Scheherazade - Morning
MORNING SYMPHONY SERIES
Thursday 23 May 2024, 11.00am
Perth Concert Hall
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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Scheherazade
Mel BONIS Trois femmes de légende –
Suite (18 mins)
I. Ophélie
II. Salomé
III. Le songe de Cléopâtre
Nikolai RIMSKY-KORSAKOV
Scheherazade (47 mins)
I. Largo e maestoso – Lento – Allegro non
troppo (The Sea and Sinbad’s Ship)
II. Lento (The Story of the Kalandar Prince)
III. Andantino quasi allegretto (The Young
Prince and the Young Princess)
IV. Allegro molto – Vivo – Allegro non
troppo e maestoso – Lento (Festival at
Baghdad – The Sea – The Ship Goes to
Pieces on a Rock Surmounted by a Bronze Warrior – Conclusion)
Jen Winley conductor
Wesfarmers Arts Pre-concert Talk
Find out more about the music in the concert with this week’s speaker, Alan Tyrrell. The Pre-concert Talk will take place at 9.40am in theMain Auditorium.
Listen to WASO
This concert will be broadcast live on ABC Classic. For further details visit
abc.net.au/classic
WASO On Stage
About the Artists
Jen Winley
Conductor
Jen Winley is WASO’s Associate Conductor. Jen began her career in percussion and timpani working principally with the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra and regularly with Orchestra Victoria and the West Australian Symphony Orchestra (WASO). She then spent several years as a classroom music educator and loves being able to combine her passions for music and education when working with young people.
Jen made her professional conducting debut in 2020 with several orchestras in Perth including WASO and Perth Symphony Orchestra. Jen is a highly versatile conductor and enjoys working on a wide variety of projects. She has conducted WASO in mainstage concerts, Family, Education and Outreach projects, regional tours, Films in concert, and contemporary and recording projects. Jen is also proud to have conducted the WA Youth Orchestra since 2019.
In 2023, Jen made her debut as conductor with West Australian Opera and Queensland Symphony Orchestra and in November 2023 WASO announced Jen as their Associate Conductor. The two-year appointment sees Jen become the first Associate Conductor in the organisation’s history. 2024 sees Jen make her debut with the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra and her subscription concert debut with WASO.
Jen Winley is supported by the Simon Lee Foundation.
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About the Music
Mel Bonis
(1858-1937)
Trois Femmes de légende (Three Legendary Women)
I. Ophélie
II. Salomé
III. Le Songe de Cléopâtre (Cleopatra’s Dream)
Identities
It’s 1881. A prize-winning 23-year-old student at the Paris Conservatoire composes a nocturne for piano and labels it Opus 1, ‘my first piece’. The signature reads ‘Mel Bonis’.
Elsewhere in Europe, Richard Strauss is completing his own early opuses; Oscar Wilde publishes his first book of poems; Vincent van Gogh begins painting in earnest. In Paris, a Conservatoire classmate, Claude Debussy, is trying his hand at opera. Perhaps more significant, because ‘Mel Bonis’ is a woman, the French feminist newspaper La Citoyenne (The Citizeness) is launched. Over the course of a decade, the paper will advocate for women’s enfranchisement: demanding changes to the Napoleonic Code that had abolished the financial and legal rights gained during the Revolution and relegated women to an inferior status by upholding the supremacy of husbands and fathers.
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.
This is the world in which the young Mélanie Hélène Bonis resorts to a gender-neutral nom de plume. A world in which her very presence at the Conservatoire is remarkable, and must be attended by chaperones. A world in which her parents can halt her studies (she’d fallen in love with a singer-poet) and in 1883 marry her off to a twice-widowed industrialist 22 years her senior.
And so, barely two years after the ‘birth’ of Mel Bonis, a new identity was established: Madame Albert Domange. Her husband was likeable but didn’t share his new wife’s musical ear. For the next decade, the composer who’d been described as ‘strongest in her class’ raised children and managed an affluent household but wrote almost no music.
Mel Bonis emerged again in the 1890s, when she reconnected with her true love, Amédée- Louis Hettich. Eventually, an affair led to the secret birth in 1899 of a child, Madeleine. (Madeleine would learn the truth about her ‘godmother’ only after a budding romance with her half-brother forced a revelation.) But meanwhile, Hettich encouraged Bonis to compose, collaborating with her on songs and introducing her to the publisher Leduc. In a musical blossoming that extended to World War I, Bonis composed prolifically in most genres except opera, appeared in concert as a pianist, was published, won prizes and received admiring reviews. And at a time when women numbered only seven per cent of the membership, she was enlisted in the Société des Compositeurs de Musqiue, becoming the first woman to serve on the committee. Of particular significance for this concert, in 1908–09 she resumed her technical studies, taking orchestration lessons from Charles Koechlin.
