WASO's The Lark Ascending & Mozart's Masterpieces

Laurence Jackson
Director/Violin

After attending Chetham’s School of Music, Laurence Jackson gained a scholarship to the Royal Academy of Music in 1984. Studying with Emanuel Hurwitz, Maurice Hasson and Anne-Sophie Mutter, he was a prize-winner at the 1985 Yehudi Menuhin ‘Concours de Paris’ Competition and won 3rd Prize at the first Sarasate Violin Competition in Pamplona, Spain.

In November 1990, Laurence received 1st Prize at the 17th International Violin Competition 'Dr Luis Sigall' held in Vina del Mar, Chile and subsequently, he gave concerto and recital performances throughout Chile as well as a recital tour of Argentina.

Since making his Royal Festival Hall debut in 1990, Laurence has forged a highly successful career as a soloist, chamber musician and concertmaster, appearing with the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra as well as directing the Guildhall Strings, Calgary Festival Orchestra and the Birmingham Contemporary Music Group. He has regularly been invited to guest lead orchestras around the world, including the London Philharmonic, Philharmonia, Royal Scottish National Orchestra, BBC Philharmonic, Trondheim Symphony Orchestra and Bergen Philharmonic. Guest leading in the 2014/15 season included the West Australian Symphony Orchestra and the San Francisco Ballet.

Between 1994 to 2006, Laurence was leader of the Maggini Quartet, with whom he regularly toured throughout the USA, Canada and Europe to much critical acclaim. Worldwide sales of their recordings for their Naxos English Music series have exceeded 100,000 discs. With the Magginis, Laurence recorded some 23 discs and most notably won the Gramophone Chamber Music Award of 2001, the 2002 Cannes Classical Award, the Diapason d’Or of the Year in France and CHOC award for Le Monde de la Musique (Elgar quartet and piano quintet with Peter Donohoe). They were also nominated for Grammy Awards in both 2004 and 2005 and the Classical Brit Awards Ensemble/Orchestral Album 2002. Their collaboration with Sir Peter Maxwell Davies, performing and recording his ten ‘Naxos Quartets’ over a five-year period, was a hugely exciting and unique project and the works were premiered at the Wigmore Hall, as well as the Cheltenham Festival, Oslo Chamber Music Festival and the Purcell Room.

In 2006, he accepted the position of Concertmaster of the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra (CBSO), with whom he has appeared as soloist in the Dvořák, Bruch, Brahms' Double and Nielsen concertos, as well as several performances of Vaughan-Williams' The Lark Ascending. Laurence has also directed the CBSO strings on several occasions, including directing performances of Mozart's Sinfonia Concertante and Mozart's Violin Concerto No.3. In June 2009 he recorded live the solo violin part in Ein Heldenleben by Richard Strauss, with the CBSO and Andris Nelsons for Orfeo to much critical acclaim.

After ten years as Concertmaster of the CBSO, Laurence was appointed as Concertmaster of the West Australian Symphony Orchestra in 2015.

As well as his numerous award-winning recordings with the Maggini Quartet, he has recorded the John Jeffreys Violin Concerto (Meridian) and the Frank Martin Violin Sonata (ASV) with Iain Burnside (piano). Laurence, with the pianist Ashley Wass, has recorded two discs for Naxos of the complete repertoire for violin and piano by Sir Arnold Bax and both discs have received wide critical acclaim throughout the musical press.

Laurence is an Honorary Fellow of both Brunel University, London and Canterbury Christ Church University and he was awarded a fellowship of the Royal Academy of Music in 2013.

Laurence plays a violin made by J. B. Vuillaume, circa 1850.

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

(1756 – 1791)

Don Giovanni, K527: Overture

It was the librettist, Lorenzo da Ponte, who suggested the theme to Mozart: the well-known tale of Don Juan, the libertine who seduces woman after woman until, having killed the father of one of his conquests, he is finally dragged off to hell by a stone statue of the dead man.

Mozart’s opera, however, is more than a simple morality play. Indeed, there is some question as to exactly how it should be described. Mozart in his thematic catalogue called it an opera buffa (‘comic opera’), but the score and the libretto both describe it as a dramma giocoso or ‘playful drama’ – a term which some take to be a simple alternative to the term ‘opera buffa’ but which had also been used to describe the blend of serious and comic characters and turns of plot, in a realistic narrative style, pioneered by librettist Carlo Goldoni from around 1750. Certainly, despite the sober ending and moral epilogue, there are plenty of comic elements and the Overture establishes this from the start, as the slow and imposing introduction, with its crashing chords and whisperings and murmurings from the violins, emerges into a bright and energetic Allegro.

