Elgar's Violin Concerto

Alpesh Chauhan OBE
Conductor

Alpesh Chauhan OBE is Principal Guest Conductor of the Düsseldorfer Symphoniker and Music Director of Birmingham Opera Company. His debut album featuring orchestral works by Tchaikovsky, released with the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra on Chandos Records in June 2023, was received to great critical acclaim, described in Gramophone as enthralling and named BBC Music Magazine’s Orchestral Choice of the Month.

Recent and forthcoming highlights include performances with the Los Angeles Philharmonic; Seattle and Houston Symphonies; National Symphony Orchestra Washington; Deutsches Symphonie- Orchester Berlin; Oslo Philharmonic; the Hallé; the Toronto, Atlanta, Melbourne, and Antwerp Symphony Orchestras; Symphony Orchestra of India; the London Philharmonic and Philharmonia Orchestras; Accademia di Santa Cecilia; Orchestra Sinfonica Nazionale della RAI; the BBC Symphony Orchestra; the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra, of whom he was Associate Conductor; Orchestre National de Lille; and Malmö Symphony Orchestra, touring iconic venues such as Berlin’s Philharmonie; London’s Royal Albert Hall; Barbican Centre and Royal Festival Hall; Buenos Aires’ Teatro Colón; Venice’s Teatro La Fenice; Valencia’s Palau de les Arts Reina Sofía; and Los Angeles’ Walt Disney Concert Hall.

Alpesh enjoys collaborations with distinguished soloists such as Karen Cargill, Colin Currie, Stefan Dohr, Veronika Eberle, James Ehnes, Pablo Ferrández, Alban Gerhardt, Ilya Gringolts, Benjamin Grosvenor, Brenden Gunnell, Hilary Hahn, Sir Stephen Hough, Zakir Hussain, Pavel Kolesnikov, Johannes Moser, Beatrice Rana, Nikolaj Szeps-Znaider, and Frank Peter Zimmermann. He is particularly well-known for his interpretations of the late Romantic and twentieth century repertoire, including works by Brahms, Tchaikovsky, Bruckner, Mahler, Strauss, Schönberg, Shostakovich, and Stravinsky, alongside championing contemporary and living composers such as Thomas Adès, Anna Clyne, Chaya Czernowin, Henri Dutilleux, Osvaldo Golijov, Sofia Gubaidulina, Zakir Hussain, Nicole Lizée, Jessie Montgomery, John Psathas, Steve Reich, Mark Simpson, and George Walker.

Following his outstanding debut in 2015, he was appointed Principal Conductor of the Filarmonica Arturo Toscanini in Parma where he performed complete cycles of the symphonies by Beethoven and Brahms. Alongside the recently critically acclaimed Rheingold, other notable opera titles include Shostakovich’s Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk, West Side Story, and productions of Turandot, including at the Palau de les Arts Reina Sofía in Valencia.

A keen advocate of music education for young people, Alpesh is a patron of Awards for Young Musicians, a UK charity supporting talented young people from disadvantaged backgrounds on their musical journeys. He has also worked with ensembles such as the National Youth Orchestra of Scotland and the symphony orchestras of the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland and the Royal Northern College of Music. He was the conductor of the 2015 BBC ‘Ten Pieces’ film which brought the world of classical music into secondary schools across the UK and received a distinguished BAFTA award.

Born in Birmingham, Alpesh studied ‘cello with Eduardo Vassallo at the Royal Northern College of Music in Manchester before continuing at the RNCM to pursue the prestigious Master’s Conducting Course. Alpesh studied with Stanislaw Skrowaczewski and was mentored by Andris Nelsons and Edward Gardner in his post as Assistant Conductor of the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra from 2014 to 2016. Alpesh was named ‘Newcomer of the Year’ in the 2021 International Opera Awards and in 2022 was delighted to receive the Conductor Award from the Italian National Association of Music Critics for ‘Miglior Direttore’.

