Dance of Desire

Fabien Gabel
Conductor

Fabien Gabel has established an international career of the highest calibre, appearing with orchestras such as London Philharmonic Orchestra, Orchestre de Paris, NDR Elbphilharmonie Orchester, Gürzenich- Orchester Köln, Oslo Philharmonic, Helsinki Philharmonic Orchestra, The Cleveland Orchestra, Seoul Philharmonic and Melbourne Symphony Orchestra.

Praised for his dynamic style and sensitive approach to the score, he is best known for his eclectic choice of repertoire ranging from core symphonic works to new music to championing lesser-known composers of the 19th and the 20th century.

Having attracted international attention in 2004 as the winner of the Donatella Flick conducting competition, Fabien Gabel was Assistant Conductor of the London Symphony Orchestra from 2004-2006. He was music director of Orchestre symphonique de Québec from 2012-2021 and Orchestre Français des Jeunes from 2017-2021.

In the 2022/23 season, Gabel makes his debut at the BBC Proms, alongside return appearances to the Tonkünstler-Orchester in Vienna, Deutsches SymphonieOrchester Berlin, City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra, Malmö Symphony Orchestra, Stavanger Symphony Orchestra and Orchestre Philharmonique de Monte-Carlo.

Image credit: Maison Simons

Alexander Gavrylyuk
Piano

Alexander Gavrylyuk is internationally recognised as one of the leading pianists of his generation for his electrifying and poetic performances.

A Steinway artist, Alexander is the winner of numerous international piano competitions including the Arthur Rubinstein International Piano Masters Competition (2005).

Alexander has since gone on to perform with many of the world’s leading orchestras and has appeared at many of the world’s foremost festivals, including the Hollywood Bowl, Bravo! Vail Colorado, Mostly Mozart, the Ruhr Festival, the Kissinger Sommer International Music Festival and the Gergiev Festival in Rotterdam.

As a recitalist Alexander has performed at the Musikverein in Vienna, Tonhalle Zurich, Victoria Hall Geneva, Concertgebouw Master Pianists Series, Suntory Hall, Tokyo Opera City Hall, Cologne Philharmonie, Tokyo City Concert Hall, San Francisco, Sydney Recital Hall and Melbourne Recital Centre. As a chamber musician, Gavrylyuk has toured extensively with violinist Janine Jansen.

Alexander currently serves as Artist-in- Residence at Chautauqua Institution where he leads the piano program as Artistic Advisor. He has also been named Artist in Residence at the Wigmore Hall in London.

Image credit: Marco Borggreve

Samy Moussa
(b.1984)

Samy Moussa is a Canadian composer and conductor, born in Montréal in 1984. He was awarded a year fellowship at the German Academy in Rome (2018- 19), the Hindemith Prize (2017) and the Composer’s Prize from the Ernst von Siemens Music Foundation (2013).

Last season, he conducted the Bavarian State Opera Orchestra and Chorus in Haydn’s Nelson Mass for the opening of the Opernfestspiel. He has also conducted the Vienna Radio Symphony Orchestra, the MDR Sinfonieorchester Leipzig, the Québec Symphony Orchestra, the Staaskapelle Halle and the Zurich Chamber Orchestra among others. He is also a recording artist having conducted for Deutsche Grammophon and Sony releases.

Samy Moussa had made his conducting debut with the NDR Radiophilharmonie in January 2020 in a concert dedicated to Beethoven’s 250th anniversary. Samy Moussa is currently composing a work for the Vienna Philharmonic and Christian Thielemann. His music for orchestra has been championed by world renowned conductors such as Christoph Eschenbach, Hannu Lintu, Stéphane Denève and Kent Nagano who has commissioned him six orchestral works for the Orchestre symphonique de Montréal, including his Symphony No.1 Concordia. Past performers include the Dallas Symphony Orchestra, the Deutsches Symphonie-Orchester Berlin, the Toronto Symphony Orchestra, the Brussels Philharmonic and the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra.

His music is published by Durand / Universal Classical Music.

