Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra Programme Notes Online

Henry E Rensburg Series The Planets I Thursday 19 October 2017 7.30pm sponsored by Investec

LEONARD BERNSTEIN (1918-1990) On the Waterfront: Symphonic Suite Andante (with dignity) – / At a walking pace (with dignity) – Presto barbaro – / Very fast and wild – Andante largamente – moving forward, with warmth – / At a stately walking pace – moving forward, with warmth – Allegro non troppo, molto marcato – / Fast but not too fast, very marked – Poco più sostenuto – a tempo / A little more sustained – at the original speed Given the profound impact that Leonard Bernstein had upon the musical world as a composer, a conductor, and an educator, it might come as a surprise that his score for Elia Kazan’s 1954 crime drama On the Waterfront represents his only foray into film music. The captivating sense of drama embedded within his writing for the stage might easily lead us to assume that cinema would have provided an ideal outlet for his talents. Nevertheless, he was initially hesitant to even entertain the idea, seemingly reluctant to hand over creative control of his music to a production team. Bernstein was similarly wary of Kazan himself. The Greek-born director’s recent cooperation with the House Un-American Activities Committee, the Congress-backed team tasked with investigating “disloyal and subversive” activities, had proved

particularly controversial, with Kazan eventually providing names of colleagues who, like him, had been a member of the Communist Party. It was only after Bernstein was shown a rough-cut of the film itself that he felt compelled to accept the commission. Given Kazan’s recent role as an informant, the subject matter of Budd Schulberg’s screenplay for On the Waterfront seemed especially relevant. Marlon Brando stars as Terry Malloy, a dockworker who finds himself caught in a crisis of conscience when he is encouraged to testify against Johnny Friendly (played by Lee J. Cobb), a corrupt union official whose control over the waterfront rests upon the silent compliance of those who work there. Having previously submitted to Friendly’s brutal regime, Malloy’s resolve begins to crumble after he unwittingly plays a role in the murder of a fellow dockworker and subsequently falls for his departed colleague’s sister Edie (Eva Marie Saint). The film was met with critical acclaim, and picked up eight Academy Awards. Though nominated, Bernstein lost out to Dimitri Tiomkin’s score for The High and Mighty, a result that evidently took many by surprise, the winner included. Writing to his composer a week after the ceremony, Kazan expressed his regret: “I felt terrible about their passing you by. Tiomkin’s speech told the whole story. I agree with him. You wrote one of the really original scores and I felt terrible about what happened. Anyway, I hope you feel that you want to do more pictures because I’m going to come at you with another one.” Though Bernstein’s return to film composition never materialised, there can be little doubt as to the quality of the music he produced for On the Waterfront. Though, as he had feared, much of what he wrote wound up on the cutting room floor, he quickly decided to forge a concert piece from his material. Cast in an expansive single movement, the suite traces the exploits of two principal ideas: Malloy’s own contemplative melody heard in an initial horn solo, and the tender love theme of Terry and Edie

introduced by the flute at the heart of the piece. These motifs are at first separated by an episode of prolonged agitation, an uneasy saxophone figure paving the way for rumbling percussion, whirling woodwind, and explosive brass stabs. However, as the suite progresses, elements of the two themes entangle with increasing frequency, and the result is an overwrought finale as impassioned climaxes give way to tumult. Richard Powell © 2017 about the composer Aaron Jay Kernis (b.1960) Winner of the 2002 Grawemeyer Award for Music Composition, 1998 Pulitzer Prize, and 2011 Nemmers Award, Aaron Jay Kernis is one of America's most honoured composers. His music appears prominently on concert programmes worldwide, and he has been commissioned by many performing organisations and artists including the New York Philharmonic, San Francisco, Toronto and Melbourne Symphonies, Los Angeles and Saint Paul Chamber Orchestras, Walt Disney Company, Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, Renée Fleming, Dawn Upshaw, Joshua Bell, Nadja Salerno-Sonnenberg and Sharon Isbin. Recent and upcoming commissions include his Symphony No.4 for the New England Conservatory (for its 150th anniversary) and Nashville Symphony; concertos for violinist James Ehnes, cellist Joshua Roman, violist Paul Neubauer and flautist Marina Piccinini; a work for the Borromeo String Quartet; and a piece for the San Francisco Girls and Brooklyn Youth Choruses with The Knights for the New York Philharmonic Biennial. His works have been recorded on Virgin, Dorian, Arabesque, Phoenix, Argo, Signum, Cedille and many other labels. Recent recordings include his Goblin Market and Invisible Mosaic II (Signum); Three Flavors featuring pianist Andrew Russo, violinist

