Lamb & Hayward Masterworks: Grenfell, Tchaikovsky, Bartók

Programme Notes

Stealing Tutunui (2000)

MARIA GRENFELL (b. 1969)

Maria Grenfell began her compositional education in Ōtautahi, before furthering her studies in North America and settling in Tasmania, where she is an Associate Professor at the University of Tasmania Conservatorium of Music. Her orchestral music has been commissioned, performed, or recorded by every major symphony orchestra across Australasia. She describes her work as taking much of its influence from poetic, literary, and visual sources, and from non-Western music and literature; and said in an interview for New Music USA “I really enjoy the diverse influences. They inform my use of colours and harmonic materials.”

Her work Stealing Tutunui was commissioned by Symphony Australia in 2000 for the New Voices composer development programme in Perth, and in 2001 it was re-orchestrated for the Tasmanian Symphony Orchestra. It is a work that uses the full spectrum of colour from the orchestra to bring to life the dark drama of a Māori legend concerning a chief (Tinirau), his pet whale (Tutunui), and a priest (Kae).

Get to know the story behind Maria Grenfell's Stealing Tutunui in more detail here.

Piano Concerto No. 1 in B♭ minor Op. 23 (1874)

PYOTR ILYICH TCHAIKOVSKY (1840-1893)

Tchaikovsky was in the process of staking his claim as a composer of great success at the time of attempting his first Piano Concerto. He was 35 years old, teaching at the St Petersburg Conservatory, and stepping away from Russian nationalism in favour of a more European sound. It had been a while since his last compositional outing and he needed this new concerto to make a real splash. Tchaikovsky initially wrote the work for the pianist Nikolay Rubinstein – a colleague from the Moscow Conservatory and big supporter of his work to date – in the hope that he would premiere it and make it famous. However, on hearing the completed score, Rubinstein had other ideas, as Tchaikovsky described in a letter to his benefactor:

“…[Rubinstein said] my Concerto was worthless, absolutely unplayable; the passages so broken, so disconnected, so unskillfully written, that they could not even be improved; the work itself was bad, trivial, common; here and there I had stolen from other people; only one or two pages were worth anything; all the rest had better be destroyed. I left the room without a word. Presently Rubinstein came to me and, seeing how upset I was, repeated that my Concerto was impossible but said if I would suit it to his requirements he would bring it out at his concert. ‘I shall not alter a single note,’ I replied.”

Tchaikovsky was true to his word, and took the concerto to German pianist Hans von Bülow, who premiered it during a tour of the United States, in 1875. It made exactly the splash Tchaikovsky had hoped for, and the work went on to become one of the most popular concertos in the repertoire – with Rubinstein even going back on his initial harsh judgement of the work.

This concerto is famous for its expansive opening melody, and sequence of pounding piano chords that propel the listener straight into the first movement’s power grip. The middle Andantino semplice movement includes a melody from the French song Il faut s’amuser, danser, et rire, using the orchestra more sparsely, and including some incredibly finger-twisting fast moments for the pianist. The concerto finishes with an Allegro con fuoco movement – “fast with fire” – which quotes from a flamboyant Ukrainian tune to open, and ends triumphantly in a dazzling burst of orchestral sound.

Concerto for Orchestra (1943)

BÉLA BARTÓK (1881-1945)

It is easy to take this work at the face value of “beloved staple of orchestral programming” and overlook the adverse conditions under which it was created.

Bartók and his wife left Hungary just three years prior to its composition, to escape Nazi Germany. The composer said on the way that “this voyage is like plunging into the unknown from what is known but unbearable,” and later described the dismal scene – the world was in turmoil, work was scarce, and his health was deteriorating – in a letter by saying “I have lost all my faith in men and nations, everything.”

Enter Serge Koussevitzky, Music Director of the Boston Symphony, and huge champion of new music at the time, who visited Bartók in hospital in New York in 1943 and commissioned him to write this work. It was just the injection of opportunity that Bartók needed, and his health rejuvenated enough for him to finish the work in just two months. It was premiered by the Boston Symphony – with Koussevitsky conducting – and the ending was later revised to extend the work by around 15 minutes. Bartók would only live for another year after the premiere, with continued ill health.

Concerto for Orchestra showcases both the individual elements and collective magic of the symphony orchestra, with a sweeping palette of colour. Bartók said in his description for the premiere in 1944 that “the title of this symphony-like orchestral work is explained by its tendency to treat single instruments or instrument groups in a “concertant” or soloistic manner….”

The first movement in some ways pays tribute to the conventional ‘slow introduction followed by fast section’ form – an approach standardized by the likes of Beethoven in his symphonies. The second movement’s Game of Couples is one of the most unique, as it isolates the winds in pairs, each playing a solo feature at a different interval away from each other (bassoons in sixths, oboes in thirds, clarinets in sevenths, flutes in fifths, and two muted trumpets in seconds).

The middle Elegia movement brings a mysterious nighttime atmosphere, with shimmering woodwinds, rolling timpani, and a soft plaintive cry from the piccolo. It is impossible to hear this and not feel something of Bartók’s intense homesickness. In the fourth Interrupted Intermezzo we also hear references to home, through his use of folk melodies. We also hear a quote from Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 7, Leningrad, presented in a mocking tone, as a parody of a work we know Bartók despised – it had been Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 7, Leningrad premiered in 1942, just a few years before Bartók was creating this, and would have been fresh in his mind. The Finale is heralded by the horns, into a scuttling melody, more folk tunes, and a large-scale fugue – possibly a nod to the musical form of one of his heroes, Johann Sebastian Bach. The stampede of sound in the finale leaves you almost feeling breathless, after the emotional rollercoaster that is Bartók’s beloved Concerto for Orchestra.

Thank you to Hannah Darroch for our programme notes.