Cellist Victor Julien-Laferrière Photo: Jean-Baptiste Millot
French cellist Victor Julien-Laferrière joins the APO to perform Dvořák's ever-popular concerto in a programme that also includes the bracing Concerto for Orchestra by Witold Lutosławski and a gorgeous work for strings by American composer George Walker.
George WALKER: Lyric for Strings
George Walker, American composer Photo: screenshot ex YouTube
"I don't regard music as fun at all." American composer George Walker said in an interview in 1987. "This is not to say I don't enjoy it, but maybe there is some kind of deep Puritan ethic I have that tells me I have to work at something and try to make it as good as possible. I am relieved when it's finished and feel that I have put together something that I can live with without being embarrassed or having to question it."
His Lyric for Strings was composed when he was freshly graduated from the Curtis Institute where he’d studied piano as well and composition. Lyric for Strings began as the second movement of a string quartet but when Walker learned that his grandmother had died it became a memorial for her, initially named Lament.
He reflected that the reaction to the work was something that he "never could have anticipated." After a performance by the New York Philharmonic, he was "…astounded after the conclusion of the piece, absolute silence for what seemed to be almost 20 seconds. And then there was like a thunderclap of applause… For a six-minute piece, you get a standing ovation each time."
"I have never played a string instrument’ he said ‘but somehow strings have always fascinated me."
DVORAK: Cello Concerto in B minor Op 104
This concerto was in part a tribute to an unrequited love of Dvořák’s, Josefina Čermáková.
He was mid-flow on the concerto when he learned of her illness and in the second movement we hear quotes from Leave me alone - one of her favourite songs of the composer's.
The tribute didn't end there. Josefina died in 1895 and Dvořák, now back home in Prague, altered the original ending to include the delicate coda of which his son wrote: "This impressive ending to the concerto was my father’s tribute to and final departure from his last love."
It was Hanuš Wihan, cellist of the Bohemian Quartet who received the work's dedication however, although he may have begun to endanger that award with constant insistence on revisions. Dvořák finally wrote to his publisher: "I will give you my work only if you promise not to allow anybody to make changes – friend Wihan not excepted."
Our soloist tonight is Victor Julien-Laferrière ... and how wonderfully unusual it is to welcome a musician from overseas! Victor won the Queen Elisabeth Competition in Brussels in 2017 and he’s got a nice little career developing, playing with some big name orchestras. He’s also an occasional conductor and has founded his own orchestra, Consuelo.
LUTOSŁAWSKI: Concerto for Orchestra
Witold Lutosławski Photo: L. Kowalski/W. Pniewski ex Wikimedia
This work owes a debt to the folk music of Lutosławski’s Poland. In 1945 he received a series of commissions to compose works based on Polish folk themes. He didn’t attach great significance to the works considering them secondary to his "real work" as a composer.
"At the same time", he wrote, "the whole series of my functional pieces based on folk themes gave me the possibility of developing a style that, though narrow and limited, was nevertheless characteristic enough. I thought at the time that this marginal style would not be entirely fruitless and... I could possibly make use of it in writing something more serious."
An opportunity to test this thesis arrived in 1950.
Again the composer wrote: "The director of the Warsaw Philharmonic asked me to write something especially for his new ensemble. This was to be something not difficult, but which could, however, give the young orchestra an opportunity to show its qualities. I started to work on the new score, not realising that I was to spend nearly four years on it. Folk music and all that follows were used in my new work. Folk music in this work however, was merely a raw material used to build a large musical form of several movements that does not in the least originate from folk songs or dances.
"A work came into being that I could not help including among my most important works as a result of my episodic symbiosis with folk music and in a way that was somewhat unexpected for me.
"It seems to me that my possibilities of making use of folk themes have been almost completely exhausted in this score."
SILVESTROV orch Gies: Prayer for Ukraine
Valentin Silvestrov Photo: Creative Commons image ex Wikimedia
In support of Ukraine, the orchestra played this short piece by Valentin Silvestrov as an encore.
The 84 year old, now reluctantly fled to Germany, wrote a series of 14 songs for a capella choir, entitled Maidan-2014 in support of the protests in Kiev against closer ties to Russia in 2014.
This 13th movement is an orchestration by Andreas Gies.
In an article in the New York Times his friend Constantin Sigov, speaking from Kiev, said: "Putin’s bombardments of Kyiv have killed and destroyed people, houses and music. But with some kind of unbelievable sense of hearing, Silvestrov has realised how they might be resurrected."
He is, Sigov added, "a true voice of Kyiv that is connected with the whole world and hopes to speak directly with the world."
Silvestrov himself said the current war is "a continuation of the Maidan. Only the Maidan revolution was only in Kyiv, and now all Ukraine has become the Maidan."
Recorded by RNZ Concert
Producer: Tim Dodd; Engineer: Adrian Hollay
