Sibelius' Second Symphony

Pietari Inkinen
Conductor

The Finnish conductor Pietari Inkinen has been Chief Conductor of the Deutsche Radio Philharmonie since September 2017, where his contract has recently been extended until June 2025. In addition, he will become Music Director of the KBS Symphony Orchestra, from January 2022. He is also Chief Conductor of the Japan Philharmonic Orchestra, a post he has held since 2016.

Recent and future highlights include his debuts with the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra, Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra, NDR Elbphilharmonie Orchester, SWR Symphony Orchestra and Budapest Festival Orchestra. In previous seasons Pietari Inkinen has also conducted Symphonieorchester des Bayerischen Rundfunks, Staatskapelle Berlin, Gewandhausorchester Leipzig, Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia, Orchestre Philharmonique de Radio France, Los Angeles Philharmonic Orchestra, Israel Philharmonic Orchestra and Helsinki Philharmonic.

Inkinen is also an accomplished violinist. He studied at the Cologne Music Academy with Zakhar Bron before taking further studies in conducting at the Sibelius Academy in Helsinki.

Image credit: Kaupo Kikkas

Sara Macliver
Soprano

Sara Macliver is one of Australia’s most popular and versatile artists, and is regarded as one of the leading exponents of Baroque repertoire.

Sara is a regular performer with all the Australian symphony orchestras as well as the Perth, Melbourne and Sydney Festivals, Pinchgut Opera, the Australian Chamber Orchestra and Australian Brandenburg Orchestra, Musica Viva, and a number of international companies.

Sara records for ABC Classics with more than 35 CDs and many awards to her credit.

Most recently Sara has sung with West Australian Opera, Sydney, Melbourne, West Australian, Tasmanian, Queensland and Adelaide Symphony Orchestras, Sydney Philharmonia Choirs, Ten Days on the Island, the Australian String Quartet, St George’s Cathedral and Auckland Philharmonic Orchestra. She also sang with the Perth Festival, Peninsula Summer Festival, Brisbane Camerata, ANAM and Collegium Musicum amongst many other projects.

Sara has been awarded an honorary doctorate from The University of Western Australia in recognition of her services to singing.

Image credit: Rhydian Lewis

Fiona Campbell
Mezzo-soprano

Fiona Campbell is one of Australia’s most versatile and beloved classical singers - the winner of the national Limelight Award for Best Solo Performance 2011 and vocal winner of the ABC Young Performer of the Year Award and the ASC Opera Awards.

Fiona sings regularly as a principal artist with all of the major ensembles and orchestras in Australia and with Opera Australia, Opera Queensland and West Australian Opera. Her international collaborators have included the Brodsky Quartet, Tokyo Philharmonic, Manchester Camerata, Prague Chamber Orchestra, Hong Kong Philharmonic and Glyndebourne Festival Opera.

She was Associate Artist for José Carreras in Japan, Korea and Australia and for Barbara Bonney in Tokyo and London. In 2021, she sang Hippolyta in A Midsummer Night’s Dream for The Adelaide Festival and was soloist with the Australian String Quartet and the Queensland and West Australian Symphony Orchestras. In 2022, she returns to WASO and the QSO and appears as Laura (Iolanta) and Flora (La traviata) for West Australian Opera.

© Patrick Togher Artists’ Management 2022

Image credit: Steven Godbee Photography

Richard Wagner
(1813-1883)

Tannhäuser: Overture (Dresden version, 1845)

Tannhäuser dates from Wagner’s time as Second Kapellmeister in Dresden (1843-49). In his previous opera, The Flying Dutchman, Wagner had already established Redemption as one of his lifelong themes. Tannhäuser continues the idea of a woman sacrificing herself for the man she loves.

Love and death may be opera’s two defining poles. Tannhäuser depicts furthermore a tussle between carnality and spiritual love. The curtain rises on the minstrel Tannhäuser in the Venusberg, the legendary haunt of the goddess of love. Sated with the Venusberg’s delights, he wants to return to the everyday world. Once there, he rediscovers his former love, Elisabeth, and tries to win her back in a song contest. He is expected, however, to seek repentance for his sins but is refused forgiveness by the Pope. But all is not lost. At the last, Elisabeth dies and in dying intercedes for him. News is brought of the Pope’s staff in Rome bursting into leaf, signifying Tannhäuser’s salvation.

When he began Tannhäuser, Wagner had not yet conceived his revolutionary theory of music drama. The version of Tannhäuser premiered in Dresden was still basically a traditional ‘number opera’ with discrete arias, ensembles, and choruses. Its overture was in a closed form and could stand alone as a musical item.

