Introduction

I am greatly looking forward to working with the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra in today’s concert and performing four works that are deeply rooted in my career.

This is a programme consisting of four virtuosic orchestral works, all of which have been orchestrated by genius composers at the beginning of the 20th century and present the same challenge to the conductor: to achieve utter precision in rhythmic expression in order to reveal every detail of orchestral colour.

Ravel's Piano Concerto and Hindemith's Music for Brass and Strings were both written in 1930 to celebrate the anniversary of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, so get ready for joy, fun, energy and a party! You’re guaranteed to enjoy these pieces. Honegger, a member of the modernist composition Groupe des Six, was fascinated by technique, transforming Pacific 231 into a powerful orchestral journey by train.

I have many personal connections with the music in this concert. As a child, I was fascinated by the fact that music could imitate an engine like a locomotive. As an adolescent, I heard Ravel's piano concerto and wanted to become a pianist. As a master student of conducting, I was looking for the music behind the technique in Hindemith's writing and finally: Petrushka was the first Stravinsky ballet I ever conducted in the first year of my professional career.

I hope you too may be able to enjoy listening and reflecting on the skills and intricacies incorporated into these compositional works.

Jac van Steen
Conductor

Programme notes

This concert is a bracing plunge into the excitements of the early twentieth century. The pieces here fizz with the thrill of the new sounds around them. ‘Take jazz seriously’ Ravel once scolded the American public: it certainly finds its way into this fabulously funky Piano Concerto. Stravinsky, once the wild child on the scene, brings puppets to life in Petrushka, his 1910 forerunner of Toy Story. We climb aboard a steam train for Honegger’s Pacific 231, while Hindemith gives the strings and brass a major workout. Blistering, energetic and surprising from start to finish.

Concert Music for Strings and Brass

Paul Hindemith (1895-1963)

Hindemith was one of those multi-faceted musicians whose ‘to do’ list would put most of us to shame. In the 1920s he worked as a composition teacher at the Berlin Musikhochschule, composed chamber works, experimented with electronic sounds, taught courses on film music, and taught himself Latin and mathematics. If that wasn’t enough, he embarked on a series of large-scale orchestral works at the end of the decade, including a trio of ‘Konzertmusiken’, the last of which was for Strings and Brass (one of several commissions for the Boston Symphony Orchestra’s 50th anniversary). His academic interests feed into the construction and instrumental interplay of the piece, but not at all in a dry or purely intellectual manner. Rather, it is a thrilling exploration of sonorities; a discourse, sometimes combative, sometimes conciliatory, between strings and brass.

In the opening bars it seems as if two pieces are being played simultaneously: a stern chorale from the brass alongside scampering, agitated strings, all upwards flurries and spiky rhythms. The strings give way to the brass, then reclaim the space in turn. After a brief joining of forces, the strings continue, contending with rude, discordant blasts from the ‘other side’. In the slower second half of the movement, there is more unity, with the horns even joining the string section in a shared melody, and the movement concludes with a beautiful, burnished major chord. The more collaborative second movement opens with an exuberant main theme across the whole ensemble, followed by a deeply soulful section led by the violas – Hindemith’s own instrument. This mood alternates with the scurrying style of the opening, until an almost romantic-sounding passage heralds the final, energetic burst – and a moment of absolute unity in the last bar.

Piano Concerto in G Major

Maurice Ravel (1875-1937)

In 1928 Ravel had a revelatory visit to the US, where he heard Gershwin perform at the Cotton Club in Harlem, spending the evening of his 53rd birthday in the company of the American composer. Ravel was surprised that the American musical establishment did not rate jazz and blues as highly as he did; he gave a lecture in April 1928 entitled ‘Take Jazz Seriously!’, and took his own advice by paying a generous tribute to it in his Piano Concerto in G. Suitably enough, it was commissioned, like Hindemith’s Concert Music for Strings and Brass, to celebrate an American orchestra – the 50th anniversary of the Boston Symphony.

The concerto opens with a bang, or rather a slap: an attention-grabbing beat on the whip and tambourine. The piano playfully warms up with some glissandi (rapid runs up and down the keyboard) while several instruments take solo spots in a carnivalesque opening passage. Jazz makes its appearance after less than a minute. The piano sounds like it is improvising, clarinets and muted trumpets are moody and bluesy, and strings are sensuous. There is also a gorgeously lyrical, climbing theme for piano and orchestra, channelling the sound of musical theatre. The movement is brilliantly eclectic, veering from one mode to another, as if someone was twiddling the dial on a radio, passing through a range of music stations.

