Dvořák’s Symphony No.8

Dmitry Matvienko
Conductor

Dmitry Matvienko is the winner of the 2021 edition of the prestigious Malko Competition for Young Conductors with First prize and Audience prize. Previously, he was awarded with the Critics and the Made in Italy prizes at the International Conducting Competition Guido Cantelli. From this season he starts his tenure as Chief Conductor of the Aarhus Symphony Orchestra.

He received his first music lessons at the age of six before undergoing a formal training as a chorister and chorus master. He studied choral conducting at the
St. Petersburg Conservatory and he was a member of the MusicAeterna Choir at the Perm Opera and Ballet Theatre under the artistic direction of Teodor Currentzis from 2012 to 2013. In the following years he studied conducting at the Moscow Conservatory and attended master classes of Gennady Rozhdestvensky, Vladimir Jurowski, Teodor Currentzis and Vasily Petrenko.

In 2017, Dmitry Matvienko became a member of the conductor internship programme of the National Philharmonic Orchestra of Russia (chief conductor Vladimir Spivakov). He assisted and prepared several programmes for chief conductor Vladimir Jurowski, Vasily Petrenko and Michail Jurowski with Svetlanov Symphony Orchestra.

While conducting concerts with the Svetlanov Symphony, the National Philharmonic of Russia, the New Russia State Symphony Orchestra (chief conductor Yuri Bashmet) and the Moscow Chamber Orchestra “Musica Viva”, Dmitry conducted revivals of Prince Igor, Faust, Iolanta, La Traviata, The Tsar’s Bride, The Firebird, and Verdi’s Requiem at the National Academic Opera and Ballet Theatre of Belarus.

He worked as musical assistant of Vladimir Jurowski in a new production of The Nose (directed by Kirill Serebrennikov) and a new production of War and Peace (directed by Dimitri Tcherniakov) at the Bayerische Staatsoper.

During the past seasons he conducted prestigious orchestras such as Orchestra del Teatro Carlo Felice Genova, Orchestre Philarmonique de Monte-Carlo, Orchestra Teatro Comunale Bologna, Orchestra Teatro Regio Torino, National Orchestra of Russia, Bergen Philharmonic, Adelaide Symphony Orchestra, Sønderjyllands Symfoniorkester, Danish National Symphony Orchestra, Helsingborg Symphony, the Orquesta de la Comunidad de Madrid, Orchestra del Teatro La Fenice of Venice, Aarhus Symfoniorkester, Iceland Symphony Orchestra, Orchestra del Teatro Lirico di Cagliari, Orchestre national de Lille, Arktisk Filharmoni, Dallas Symphony, Orchestra Sinfonica Nazionale RAI Torino, Orquestra Gulbenkian, Tonkünstler Wien, Atlanta Symphony, Orchestra del Teatro San Carlo di Napoli and Tokyo Symphony.

In the 24/25 season he is awaited for returns on the podium of Adelaide Symphony, Arctic Philharmonic, Aarhus Symfoniorkester and he will make his debuts with Göteborgs Symfoniker, Orchestra del Maggio Musicale Fiorentino and Orchestra Toscanini.

After a successful operatic debut in Rome, leading the Italian premiere of Warlikowski’s production of From the house of the Dead, in the current season he will make his Austrian and German operatic debut, respectively with Eugene Onegin at the Deutsche Oper am Rhein and Betrothal in a Monastery new production at the Theater an der Wien.

Konstantin Shamray
Piano

Described as an exhilarating performer with faultless technique and fearless command of the piano, Russian-Australian concert pianist Konstantin Shamray performs at an international level with the world’s leading orchestras and concert presenters.

Konstantin was born in Novosibirsk and commenced his studies at the age of six with Natalia Knobloch. He then studied in Moscow at the Russian Gnessin Academy of Music with Professors Tatiana Zelikman and Vladimir Tropp, and the Hochschule fuer Musik in Freiburg, Germany, with Professor Tibor Szasz.
In 2008, Konstantin burst onto the concert scene when he won First Prize at the Sydney International Piano Competition. He is the first and only competitor to date in the 40 years of the competition to win both First and People’s Choice Prizes, in addition to six other prizes.