Legends
‘Femmes de légende’ might be a 21st-century label – assigned by her great-granddaughter, Christine Géliot, when she collected these pieces for publication – but it reflects an abiding theme in Bonis’s music. In eight cameo works for piano as well as orchestra, she gave musical life to remarkable women of myth, literature and history – their passions, their strengths and their tragedies.
Géliot suggests that Bonis’s choice of subject matter testified to her thoughts and feelings about the nature of femininity. At the same time, these subjects reflect contemporary fashion. Shakespeare’s Ophelia was a popular subject in visual art (for example, the 1852 painting by Pre-Raphaelite John Everett Millais). Oscar Wilde’s Salomé premiered at the Comédie-Parisienne in 1896 and Richard Strauss’s opera based on it received its Paris premiere in 1907. And Cleopatra’s fatal dream of Antony had been an established trope in French tragedy for centuries.
Musically, Bonis was equally in tune with times. Her language embraced the Romanticism of César Franck and Gabriel Fauré and her command of form was widely admired, but on this conservative foundation she built an inventive style that reveals an ear for jewel-like colours and expressive use of harmony. She also adopted technical devices that can be heard in composers such as Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov and Igor Stravinsky as well as Debussy, including octatonic scales and modes. These otherworldly or ‘exotic’ aspects of her style were in turn rooted in the singular fascination with the East that had emerged with the expansion of the Second French colonial empire (think Camille Saint-Saëns’ Egyptian piano concerto).
The slow and mysterious Ophélie is an Impressionistic miniature portrait, in which cascading harps and shimmering strings over repeated horn notes introduce the themes of water, despair and death. Salomé is just as compact: in the space of five minutes, Bonis evokes the perilous seduction of the dance of the seven veils and – with one abrupt chord at the end – its violent aftermath. Listen for the compelling five-beat pulse (a dance, yes, but not a dance for a European ballroom) and the stark contrasts of tempo, mood and colour.
Le Songe de Cléopatre is the longest and most complex of the three pieces. According to legend, the Queen of Egypt saw Mark Antony’s ghost in a dream, commanding her to kill herself. In Bonis’s music we hear both the floating tranquillity of a dreamscape and the horror of impending doom. Again, the music is dominated by harp sonorities, and seductive and sumptuous effects are created through harmony and a kaleidoscope of instrumental colours.
There’s a curious disconnect between ‘Madame Domange’ – conservative, dutiful and profoundly religious – and ‘Mel Bonis’ – composer of the forward-looking and extraordinarily sensuous orchestral works. But both must have shared what she called her ‘greatest sorrow’: never to hear these remarkable works in public performance. A century on, the world is making up for the neglect.
Yvonne Frindle © 2024
Premiere history:
Although the orchestral versions of Salomé and Le Songe de Cléopâtre were probably played through in a rehearsal in the composer’s lifetime, there were no public performances of these works until the 21st century, when Christine Géliot, Mel Bonis’s great-granddaughter, collected and edited them for publication. They were recorded by the Bucharest Symphony Orchestra and Benoît Fromanger in 2012 and received their concert premiere in 2015, Jessica Cottis conducting the BBC National Orchestra of Wales.
First WASO performance:
This is the first performance by WASO.
Instrumentation:
three flutes (one doubling piccolo), two oboes (one doubling cor anglais), two clarinets (one doubling bass clarinet), two bassoons, four horns, two trumpets, three trombones, timpani and percussion, two harps and strings.
Glossary
octatonic scale – an eight-note ‘artificial’ scale, often featuring a symmetrical pattern of notes in which whole and half steps alternate.
modes – a system of scales founded on mediæval plainchant and predating the major and minor key system. Composers in the Western tradition often use modes to evoke an ancient or religious mood, or (since modes are also common in many non-Western cultures) to create an ‘exotic’ sound world.
