Pictures at an Exhibition

Umberto Clerici
Conductor

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

It was in Sydney in 2018 that Umberto made his conducting debut with the Sydney Symphony Orchestra at the Sydney Opera House. A host of acclaimed conducting engagements followed culminating in his recent appointment as the Chief Conductor of the Queensland Symphony Orchestra. Simultaneously to this, Umberto continues to be in high demand with all the major symphony orchestras of Australia and New Zealand.

In addition to his first season as Chief Conductor of the Queensland Symphony Orchestra, Umberto’s 2023 conducting engagements include returns to the Sydney, Melbourne and West Australian Symphony Orchestras. Having conducted each of the New Zealand and Dunedin Symphony Orchestras in 2022, Umberto will debut this year conducting the Christchurch Symphony Orchestra. In addition, Umberto looks forward to his first collaboration with Opera Queensland for Verdi’s Macbeth.

Image credit: Jay Patel

Western Australian Youth Orchestra

WA Youth Orchestras (WAYO) is a not-for-profit registered charity providing unparalleled orchestral training and performance opportunities for young Western Australians.

Established in 1974, WAYO is one of Australia’s leading and most comprehensive youth orchestra programs, with six full time large ensembles comprising over 400 annual members drawn from over 170 suburbs in Perth, South West WA and beyond. Each year, WAYO presents concerts to live annual audiences often in excess of 30,000.

The past decade has seen WAYO enjoy increased exposure to conductors of international standing through our Woodside Energy International Conductor Season including Vladimir Verbitsky, Tze Law Chan & Benjamin Northey who will return in July 2023. These fine conductors build on the fantastic work of all of WAYO’s music staff led by Music Director Peter Moore OAM.

Tonight’s side-by-side collaboration gives our members the opportunity to share a stage with their WASO heroes. WAYO is most grateful to Woodside Energy for championing this unique and highly beneficial program.

Roger Smalley
(1943-2015)

Diptych (Homage to Brian Blanchflower)

Sea-Nocturne
II Particle Madness

Roger Smalley writes:
The British-born artist Brian Blanchflower came to live in Perth, as I did, in the mid-70s and the course of his artistic development has, like my own, been deeply affected by this move. I have always been attracted to his work, with its combination of deep structure and surface allure, and he, in his turn, has been significantly influenced by the work of several contemporary composers (notably Varése, Ligeti and Xenakis). It was seeing a large quantity of his output at one time (in the retrospective exhibition held at the Art Gallery of Western Australia during the 1990 Festival of Perth) which gave me the idea of composing a piece of music based on certain aspects of his work. I was particularly struck by the contrast between the extremely sombre series of paintings generically entitled Nocturne and the sculptural installation Tursiops (both dating from the early 80s) and the brilliant explosions of colour in his more recent work, typified by the painting Glimpses (An Earth History) of 1986-7. I envisaged a pair of orchestral pieces which would similarly embody this contrast between dark and light - contrasts which could be further extended in the musical domain to encompass polarities such as low/high, loud/soft, slow/fast, and stasis/motion. It seemed obvious to give such a work the painterly title of Diptych.

The first panel of the musical Diptych is based rather closely on a large-scale sculptural installation called Tursiops (this being the latin name for a dolphin). The installation consists of seven black objects incised with white marks and arranged from left to right as follows : 1) a square canvas on the wall 2) 14 small baskets filled with sand plus a dolphin's skull on the floor 3) a thin pole leaning against the wall 4) an inverted triangular canvas on the wall 5) a ladder with only the top and bottom rungs leaning against the wall 6) a string running down the wall and sprouting seven cross-strings on the floor, leading to 7) a looming shape reminiscent of a ship's keel, also on the floor.

