“A  beautiful little Sinfonietta with fanfares” was how Leoš Janáček in a letter to female companion described a composition inspired by a military band they had listened to in a park in Písek, in southern Bohemia. Yet there was nothing “little” about it. Apart from it being the longest purely orchestral work Janáček composed (about 25 minutes’ worth), his Sinfonietta is scored for just about the largest brass section you’ll ever see in any orchestral work including nine trumpets in C, two bass trumpets, and two tenor tubas all underpinned by a pounding two-measure phrase in the timpani. 

The music of fellow countryman Antonin Dvořák in contrast is often filled with a quiet, wistful nostalgia, and an embrace of nature. We hear all of this in the Piano Quintet No. 2 in A Major, a work of profound depth and monumental scale which Dvořák composed in 1887 following his unsuccessful and discarded earlier piano quintet. Contrasts notwithstanding, the compositions of Dvořák and Janáček were deeply inspired by the folk songs and speech patterns of their Bohemian homeland known today as Czechoslovakia.  Such was the first of our two October programmes.

“Tragic”  was Schubert’s name for his 4th symphony, but we don’t know why. We do know that only two of his symphonies were written in minor keys (the other was the “Unfinished Symphony”). The nickname may have more to do with youthful drama then actual tragedy - Schubert was only 19 years old at the time of its composition, by which time this young genius had already written four symphonies and over a hundred musical works in all. Nothing tragic about Robert Schumann’s Three Romances Opus 94. Written on December 7, 11, and 12th 1849, the pieces - according to Schumann himself - were given to his wife Clara, whom he once described as his own "right hand", as a Christmas present. How romantic is that?

Bookending these two works in the second October session was Paul Schoenfeld’s Café Music and Mozart’s Quartet for Oboe and Strings.   In 1985 Schoenfeld was asked to fill in for the pianist at a restaurant which employs a house trio that plays entertaining dinner music in a wide variety of styles. “My intention, Schoenfeld said, “was to write a kind of high-class dinner music — music which could be played at a restaurant but might also (just barely) find its way into a concert hall”. Centuries earlier Mozart was invited to Munich to visit Elector Karl Theodor, who had commissioned the opera Idomeneo for a carnival celebration. While in Munich, Mozart renewed an acquaintance with Friedrich Ramm, a virtuoso oboist in the Munich orchestra and the most celebrated oboist of the day. It was for Ramm that Mozart composed the quartet. The year was 1781, the pivotal year of Mozart’s life. This was the year when he cut his ties with his family and hometown of Salzburg and struck out on his own as a freelance musician in Vienna. Reflecting his growing adulthood, the quartet was his first really mature piece of chamber music.

All this and more, including recordings, can be viewed by clicking on the links below.

Bill Squire.

Session Notes 10th October
Wagner - Flying Dutchman Overture
Dvorak - Piano Quintet No.2
Janacek - Sinfonietta
Sibelius - Finlandia
 
Session Notes 24th October
Schoenfeld -Cafe Music
Schubert - Symphony No.4
Schumann - Three Romances Opus 94
Mozart - Oboe Quartet
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Albert Einstein once said: “A person who never made a mistake never tried anything new”. Robert Schumann made a grave mistake in experimenting with a device to strengthen his fingers for his planned future as a concert pianist. It so damaged his fingers that it ruined any chance of his becoming a pianist. This led to his turning to a career in musical composition. The outcome of this decision to try something new was his being acclaimed one of the most important composers of the nineteenth century. Schumann succeeded in a magnificent manner by composing what is acclaimed “probably the most beautiful of Romantic concertos. This flawless masterpiece is one of the most outstanding and romantically inspired concertos in the repertoire”.

Austrian-American composer Arnold Schoenberg thought Brahm’s 1st Piano Quartet was something of a “mistake” because the piano tended to overwhelm the other instruments. 70-plus years after the event he decided to do something new with it by arranging it for Orchestra so that the other instruments could be heard. Schoenberg’s transcription has been variously described as a “masterpiece” and as “an over-rated travesty”.

Antonin Dvorak began his working life as a butcher. At the age of 13 he was inducted into the Butcher’s Guild of Zlonice. Thankfully for us, and audiences the world over, his musical talent shone through and he changed career path. in 1889 he was inducted into the Bohemian Academy of Science, Literature and Arts. His 8th symphony was composed in celebration of his election.

These compositions were the prime focus of our June sessions. More detail and description of other works plus links to the recordings played are available below.


​Bill Squire.

