ELY SINFONIA

Reg. Charity No. 1161642 President: Raphael Wallfisch

presents

SYMPHONIC METAMORPHOSIS

Ely Cathedral Saturday May 6th 2017

at 7.30pm

Ely Sinfonia

Conductor: Steve Bingham

Programme

Maurice Ravel Le Tombeau de Couperin Paul Hindemith Symphonic Metamorphosis César Franck Symphony in D minor

There will be a 20-minute interval after the Hindemith

By kind permission of the Dean and Chapter of Ely Cathedral

Programme £1.50

FRIENDS OF ELY SINFONIA

SUPPORT THE ORCHESTRA AND GET DISCOUNTED TICKETS PLUS PRIORITY BOOKING FOR OUR CONCERTS! Joining the FRIENDS of ELY SINFONIA is a great opportunity to become part of a lively, social group dedicated to supporting the orchestra.

Being a Friend will give you the following advantages:

Personal email giving advance information of concerts and special events

10% discount plus advance booking for tickets to concerts promoted by Ely Sinfonia

Friends’ newsletter

Opportunity to meet the conductor and players at rehearsal

All this for just £10 a year!

As the local community orchestra, Ely Sinfonia aims to give players the chance of orchestral experience close to home, to provide local schoolchildren with the opportunity to learn about music and instruments, and to bring a wealth of wonderful music to local music-lovers.

Your subscription will go towards developing the orchestra, allowing it to give more concerts in Ely and to take live music out to rural East Cambridgeshire and beyond. The Friends of Ely Sinfonia help us to perform in local venues and to run workshops during which young players have the chance to play alongside more experienced musicians and learn new, challenging pieces.

For more information about becoming a Friend, please ask for details and a membership form at the Friends’ stall or email friends@elysinfonia.co.uk.

Jonathan Woolston

Maker of fine violins, violas, cellos & their bows

Instrument repair & restoration

Sound adjustments Bow rehairs

222 Mill Road (entrance on Hope Street)

Cambridge CB1 3NF

Tel: 01223 413860 jwwoolston@gmail.com

STEVE BINGHAM studied violin with Emanuel Hurwitz, Sidney Griller and the Amadeus Quartet at the Royal Academy of Music from 1981 to 1985, winning prizes for orchestral leading and string quartet playing. He is founder and lead violinist of the Bingham String Quartet, internationally known for its performances of both classical and contemporary repertoire.

Steve has appeared as guest leader with many orchestras, including the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra and Scottish Chamber Orchestra, English National Ballet and English Sinfonia. He has given solo recitals in the UK and America and his concerto

performances include works by Bach, Vivaldi, Bruch, Prokofiev, Mendelssohn and Sibelius.

Steve is developing a sound reputation as a conductor. As well as Ely Sinfonia, he is musical director of the City of Peterborough Symphony Orchestra, and he is increasingly being invited to appear as guest conductor with groups all over the country.

As a violinist, Steve is keenly interested in improvisation, electronics and world music. He has collaborated with several notable musicians in the field of world music, and has also released five solo CDs: Duplicity, Ascension, Third, The Persistence of Vision and Touch.

www.stevebingham.co.uk

WELCOME Quotation and conflict

Where do composers get their ideas from? What moves them to write a song, a suite, a poem or a symphony?

In tonight’s programme three artists pay homage to earlier musicians, either through direct quotation or by revisiting their musical styles in the service of their own inspired visions. There is conflict too. In Ravel’s case it was the First World War; with Hindemith it was an irritation, perhaps, with what he saw as American superficiality; and for a beloved teacher and extraordinary musical talent, the Belgian César Franck, conflict arose from a clash of views about what French music should be, which provoked an unenthusiastic reaction to his great symphony.

In the end none of this matters, though, because what emerges are three pieces of extraordinary poignancy, wit and charm. And hearing them together like this? Well, it seems as if they were made for each other!

Jeremy Harmer

Le Tombeau de Couperin Maurice Ravel (1875–1937)

Prélude Forlane Menuet Rigaudon

As patriotic as the next man (or woman), Maurice Ravel wanted to join up when the First World War erupted in 1914. But he was small and somewhat frail, and so he couldn’t become a front-line soldier. Instead, for a while he served as a military nurse’s aide, where he managed to work at composing, including starting a six-movement piano work originally designed to be a memorial (tombeau) to François Couperin ‘the Great’ (1668–1783), one of the masters of the French Baroque. But then he managed to get himself assigned as a truck driver to the 13th Artillery Regiment. He called his truck Adelaide and referred to himself as Driver Ravel. And witnessed the horror of war. His mood changed, his health suffered, friends died and so too, in 1917, did the composer’s mother.

Together they play everything from mainstream works to the contemporary, including special commissions.

Ely Sinfonia is particularly keen on promoting youth music and is a strong supporter of the Cambridge Young Composer of the Year competition: winners’ pieces have frequently been played at our concerts.

