Liszt’s Piano Concerto

MASTERS SERIES

Friday 6 & Saturday 7 September 2024, 7.30pm

Perth Concert Hall

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West Australian Symphony Orchestra respectfully acknowledges the Traditional Custodians and Elders of Country throughout Western Australia, and the Whadjuk Noongar people on whose lands we work and share music.

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Liszt’s Piano Concerto

Franz LISZT Les Préludes (16 mins)

Franz LISZT Piano Concerto No.1 (21 mins)

Allegro maestoso –
Quasi adagio –
Allegro vivace – Allegro animato –
Allegro marziale animato

Interval (25 mins)

Edward ELGAR Symphony No.2 (54 mins)

Allegro vivace e nobilmente
Larghetto
Rondo (Presto)
Moderato e maestoso

Asher Fisch conductor
Lukáš Vondráček piano

Asher Fisch appears courtesy of Wesfarmers Arts. Lukáš Vondráček’s performance is supported by the McCusker Charitable Foundation.

Wesfarmers Arts Pre-concert Talk
Find out more about the music in the concert with this week’s speaker, Cecilia Sun. The Pre-concert Talk will take place at 6.45pm at the Terrace Level Corner Stage.

Listen to WASO
This performance is recorded for broadcast Thursday 10 October, 1pm (AWST) on ABC Classic. Date subject to change. For further details visit abc.net.au/classic

Did you know?

Many believe Liszt invented the symphonic poem as he was among the first composers to adapt a non-musical piece of art into a musical work.

Liszt worked on the Concerto for over 20 years before it premiered in 1855.

Liszt was a child prodigy at the age of 9 but retired from his performance career at age 35. He got rich by performing but donated much of his earnings to charity.

The Symphony was written as a tribute to King Edward VII, who passed before its debut, and was later dedicated to his memory.

In his early career, composing wasn't the most lucrative path, so Elgar spent time working at a solicitors office to make ends meet.

Elgar was knighted by King Edward VII in 1904.

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About the Artists

About the Artists

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About the Music

About the Music

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Franz LISZT
(1811-1886)

Piano Concerto No.1 in E flat

Allegro maestoso –
Quasi adagio –
Allegro vivace – Allegro animato –Allegro marziale animato

Liszt was a larger-than-life character, both biographically and musically. A gifted child prodigy, he was publicly kissed on the brow by Beethoven, and later gained a formidable reputation as a womaniser, toured extensively as the greatest pianist of his era, lived with a princess and even took a form of Holy Orders. Yet behind this colourful and romantic image lay an immensely gifted musician, deeply committed to the future of music and the creative endeavours of his contemporaries.

Liszt’s two piano concertos rank among his most important works and, while quite different in character, have a similar history. Early sketches for both works date from 1838-1840, but Liszt’s constant touring prevented the completion of the first until 1849, the year after his appointment as court conductor in Weimar. But even then, there was a delay and the Piano Concerto No.1 was not to be premiered in Weimar until 17 February 1855, with Liszt himself as soloist and Berlioz conducting.

Dedicated to Henri Litolff, the concerto is a work of extraordinary unity in four movements played without a break. The main theme dominates both the first and the last movements and all other important themes recur several times during the course of the work. Variations of these themes occur through metamorphosis and transformation rather than through formal development.

The forceful principal theme is stated immediately in the strings over wind chords. It is said that Liszt sang the words ‘Das versteht ihr alle nicht’ (‘None of you understands this’) to this melody. After four bars the piano enters and we hear a cadenza and some elaboration of the opening theme. The movement ends with intricate arpeggios and runs in the piano while the orchestra restates the main theme. A subject on muted cellos and double basses amplified by the solo piano heralds the beginning of the Adagio. The dreamlike melody for the piano gives way to a magical moment where the flute and then clarinet enter while the pianist’s trills die away to nothing.

