Thursday 22nd October, 5.45pm to 8.45pm
The Octagon, Performance Space - Centre for Digital Music
Queen Mary University of London, Mile End Road, E1 4NS
London Chamber Orchestra Chamber Players with Omar Ebrahim (narrator) and Karim Said (piano)
Professor Elaine Chew (piano), Hilary Sturt (violin) and Ian Pressland (cello), Dr Paul Edlin (lecturer)
A Music@QMUL event curated by Dr Paul Edlin. Full program notes re-produced here.
PROGRAMME
5.45pm: Five Orchestral Pieces (The Octagon) - film: 55 mins - 1994
Michael Gielen conducts the Netherlands Radio Philharmonic.
The Dutch filmmaker Frank Sheffer studied graphics, design and art in Eindhoven and The Hague, and received his degree from the Dutch Cinema Academy in Amsterdam in 1982. From the outset, his films have combined various influences and disciplines. His first film, “Zoetrope People”, devoted to Francis Ford Coppola, includes long sequences with the singer Tom Waits. His filmed portrait of the Dalai Lama was made with the performer Marina Abramovic, who introduced him to the composer John Cage. Between 1987 and 1992 they worked on various projects, and Cage became one of Scheffer’s main inspirations. Scheffer’s desire to have significant encounters with his subjects before filming them shines through in his work, and results in perceptive, meaningful portraits. This approach is particularly noticeable in his work on the great American composer Elliott Carter, whom he filmed over a period of 25 years and became a close friend. His documentary portraits of key figures such as Carter, Pierre Boulez, Gustav Mahler and Igor Stravinsky provide a veritable panorama of 20th century music. Scheffer’s work is committed to showing that barriers, labels and pigeonholes are completely outdated concepts. The experimental video he made jointly with Brian Eno about the latter’s Music for Airports, in which he sought to translate Eno’s “ambient music” into images, is a perfect example of this approach. In the Ocean is devoted to the three central figures of contemporary music in New York, Eno, Steve Reich and Philip Glass. Sheffer has also recently returned to directing, with a video inspired by the Chinese composer Tan Dun’s Tea-Opera.
6pm and 6.45pm: Art Inside Music (Performance lab inside G2, Engineering Building) - illustrated lecture/full performance: 40 mins
Performance lab inside G2, Engineering Building - illustrated lecture/full performance: 40 mins
Arno Babajanian (1921 - 1983) Piano Trio in F# minor (full performance: circa 23 mins)
I. Largo – Allegro espressivo – Maestoso • II. Andante • III. Allegro vivace
Elaine Chew (piano), Hilary Sturt (violin) and Ian Pressland (cello)
Alessia Milo (spectral art)
Arno Babajanian (1921-1983) is a national hero in his native Armenia. Born in Yerevan, Babajanian’s extraordinary musical talent was recognised at age five by composer Aram Khachaturian who suggested he be given proper music training. Following studies at Yerevan Conservatory, then in Moscow with Vissarion Shebalin, he returned to teach at Yerevan Conservatory from 1950-1956. It was during this period (1952) that he wrote the Piano Trio in f# sharp minor. It received immediate acclaim and was regarded as a masterpiece from the time of its premiere. The Piano Trio is considered one of his most important works. In three substantial movements, it is filled with memorable melodies, and unusual juxtapositions of notes to form strange sonorities. The piece is full of passion—at times soulful and others stormy—with excellent writing for all three instruments.
Elaine Chew is Professor of Digital Media at Queen Mary University of London, where she is affiliated with the Centre for Digital Music and serves as its Director of Music Initiatives and co-Lead of the Cognition, Creativity, and Expression research theme. Previously, she was a faculty member at the University of Southern California, where she founded and directed research at the Music Computation and Cognition Laboratory, first as an Assistant Professor, then a tenured Associate Professor. She received PhD and SM degrees in Operations Research at MIT, a BAS in Mathematical and Computational Sciences (honors) and in Music (distinction) at Stanford, and FTCL and LTCL diplomas in Piano Performance from Trinity College, London.