The orchestra also has close links with Ely Cathedral, regularly providing small groups to play at events such as the Easter Day Mass. Other projects include open workshops, when less experienced players have the chance to play alongside the orchestra’s regular members and develop their orchestral and ensemble playing techniques.

www.elysinfonia.co.uk publicity@elysinfonia.co.uk

These experiences changed Ravel and his music-making. For example, he altered his cheerful orchestral work Wien: its character changed so that it became the acid La Valse, a scathing demolition of fin-de-siècle excess in a disintegrating noise of nihilism.

His Tombeau de Couperin changed too, becoming a memorial not just to music, but also to seven friends who had been claimed by the conflict (one of the original six movements was devoted to two brothers). And then, when the war was over, Ravel set to work on one of the things he did best: orchestrating – think of his extraordinary reworking of Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an exhibition, for example. The result is this suite, now rearranged as four movements; a gentle reminder not of conflict, but of young lives lost and mourned.

There is something of the Baroque suite, still, in the music. A gentle Prélude leads into the Forlane, a northern Italian dance. Listen out for the beautiful oboe line in the Menuet before the work ends with an old provençal dance, a Rigaudon – a form occasionally used by Rameau and Bach, amongst others, and notably (as all string players know) by Grieg in his Holberg Suite.

ELY SINFONIA Violin 1 Christina Everson, Ann Claydon, Chris Moule, Naomi Laredo, Jacky

Cox, Richard Williamson, Fiona Gloag, Ashley Thorpe, Christian Ayling

Violin 2 Roz Chalmers, Richeldis France, Ursula France, Judith France, Ian Claydon, Jonathan Skerrett, Graham Jones, Mel Siddal

Viola Katy Baker, Yvonne Williamson, Marlen Moss-Eckhart, Hilary Sellars, Tricia Mathieson, Simon Watkins, Susan Pyke

Cello Dave McLeish, Rachel Mycock, Carol McEvoy, Saeko Soya-Dijkstra, Helen Hills, Nick Balaam , Jacob Cox, Nat Johnson, Sally Parnell, Charlotte Dean, Joan Marchbank, Laura Millman

Double bass John Chalmers, Rosemary Hughes, Chris Finch, Stuart Clow

Flute/Piccolo Susan Gatell, Jean Swift, Ellie Wolmark

Oboe Jenny Sewell, Carol London (cor), Amanda Williams

Clarinet Michelle Heathcote, Peter Fisher, Stella Page (bass)

Bassoon Phil Evans, Simon Laughlin, Wes Gibbon (contra)

Horn Rob Spivey, Adrian Watts, Clare Stygall, Nick Sims-Williams, Laurie Friday

Trumpet Graham Berridge, Evert Bokma, David Ellis

Trombone Michael Rickwood, Matthew Ralph, Carl Davis, Edwin Sung

Tuba Brian Partridge

Timpani Kate Wishart

Percussion Jack Davis, Peter Britton, Sarah Wright, Brenda Stewart

Harp Cecily Beer

Artistic director Steve Bingham

ELY SINFONIA was founded in November 1999 as a millennium project. It was the brainchild of local musicians and launched with the aid of ADeC (Arts Development in East Cambridgeshire) and various leading local organisations and individuals.

Since then it has more than achieved its aim of becoming a beacon of excellence as East Cambridgeshire’s own community orchestra. It is now regarded as one of the region’s best respected orchestras, with players of all ages and backgrounds, from school and college students to business professionals, retired people and local music teachers.

Symphonic Metamorphosis of Themes by Paul Hindemith (1895–1963) Carl Maria von Weber

Allegro Scherzo Andantino Marsch

Paul Hindemith, a gifted composer, was also a conductor, teacher and, like so many other notable figures (Mozart and Tchaikovsky, to name but two), a gifted viola player. However, he was also German, and so when the power of the Nazi state started calling his music “degenerate” and the composer himself an “atonal noisemaker” (according to Goebbels), and bearing in mind the rising anti-Jewish sentiment in the country, he knew it was time to leave. Even Furtwängler got into trouble for defending him. He went first to Switzerland before arriving in the USA, where he stayed until 1953, teaching at Yale University amongst other places.

To give an idea of Hindemith’s mercurial brilliance we need only mention Trauermusik, an elegiac work for solo viola and strings written in a room at the BBC in less than six hours when the death of George V made a première of his viola concerto that night inappropriate!

But back to tonight’s programme. Symphonic Metamorphosis was the result (or was it?) of a commission from the choreographer and dancer Léonide Massine. He wanted a ballet based on themes by Carl Maria von Weber, one of the great composers of the early 19th century. Hindemith might have been happy to do that – he had previously written a ballet called Nobilissima Visione for Massine. Unfortunately, however, he went to see Massine’s interpretation of the Bacchanale from Tannhäuser and found it “simply quite stupid”. The final straw was Massine’s announcement that Salvador Dalí would do the designs. That was the end of that! But Hindemith had been sketching music based on little-known Weber pieces from a book of piano duets he had in his possession, and when he returned to these three years later he created the work you hear this evening.

