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Errol Gay, Conductor
Forsyth | Jubilee Overture
Anton Bruckner | Symphony #4, in Eb Major (Cahis 11)
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Pre-Concert Talk
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George Weston Recital Hall, Toronto Centre for the Performing Arts Phone: (416) 733-9388
The Toronto Centre for the Arts is conveniently located on the TTC Yonge subway line, (North York Centre or Sheppard stops) minutes away from Highway 401 and Yonge Street with convenient parking lots in the surrounding area. |
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OCTOBER 25, 2009 CONCERT NOTES |
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SPECIAL FEATURES |
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VENUE |
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Jubilee Overture Malcolm Forsyth (b.1936) Born in Pietermaritzburg, South Africa, Malcolm Forsyth majored in trombone, composition and conducting at the University of Cape Town, obtaining his BMus in 1963, his Master's in 1966 and his Doctorate in 1972. During his studies he played trombone in the Cape Town Symphony Orchestra for 8 years.
His career as a composer was launched in 1962 with the Overture Erewhon, the success of which led to an invitation in 1963 to write the Jubilee Overture for the CTSO’s 50th anniversary the following year. The work was premiered on 5 March 1964 in the City Hall, Cape Town, with Arthur Fiedler conducting the CTSO.
Forsyth emigrated to Canada in 1968 and settled in Edmonton, where he was Bass Trombonist for the Edmonton Symphony Orchestra for 3 years and then Principal Trombone for another 8 years. He joined the Faculty of Music at the University of Alberta, teaching theory, composition and conducting, and became Composer-in-Residence in 1996. He retired from the university in 2002.
Forsyth’s first contribution to the Canadian music scene was Sketches from Natal, commissioned and broadcast by the CBC in 1970. Its celebration of South African tribal rhythms is typical of many subsequent Forsyth works.
The composer has won three JUNO awards for Best Classical Composition: in 1987 for the 1984 orchestral suite Atayoskewin; in 1995 for Sketches from Natal; and in 1998 for Electra Rising, the concerto he wrote for his daughter, the cellist Amanda Forsyth.
Malcolm Forsyth is a recipient of the Order of Canada and the Queen’s Golden Jubilee Medal.
Symphony No.4 in Eb major, Romantic Anton Bruckner (1824-96) Rarely in the course of musical history can there have been such a contrast between the outward persona and the inner creativity of a composer than is the case with Anton Bruckner.
His provincial background and the many stories about his legendary naïveté and gullibility, his servility and obsequiousness, his unrefined clothing (it was once said of his trousers that they looked as though they had been made by a carpenter), his awkward social behaviour, his mania for counting objects, his life-long proclivity for romantic infatuations with teenage girls, and many other supposed evidences of personal shortcomings have combined to produce a picture of a child-like peasant completely unable to deal with the real world. That such an apparently unsophisticated nature could produce enormous symphonic compositions of such startling originality is little short of incredible.
Already established as a brilliant organist, Bruckner was turning 40--after years of obsessive theoretical study--by the time he felt ready to embark on a career as a composer. In the following year, 1865, he saw – and was stunned by--a performance of Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde, and became friends with its composer.
In 1868 he moved from St. Florian to Vienna, where he unwittingly became involved in the ongoing musical war between the Wagner and Brahms factions, the latter led by the influential critic Eduard Hanslick, who up until then had been warmly supportive of Bruckner. Bruckner’s criticism of the symphonies of Brahms, however, together with his allegiance to Wagner, made him a lightning rod for the vitriol of the pro-Brahms camp; he was vilified by the press, rejected by the public, repeatedly unable to secure government grants or teaching positions, and humiliated by the orchestras, with the Vienna Philharmonic consistently refusing to perform his new works.
Much has been written about the apparent influence of Wagner’s music on Bruckner, but this was in fact nowhere near as strong as is sometimes claimed; indeed, much of the ‘Wagner’ in Bruckner is the result of the well-intentioned but misguided efforts of three of his pupils, Franz and Josef Schalk and Ferdinand Löwe, who re-worked and re-orchestrated several of the symphonies to substitute a Wagnerian ebb and flow in place of Bruckner’s distinctive stop-start pacing.
All of Bruckner’s numbered symphonies were written after the start of his friendship with Wagner, but while Bruckner did absorb a few Wagnerian touches over the years his music is in most respects quite remote from Wagner’s. Certainly Bruckner’s harmonic evolution benefitted little from the relationship. Wagner had, after all, extended the boundaries of tonality in opera, where form was also based on non-musical considerations; with the concept of tonality being so fundamental to classical form it would have been a brave symphonic composer who would have embraced Wagner’s innovations at that time.
What did strike Bruckner immediately, however, was the enormous and unprecedented slowness of Wagner’s compositional process; he was fascinated by the majestic deliberation of Wagner’s musical invention and its slow growth into vast forms. Through his own constant exploration of the problem Bruckner became the first composer to transfer successfully this kind of slowness to purely instrumental music.
It is precisely this monumental size and slowness that can make Bruckner’s symphonies seem so difficult to understand, but the accusations leveled against them are often unfounded. Bruckner’s orchestra, for example, is not overly large; generally, the instrumentation required is a bit smaller than for a Brahms symphony. (Only his last three symphonies reach Wagnerian proportions.) The music is not rambling and disjointed – far from it: there is a wealth of closely-related thematic material and a conciseness that is frequently overlooked because it is not accompanied by brevity. Nor are the sudden changes in texture and the frequent pauses, both so typical of Bruckner, indications that he was unable to write smooth transitions; Bruckner tended to orchestrate in blocks of sound, and the pauses and interruptions not only provide clear dividing lines between the various sections, without which the listener may easily become lost, but also help to increase the comprehension of the unity of the subjects in the large-scale movements without undermining the logic of the structure.
Even more basically, the pauses are simply part of Bruckner’s unique mode of expression. When the conductor Arthur Nikisch remarked on the number of rests in the Second Symphony, Bruckner replied: “But look, if I have something important to say I must first take a deep breath!”
If there is a key to understanding Bruckner’s symphonies it is, above all, patience. Rather like a walk through the mountains of Bruckner’s Austria, the works do not so much develop as unfold. Just as we can pause in the beauty of a wonderful view without moving on, knowing that whatever views await us along the path will present themselves in their own good time, so, too, our experience of a Bruckner symphony can be no less rewarding if we are in no hurry to be anywhere other than where we are, if we are prepared to absorb fully the beauty of each moment, and if we are willing to resist the temptation to forge constantly ahead.
Although Bruckner had private names for several of his symphonies, The Romantic is the only one to which he gave an official title. Despite its name, however, and the fact that Bruckner lived through the Romantic era, his symphonic works in particular are pure music, written in an individual style but without the poetic or programmatic influences of the period.
The Fourth Symphony occupied Bruckner for almost all of 1874 – from January 2 until November 22; that version, however, was not heard until 1979. No symphonies have ever been subject to as much revision as Bruckner’s – and not always by the composer himself, of course – and Bruckner worked on what he regarded as the definitive version between 18 January 1878 and 5 June 1880, although he did make further slight revisions in 1886.
Hans Richter gave the first performance with the Vienna Philharmonic on 20 February 1881, and it was an unqualified success, the first that Bruckner had experienced for one of his symphonies. Overwhelmed and in tears at the end, and in a gesture typical of his childlike naïveté, Bruckner squeezed a coin into Richter’s hand, requesting that he “Take it and drink a pitcher of beer to my health.”
Rather than spend it, Richter wore the coin on his watch chain, recalling it years later as “the memento of a day on which I wept.”
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PROGRAM NOTES |
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