Nocturne (2014)

Kent Nagano has commissioned six works from Moussa, one of which being Nocturne, a work dedicated to Moussa’s principal composition teacher at the Université de Montréal, José Evangelista. Moussa writes that “this could well be the composition in which I have maximized to the fullest economy of means in harmonic terms. The work is based on four chords, the most important of which is a major-seventh chord, which gives rise to nearly everything in the score. The melodic unfolding of this chord is heard in the opening ‘theme’ played by the solo horn, which returns throughout Nocturne, sometimes in inversion, but hopefully always recognizable. The overall colour is rather grave, due to the use of the low register of most instruments. Three times the music attempts to rise from the depths; each time it falls back.”

First performance:
17 February 2014, Montréal. Kent Nagano, conductor.

First WASO performance:
These concerts are the Australian Premiere performances.

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

Sergei Prokofiev
(1891-1953)

Piano Concerto No.3 in C, Op.26

Andante – Allegro
Andantino (with variations)
Allegro non troppo

Prokofiev was a virtuoso pianist, who made an authoritative recording of his own Third Concerto. One of his most successful and popular concert works, the concerto shows the most typical aspects of his mature musical style in ideal balance: a mixture of rather Romantic passages with incisive, humorous, sometimes even grotesque episodes. This is obvious right at the start: the opening Andante melody for clarinet is lyrical, almost wistful, and Russian-sounding. But immediately the
piano comes in, the music becomes very busy, incisive, almost icy. The lyricism of the opening will return in place of a ‘development’ section in the middle of the first movement.

Prokofiev conceived musical materials for his first three concertos in the years before he left Russia at the time of the 1917 Revolution. The first two concertos, in their driving rhythms and crunching discords, illustrate Prokofiev’s not altogether unwelcome casting as the ‘enfant terrible’ of Russian music, and evoked a corresponding critical reaction (‘cats on a roof make better music,’ wrote one Russian critic of Concerto No.2). No.3, on the other hand, shows much more of the tunefulness and accessibility which it is wrong to regard as having entered Prokofiev’s music only after he returned to Russia in the early 1930s. The lyrical opening of this concerto, completed in 1921, recalls that of the First Violin Concerto of 1916-17. Even earlier, the great Russian impresario Diaghilev had perceived Prokofiev’s true musical nature: ‘Few composers today have Prokofiev’s gift of inventing personal melodies, and even fewer have a genuine flair for a fresh use of simple tonal harmonies … he doesn’t need to hide behind inane theories and absurd noises.’

The Third Piano Concerto reflects Prokofiev’s world-travelling existence around the time of its creation. He had been collecting its themes for over ten years by the time he put them together in 1921. Prokofiev rarely threw away anything that might come in handy later on. He began the concerto in Russia in 1917, completed it in France in 1921, and gave the premiere later that year in Chicago, where his opera The Love of Three Oranges was premiered. An American critic wrote, ‘It is greatly a matter of slewed harmony, neither adventurous enough to win the affection nor modernist enough to be annoying.’ You can’t win! A New York critic was wrong, but more perceptive, when he wrote, ‘It is hard to imagine any other pianist than Mr Prokofiev playing it.’ Prokofiev’s own playing pioneered a new kind of piano virtuosity. A rewarding piece for any virtuoso, this concerto is formally clear and satisfying, full of memorable tunes harmonised and orchestrated with a peculiarly personal piquancy, and sufficiently of our time to be bracing and refreshing.

The second movement is a set of five variations on a theme Prokofiev had composed in 1913, intending it even then for variation treatment. This theme has an old-world, rather gavotte-like character, which in the first variation is treated solo by the piano in what Prokofiev describes as ‘quasi-sentimental fashion’. Then the tempo changes to a furious Allegro, one of the abrupt contrasts in which the concerto abounds. After a quiet, meditative fourth variation, and an energetic fifth one, the theme returns on flutes and clarinets in its original form and at its old speed, while the piano continues at top speed but more quietly. This has been compared to a sprinter viewed from the window of a train.

