This programme was presented at St John's Kirk, Perth, Scotland on Friday 3rd October at 7.30pm and at
St John's Notting Hill, Lansdowne Crescent, off Ladbroke Grove, W11 2NN, Friday 28th November, 7.30pm.
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This programme is entitled “Play, Architecture, Emotion” and
explores a range of works, some familiar, and some less frequently performed
from the cello repertoire in which the composers have used the language of
music in particular ways reflecting the above themes.
We open with the work of Scottish composer, Ronald Stevenson
who celebrated his 80th birthday earlier this year. His mournful Recitative
and Air on DSCH
takes the motif spelling out the initials of Dmitri Shostakovich, and he then
plays with this material to create his work which is dedicated in memoriam to
Shostakovich. I first became
familiar with the work of Ronald Stevenson as a teenager through my mother’s
performances of some of his work based upon traditional Scottish poetry for
choir, although I have enjoyed getting to know more of this extraordinary
musician’s work in recent times through friends and colleagues who have
performed his music.
We then continue with the theme of “playing” with musical
material presented by another composer in order to create something new. Busoni’s
transcription of Bach’s
Chromatic Fantasia and Fugue for cello and piano was written in 1917, giving a
fresh perspective on Bach’s original work for this instrumental combination. The
sense of dialogue allowed between
the two instruments brings a new and dramatic approach to the original work
where this is so clearly implied in the writing in certain parts of this piece. Stevenson
cites Busoni as one of his
strongest musical influences, so it seems fitting to present their work side by
side in this way.
Then we move on to Brahms’ Sonata in F major, op. 99 for
Piano and Violoncello. Notice the
order in which the composer lists the instruments. Indeed this does point towards the richness and complexity
of the piano writing, over which the cello sings in soaring melodic lines. “The Romantic movement held that not all truth could be
deduced from axioms, that there were
inescapable realities in the world which could only be reached through emotion,
feeling and intuition.” Both the
cello and the piano were favourite instruments to communicate the expressive
ideals of this period, and many well known pieces of the cello repertoire come
from this period. The emotional
experience of engaging with music has always been the most important part of
being a musician for me. The music
of this period was one of the things which made we want to learn to play the
cello, so I hope the audience can allow themselves to fully engage with the experience
of the live performance, and be moved emotionally by this passionate music which speaks
directly to the heart.
In the second half of
the concert, we open with the Prelude of the second Bach cello Suite in D
minor. Brought into the
concert repertoire by Catalan cellist and revered teacher, Pablo Casals, they
are now considered the cornerstone of the repertoire for any cellist. In this part
of the concert, we are
examining concepts of musical architecture. The Prelude sets the scene for the rest of the suite to
follows, made up of various dance movements. The fundamental harmonic material that follows in the rest
of the suite is explored in a quasi improvisatory manner in this movement. There is
an innate sense of musical
architecture – like the various arcs in a beautiful cathedral working together
in harmony to build a greater whole reflecting a logical sum of the parts. When
I am practicing the suite, I often like to play the Prelude after having played
the rest of the suite. To me, it
almost feels like there could be a kind of circular form to this suite where
the Prelude could happily sit either before or after the other movements.
This seems fitting before the next work where these themes of circular
form and improvisation are likewise explored in the context of harmonic
language of a different period in Elliot Carter’s Cello Sonata of 1948. This
American composer is one of the most important musical voices of this musical
age, and is due to celebrate his hundredth birthday on 11th December
this year. Carter felt that whilst composers before
him had begun to attempt to revolutionize approaches to harmony and rhythm,
they had not as yet really reinvented their approach to musical form and
structure. He felt that this was
the next big development that the musical world needed to hang the new elements
upon, in order for musical language to progress further. Here, he experiments with
the notion of
circular form: a connection between the ending of a work and its beginning that
suggest that the work could be imagined as a continuous loop. This also accords well
with the fact
that the first movement was written after the other three. He has cited Joyce’s
“Finnegan’s Wake”
as his inspiration for this device, as well as Cocteau’s “The Blood of a Poet”. He also discusses the influence of the
idea of improvisation upon his use of the musical language, in particular in
the first movement of the Sonata.
He writes, "I've always thought that in some very important way my
pieces came from jazz - with a regular beat background and improvisations on
top of that."
The programme then culminates with Chopin’s
Introduction and Polonaise Brilliante, op.3 once again bringing us back to the ideals
of the Romantic era with its virtuosic piano writing and singing cello lines
which could be said to be almost operatic in nature. Written in the throes of heartbreak by the young Chopin,
here the theme of using music to invoke emotion is once again foremost in the
aims of the composer.