My piece attempts to translate these visual forms into musical ones. Accordingly, it is in seven sections whose differing lengths roughly correspond to the proportions of the installation. These seven elemental musical gestures are filled with a teeming profusion of detail which mirrors the complex granular surface of the two canvasses in the installation. The white marks are represented by a series of sharp chords which stand out in relief against these textural backgrounds. They are first heard on the brass at the beginning of Section 2 and then on piano in Section 3.

Just as important as these structural parallels are my emotional responses to the installation. These have resulted in a piece which is stark and monumental in character, predominantly slow in tempo and low in tessitura. It depicts the dark night in which `fear eats the soul' and is pervaded by the mysterious and threatening sounds of the nocturnal sea.

The second panel of Diptych is based more generally on the painting Glimpses (An Earth History). This vast work (over six metres long and two metres high) has a richly-textured surface built up from the superimposition of many layers of brightly coloured marks until it resembles a photograph of a galaxy. I began with the thought that the light from distant galaxies gradually increases in intensity as it streams across interstellar space towards our vantage-point on earth. The piece is therefore a sustained crescendo of volume and rhythmic activity from a static beginning to a turbulent end. As the piece progresses more and more layers of material are superimposed until they finally coalesce in a wild dance. This last section arose from an alternative view of the painting in which it could be seen as a picture of atomic particles in motion. For this reason, I decided not to use the title of the painting (which has strong visual connotations) but chose that of a small (but related) print called Particle Madness.

Diptych was commissioned by the ABC with financial assistance from the Performing Arts Board of the Australia Council.

© Roger Smalley

First and most recent WASO performance:
6 September 1991, Perth. Jorge Mester, conductor.

Instrumentation:
three flutes (two doubling piccolos), three oboes, three Bb clarinets (two doubling bass clarinets), three bassoons (one doubling contra bassoon), four horns, four trumpets, two tenor trombones, bass trombone, tuba, four percussion, timpani, harp, piano, strings.

Claude Debussy
(1862-1918)

La mer – Three Symphonic Sketches

De l’aube à midi sur la mer (From Dawn to Noon on the Sea)
Jeux de vagues (Play of Waves)
Dialogue du vent et de la mer (Dialogue of the Wind and the Sea)

‘Never before had that marvellous music La Mer appeared so seductive and yet mysterious at the same time, so imbued with the enigmatic life of the Cosmos, than on that evening when her great creator, with a gentle hand, was ruling over her waves.’

So wrote a young Russian composer, Lazare Saminsky, on hearing Debussy conduct La Mer in St Petersburg in 1913. But the work’s greatness had by no means seemed self-evident when it had first appeared in 1905. Debussy himself was weathering a personal scandal, having left his second wife, and part of the lack of enthusiasm on the part of the Parisian public may have stemmed from its disapproval. The first performance, too, was by all accounts under-rehearsed and the conductor, Camille Chevillard, unsympathetic to Debussy’s style. The composer and conductor Lalo complained that he could neither hear, see nor feel the sea, and a reviewer in Boston wrote that ‘we clung like a drowning man to a few fragments of the tonal wreck, a bit of theme here, a comprehensible figure there, but finally this muted-horn sea overwhelmed us.’

The point missed by the authors of such remarks, however, is that Debussy’s music (both generally speaking and with regard to this work) is not intended as visual imagery, or the soundtrack to some imaginary film. The composer may have invited such misinterpretations: in subtitling the work ‘Three Symphonic Sketches’ he of course evokes the media of visual art; moreover, he often used terms like ‘colour’ and ‘shading’ when discussing his music. But in 1903, when he began work on La Mer, Debussy wrote to a friend from the Burgundian countryside:

You may not know that I was destined for a sailor’s life, and that only chance led me in another direction…You will say that the ocean does not exactly bathe the hills of Burgundy, and my seascapes may be studio landscapes, but I have an endless store of memories, and in my mind they are worth more than reality, whose beauty often weighs heavily on the imagination.