He then went on to win First Prize at the 2011 Klavier Olympiade in Bad Kissingen, Germany and has performed at the Kissinger Sommer festival. In July 2013, following chamber recitals with Alban Gerhardt and Feng Ning, he was awarded the festival’s coveted Luitpold Prize for
“outstanding musical achievements”.

Since then, Konstantin has performed extensively throughout the world in recitals, as a soloist with orchestras and as a chamber musician. In Australia, highlights have included engagements with the Adelaide, Queensland, West Australia, Tasmanian and Sydney Symphony orchestras, as well as tours with the Australian Chamber Orchestra and ANAM Orchestra. Outside of Australia, he has performed with the Russian National Philharmonic, the Mariinsky Theatre Orchestra, Moscow Virtuosi, Orchestre National de Lyon, Prague Philharmonia, Belgrade Philharmonic Orchestra and the Calgary Philharmonic amongst many others. He has enjoyed collaborating with distinguished conductors such as Kirill Petrenko, Vladimir Spivakov, Dmitry Liss, Tugan Sokhiev and Nicholas Milton.

Chamber music plays a strong role in Konstantin’s musical career and collaborations have included tours with the Australian String Quartet, Southern Cross Soloists, Richard Tognetti, Natsuko Yoshimoto, Alban Gerhardt, Kristof Barati, Andreas Brantelid, Li Wei Qin and Leonard Elschenbroich. Konstantin has performed as part of the International Piano Series in Adelaide, and at the Melbourne Recital Centre and Ukaria Cultural Centre. He has enjoyed critical acclaim at the Klavier-Festival Ruhr,
the Bochum Festival in Germany, the Mariinsky International Piano Festival and the White Nights Festival in St. Petersburg, Adelaide Festival, Musica Viva Sydney and Huntington festivals. Konstantin has recorded albums with the labels Naxos, ABC Classics and Fonoforum.

Konstantin was formerly Lecturer in Piano at the Elder Conservatorium of Music at the University of Adelaide and was awarded his PhD in 2020 for his performance-based project ‘The piano as Kolokola, Glocken and Cloches: performing and extending the European traditions of bell-inspired piano music’.

He is currently Senior Lecturer in Piano at the University of Melbourne. Konstantin is open to research supervisions, with particular areas of interest being Russian piano music of the 20th century and bell-inspired piano performance traditions.

Olivia Davies
(b. 1988)

Hyphae (World Premiere)

Composer’s notes:

Hyphae (pronounced high-fee), are long branching filaments that form the underground fungal network known as Mycelium. At a fundamental level, individual Hypha grow in two key steps—they branch, and they fuse. I was initially inspired by Mycelium more broadly—a living network that is the connective tissue of our world—but I found myself drawn to its most basic component, and more specifically, how it grows.

The music begins with a single pitch, a drone shared between individual strings. Sudden accents give way to new tones, sustained against the initial drone. As the music unfolds, more parts are added, and more pitches are introduced—branching away from the starting tone. Naturally, the piece becomes increasingly dense, culminating in a chromatic web of lines that weave around each other.

As I wrote the piece, I held an image in mind of Hyphae extending, branching and fusing. It is a world that I found rich and poetic, both beautiful and dark, hidden in plain sight.

Hyphae was commissioned for the West Australian Symphony Orchestra by Prue Ashurst.

First performance:
These are the World Premiere performances of Hyphae.

Instrumentation:
two flutes (one doubling piccolo), two oboes, one clarinet, one bass clarinet, two bassoons and one contrabassoon; four horns, three trumpets, three trombones and tuba; percussion, harp and strings.