Alpesh was honoured to receive an OBE in Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II’s 2022 New Year’s Honours for Services to the Arts and in 2024 was conferred an Honorary Fellow of the RNCM.

Laurence Jackson
Violin, WASO Concertmaster

After studying at The Royal Academy of Music in London, Laurence joined the Maggini Quartet in 1993 with whom he toured all over the world and made numerous recordings, winning the 2001 Gramophone Award for Chamber Music, 2002 Cannes Classical Awards as well as two Grammy Award nominations.

Laurence was appointed concertmaster of the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra (CBSO) in 2006, touring extensively and making many recordings, including the solo in Strauss’ Ein Heldenleben. With the CBSO he has appeared as soloist many times, performing concertos by Dvořák, Bruch, Nielsen, and Brahms and has also directed the orchestra in various programmes, both as director and director/soloist. Laurence is an Honorary Fellow of both Brunel University, London and Canterbury University and was awarded a fellowship of the Royal Academy of Music in 2013. Laurence plays a violin by J. B. Vuillaume, circa 1850.

Edward Elgar
(1857-1934)

While the Violin Concerto, written for Fritz Kreisler in 1909-10, was Elgar’s first mature work for solo instrument and orchestra, in a sense it was predestined that he would write such a work. He was, after all, an accomplished violinist himself, had made sketches for a violin concerto as early as 1890 (before abandoning the project), and the excellence of his string writing had been a feature of all the works which had established his reputation since the sensational emergence of the Enigma Variations in 1899.

And there was more than a hint of an ‘enigma’ about the Violin Concerto as well. It too bore traces of Elgar’s friends and relations – of his wife, of his friend Alice Stuart-Wortley, and of W.H. (Billy) Reed, who had then just become leader of the London Symphony Orchestra and who had assisted during the concerto’s composition by playing through Elgar’s sketches. But most of all, like the Enigma, the concerto contains a cryptic inscription facing the title page: ‘Aquí está encerrada el alma de…’ (‘Herein lies enshrined the soul of…’). Elgar had found the Spanish text in the preface to the novel Gil Blas by Alain-René Lesage (1668-1747). In the novel, the inscription appears on a poet’s tomb, but in his own adaptation of it Elgar pointedly left the name blank. Subsequent commentators have speculated on the identity of the person whose ‘soul is enshrined’ within this, one of Elgar’s own favourite works.

The most plausible candidate is Alice Stuart-Wortley, the amateur pianist whose friendship with Elgar is documented in more than 400 letters written between 1909 and 1931. Within that correspondence, Elgar consistently referred to the Violin Concerto as ‘our concerto’ and he sent her a handwritten copy of the quotation from Lesage. His private name for her was ‘Windflower’ and Elgar described the work as containing more than one ‘Windflower’ theme. But Elgar was always one who liked to complicate his enigmas, and later in his life he confided to his friend Ivor Atkins that the inspiration for the concerto had actually been his former fiancée Helen Weaver, a fine violinist in her own right. No matter who the unknown inspiration was, the ‘subject’ of the concerto, as always, remains Elgar himself. ‘I have written out my soul,’ Elgar wrote to Stuart-Wortley shortly after its completion.

When Fritz Kreisler was shown the score on 1 July 1910, he exclaimed, ‘It will shake Queen’s Hall!’ and word soon got around that Elgar had another major triumph looming. The London orchestras fought for the right to give the premiere, with the Philharmonic Society winning the right to have the work’s dedicatee, Kreisler, perform it twice, with the composer conducting, in November 1910.

Kreisler described it as ‘perhaps the most difficult of all concertos for endurance’. Certainly it’s a test of technique, with the soloist called upon to range widely through difficult passagework while maintaining the essentially poetic spirit of the work as a whole.

The first movement opens with a rising and falling theme, like a kind of nostalgic sigh. The sublime melody for the soloist represents Elgar at his lyrical best and that distinctive ‘Windflower’ theme undergoes some majestic transformations as the movement proceeds.

