Masters Program Notes: Great Britten, November 15 & 16, 2008

Masters Program Notes: Great Britten, November 15 & 16, 2008

An Aspects of Eddins performance

Great Britten
Saturday, November 15 - 8:00 pm
Sunday, November 16 - 2:00 pm

William Eddins, conductor
Livia Sohn, violin

Learn more about the performance at Symphony Prelude: Saturday, 7:15 pm, Third Level (Upper Circle) Lobby with D.T. Baker, free to all ticket holders.

PURCELL
Chacony in G minor (arr. Britten)  (7’)*

BRITTEN
Violin Concerto in D minor, Op.15  (34’)*
    Moderato con moto
    Vivace
    Passacaglia: Andante lento (un poco meno mosso)
    Livia Sohn, violin

INTERMISSION

SCHUBERT
Symphony No. 7 in C Major, D.944 “The Great”  (55’)*
    Andante – Allegro ma non troppo
    Andante con moto
    Scherzo: Allegro vivace
    Allegro vivace

*indicates approximate performance duration

Program Notes - Great Britten

Chacony in G minor (arr. Britten)
Henry Purcell
(b. Westminster, 1659 / d. Westminster, 1695)

First performance: Beginning in 1677, Purcell took over from the late Matthew Locke as composer for The Twenty-Four Violins. It is believed he wrote this piece for that ensemble.
First performance of the Britten arrangement: January 30, 1948 in Zurich
This is the ESO premiere of the piece

 

“It is a magnificent example of the baroque mastery of these popular ostinato variations, which grow in power and magic, with each repetition of the same eight-measure phrase.”

Phillip Huscher, Chicago Symphony Orchestra

In the Baroque period music was a family business.  Johann Sebastian Bach was just one of many of the Bach clan who made their living making music in the church or in the employ of the aristocracy.  Henry Purcell came from an equally prestigious musical family and in his unfortunately short career he made an impact on English music that is felt to this day. 

 

A true child genius, Purcell is known to have composed from the age of eleven, and his keen mind led him to compose for the church, the theatre, and the royalty.  His sacred works, most of which were written once he became the official organist at Westminster abbey at the ripe old age of 22, are staples of the Anglican Church to this day.  His opera Dido and Aeneas is considered the first true English opera.  Composers who took direct inspiration from his music include Benjamin Britten, who arranged many of Purcell’s works and also used several of his themes in his own compositions (The Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra), and also Pete Townshend of The Who.  Townshend has said that Purcell’s “drone type chords” inspired the opening of the classic song Pinball Wizard.

Purcell’s “Chacony” as a form is emblematic of Baroque music.  It is for all intents and purposes musically indistinguishable from the “Passacaglia.”  Both are forms that feature a repeated harmonic progression and usually based on a pattern in the bass voice.  Other great chaconnes include Bach’s Chaconne from the Second Violin Partita and the last movement of Johannes Brahms’ Fourth Symphony (which the ESO performed on September 19 & 20). 


Violin Concerto in D minor, Op.15
Benjamin Britten
(b. Lowestoft, 1913 / d. Aldeburgh, 1976)

First performance: March 28, 1940 in New York
This is the ESO premiere of the piece

“For me the Britten Concerto is a piece that makes me grateful to be a violinist. The depth of the work is amazing…it is an epic, larger-than-life masterpiece. The format is of a violin concerto, but inside it is an opera, a mass, an anti-war statement, and a requiem. Not only is this one of my favourite concertos, it is one of my favourite pieces of all time.”
Livia Sohn

Considering how similar their talents developed, it is not surprising that Benjamin Britten took inspiration from Purcell’s music.  Like Purcell, Britten came from a musical family, and he started composing from an early age.  By some accounts there more than 800 works and fragments of works that precede his published oeuvre.

In 1937, Britten met the great tenor Peter Pears who was to become his constant musical collaborator as well as his life partner.  By this time Britten had already established himself as a confirmed pacifist, and it is this belief that suffuses his music during this time.  In 1939, Britten and Pears moved to America and the next three years were some of the most productive of Britten’s life.  Several song cycles for Pears flowed quickly from his pen, as well as orchestral works and his first opera, Paul Bunyan, which was a collaboration with his old friend and fellow pacifist W. H. Auden.

