WOODBRIDGE ORCHESTRAL SOCIETY

“AT-HOME” CONCERT

MONDAY, MARCH 17^th, 2008

At Kyson Primary School, Woodbridge

PROGRAMME

	Symphony No. 1 3. Allegro Vivace 4. Allegro Maestoso	Paul Benyon
	Trumpet Concerto - Soloist: Mark Chalklen 2. Andante 3. Allegro	Joseph Haydn
	Second Suite for Orchestra 2007 1. Allegretto 2. Andante 3. Allegro	David Lloyd
	Nutcracker Suite 4. Russian Dance 5. Arabian Dance 7. Dance of the Flutes	Tchaikovsky
INTERVAL Refreshments will be served during the interval
	Overture Don Giovanni	Mozart
	Hadleigh Blues	John Cooper
	Andante Cantabile from Symphony No. 5	Tchaikovsky

Programme Notes

Paul Benyon – Symphony No. 1 - Movements 3 & 4

Written in 2007, Paul Benyon's symphony is his first composition for orchestra. The third movement is a light hearted Scherzo (meaning 'joke') and was written on a particularly pleasant morning in early Spring. The fourth movement starts with a Handelian theme and then explores a variety of musical styles. Listen out for both the dance and the rather haunting clarinet tune in the middle section.

Paul lives in Martlesham near Ipswich with his wife Liz and cat Sylvester. All Paul's family are musicians including his daughter Sarah, his son Michael, and their respective boyfriends/girlfriends. Sylvester the cat however, remains largely unimpressed!

A software engineer by profession, Paul is a bandleader and tuba player with Martlesham Brass, a brass band he helped to start in 1996. The band has grown rapidly from an original 26 players to its current membership of over 100.

Haydn - Trumpet Concerto – Movements 2 & 3

The Trumpet Concerto is probably Haydn’s most famous concerto for any instrument. It was written in 1796 as a vehicle for the Viennese trumpet player Anton Weidinger, who had recently invented a new trumpet with keys, permitting much greater freedom in melodic writing for the instrument. Up until this point, the trumpet’s range of pitches was restricted to the overtones generated by the harmonic series. Weidinger’s new trumpet incorporated a system of five keys which could be operated by the player’s left hand. These keys opened and closed holes drilled along the length of the tubing, much in the manner of modern clarinets.

The second movement is typically songful in nature, and exploits the soloist’s new-found ability to play lyrical chromatic lines in its middle range. It has been commented that the audience at the concerto’s premiere was surely so used to hearing trumpets play nothing but notes from the harmonic series that the effect of the Haydn’s concerto must have been incredible. It was reckoned that the tradition of expressively poetic, lyrical trumpet music by Viennese composers, such as Bruckner and Mahler began right here.

The finale is chock full of sparkling humour, high spirits, dramatic surprises (sudden alternation of f and p, full and thin texture), harmonic detours, and brauva work for the soloist, a splendid and fitting conclusion to a path-breaking work.

David Lloyd – Suite for Orchestra 2007

The piece has three movements in a musical ‘sandwich’, with two brisk-paced sections and a slower movement between them.

The first movement is itself also in a sandwich form. There is a short section marked Allegretto (moderately lively) with strings and wind playing alternately. The music accelerates into a faster central section marked Con Moto, having jazz-influenced syncopation with a repeated rhythmic “Da-da, da-dah” in the tunes. The music slows back to the starting Allegretto, and ends with different woodwind players apparently trying to outdo each other with scale fragments in clashing keys.

The second, slow movement I think of as ‘Watford Junction’ because the main melody was sketched out between Crewe and Euston on a train some years ago. There is a conversation between wind and strings, with at times only one player per line. The whole orchestra plays tutti to finish the movement.

The third movement continues the conversation and the “Da-da,da-dah” of the first movement is heard again. The piece soon turns into a romp , with all the instruments sounding at once. A side drum marks up the rhythm, for good measure. Another tutti with a big crescendo finishes the whole piece.

David’s work in electronic engineering took him to Canada and the far east as well as the UK, where he enjoyed musical activities. In 1975 he was a part time peripatetic cello teacher with Rural Music School, then the County Music Service. On retirement he set up a workshop and built a number of string instruments, 5 cellos, 2 violins, viola and rebuilt the Double Bass he now plays. David joined the Woodbridge Orchestral Society in 1975, and became its president after the passing of Bernard Barrell in 2005. For more detail of his interesting career, visit www.members.aol.com/WoodbridgePast/DavidLloydCV.htm.

Tchaikovski (1846-1893) – Nutcracker Suite

This two-act ballet is based on Alexandre Dumas père's version of a tale by the composer E.T.A. Hoffman, 'The Nutcracker and the Mouse King'. As a ballet with choreography by M. Petipa it received its first performance at St.Petersburg in 1892, being the third of Tchaikovsky's great ballet scores.