James Ehnes and the Albany Symphony with conductor David Alan Miller (Albany); and a disc of his solo and chamber music, ‘On Distant Shores’ (Phoenix). His conducting engagements include appearances with the Pascal Rioult Dance Company, at major chamber music festivals in Chicago and Portland, and with members of the San Francisco and Minnesota Orchestras and New York Philharmonic. He is the Workshop Director of the Nashville Symphony Composer Lab and, for 11 years, served as New Music Adviser to the Minnesota Orchestra, with which he co-founded and directed its Composer Institute for 15 years. He teaches composition at Yale School of Music, and was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the Classical Music Hall of Fame. Leta Miller's book-length portrait of Kernis and his work was published in 2014 by University of Illinois Press as part of its American Composer series. AARON JAY KERNIS Legacy for solo horn and orchestra European premiere 1. Introduction: Echoes of … Will: intenso, allegro / intense, fast 2. Divided: adagio / slow 3. … Grace: grazioso / gracefully Legacy, a concerto for solo horn, strings, harp and percussion, grew out of the uneasiness and highly conflicted feelings I’ve experienced since the last American election. This concerto is an abstract work made up of themes presented in both harmonious and conflicting relationships, and equally a transformation of personal emotions and thoughts into musical structure, ideas and sounds. Former U.S. President Barack Obama gave his 2008 election acceptance at Grant Park in Chicago, and his farewell speech not

far from there, and to close that farewell sang the well-known hymn tune ‘Amazing Grace’. Most memorably he burst into it while eulogizing victims of the heinous 2015 race-motivated church shooting in Charleston, South Carolina. This song (by British-slave-trader-turned-Anglican-priest John Newton) has become deeply meaningful to Americans and people around the world, embodying ideas of religious transformation and mercy in light of earthly woes and personal wretchedness. First movement Legacy opens lyrically with an initial variation of that tune, ‘Echoes of …’ and is followed immediately by the main part of the first movement, ’Will’, which presents both forceful and pensive melodic ideas. A second slow variation of ‘Amazing Grace’ develops it further before closing in more agitated fashion. Second movement The second movement, ‘Divided’, is formed primarily out of an alternately descending and rising melody set with intense, massed strings and timpani. In fact, the timpani plays a role throughout much of the concerto of importance secondary only to the horn’s. A rising, searching horn melody contrasts with opening, while a sarcastic march based on the opening string line provides further contrast. Third movement Finally, ‘… Grace’ presents a series of compact, mostly transformed variations of the hymn melody in multiple characters before reaching a forceful climax and a closing which finally presents the original hymn tune to the people as the orchestra fades. Legacy was written in 2017 for Timothy Jackson and the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra, and co-commissioned for Jonathan Boen by the Grant Park Festival in Chicago. Legacy is dedicated to President Barack Obama to honour his humanity, humility, intelligence and inspiration as the nation’s former leader.