Graduating from the Guildhall School of Music and the Royal College of Music with solo, chamber and contemporary music prizes, Hilary Sturt performed on both violin and viola with Ensemble Modern for the next 20 years. She has been guest leader of many British ensembles and chamber orchestras, and is currently a member of the Rasumovsky Quartet and Apartment House, winners of the Philharmonic Society Award for the Most Outstanding Chamber Music in 2011. Hilary is much in demand as a teacher, adjudicator and conductor throughout the UK. She is Head of Strings at St Paul's Girls' School, Professor at the Royal College of Music, a Diploma examiner for the Associated Board and an examiner for AQA exam board. Last summer Hilary recorded the new 2015 syllabus Grades 1-4 for the Associated Board.
As a young cellist, Ian Pressland was a member of the Hampshire Country Youth Orchestra and studied cello with Elizabeth Braddock, Joseph Koos, Florence Hooton, Colin Walker and Donald Mcall. Whilst at Trinity College of Music London, he won various prizes, including the Sonata Prize, the Louise Bande and Sir John Barbirolli prizes for cello. On leaving the college, he taught and worked as a freelance cellist before becoming a member of the BBC Concert Orchestra. For 10 years he coached at and became Assistant Director of Pro Corda (The National Association for Young Chamber Music Players). During this time, he was invited to become player / manager at The London Festival Orchestra following which he set up his own arts promotion company. In 2004 he became Managing Director of the London Chamber Orchestra (LCO). Ian now combines his part-time work as a consultant to the LCO with his long-time membership of the Rasumovsky String Quartet and other playing, coaching and teaching. He has enjoyed many years as coach and principal cellist of The Forest Philharmonic Orchestra, where he is also on the Board of Directors. Ian considers himself fortunate to play a cello made by Joseph Hill in 1760; this was purchased with the generous help of a loan from the Musicians Loan Fund in memory of Jacqueline du Pre.
Alessia Milo is an architect and PhD candidate in Media and Arts Technology at Queen Mary University of London. She researches the influence of architecture on how we make sense of a spatial sound field. She is interested in creating digital architectures inspired by sound where sonic interactions can alter spatial situations and interpretations. Milo received her first class honors degree in Architecture from Valle Giulia - Universitá di Roma "La Sapienza" with an experimental thesis in acoustics. She has worked and collaborated as architect and visualiser with Archea Associati, CAVE in RTWH in Aachen, VIS from SNS of Pisa, Human Harp and Di Mainstone, Matteo Fraboni. For this performance, she will illuminate the musical scene with a set of vectorial drawings created in Processing, designed specifically for Arno Babajanian's Trio, playing with time, light, darkness, colours, frequencies, and their spectral energy.
6.45pm: Composers’ Secrets (The Octagon) – illustrated talk (40 mins)
Dr Paul Max Edlin is Director of Music at Queen Mary University of London. He has a career that encompasses composing, performing, lecturing and artistic direction. He studied at the Royal College of Music and at Sussex University where he took his doctorate. His works have been performed both nationally and abroad by many of the UK’s leading artists such as London Sinfonietta, Arditti Quartet, Sarah Connolly CBE, Dame Evelyn Glennie, Nicholas Daniel, Rolf Hind, Psappha and the Britten and Southbank Sinfonias. A former Professor of Music, his works have been broadcast on BBC 2, BBC Radio 3, as well as on radio & television abroad. He was elected President of the Incorporated Society of Musicians (2011 to 2012). From 2008 to 2012 he was Artistic Director of Sounds New, a time that the festival flourished. He is currently Artistic Director of Deal Festival of Music and the Arts. He is also a trustee of Cantoris Charitable Trust and is Chair of the Board of Ora and a member of the board of the East London Music Group.
