Scottish Symphony - Morning

Umberto Clerici
Conductor

With a career spanning more than 20 years as a gifted cello soloist, orchestral musician, and now conductor, Umberto Clerici has gained a reputation as an artist of diverse and multifaceted talents.

Umberto began his career as a virtuoso cellist making his solo debut at the age of 17 performing Haydn’s D Major cello concerto in Japan. After years of performing on the stages of the world’s most prestigious concert halls, Umberto took up the position as Principal Cellist of the Royal Opera House in Turin and in 2014, he was appointed as the Principal Cello of the Sydney Symphony Orchestra, a position he held until 2021.

It was in Sydney in 2018 that Umberto made his conducting debut with the Sydney Symphony Orchestra at the Sydney Opera House. Umberto is now in high demand with the major symphony orchestras throughout Australia and New Zealand.

Future conducting highlights in Australia include returns to the podiums the Sydney Symphony, Queensland Symphony and Melbourne Symphony Orchestras. Umberto also looks forward to his debuts with the West Australian Symphony, Adelaide Symphony, Dunedin and New Zealand Symphony Orchestras.

Image credit: Jay Patel

Hector Berlioz (1809-1869)

Béatrice et Bénédict: Overture

Berlioz ended his composing career in 1860- 2 with a comedy, Béatrice et Bénédict – an Indian summer, following his epic opera The Trojans. The Overture fits Berlioz’s description of the opera: ‘a caprice written with the point of a needle, and demanding excessive delicacy of execution’. Berlioz commented wryly on the critics’ response: ‘They have discovered that I have melody, that I can be gay and even comic.’

Berlioz was obsessed with Shakespeare. Well-known is his infatuation with the actress Harriet Smithson, who came to Paris in a touring Shakespeare company, and whom he married. Berlioz’s Shakespeare-inspired music includes Roméo et Juliette and the King Lear Overture. He had been contemplating a Romeo and Juliet opera, or an Antony and Cleopatra when the commission for a new opera came from Edouard Bénazet, to inaugurate the new theatre he was building at the fashionable spa in Baden-Baden.

Berlioz chose to base the opera on his adaptation of a Shakespeare comedy – light relief after his struggles getting The Trojans finished and performed. He had been toying with the idea of setting Shakespeare’s Much Ado about Nothing since as early as 1833, when he made a few preliminary sketches. His life since then had made Shakespeare’s play even more meaningful. A tragi-comedy, originally called Benedick and Beatrix, the play celebrates a marriage between two high-spirited young people. Beatrice and Benedict achieve a true partnership in spite of themselves, love triumphing in the end over independent-mindedness, cynicism, and raillery. Berlioz saw the irony of his choice of subject – his own marriages, with Harriet Smithson and Marie Récio, brought him much unhappiness.

The opera, premiered in 1862, was a success, but the overture remains its best-known music. Composed last, it is a brilliant précis, a weaving-together, or patchwork, of melodies from the opera (at least seven of them); a quicksilver scherzo, with episodes of soft emotion. ‘Racing, headlong, yet ironically poised, brilliant but touched with warmth of heart and a delicate spirit of fantasy’ is Berlioz biographer David Cairns’ summary of the overture, and he comments with wonder that it was the creation of a man in pain and longing for death. Though Berlioz lived seven more years, Béatrice et Bénédict was his last major composition. The overture quotes at the beginning the duet Béatrice and Bénédict sing about the love that has broken down their defences: ‘a flame, a will o’ the wisp, coming from no one knows where, gleaming and vanishing to distract our souls’.

David Garrett © 2011

First performance:
9 August 1862. Composer conducting.

Most recent WASO performance:
5 December 1992. Ron Spigelman, conductor

Instrumentation:
two each of flutes (one doubling piccolo), oboes, clarinets and bassoons; four horns, two trumpets and one cornet, three trombones; timpani and strings.

Felix Mendelssohn (1809 – 1847)

Symphony No.3 in A minor, Op.56 Scottish

Andante con moto – Allegro un poco agitato – Andante con moto –
Vivace non troppo –
Adagio – Allegro vivacissimo – Allegro, maestoso assai

Like the Piano Concerto No.1, the Italian Symphony and the Hebrides Overture, this work dates from the period of what we may call Mendelssohn’s ‘Grand Tour’ – a period of roughly four years during which the composer, entering his 20s, toured the British Isles and Europe.

Sometime in the summer of 1828, Mendelssohn’s parents decided that their young man needed to travel to broaden his mind. Unlike so many 19th-century composers, Mendelssohn was born into middle-class comfort. His home was a cultural hub, and it could be asked how much more broadening was needed by someone whose family home buzzed with the company of people such as the scientist Alexander von Humboldt, the philosopher Hegel, the actor Eduard Devrient, and music critic and theorist Adolph Bernhard Marx, among others. In any case Felix left Berlin on 10 April 1829, bound for England, Scotland and Wales. There in the British Isles, he was enthusiastically received as a concert and salon pianist, but he also spent time touring and observing, soaking up the sights and sounds of fascinating new environments.

