Prelude to Peace

Vasily Petrenko
Conductor

Vasily Petrenko is Music Director of the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, a position he took on in 2021, becoming Conductor Laureate of the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra following his hugely acclaimed 15-year tenure as their Chief Conductor from 2006–2021. He is the Associate Conductor of the Orquesta Sinfónica de Castilla y León, and has also served as Chief Conductor of the European Union Youth Orchestra (2015–2024), Chief Conductor of the Oslo Philharmonic Orchestra (2013–2020) and Principal Conductor of the National Youth Orchestra of Great Britain (2009–2013). He stood down as Artistic Director of the State Academic Symphony Orchestra of Russia ‘Evgeny Svetlanov’ in 2022, having been their Principal Guest Conductor from 2016 and Artistic Director from 2020.

Petrenko has worked with many of the world’s most prestigious orchestras, including the Berlin Philharmonic, Bavarian Radio Symphony, Gewandhausorchester Leipzig, London Symphony, London Philharmonic, Philharmonia, Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia (Rome), St Petersburg Philharmonic, Orchestre National de France, Czech Philharmonic and NHK Symphony Orchestras, and in North America has led the Philadelphia Orchestra, Los Angeles Philharmonic Orchestra, Cleveland Orchestra, and the San Francisco, Boston and Chicago Symphony Orchestras. He has appeared at the Edinburgh Festival, Grafenegg Festival, and made frequent appearances at the BBC Proms. Equally at home in the opera house, and with over thirty operas in his repertoire, Vasily Petrenko has conducted widely on the operatic stage, including at Glyndebourne Festival Opera, the Opéra National de Paris, Opernhaus Zürich, the Bayerische Staatsoper, and the Metropolitan Opera, New York.

Recent highlights have included wide-ranging touring with the Royal Philharmonic, across major European capitals, the US and China. The 23/24 season included a debut appearance with the NDR-Elphilharmonie in Hamburg and returns to Hong Kong, Seoul, Israel and Dresden Philharmonics, the Dallas and Pittsburgh Symphonies and the Filarmonica della Scala in Milan and Dresden Symphony Orchestras.

Highlights of the 24/25 season include his debut with the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra in a new production of Boris Godunov at the Dutch National Opera, returns to the Orchestre de la Suisse Romande, the Sydney, Montreal, Singapore, Berlin Radio and Sao Paulo Symphony Orchestras, and the National Symphony Orchestra of Washington DC, and touring to Germany and major European summer festivals with the Royal Philharmonic.

Vasily Petrenko has established a strongly defined profile as a recording artist. Amongst a wide discography, his Shostakovich, Rachmaninov and Elgar symphony cycles with the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra have garnered worldwide acclaim. With the Oslo Philharmonic Orchestra, he has released cycles of Scriabin’s symphonies and Strauss’ tone poems, and an ongoing series of the symphonies of Prokofiev and Myaskovsky.

Born in 1976, Petrenko was educated at the St Petersburg Capella Boys Music School (Russia’s oldest music school) and the St Petersburg Conservatoire, where he participated in masterclasses with such luminary figures as Ilya Musin, Mariss Jansons and Yuri Temirkanov, and began his career as Resident Conductor (1994–1997) of St Petersburg’s Mikhailovsky Theatre. In September 2017, Vasily Petrenko was honoured with the Artist of the Year award at the prestigious annual Gramophone Awards, one decade on from receiving their Young Artist of the Year award in October 2007. In 2010, he won the Male Artist of the Year at the Classical BRIT Awards. He is only the second person to have been awarded Honorary Doctorates by both the University of Liverpool and Liverpool Hope University (in 2009), and an Honorary Fellowship of the Liverpool John Moores University (in 2012), awards which recognise the immense impact he has had on the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra and the city’s cultural scene. In 2024, Vasily also launched a new academy for young conductors, co-organised by the Primavera Foundation Armenia and the Armenian National Philharmonic Orchestra.

William Walton
(1902–1983)

Spitfire Prelude and Fugue

Prelude
Fugue

William Walton’s Spitfire Prelude and Fugue sounds as majestic as its namesake. The Spitfire was a fighter aircraft that featured in the 1942 film, The First of the Few. Walton composed the music for this cinematic adventure about the aircraft designer R.J. Mitchell, and this concert arrangement stems from the wartime score. Walton conducted its premiere in 1943 at Liverpool’s Philharmonic Hall.

A prelude is an introduction, so the start of this music was set against the black and white title sequence of the film. The proudly blazing brass, rousing strings, and simple rhythms all contribute to the work’s nationalistic flare. The march-like tempo and crashing percussion give it a typical military feel, but we can also feel a hint of warmth and sentimentality. After all, the story is one of respect and pride for the efforts of those who worked to protect Britain against the Nazis during World War II.

Then the music shifts, and you will hear a rush of notes that scurry between different sections of the orchestra. If you think it sounds a little bit Baroque, you aren’t mistaken because it takes the form of a fugue, a compositional technique that Bach himself employed. It introduces one musical idea, then another voice answers. In Spitfire, the fugue drives the narrative of the film: the aircraft is designed and built, layer by layer, in a clever fusion of story and sound.

