• Home
• Concerts
• Programme Notes Archive
• 25 November 2011 Programme Notes

Programme Notes | 25/11/11

St John's, Smith Square | 25 November 2011

Composing the suite was a struggle. Parry wrote to a friend: ‘It will take me a long time to better my confusticated style. I suppose it has grown up with its heels in the air and it’s no joke getting it round into a proper posture.’ (The Oxford English Dictionary defines ‘confusticate’ as ‘confuse, confound, perplex.’)

Parry was apparently the ultimate establishment figure: Eton, Oxford, Director of the Royal College of Music, a post on Grove’s Dictionary of Music and Musicians, even an early involvement with Lloyd’s Register of Shipping. He translates the ironically ecstatic ending of Aristophanes’ satirical comedy – where birds have avoided being roasted and install a new regime in the cosmos, sealed by ludicrous nuptials – into high Victorian pomp and bombast, its feet concreted into C major. (Contemporaries might have noticed a link between The Birds and Iolanthe, which depicts a House of Lords overrun by fairies and ends in intermarriage.)

Although this march has not achieved the astral position of Parry’s Jerusalem (a hugely popular choice with Desert Island Discs castaways, incidentally, including Frankie Howerd, Roy Hattersley and Nicole Kidman), it has landed at the heart of national ceremony: it heralded Princess Elizabeth’s arrival at her wedding in Westminster Abbey in 1947, and was played there by the LCO for the procession of The Queen at the wedding of the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge.

Tonight’s arrangement by John Rutter, made more sonorous for this year’s ceremony, adds three trumpets and a bass trombone to the original orchestration.

© Isobel Williams

Parry is usually portrayed as the ultimate establishment figure but he was more complicated than that - and his wife was a suffragette.  One wonders what he was actually thinking about during the struggle to compose the suite that he described in his letter to a friend above. 

Although separated from Aristophanes by nearly two and a half millennia, Parry was a good deal closer in sensibility to Aristophanes' political understanding than we are to Parry's, separated though we are by a mere hundred years.  When Aristophanes wrote The Birds, the all-conquering Athenian navy had not long before starved a whole island into submission without a qualm, in the cause of the seemingly ever-expanding Athenian empire - which is where Aristophanes' birds got their idea of becoming their own imperial power, in their case aiming to defeat the gods by blockading their food supply, the smoke of the sacrifices offered in the temples down on earth.  After all, the birds had mastery of the sky just as the Athenians had mastery of the seas, so why not assert it.

We probably need to shed a few post-colonial sensibilities to appreciate Aristophanes' humour in all this - he is extremely funny, poking merciless fun at inept, scheming politicians and their overweening ambitions.  But keep your 21st century post-modern sensibilities at bay.  All this was built on an unquestioning acceptance of Empire fundamentals - the siege of Melos was an acceptable detail in the grand scheme of Empire (the foundation of the world's first ‘democracy’ on slavery wouldn't be questioned for many centuries to come) and the Sicilian Expedition had set out under the greatest general of Empire, Demosthenes, to win even greater glory for Athens. At this point, there was no inkling of the defeat at Syracuse, even less of the concentration camp-like suffering of the Athenian forces in the unspeakable Sicilian quarries.  

This was closer, in political sensibilities at least, to Parry's late Victorian England - to understand the true spirit of which we also need to keep our post-modern sensibilities at bay, and try to imagine ourselves into an era pre-holocaust, pre-trenches, pre-Emily Hobhouse - and pre-Human Rights Act.

To listen to Parry's march, one can easily conjure up the worst aspects of this era - worst as they seem to our curiously judgmental yet amoral age - a seemingly secure and self-satisfied edifice built on foundations of supposedly eternal values, which would all be blown away with unimaginable destruction unexpectedly soon.  A real mirror image of Athens - including naval supremacy. 

But all this is with hindsight: Aristophanes had no inkling of the rout at Syracuse, Parry had no inkling of Gallipoli.  So why is Parry's music, written to accompany what to most of Parry's contemporaries, as to Aristophanes' contemporaries - though probably not to either group a few years later - was an amusing and light-hearted poke at the status quo, like it is?  For whatever it is, amusing and light-hearted it is not.  Parry wasn't the establishment figure he is branded as - but he wasn't a political revolutionary.  But then, Vaughan Williams' incidental music for Aristophanes’ The Wasps is the same - nice music, even some cool wasp-buzzing effects in the overture - but not an iota of Aristophanes' rollicking humour. 

Perhaps the answer is that both composers were still to find their true voice - of which humour wasn't to be a significant part: not everyone can be a satirist. Parry was probably thinking about his ‘confusticated style’ and maybe a few of Aristophanes' dactyls, spondees and elisions for the choruses (which unfortunately - or maybe not - we won't hear - anyway, they even pronounced the Greek as though it were the language of Empire in those days) but little else. 

Not all incidental music need miss the mark. Mendelssohn perfectly captured Shakespeare’s flighty midsummer night shades, and Delius's exoticism more than matched the exotic world of James Elroy Flecker's Arabian anti-hero Hassan.