Legend would have us believe that Mozart procrastinated so much about the composition of this overture that on the eve of the opera’s premiere he had still not composed it. Whatever the case, the overture made it in time for the raising of the curtain on the opera’s first performance on 29 October 1787.

Symphony Australia © 2004

First performance: 29 October 1787, National Theatre, Prague.
First WASO performance: 12 June 1945. Ernest MacMillan, conductor.
Most recent WASO performance: 11 November 2023. Asher Fisch, conductor (Albany).
Instrumentation: two flutes, two oboes, two clarinets, two bassoons, two horns, two trumpets, timpani, strings.

Ralph Vaughan Williams

(1872-1958)

The Lark Ascending - Romance for Violin and Orchestra

Surely one of Vaughan Williams’ most loved and best-known works is the miniature masterpiece The Lark Ascending. A magical opening and a serene simplicity transport the listener to an unmistakably English landscape, perhaps to the Cotswolds where Vaughan Williams grew up. Inspiration for the work came from a poem of the same name by George Meredith (1828-1909). Meredith (also remembered for his novels The Ordeal of Richard Feverel and The Egoist) was one of the most admired literary figures of his day, of whom contemporary Scottish writer William Sharp declared ‘there is no living writer so saturated with the spirit of nature in England as this rare poet’. Vaughan Williams precedes the score with lines from Meredith’s poem:

He rises and begins to round,
He drops the silver chain of sound,
Of many links without a break,
In chirrup, whistle, slur and shake.

For singing till his heaven fills,
‘Tis love of earth that he instils,
And ever winging up and up,
Our valley is his golden cup

And he the wine which overflows
To lift us with him as he goes.
Till lost on his aerial rings
In light, and then the fancy sings.

Vaughan Williams composed The Lark Ascending in 1914, just before the outbreak of World War I when birdsong was gradually to be replaced by the horrifying sounds of conflict and destruction; but he put the score aside until 1920. It was dedicated to Marie Hall, a brilliant violinist who had, at one time, been given lessons by Elgar. She gave the first performance with Geoffrey Mendham in December 1920 in an arrangement for violin and piano. The first performance of the orchestral version took place at the Queen’s Hall in a British Music Society concert held on 14 June 1921 with Marie Hall as soloist, and the British Symphony Orchestra conducted by Adrian Boult. The Times reported that ‘it showed serene disregard of the fashions of today or yesterday. It dreams its way along.’

The brevity of The Lark Ascending belies its significance in the emergence of what came to be referred to as ‘English Pastoralism’. Alarmed at the spread of industrialism over the English landscape and expressing a nostalgia for rural traditions, writers such as George Meredith, Edward Thomas, W.H. Hudson and Thomas Hardy sought to promote and preserve a quintessentially English landscape through the literary medium. Until The Lark Ascending was performed, few musical equivalents existed. Following its first public performance, English critics described The Lark Ascending as a musical evocation of the English landscape and the preeminent example of English Pastoralism in music. Wilfrid Mellers comments that ‘the ramifications of this magical piece haunted Vaughan Williams throughout the rest of his creative life, and its presence is at least latent in the finest music of his successors... But by no other composer is the interdependence of man and Nature more movingly expressed.’

The ‘Romance’ of Vaughan Williams’ subtitle is unlikely to mean the common idea of ‘romantic’; rather, it may refer to the 18th-century musical term for an instrumental slow movement in ABA form. He also used the term for other slow movements, including those of his Piano Concerto and Fifth Symphony. The version of The Lark Ascending we hear in this performance is scored for two flutes, one oboe, two clarinets, two bassoons, two horns, triangle and strings; however, Vaughan Williams also scored a version for chamber orchestra with single winds.

The ethereal opening establishes the tone and also provides the main thematic material of the entire piece. Above pianissimo sustained muted strings, the solo violin emerges, trilling, swooping, rising in emulation of Meredith's lark soaring above the English countryside. Vaughan Williams’ lark sings a pentatonic melody (a five-note phrase equivalent to playing the black notes on the piano) with a falling minor third. James Day observes that, unlike Messiaen in his treatment of birdsong, Vaughan Williams makes no attempt to replicate the lark’s microtonal call. The harmonic background, which is essentially modal, shifts subtly so that orchestral colours and textures provide a changing musical landscape.