Prokofiev’s own program note describes the finale as beginning with a staccato theme for bassoons and pizzicato strings, interrupted by the blustering entry of the piano:

The orchestra holds its own with the opening theme, however, and there is a good deal of argument, with frequent differences of opinion as regards key. Eventually the piano takes up the first theme and develops it to a climax. With a reduction of tone and slackening of tempo, an alternative theme is introduced in the woodwinds. The piano replies with a theme that is more in keeping with the caustic humour of the work.

The unabashedly Romantic ‘alternative theme’ is worked up to an emotional pitch that shows Prokofiev as having more in common with Rachmaninov than is usually suspected, and both as owing much to Tchaikovsky. Then the opening returns in a brilliant coda.

David Garrett © 2003

First performance:
16 December 1921, Chicago. Frederick Stock, conductor; Prokofiev, soloist.

First WASO performance:
7 August 1958. John Farnsworth Hall, conductor; Gary Graffman, soloist.

Most recent WASO performance:
3-4 June 2016. Daniel Blendulf, conductor; Behzod Abduraimov, piano.

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

Albert Roussel
(1869-1937)

Bacchus et Ariane, Op.43 – Suite No.2

Introduction
Ariadne awakens
Dance of Bacchus alone
The Kiss
The Dionysiac spell
March past and presentation of the golden
goblet to Ariadne
Ariadne’s Dance
Dance of Ariadne and Bacchus
Bacchanale

The ballet Bacchus et Ariane, composed by Albert Roussel in 1930, had its premiere at the Opéra in Paris in 1931. The choreography was by Serge Lifar, who danced the role of Bacchus, and the designs were by Giorgio di Chirico. Roussel later made two orchestral suites for concert performance. The second suite, which corresponds exactly to the second act of the ballet, had its first performance in the Salle Pleyel, Paris, in 1934 under Pierre Monteux.

The suites from Bacchus et Ariane are Roussel’s most often performed music, belonging to the fullest artistic maturity of this individual and distinguished composer. Roussel was a late starter, beginning to compose on shipboard while training to be a naval officer. He reached the rank of Lieutenant before deciding at age 25 to become a professional musician. Roussel’s early music is marked to a certain extent by the Franckian harmony and cyclical structures favoured at the Schola Cantorum, where he studied under Vincent d’Indy, and later taught. Elements of Impressionism mark works such as Evocations (1910-11), inspired by travels in Asia, and Le festin de l’araignée (The Spider’s Feast, a ballet). The success of these led to the commission of a remarkable opera-ballet on an Indian theme, Padmâvatî, whose completion was delayed by World War I.

After the war, Roussel clarified his style still further – uncommon harmonic combinations, ingeniously irregular rhythmic patterns, a melodic language favouring wide leaps, and a preference for independent counterpoint. Roussel’s mastery of instrumental effect gives his music brilliance and clarity, but ‘like a winter sun gives more light than heat, revealing the nakedness of the surrounding country without increasing its fertility’ (Martin Cooper). Bacchus et Ariane partly escapes this generalisation: its outlines are as strongly drawn as an etching, but strong primary colours break through Roussel’s usual slight reserve into passionate expression, as befits the Dionysian subject. Along with the Third Symphony (composed for the 50th anniversary of the Boston Symphony Orchestra in 1930), Bacchus et Ariane was one of the triumphs of Roussel’s later years. Fastidious composer of a small body of work, his unique personal language had no followers, though he was the mentor of composers of whom the most famous is Frank Martin.

Ballet music suited Roussel. When he wrote that ‘the directness of the rhythm constitutes a trump card in the hand of the ballet master, [and] the clarity of the melodic line is no less valuable’, he was naming the strongest points of his own music. The classicism of Bacchus et Ariane, the marine setting, and the intoxication of the Dionysian dances were ideal for a musician of Roussel’s gifts.