7.45pm: Ode to Napoleon (The Octagon) – concert
Anton Webern (1883 – 1945) Langsamer Satz
Johannes Brahms (1833 – 1897) Theme and Variations in D minor for piano, Op.18a
Arnold Schoenberg (1874 – 1951) Ode to Napoleon Bonaparte, Op 41
London Chamber Orchestra Chamber Players with Omar Ebrahim (narrator) and Karim Said (piano)
Webern composed Langsamer Satz for string quartet in June 1905, but it wasn't publicly performed until May 27, 1962, in Seattle. The Langsamer Satz (literally "Slow Movement") originated during a hiking trip in Lower Austria that Webern took with his cousin, Wilhelmine Mörtl, who later became his wife. It is love music, as Webern diarized ecstatically - an outpouring by the 21-year-old composer, whose studies with Arnold Schoenberg had begun the previous autumn. "To walk forever like this among the flowers, with my dearest one beside me, to feel oneself so entirely at one with the Universe, without care, free as the lark in the sky above - Oh what splendor...when night fell (after the rain) the sky shed bitter tears but I wandered with her along a road," wrote Webern in language reminiscent of the poet Richard Dehmel, who had inspired Schoenberg's Verklärte Nacht -- a work not without influence on the present composition. "A coat protected the two of us. Our love rose to infinite heights and filled the Universe. Two souls were enraptured." The Langsamer Satz is tonal music, albeit chromatic, firmly ensconsed in a tradition stretching from Liszt through Wagner to Hugo Wolf, Richard Strauss, and Mahler. The last named had not as yet entranced Webern, but during the 1930s he led Vienna's Workingmen Symphony Orchestra in readings of Mahler's music allegedly as insightful as Bruno Walter's, and certainly more comprehensive. Webern wrote tonal music for several more years after 1905 -- until, as Schoenberg's most intuitive pupil, he became "more Catholic than the Pope," to borrow an apposite aphorism (it nettled the Master when Webern anticipated his serial dicta, especially as regards rhythm). At just over 13 minutes, the Langsamer Satz is marginally the lengthiest of all Webern works, longer even than In Sommerwind that preceded it, or the Passacaglia, Op. 1, both orchestral, that followed. (With his radical renunciation of tonality came a new minimalism.) It has a root key, C minor, and a traditional sonata-form structure.
Before the final revisions and publishing of the String Sextet in B-flat, Clara Schumann heard Brahms trying it out. Especially impressed with the variation movement, she ardently requested that Brahms make a piano arrangement. He did this, presenting it to her as a birthday greeting in 1860, two years before the Sextet was published. While the arrangement is performed frequently and Brahms himself seems to have been particularly fond of it, it has attracted negative criticism as a piece of piano music. In attempting to retain most of the music written for six instruments while transferring it to two hands, Brahms asked for several awkward techniques, including many wide rolled chords and anticipatory bass notes jumping to the upper harmonies. He also assigned a great deal of harmony to the right hand, asking it to split chords with the left hand under the melody, which makes voicing and projection of the melody itself difficult. Continuity of inner voices is also made difficult by the many jumps. The rushing scales in variation 3 are far more effective on cello strings than on piano keys. In general, the piece demands a performer with very large hands. If played with sensitivity, the arrangement can be highly effective and virtuosic, although it is certainly inferior to the idiomatic original version for strings, where it also serves as part of a greater whole.
The impetus for Schoenberg’s Ode to Napoleon was twofold: 8 December 1941, the day after Pearl Harbor was bombed, Schoenberg heard President Roosevelt’s “day of infamy” radio address; and in January 1942 Schoenberg received a commission from the League of Composers for a short chamber work. The League celebrated its 20th anniversary by commissioning several 10- to 20-minute works. Schoenberg accepted the commission and composed the work between 12 March and 12 June 1942. However, it seems that Schoenberg was not satisfied that his work would receive an adequate performance at the League of Composers’ concert, and he declined to send them the piece. He and his students searched for suitable performers and venues, but the “Ode” was not premiered publicly until 23 November 1944. Schoenberg exercised great care in choosing the text; he wanted to compose something on a text by Lord Byron, for the poet’s support of Greece’s struggle for independence mirrored Schoenberg’s allegiances to the Europe struggling against Hitler. Of his decision to compose the piece, Schoenberg wrote: “I knew it was the moral duty of intelligentsia to take a stand against tyranny.” He combined the “Marseillaise” and the motive from Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony at the moment when the speaker declaims, “the earthquake voice of victory.” In a letter of 8 September 1943 to his former pupil Heinrich Jalowetz, who had prepared the piece for a recording with a singer, Schoenberg insisted that the singer must have “the number of shades, essential to express one hundred and seventy kinds of derision, sarcasm, hatred, ridicule, contempt, condemnation, etc., which