The work, then, is about the idea of the sea rather than being a representation of it; significantly, much of the composition of the work took place away from the coast. Debussy’s genius for orchestration and subtle rhythmic organisation certainly make for an evocative work where it is possible to imagine the crash of waves, the call of seagulls and the protean movement of light on water. The final climactic moments of the first movement, for instance, somehow create a sense of emerging from the deep into the light.

Other masterly touches abound: the unusual timbre of cellos divided into four parts; the use of muted horns (which Debussy admitted to taking from the music of Weber) to evoke space; the soloistic use of wind instruments and harp.

But La Mer is as much ‘symphonic’ as it is ‘sketch’. Its three movements are by no means simply rhapsodic, but rather show Debussy’s subtle and careful approach to form. In the first movement his careful development of short motifs is perfectly symphonic; the second movement, ‘Play of Waves’, is, among other things, a symphonic scherzo; and the third movement – which has one of the rare ‘big finishes’ of any work by this composer – is a symphonic finale.

The pianist and Debussy expert Roy Howat has also shown how Debussy’s structure corresponds to the ancient Greek idea of the Golden Section where a line is divided so that the ratio of the shorter portion to the longer portion forms the same ratio as the longer portion does to the whole length. By applying this formula to time, a composer can plot where significant events (changes of speed, colour moods or metre) will have the greatest dramatic effect. Howat has argued persuasively that the moment in the last movement of La Mer where the violins play a soft, impossibly high harmonic represents the Golden Section of the piece.

By a nice paradox, Debussy’s marvellous musical reflection on the constant flux of the sea is achieved by the most painstaking and careful calculation. Not for nothing did the published score carry the intricately designed woodcut The Hollow Wave by the Japanese artist Hokusai.

Abridged from a note by Gordon Kerry © 2005

First performance:
15 October 1905, Paris. Lamoureux Orchestra conducted by Camille Chevillard.

First WASO performance:
22-23 July 1966; Thomas Mayer, conductor.

Most recent WASO performance:
5-6 October 2018; Ludovic Morlot, conductor.

Instrumentation:
two flutes, piccolo, two oboes, cor anglais, two clarinets, three bassoons, contrabassoon, four horns, three trumpets, two cornets, three trombones, tuba, timpani, percussion, two harps, strings.

Modest Mussorgsky
(1839-1881)

orchestrated by Maurice Ravel
(1875-1937)

Pictures at an Exhibition

Promenade –
1. Gnomus (Gnome)
Promenade –
2. Il vecchio castello (The Old Castle)
Promenade –
3. Tuileries. Dispute d’enfants après jeux (Tuileries. Children quarrelling after play)
4. Bydło (Oxen)
Promenade –
5. Ballet of the Unhatched Chicks
6. ‘Samuel’ Goldenberg und ‘Schmuÿle’
7. Limoges. Le marché. La grande nouvelle (Limoges Market. The Big News) –
8. Catacombæ. Sepulcrum romanum (Catacombs. A Roman Sepulchre) –
Con mortuis in lingua mortua (With the Dead in a Dead Language)
9. The Hut on Hen’s Legs. Baba Yaga –
10. The Great Gate of Kiev

Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition is piano music but it has inspired more orchestrations and arrangements than possibly any other piece of music. And it was one of these – Ravel’s brilliant orchestration from 1922 – that brought this remarkable music to widespread public attention decades before it entered the piano recital repertoire.

Mussorgsky never intended to orchestrate Pictures at an Exhibition, and yet many musicians have felt that this vivid music called for orchestral colours. Among them were conductors Henry Wood (who withdrew his 1915 effort after Ravel’s was published) and Leopold Stokowski, as well as Serge Koussevitzky, whose instructions to Ravel were that the orchestration be in the style of Rimsky-Korsakov, the one composer who, surprisingly, didn’t attempt the task.