For all his conservative political affiliations, Elgar was never averse to the occasional post-Wagnerian harmonic leap. He begins the slow movement, for instance, in the comparatively distant key of B flat major, with, again, a small upward leap getting the theme underway and the violin introducing new material in keys as diverse as E and D flat. It’s an elegy of uncommon beauty and here, surely, we come closest to the musical depiction of ‘the soul of …’.

The march-like last movement is substantial and, in its cadenza, contains one of the most extraordinary instrumental effects in all of Elgar’s music. The soloist’s virtuoso extravaganza is accompanied by the orchestral string players ‘thrumming’ with the soft part of their fingers, as if playing guitars. Elsewhere, themes from the previous movements are recalled, the mood lurches between joy and nostalgia, the keys of B minor and major struggle for supremacy, before a brilliant flourish announces the conclusion.

Abridged from a note by Martin Buzacott © 2001

First performance:
10 November 1910, Queen’s Hall, London. Composer conducting; Fritz Kreisler, soloist.

First WASO performance:
28-29 June 1963. John Farnsworth Hall, conductor; Geoffrey Michaels, soloist.

Most recent WASO performance:
16-17 August 2019. Asher Fisch, conductor; Nikolaj Szeps-Znaider, soloist.

Instrumentation:
solo violin; two flutes, two oboes, two clarinets, three bassoons (optional doubling contrabassoon); four horns, two trumpets, three trombones and tuba (optional); timpani and strings.

Dmitri Shostakovich
(1906-1975)

Dmitri Shostakovich once bemoaned that “without Party guidance…I would have displayed more brilliance, used more sarcasm, I could have revealed my ideas openly instead of having to resort to camouflage”. The composer was born in Saint Petersburg, 1906 and had experienced first-hand the decades of political turmoil that would lead to a number of his works being banned. His satirical Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk was condemned when in 1936 a communist news outlet published a bad review; Stalin himself was entirely unimpressed with the opera. Shostakovich also hid his Violin Concerto No.1 inside his desk, anxious it would offend the authorities who imposed a strict cultural policy on artists. The composer lived in fear: would they arrest him for his work? His suitcase was packed, just in case.

Yet in 1960, Shostakovich joined the Communist Party, and the following year he completed his Symphony No.12 The Year 1917 – a musical odyssey honouring the life of one of the most influential dictators of modern history: Vladimir Lenin. Across four movements, it portrays the journey of a leader who would help orchestrate the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 and usher in the dawn of the Soviet Union. In composing his Twelfth, did Shostakovich finally enjoy the sarcasm he had repressed all those decades before? Or did this mammoth work stem from a genuine admiration for the founder of the Russian Communist Party? It’s a contradiction that has led many musicologists to speculate whether the work came from a place of satire or seriousness. But from its earliest moments, this music does not feel like a joke: it sounds as dark as the toll of war. So while you listen, you may feel that you are bearing witness to a serious retelling of history as seen through the lens of a denounced composer. This is a compelling truth – although not the only truth – we hear in the music of The Year 1917.

It begins with Revolutionary Petrograd, in which you may imagine valenki boots trudging over cold roads. They march together, but without clear purpose: the time signature is inconsistent (five beats in a bar are reduced to four, then three, before rising to four again). Double basses and cellos labour on until violins enter in rhythmic unison, sharing few pleasant harmonies (if any). Unlike the many orchestral works linking bold military gestures with a sense of pride and glory – from Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture to Beethoven’s Wellington’s Victory – this movement does not. Its revolutionary spirit sounds dissonant, messy, and raw.

Razliv starts with the thrum of pizzicato violins above drawn-out lower strings and brass, which lay a foundation of tension. This movement is named after an unusual location at which Lenin, then facing arrest, went into hiding. He lived in a little straw hut, pretending to be a farmer while writing his theoretical book The State and Revolution. When a solo clarinet soars above the quiet of the hall, are we hearing the solitary voice of a revolutionary thinker? The movement comes to a hollow conclusion before drifting into Aurora.