There are broadly two views on what emerged from the composer’s pen. Edward Downes, for example, wrote that “with all the unquenchable exuberance of a frisky Triton, trumpeting and splashing about in a fountain by Lorenzo Bernini, Hindemith pours forth a flood of joyous sound. This spirit of plenty, of easy, uninhibited productiveness is expressive of Hindemith’s affinity for the Baroque spirit in music.” Giselher Schubert, one of Hindemith’s biographers, suggests, on the other hand, that the piece was a deliberate concession to the vulgar taste of an American public whose musical ideal could be gauged by the popularity in the 1940s of Prokofiev and Shostakovich. It’s difficult to know what to make of that on so many levels! But froth or cynicism? Frankly, who cares? It’s just wonderful.

But the symphony! Franck was pressured to write it by his devoted students, but the work ran into the hostility of Saint-Saëns and his crowd, who wished to champion new French music in a revolt against the German symphonic tradition. Franck’s composition was exactly what they didn’t want. Even Félicité was unhappy, railing against its morally compromising sensuality and passion. Others disagreed, César’s pupils especially. He was their beloved teacher, Père Franck, who according to one pupil “never taught by means of hard and fast rules or dry, ready-made theories”, and the symphony is dedicated to another of them, Henri Duparc. He and the other students defended their hero against the antagonism of his rivals, and of course they (and Franck) have the last laugh, for this charming symphony has been a favourite for many people ever since.

Well, actually that’s not quite true. There was a time, according to Tom Service, writing in the Guardian, when every conductor, from Furtwängler to Karajan, Klemperer to Bernstein, would programme the work regularly. But recently? When was the last time you heard it? And this neglect is a pity, because it is a radical work, a hybrid, a wonderful distillation of German symphonic form through the filter of French imagination and clarity. It is one of the great glories of late 19th-century French music (and yes, Camille, it stands up there with your Organ symphony!) and it deserves to be heard a lot more. Maybe tonight’s performance will start a trend.

The symphony’s three movements are “saturated”, according to Phillip Huscher, with the three-note theme of the first movement, a motif that echoes Beethoven’s last quartet (he gave it the words Muss es sein? – Must it be?). Liszt used the same motif and in the Ring cycle Wagner used it as his ‘fate’ leitmotif.

The Allegretto is part slow movement, part scherzo. The opening theme, played on a cor anglais, really upset one of those critics at the first performance, who, forgetting how magically Berlioz uses the instrument, thought it was completely out of place.

“The finale,” Franck wrote, “takes up all the themes again as in Beethoven’s ninth. They do not return as quotations, however; I have elaborated them and given them the role of new elements.”

“I have risked a great deal,” the composer wrote, “but the next time I shall risk even more.” Sadly he never got the chance, but we have the exquisite Symphony in D minor to tell us what he did and what he might have done had he lived.

The opening Allegro, almost Hungarian in flavour, is based on the fourth of eight pieces in the piano book Hindemith owned. The exuberant Scherzo takes a theme from incidental music that Weber wrote for Turandot, a play by Carlos Gozzi based on the legend that later inspired Puccini. The Andantino is a pastoral in ternary form with a beautifully lyrical clarinet tune.

The final Marsch starts out as the eerie funeral theme Weber intended it to be, before horns announce a cheerful tune which, though interrupted again by doom and gloom, eventually blazes out in an explosion of orchestral brilliance.

Symphony in D Minor César Franck (1822–1890)

Lento – Allegro ma non troppo Allegretto Allegro non troppo

Belgian by birth, French by choice (and so that he could get the job of Professor at the Paris Conservatoire), César Franck composed his symphony very late in his career, and it ran into a storm of criticism at its first performance – a year before the composer’s death. It was an unusual piece, a symphony in the symphony-averse world of nineteenth-century Paris, and that may partly explain its hostile reception. But it’s all a bit more complicated than that.

César-Auguste-Jean-Guillaume-Hubert Franck was born in Liège, Belgium, but moved to Paris with his brother to study at the Conservatoire. It was his bank-clerk father’s encouragement and championing of their prodigious talents that got them there; it was his father’s abrasive (some say vindictive) behaviour that finally alienated the young César-Auguste. But by then Franck-père had already alienated half of Paris too with his relentless promotion of his sons’ performances. In the end, though, it was his father’s implacable hostility to César-Auguste’s affection for Félicité Desmousseaux, the woman he finally married, that caused him to leave his parents’ house after they had moved back to Belgium. Franck went back to Paris, where he developed his gifts as a pianist, improviser and organist. His improvisations were legendary, and his tenure as organist at Sainte-Clotilde was to last for many years.

He was also composing, with mixed results. Ruth, an early oratorio premièred in front of Liszt and Meyerbeer, was not a success, but organ pieces and chamber works (such as the famous violin sonata) fared better.