It is Christmas and all the children have received their presents, but Fritz, trying to crack a hard nut in the doll's jaws, breaks it much to his sister's displeasure. The family drawing room is invaded by an army of mice and with a touch of magic the broken doll changes into a handsome soldier prince and leads the fight against the invading mice wounding the Mouse King, who immediately takes flight with his mouse troops following. With calm restored, Clara and her Prince fly off through an enchanted kingdom of pinewood and snow to the Kingdom of Sweets ruled over by the Sugar Plum Fairy, where they are entertained by exotic dancing characters. Tonight we only have time for three movements of this suite.

Trepak, Russian Dance. An energetic dance of flung legs which builds into an accelerating climax of whirling bodies and stamping feet.

Arabian Dance An exotic sinuous theme is given to the clarinets low in their register, over muted lower strings who play a repetitive almost hypnotic accompaniment.

Dance of the Flutes This piece is danced to an infectious theme given to the flutes, and one may find it entitled Dance of the Reed Pipes or Danse des Mirlitons.

Mozart – Overture Don Giovanni

The overture is approximately six minutes in performance. Mozart began work on the opera during the summer of 1787. Lorenzo Da Ponte’s libretto draws substantially from, but vastly improves upon, the one that Giovanni Bertati had written for composer Giuseppe Gazzaniga’s version, which had premiered just six months previously. Where most earlier operatic versions of the story, including Gazzaniga’s, had needed a single act, Mozart and da Ponte’s desire to produce something grander led them to create a canvas sketched in two substantial acts running three hours. The premiere of the opera took place in Prague, Bohemia, on October 29, 1788.

The overture to the opera was written only the night before the premier. The sharp emotional contrasts in the overture mirror the opera itself. It begins with the stark, dramatic music associated with the “stone guest” who will lead Don Giovanni to his punishment in hell. The brisk, charming Allegro that follows, depicts Don Giovanni’s amorous escapades.

John Cooper – Hadleigh Blues

In 2006 I wrote a little piece for the children in the Hadleigh Music School based on the 12 bar blues sequence of chords.  Derek Dunstone, the father of one of the children, liked it so much that he suggested to Ute, my wife (who directs both Hadleigh groups), that it should be played by the Hadleigh Orchestra in its next concert.  I decided to extend it and add slow sections before and after the blues passage.   Following the example of the children's piece, the theme is based on musical names in Hadleigh Orchestra, hence: B (= H in German nomenclature) A D E G B (H again) C B E E flat (S in German) A.  One can hear B A D quite clearly at the beginning of the slow sections and the whole theme in the fast section.  The opening chord reminded me of Gershwin's 'Summertime' so there is a reference to that song in the Coda..  The fast blues section is much longer than the children's piece and contains solos for piano and trumpet as well as a pizzicato variation for the strings.  'Hadleigh Blues' is dedicated to Derek Dunstone who played the trumpet solo in the first performance last June. 

For many years, John was the Organist and Director of Music at St Mary-le-Tower, the Civic Church of Ipswich. He was also Senior Lecturer in the Colchester Institute School of Music, where he still teaches part-time, and for ten years , the Conductor of the Ipswich Choral Society. He is Chairman of the Suffolk area of the Royal School of Church Music.

Born in Leicester, he was formerly organist of Holy Trinity Church in Leamington Spa, Conductor of the Royal Leamington Spa Bach Choir and Director of Music at Leamington College.  In 1962 the Bach Choir and his boy choristers at Holy Trinity Church sang in the première of Britten’s War Requiem in the newly-built Coventry Cathedral, a performance in which he was also organist. Both in Leamington Spa and at St Mary-le-Tower, he has conducted amongst other works, Bach’s St Matthew’s and St John’s Passions, and Requiems by Brahms, Fauré and Mozart. Works performed by Ipswich Choral Society whilst he was  conductor included Walton’s Belshazzar’s Feast and Elgar’s Dream of Gerontius.

Tchaikovsky – Andante Cantabile from Symphony No. 5 in E minor, Op. 64

Tchaikovsky wrote his Fifth Symphony in 1888. During its composition, and even later, he expressed both delight and disgust with the work: It is a failure. There is something repellent, something superfluous and patchy. The Symphony appears too colourful, too heavy and drawn out. Early critics mostly condemned the work but it steadily won the approval and, indeed, love of performers, audiences and musicologists and now stands, together with Tchaikovsky’s Fourth and Sixth, as amongst the most frequently performed symphonies of any ever composed.

However the Fifth is a simpler, less troubled work than the Fourth or Sixth .

Andante cantabile, con alcuna licenza:  

The slow movement begins with eight measures of hymn-like chords which are followed by one of Tchaikovsky’s great melodies, based on the last of his 12 Songs, Op. 60 “The mild stars shone for us.” This rapturous theme (converted into a pop song Moon Love in 1939) is sounded by the French horn and later dramatically interrupted by a return of the “Fate” motif, originating from the first movement.