14th June
Session Notes
Glinka - Overture Ruslan and Ludmilla
Brahms -  Piano Quartet No. 1
Tchaikovsky -  The Seasons (Complete)
Telemann - Flute Concerto in D


28th June
Session Notes
Schumann - Manfred Overture
Dvorak - Symphony No.8
Schumann - Piano Concerto

“Here they grow in mountain depths. Far from any dwelling place. And no one comes to view their blooms” (from a poem by Japanese noble woman, poet, and author, Lady Sarashina). Ann Boyd, the first woman to be appointed as professor of music at the University of Sydney said in reflecting on those words: “It felt to me like it was the voice of all the women composers that had ever composed in the world before”. “They create great beauty but no one listens, no one hears, they don’t have a permanent place. And I felt one of them”. An ABC presenter introducing a programme for International Women’s Week on ABC FM a couple years ago took a more positive stand: “Throughout history people have said some very strange things to, and about, women in classical music. And for just as long, women have been doing incredible things anyway”.

It was with both those thoughts in mind that one of our sessions in March was given over to honour the music and the fortitude of women composers and musicians down through the ages and to showcase some of their wonderful music.  You can read about and listen to just some their music as was presented to our group by clicking on the links below. For the record, the other March session featured works by Rimsky-Korsakov, Felix Mendelssohn, and Max Bruch – all of them male composers. But don’t let that put you off -  it’s equally good and enjoyable music, too; and likewise, the links to the notes and recordings are posted below.   
              
Bill Squire

Session Notes – 22nd March Women Composers

Fanny Mendelssohn - Overture in C
Hildegarde of Bingen - De Spiritu Sancto
Emilie Mayer -  Piano Concerto in B flat major
Clara Schumann - Three Romances for Violin and Piano
Germaine Tailleferre - Sonata for Harp
Maddalene Lombardini-Sirman - Quartet No.3 Opus 2

 
Session Notes – 8th March
Additional Notes to Bruch's Scottish Fantasy
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Rimsky-Korsakov - Russian Easter Festival Overture
Mendelssohn - 5th Symphony
Bruch - Scottish Fantasy

“It simply wrote itself”, commented Sergei Rachmaninoff on the melody that comprised the major theme of his 3rd Piano Concerto. Perhaps that could be the wish of many of us as we get older and brain fade tendencies seem to increase! That melody, however, was to grow into one of the towering masterpieces composed for the keyboard and formed the centrepiece of the first of our September sessions.

Unlike Rachmaninoff, Tchaikovsky could relate to some degree of brain fade. Struggling to compose his 5th Symphony, he frequently complained of ‘writer’s block’ and began to wonder whether he has simply run out of ideas. History demonstrates, of course, that nothing was further from the truth.  This symphony with its theme of “ultimate victory through sacrifice”, was ordered to be played during the World War II Siege of Leningrad in an endeavour to keep up the spirits of the city’s population, thus ensuring its popularity. One performance was broadcast live to London and listeners could hear the sounds of bombs exploding as the musicians played on.  This symphony was the central item for the second of our sessions this month - but without any added sound effects of bombs. 

A Spring Festival Overture by Chinese composer Li Huanzhi and Schumann’s Spring Symphony helped put spring into our step as we celebrated the arrival of the new season, while Smetena’s romantic “The Moldau” and Bruch’s 1st Violin Concerto with its dreamy adagio movement, proved a perfect foil to the drama of Tchaikovsky Symphony.  

Bill Squire

​Click on the links below to access session notes and recordings.

“Listening to the music while stretching her body close to its limit, she was able to attain a mysterious calm. She was simultaneously the torturer and the tortured, the forcer and the forced”. That quote by Japanese writer and translator Haruki Murakami, kind of describes some of the class reactions to the first of our June sessions as we endeavoured to get our musical minds around Karl Jenkins’ composition The Armed Man, commissioned by the British Royal Armourers to mark the transition from the 20th to the 21st century and their move to a new Museum in Leeds.  Dedicated by the composer to the victims of the Kosovo conflict, the work is a 13 movement Mass for peace loosely set within the Christian Mass, with additional texts from Muslim and Hindu sources and secular writers. A mind and body exercise occupying us for the whole of the session.

No such concerns with our second session as we watched a scintillating performance of Chopin’s Piano Concerto No 1 given in the final round of the 18th Chopin Competition in 2021. The work was bookended in our programme by Mozart’s Overture to Don Giovanni and Schumann’s Symphony No.4 leaving us in a buoyant mood as the curtain came down on Semester 1.  Semester 2 for us kicks off on Friday 14th July.

Meanwhile you can check out recordings and notes for our June programmes below.  Enjoy!

Bill Squires

Session Notes  9th June 

Karl Jenkins - The Armed Man

​Session Notes  23rd June

Mozart - Don Giovanni Overture

Chopin - Piano Concerto No 1
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Schumann - Symphony No.4

When is a symphony not a symphony? When it’s an overture! Maksym Berezovsky (the Ukrainian Mozart) composed a Symphony in C lasting all of nine minutes, which also doubled as the overture to his one and only opera “Il Demonfonte”, and also as the ‘overture’ to our first session for April. 

