Introduction

It will be the first time my Abbey Road Concerto will be played in the UK and as the home place of The Beatles, I am so looking forward to sharing this music with you.

I first listened to The Beatles in the 1980s – whilst growing up in Israel, they were always played on the radio and the bus driver to school always played their music too. They soon became the soundtrack of my childhood!

I now live in Berlin with my family and six years ago my little boy pointed out the John Lennon High School, asking “who is that?”. I told him what I knew and then showed him some of their music on YouTube – he was completely mesmerised and during the next six months, they were all he spoke of. When I practised, he didn’t want to hear Bartók’s Violin Concerto but instead snippets of The Beatles’ music! So, The Beatles were naturally reintroduced into my life and I rediscovered my love for them.

I’ve always been into arranging and transcriptions of music, ignoring typical musical boundaries and instead approaching music by composers like Billy Joel or Tchaikovsky in the same way. I even took a couple of Beatles songs to use as solo violin encores. When the pandemic came, I had more time to explore these arrangements and put them with piano accompaniment. I wanted to arrange music from The Beatles’ Abbey Road Concerto as I knew all of the songs from my childhood but I just couldn’t pick which ones to arrange – so I decided to include them all in a concerto instead!

This concerto is 35 minutes of tremendous violin writing and it’s not easy for the conductor or orchestra, yet alone the soloist. From the very beginning you’ll be able to hear fragments of some of your favourite songs, including ‘I Want You’, which is used as an introductory melody and continues to accompany the first movement. The second half of the concerto leads to a crazy cadenza which is reminiscent of the melody from ‘Strawberry Fields’. If you really concentrate, you may be able to hear this quotation as we move into the finale.

I’m excited to be joined by Eivind Gullberg Jensen – we’ve worked together a lot over the past 20 years, having first met when I was at the Berlin Philharmonic. This will be his first time conducting this concerto, and
I warn him – it’s not the typical crossover!

I am very excited to be back with the CBSO and to make music with the orchestra, especially to reminisce about our ties and shared reflections of our past times with Sir Simon Rattle.

Guy Braunstein
Violin

Programme notes

Howard’s glittering Argentum was written for the silver anniversary of Classic FM, while Anna Meredith was inspired by ‘stomping along a beach in Scotland’ for Nautilus. Violinist Guy Braunstein combines the Beatles’ Abbey Road with the orchestra in the UK Premiere of his new concerto, under the baton of Eivind Gullberg Jensen. Plus, Vaughan Williams’ inspiring The Lark Ascending, Elgar’s short-but-sweet Elegy, and Britten’s famous Sea Interludes.

Argentum

Dani Howard (b. 1993)

Howard’s Argentum, commissioned to mark the silver anniversary of Classic FM, is a glorious curtain-raiser. Whirling, rising figures dominate the opening moments, appropriately sparkling for a work whose title means ‘silvery’. The energy rarely flags, other than a few pauses for breath. A more stately theme seems on the brink of breaking out, yet the glittering figure from the start is constantly straining at the leash, seemingly impossible to hold back.

Elegy

Edward Elgar (1857-1934)

A short, sweetly sad piece for string orchestra, Elgar’s Elegy was composed in 1909. It is a moving tribute to his friend, music editor August Jaeger, who had died suddenly (some ten years earlier, Elgar had immortalised him as ‘Nimrod’ in his Enigma Variations). Elegy is gently melancholy rather than tragic, conveying a dignified sense of mourning in its slow-moving melody, the strings muted throughout. It resolves at the very end in a cautiously hopeful major key.

Violin Concerto

The Beatles (arr. Guy Braunstein)

The Beatles are having something of a resurgence – if indeed their music ever went away. From the recent 8-hour deep-dive assemblage of footage in Peter Jackson’s Get Back, to Ron Howard’s documentary Eight Days a Week, to Sam Mendes’ forthcoming feature films about each of the Fab Four, it appears that both the musicians and their songs are perpetually current, somehow forever relevant. Even in Richard Curtis’s Yesterday, a film that imagines a world where their music didn’t exist, the melodies somehow survive. In this spirit of ongoing rediscovery, violinist Guy Braunstein, long obsessed with their music, was seized with the impulse to create a violin concerto out of the songs from the 1969 album Abbey Road. Braunstein has been quite clear that this is not ‘crossover’ music, but rather a classical, virtuoso interpretation of the ‘eternal’ music of the Beatles.