The Lark Ascending is in a simple ternary form with the outer lifting sections framing a middle section in 2/4 time. While the rhapsodising violin soars far above the countryside in the first section, it is drawn earthward in the central section (Allegretto tranquillo) which features a simple folk-like theme introduced initially by the flute and clarinet. The nature of the folk-song theme constrains even the lark as the solo violin’s melismas become separate and marked notes which are forced into duple patterns. In the last section the main theme is fully orchestrated and the tempo more animated but in the final ethereal moments the soloist’s lyrical melody is heard alone as the lark flies beyond our vision of this tranquil idyll.

Catherine Hocking ©2001

First performance: 14 June 1921, London. Marie Hall, violin. Adrian Boult, conductor.
Most recent WASO performance: 2 July 2022. Emma McGrath, violin. Fabien Gabel, conductor.
Instrumentation: 2 flutes, oboe, 2 clarinets, 2 bassoons, 2 horns, triangle, strings.

Benjamin Britten

(1913-1976)

Simple Symphony, Op.4

Boisterous Bourrée
Playful Pizzicato
Sentimental Sarabande
Frolicsome Finale

It is usually left to devotees of the music of a major composer to resurrect juvenilia, the ideas of a highly musical child. Britten, however, performed that service himself with his Simple Symphony. This was assembled in 1934, when he was 21, from works he had written before he was 12. The dilemma facing the composer was how far to ‘touch up’ his simple, innocent ideas. Britten’s piece keeps much of the fresh charm of unsophisticated music, but he has not entirely resisted the temptation to introduce a more mature cleverness in putting his original piano pieces and songs side by side to form symmetrical, classically modelled structures.

As is often the case in Britten’s music, the Simple Symphony is the result of a practical challenge the composer had set himself: how to write ingenious and satisfying textures for strings without exceeding the technical capacities of quite modest amateur players. The symphony is simple in more ways than one. To be played either by a string quartet or by a string orchestra, it already displays the deep understanding of the string medium which Britten (an amateur viola player himself) was to reveal at full stretch in 1937’s Variations on a Theme of Frank Bridge. Britten later wrote:

'I am attracted by many features of the strings. For instance, the possibilities of elaborate divisi – the effect of many voices of the same kind. There is also the infinite variety of colour – the use of mutes, pizzicato, harmonics and so forth. Then again, there is the great dexterity in technique of string players. Generally speaking, I like to think of the small combinations of players, and I deplore the tendency of present-day audiences to expect only the luscious ‘tutti’ effect from an orchestra.'

Of course, not all the available techniques are exploited in the Simple Symphony, but it is remarkable how many are. There is perhaps an element of tongue-in-cheek as Britten shows how classical musical structures are built out of the simplest musical ideas. There is cunning in this innocence. The dance form of the Boisterous Bourrée contains some elementary counterpoint exercises, and the trio of the Playful Pizzicato has some witty silent bars in its tune. The Sentimental Sarabande has been described as ‘bogus-Baroque’, but Britten’s attitude to its expressiveness is revealed in the adjective of his alliterative title. The excitement of the Frolicsome Finale is built up from a theme which, as Peter Evans has remarked, a cinema pianist would have cherished.

David Garrett

© Symphony Australia

First performance: 6 March 1934. Norwich, Benjamin Britten, conductor.
First WASO performance: 27 August 1949. Henry Krisps, conductor.
Most recent WASO performance: 3 March 2019. Laurence Jackson, director.
Instrumentation: Strings.

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

(1756 – 1791)

Symphony No.40 in G minor, K550

Molto allegro
Andante
Menuetto (Allegretto) – Trio – Menuetto
Allegro assai

Producing over 50 symphonies (the official number 41 notwithstanding) in the space of 23 years, Mozart can truly be said to have enjoyed a ‘symphonic career’, much as did his older friend Joseph Haydn (100 symphonies in 38 years). And as symphonic careers go, it was, like Haydn’s, successful from first to last. Mozart composed his Symphony No.1 – perhaps with a little help from his sister and father – in the London suburb of Chelsea in summer 1764. Generically and stylistically, it dots all the ‘i’s and crosses the ‘t’s, almost as convincingly as do the symphonies of one of his London mentors, Johann Christian Bach, works indeed said to have ‘influenced’ the eight-year-old’s first attempt. Between the ages of 15 and 18, he produced all of what now count as his ‘middle period’ symphonies (Numbers 14-30, and at least 5 unnumbered).

