro’s fiancée – Susanna. The anticipation and excitement whipped up by Mozart’s brilliant orchestration makes this overture a favourite concert opener.

Symphony Services Australia © 2006

First Performance:
1 May 1786, Vienna. Composer conducting.

Most recent WASO performance:
29 August 2020. Laurence Jackson, director.

Instrumentation:
two flutes, two oboes, two clarinets, two bassoons, two horns, two trumpets, timpani, strings.

Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827)

Symphony No.8 in F, Op.96

Allegro vivace con brio
Allegretto scherzando
Tempo di minuetto
Allegro vivace

The Eighth must surely be a young man’s symphony, bursting on us with the boundless energy of a frisky colt. Yet Beethoven was in his 40s when he composed it. The time he was most busily working on it, following the completion of Symphony No.7 in mid-1812, is widely thought to have been the occasion when he penned the famous letter to his unnamed ‘Immortal Beloved’. He spent that summer in Bohemia, taking the waters of various spas for his notoriously delicate health, and he finished the symphony at Graz in October.

If Beethoven was a middle-aged man helplessly in love, it is not reflected in the robust, down-to-earth vigour of this symphony. But as his friend Franz Wegeler wrote, ‘there was never a time when Beethoven was not in love’; and his compositions, in any case, were the fruit of long periods of gestation, not created on impulse. Even if the Eighth Symphony was, relatively speaking, rather tossed off after the labours of the Seventh, it still derived from sketches going back at least a year.

Since the two symphonies were composed virtually in tandem, and derived from the same collection of sketches, it is hardly surprising that they have characteristics in common - specifically, the use of rhythm as a motive force, some untraditional turns of tonality and, overall, an Olympian stance. But while the Seventh is relatively relaxed and expansive, the Eighth is taut and highly compressed.

Wasting no time with any sort of introduction, Beethoven launches straight into the main theme, self-confident and self-sufficient. The graceful second subject also has not a care in the world, apart from a habit of appearing in the ‘wrong’ key, and having to be corrected. The movement presses forward with such boundless enthusiasm, and to such an exuberant climax in the big coda, that it needs no further emphasis and quietly subsides at the end in evident contentment.

As in the Seventh Symphony, Beethoven does without a true slow movement, but on this occasion he adds a qualification to the Allegretto marking: scherzando. This neat, deceptively straightforward little movement can thus be invested with the light-heartedness of a scherzo, allowing the third movement to be an ‘old-fashioned’ minuet rather than the fierce Beethovenian scherzo which listeners had come to expect.

A scurrying theme in the home key of F major begins the finale in all innocence, pianissimo, only to be crudely dismissed by a loud and irrelevant chord of C sharp. This immediately unleashes the whirlwind. In a remarkable movement, by dint of omitting formal repeats, Beethoven manages (in Robert Simpson’s analysis) to produce two complete developments and two complete recapitulations, together with a coda. And if we thought the C-sharp incursion was a mere accident of history, we encounter a shock when it reappears in the second recapitulation, crashing into the F-major theme with sufficient force to shunt everything unceremoniously into F sharp minor. From this point, the battle is on to re-establish the home key, so that it can be reinforced, with a certain amount of nervous relief, in an emphatic conclusion.

Beethoven conducted the first performance of the Eighth Symphony before a packed house in the Grand Redoutensaal in Vienna on 27 February 1814. The crowd, buoyed by improving news from the war front, was aroused less by the new symphony than both the jingoistic Wellington’s Victory and the earlier Symphony No.7. Beethoven was stung into declaring the new symphony ‘much better’ than its predecessor. Unconvinced, however, some conductors subsequently sought to inflate the Eighth by replacing the proper second movement with the Allegretto of the Seventh.

There are signs among Beethoven’s sketches that he was contemplating a symphony in D minor as a companion to the pair of 1812, but as the Napoleonic Wars neared their end, the composer was entering a period during which work would be difficult for him, and that project was not to be realised for more than a decade.

Anthony Cane © 2001

First Performance:
27 February 1814, Vienna. Composer conducting.

Most recent WASO performance:
4 June 2022. Asher Fisch, conductor.

Instrumentation:
two flutes, two oboes, two clarinets, two bassoons, two horns, two trumpets, timpani, strings.

