Sunday 21^st January 2024

3.00 pm

Runtime: 120 minutes

Colyer-Fergusson Hall

The Gulbenkian Arts Centre

University of Kent

Clare Hammond, piano

Programme Notes

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756-1791)

Sonata in D major, K. 311 (1777) 

i.   Allegro con spirito

ii.  Andante con espressione

iii. Rondeau (Allegro)

Dissatisfied with the limited opportunities available to him at the Salzburg Court, Mozart resigned his post as Konzertmeister of the Court Orchestra in 1777 to seek employment elsewhere. He travelled through Augsburg, Munich and eventually reached Paris after a prolonged stay in Mannheim, famous for the dramatic performance style of its Court Orchestra.

The Mannheim School was to become a significant influence on Mozart's work and comprised, among other techniques, rapid and sudden dynamic variation, the abandonment of basso continuo, and the 'Mannheim Rocket' (a rapidly rising passage with arpeggiated melodic line and crescendo). The Mannheim School were key in the development of sonata form while the pianos of local maker Johann Andreas Stein were praised by Mozart in letters to his father for their even tone.

In the Sonata in D major K. 311, Mozart manipulates thematic material in unusual ways and uses dissonance more extensively. The orchestral textures of the first movement give way to an affectionate love duet in the second. The Finale is a virtuosic rondo whose principal theme is carefree and vibrant. This sonata was written during the period when Mozart met the Weber family. First falling in love with their daughter Aloysia, he married her sister, Constanze, five years later.

Maurice Ravel (1875-1937)

Miroirs (1904-5)

i.    Noctuelles ('Moths')

ii.   Oiseaux Tristes ('Sad birds')

iii.  Oiseaux Tristes ('Sad Birds)

iv.   Une barque sur l'océan ('A boat on the ocean')

v.    Alborada del gracioso ('Dawn song of the Jester')

vi.   La vallée des cloches ('The valley of bells')

Written as a tribute to members of Les Apaches ('The Hooligans'), a group of artists of which Ravel was a member, Miroirs shows the composer striking out on new paths. Ravel wrote that the piece marked "a considerable change in my harmonic evolution" while its subtlety, nuance and eloquence is, at times, breath-taking.

Each movement is dedicated to a member of the group. 'Noctuelles' illustrates a line from dedicatee poet Léon-Paul Fargue ("the owlet moths fly clumsily out of a barn to drape themselves round other beams") and perfectly captures the delicacy and quiver of the insects' flight. 'Oiseaux tristes', dedicated to pianist Ricardo Viñes who premiered the set, is, according to Ravel, an evocation of "birds lost in the torpor of a dark forest during the hottest hours of the summer" and may have been inspired by the dawn singing of birds in the woods at Fontainebleau. Ocean waves and dazzling slivers of light are expertly captured in 'Une barque sur l'océan', dedicated to painter Paul Sordes. 'Alborada del gracioso' is an alternately serious and satirical portrait of a Jester performing at the Spanish Court, dedicated to music critic Michel-Dimitri Calvocoressi. Composer and pianist Maurice Delage is the final dedicatee with 'La vallée des cloches', a piece of mystery and rare serenity.

Interval

Huw Watkins (1976 - )

Four Spencer Pieces (2001)

Prelude

i.    Shipbuilding on the Clyde

ii.   The Crucifixion

iii.  The Resurrection of Soldiers

iv.   Separating Fighting Swans

Postlude

This sequence for solo piano actually comprises six pieces, since the four titled movements inspired by paintings of Sir Stanley Spencer are enclosed between a Prelude and Postlude in which serenely descending harmonies settle on repeated notes, tolling like a distant bell. Seven repeated notes prove a recurrent feature of the Spencer Pieces proper.

Watkins describes ‘Shipbuilding on the Clyde’ as ‘fast, rhythmically intricate and energetic’ and adds that ‘the juxtaposition of different ideas in the music reflects the level of detail in the painting’. Here, polymetric superimposition of repeated notes suggests the hammering of rivets, whereas the brief but violent third movement is audibly driven by a hammering of nails suggested by ‘The Crucifixion’.

The distant, tolling bell of the Prelude returns at the still opening of the longest movement ‘The Resurrection of Soldiers’, with convergent high and low sonorities suggesting a passing echo of ‘Le gibet’ from Ravel’s 'Gaspard de la nuit'. In due course the music passes over into a convolved fugue, but so subtly that it is difficult tell exactly where the transition occurs – or where it passes back again into the preludial music. Watkins describes ‘Separating Fighting Swans’ as both a scherzo and finale. Here note repetitions articulate chordal riffs and ostinati in a toccata-like texture.