Aaron Jay Kernis © 2017 The world premiere was given on 11 August 2017 at the Grant Park Music Festival, Chicago, by Jonathan Boen, with the Grant Park Orchestra conducted by Carlos Kalmar. GUSTAV HOLST (1874-1934) The Planets, Suite, Op.32 Mars, the Bringer of War Venus, the Bringer of Peace Mercury, the Winged Messenger Jupiter, the Bringer of Jollity Saturn, the Bringer of Old Age Uranus, the Magician Neptune, the Mystic When Gustav Holst wrote The Planets, between 1914 and 1916, there must have been times when he wondered if he would ever hear it performed. As Europe plunged headlong into a long and devastating war, Holst was composing an ambitious work for an unusually large, colourful orchestra – one which would stretch the techniques of the country’s finest orchestral musicians to the limit. Yet these were not the kind of times in which concert-managers were likely to be taking expensive risks. Fortunately help was at hand, in the form of the wealthy composer and new music promoter Balfour Gardiner – great-uncle of the conductor John Eliot Gardiner. Astonished by the boldness and imaginative power of The Planets, Gardiner arranged for a performance in London’s Queen’s Hall in 1918, with the young Adrian Boult conducting. Right from the outset it was clear that a new chapter in British music had begun: the merciless, martial violence of Mars, the quicksilver rhythmic vitality of Mercury, the glacial stillness of the mystical, closing Neptune – nothing like this had been heard from a British

composer before. There are even stories of the Queen’s Hall cleaning ladies linking arms and dancing during a rehearsal for the fourth movement, Jupiter ... There was much in The Planets which was innovatory – even by the most advanced continental standards of the time. The terrifying 5/4 ostinato which dominates Mars is without parallel in music before 1914; and although the wordless off-stage choral writing in Neptune may owe something to Debussy’s Sirènes (from Nocturnes, published in 1900), the glittering coldness of Holst’s scoring is quite new, while the weirdly free-floating harmonies often seem to have more to do with Schoenberg or Scriabin. It’s hard to imagine anything in music more otherworldly than the slow fade-out at the end of Neptune. Holst stipulates that the upper-voice choruses are “to be placed in an adjoining room, the door of which is to be left open until the last bar of the piece, when it is to be slowly and silently closed”, and that the final bar (scored for choruses alone) is “to be repeated until the sound is lost in the distance”, until, added his daughter Imogen Holst, “the imagination knows no difference between sound and silence”. There are new instrumental effects too – like the two timpanists athletically pounding out the main theme soon after the start of Jupiter. There are things in The Planets which show how much Holst was influenced by the spirit of his times. It’s a surprise to learn that he finished Mars before the outbreak of the First World War – not just because it encapsulates the horror of war so memorably (Holst was never a military combatant) but because the kind of war it seems to anticipate is the mechanised mass destruction characteristic of the 20th-century. Yet when Mars was composed, war was largely fought by men on horseback or in hand-to-hand conflict; aerial bombardment was unknown; the tank hadn’t even been invented. The lyricism of Venus, the dashing brilliance of Mercury and the elemental good humour of Jupiter almost banish dark memories;

but then comes Saturn with its desolate slow funeral march and grindingly dissonant climax (with pealing alarm bells), the sinister, even brutal humour of the scherzo Uranus, and finally the world-renouncing, almost inhuman Neptune. It’s hard to resist the impression that – more than any other British composer at that time – Holst saw the shape of things to come. In choosing the seven known planets of our solar system besides Earth as a subject, Holst was giving public expression to his fascination with astrology, an interest he had kept to himself. A remark Holst made at the time shows how his interest in astrology fitted in with his philosophy as a whole. “Everything in this world ... is just one big miracle. Or rather, the universe itself is one.” This view of the cosmos as a “miracle”, in which everything is mysteriously connected, is of a piece with Holst’s abiding interest in Indian religious thought. It isn’t just coincidence that Neptune, the Mystic is placed last (in Holst’s ordering of the first two planets – Mars and Venus – are out of sequence, astronomically speaking). ‘The Mystic’, it would appear, has to have the last word. And it is fascinating to find Holst’s belief in the connectedness of everything reflected even in the basic elements of the music. As with the opening movement Mars, the final one, Neptune, is in 5/4 time, the five beats arranged ONE-two-three ONE-two. The note on which the offstage sopranos enter – thrillingly and very quietly at the heart of Neptune – is the very same note (G) to which so much of Mars is obsessively tied. So the two outer movements of The Planets – vastly different as they are – reflect each other closely. Stephen Johnson © 2017