In the scherzo there is an unusually prominent part for that most humble of orchestral instruments – the triangle! It is employed at the beginning as a sparkling companion to the descending cascades of the piano. Eduard Hanslick bitterly attacked the prominence given to the triangle in this movement, but Liszt retorted that it offered ‘the effect of contrast’. Such extraordinary aesthetic debates hindered the general acceptance of the concerto early in its life (it was not performed again until 1869), although they could not distract popular attention from it forever. A third important theme is introduced in this scherzo and the end of the movement is signalled by a cadenza in which the opening theme of the movement is again suggested.

A development section then leads to the final movement in which we find all the themes of the concerto transformed and unified: first the delicate Adagio melody is treated in a march-like fashion, then the theme of the scherzo ushers in a brilliant stretto (overlapping entries in close succession), and finally the main theme returns in triumph.

The strength – and the paradox – of this concerto lie in its tight structure that nevertheless appears to be almost ‘improvisatory’. As the legendary pianist Alfred Cortot remarked, ‘The listener…must not be given the impression that he is subjected to a kind of nonsensical chitchat. The steadiness of the work’s foundations must be felt.’

Martin Buzacott

Symphony Australia © 1998
[Rev. kk mar 99]

First Performance:
17 February 1855. Hector Berlioz, conductor. Franz Liszt, piano.

First WASO Performance:
3 July 1943. Lionel Lawson, conductor. Nora Coalstad, piano.

Most Recent WASO Performance:
17-18 October 2014. Andrew Grams, conductor. Piers Lane, piano.

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

Glossary

Cadenza – a showy passage by a solo instrument, usually towards the end of a concerto movement. Originally, cadenzas were improvised by the soloist to show off their brilliant technique.
Arpeggio – the notes of a chord played one after the other instead of at the same time.
Scherzo – literally, a joke; the term generally refers to a movement in a fast, light triple time which may involve whimsical, startling or playful elements.

About the Music

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Edward ELGAR
(1857-1934)

Symphony No.2 in E flat, Op.63

Allegro vivace e nobilmente
Larghetto
Rondo (Presto)
Moderato e maestoso

In Britain by the 1920s, the opulence that forms so crucial a component of Elgar’s musical language had already become a victim of musical fashion. From the distance created by the First World War and the subsequent toppling of empires, Elgar’s music was seen as symbolic of post-Victorian complacency. The symphonies came in for particularly harsh criticism for their ‘triviality and tawdriness’ (in Cecil Gray’s words) and perceived structural weaknesses.

The reputation of Elgar’s First Symphony had quite some journey to make to the dark side. It is – and was – recognised as the first great English symphony, and its popularity surged quickly after its premiere in 1908. Elgar hoped the Second Symphony would be equally successful, writing, ‘I have worked at fever heat and the thing is tremendous in energy.’

That this symphony failed to make the impact of its predecessor is due to the more emotionally complex world it inhabits and the circumstances of its first performances. Elgar conducted the premiere during the glittering London ‘season’ of 1911, to an audience mindful of the symphony’s dedication to the
late Edward VII. No doubt many were expecting a grand symphony of loyal tribute, perhaps even a paean to Imperial splendour. What they heard was epic in scope and wild in its emotional extremes, doubting its own exuberance, exploding its own vivid tales of conquest, battling to regain ground lost in a tumult of its own devising. That in itself probably flummoxed the symphony’s first hearers considerably. The work did not really begin to have any success until after World War I, but by then it sounded to the younger British critics like music from another planet.

The passionate expressiveness of Elgar’s music inevitably suggests a play of personal meanings at work. To his friend Alice Stuart-Wortley he referred to this work, the Violin Concerto and the Ode The Music Makers as works in which ‘I have written out my soul … in these works I have shewn myself.’ Furthermore, we have the enigmatic extract from Shelley’s Invocation, which Elgar wrote at the end of the score:

Rarely, rarely, comest thou,

Spirit of Delight!

