Vasily Petrenko conducts Shostakovich

Vasily Petrenko
Conductor

Vasily Petrenko is Music Director of the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, Chief Conductor of the European Union Youth Orchestra, Artistic Director of the State Academic Symphony Orchestra of Russia and Conductor Laureate of the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic, following his hugely acclaimed fifteen-year tenure as their Chief Conductor.

He has worked with many of the world’s most prestigious orchestras, including the Berlin, Czech, London, Los Angeles and St Petersburg Philharmonic orchestras, the Bavarian Radio, Boston, Chicago, London, Montreal, NHK, San Francisco and Sydney Symphony orchestras, Orchestra dell’Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia, Rome, Cleveland Orchestra, Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra, Philharmonia Orchestra and Philadelphia Orchestra.

Notable among his recordings are cycles of Shostakovich, Rachmaninov and Elgar symphonies with the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra and, with the Oslo Philharmonic, cycles of Scriabin’s symphonies and Richard Strauss’s tone-poems.

In 2017 he was named Artist of the Year at the Gramophone Awards, a decade after receiving its Young Artist of the Year.

Image credit: Svetlana Tarlova

Emily Sun
Violin

Emily is a multi-international prize winner, having been awarded the 2018 ABC Young Performer of the Year, the 2016 UK Royal Overseas League ‘Commonwealth Musician of the Year’, and prizes at Yampolsky International Violin Competition (Russia), Brahms International Violin Competition (Austria), and Lipizer International Violin Competition (Italy).

As a concerto soloist, Emily has appeared with orchestras worldwide including the Sydney, Melbourne, Queensland, and Adelaide Symphony orchestras; Arlington and Arizona Symphony Orchestras in USA; Shanghai Youth Orchestra and Qingdao Symphony Orchestra in China; Orchestre de Royal Wallonie and Orchestre de Chambre Namur in Belgium.

Emily’s critically acclaimed debut album for ABC Classic, Nocturnes was nominated for a 2021 ARIA for ‘Best Classical Album’. As recent ABC Artist-in-Residence, and BBC Introducing Artist, she is regularly broadcast on ABC Classic, Classic FM, BBC Three (UK), Kol Hamusica (Israel), WXQR (USA), and Musiq 3 (Belgium).

Emily plays a 1760 Nicolò Gagliano violin, kindly loaned to her through the Beare’s International Violin Society.

Image credit: Benjamin Ealovega

Carl Nielsen (1865-1931)

Maskarade: Overture

The elder statesman of Scandinavian music, Edvard Grieg, wrote enthusiastically to Nielsen after the first performance of Maskarade (under the composer’s direction) in Copenhagen in 1906: ‘What fine humorous art…! I was totally laid out
with exhaustion at the end…’

Nielsen’s gamble in presuming to make an opera out of a play by the revered ‘Molière of the North,’ Ludvig Holberg, paid off. Grieg himself had honoured the great writer with a pastiche of popular period dances in his suite From Holberg’s Time, but he now welcomed a thoroughly modern opera based on Holberg’s 1724 comedy of manners. That work has come to be regarded as Denmark’s national opera.

Chronologically, Nielsen’s two great operas, Saul and David and Maskarade, flank his Symphony No.2, The Four Temperaments. Together, the three works affirm his lifelong fascination with humankind, his affection for people as individuals and his unquenchable confidence in the human spirit.

Nielsen composed Maskarade with astonishing speed and fluency, in a state, as he described it, of ‘pure bliss.’ Perhaps he felt the glance of his beloved Mozart over his shoulder, for the independent-minded manservant Henrik in Maskarade has more than a little in common with Figaro, albeit in a less revolutionary atmosphere than that of the later Beaumarchais comedy used by Mozart. Nevertheless, as Nielsen declared, Henrik ‘is quite modern in his feelings after all: he even says socialist things.’