After relocating from Salzburg to Vienna in 1781, however, piano concertos took over as Mozart’s preferred orchestral vehicle, better for charming fickle metropolitan audiences than the more esoteric symphony. New symphonies were not entirely absent from his Vienna concerts, but all of them from these years were, in the first instance, out-of-town commissions: No.35 for the Haffner family in Salzburg in 1782; No.36 and the so-called No.37 (most of it actually by Michael Haydn) for a concert in Linz in 1783; and No.38 for Prague in 1787, during the season there of his opera The Marriage of Figaro.

On 24 February 1788, only months before starting on the next three symphonies, he finished his Piano Concerto No.26 (‘Coronation’). Then in May, the imperial theatre in Vienna unveiled for hometown audiences his latest Italian opera, Don Giovanni (or the Libertine Punished), premiered in Prague the previous October. The tepid reception it received perhaps explains why Mozart devoted much of the sultry Viennese summer that year to composing three new symphonies, Numbers 39-41, works that, like their immediate predecessors, were unlikely to appeal greatly to the Viennese. By then, Austria was at war with Ottoman Turkey. Accordingly, most of his patrons were also feeling the economic pinch, and Mozart’s plans to give another concert series, at which the new symphonies might have been performed, came to nothing. However, it may well have been with one eye to possible publication and performances in England, France and Germany that he completed the trilogy in quick succession between June and August.

Minor keys are natural phenomena in the music of Beethoven. In Mozart’s overwhelmingly sunny output, however, they seem like unseasonal intrusions, requiring some explanation from outside of the composer’s usual circumstances. Yet if minor keys signify depression or fatalism, causes are easy enough to find leading up to the completion of the Symphony No.40 on 25 July 1788. Not only did Don Giovanni flop, but tragically, at the end of June, Mozart’s six-month-old daughter Theresia died. Perhaps this explains why the G minor symphony’s first movement is saturated with Mozart’s most unusual and haunting theme.

The other three movements are far less familiar to most people, and so can still surprise. After Mozart’s death, Haydn quoted a phrase from the luminous second movement in his oratorio The Seasons, memorialising his young friend. Since the Andante is also the symphony’s only major-key movement, the Viennese had by then come to prefer it too. What the Romantics thought of as the high-minded angst of minor keys was all too often anathema to Viennese audiences, as Beethoven later discovered. But at least they had more staying power than the average audience today. When played with all its repeats, as Mozart intended (but which most conductors do not bother with today), it is almost twice as long as the opening movement.

The third movement, a minuet in G minor again, is not a well-balanced, copybook example of the dance. This one is energetic and eventful, with dissonant notes and syncopated rhythms – as unusual, in its small way, as the opening movement. The fourth movement is an orchestral tour de force, designed by Mozart to sweep his audience along in a state of increasing nervous excitement. Its inexorable forward motion is interrupted only by the weirdness of a couple of audibly disconcerting moments, when Mozart perversely avoids any clear sense of key for rather longer than is comfortable.

Adapted from an annotation by Graeme Skinner © 2013

First performance: Mozart entered the work into his catalogue on 25 July 1788, however the date and circumstances of the first performance is not known.
First WASO performance: 3 July 1943. Lionel Dawson, conductor.
Most recent WASO performance: 16 March 2019. Asher Fisch, conductor.
Instrumentation: flute, two oboes, two clarinets, two bassoons, two horns, strings.

Jeremy Garside
Cello

What’s your earliest memory of playing music?

My earliest musical memory is of my sister playing the piano. I wanted to learn because she did, and I would flip through her beginner piano books, trying to play from them. This sparked my desire to take piano lessons, and I soon started as well.

What inspired you to play the cello?

I was exposed to various instruments at Davallia, my primary school. In Year 3, I had the opportunity to learn the violin, but I found I didn’t like the sound of it. I was drawn to the cello instead and, though I had to wait a year, I seized the chance to start learning it.

Is there anything special about your instrument?

My cello is a modern instrument, made in 2015 by Pietro Contu, a luthier based in Bruchsal, Germany. My teacher, Suzie, strongly advised me to upgrade my cello and find an instrument that could support my future growth. Following her recommendation, I visited Pietro, tested several cellos, and ultimately chose the one I now play – and love. It was also my first trip to Europe, made even more memorable because I got to see my sister’s ballet performance in Mannheim.

Do you have a favourite genre or style of music to play?

Classical music, without a doubt. I'm particularly drawn to the symphonic repertoire, but I have a passion for chamber music as well. The two complement each other. Now that I'm settled back in Perth for the foreseeable future, I’m excited to delve into more chamber music projects.

What’s the best advice you’ve received during your career?

My teacher, Suzie, had a mantra that has always resonated with me: 'Cool head, warm heart.' I think it’s good advice, both for playing music and navigating life in general!

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