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A treasure for

all TasmaniansA live symphony orchestra can transport usto a world that’s enchanting and uplifting.

We want all Tasmanians to be able to share that joy, so we’re helping to make that happen.Through the AccessTix program, Hydro Tasmania provides free tickets for Tasmanians who, because of disadvantage or disability, couldn’t otherwise attend a TSO concert.To see if you, or someone you know, is eligible,go to tso.com.au/accesstix

Photograph by Alastair Bett

Giordano Bellincampi conductorBenjamin Beilman violin

NIELSENHeliosDuration 12 mins

TCHAIKOVSKYViolin ConcertoAllegro moderato – Moderato assai Canzonetta (Andante)Finale (Allegro vivacissimo)Duration 33 mins

Friday 8 March 7.30pmFederation Concert Hall Hobart

INTERVAL

Duration 20 mins

DVORÁKSymphony No 8Allegro con brioAdagioAllegretto graziosoAllegro ma non troppoDuration 36 mins

This concert will end at approximately 9.30pm.

M A S T E R 2

TchaikovskyViolin Concerto

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Tasmanian Symphony Orchestra concerts are broadcast and streamed throughout Australia and around the world by ABC Classic. We would appreciate your cooperation in keeping coughing to a minimum. Please ensure that your mobile phone is switched off.

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Giordano Bellincampi is Music Director of the Auckland Philharmonia Orchestra. Previous posts have included Principal Conductor of Milan’s I Pomeriggi Musicali, Chief Conductor of the Kristiansand Symphony Orchestra, General Music Director of the Duisburg Philharmonic, General Music Director of the Danish National Opera, Aarhus, and, between 1997 and 2000, Chief Conductor of the contemporary ensemble Athelas Sinfonietta Copenhagen, Denmark. He has worked with orchestras such as the Royal Stockholm Philharmonic, Rotterdam and Royal Flemish Philharmonics and St Petersburg Symphony. Highlights of recent seasons have included Verdi’s Requiem with the Sofia National Opera, concerts with the Toledo Symphony Orchestra, performances of Aida and Manon Lescaut with the Auckland Philharmonia Orchestra and a concert of Wagner highlights with the Duisburg Philharmonic to mark the re-opening of the orchestra’s home in Duisburg’s Mercatorhalle. As an opera conductor he has worked also with the Royal Danish Opera and Deutsche Oper am Rhein. Recordings include the Nielsen Violin Concerto with Kolja Blacher and Hans Christian Lumbye’s Orchestral Works. Giordano Bellincampi was born in Rome and studied conducting at Copenhagen’s Royal Danish Academy of Music. Honours include a Knight of the Order of the Dannebrog, awarded for services to Danish culture, and the title of Cavaliere from the President of Italy for his international promotion of Italian music.

Helios, Overture, Op 17

Denmark’s greatest composer, Carl Nielsen was born on the island of Fyn (or Funen) in 1865. His family was extremely poor, but his mother introduced him to folksong, which she sang ‘as if she were longing for something far away beyond the farthest trees of the land.’ His father played violin and cornet in a local amateur band. Carl soon joined the band, initially as a violinist. Soon after, he joined a military band in Odense, playing signal horn and trombone, where he came to the notice of local authorities who arranged for him to study at the Copenhagen Conservatorium. Nielsen was not, by all accounts, a brilliant or disciplined student; but he did become avidly interested in philosophy, art and language – all elements which had a profound influence on his music.

Three years after graduating he joined the Royal Chapel, the orchestra of the Royal Theatre, as a second violinist. He held this post for many years, but during that time was also awarded an Ancker scholarship, which enabled him to travel to a number of European cities. In Paris in 1890 he met the Danish sculptor Anne Marie Brodersen, whom he married the following year. His reputation as a composer grew steadily during the 1890s, so that in 1901 he was granted a government annuity to supplement his income as an orchestral player, and by 1903 he also received a retainer from his publisher. In 1904 his wife received an Ancker scholarship to travel to Greece, and Nielsen accompanied her, in part to further explore his interest in the culture of classical antiquity. Nielsen wrote the Helios overture in Athens, in a room in the Conservatorium there that looked out at the Acropolis.

Helios was the ancient Greek god of the sun, and Nielsen’s piece was inspired by the sight of the sun rising and falling above the Aegean Sea.

Nielsen’s description of the piece prefaces the score:

Silence and darkness – then the rising sun with a joyous song of praise – it wanders on its golden way – and sinks quietly into the sea.