In Maskarade, Nielsen pokes fun at the pomposities of sophisticated city folk, while introducing elements of earthy peasant humour – a ‘ghost’-induced confession by the superstitious servant Arv that he has stolen the cook’s virginity, and the shock-horror discovery of a new-laid egg following the dance of the cockerels.

The short but brilliant overture to Maskarade reflects these contrasting elements of the comedy, pitting a racy first subject against a genteel subsidiary theme. The whole is tied together in a rousing concert ending, so that the piece has become a staple in the repertoire of Danish orchestras on tour. In the original theatrical version, however, the exuberance of the overture subsides into the calm of late afternoon as the curtain rises on young Leander surfacing with a splitting head, having danced all night with an unknown beauty at the masked ball; and he and his servant Henrik, defying parental orders, make immediate plans to do it all again…

Anthony Cane © 2000

First performance:
11 November 1906, Copenhagen.

Most recent WASO performance:
28 November 1966. Thomas Mayer, conductor.

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

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756-1791)

Violin Concerto No.4 in D, K218

Allegro
Andante cantabile
Rondeau (Andante grazioso – Allegro ma non troppo, alternating)

Mozart’s father once suggested to him that the best way to introduce himself in a place where he wasn’t known was to play a violin concerto. It is easy to take for granted how masterly are Mozart’s violin concertos, because they are not as great as the best of his piano concertos. We think of Mozart as a pianist, and the most that many people know about his violin playing comes from letters written to him by his father Leopold, one of the leading violin teachers of the time, exhorting him not to give up practising, and claiming that he could be, if he worked at it, the finest violinist in Europe. Mozart composed all but the first of his five violin concertos, including this one, in a sustained burst in 1775 when he was 19. They have sometimes been regarded as attempts to please his father rather than himself. Yet none of the piano concertos Mozart had written up to this time show the maturity of conception of the last three of these violin concertos, the ones in G, (K216), in D (K218), and in A (K219). It was after Mozart left Salzburg for Vienna, which he called ‘the land of the piano’, that his concerto energies flowed exclusively into keyboard works. He wrote no further violin concertos.

Of the countless violin concertos composed in the 18th century, the standard modern ‘symphony concert’ repertoire retains only a few of Vivaldi’s, those of JS Bach, and Mozart’s. Mozart’s violin concertos are standard because they are very good music. Listening illustrates this better than words, but part of it is that the musical ideas are so strong, and there are so many of them. Mozart, even at this age, can organise his many ideas concisely and convincingly. Composing opera, his main preoccupation, has already taught him how to make the soloist the protagonist in a drama.

The solo violin parts of these concertos put musical substance and idiomatic writing for the instrument ahead of virtuoso display. This wasn’t because Mozart’s own violin technique was limited. The concertos were possibly intended not for him but for his Salzburg colleague Antonio Brunetti (first violin and soloist in the Court Orchestra). Both men certainly played at least some of them, and Brunetti himself said, ‘Mozart could play anything.’ In some of Mozart’s Serenades, which he did play, the solo violin parts are more brilliant than anything in the concertos. The style of the concertos was a matter of preference – a direct, uncluttered mode of expression in writing for the violin.

Concerto No.4, in D, is similar to its immediate predecessor composed a few weeks earlier, No.3 in G. It is also more brilliant and sonorous, as one might expect from the brighter key. Indeed it opens with fanfare figures suggesting trumpets and drums, though the orchestra contains neither. The horns and oboes are used more assertively. Mozart has so many ideas that he can afford to throw some away: the theme of the opening tutti, although it is repeated by the soloist, does not appear again, either in development or recapitulation. The soloist’s part is almost continuous, without the interchanges with the orchestra which mark the previous concerto. The most memorable of the many themes is the sinuous one presented by the soloist in the lower register, with its sudden forte. The impression left by this movement is of delightfully unpredictable regrouping of the material, rather than regular sonata form.