Camille Saint-Saëns
(1835-1921)

Piano Concerto No.5 in F, Op.103 Egyptian
Allegro animato
Andante – Allegretto tranquillo – Andante Molto allegro

By 1896, fifty years had elapsed since Saint-Saëns’ debut as an 11-year-old pianist at the Salle Pleyel, Paris. A concert was given to celebrate his anniversary, and the program included his Second Violin Sonata, Op.102, featuring the great violinist Sarasate, and the premiere of the Fifth Piano Concerto, composed the previous winter in Egypt.

On that anniversary evening in 1896, Saint-Saëns paused on his way to the piano and read a poem he had written which looked back to the time when a
‘sallow little boy’ had dared to measure himself against Beethoven and Mozart. The audience cheered. It is difficult
for us today to think of Saint-Saëns, in the term of his contemporaries, as ‘the French Beethoven’. A genius or prodigy perhaps, given that 11-year-old Saint-Saëns could perform any of Beethoven’s 32 piano sonatas from memory! But Saint-Saëns’ mature compositions lack the psychological penetration and dramatic revolution we associate with Beethoven. They are more typical of the French aesthetic – pleasure, taste and elegance.

On that evening in 1896, Saint-Saëns was recalling his debut as a pianist. Saint-Saëns lived into the era of the phonograph, becoming the earliest-born pianist to have his performances recorded for posterity. His recordings connect us with a style of playing which was contemporary with Chopin and Liszt. But it is in the concertos that we today can gain the clearest sense of Saint-Saëns’ pianism. Critic Harold C. Schonberg describes the playing on those scratchy wax cylinders as fluent, flexible, with a dry touch, restricted dynamics (‘He had none of those fortissimi that shatter you as if you’d dived head first into the sea’ said novelist Marcel Proust) and a tendency towards speed. On the basis of this work we can add: a comfortable sense of formal shape, a taste for the exotic, and a perfect calculation of effect.

Saint-Saëns wrote the Egyptian Concerto at a time when middle-class Europeans were curious about African travel. Travellers’ tales and ‘armchair adventures’ in Africa were a popular topic. The opening of the Suez Canal, the development of regular steamship routes across the Mediterranean, and widely reported archaeological finds in Egypt all contributed to the 19th-century fascination with Northern Africa. In music this interest resulted in works as diverse as Verdi’s Aïda and certain Strauss waltzes!

Saint-Saëns was perhaps even more susceptible than most of his contemporaries to the appeal of North Africa. Algeria and Egypt were favourite travel destinations, and provided him with the inspiration also for the Suite algérienne (1880) for orchestra and Africa (1891) for solo piano and orchestra. Saint-Saëns in fact died while on his annual pilgrimage to Algiers in 1921.

The Piano Concerto No.5 has been described by Saint-Saëns biographer James Harding as ‘a travelogue …
with its reminiscences of a translucent Egyptian morning, the croaking of frogs in the Nile Valley, and the thud of ships’ propellers in the last movement’. It is not hard to understand the impact this work might have had on late 19th-century audiences for whom a work such as this conveyed so deliberately the ‘feel’ of exotic locations.

Though Saint-Saëns’ music is more Mozartian than Romantic, he was able to do much with the simplest of means. So often, as in the opening of this concerto, the most effective material turns out to be, on closer study, a simple common chord. The opening piano melody seems simple and singable, but the metre
is slightly equivocal. The work is one of continual charm and colour. The second movement is clearly the most illustrative, and for that reason, perhaps, the most episodic. There is marvellously innovative piano writing here. Melismas running at tangents to the throbbing string accompaniment recall Eastern vocal style.

Despite the sound of ships’ propellers, the final movement seems as Parisian as African, but perhaps catching the sense of a swift gliding through a changing panorama.

G.K. Williams

© Symphony Australia

Frist performance:
2 June 1896, Salle Pleyel, Paris. Saint-Saëns, soloist.

First WASO performance:
1 August 1972. Lorin Hollander, soloist; Tibor Paul, conductor.