In the summer of 1829 Mendelssohn set off for Scotland. Taken by the wild atmosphere of the country, he set sail for the Hebrides, where he visited Fingal’s Cave and made a sketch for what later became the Hebrides Overture. The Third Symphony can also be traced to a sightseeing visit, this time to Holyrood House, Edinburgh, about which Mendelssohn wrote:

The chapel beside it has now lost its roof. It is overgrown with grass and ivy, and at the altar Mary was crowned Queen of Scotland. Everything is ruined, decayed and open to the sky. I believe I have found there the beginning of my Scottish Symphony.

It is probably in terms of overall mood that the Scottish Symphony most noticeably reveals its original impetus. One can perhaps glimpse, through the overall sombreness, the Scottish landscape ‘looking so stern and robust, half-wrapped in haze of smoke or fog’, but this work is not as pictorial as the Hebrides Overture. The portrait is somewhat muted.

Although many of Mendelssohn’s works during the period bore the sign of literary or pictorial inspiration, his aesthetic probably owes more to the philosophy of a family friend, Hegel, who was to say in Vorlesung über die Aesthetick (Lecture on Aesthetics, Berlin, 1836) that the composer ‘should devote equal attention to two
aspects – musical structure, and the expression of an admittedly indeterminate content’. It is probably towards the creation of a piece which is satisfying on purely musical terms that the composer directed his energy in this instance. The symphony is composed in the standard symphonic four-movement plan, but structurally, Mendelssohn was trying to break new ground, not only linking the four movements, but relating them through some cross-referencing of themes.

The first movement rarely leaves the minor mode, even for the lyrical second subject. The second movement is an example of the fleet-footed scherzando style which we have typically come to associate with the composer of the Octet and A Midsummer Night’s Dream. The finale provides an affirmative conclusion but
also binds the work together thematically. Here we may recognise the music of the opening – purged of its brooding, but retaining its regal quality.

How Scottish is the work? Certainly there are no bagpipe competitions, though Mendelssohn wrote home about one:

[the bagpipers] with long red beards, tartan plaids, bonnets and feathers, naked knees, and their bagpipes in their hands… passing along the half-ruined grey castle on the meadow, where Mary Stuart lived in splendour and saw Rizzio murdered…

And there is no folksong quotation, which would have been the easiest way to make a Scottish association. The nearest Mendelssohn actually comes to folk-like sources is in the scherzo, where the main melody could be thought to possess a ‘folkish’ pentatonicism. Even so perceptive a critic as Schumann, hearing this symphony and thinking it was the Italian, was moved to remark on how appropriately it portrayed its subject! It was, he said, ‘so beautiful as to compensate a listener who had never been in Italy’ – which should console those listeners who simply wish to enjoy the superbly well-written music.

G.K. Williams
Symphony Australia © 1999

First performance:
3 March 1841, Leipzig. Composer conducting.

Most recent WASO performance:
9-10 August 2013. Paul Daniel, conductor.

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

Nicholas Metcalfe
Cello

What is your favourite city in the world and why?
Tokyo for sure. Almost nobody speaks English yet it is so easy to get everywhere, there's a million things to do that are unique to Japan, and the people that live there are so polite and generous. 5 stars - will definitely visit again and again.

What do you enjoy most about your chosen career path?
Playing music can be amazing but it's only as good as the people surrounding you. I've made so many great friends in this orchestra and I can tell you the performance side of the job would not be nearly as satisfying were it not for my colleagues being such great value. 5 stars - will definitely be back next week.

Do you have any hobbies outside of music?
I've recently taken up woodworking and it has been giving me a great deal of enjoyment. Making something from a lump of timber and being able to hold it in your hands is very gratifying. Music can do a lot of things but it can't give you that sensation of holding something physical that you've made with your own hands. Fingers crossed I don't lose any digits in the process, otherwise I'll have to play the tuba.

What is one of your strongest early memories of music?
When I was young, growing up in country NSW, the Australian Youth Orchestra did a regional tour and my parents took me along to one of their concerts. The only thing I remember about the program was Li-Wei Qin performing Tchaikovsky's Rococo Variations. I was really impressed by the music and thought Li-Wei was amazing. As a youngster did this event set me on the path to being a professional cellist? No. I was convinced I was going to play cricket for Australia.

Which soloists do you particularly admire that have played with WASO?
Alban Gerhardt (cellist) has performed concertos with us on a number of occasions. I love watching and hearing him play and as well as being a stellar artist he's also an incredibly lovely human. He will always join the cello section in the second half which is a real treat. One week he played the overture at the back of the cellos, left the stage, came back on to do his concerto, then played the symphony as well. He just loves to play! And that sort of positive energy is infectious.

I am most proud of...

• My whisky collection.
• I can do that thing where you flick your cheek and it sounds like a droplet of water.
• My partner Jen Winley who went from being a percussionist, to classroom music teacher, to now being the Assistant Conductor at WASO. I am blown away by her work ethic, her professionalism, her authenticity, and how far she has come as a conductor in only a few years. Every day I am proud to know such an amazing person.
• I know the proper way to fold a fitted sheet.