Wagner revised Tannhäuser for Paris in 1861. By that time he had composed the highly chromatic and anguished Tristan und Isolde, and the ‘Paris’ version benefits from Wagner’s advanced harmonic language. It is as if he was being lured to evermore sensual depictions of love.

Gordon Kalton Williams © 2012

First performance:
19 October 1845, Dresden; Wagner conducting.

First WASO performance:
2 November 1938. Malcolm Sargent, conductor.

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

Instrumentation:
three flutes (third doubling piccolo), two oboes, two clarinets, two bassoons, four horns, three trumpets, three trombones, tuba, timpani, percussion and strings.

Elena Kats-Chernin
(b. 1957)

Ave Maria

1. Ballina
2. A Life Travelled
3. Bird on the Bench
4. Ave Maria
5. Share Wisdom
6. Thank You for the Memories

Ave Maria was commissioned for the West Australian Symphony Orchestra by Dr Paul Rodoreda in memory of his mother Mary. It is scored for soprano, mezzo-soprano and full orchestra and is designed in six distinct movements with text by Tamara-Anna Cislowska (movements 1, 5 and 6). The voices of soprano soloist, Sara MacIiver, and mezzo-soprano soloist, Fiona Campbell, were firmly in Elena’s head while writing the piece. Writing for a vocal duet is something that Elena considers a gift. The two timbres represent the younger and older Mary, often singing in tandem.

Tamara-Anna Cislowska writes:

"Whenever she creates, Elena Kats-Chernin draws on the influences and colours from her formative music years in Tashkent, cabaret performance culture of Sydney as well as intensive studies of new music composition in Hanover, Germany. Elena has said ‘Sometimes I just don’t know what will come out next. It’s like a puppet show I’ve been invited to but there are always a few more puppets coming out of the shadows in the wings that no one has invited along’. Elena has written for operas, ballet and film but some of her most personal compositions come when she has written about a friend, or in tribute to a great life."

This Ave Maria is such a piece. It forms a series of contemplations on Mary, Paul Rodoreda’s mother and the six parts serve as a portrait of her and the way she loved music as well as the way she moved through the world. Included are a sea shanty to mark her beginnings in Ballina (Northern NSW), frenetic music marking her extensive travels, a dedicated movement Bird on the Bench to honour her seat by the Swan River and a prayer to her giving, caring nature.

Elena writes:

"I was excited to be writing for two of Australia’s most glorious singers and to be composing to the memory of a woman of real substance and compassion, Mary Rodoreda. Creating this work for the much admired and loved WASO has been a privilege and joy."

1. Ballina begins mysteriously as if we don’t know what the world will bring us. Alto flute and harp enter and a song develops that reminds me of the sea shanties that I have heard.

A home in harmony
in nature by the sea
In deepest blue and river wide
alone in paradise

A river to the north
In nature by the sea
in deepest blue and river wide
alone in paradise

River to the north
A place for fish to live
A lighthouse watching over us
in Ballina my home

Ballina, Ballina, Ballina, Ballina

2. A Life Travelled (wordless) is active and adventurous just like Mary. She loved to take trips, loved to meet people and always took the world in her stride. This movement contains some clanking percussive sounds and textures with broad melodies in the brass.

3. Bird on the Bench (wordless)
When Mary’s son Paul told me there was a bench by the water with Mary’s name on it in Perth, I wondered how the pretty birds would react to this and whether they would come and visit close by and sing to each other and pass the day with Mary. The birds are represented by the flutes, glockenspiel, harp and plucked strings. The singers join and repeat the call.

4. Ave Maria (in Latin)
In this semi-setting of the famous prayer the orchestra begins and ends in dark low registers but it is a celebration and a reflection for this Mary who touched so many lives while she was here with us.

Ave Maria Gratia Plena
Dominos Tecum
Benedictus Sancta Maria

[English translation]
Hail Mary, full of grace,
The Lord is with you.
Blessed Holy Mary.

5. Share Wisdom is almost chamber music, intimate, single instruments, each contributing a line or a note anchored in the piano material. It has a peaceful feeling but more out of focus, as if looking from a distance.

Behold
Nature
Seek
Knowledge
Share Wisdom
Share Wisdom

6. Thank You for the Memories is a straight ahead fast and full movement, some merry-making and cheers to good times for a wonderfully lived life. The whole orchestra comes together, joyfully incorporating the sea shanty of Ballina back into the mix and ending similarly to how the whole piece started, in a quiet content way.