The composition reaches a predictably triumphant conclusion, epic enough to raise your spirits even without the accompanying vision.

© Stephanie Eslake, 2025

First performance: 2 January 1943, Liverpool, composer conducting.
First WASO performance: This is the first performance by WASO.
Instrumentation: two each of flutes (one doubling piccolo), oboes, clarinets and bassoons; four horns, two trumpets, three trombones and tuba; timpani, percussion, harp and strings.

Ralph Vaughan Williams
(1872–1958)

Symphony No.5 in D Major

Preludio (Moderato)
Scherzo (Presto)
Romanza (Lento)
Passacaglia (Moderato)

Vaughan Williams’ Fifth Symphony was premiered in June 1943, six months after Churchill’s famous declaration of the ‘end of the beginning’ of the Second World War. Conflict and violence had characterised the composer’s Fourth Symphony (1935), but in this Symphony, Vaughan Williams chose to create a work of sublime tranquility and moral reassurance.

Much of the material derives from music for a projected opera of Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress. It may be true that, as the composer got on in years, he worried that this operatic project would not see the light of day, so he used some of its elements in the new Symphony. But that is a rather prosaic way of considering this exultant and musically unified work. It’s better to think of the Fifth as imbued with the character and aesthetic of The Pilgrim’s Progress, so that it represents, in Wilfrid Mellers’ words, a ‘musical quintessence’ of the book.

The Pilgrim’s Progress was a story that worked powerfully on Vaughan Williams’ imagination. Above all, the book provided him with a vision of the heavenly Ideal. A ‘cheerful agnostic’, he understood the promise of heaven and its importance for individuals and for society. Perhaps this heaven can be read more rightly as ‘utopia’, its defining character: peacefulness. Musicologist Frank Howes observed that in this Symphony, Vaughan Williams not only reflected upon a world after the War, in which there is an ‘absence of armed conflict’, but aspired to essay a higher condition of ‘peace, ultimate and fundamental’. This peaceful state is attained only after a considerable quest.

While thankfully the Symphony doesn’t put us through a litany of trials such as ‘Pilgrim’ goes through, we nevertheless gain a sense of a life’s journey through different emotional experiences. The Symphony adopts a relatively formal Classical symphonic structure, so we should avoid ascribing to it an excessively programmatic or narrative reading. However, some of the Symphony’s music appears also in Vaughan Williams’ other versions of the Pilgrim’s Progress story, in particular a radio play from 1942 and an opera (more like a dramatic oratorio) performed in 1951. Some observation of the links between the Symphony and other Pilgrim’s Progress material can inform an appreciation of the music.

The Symphony opens with an evocation of blissful, unsullied nature. Human or perhaps sinister influence intrudes, with thematic material adapted from music associated with Beelzebub in the opera. The sinister presence comes forward more in the second movement, where the scurrying, ethereal music is like that with which Vaughan Williams describes Pilgrim’s fight with ‘hobgoblins’ in the opera.

The third movement is entitled Romanza, but even here the idyllic mood (material similar to the opera’s Act I, Scene ii, ‘The House Beautiful’) is contrasted with music of agitation (Act I, Scene i’s ‘Save me, Lord! My burden is greater than I can bear’). The final movement is dominated by a glorious passacaglia on a hymnlike theme, rising to a great D major climax. But, this is not the Symphony’s end. An epilogue shares material with the scene in the opera where Pilgrim passes over the River of Death, entering humbly but triumphantly into Paradise.

These instances illustrate not so much a narrative underpinning, but a philosophical one for the Symphony: the pursuit of goodness and justice faces continual challenge from darker forces. In seeing evidence of Pilgrim’s Progress in the work, we understand its character as one of benediction. In the contest of good and evil, Vaughan Williams offers us gentle encouragement to maintain our resolve and persistence towards attaining the final goal – peace.

The music’s structure reflects this philosophical purpose. The Classical structure is subjected to such richly imaginative and intuitive remodeling we can barely recognise it. For the most part, the Symphony proceeds by means of contrasts rather than traditional ‘argument’ or ‘conflict’. Artful combination of ancient modality and pentatonic harmony with contemporary tonality creates an extended, harmonically luscious soundworld. It’s only in the final movement that D major unequivocally asserts itself, its triumph so emphatic that Mellers describes the key as representing ‘human fulfilment’.

The feeling at the end of this work is one of absolution, from which, it is to be hoped, we gain the resolve to continue our pursuit of the just cause or to seek out the path of goodness.

James Koehne © 2004

First performance: 24 June 1943, London, composer conducting.
First WASO performance: 23-24 May 1952; Rudolf Pekárek, conductor.
Most recent WASO performance: 13-14 October 2017; Douglas Boyd, conductor.
Instrumentation: two flutes, oboe, cor anglais, two clarinets, two bassoons, two horns, two trumpets, three trombones, timpani, strings.

Ashley William Smith

Your Wesfarmers Arts Digital Pre-concert Talk for Prelude to Peace 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.