Friedrich Nietzsche, a highly poetic philosopher was all the rage in Germany when Richard Strauss was a young man. Strauss set to music a wildly rhapsodic book of his called Thus Spake Zarathustra, which was the major focus for our group this session. The work isn't really about Zarathustra at all. Nietzsche simply used Zarathustra as a spokesman, a sort of prophet—hero, into whose mouth he put his own philosophy. Strauss’ "Zarathustra" is a music picture of man's greatest problem—his mortality, the grim fact that he must die. This painful problem is shown in terms of a conflict—the struggle between Man's tremendous need for immortality, and his equally strong need to accept the fact that he is mortal. It's a struggle we all share.

A little bit of Russian fairytale by way of contrast - Stravinsky’s Firebird Suite - completed the morning. As an encore the Pas de Deux from the Firebird ballet was danced courtesy of the Mariinsky Ballet Company.

The ‘Overture to get session two underway came from the pen of Robert Schumann in the form of his “Overture, Scherzo and Finale”. Written in the wake of his marriage to Clara Wieck (after a long and tortuous courtship made difficult by Clara’s father), it is essentially a symphony without a slow movement.  Schumann initially named it “Symphony No.2” before settling for the title “Sinfonietta”. 

When war broke out in August 1914, Edward Elgar was not among the enthusiastic.  He had serious forebodings, and after the cataclysm that effectively eliminated an entire generation of English youth, he plunged into despair.  His Cello Concerto (the major work for this session) is completely the reflection of a heartfelt response to the national tragedy.  It’s an unconventional concerto, but it is a masterpiece.  It is not only a reflection of the forever altered world of Britain in 1919, but also the deep and apt expression of great composer facing his own old age, and for that matter, an audience that soon saw him as an anachronism. 

When Rachmaninoff, wizard of the piano, meets Paganini, wizard of the violin, the result is the notoriously difficult Rhapsody — 24 variations on the 24th of Paganini’s Caprices — encompassing everything from knuckle-busting runs to the terrifying Day of Wrath medieval chant and the swoon-worthy 18th variation. Said to be Rachmaninoff’s finest work for piano and orchestra, it brought down the curtain on our April music excursions. Full notes and links to the recordings used can be found on Music Appreciation page of our U3A website.

​Bill Squire

​14th April
 
Session Notes for 14th April
 
Berezovsky - Symphony in C
 
R Strauss - Thus Spoke Zarathustra
 
Stravinsky - Firebird Suite
 
Stravinsky - Firebird Pas de Deux
 
28th April

Session Note for 28th April
 
Schumann - Overture, Scherzo & Finale
 
Elgar - Cello Concerto
 
Rachmaninoff - Rhapsody on a theme of Paganini
 
Start times - Rachmaninoff Variations

​And, of course, no music year is ever complete without some reference to Handel’s “Messiah” which is exactly how our year ended up.

​Meanwhile, as TS Eliot observed: “to make an end is to make a beginning”. 2023 will see Music Appreciation widen its source of recordings and music selections with a little bit of innovation. A fascinating year awaits. 

As the year draws to a close, did you know that the original meaning (in English) for “merry” is “strong”? Have a “strong” Christmas.
​
Bill Squire.

​Two musicians of the romantic period were our focus for May – Felix Mendelssohn and Robert Schumann lived at the same time as each other. The music that came from both of them is firmly classical in form and romantic in nature. But there the similarity fades.

Much of Felix Mendelssohn’s music came as a result of his travels. He toured Europe visiting a number of countries where he sketched musical fragments later to be turned into concert works, which is why a number of them bear titles suggesting these countries (the titles are not his doing, but publisher’s- he hated the idea). For example, he visited Scotland, writing the seeds for his Scottish Symphony and the Fingal's Cave overture (following a trip to visit the Isle of Staffa, near Mull) and meeting Sir Walter Scott. He sketched his Italian Symphony while visiting Rome and Naples.

Although some of Mendelssohn’s  compositions were clearly inspired by external events and bear highly descriptive titles, he shied away from any programmatic interpretations voicing the opinion that music was to be interpreted by the listener. 

Schumann on the other hand composed a far amount of music that was programmatic – much of it evocative of the love of his life, Clara.  Schumann was not so widely travelled and his compositional life was sporadic due to health issues (he was bi-polar) and periods of separation from Clara ( her father took to all sorts of measures early on keep them apart and discourage any relationship). His early works of piano miniatures and songs in earlier years gave way, in the later years, through Clara’s inspiration and encouragement to symphonies, concertos, string quartets, and stand-alone concert overtures and more.

You can read more detail of the lives and music of both composers on the Music Appreciation Page of the U3A website. There you will find also links to Youtube for the music we listened to at both sessions.

​
Bill Squire