In a completely different mood, the second movement is serene and luxurious. It is rightly celebrated for its lengthy and sumptuous melody: Ravel wrote later that he ‘worked over it bar by bar! It nearly killed me!’. It is the longest movement of the three, yet the quality of this ‘flowing phrase,’ as Ravel put it, fills time so agreeably that we barely notice. The finale, by contrast, is over in about four minutes. Back in the circus again, the piano has a fiendish time of it, while wind and brass heckle from the sidelines, occasionally brought to attention by the whip. Jazz is lightly present, mainly in punchy rhythms and impudent chromatic ‘slides’. The Concerto ends with a burst of fireworks from the piano and some emphatic chords from the band.

Pacific 231

Arthur Honegger (1892-1955)

What is it about music and trains? Ever since train travel was invented, composers have been setting their sounds to music – from Lumbye’s Copenhagen Steam Railway Gallop to Britten’s Night Mail to Steve Reich’s Different Trains. It is presumably something to do with the propulsive forward momentum and regular rhythms of the machine itself. For Arthur Honegger it was a need for speed (alongside music, the Swiss composer’s great love was his Bugatti sports car) and an intention to convey the locomotive’s ‘jouissance physique’ (physical pleasure) through music.

Pacific 231 charts a journey, from ‘breathing’ at the start, to getting going, to gathering speed up to 120 miles per hour. Honegger’s skill at orchestration gives great colour to the train’s sound world, with parping horns and string harmonics suggesting the powering-up of the engine, while low strings and brass provide the rhythmic underpinning as the locomotive gets going. The central section becomes an exhilarating whirl, perhaps depicting a blurry landscape seen through the windows. Ultimately sheer rhythmic power takes over: as Honegger put it ‘the 300-ton train hurtles through the dark night’, before – in a somewhat sinister-sounding turn – the train comes to an abrupt halt.

Petrushka (1947)

Igor Stravinsky (1882-1971)

The concept for Stravinsky’s Petrushka came to him in a vision in 1910:

I had in my mind a distinct picture of a puppet, suddenly endowed with life, exasperating the patience of the orchestra with diabolical cascades of arpeggios.

This puppet, ‘endowed with life’ became the subject of a ballet, directed by Sergei Diaghilev and – several decades later – an orchestral suite. It opens with a bustling orchestral trill over which various scraps of melody begin to emerge. This musical ‘montage’ includes numerous themes from Russian folk music, French folksongs, street songs, a queasy grind of the organ, and an Easter carol, all held together by repeated trills in the orchestra. This continues until wild tattoo on the timpanis and side drums interrupts everything, heralding the arrival of the Magician, and an entirely different mood. The Magician’s flute playing generates the puppets into life: Petrushka, the Moor and the Ballerina.

The piano comes to the fore in the Russian Dance section, where we discover that Petrushka loves the Ballerina, who in turn loves the Moor. The middle two tableaux are in the world of the puppets, capable of independent life away from the Magician – like an early-century Toy Story. Petrushka’s ‘cry’ is first heard here: a dissonant chord, initially in a soft clarinet duet (it becomes much more brutal later on). Petrushka has a halting dance, expressing his doomed love, and his hatred of the Magician who so cruelly created his thwarted life. The Ballerina arrives, sending him into a frenzy, which frightens her away. The Moor’s scene is dark, full of suppressed – and not-so-suppressed – violence before the Ballerina enters, to a flirtatious trumpet tune. A distressed Petrushka arrives, heralded by his ‘cry’, to take part in a one-sided scuffle with the Moor.

The finale takes place at a Shrovetide fair, and features another ‘montage’ in the final section, including a woozy clarinet tune in the ‘Peasant & the Bear’ section. Petrushka and the Moor reappear, with tragic consequences for Petrushka: the puppet’s death is marked by a laconic thump on the tambourine, yet the story does not end here. After some low growls from the bassoons as the Magician is interrogated by the police, the trills from the opening reappear, then Petrushka’s cry leaps from the texture, brandished loudly by two trumpets: his ‘puppet-body’ may have died, but his soul, now free of the Magician, survives. The piece finally ends with a questioning, sinister pizzicato: its impact is that of unfinished business – and it sends the sadistic Magician flying in terror.

© Lucy Walker