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Reger – Serenade for Flute, Violin & Viola, Op. 141a in G

Haydn – Symphony No. 101 in D, “The Clock”, arr. J P Salomon

Ensemble Nova Luce, Monday 21 November 2016

I escaped grey skies and pouring rain on Monday to slip into St Martin-in-the-Fields for a delightful lunchtime concert given by Ensemble Nova Luce.

A chamber ensemble formed in 2015 by postgraduate students and fellows of the Guildhall School of Music and Drama, Ensemble Nova Luce performs unusual repertoire and chamber arrangements of well-loved orchestral works which offer a fresh take on the music while also harking back to the historical convention of music being performed at home as a form of recreation. Such arrangements made large-scale suitable for small-scale and intimate gatherings of friends, to be played in the comfort of one’s living room.

Another of Ensemble Nova Luce’s projects is exploring the lost art of classical improvisation, something which during the time of Haydn and Mozart, and indeed into the 19th century with musicians such as Liszt, was an everyday part of the performers’ skill set. The practice of improvisation gives performers the freedom to diverge from the score and the idea that there is one version of the music, a concept which has gained increasing currency with the wide availability of high-quality of recordings.

The recital opened with Max Reger’s Serenade for Flute, Violin and Viola, Op 141a. The distinctive instrumentation, which omits the lower registers, major key and witty musical figures combine to create a bright, joyful mood. The work was engagingly performed by Rosie Bowker (flute), Marie Schreer (violin) and Henrietta Hill (viola)._

The second work in the programme was Haydn’s Symphony no. 101 in D Major, “The Clock”, arranged for a chamber ensemble of flute, two violins, viola, cello (bass) and piano by J P Salomon who was a founding member of London’s Philharmonic Society at the same time as Haydn visited London. The ensemble of seven musicians created a full, textural sound, underpinned by the double bass part which lent a richness to the music. Meanwhile, the small scale arrangement reminded us that it is possible to enjoy this music in a more intimate setting. There was wit and humour aplenty, in particular in the second movement (from where the symphony gets its nickname) and a keen sense of the musicians thoroughly enjoying this music. A most enjoyable and vibrant concert and an excellent start to the week. I recommend seeking out Ensemble Nova Luce.

After the concert, I met up with the bass player, Gwen Reed, a postgraduate student at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama, following studies at the Manhattan School of Music in New York. In addition to her work with Ensemble Nova Luce, Gwen performs with several other ensembles in London, including the Silk Street Sinfonia and Ensemble X.Y., and she has performed in London’s Barbican Hall, LSO St. Luke’s, and Cadogan Hall, as well as at venues in Europe. In common with her colleagues in Ensemble Nova Luce, Gwen is clearly a very active, engaged young musician who is keen to create performance opportunities and to collaborate with a wide variety of musicians and composers.

(Look out for a Meet the Artist interview with Gwen Reed, coming soon to http://www.meettheartist.site)

 

www.ensemblenovaluce.com

(photo credit: Skins Elliott Photography)

 

 

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As musicians our musical scores are very personal to us, and the markings and annotations we make on our scores can be deeply associated with memories – of significant teachers, special concerts and venues, colleagues and friends, and may even correspond to certain periods in our lives. Looking at another musician’s annotated score can feel like an act of voyeurism: a score liberally marked with someone else’s fingering and comments might reveal someone’s deepest insecurities and frustrations, their unspoken hopes and most secret desires. Our markings also reveal our personal working processes and practise patterns, our attempts to dig away at the surface of the music to look beyond the notes to find a deeper meaning.

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Clifford Curzon’s heavily annotated score of a Schubert moment musical
On a most basic level, markings on the score relate to fingering schemes, dynamics, pedaling and so forth. Learning music is a complex mental and physical process, and anything that assists in that process is useful. Often it is simply not possible to remember all the details in the music and annotations provide a useful aide memoir and an immediate mnemonic for the practice of practising. The permanence of the graphite pencil mark is such that, until we choose to erase that mark, it remains there on the page in front of our eyes.

The marks we make in our music are our personal “hieroglyphs”, our own secret code, if you will. While working on Schubert’s Piano Sonata No 20 in A, D959, with a colleague recently, she asked me if, as my page turner, she needed to worry about the word “NO!” scrawled in thick pencil at the top of one page, or the exclamation marks above a phrase further on in the music. I assured her that these were directions purely for myself (directions to add more emphasis to a particular group of notes, in fact). I also use a pair of spectacles doodle (or what I suppose might be called an “emoji” these days!) which means “watch out” – a note to self to be wary or to take extra care in a certain passage – while a series of dots is a pre-emptive ritardando direction.