‘Silence and darkness’ form the background for a gentle motive of echoing horn calls, not unlike Wagner’s evocation of latent energy at the beginning of Das Rheingold. String scale figures and rising motives from solo winds build in intensity until the ‘peaceful song of praise’ is sounded by the horns. Trumpet fanfares announce a new faster tempo where the big tune is developed first with ever-increasing energy, but framed with contrastingly pastoral episodes. A brass apotheosis releases yet more energy in thrilling, rapid string passages and after one more glorious climax from the full orchestra, the music begins its descent into the stillness and darkness with which the work began.

Gordon Kerry, Symphony Australia © 2001

This is the first performance of this work by the Tasmanian Symphony Orchestra

Carl Nielsen (1865-1931)

Benjamin Beilman began playing violin at the

age of five and went on to study with Almita

and Roland Vamos at the Music Institute of

Chicago, Ida Kavafian and Pamela Frank

at Philadelphia’s Curtis Institute, and with

Christian Tetzlaff at the Kronberg Academy.

He first came to international attention

following First Prize wins in the 2010 Young

Concert Artists International Auditions and

the 2010 Montréal International Musical

Competition. In the 2017-18 season,

Benjmain Beilman appeared as a soloist

with the Detroit, Houston, Oregon, North

Carolina and Indianapolis Symphonies and

the Orchestra of St Luke’s. He also toured

California with the New Century Chamber

Orchestra in a program which he both

programmed and play-directed and, in

Europe, debuted with the Scottish Chamber

Orchestra and Trondheim Symphony. Recent

highlights have included play-directing

Vivaldi’s Four Seasons with the Vancouver

Symphony. In the spring of 2018, Benjamin

Beilman and pianist Orion Weiss premièred

Demons, a new sonata written for the pair

by Frederic Rzewski, commissioned by

Music Accord and dedicated to the political

activist Angela Davis. They will continue to

perform that work during this year. Benjamin

Beilman’s discs include Spectrum, featuring

works by Stravinsky, Janácek and Schubert.

Benjamin Beilman plays the ‘Engleman’

Stradivarius from 1709 generously on loan

from the Nippon Music Foundation.

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Violin Concerto in D, Op 35 Allegro moderato – Moderato assai Canzonetta (Andante) Finale (Allegro vivacissimo)

It was the winter of 1877, and Tchaikovsky was in love with a young violin student at the Moscow Conservatorium, Josef Kotek. Tchaikovsky had known ‘this wonderful youth’ for about six years. In 1876 Kotek had also acted as a go-between for Tchaikovsky and his new patron, Nadezhda von Meck, who eschewed any face to face contact with the composer. Kotek was a devoted and affectionate but platonic friend to Tchaikovsky, but predictably enough, soon became besotted with a fellow (female) student. The composer’s ardour cooled quickly, and within weeks of discovering Kotek’s new relationship, Tchaikovsky had made his fateful proposal to Antonina Milyukova, a former Conservatorium student who had fallen in love with him. They married two months later, and as the depth of their cultural and personal differences quickly became clear, Tchaikovsky left his wife two months after that. Milyukova, incidentally, was not the deranged harpy that histories (or myth) have made of her.

Kotek and Tchaikovsky remained friends, however, and the Violin Concerto seems to have grown out of a promise that the composer made to write a piece for one of Kotek’s upcoming concerts. While Kotek was not, ultimately, the dedicatee or first performer of the work, he was of enormous help to Tchaikovsky in playing through sections of the piece as the composer finished them.

After leaving his wife, Tchaikovsky, accompanied by one or other of his brothers (and at one point Kotek himself), travelled extensively in western Europe. Tchaikovsky worked on the Violin Concerto in Switzerland in early 1878, not long after completing the Fourth Symphony and the opera Eugene Onegin. Commentators are generally agreed that both of those works reflect

Tchaikovsky’s emotional reactions to the traumatic events of his marriage, though the composer himself was careful, in a letter to Mme von Meck, to point out that one could only depict such states in retrospect. In any event, it seems likely that, apart from honouring a promise to Kotek, Tchaikovsky found the conventions of the violin concerto offered a way of writing a large-scale work without the personal investment of the opera and symphony.

Like the great concertos of Beethoven and Brahms, Tchaikovsky’s is in D major and in three substantial movements. The first develops two characteristic themes within a tracery of brilliant virtuoso writing for the violin, and like Mendelssohn in his concerto, Tchaikovsky places the solo cadenza before the recapitulation of the opening material. As in the slow movement of the Fourth Symphony, the central Canzonetta works its magic by the deceptively simple repetition of its material. The work concludes with a bravura, ‘Slavic’ Finale which is interrupted only by a motif for solo oboe which for one writer recalls a moment in the ‘Letter Scene’ from Onegin (which itself parallels the relationship between Tchaikovsky and Antonina).