I tried to portray in my music.” He further contrasts the performance of this work to his intentions in “Pierrot lunaire” (another work for small ensemble and ‘Sprechstimme’): “The recitation in ‘Pierrot lunaire’ is so as if the voice would be an instrument like the other five. But in contrast to that, here the recitation must be as realistically natural as if there were no music at all.” Schoenberg heard the piece live only in a rehearsal that took place before the concert in honor of his 75th birthday (the performance at which his Phantasy received its premiere). Leonard Stein, who witnessed this occasion, remembered, “The speaker was William Schallert, I was the pianist, and the quartet was led by Adolph Koldofsky. In a special coaching session with the speaker, Schoenberg, his dark eyes flashing expressively while he recited lines from the work, emphasized, above all, their dramatic and expressive values. The inflections of pitch, marked so carefully in the score, were treated in a secondary manner. The main impression of the ‘Ode’ was, and remains, one of powerful dramatic expression.” Camille Crittenden © Arnold Schoenberg Center
Omar Ebrahim began singing as a chorister at Coventry Cathedral and went on to study voice at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama. He served his performing apprenticeship at the Royal Shakespeare Company and Glyndebourne. He has been associated with many new music projects including The Electrification of the Soviet Union by Nigel Osbourne and Birtwistle’s The Second Mrs Kong for Glyndebourne Festival Opera, and Berio’s Un Re in Ascolto and Birtwistle’s Gawain for the Royal Opera House. He appeared in Liza lim’s opera The Navigator at the festivals in Brisbane and Melbourne and gave first performances of Enno Poppe’s concert and opera collaborations with Marcel Beyer - Interzone, Arbeit Nahrung, Wohnung and IQ - at the Berlin festival, Munich Biennale and Schwetzingen. In exploring the connection between spoken word and song, he has helped recreate the sound worlds of Frank Zappa (Ensemble Modern, The Adventures of Greggary Peccary) and Blade Runner with the Heritage Orchestra. Other text led projects include Morton Feldman’s Words and Music and Frank O’Hara Songs with the Ensemble Recherche, King Gesar by Peter Lieberson for Munich Biennale. He is also closely associated with Ligeti’s Aventure et nouvelles Aventures.
Karim Said launched his professional career in 2009, with performances with the English Chamber Orchestra in London's Barbican Centre under the late Sir Colin Davis, and a BBC Proms debut at the Royal Albert Hall with Daniel Barenboim and the West Eastern Divan Orchestra. January 2015 saw the launch of Said's debut album 'Echoes from an Empire' on Opus Arte, The Royal Opera House's new audio CD label - the very first pianist invited to do so. His programme explores the exciting period of musical innovation that characterised the final years of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. This season continues his long association with Daniel Barenboim and the West Eastern Divan Orchestra performing at the Mozarteum as part of the Salzburg Music Festival and at the Teatro Colon in Buenos Aires. Said has been involved with the West Eastern Divan since it was founded in 1999. After hearing him play at the age of ten Daniel Barenboim commented “What you can't learn, he already knows". Said has regularly toured with the orchestra as soloist, under Barenboim's baton, performing at the Philharmonie in Berlin, Musikverein in Vienna, La Scala in Milan, Royal Albert Hall in London and the Tchaikovsky Hall in Moscow. Said is equally at home performing chamber music. Other recent highlights include a series of three recitals, which Said curated as part of the International Piano Series and The Rest is Noise festival, at the Southbank Centre in London. Taking the music of Schoenberg as their focus, these concerts included a fascinating on-stage discussion with the BBC's Sara Mohr-Pietsch, in which Said spoke about the composer, his music and his influence. Said was born in Amman, Jordan in 1988 where he commenced his piano studies with Russian teacher Agnes Bashir-Dzodtsoeva. He moved to the UK in 2000, aged eleven, to study piano, composition and conducting at the renowned Purcell School of Music and later at the Royal Academy of Music, both on full scholarships. At the Royal Academy of Music he studied mainly with Prof Tatiana Sarkissova. He has also studied with Tessa Nicholson and, more recently, with Hinrich Alpers. His development as a student throughout his time at the Purcell School is documented in Christopher Nupen's film 'Karim's Journey', which was broadcast on the UK's BBC4, and internationally, in 2008.
Founded in 1921, the London Chamber Orchestra is the UK’s oldest professional chamber orchestra. The orchestra’s members, drawn from the ranks of London’s leading symphony orchestras and chamber ensembles, come together to be a part of the collaborative musical culture which Principal Conductor and Music Director Christopher Warren-Green has shaped over his many years with the orchestra.
Music at QMUL is very grateful to QMUL’s Annual Fund for its generous support for this concert.
It is also grateful to the following organizations for their support: QMUL Centre for Public Engagement, Inside Out Festival, London Chamber Orchestra, Centre for Digital Music