Take me the long way
Watch the world
Sing me the old songs
Two at once

Our home in harmony
in nature by the sea
It is you who must remain
and I alone, depart.

First performance:
World Premiere performances by Sara Macliver, Fiona Campbell and the West Australian Symphony Orchestra conducted by Pietari Inkinen at the Perth Concert Hall on 7 & 8 October 2022.

Instrumentation:
one piccolo, two flutes (one doubling on Alto), two oboes, cor anglais, two clarinets, bass clarinet, two bassoons and contrabassoon; four horns, three trumpets, three trombones and tuba; timpani, percussion, harp, piano and strings.

Jean Sibelius
(1865-1957)

Symphony No.2 in D, Op.43

Allegretto
Tempo andante, ma rubato
Vivacissimo –
Allegro moderato

Sibelius, like Brahms, came relatively late to writing symphonies, producing his First at the age of 33 and premiering it in 1899. Like Brahms, though, Sibelius had accrued considerable experience in writing for orchestra. The 1890s saw the composition of works like Kullervo, En saga, movements which later became the Karelia suite and the original version of the Lemminkäinen Suite, which depicts heroic tales from the Finnish mythological cycle, the Kalevala.

What all these works have in common, of course, is their preoccupation with the myths and legends of Finland, which remained until 1917 a satellite of Imperial Russia. As a member of the Swedish-speaking minority in Finland, Sibelius hadn’t given much thought to the traditional mythology of the Finns until his engagement in 1890 to Aino Järnefelt, whose family were very pro-Finnish. At the time he was studying in Vienna, where the music of Anton Bruckner made a deep impact on him. While Sibelius’ enthusiasm for Bruckner cooled over the years, the influence of the Austrian composer – particularly his ability to structure largescale symphonic movements – remained crucial.

Sibelius’ nationalist music was related to a growing political consciousness: by 1899 the Russians were actively discriminating against Finns and suppressing their language. The work we know as Finlandia was banned by the Russians and had to be performed under the politically inoffensive title of ‘Prelude’, though no Finn in the audience was unaware of the work’s significance. Sibelius’ enterprise in the 1890s, then, was to create a Finnish musical language out of the drama of its legends, the typical modal patterns of its folksong (though he never quoted actual folk tunes) and the rhythmic imprint of its verse, and to blend these elements with the contemporary idioms of Bruckner, Liszt and Tchaikovsky.

Sibelius always denied that the Second Symphony, which appeared in 1902, had any extra-musical significance. The journey it enacts from darkness to light relates it to works of ‘absolute’ music such as certain Beethoven symphonies, but commentators – particularly in Finland – have often argued for its having an implicit program of national liberation. The audiences at its premiere performances certainly thought so: the concerts were sold out, the audiences ecstatic and the composer acclaimed as a national hero. Its first movement seems to evoke the pastoral landscapes of Finland, shot through with a sense of incipient grief.

During its course the symphony passes through often fragmentary stages of deep melancholy and conflict before emerging in the final movement with one of Sibelius’ most stirring and memorable tunes.

In fact, Sibelius began writing music which ended up in the symphony while holidaying in Italy, leading some writers to comment on the more than usually warm textures that he draws from a modestly constituted orchestra. From his correspondence we know he was contemplating at least two projects: a set of tone-poems called Festivals and a single-movement work – inspired perhaps by Richard Strauss, whom Sibelius had recently met – on the story of Don Juan. Out of the sketches for these works, Sibelius fashioned some of his most memorable gestures: the sinister start of the second movement, with its soft pizzicato opening, horn calls and bassoon solo, was originally to have evoked the figure of Death arriving at Don Juan’s castle.

The work may be a document of national liberation, but it is also about the process of unifying and reconciling diverse, often fragmentary, musical gestures, so that the expansive melody of the finale seems the inevitable outcome of all that went before. Five years later, Sibelius would have his much reported meeting with Mahler where he advocated a ‘severity of style and the profound logic that creates an inner connection between all the motifs’. Mahler’s response, ‘No, the symphony must be like the world and embrace everything’, missed the point. In their different ways, they were saying the same thing.

Gordon Kerry © 2003

This work, published by Breitkopf & Härtel, has been supplied by Clear Music Australia Pty Ltd as hire agents for Bärenreiter in Australia.

First performance:
8 March 1902, Helsinki; composer conducting.

First WASO performance:
16 August 1947; Joseph Post, conductor.

Most recent WASO performance:
21-22 April 2017; Asher Fisch, conductor.

Instrumentation:
two flutes, two oboes, two clarinets, two bassoons, four horns, three trumpets, three trombones, tuba, timpani, strings.