Ravel didn’t have access to Mussorgsky’s original music from 1874 – only the 1886 edition by Rimsky-Korsakov, compromised by misreadings and errors – but he aimed for fidelity to Mussorgsky’s style, sublimating his own. It’s no accident that his orchestration was praised for not sounding like his ballet Daphnis. Similarly, and despite Koussevitzky’s instructions, Ravel avoided the showy glamour of, say, Scheherazade.

The exhibition of the title was a memorial in honour of Mussorgsky’s friend, the architect and artist Viktor Hartmann, who had died in 1873, at the age of 39. As an architect he was notoriously bad at constructing ‘ordinary, everyday things’ but, given palaces or ‘fantastic’ structures, his artist’s imagination was capable of astonishing creativity.

From hundreds of drawings and watercolours, Mussorgsky chose ten – some showcasing Hartmann’s imagination, others reflecting his travels. His music places the listener at the exhibition itself, promenading from picture to picture in ‘Russian style’ with a lopsided alternation of five- and sixbeat groupings. (Mussorgsky said his own ‘profile’ could be seen in these Promenades.) Then, pausing before each artwork, he takes us into its world.

Several of the movements reveal Mussorgsky’s fascination with speech rhythms and his gift for characterisation. The Tuileries movement, for example, is a fond depiction of shrieking children in the palace gardens, although these Parisian children seem to be calling for their nanny in Russian: ‘Nianya! Nianya!’ Gossiping women populate the Limoges Market.

Later, in ‘Samuel’ Goldenberg und ‘Schmuÿle’, Mussorgsky unites two portraits of Polish Jews in a timeless narrative: the poor Schmuÿle begging from the rich Samuel (Yiddish and German variants of the same name). Samuel appears first – assertive and powerful – with (in Ravel’s orchestration) full strings. Then, in a stroke of genius, Ravel casts a stuttering trumpet as Schmuÿle.

Even more memorable is Ravel’s decision to give the troubadour in front of The Old Castle a saxophone to play. Gestures such as these have become so intimately associated with Mussorgsky’s music they seem inevitable and it’s no surprise that Ravel’s orchestration remains the bestknown of the many that have been made.

It's not without its flaws, though. In Bydło (Oxen), Ravel’s reliance on Rimsky’s edition resulted in a striking departure from Mussorgsky’s original, which begins with
heavy, thundering chords in the piano’s bass. What we hear instead is a gradual crescendo, emerging from the muted sound of bassoons, tuba, cellos and basses: entirely ‘wrong’ but an ingenious representation of the approach and passing of a Polish ox-drawn wagon.

The ponderous Bydło is followed by chirping flutes, fluttering violin trills, and the staccato tapping of chicks at their shells for Mussorgsky’s imaginary Ballet of the Unhatched Chicks. Then, in another swift change of mood, a pair of movements inspired by Hartmann’s painting of the Paris catacombs: Catacombs. A Roman Sepulchre and With the Dead in a Dead Language. Cue gloomy brass sounds and an introspective evocation of the Promenade theme in a minor key, which Ravel gives to the oboes and cor anglais against a background of shivering high strings.

The final pair of pictures brings the music to a climax: a fantastical clock in the form of Baba Yaga’s hut and a competition entry for a grand city gate. Unlike Western witches, Baba Yaga travels in a mortar propelled by a pestle – her broomstick is for sweeping over her tracks – and her music is terrifying and inexorable.

The Great Gate of Kiev conveys an ‘old heroic Russia’ with a Russian Orthodox chant (‘As you are baptised in Christ’), which Ravel gives to clarinets and bassoons in imitation of Russian reed organs. This is interrupted by a characteristically Russian peal of bells, which Ravel gives to everyone except the tubular bells and glockenspiel – these are held in reserve for the Promenade theme as it rings out one last time.

Yvonne Frindle © 2019

First performance:
22 October 1922, Paris. Serge Koussevitzky, conductor.

First WASO performance:
March 1967. Thomas Mayer, conductor.

Most recent WASO performance:
23-23 November 2019. Asher Fisch, conductor.

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