The concert suites stand up very effectively without the stage action. It may help the listener to connect Ariadne first with the tender viola solo of the introduction, then with a solo violin as she dances in Dionysian frenzy. Bacchus is introduced by clarinet figures strongly reminiscent of Richard Strauss’ Till Eulenspiegel. Roussel has written music of sustained invention, and avoided merely illustrative detail. The tonal plan of the ballet and each of its acts has a strong and satisfying logic. In this and other respects, comparison with Ravel’s ballet Daphnis et Chloé of 1912 is inevitable. The subject matter is similar, but as Basil Deane writes in his study of Roussel, ‘Ravel’s form is expansive, his rhythm flexible, and his harmony caressing. Roussel condenses his material; his rhythm is taut and his chords astringent’.

The story of the ballet
The story of the ballet, by Abel Hermant, is set on the island of Naxos where Theseus has landed with Ariadne, daughter of King Minos of Crete, and the youths and maidens he has rescued from the Minotaur, with the help of Ariadne’s thread in the labyrinth. Theseus and his companions celebrate their deliverance, and he mimes his duel with the monster. A sinister veiled figure appears. Ariadne approaches him, and falls asleep under his power. He is none other than Bacchus himself: he orders Theseus and his companions to leave the island. In a dream Ariadne dances with Bacchus.

Here the second act of the ballet (and the second suite) begins. Ariadne awakens and finds herself abandoned. She climbs the rocks and sees the receding sail of Theseus’ galley. She tries to throw herself into the sea, but falls instead into the arms of Bacchus. They resume the dream dance. Their lips meet in a kiss, releasing an enchantment, and the sterile island suddenly becomes populated with fauns and bacchantes. These followers of Bacchus march past. Two of them present Ariadne with a golden cup filled with grape juice. She drinks and, intoxicated, dances with mounting frenzy, first alone, then with Bacchus. The entire company joins in a Bacchanalian revel, while the god conducts Ariadne to the highest pinnacle and crowns her with a diadem of stars ravished from the constellations.

David Garrett © 2001

First performance of the ballet:
22 May 1931, Paris.

Most recent WASO performance:
28-29 September 2001. Jean Bernard Pommier, conductor.

Instrumentation:
piccolo, two flutes, two oboes, english horn, two clarinets, bass clarinet, two bassoons, contrabassoon, four horns, four trumpets, three trombones, tuba, timpani, triangle, tambourine, drum, cymbals, bass drum, tam tam, celesta, two harps, strings.

Maurice Ravel
(1875-1937)

La Valse – poème chorégraphique

In the space of 120 years the waltz evolved from sturdy rusticity through elegant whirling to intoxicating sumptuousness – everyone from Mozart to Richard Strauss had taken a turn on the dance floor. Then World War I crushed the society that danced in three-quarter time, and the waltz became a thing of the past. For Ravel, himself traumatised by the war, this could only have made the waltz more irresistible; the composer of the Menuet antique and the Pavane pour une infante défunte was drawn, as always, to the past and to the dance.

In 1911 Ravel completed his Valses nobles et sentimentales – a string of lapidary waltzes in the spirit but not the style of Schubert – and he had begun to toy with the idea of a grander work for two pianos capturing the essence of Vienna through various aspects of the waltz. But Ravel didn’t write Wien, as it was to be called. When war broke out he headed to the front, driving lorries because he was too slight to be admitted to the fighting forces. After the armistice he completed something quite different: La Valse – a choreographic poem for orchestra.

Where the Valses nobles… had been inspired by Schubert and the embryonic waltz of the early 19th century, La Valse is a tribute to ‘An Imperial Court, around 1855’, a court in which the Strausses are the kings. Ravel imagined the music as ‘a sort of apotheosis of the Viennese waltz’, associated in his mind with ‘the impression of a fantastic, fatal whirling’. The effect is achieved through the simplest of structures, based not so much on themes or harmony but on something very simple: the crescendo, or building of sound from soft to loud. In this respect it is not unlike Bolero, but instead of one long overwhelming crescendo, La Valse offers two.

