Mozart & Mendelssohn

Jen Winley
Conductor

Jen Winley is WASO’s Associate Conductor.

Australian conductor Jen Winley was appointed West Australian Symphony Orchestra (WASO)’s inaugural Associate Conductor in 2024, after holding the Assistant Conductor position since 2022. An accomplished percussionist and timpanist, Jen has previously performed regularly with WASO, as well as with the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra (MSO) and Orchestra Victoria. She returned to MSO in 2024 for her first conducting appearance with the orchestra.

Jen made her professional conducting debut in 2020 while participating in WASO’s Emerging Conductors program. She went on to lead the Orchestra in a wide variety of performances, including mainstage concerts, Family, Education and Community Engagement projects, regional tours, films in concert, and contemporary and recording projects. Highlights from her cross-genre projects include conducting WASO in Home Alone in Concert and the world premiere performances of Drapht and WASO: How the West Was Won; a collaboration with Perth hip-hop artist Drapht, that culminated in the Orchestra’s first music videos.

Jen recently became a member of an exclusive group of conductors around the world who are approved to conduct Disney in Concert events, going on to conduct WASO in Star Wars: The Force Awakens, Frozen, and Toy Story in Concert. She made a further company debut with West Australian Opera (WAO) as Music Director for Sondheim’s Into the Woods (2023).

Jen is highly focused on innovative programming development for educational and family concerts, and has frequently collaborated with acclaimed UK animateur Paul Rissman, most recently conducting the Queensland Symphony Orchestra in Sounds Like an Orchestra. She has played a key role in in developing several shows in this genre for WASO. Jen spent several years as a classroom educator and continues to enjoy working with young people. She currently oversees the WASO Conducting Fellowship Program, has conducted the Western Australian Youth Orchestra since 2019, and makes her debut with the Melbourne Youth Orchestra in 2025.

She will conduct Symphony on the Waterfront in 2025 in her first appearance with the Tasmanian Symphony Orchestra and returns to WAO as Assistant Conductor for their season of Verdi’s Il trovatore.

Jen Winley is supported by the Simon Lee Foundation and the JACE Foundation.

Som Howie
Clarinet

Som Howie is WASO’s Associate Principal Clarinet.

Som joined WASO in 2024. Before joining WASO, Som held the position of solo Clarinettist with the Danish Chamber Players. Originally from Sydney, Som began playing clarinet at the age of 11 with Mark Walton until he started his Bachelor’s Degree at the Sydney Conservatorium of Music. During his time in Sydney, Som studied with Cathy McCorkill and Sue Newsome, and completed his final years with Frank Celata. After moving to Europe in 2014, Som completed a Master’s Degree with Hermann Stefánsson and Andreas Sundén at the Royal College of Music in Stockholm.

As an orchestral musician, Som has performed with major orchestras around the world including: Copenhagen Philharmonic, The Swedish Radio Symphony, Royal Stockholm Philharmonic, Swedish Chamber Orchestra, Royal Swedish Opera, Royal Liverpool Philharmonic, Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, Malaysian Philharmonic, Sydney Symphony, Australian Opera and Ballet, and the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra. Som has toured to Edinburgh with the Swedish Radio Symphony Orchestra and to India with the Australian World Orchestra.

In 2016, Som was selected for the Royal Stockholm Philharmonic Orchestra Academy. Previous to this, Som has held academy positions with the Sydney Symphony Orchestra, and London Philharmonic Orchestra’s Future Firsts Scheme. Som has attended masterclasses with Sabine Meyer, Andrew Marriner, Martin Fröst, and Yehuda Gilad.

As a soloist, Som has performed concertos with the Adelaide Symphony Orchestra, West Australian Symphony Orchestra, Willoughby Symphony Orchestra, and the Southbank Sinfonia in the UK. In 2016, he recorded English composer Geoffrey Hanson’s Clarinet Concerto with the London Mozart Players.

In 2015, Som was a prize winner in the Royal Overseas League (ROSL) Annual Competition, and, as a result, toured with his trio (the Dolmen Ensemble) on behalf of ROSL to Malta, Scotland, and New Zealand. In the same year, Som recorded his first solo album with his father, David Howie. The album is titled Premiere Rhapsody and was produced by UK-based record label, Cala Records. Som is a Buffet Crampon Artist and a scholar of the Australian Elizabethan Theatre Trust.

