Programme notes – Music from Pole to Pole

From winning a Pulitzer Prize in music to starring as herself in Amazon Prime’s Mozart in the Jungle, Caroline Shaw is much in demand. She’s a singer, violinist and composer, and she also has a keen interest in architecture –  something that’s evident in her solo cello piece In manus tuas. This work evokes the sensation of hearing a piece of choral music in a particular church in New Haven, Connecticut. The cello’s wide-ranging melody creates a sense of the spacious church interior, while wordless notes sung by the player add a ghostly resonance.

Precisely 100 years before Shaw’s composition, the Austrian composer Anton Webern was exploring new ways to construct music. His Five Movements for String Quartet of 1909 is an early example of ‘atonality’, which completely re-imagined how notes could be combined – a development pioneered by his teacher Arnold Schoenberg. Instead of using familiar harmonies, Webern creates a network of fragmentary ideas with sensual colour effects, qualities that led Stravinsky to later describe his works as ‘dazzling diamonds’. We’ll hear three of the movements in an arrangement Webern made for string orchestra.

Antonín Dvořák’s Nocturne in B major has a complicated history – the composer originally planned for it to be part of a larger work but changed his mind twice, eventually making is a standalone piece. He named the final version ‘Nocturne’ to suggest night-time, and a sense of nocturnal stillness is especially apparent in its quiet opening, which is underpinned for several minutes by a single long note held by the cellos, after which the music blossoms with true melodic charm.

Two works on tonight’s programme were written in memory of composers. Witold Lutosławski’s Musique Funèbre of 1958 pays homage to Béla Bartók. Its final movement, ‘Epilogue’, creates a disorienting effect not unlike a hall of mirrors, beginning forcefully but eventually dying away quietly to a single cello. Last Round, by Argentine composer Osvaldo Golijov, is much more energetic. Written after the death of the tango master Astor Piazzolla, its frenetic first movement imitates the ‘violent compression’ of the bandoneon, a type of concertina used in the dance. The music is scored for two string quartets (plus double bass), which represent a dancing couple. The title, however, refers to the less salubrious dance of boxing – Piazzolla was known for getting into fist-fights.

There’s fury of a more elemental kind in two works from the early 18th century. Marin Marais’s opera Alcione was an instant triumph when it was performed at the Palais Royal in Paris in 1706. One interlude depicting a storm at sea was particularly popular, and here Marais introduced the deep sound of the double bass to French opera for the first time. Around a decade later, Antonio Vivaldi composed The Four Seasons, his famous violin concertos which represent country scenes throughout the year. Two movements from ‘Summer’ illustrate a thunderstorm: at first, its approach is heard in brief rumbles on a hot afternoon, and then it arrives in a deluge of fast cascades.

A more peaceful country vista emerges in Arcadiana, a suite by Thomas Adés which explores the idea of vanishing idylls. Its exquisite sixth movement, ‘O Albion’, suggests a remembered English landscape coming in and out of focus. Nature also provides inspiration to the Icelandic composer Anna Thorvaldsdottir – she describes her music as ‘an ecosystem of materials’ which ‘continuously grow in and out of each other’. Her string trio Spectra combines atmospheric effects with passages of sparse lyricism.

We end tonight’s concert with one of the most revered keyboard compositions of all time. J.S. Bach’s Goldberg Variations is a huge and elaborate work, all based on a simple tune known as the ‘Aria’. A string arrangement by Dmitry Sitkovetsky brings out the singing quality of this graceful melody. Bach’s first biographer tells the story that the variations were originally played by the musician Johann Gottlieb Goldberg to entertain his aristocratic employer during bouts of insomnia. While the truth of this account is doubted, it’s certainly easy to imagine that this soothing music might lull you to a peaceful sleep.

Programme notes by Simon Brackenborough