The work was initially dedicated to the virtuoso Leopold Auer, who thought it far too difficult and refused to play it. In 1881 Adolf Brodsky gave the première in Vienna, where that city’s most feared critic, Eduard Hanslick, tore the piece to shreds. But Hanslick, like many a music critic, made a bad call; Tchaikovsky had written one of the best-loved works of the repertoire.

Abridged from a note by Gordon Kerry © 2003

The Tasmanian Symphony Orchestra performed this work with conductor Kenneth Murison Bourn and soloist Beryl Kimber in Hobart on 2 August 1957 and, most recently, with Mark Wigglesworth and Karen Gomyo in Hobart on 15 May 2015.

Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky (1840-1893)Symphony No 8 in G, Op 88, B163 Allegro con brio Adagio Allegretto grazioso Allegro ma non troppo

The success that enjoyed, thanks to Brahms’ advocacy in the late 1870s, made his name beyond Vienna and Prague, and in 1884 he made the first of nine visits to England where his music became – and remained – extremely popular. In 1890, now a regular visitor, Dvorák arrived with the score of his Eighth Symphony (published originally as No 4), which he had recently premièred in Prague but which for some time was colloquially known as the ‘English Symphony’.

In fact the piece has, even for Dvorák, an especially Bohemian accent; its immediate popularity with the British audience perhaps has more to do with its relaxed attitude to the formal rigours of Germanic symphonism, and an abundance of memorable, folk-inflected melody. For Brahms, normally a great supporter, this was a major flaw. He argued (offering, in passing, a seriously backhanded compliment to his rival Anton Bruckner) that

too much that’s fragmentary, incidental, loiters about in the piece. Everything fine, musically captivating and beautiful – but no main points! When one says of Dvorák that he fails to achieve anything great and comprehensive with his pure, individual ideas, this is correct. Not so with Bruckner, all the same he offers so little.

In fact, the formal freedom and melodic richness are precisely what makes this work special. According his early biographer, Otakar Šourek, Dvorák aimed ‘to write something different from his other symphonies and shape the musical content of his ideas in a new manner’. He did so not by piling up beautiful

incidents, as Brahms suggests, though; as he is said to have told his student, Josef Michl: ‘To have a beautiful idea is nothing special. The idea comes from itself and if it is beautiful and great, man can take no credit for that. But to develop the idea well and make something great from it, that is the most difficult, that is – art!’

While the Symphony is a work of absolute music, it was composed in close proximity to a series of concert overtures originally known as Nature, Life and Love – the more customary titles In Nature’s Realm, Carnival and Othello came later. This triptych shows Dvorák’s essential Romanticism in his adherence to the cult of Nature and his delight in celebrating his ethnic musical roots, and in similar musical language to that of the Eighth Symphony.

The first movement is in G major and marked Allegro con brio, but Dvorák disguises both speed and tonality by beginning with a slow-moving minor-mode melody in the cellos, richly doubled by horn, clarinet and bassoon. When the music makes it to the home key of G major it is with a chirping melody for the flute. In a breathtaking display of orchestration that ranges from translucent shimmering to the richness of divided violas and cellos, Dvorák elaborates his themes through an audacious series of key changes; the conventional recapitulation is here a shining G major chord with the flute melody now given to a more introspective cor anglais. The Adagio, in C minor, is often brightened with rapid, falling major scales like pealing bells, and has an impassioned central section. The scherzo begins with a lyrical G minor dance contrasting with a more buoyant G major trio and fast coda. The finale is a set of variations on the bright fanfare announced by the trumpet as the movement opens.

Antonín Dvořák (1841-1904)

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What Brahms, of all people, failed to hear in this music is how the varying episodes, across the movements, are unified by pervasive rhythmic cells. The long-short-short figure with which the work opens also dominates the slow movement’s main theme. Groups of four repeated even notes – crotchets or quavers – appear at structural points; groups of triplets can appear as distant drum taps, or the opening gesture of an important melody (like that of the Adagio), and be transformed into the three-note up-beat of the third movement; the dotted rhythm of the third movement’s trio is transmuted in the rhythm of the fourth movement’s fanfare, and when that theme is stated by the orchestra its rising arpeggio reveals it to be related to the flute’s theme from the first movement. This almost subliminal motivic manipulation gives coherence to some of Dvorák’s most expansive and poetic music.

Gordon Kerry © 2013

The Tasmanian Symphony Orchestra first performed this work with conductor Rudolf Pekárek in Hobart and Launceston on 19 and 21 September 1951 and, most recently, with Howard Shelley in Hobart and Launceston on 29 and 30 April 2016.

Antonín Dvorák