In his spare time, Som loves spending time at the beach, playing cricket and soccer, and looking for all the best coffee spots.

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
(1756-1791)

Clarinet Concerto in A, K622
Allegro
Adagio
Rondo (Allegro)

The clarinet was an exotic instrument in Mozart’s day. Writing to his father from the German city of Mannheim, 22-yearold Mozart exclaimed: ‘If only we had clarinets! You cannot imagine the glorious effect of a symphony with flutes, oboes and clarinets.’ The famed Mannheim orchestra had no less than two clarinets; the Salzburg orchestra – in which Mozart father and son played – had none. Years later, when Mozart was making a career for himself in Vienna, he became acquainted with the Stadler brothers, Anton and Johann, skilled clarinettists who performed in various ensembles in the imperial capital. It was for Anton, the elder of the two, that Mozart composed the Clarinet Concerto, in September- October 1791.

Among the features of the clarinet that must have appealed to Mozart are the strongly differentiated colours of the instrument’s various registers. The clarinet’s tonal variety is astonishing. The low register is dark and resonant, the middle is warm and melodious, and the top is clear and bright. No other woodwind instrument has such a broad range of sounds from top to bottom.

Curiously, no other woodwind instrument has such a powerful ‘break’ in the middle of its range. Like the break in the singing voice, the clarinet break is something that players have to work hard at controlling. Playing above or below the break poses no special challenges but travelling across it can be hazardous.

And this is probably another reason why Mozart so loved the clarinet: its strong affinity with the human voice. The clarinet has a chest voice, a head voice and a break in-between. It is powered by air passing from the lungs through the lips. It sings not with words but with pure open sounds. And the smooth carriage from one sound to another – as smooth as a singer gliding from one note to the next – is one of the instrument’s specialties. ‘Never should I have thought that a clarinet could be capable of imitating a human voice so deceptively as it was imitated by you,’ wrote a critic of Anton Stadler’s playing.

Judging from the opening movement of the Clarinet Concerto, Allegro, Mozart relished putting Stadler through his paces, while simultaneously exhibiting the instrument’s kaleidoscopic range. Of particular note is Mozart’s tendency to commence a phrase in one register (either high or low) and abruptly jump to another for its continuation. There’s something marvellous about the apparent ease with which the clarinet is able to carry this out.

The second movement, Adagio, is a soulful aria for clarinet and orchestra. What is remarkable is the way in which Mozart creates such beautiful, song-like melodies from such plain and simple means: the rising notes of a chord and the falling notes of a scale. Here, the building blocks of music open a portal to the sublime. By contrast, the jaunty finale exhibits the clarinet’s playful side. As before, the music leaps between registers. Mozart also has the soloist perform dazzling acrobatics, proving just how agile this novel instrument is.

Robert Gibson © 2019

First performance: 16 October 1791, Prague National Theatre. Anton Stadler, soloist.
First WASO performance: 20 September 1962. John Farnsworth Hall, conductor; Allan Rule, soloist.
Most recent WASO performance: 3-4 May 2019. Mark Wigglesworth, conductor; Andreas Ottensamer, soloist.
Instrumentation: solo clarinet, two flutes, two bassoons, two horns, strings.

Felix Mendelssohn
(1809-1847)

Symphony No.4 in A, Op.90 Italian
Allegro vivace
Andante con moto
Con moto moderato
Saltarello (Presto)

For once a subtitle seems apt: Mendelssohn’s Italian Symphony expresses a northern European’s love of the sun-drenched south. ‘Blue sky in A major’, it has been called. The ideas for it came to Mendelssohn as he spent the winter of 1830-31 in Italy and he wrote to his parents about the symphony, that Naples ‘must play a part in it’. Indeed, it did, in the leaping dance of the Saltarello finale. Mendelssohn was in his early twenties, and in this symphony ‘there stands the eager youth who looks out with bright eyes upon the world, and, behold, all is very good’ (Ernest Walker).

Fresh and youthful, this symphony is at the same time one of Mendelssohn’s supreme achievements. He himself considered it ‘the most mature thing I have ever done’. For some reason, he was dissatisfied with it, and always intended to revise it. He never got around to doing so, and it was published only after his death. Mendelssohn had submitted the work in response to a request from the London Philharmonic Society for ‘a symphony, an overture, and a vocal piece’ (along with the concert aria Infelice, the overture The Hebrides and perhaps the Trumpet Overture). The Italian Symphony was performed in a concert of the Society in London, in which Mendelssohn also played Mozart’s D minor Piano Concerto K466, on 13 May 1833.

