Bela Bartok (1881 - 1945) Divertimento, Sz 113 Benjamin Britten (1913 - 1976) Simple Symphony, Op. 4 William Walton (1902 - 1983) Two Pieces for Strings...
Bela Bartok (1881 - 1945)
Divertimento, Sz 113
Benjamin Britten (1913 - 1976)
Simple Symphony, Op. 4
William Walton (1902 - 1983)
Two Pieces for Strings from the film music for Henry V
Igor Stravinsky (1882 - 1971)
Concerto in D Major
The Hungarian composer Bela Bartok was born in 1881. His father, director of
an agricultural college, was a keen amateur musician, while it was from his
mother that he received his early piano lessons. The death of his father in 1889
led to a less settled existence, as his mother resumed work as a teacher,
eventually settling in the Slovak capital of Bratislava (the Hungarian Pozsony),
where Bartok passed his early adolescence, counting among his school- fellows
the composer Erno Dohnanyi. Offered the chance of musical training in Vienna,
like Dohnanyi he chose instead Budapest, where he won a considerable reputation
as a pianist, being appointed to the teaching staff of the Academy of Music in
1907. At the same time he developed a deep interest, shared with his compatriot
Zoltan Kodaly, in the folk-music of his own and adjacent countries, later
extended as far as Anatolia, where he collaborated in research with the Turkish
composer Adnan Saygün. He acquired a considerable reputation abroad,
particularly among those with an interest in contemporary music, although
acceptance at home proved more grudging. Dissatisfaction at the growing
association between the Hungarian government of Admiral Horthy and National
Socialist Germany, led him in 1940 to emigrate to the United States of America,
where he died in 1945, after a briefly held series of teaching appointments and
a small but important number of major compositions.
Bartok's Divertimento for string orchestra was written in 1939 in
response to a commission from Paul Sacher, founder and conductor of the Basle
Chamber Orchestra (Basler Kammerorchester). Bartok had first met Sacher in
1929, and had already written for him the Music for Strings. Percussion and
Celesta and his Sonata for Two Pianos and Percussion. The Divertimento
has something of classical structure about it, with a sonata-allegro first
movement, a four section slow movement, with the first section finally
recurring, and a final movement that is, formally, a rondo. Texturally Bartok
makes use of the Baroque concert grosso. The first movement opens with a first
subject stated by the first violins over the repeated chords of the rest of the
orchestra. A secondary element alternates between solo instruments and the whole
orchestra, before the second subject proper, introduced by loud syncopated
octaves, and a development that includes canonic writing. Muted lower strings
provide the accompanying figuration at the start of the Adagio, with a
second violin theme, the opening figure of which assumes importance. The violas
provide a strong opening to the second section, with a third section over an
ostinato accompaniment in fourths and fifths. The last movement opens with a
statement of the principal subject, continuing to contrast the solo string
quartet with the whole orchestra. There is a central fugato section and a
quasi-improvisatory violin cadenza, before a reworking of the earlier material,
now diverted into other musical channels.
Benjamin Britten's Simple Symphony is testimony to his precocious
ability as a child. The work itself was written in 1934, when the composer was
twenty, but makes use of thematic material written before he was twelve. The
movement titles hint at an element of satire, in what has proved an attractive
work, available to competent amateurs as to professional string orchestras. Born
in Lowestoft in 1913, Britten went through the customary English education of
private and public school, before continuing his professional musical raining,
already begun privately with Frank Bridge, at the rather less satisfactory Royal
College of Music. His marked ability, facility as a composer, and musical
language that had an international as much as a national appeal, aroused
jealousy, as his career developed, not least with his opera Peter Grimes in
1945, a work that soon, unlike anything else by his compatriots, entered
international operatic repertoire. The Simple Symphony demonstrates a
winning command of melody and a deft handling of material and string textures,
making the work one of the most attractive of the string orchestra repertoire.
Each movement has a descriptive title that aptly captures its mood.
The English composer William Walton, born in Oldham in 1902 and a chorister
and later student at Christ Church, Oxford, owed much of his earlier success to
his friends and patrons the Sitwells, with whom he collaborated on Façade. During
the course of his life he wrote a considerable quantity of film music, of which
the music for Laurence Olivier's 1944 film of Shakespeare's Henry V remains
the best known. The film included a scene not in Shakespeare's play Henry V, although
graphically described by Mistress Quickly. The death of the old drunkard
Falstaff, once a boon companion of the young prince, provided Walton with the
opportunity for a moving Passacaglia, a Short piece that unwinds over a
repealed bass figure. Equally moving is the gentle "Touch her soft lips and
part", which was written for the parting of Falstaff's companion Pistol and
his landlady Mistress Quickly.
The Son of a distinguished Russian singer, Igor Stravinsky spent his
childhood and adolescence either in St. Petersburg or, during the summer, at the
country estates of his relatives. He studied music briefly with Rimsky-Korsakov, but first made a name for himself in Paris with commissions for the
Russian ballet impresario Dyagilev. He spent the years after the Russian
Revolution of 1917 in Western Europe and in 1939 moved to the United States of
America, settling finally in Hollywood. He wrote his Concerto in D in
response to a commission from Paul Sacher to celebrate the twentieth anniversary
of the foundation of his Basle Chamber Orchestra in 1946. The work was first
performed by the orchestra in Basle on 27th January 1947. In three movements,
the concerto opens with a bold introduction and a movement broadly in tripartite
sonata-form, leading to a slow movement Arioso in a lyrical spirit later
to become familiar in Stravinsky's opera The Rake's Progress. The final Rondo
follows without a pause, continuing, as its title proclaims, in that highly
characteristic form of neo-classicism that Stravinsky had made his own, at once
identifiable by its melodic contours, harmonies, rhythmic figuration and
structure.
Bournemouth Sinfonietta
Since its foundation in 1968, the Bournemouth Sinfonietta has established
itself as one of the most versatile chamber orchestras working in Europe today.
With a busy touring schedule of concerts across the South and West of England,
elsewhere in the United Kingdom and abroad, a pioneering education and community
programme and a commitment to music by living composers, the range of the
orchestra's work is unparalleled. Since 1989, the Principal conductor has been
the distinguished Hungarian-born pianist and conductor Tamas Vasary, who assumed
the additional position of Artistic Director in 1992.
Richard Studt
Richard Studt, Director and Associate Conductor of the Bournemouth
Sinfonietta, a pupil of Manoug Parikian and winner of various prizes as a
student at the London Royal Academy of Music, was for some ten years a violinist
and soloist with the Academy of St. Martin-in-the-Fields. He was subsequently
concert-master of the London Symphony Orchestra and directed the London
Virtuosi, the Concertante of London and his own Tate Music Group, recording with
the last of these five Vivaldi concerti, two of which were, newly discovered. As
a conductor he studied with Maurice Handford and received significant
encouragement from Simon Rattle and from courses under Sergiu Celibidache. At
the same time he continues his career as a violinist in classic repertoire on
his Stradivarius instrument, the 'Dolphus', made in 1727.