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About the Music
Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov
(1844-1908)
Scheherazade – Symphonic Suite, Op.35
I. Largo e maestoso – Lento – Allegro non troppo (The Sea and Sinbad’s Ship)
II. Lento (The Story of the Kalandar Prince)
III. Andantino quasi allegretto (The Young Prince and the Young Princess)
IV. Allegro molto – Vivo – Allegro non troppo e maestoso – Lento (Festival at Baghdad – The Sea – The Ship Goes to Pieces on a Rock Surmounted by a Bronze Warrior – Conclusion)
The Sultan Shahryar, convinced of the duplicity and infidelity of all women, had vowed to slay each of his wives after the first night. The Sultana Scheherazade, however, saved her life by the expedient of recounting to the Sultan a succession of tales over a period of a thousand and one nights. Overcome by curiosity, the Sultan postponed from day to day the execution of his wife, and ended by renouncing altogether his sanguinary resolution.
We think we know the story of Scheherazade, Persian queen and fabled storyteller of The Thousand and One Nights. Some of her stories (and a few that were invented for her by Europeans) have become part of popular culture: Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves, Aladdin (an 18thcentury French addition), and one you’ll recognise from the movement titles for Rimsky-Korsakov’s Scheherazade: Sinbad the Sailor.
Strictly speaking, orchestras shouldn’t publish those titles; the composer withdrew them with so as not to constrain his listeners’ imaginations. Rimsky-Korsakov had taken the idea of Scheherazade and the Arabian Nights as his starting point, and the narrative titles he’d devised in the winter of 1887–88 were intended to suggest particular characters – the story of a kalandar or “beggar” prince, for example. But the end result, he said, was a “kaleidoscope of fairytale images and designs of Eastern character”, more concerned with the connotations of the East it brings to mind than with literal storytelling.
He believed it was futile to seek in Scheherazade leading motifs that could be consistently linked to particular characters or events. The motifs we recognise were “nothing but purely musical material … for symphonic development” and a means of creating unity between the four movements, and on each appearance they are presented in different musical guises so that the “themes correspond each time to different images, actions and pictures”.
“All I had desired,” he later wrote in My Musical Life, “was that the hearer, if he liked my piece as symphonic music, should carry away the impression that it is beyond doubt an Eastern narrative describing a motley succession of fantastic happenings,” and not merely four pieces based on common themes.
The ominous pounding melody representing the stern Sultan in the opening, for example, appears in the tale of the Kalandar Prince, although Shahryar plays no part in that narrative. And the muted fanfare of the second movement returns in the otherwise unconnected depiction of the foundering ship. Rimsky-Korsakov also cites the appearance of both the Kalandar Prince’s theme and the theme of the Young Princess in the Baghdad festival although “nothing is said about these persons taking part in the festivities”.
But Rimsky-Korsakov did admit that one of his motifs was quite specific, attached not to any of the stories, but to the storyteller who provides the frame story of The Arabian Nights: “The unifying thread consisted of the brief introductions to the first, second and fourth movements and the intermezzo in movement three, written for violin solo and delineating Scheherazade herself as telling her wondrous tales to the stern Sultan.”
It is this idea – an intricately winding violin theme supported only by the harp – which soothes the thunderous opening and embarks upon the first tale: the sea and Sinbad’s ship. For Rimsky-Korsakov, who was synæsthesic, the choice of E major for the billowing cello figures was surely no accident: his ears “saw” this key as dark blue. But you don’t have to be synæsthesic to experience the marvellous colours of Rimsky-Korsakov’s orchestral writing. So formidable is his instinct that Rimsky- Korsakov can convince his listeners of the raging of a storm at sea, the exuberance of a festival and the exotic colours of the East.
A cajoling melody played by solo bassoon represents a Kalandar (or ‘beggar’) Prince in the second movement. (Rimsky-Korsakov, perhaps deliberately, neglects to tell us which of the beggar princes in The Arabian Nights he had in mind.) The dramatic middle section features muted fanfares, based on the Sultan’s theme. The third movement opens with a sinuous violin melody – it’s easy to imagine Scheherazade telling this story in her own voice. The similarity between the two main themes of the third movement (for violin and then flute and clarinet) suggests that the Young Prince and Princess are perfectly matched in temperament and character.
An agitated transformation of the Sultan’s theme, in dialogue with Scheherazade’s theme, prefaces the final tale. The fourth movement combines the Festival in Baghdad and the tale of the shipwreck in music that’s both splendid and terrifying. Triangle and tambourines accompany the lively cross-rhythms of the carnival; and the mood builds in intensity before all is swamped by the return of the sea theme from the first movement. But after the fury of the shipwreck, it is Scheherazade who has the last word. Her spinning violin solo emerges in gentle triumph over the Sultan’s bloodthirsty resolution.