Most recent WASO performance:
30 September – 1 October 2016. Jean-Yves Thibaudet, soloist; Asher Fisch, conductor.

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

Antonín Dvořák
(1841-1904)

Symphony No.8 in G, Op.88 B.163
Allegro con brio
Adagio
Allegretto grazioso
Allegro ma non troppo

The success that Dvořák enjoyed, thanks to Brahms’ advocacy in the late 1870s, made his name beyond Vienna and Prague, and in 1883 he made the first of eight visits to England where his music became – and remained – extremely popular. In 1890, now a regular visitor, Dvořák arrived with the score of his Eighth Symphony (published originally as No.4), which he had recently premiered in Prague but which for some time
was colloquially known as the ‘English Symphony’.

In fact, the piece has, even for Dvořák, an especially Bohemian accent; its immediate popularity with the British audience perhaps has more to do with its relaxed attitude to the formal rigours of Germanic symphonism, and an abundance of memorable, folk-inflected melody. For Brahms, normally a great supporter, this was a major flaw. He argued (offering, in passing, a seriously backhanded compliment to his rival Anton Bruckner) that too much that’s fragmentary, incidental, loiters about in the piece. Everything fine, musically captivating and beautiful – but no main points! When one says of Dvořák that he fails to achieve anything great and comprehensive with his pure, individual ideas, this is correct. Not so with Bruckner, all the same he offers so little.

In fact, the formal freedom and melodic richness are precisely what makes this work special. According his early biographer, Otakar Šourek, Dvořák aimed ‘to write something different from his other symphonies and shape the musical content of his ideas in a new manner’. He did so not by piling up beautiful incidents, as Brahms suggests, though; as he is said to have told his student, Josef Michl: ‘To have a beautiful idea is nothing special. The idea comes from itself and if it is beautiful and great, man can take no credit for that. But to develop the idea well and make something great from it, that is the most difficult, that is – art!’

While the Symphony is a work of absolute music, it was composed in close proximity to a series of concert overtures originally known as Nature, Life and Love – the more customary titles In Nature’s Realm, Carnival and Othello came later. This triptych shows Dvořák’s essential Romanticism in his adherence to the cult of Nature and his delight in celebrating his ethnic musical roots, and in similar musical language to that of the Eighth Symphony.

The first movement is in G major and marked Allegro con brio, but Dvořák disguises both speed and tonality by beginning with a slow-moving minor-mode melody in the cellos, richly doubled by horn, clarinet and bassoon. When the music makes it to the home key of G major it is with a chirping melody for the flute. In a breathtaking display of orchestration that ranges from translucent shimmering to the richness of divided violas and cellos, Dvořák elaborates his themes through an audacious series of key changes; the conventional recapitulation is here a shining G major chord with the flute melody now given to a more introspective cor anglais. The Adagio, in C minor, is often brightened with rapid, falling major scales like pealing bells, and has an impassioned central section. The scherzo begins with a lyrical G minor dance contrasting with a more buoyant G major trio and fast coda. The finale is a set of variations on the bright fanfare announced by the trumpet as the movement opens.

What Brahms, of all people, failed to hear in this music is how the varying episodes, across the movements, are unified by pervasive rhythmic cells. The long-short-short figure with which the work opens also dominates the slow movement’s main theme. Groups of four repeated even notes – crotchets or quavers – appear at structural points; groups of triplets can appear as distant drum taps, or the opening gesture of an important melody (like that of the Adagio), and be transformed into the three-note up-beat of the third movement; the dotted rhythm of the third movement’s trio is transmuted in the rhythm of the fourth movement’s fanfare, and when that theme is stated by the orchestra its rising arpeggio reveals it to be related to the flute’s theme from the first movement. This almost subliminal motivic manipulation gives coherence to some of Dvořák’s most expansive and poetic music.

Gordon Kerry © 2013

First performance:
2 February 1890. Composer conducting.

First WASO performance:
25 June 1949. Rafael Kubelik, conductor.

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