Not least striking about the Four Spencer Pieces, is how Watkins, even at his most aggressively chromatic, contrives to keep his textures clean of the dispiriting greyness of so much ‘advanced’ piano writing. The Maidenhead Music Society commissioned the work in 2001 and Watkins gave the premiere in the Parish Church at Cookham, the Thames-side village Spencer lived in for so long and transfigured in his paintings.

Note by Bayan Northcott

Clara Schumann (1819-1896)

Three Romances, Op. 21 (1853)

As a child prodigy, Clara Wieck enjoyed a dazzling career and gave her official debut at the Gewandhaus in Leipzig at the age of nine. While touring Europe she performed bravura showpieces by Kalkbrenner, Herz and Thalberg, yet later was instrumental in changing the kinds of concerts pianists were expected to give. She performed from memory, unusual at the time, and started to include more substantial repertoire in her programmes.

Of composition, she wrote that "there is nothing that surpasses the joy of creation" yet the demands of eight children and a husband who, by his own admission, was "always living in the realm of imagination" meant that she was unable to dedicate as much time to the discipline as she wished. These Romances were written a year before Robert Schumann attempted suicide and was admitted, at his own request, into a sanatorium near Bonn. Towards the end of the first movement, Clara quotes Robert's Romance for oboe and piano Op. 94 No. 1. The harmonic complexity and subtlety of these pieces give them far greater depth and power than one might expect from mere miniatures. This is nuanced and deeply touching music.

Samuel Coleridge-Taylor (1875-1912) 

'Thata Nabandji',

'Deep River',

'The Bamboula'

from 24 Negro Melodies, Op. 59

Nos. 3, 10 and 8 (1905)

Coleridge-Taylor grew up in Croydon and studied at the Royal College of Music under Charles Villiers Stanford, alongside Gustav Holst and Ralph Vaughan Williams. He won significant acclaim early in his career with his cantata, Hiawatha's Wedding Feast, which Stanford conducted at its premiere in 1898.

Coleridge-Taylor developed a strong interest in African American spirituals after hearing the Fisk Jubilee Singers in concert in the 1890s and began to incorporate these melodies into his own works. In 1900 he participated in the First Pan-African Conference in London where he met intellectual and activist W. E. B. Du Bois, and poet Paul Laurence Dunbar. The ideology of pan-Africanism, a belief that "African people, both on the continent and in the diaspora, share not merely a common history, but a common destiny", resonated strongly. Coleridge-Taylor became deeply committed to the preservation and promotion of African and African American music, a cause which is expressed powerfully in the 24 Negro Melodies.

In the preface to this work, Coleridge-Taylor wrote that "what Brahms has done for the Hungarian folk-music, Dvorak for the Bohemian, and Grieg for the Norwegian, I have tried to do for these Negro Melodies". He inserts the original melody of each movement at the head of the page and then embarks on what he described as "nothing more nor less than a series of variations built on said motto. Therefore my share in the matter can be clearly traced and must not be confounded with any idea of 'improving' the original material any more than Brahms' Variations on the Haydn Theme 'improved' that." Of the 24 melodies, 16 are from the United States (including 'Deep River'), 7 from Africa (including 'Thata Nabandji' from the Ba-Ronga area of South Africa) and 1 ('Bamboula') is West Indian.

Cécile Chaminade (1857-1944)

'Impromptu' Étude de concert,

Op. 35 No. 5 (1886) and

Étude romantique, Op. 132 (1909)

Chaminade's musical talent was immediately evident from childhood yet her father did not permit her to study at the Conservatoire de Paris, arranging instead for her to study privately. She performed for Georges Bizet in 1869, who was impressed, and from 1878 started to give recitals exclusively of her own music. Chaminade toured widely in France, England and the US where her compositions both gained great popularity and brought her financial success.

Elected a Chevalier of the National Order of the Legion of Honour in 1913, Chaminade made a number of gramophone recordings which are highly sought after by collectors today. She described her style as "essentially of the Romantic school" as is borne out by these two etudes, the improvisatory and expansive 'Impromptu' and the Puckish 'Étude romantique'.

All notes by Clare Hammond, unless otherwise stated.