Antonio Vivaldi (1678-1741)

The Four Seasons

Concerto in E, RV 269, La primavera (Spring)
Allegro
Largo
Allegro

Concerto in G minor, RV 315, L’estate (Summer)
Allegro non molto
Adagio – Presto
Presto

Concerto in F, RV 293, L’autunno (Autumn)
Allegro – Allegro assai
Adagio molto
Allegro

Concerto in F minor, RV 297, L’inverno (Winter)
Allegro non molto
Largo
Allegro

Antonio Vivaldi died in Vienna in July 1741 and was buried in an unmarked grave. His music was rarely if ever played between then and the 1930s, when musicians in Italy began rediscovering Vivaldi’s huge and varied output of works. With the interest of music scholars like Alfred Einstein, composer Alfredo Casella and poet Ezra Pound, the revival of Vivaldi began; by the end of the 20th century Vivaldi was once again one of the most popular and frequently performed composers.

Despite his death in obscure poverty, Vivaldi had enjoyed great popularity and success during his lifetime. Born in Venice in 1678, Vivaldi began learning violin with his father, a professional musician. He began studying for the priesthood in his early teens, though this in no way would have been seen as conflicting with the expectation of a career in music. It should be noted, too, that in Vivaldi’s time one was not obliged to enter a seminary; he was effectively ‘apprenticed’ to an older priest and was eventually ordained.

Although ordained a priest, Vivaldi spent his adult life as a composer and violinist. His works included some 500 concertos as well as many operas, instrumental sonatas and a large body of sacred music. He pioneered the solo concerto, rather than the more common concerto grosso which had, at the very least, a pair of solo instruments. This was in part a vehicle for his own virtuosity; his playing was clearly prodigious – one contemporary describes how Vivaldi ‘put his fingers but a hair’s breadth from the bow, so that there was scarcely room for the bow’. He also experimented with violin technique, developing methods like position shifts, the use of mutes and pizzicato to create new sounds and effects, often with specifically illustrative intent.

Venice in Vivaldi’s time was, as H.C. Robbins Landon puts it, ‘a city past its prime’, yet it maintained a rich and elaborate cultural life. A particular feature of the city was the establishment of a number of orphanages for girls that doubled as music academies. In 1703, the year he was ordained, Vivaldi began teaching at one such orphanage, the Ospedale della Pietà. In his capacity as director of music at the Pietà, Vivaldi composed the first known concertos for cello, bassoon, mandolin and flautino (sopranino recorder). On the available evidence, the students were very fine players indeed.

The Four Seasons forms part of Il cimento dell’armonia e dell’inventione (‘The Contest of Harmony and Invention’), Opus 8, which was published in 1725 in Amsterdam. The Four Seasons is a frankly programmatic work. French composers had a tradition of music imitating nature, but Vivaldi was one of the first Italian composers to experiment in this vein. Vivaldi’s rhetoric exquisitely depicts the seasons’ progress, described also in sonnets (possibly written by him) which he affixed to the score.

The bright opening of the first concerto reflects joy at the arrival of spring, and the soloist’s entry sets off a chain reaction of trilling birdcalls over a static bass. Rippling passages suggest running water, and the menace of distant thunder can be heard before the birds sing again. In the slow movement, a goat-herd falls asleep among murmuring plants, not even disturbed by the repeated barking of his dog. In the finale Botticellian nymphs and shepherds perform a rustic dance with bagpipe drone.

Summer’s first movement embodies a sense of heat-struck lassitude with only the intrepid cuckoo and turtle-dove calling, as the shepherd fears the encroaching storm. This apprehension is carried over into the unquiet slow movement, before the storm arrives in all its fury in the finale.

Autumn begins with peasants celebrating the harvest with dance and song, and, as the movement progresses, Vivaldi creates a striking musical image of drunkenness. In the slow movement, the peasants sleep off their binge, before going hunting in the finale. This contrasts cantering ‘hunting’ music with the panic of the quarry, which is caught and killed.

Snow, ice, chattering teeth and a cruel wind inform the first movement of Winter, but for the slow movement we go indoors and enjoy a crackling fire as the rain beats on the windows. The finale begins with ice-skating, weaving different voices in slow-moving elegant arcs. The ice cracks, the skater shivers, and the four winds are unleashed.

Gordon Kerry © 2005/2010

First Performance:
The Four Seasons first appeared in print in 1725 but we do not know when exactly they were composed or first performed.

Most recent WASO performance:
2 April 2022. Laurence Jackson, violin.

Instrumentation:
Strings and continuo only.