Mendelssohn’s anxiety about his symphonies had a lot to do with his sense of responsibility imposed by what Beethoven had done. An energetic symphony in A major was bound to put listeners in mind of Beethoven’s Seventh, and the processional character of Mendelssohn’s second movement inevitably recalls the same movement in Beethoven’s symphony. Perhaps Mendelssohn was also bothered by the challenge which faces interpreters of his Italian Symphony: how to avoid making three of the four movements sound like a moto perpetuo. Posterity considers that Mendelssohn should have remained satisfied with a masterpiece in which, far from being a pale reflection of Beethoven, he was entirely himself in the lightness of touch, the polished elegance of scoring, and the sureness of form which mark every movement of the Italian Symphony. Mendelssohn sometimes spoke convincingly of weightier things, but it is no accident that along with the Violin Concerto, the Midsummer Night’s Dream music, several overtures and the Octet for Strings, the Italian Symphony is among those works of his which have never gone out of fashion.

The opening of the symphony, like much of what follows, is notable for its brilliant and imaginative scoring. Here the bounding theme for the violins is presented to the accompaniment of repeated chords for the woodwinds, which at least doubles its effect of almost breathless energy. The second subject is a rocking figure for clarinets and bassoons which, as musicologist Donald Tovey says, is obviously in no hurry. The development soon presents a fugato on a wholly new theme, then the two main subjects are elaborately worked out and the recapitulation is approached through a long crescendo beginning under a long-held A for the first oboe – another memorably original idea.

The second movement may have been suggested by a religious procession Mendelssohn is known to have seen in Naples (though Moscheles claimed that it was based on a Czech pilgrims’ song). It begins with plainchant-like intonation, then the ‘marching’ starts in the cellos and basses, over which the cantus firmus is sounded by oboes, bassoons and violas.

Although not called a minuet and trio, this is in effect what the third movement is. There is little suggestion of the dance in this graceful music, which is more like a song without words, and the trio, with its solemn horns and bassoons, sounds a deeply Romantic, poetic note. Pedants point out that one of the rhythms of the movement Mendelssohn calls Saltarello is that of the even more furious Tarantella. The energy here is even more irresistible than in the first movement.

Mendelssohn said this symphony was composed at one of the bitterest moments of his life, when he was most troubled by his hypercritical attitude towards his own music. It is good to be reminded of this artistic struggle by a ‘driven’ personality, because his art so transcends the struggle that we can hardly guess that it ever existed.

Abridged from a note by David Garrett © 2003

First performance: 13 May 1833, London. Composer conducting.
First WASO performance: 14 June 1938. E.J. Roberts, conductor.
Most recent WASO performance: 21-22 June 2019. Asher Fisch, conductor.
Instrumentation: two each of flutes, oboes, clarinets and bassoons; two horns, two trumpets; timpani and strings.

Ashley William Smith

Your Wesfarmers Arts Digital Pre-concert Talk for Mozart & Mendelssohn is delivered by Ashley William Smith.

Described as ‘Incandescent... a masterly display of skill and insight... as an apologist for contemporary music-making, you would search hard to find this young clarinettist's equal’ (The Age), clarinettist Ashley William Smith has performed as a soloist, recitalist, and chamber musician throughout Australia, USA Europe and Asia. He is a laureate of several the industry’s most prestigious prizes including the APRA Performance of the Year, the Music Council of Australia Freedman Fellowship, an ABC Symphony International Young Performer Award, and a Churchill Fellowship. He is recognised by the world's leading clarinet manufacturer as a Buffet-Crampon Artist. Ashley is an Associate Professor at the University of Western Australia where he is the Chair of Woodwinds and Convenor of Performance Studies.

As a soloist and director he has performed alongside several international and Australian orchestras. Most notably, his performance of Lachlan Skipworth’s Clarinet Concerto with the West Australian Symphony Orchestra was awarded the APRA 2015 Performance of the Year. Ashley is the Co-Artistic Director of the Southern Cross Soloists and performs at internationally leading chamber music festivals with ensembles including the Calder, Dover, and Australian string quartets.

A graduate of Yale University, the University of Western Australia, and a Fellow of the Australian National Academy of Music, Ashley was awarded the highest honours as the most outstanding performance graduate of each institution.