Yvonne Frindle © 2024
First performance: 3 November 1888, St Petersburg; composer conducting
First WASO performance: 21 & 23 May 1949, Henry Krips conducting.
Most recent WASO performance: 8-9 April 2021, Benjamin Northey conducting.
Instrumentation: two flutes, piccolo, two oboes (one doubling cor anglais), two clarinets and two bassoons; four horns, two trumpets, three trombones and tuba; timpani and a large percussion section; harp and strings.
Glossary
intermezzo – in this context an intermezzo refers to a brief interlude or contrasting section in the middle of a larger movement.
synæsthesic – synæsthesia a condition in which one sense is melded with or experienced through another, e.g. different chords in music may be “seen” as colours.
cross-rhythms – occur when rhythms are ‘shifted’ so their strong beats fall at unexpected points in the basic pulse of the music. For example, a basic pulse of 3 beats + 3 beats might be overlayed with a rhythm made up of 2+2+2. The effect is usually complex but compelling.
About WASO
Engage | Excite | Experience | Educate
From the centre of Perth to the furthest corners of the state, we have provided the soundtrack to life in WA since 1928.
As the State Orchestra, Perth’s first and finest, WASO is the largest employer of performing artists in Western Australia and reaches two million people with musical experiences each year on stage, in our community, and online.
From concert halls to classrooms, hospitals to aged care, we bring joy, inspire learning, and nurture participation in our community, because everybody deserves the opportunity to experience live music. Every year, through community and leading industry partnerships, we engage a new generation of young and emerging artists to help secure a bright future for music in Australia.
We celebrate our rich classical music heritage with great artists from all over the world and commission and perform new repertoire to renew and expand it.
The Orchestra collaborates widely with major arts companies and independent artists, performing opera to ballet, movies to musicals, jazz to rock. We champion the diversity of music in all its forms, with a team of talented and passionate people who create unforgettable experiences for all West Australians to enjoy.
Asher Fisch is Principal Conductor and Artistic Adviser of our Orchestra and we are proud to call Perth Concert Hall home.
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Your Concert Experience
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Meet the Musician
Amy Furfaro
Violin
What inspired you to become a professional musician, and how did your journey lead you to join the West Australian Symphony Orchestra?
I have always loved making music with friends. I started violin lessons with my two best friends who learned from their grandmother. Our families used to go on holidays together and start the day with violin practice/trio, before getting down to the serious business of mucking about on bikes or the beach.
In late high school, my passion for ballet and violin came into direct conflict: I had to choose between playing with the Melbourne Youth Orchestra or dancing in Swan Lake with my ballet school, in their joint production. In the end, the choice was made for me - if I didn’t play, I couldn’t be in the orchestra. I loved it and I haven’t looked back since!
The incredible tutors and experiences on National Music Camps, Australian Youth Orchestra Programmes, the VCA and ANAM, as well as attending many MSO and ACO performances, all helped cement my determination to become an orchestral musician. There is nothing quite like the thrill of being in the middle of that massive symphonic sound.
The network of friends I made through all my studies meant that when I wanted to return to Australia after studying and working in the UK, and with the Malta Philharmonic Orchestra, Perth was a great place to land. From the first rehearsal I played with WASO (as a casual), it was a goal to get a permanent job with them!
Are there any particular pieces or performances you're excited to be a part of in 2024?
I’m excited to have the opportunity to play Mahler 8 for the first time later this year, as well as the selections from the Ring Cycle in June. This is a huge repertoire that doesn’t come around very frequently. Along the way, there are many highlights including working with soloists from within the orchestra, working with conductor Umberto Clerici again, and premiering another work by composer Holly Harrison – her piece Hi Vis that we played last year was so much fun to learn and play!
Outside of your professional career, what are your hobbies or interests?
For relaxation, I love reading detective fiction, as well as getting out and about on my bike and being part of a community garden. This year I’d like to explore more of Perth’s beautiful bike path network. I also like to get crafty, whether drawing or learning to sew.
If you could perform with any historical figure, musician, or even fictional character, who would it be and why?
This one is really tough – there are so many to choose from. Stephane Grappelli, David Oistrakh and Ginette Neveu are my violin idols so they’d have to be in the mix, but perhaps more to speak to than play alongside. Having said that, I think it would have been amazing to be part of the orchestra for the premiere of Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring. It was such challenging listening for audiences at the time that it ended in a riot!
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