The music begins with a grumble – a muted double bass section divided into three separate groups that share eerie tremolos and ominous plucked notes. Ravel’s scenario describes eddying clouds that part from time to time, offering fleeting glimpses of waltzing couples. Bassoons, horns and clarinets join in… Ravel’s beloved harps and more trembling strings…all is low and all is muted. This is the waltz viewed from a distance, each intimate couple in its own private world.

But we cannot stay voyeurs for long – the mists gradually disperse to reveal a huge ballroom in red and gold, brilliantly lit with chandeliers, and the waltzing couples have become a whirling crowd. The music embarks on a chain of waltzes that capture the verve of Johann Strauss, the opulence of Richard, and the frenzy of the ballroom. ‘I’m waltzing frantically,’ wrote Ravel when working on the piece.

The themes are sophisticated and volatile by turn – one moment the crowd of dancers is all glittering elegance, the next it is caught up in the fatal whirling that Ravel imagined. The fantastic melodic invention is matched by scintillating orchestral effects such as sweeping glissandi from the harps and divisions of the strings into as many as 16 separate parts. But the potential of Ravel’s huge orchestra of more than 90 players is kept in reserve – we are overwhelmed by its exquisite colours before we are overwhelmed by its power. By the time Ravel brings on his second crescendo, shorter and more turbulent, we are completely intoxicated.

Not all were intoxicated, however. Sergei Diaghilev of the Ballets Russes was offered this spectacular music for a ballet but rejected it as too symphonic and lacking in choreographic variety. In doing so he lost the friendship of the composer who had created Daphnis et Chloé for his company in 1912. Ironically La Valse was one of the few Ravel ballet scores that had been conceived for dancing and for orchestra: Ma Mère l’Oye (Mother Goose), Le Tombeau de Couperin and Valses nobles et sentimentales all became ballets, but only after they had first appeared as music for piano. In the end it was Ida Rubinstein who produced La Valse, some nine years later, with choreography by Bronislava Nijinska. But the music was first performed in the concert hall and it is there that its exhilarating momentum and surging climaxes continue to sweep us away. Prewar Vienna may have waltzed itself into fatal oblivion but La Valse whirls on.

Yvonne Frindle © 2005

First performance:
12 December 1920 (orchestral version), Camille Chevillard conducting Lamoureux Orchestra, Paris.

First WASO performance:
14 February 1987, Diego Masson, conductor.

Most recent WASO performance:
4-5 December 2009, Paul Daniel, conductor.

Instrumentation:
three flutes (third doubling piccolo), three oboes (third doubling cor anglais), two clarinets, bass clarinet, two bassoons, contrabassoon, four horns, three trumpets, three trombones, tuba, timpani, percussion, two harps, strings.

Liam O’Malley
Associate Principal Trombone

What’s your earliest memory of playing music?
Apparently as a toddler I was regularly kicked out of my mother’s piano room for singing along to her Suzuki piano students! I was mostly a singer (and an extremely bad piano student) until I took up the trombone at around age 9.

How would you describe tonight’s concert, Dance of Desire, in one sentence?
A sonic smorgasbord; I think this program showcases such a wide range of colour in sound.

When no one’s watching, what music do you listen to?
Queen, The Eagles, Creedence Clearwater Revival, The Bee Gees; all thanks to Dad. They remind me of a childhood full of road trips with my family.

What piece of music would you play to convince someone of the power of music?
Fifth movement of Mahler’s Second Symphony. I’d be worried if people don’t feel something listening to that!

How has the way you think about music changed over your lifetime?
I think the way I think about music has definitely changed, but more important is what’s stayed the same: I still feel joy being immersed in music as a huge part of my life.

What is your secret non-music related talent?
Not sure I have any secret talents, but you will find me quite regularly on a tennis court all over Perth. A COVID hobby has turned into quite an obsession.

Earlier this year we caught you playing the conch in Revueltas’ La noche de los Mayas – what’s the most unusual instrument you’ve played?
I would say nothing really gets more unusual than the abode of a tropical marine mollusc.