Here are members of Penelope’s Dance Studio taking a break from a week of intensive rehearsals for Snow White, a ballet composed by ESO’s Stephen Roberts which will be performed at the Artrix in Bromsgrove on December 6th. Also on hand representing the orchestra are principal viola Helen Roberts and CEO Peter Sheeran. Great to see the ESO intensive t-shirts sporting our logo…
The Big Give Christmas Challenge – funding target reached
Thank you to everyone who supported our Big Give Christmas Challenge to raise funds for concerts in Care Homes and Hospices, and to Mary Stevens who badgered you all into it. We are delighted to announce that we more than met our target of £6000 for 30 concerts which will enable us to do even more of these concerts in 2015 than planned. Our next concerts are on December 19th at three care homes in Malvern.
December 6th at Bromsgrove Artrix White Christmas
December 6th at Bromsgrove Artrix
White Christmas
7:30pm
English String Orchestra directed by Michael Bochmann
Penelope’s Dance Studio directed by Penny Frost
Penelope’s Dance Studio directed by Penny Frost
Stephen Roberts – Ballet: Snow White
Also selections from Grieg – Holberg Suite, Vivaldi – Four Seasons, Bartok – Rumanian Dances
Another collaboration with the Dance Studio for what is becoming a highlight of the season.
Tickets:£18, £17 (/60) £12 (students)
TICKETS ON SALE 01527 577330 boxoffice@artrix.co.uk
TICKETS ON SALE 01527 577330 boxoffice@artrix.co.uk
ESO Composer-in-Association John McCabe featured in Gramophone Magazine
The English Symphony Orchestra is proud to inform our community that our 2014 Composer-in-Association, John McCabe, is the focus of a major feature article in the March 2014 issue of Gramophone Magazine. The piece by Guy Rickards looks back across McCabes contributions to musical life on the occasion of his 75th birthday.
CD of the Week- Handel Messiah
The ESO’s annual performance of Messiah in partnership with the Saint Michael’s Singers is one of the orchestra’s longest running traditions. The orchestra, under the baton of founder William Boughton, recorded Handel’s masterpiece for Nimbus in 2004.
Click here to buy direct from Nimbus, or here to stream direct from Spotifiy.
There are still a very few tickets available for this year’s concert with our newly appointed Principal Conductor, Kenneth Woods. Concert Details here.
CD of the Week- English Salon Orchestra, In the Spirit of Christmastime
The ESO: English Salon Orchestra returned to Stanbrook Abbey this December to present “The Spirit of Christmastime” – a sumptuous collection of the best Christmas and Holiday melodies. From the reflective to the jolly, there’s something about an ‘old-fashioned’ seasonal soundtrack that is hard to forget and never fails to invigorate the spirit. Now, just in time for Christmas, the ESO are pleased to release this evening of sparkling holiday favourites as the first CD on our new ESO ENGAGE label.
http://youtu.be/mJVhOXrQuL4
The programme features sixteen holiday favorites from the Renaissance to the present day, newly arranged by Simon Lenton for the English Salon Orchestra. You won’t find these sparkling arrangements anywhere else.
Soloists-
Produced and engineered by Paul Arden-Taylor
Purchase CD here:
(£10 + £2 postage and packing for UK orders (usually ships within 24 hours))
Purchase Download here:
(£8)
ESO Programme Notes Online- Shostakovich Chamber Symphony, opus 83a
Dmitri Shostakovich (1906-1975): Chamber Symphony, opus 83a
Shostakovich began work on his Fourth String Quartet in April 1949, during what his long time collaborator, the cellist of the Borodin String Quartet, Valentin Berlinsky described as “the most difficult year for him.” Shostakovich had been denounced by the Party in 1948, and found himself for the second time in his career in fear for his life and the lives of his immediate family. As part of a desperate effort to rehabilitate himself within the musical establishment, Shostakovich worked on a cantata called the “Song of the Forests” alongside the new quartet. “Song of the Forests” was a work of pure propaganda, written in praise of Stalin “the great gardener” in celebration of Stalin’s to convert Russia’s steppes to forest land. The success of that piece in the eyes of the authorities brought Shostakovich a certain degree of respite, but he continued to be extremely cautious about presenting new works until after Stalin’s death. Shostakovich completed the quartet on the 27th of December, and applied to the Ministry of Culture for a commission fee. He and the members of the Borodin Quartet were summoned for an audition. Rostislav Dubinsky, the founding first violinist of the quartet, said that after playing the work through for the committee the first time the reception was quite frosty. Desperate to help Shostakovich receive a badly needed fee, they played the work a second time “more optimistically,” stripping away any anger or irony from their performance, and the Party representatives then accepted the work. Dubinsky’s colleague, Berlinsky, denied this story, which probably says more about the fraught nature of string quartet politics than about what happened that day. Although the new Quartet had officially been accepted by the Ministry, it was held back from performance until after Stalin’s death in 1953. It was one of a number of major works that had been written, in Shostakovich’s words “for the drawer” that came flooding out in the final months of 1953.
Shostakovich maintained a lifelong interest in Jewish music and was a vociferous critic of any form of anti-Semitism. Many of his works, including the Fourth Quartet, incorporate original themes based on Jewish models, and a number of these came from the years just after World War II, when Shostakovich observed with particular horror that even as the memories of the Holocaust were painfully fresh that anti-Semitism began to return to Soviet society. He is quoted in Solomon Volkov’s “Testimony” as saying:
“Despite all the Jews who perished in the camps, all I heard people saying was “The kikes went to Tashkent to fight.” And if they saw a Jew with military decorations, the called after him , “Kike, where did you buy the medals?” That’s when I wrote the Violin Concerto, the Jewish Cycle and the Fourth Quartet. None of these works could be performed then. They were heard only after Stalin’s death. “
In the case of the Fourth String Quartet, it is in the last movement that the influence of Jewish music is most obvious- it is a kind of slow-burn Klezmer march which builds to a monumental climax then tapers off into brooding silence. Many listeners find the extraordinary second movement of the quartet to be the heart of the work- it is deeply personal and melancholy in tone, while the first movement is more extrovert, and the scherzo distinctly Russian in mood.