The Violin Concerto performed tonight dates from 1939 and strongly represents the new artistic vision that Britten was pursuing.  It is the first work that Britten completed in the New World, and the premiere was given by the New York Philharmonic in 1940, Antonio Brosa on violin and John Barbirolli conducting.  It was only three years after this that Britten wrote the Serenade for Tenor, Horn, and Strings (to be performed in The Masters Series, in April 2009).


Symphony No. 7 in C Major, D.944 “The Great”
Franz Schubert
(b. Vienna, 1797 / d. Vienna, 1828)

First performance: It was rehearsed with the Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde in 1827, but not performed in Schubert’s lifetime. It premiered March 21, 1839 in Leipzig.
Last ESO performance: November 2001

“This is one of several examples where Schubert, quite apart from creating melodies of supreme genius, demonstrates his remarkable sense of form and symmetry. The ‘Great C major’ is a work set in perfect classical form, and perhaps the only reason why listeners (and sometimes musicians) are not aware of this, is simply because of its considerable length.”

Music scholar Antony Hodgson

The common thread between Purcell, Britten, and Franz Schubert is the support they received from their family and friends.  Schubert’s two brothers played violin; his father, the cello.  Schubert himself was an accomplished violist, thereby following in the footsteps of both Mozart and Beethoven, and playing quartets with his family was a foundation of Schubert’s early musical training.  Interestingly enough, Schubert’s first true teacher was none other than Antonio Salieri (of Mozart vs. Salieri fame), and when Schubert died his request was to be buried next to Beethoven.  They were moved to the Central Cemetery of Vienna in 1888 where none other than Johannes Brahms joined them nine years later. 

Schubert, for all that he lived only 31 years, was a tremendously prolific composer.  There are nearly 1000 compositions listed in the Deutsch catalog, though this includes both lost early works and fragments. The majority of his works are in the song literature, where he is acknowledged as one of the great masters of the form.  The cycles Die Schöne Müllerin, Winterreise, and individual songs such as Gretchen am Spinnrade and Der Erlkönig are amongst the greatest masterpieces of the literature.

Despite the fame of the composer Schubert’s Great Symphony was nearly relegated to the trash heap of history.  Largely written from 1825-26, the score was sent to the Vienna Philharmonic Society with the hope that they would subsidize a performance, since Schubert most definitely did not have the funds necessary to underwrite one himself.  The response of the Vienna Philharmonic was somewhat ambivalent, and if Schubert’s old friend Robert Schumann hadn’t made a surprise inspection of the library in 1838, who knows if the symphony would ever have been found.  But find it he did, and he took it to their mutual friend Felix Mendelssohn, director of the famed Gewandhaus orchestra, and Mendelssohn premiered the work in 1839.

The Great is the largest of Schubert’s symphonies, both in length and in the size of orchestra required. Funnily enough, there is great confusion over the numbering of the symphonies of Schubert.  There is an early work in E major, never fully orchestrated, that some consider the 7th.  There is also the almost mythical Gastein Symphony to consider – several of Schubert’s friends refer to a “Grand Symphonie” he was supposed to have started on during his time at Bad Gastein (1825). This led to all sorts of theories and renumberings during the last half of the 19th century, and the confusion continues to this day.  What we now know is that the E Major Symphony was abandoned, and that the “Grand Symphonie” is actually this C Major Symphony, which was indeed started during the Bad Gastein excursion.  So this symphony should properly be referred to as Symphony No. 7, but because of 180 years of confusion many orchestras just refer to this work as The Great.

Program Notes © 2008 William Eddins

Program notes © 2008 by the Edmonton Symphony Orchestra and its respective annotators. All Rights Reserved. Program notes may not be printed in their entirety without the written consent of the Edmonton Symphony Orchestra; excerpts may be quoted if due acknowledgment is given to the author and to the Edmonton Symphony Orchestra. For reprint permission, contact D.T. Baker, Music Resource, by email, dave.baker@winspearcentre.com.

These notes appear in galley files prepared for Signature magazine, official publication of the ESO, and may contain typographical or other errors, or may differ from the final print version. Programs and artists subject to change without notice.