The beginning of the first movement at once proclaims the ‘tremendous energy’ Elgar described. The very first theme contains a two-bar melodic cell, sometimes called the ‘Spirit of Delight’, that acts as a presence throughout the work. Elgar described the beautiful and sinister episode that haunts the centre of the movement as ‘a sort of malign influence wandering thro’ the summer night in the garden’. In a completely different guise, this theme returns in the third movement to devastating effect.

The grief of the second movement is immense and, until the last bars, inconsolable. The final climax is almost feverishly sad, the benediction-like appearance of the ‘Spirit of Delight’ theme offering some consolation before the movement shudders to a close.

The scherzo opens with apparent jollity, but the darkening harmonies and darting cross-rhythms produce a feeling of impending danger. After a more lyrical section, a pulsating version of the ‘unearthly’ theme from the first movement is given out by the violins with insistent timpani commentary. Suddenly the music takes on an aspect of thundering terror. The passage disappears with the swiftness of waking from a nightmare; the movement then hastens to a brilliant coda.

The finale begins as if it is going to be the most conventional movement of the four, resolving the tremendous conflicts depicted in the earlier movements. There is a Brahmsian inflection to the stately first theme and to the grander second one; we then hear a new, gentle theme for the strings, which carries Elgar’s characteristic direction, nobilmente [nobly]. In the following section we are plunged into the thick of battle, a piercing trumpet cry leading the charge. The mood is restless, and although the martial atmosphere gradually recedes to make way for a return of the main theme, the recapitulation makes us realise that the likelihood of a Brahms-like darkness-to-light symphonic outcome is remote. Just as Elgar seems to prepare us for a victorious peroration, the music quietens, we hear the finale’s main theme again on the cellos, the ‘Spirit of Delight’ appears once more and all is radiantly still. At the close there is hope, perhaps consolation, but not triumph.

Abridged from a note © Phillip Sametz

First Performance:
24 May 1911, London, composer conducting.

First WASO Performance:
29-30 August 1975. David Measham, conductor.

Most Recent WASO Performance:
9-10 June 2017. Johannes Debus, conductor.

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

Glossary

Scherzo – literally, a joke; a movement in a fast triple time which may involve playful elements and which, as the second or third movement in a symphony, replaced the minuet and trio. Recapitulation – a return to the opening material of a piece or a movement.
Recapitulation – a return to the opening material of a piece or a movement.

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Meet the Musician

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Mary-Anne Blades
Associate Principal Flute

Can you remember your first WASO concert?
I started playing with WASO in April 1998 in the WA Opera season of Lucia di Lammermoor by Gaetano Donizetti. It was unforgettable because I had to play the mad scene which features the flute and Lucia after she murdered her bridegroom. Everyone knew I was the new flute player after that!

When did you realize that you wanted to become a professional musician?
I decided to really pursue my flute playing when I was about 18. I had played the flute from the age of 10 and loved it but hadn’t decided which direction to go in. Growing up in Adelaide, I was part of the South Australian Youth Orchestra which gave me a taste of orchestral music. I absolutely loved it so once I decided to study music I moved to Canberra where I was accepted into the Canberra School of Music. After that I studied at the Royal Academy of Music in London with the late and wonderful William Bennett OBE.

What qualities are most important in order to play the flute?
Apart from having a love of the instrument, you need resilience and determination. I really enjoy the challenge of playing well and I still find now that I want to improve not only my technique but expression.

If you had to choose any other instrument to play in the orchestra, what would it be?
It would be the double bass. I would love to play the bass line and wrap myself around the instrument plus it would be fun to play in a pack of double basses!

You’ve had a varied career, playing across the world in chamber groups, symphony orchestras and for musical theatre. What is your favourite style of music to play?
I don’t know that I have a favourite style of music. I’m interested in the fact that the musical scale we use can create so many different styles and there are so many creative composers who have given us this music. I really enjoy playing all types.

Tell us about one of your passions outside of music.
I’m trying to learn Romanian and am currently on a 504-day streak with the Duolingo app. One day, I would like to spend more time in the beautiful countryside of Romania.

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