The slow movement, in A, has the soloist playing almost throughout. The opening theme is of the kind which used to be called ‘hymn-like’ when the more reposeful of Handel’s opera arias, which this rather resembles, were considered religious melodies. The loveliest passage has the oboe echoing the solo violin over tiptoeing figures from the strings.

The finale contains fascinating episodes of a popular cast. The alternation of metres, tempos and character is so rapid, yet so sure, that the effect is charmingly capricious rather than odd. In a movement appropriately given the French title Rondeau, there is a musette-like episode in which a drone bass is produced by the oboe doubling the soloist’s long sustained low note.

© David Garrett

First WASO performance:
22 July 1939. Malcolm Sargent, conductor; Vaughan Hanly, soloist.

Most recent WASO performance:
27 August 2016. Asher Fisch, conductor; Baiba Skride, soloist.

Instrumentation:
two oboes, two horns, strings.

Dmitri Shostakovich (1906–1975)

Symphony No.11 in G minor, Op.103 The Year 1905

Adagio (Palace Square) –
Allegro – Adagio – Allegro (Ninth of January) –
Adagio (Eternal Memory) –
Allegro non troppo (The Tocsin)

On Sunday 9 January 1905 (22 January in the Western calendar), thousands of workers together with their families came to present a petition to Tsar Nicholas II at the Winter Palace in St Petersburg. A priest led the procession, whose purpose was to request an amnesty for political prisoners, a Constituent Assembly, and an eighthour working day. The Tsar was not there; the procession was met with gunfire and cavalry charges, which killed and injured hundreds, setting the stage for the October Revolution of 1917.

Shostakovich grew up in the shadow of the 1905 uprising, and many of his formative memories (if the controversial memoirs Testimony are to be believed) seem to have been of the turmoil of the following years. Again, however, if Testimony is to be believed, the Symphony No.11 (1957) should be seen against a rather different background.

In 1956, Nikita Khrushchev made a speech to the Twentieth Party Congress denouncing Stalin. Both Poland and Hungary sought looser ties with Russia as a result, with Hungary demanding political liberalisation. The ideological ‘thaw’ of the period after Stalin’s death in 1953 also had its effects in the arts. Many artists who had been denounced by Andrei Zhdanov at the 1948 Communist Party tribunal were rehabilitated around this time, with Shostakovich releasing many works he had composed but thought it imprudent to publish. Demonstrators pulled down Stalin’s statue in Budapest, and many popular demands were met; however, when Hungary announced its intention to withdraw from the Warsaw Pact, Russian tanks were sent into Budapest within a few days. Around 20,000 Hungarians were killed, and 200,000 fled to the West.

In 1957, Shostakovich composed his Symphony No.11. With the 40th anniversary of the October Revolution approaching, he chose a revolutionary subject for his new work. What he meant by the choice of a subject bearing such a clear parallel to recent events, is – like virtually everything concerning the inner motivation of his music – uncertain. Even the most experienced scholars of Shostakovich’s music have no more than the historical background, some memoirs of disputed provenance, and the music itself to study. Listeners can thus form their own conclusions, although many recent scholars are fond of doing that for us.

The symphony as a whole is so overtly programmatic that it is tempting (and not difficult) to assign concrete associations to every musical event which occurs. Thus, the opening ‘is’ the square of the Winter Palace at dawn on the morning of Bloody Sunday; the ominous motif given out by the timpani at the close of the strings’ opening paragraph ‘is’ the crowd; the trumpet solo shortly after ‘is’ the warning given by the Tsar’s soldiers before opening fire. The danger here is that the symphony itself would then be as unsubtle as that program. All these motifs assume other roles during the course of the work, sometimes in musical contexts difficult to match with their presumed associations. No less than in Wagner’s operas (for example), the musical motifs here are flexible enough to sustain purely symphonic development.