The arrangements locate the well-known songs in an unfamiliar environment, bringing out sometimes surprising musical elements of the originals through their translation into symphonic style. Braunstein’s take on ‘Come Together’, with its bluesy violin riffs and bottom-heavy orchestration, seems to channel the orchestral poems of William Grant Still. ‘Oh Darling,’ meanwhile, converts Paul McCartney’s throaty vocals into a café-concert lilt; George Harrison’s beautiful ‘Something’ begins like a parlour song, before segueing into the famous melody. Further adventures follow, including the playful ‘Octopus’s Garden,’ bubbling with woodwind, and ‘Maxwell’s Silver Hammer,’ paying tribute to the original arrangement with its passages for brass band. Braunstein seems compelled to return to the obsessive thrum of ‘I Want You (She’s So Heavy)’, the ominous pulsing of which opens the work, and then forms the basis of a substantial movement that becomes almost Wagnerian in scope (as indeed does the original track). It is beautifully contrasted with the softly lilting ‘Because’ which follows. The violinist’s cadenza, subtitled ‘Remembering… Strawberries?’ is a sweetly nostalgic nod to the band’s 1967 single ‘Strawberry Fields Forever’. The transformation of Beatles songs into the format of ‘violin concerto’ is a remarkable feat of musicianship; and a reminder of the evergreen quality of the melodies themselves.

Nautilus

Anna Meredith (b. 1978)

Anna Meredith’s Nautilus began life as an electronic piece in 2011. Meredith would perform the work with her own band, manipulating the sound world herself from her decks. It is a blistering work, its opening propulsive fanfares segueing into an incessant, chromatic climb, so arranging it for acoustic forces was an interesting challenge (described by Meredith as a ‘call to arms’). In the electronic version the continuous beat can have a reliably metronomic precision. Across a huge ensemble, this machine-like relentlessness is harder to achieve. Meredith also found herself refining the orchestral texture to ensure that it was not an undifferentiated wall of sound or, as she put it, a ‘heavy metal piece.’ It is not, though, machine-like or inhuman, and was in fact inspired by the natural world. According to the National Ocean Service a ‘nautilus’ is ‘a mollusc that uses jet propulsion to explore the ocean deep’, and Meredith was initially inspired by the sound and feeling of ‘stomping along a beach in Scotland’. At one point there is a fascinating displacement of the original, primal beat which Meredith experienced while ‘stomping’ in irregular counterpoint to her own internal rhythms. This is conjured up brilliantly by the timpani and trumpets around the halfway mark.

The Lark Ascending

Vaughan Williams (1872-1958)

The Lark Ascending, taking its title and spirit from a poem by George Meredith, can seem weighed down by its reputation, derided as much as praised for being so often dubbed ‘the nation’s favourite’ classical piece. But it is worth listening to with a fresh perspective, and with a nod of respect to Vaughan Williams for using a poem as an organising principal rather than a musical form. Audiences at the time of its 1920 premiere (in the original version for violin and piano) were certainly startled by its originality. The Times critic noted that the piece ‘showed a serene disregard for the fashions of today or yesterday’. The violin part, frequently heard alone and stratospherically high, has a tranquil yet also vulnerable quality. The orchestra has a ‘grounding’ function, with its more earthy, folk-like harmonies, and overall the mood is peaceful and meditative. Violinist Richard Tognetti, who had originally dismissed The Lark as piece of fluff, later suggested it was ‘transcendental to the point where you are astral travelling.’

Sea Interludes

Benjamin Britten (1913-1976)

Britten’s famous Sea Interludes were composed to cover scene changes in his 1945 opera Peter Grimes. Yet their musical and dramatic qualities transcend this purely practical function. In each interlude Britten deploys one of his very characteristic techniques: creating a musical landscape which seems to be unruffled and complicated – and then thoroughly ruffling and complicating it. ‘Dawn’ is the least unsettling, with shimmering strings and liquid woodwind semiquavers. Yet it is curiously untethered, operating mostly in a high register, as if holding its breath in anticipation. Chords on the low brass intervene periodically, eventually becoming more menacing – and foretelling their more aggressive role in ‘Storm’. In ‘Sunday Morning’ horn chords suggest church bells, while strings play a lively melody suggestive of hectic activity as the villagers rush to a church service. Recurring throughout the interlude, the melody is tricksily written, as if intended to catch the players out. Real bells join in towards the end, dissonant with the rest of the harmony, and generating a sense of unease.

In ‘Moonlight’ a beautiful, surging theme plays out in the strings, punctuated by high woodwind interventions. It is largely a peaceful movement, though as with the other interludes, there are disconcerting dissonances and ominous rumblings from the timpani towards the close. Finally, ‘Storm’ is about as terrifying a piece of orchestral music as Britten ever wrote, portraying the North Sea at its most unpredictable and dangerous. The oases of calm, featuring some sensuously beautiful chords, are taken from Peter Grimes’s line in the previous scene in the opera: ‘what harbour shelters peace, away from tidal waves, away from storms.’ There is ultimately no peace in this interlude – and it ends with a window-rattling bang.

© Lucy Walker