The Fourth String Quartet was the fourth of five Shostakovich string quartets arranged for larger forces as “Chamber Symphonies” by Rudolf Barshai. Barshai had been the original violist of the Borodin String Quartet, before leaving the group to pursue a conducting career. Barshai had approached Shostakovich and asked if the composer would consider transcribing his Eighth Quartet for the strings of Barshai’s Moscow Chamber Orchestra. Shostakovich declined to do so himself, but encouraged Barshai to have a go, and was sufficiently pleased with the result that he allowed the orchestration to be published as his Opus 110a. Barshai’s later efforts became more ambitious, moving beyond string orchestra for the first time with his orchestration of the Third Quartet by adding solo winds, and then in this arrangement by adding winds, brass and percussion. It is the most ambitious reimaging of any of his chamber symphony arrangements, but result still sounds remarkably like the work of Shostakovich himself.
ESO in Classical Music Magazine
The November 2013 issue of Classical Music Magazine includes a two-page feature article on the rejuvenation of the ESO. Features writer Toby Deller interviews Principal Conductor Kenneth Woods about the future of the ESO as an “orchestra of national significance.”
[Click on each picture to view at full size]
Postscript to the Flood – All Seven Flashes
The Story of Noah
We have been posting individual “flashes” from Lindsay Stansberry-Flynn’s lovely build-up to our performances of Noyes Fludde in Gloucester (19, 20 October) and Worcester (26 October), Here is the full story… The Story of Noah
These have been passed to the children involved as animals in the hope that we can close this story with a description of events from their own point of view …
If you have enjoyed Lindsay’s stories you may be interested in her latest novel, The Piano Player’s Son – here is the press release link http://www.crucialpr.co.uk/crucial-archive/8-releases/58-piano-players-son
ESO Programme Notes Online- Hans Gál Concertino for Cello and Strings
Hans Gal (1890-1987)
Concertino for Cello and Strings, opus 87
Hans Gál was born in the small village of Brunn am Gebirge, just outside Vienna. He studied with some of the foremost teachers in Vienna, including Richard Robert for piano (teacher of Rudolf Serkin , Clara Haskil and George Szell) and Eusebius Mandyczewski for composition, who had been a close friend of Brahms. In 1915 he won the K. und K. (Royal and Imperial) State Prize for composition for a symphony (which he subsequently discarded). In 1928 His Sinfonietta (which was to become his ‘First Symphony) won the Columbia Schubert Centenary Prize. The next year, with the support of such important musicians as Wilhelm Furtwängler, Richard Strauss and others, he obtained the directorship of the Mainz Conservatory. Gál composed in nearly every genre and his operas, which include Der Artz der Sobeide, Die Heilige Ente and Das Lied der Nacht, were particularly popular during the 1920s. When Hitler rose to power, Gál was forced to leave Germany and eventually emigrated to Britain, teaching at the Edinburgh University for many years.
Gál’s music enjoyed a brief resurgence in popularity in the years immediately after World War II, and was featured regularly in broadcasts on BBC radio. However, by the 1960s, BBC director William Glock’s programming philosophy, sharply slanted in favour of strictly modernist music, meant that Gál and other tonal composers of the time found themselves unable to get their music on the airwaves of the “Third Programme.” Gradually, performances also became more and more scarce, and Gál was deeply affected by the death in 1964 of his friend and foremost champion, conductor Otto Schmitgen. There were personal tragedies as well- Gál’s younger son Franz died by his own hand during this period. Circumstances for new work in a tonal idiom were similarly bleak on the continent, and commissions for new works in standard genres or for traditional instruments were almost non-existent. Indeed, the main champions and patrons of Gál’s music at this time were recorder player Carl Dolmetsch and Vinzenz Hladky, Professor of Mandolin at the Vienna academy of Music and publisher of mandolin music, who had instigated Gáls’s writing for mandolin in the period back in Vienna between 1933 and the Anschluss in 1938. Now in the 60s, Hladky published and regularly performed Gál’s music with his mandolin ensembles, to which Gál responded with two Sinfoniettas for Mandolin Orchestra, amongst other works. The Concertino for Cello and Strings, the last of Gál’s five concertinos, was written in 1965, inspired purely by Gál’s inner impulse, rather than a commission. It was premiered in 1968 by the Sudwest Rundfunk Orchestra.
What exactly does Gál mean by a “Concertino” rather than a “Concerto”? For some composers, the word “concertino” implies a certain frivolity or lightness of tone, while for others, it implies a work of very modest scale. Neither is true for Gál- the sole unifying factor of his five concertini is that they are all scored for solo instrument and strings, rather than full orchestra. Certainly, there is nothing frivolous about the Cello Concertino, and it is substantial work by any measure- at 27 minutes, it is roughly the same length as his Violin Concerto from 1933. There, however, is plenty of quirky humour in the Finale, which bears the curious tempo marking of “Allegretto ritenuto assai” or “slightly fast, but very held back.” The first movement, which is far more serious in tone, is built from the six note cell which opens the entire piece. Typical of Gál is the persistent ambiguity of major and minor which makes for an atmosphere both questioning and uncertain. At the work’s heart is a touching and lyrical Adagio, absolutely echt-Gál in its bittersweet tenderness. Had he so wished, Gál could certainly have made a killing in the lullaby-writing business.
Kenneth Woods