There is thus much musical subtlety that over-reliance on the program would cause us to miss. The strings’ opening music features a wealth of harmonic variety which we are in danger of not noticing, if we simply see it as a depiction of a Palace Square at dawn. Occasionally it even becomes programmatic beyond its presumed role. Within a few pages it acquires the repeated notes characteristic of Orthodox chant – reminding us perhaps that the crowds which assembled outside the Palace were carrying icons and singing hymns. (But the crowds have their own music...) And it is difficult to see what it might ‘mean’ when the opening ‘Palace Square’ music appears across the whole orchestra as the climax of the second movement. Of course, it does not have to ‘mean’ anything. Some commentators have tried bravely to provide a narrative explanation – musically, it justifies itself.

Similarly, the timpani solo near the beginning has a musical function, providing the minor and major third of the opening (harmonically ‘incomplete’) bare fifth: a modal ambiguity characteristic of the late Shostakovich. His last string quartet ends with a viola trill between the major and minor third of its final chord – and indeed this symphony ends with a major fifth across the orchestra while bells ring out the same timpani motif, its major/minor ambiguity still unresolved.

The opening of the first movement (Palace Square) sets out the symphony’s three basic motifs: a chorale based on an open fifth in the strings, a timpani solo in triplets and a trumpet fanfare. These will be developed and recombined throughout the symphony, forming its musical backbone; all other ideas are derived from revolutionary songs, or indeed are literal quotations. Their texts supply a politically impeccable subtext; whether the composer was in turn hiding a riskier subtext behind that is, again, up to each listener to decide. The first is Listen (by P. Sokal’sky to words by Ivan Golts’-Miller, from 1864), in the first entry of the flutes. Its text begins: ‘Like an act of betrayal, like the conscience of a tyrant, the autumn night is dark.’ Importantly, it employs a triplet rhythm related to the timpani solo; it is contrasted with the sharper dotted rhythm of The Prisoner (by Nikolai Ogarev), and both are developed before the opening music returns.

Ninth of January follows without a break (as will the other movements). It opens with a shadowy triplet figure in the lower strings – a free extension of the first movement’s timpani solo, in a much faster tempo. This is combined with a closely related theme, from a song by Shostakovich himself – the sixth of his Ten Poems on texts by revolutionary poets (1951). The movement builds in a series of climaxes of increasing power, before the music which opened the symphony is heard in the woodwinds. A snare drum solo begins the most clearly programmatic passage in the work: a contrapuntal section beginning with a variation of the opening timpani solo, now presented sharply in the lower strings. It builds to another – this time, brutal – climax, with the opening string music now heard fff from the entire orchestra, subsiding finally into a return of the symphony’s opening texture, with the addition of shuddering trills.

In Memoriam, essentially a funeral march, is without doubt the emotional heart of one of Shostakovich’s least intimate works. It begins with a bass line derived from the opening timpani solo. The viola melody which soon enters is from another revolutionary song, You Fell a Victim. Again it builds – rather more inexorably – to a climax. At its peak, it recalls the triplets of the second movement, once more with Shostakovich’s own song heard across the orchestra.

The Tocsin is an alarm signal; it was also the title of a 19th-century revolutionary journal. It bursts in on the slow movement’s ending with another quotation. This time, it is from a song by A. Vaknyanin to a translated Polish text: ‘Rage, you tyrants, scoff at us, threaten us fiercely with prison, with chains! We are free in our souls, though our flesh be trampled on...’ The themes of previous movements return, and the final climax is capped by the alarm-bell itself.

Carl Rosman © 2000

First performance:
30 October 1957, Moscow, Natan Rachlin conducting.

Most recent WASO performance:
17 April 1993. Vladimir Verbitsky, conductor.

Instrumentation:
piccolo, two flutes, two oboes, cor anglais, two clarinets, bass clarinet, two bassoons and contrabassoon; four horns, three trumpets, three trombones and tuba; timpani, five percussion, two harps, celeste and strings.