On the other hand, if imagining yourself back a century or a millennium is all too much after a day at the office, what about the birds as eco-warriors, bravely preventing the carbon emissions from the humans' environmentally unfriendly sacrifice fires (i.e. the 21st century's coal burning power stations) reaching the ozone layer, ethereal counterparts to those fearless eco-seafarers pitted against the wicked Japanese whalers in the southern seas?  Then at least you won't miss the laughs. 

© Hubert Best

Oboe Concerto in B flat, Op. 7 No. 3 (arranged by Alison Balsom for trumpet)
Tomaso Albinoni (1671-1751)

Allegro, Adagio, Allegro

The Venetian baroque composer Albinoni completed this concerto in 1715. The same year saw the death of Louis XIV and the first Jacobite rebellion against the Hanoverian George I aiming to restore the Stuart kings to the throne. Meanwhile, Venice was struggling as a maritime power: the Ottoman Empire regained the Peloponnese.

Albinoni dedicated the concerto to Giovanni Donato Correggio, a patron, secular priest and string player with the Accademia Filarmonica, an amateur orchestra of nobles who met twice a week to play the latest works of Vivaldi and others. Correggio was godfather to one of Albinoni’s children.

This work was composed for the new-fangled oboe but the arrangement for trumpet is a legitimate move. Michael Talbot, a biographer of Albinoni, points out that, whereas Vivaldi’s oboe concerti offer the violin as an alternative, Albinoni’s oboe scoring is more vocal: he lets the soloist soar above the first violin and sometimes imitates writing for the trumpet in its higher register.

Some of Albinoni’s works were lost in the bombing of Dresden. The most successful surviving piece attributed to him is the Adagio in G minor, judging by its popularity on Desert Island Discs (Helen Mirren, Twiggy, Delia Smith et al), but it is a soggy pastiche composed in the twentieth century by another of his biographers, Remo Giazotto.

© Isobel Williams

Concertino for trumpet, piano and strings
Andre Jolivet (1905-1974)

Allegro, poco più mosso, allegro molto, più mosso

Jolivet composed this dynamic neo-classical showpiece, which he likened to a ballet, in 1948, when he was musical director of the Comédie française.

He was influenced by many composers, including Debussy, Schoenberg, Stravinsky, Bartók and his teacher Varese, whose wall of sound  was heavy on the percussion, but Jolivet rejected categorisation and claimed to be inspired by primitive music, dance, poetry and worship. He is dogged by one quotation – his aim to ‘restore to music its original, ancient meaning, when it was the magical, incantatory expression of the spirituality of human communities.’ This was an understandable desire for atavistic escape from someone developing his style in 1930s Paris, neatly born too young for one war, too old for the second.

The concertino is of its age, paying its strident respects to primitivism, jazz, ethnic sonorities and mechanised brutality, with a plangent muted melody which yearns for different times.

Also in 1948, David Lean’s film of Oliver Twistand Laurence Olivier’s film of Hamlet appeared. T. S. Eliot won the Nobel Prize for literature.

And Andrew Lloyd Webber was born.

© Isobel Williams

Symphony No. 40 in G minor K.550
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756-1791)

I Molto allegro
II Andante
III Menuetto: Trio
IV Allegro assai

Mozart’s three last symphonies date from the summer of 1788 – a time of war and foreboding, when concerts were few, and money was tight.  Why Mozart wrote these symphonies is unclear.  No commission seems to have been received. "I have greater leisure to work now since I am not troubled by so many visitors,” he wrote, turning a cheerful face on things.  One interesting theory suggests that the symphonies were intended for a tour to London he had in mind.  In the late eighteenth century London was well known as one of the best places for a good musician to make a bit of money. At several times in his life Mozart considered returning to London.

The fact that the 40^th exists in two versions – one with and one without clarinets – suggests that the piece was probably performed at least once in Mozart’s last years.  But the symphony was not published during Mozart’s lifetime.

The 40^th is one of only two of Mozart’s mature symphonies which is in a minor key – which for some has lent the work a tragic and melancholic air.  Mozart had recently suffered the loss of a daughter, which no doubt played on his mind.  For others, though, including Robert Schumann, the work has a prevailing mood of lightness and grace – heightened perhaps by the absence of trumpets and timpani.  The first movement, opening with one of Mozart’s most famous melodies, certainly has a pervading air of serene melancholy.  The second movement, also in sonata form takes the listener to the slightly unexpected world of E flat major.  The third movement is a minuet – but one which many have observed would be difficult to dance – more scherzo than minuet, and looking forward to the future rather than back into the roots of the classical symphony.  The last movement looks back to the late music of JS Bach in some of its complexities and chromaticism – but also forward to a future that Mozart was able to imagine but never realise.  And it was his older friend, Haydn, who was to make the trip to London a couple of years later, with his own set of symphonies.

© Rupert Merson

Back to the top ^