Winds and strings share the articulation of staccato during the introduction to this rigid third movement. Its war-like feel and clashing winds are vaguely reminiscent of Holst’s Mars, the Bringer of War from The Planets. But Shostakovich’s orchestral work depicts the Russian ship Aurora, which fired a blank shot outside the Winter Palace to mark the beginning of the 1917 October Revolution (when the Lenin-led Bolsheviks overthrew the Russian Provisional Government). Remember, this was the backdrop of Shostakovich’s childhood: he was just 11 years old when these events took place in Saint Petersburg. The experience permeated his music and memory; he’d also composed this revolution into his Symphony No.2, To October.

Aurora glides seamlessly into The Dawn of Humanity, where Shostakovich portrays Lenin’s ultimate triumph. Jolly and uplifting, it features all the ingredients of a rousing celebration of victory: triangle rings and cymbals crash above beamingly proud chords. By the end, all sections of the orchestra have joined forces to hammer home their simple theme with relentless repetition. (It’s not hard to imagine a message of togetherness under the dawn of a new political regime.) Would this exaggerated glory have satisfied the satirist or the propagandist? Shostakovich said his symphony would “embody the mighty image of the greatest man of our most complex epoch”. Whether composed with respect or cynicism, it would paint a brutally authentic picture of this transformative moment in history.

By Stephanie Eslake, 2024

First performance:
Although the performance on October 1, 1961, by the Leningrad Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by Yevgeny Mravinsky was billed as the official premiere, the actual first performance took place two hours earlier that same day in Kuybyshev by the Kuybyshev State Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by Abram Stasevich.

First WASO performance:
These are the first performances by WASO.

Instrumentation:
three each of flutes (3rd doubling piccolo), oboes, clarinets and bassoons (3rd doubling contrabassoon); four horns, three trumpets, three trombones and tuba; timpani, five percussionists and strings.

Rebecca Glorie
Violin

How and where did your musical journey begin?
I come from a musical family with my mum being a piano teacher and my two sisters also playing violin. I started on piano with mum when I was about 6 and then violin at age 8. I originally chose violin to annoy my older sister and then I just loved it more and more! (Now I get to work with my little sister and annoy her every day).

How long have you been performing with WASO and what have been your highlights?
I started with WASO as a casual musician when I was 17 and have now been full time for nearly 20 years! I have had some pretty amazing experiences during my time which I feel very grateful for. There have been so many highlights it is hard to narrow it down. I think playing with Birds of Tokyo will always been a highlight, along with Shostakovich Symphony No.11 conducted by Vasily Petrenko in 2022.

Do you have any special preparation on the day of a concert?
Over the years my concert preparation has definitely changed a bit. I used to be able to have a nice long nap and warm up slowly but now it’s not so luxurious! Now, I’m pretty stoked if I manage to go for a small walk to clear my head, warm up and the leave the house with the kids fed. Also, I’m pretty lucky I can drive in and work with my sister so there are always plenty of laughs to be had before we perform which helps calm the nerves.

What is your secret non-music related talent?
I love doing jigsaw puzzles and can smash out a 1000 piece one in a few days. I’m a whizz at word search and can get one done at the coffee shop before the drinks even arrive. I’m also a mum of twins so multitasking is maybe another talent!

You’ve performed in cities all over the world. What was one of your most memorable moments.
I have been very lucky to be able to perform all over the world with various ensembles. Some highlights would have to be the WASO Abu Dhabi and China tour- especially being part of the education side. Also touring the west coast of America and Canada when I lived over there. It was so interesting to play in so many different places. One night we would be in Vegas performing and then the next in Palm Springs!

I do hold some very special memories for playing in remote WA though. I have had so many different experiences from playing in schools, aged care and also down a gorge and camping in Karajini.