Returning to a score after a break from it and reacquainting oneself with its annotations can be an interesting experience in itself. In a way, the annotations become a snapshot of a time and place. I’ve still got my old Associated Board of the Royal Schools of Music editions of Bach’s Preludes and Fugues and Two- and Three- Part Inventions and Chopin’s Nocturnes, which contain annotations from the piano teacher I studied with as a teenager. Just seeing her handwriting and her diagram of the structure of a fugue, elicits a kind of Proustian rush, which takes me back to her living room, her big black Steinway, and her spaniel who used to lie across my feet as I played.

As I’ve become more experienced and mature as a musician, I write far less on the score than I used to, and lately when I return to a score I’ve previously worked on, I find myself erasing old annotations to clean up the score and make way for new, but fewer, markings. Some people like to keep one score completely free of markings and will work from a photocopy or duplicate copy of the score, so that they have a clean score for performance. Others like to cover their scores with so much annotation that the music is almost obscured, and some of us regard our scores and their individual markings as a kind of “comfort blanket”. My Henle edition score of Schubert’s sonata D959, now missing its smart blue cover, with dog-eared corners from turning the pages and many pages secured with tape, is a prized possession and one which I would hate to lose. It was, and still is, my working score and represents 20 months of hard graft, note-learning, study and thought. I can’t bear the thought of replacing this score!

Modern technology now allows us to annotate scores directly on a tablet device, and while this offers a tidy, portable means to do so (particularly useful when one is travelling), I suspect most musicians would be reluctant to completely relinquish pencil and paper score.

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Annotated score on an iPad app

 

 

Pictures

 

Clifford Curzon’s score of Schubert’s F minor movements from the Moments Musicaux

 

Yehudi Menuhin’s annotated score of Bach’s solo Violin Sonata No. 2 (source The Strad magazine/website)

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It was Schumann who coined the phrase “heavenly length”, specifically in relation to Schubert’s Great C major Symphony, D944, though this tag has now become synonymous with all of Schubert’s late music.

How to approach a work of the scale of the Sonata in A, D959? In common with the other late sonatas (including the Sonata in G, D894), it is a big work, with a first movement which can last as long as an entire mid-period Beethoven Sonata, if the exposition repeat is included (and I believe it should be).

The D959 is indeed long: the entire work takes around 40 minutes to play, and for both performer and audience there is a sense of traversing an epic landscape. One’s duty as performer/interpreter is to find connections, within the individual movements, and the work as a whole, in order to lead the listener on a unique journey deep into Schubert’s musical landscape. Schubert uses motivic and structural signposts throughout the four movements to enhance this sense of a journey (for example, the opening measures of the first movement are reprised in the closing bars of the finale, and there are many other cyclic elements – of rhythm, melody, articulation, and even character/emotion – which connect the four movements ). The cyclic elements also enhance the sense of a tightly organised structure: this sonata may be long, but it is not rambling (though some performers may make it so!). The first and the final movements are almost identical in length (c.13 minutes each if one observes the exposition repeat in the first movement). These edifices bookend the middle movements which are also of an equal length – c.7 minutes each (roughly half the length of the first and final movements) if one observes all the repeats in the Scherzo. Some scholars have pointed to a “golden ratio” or “golden section” in Schubert’s structural organisation. Whether this was conscious on the part of the composer is not known, but from the performer/interpreter’s point of view an appreciation of this almost perfectly-balanced structure is important in creating the sense of a distinct structural and narrative arc that runs through the entire work.

In terms of embarking on the learning of all these notes, I decided to treat the sonata as four separate works, learning each movement as a stand-alone piece while also remaining alert to the cyclic elements within each movement and the whole work through regular study of the score away from the piano and listening to recordings of the complete sonata. From the outset, I had a clear timescale in mind: I wanted to have the entire sonata in the fingers (learnt but by no means finessed) by summer 2015, and having a clear focus enabled me to meet my target, almost to the day. What has interested me throughout the learning process is the fact that the notes themselves are not that difficult, and most of the time the writing lies comfortably under the fingers and hand. What has been far more difficult is achieving a convincing rendering of Schubert’s unique compositional voice – and maintaining this throughout c40 minutes of music. Too many interpreters treat Schubert as Beethoven’s “enfeebled twin”, but as the pianist Paul Lewis has noted “Schubert is more internally stormy than Beethoven, which perhaps make it all the more powerful…….. Schubert almost never provides the answers. There are always more questions than answers…….it’s a reflection of what we find in life“.

Schubert interpretation is riven with some doubtful traditions which developed in the nineteenth century, many of which have been subsumed into standard performance practice today. The best commentary on the music can be drawn from the autograph scores and contemporary evidence.

Schubert should never be stereotyped or over-interpreted: such treatment can straitjacket the music, reducing it to a simplistic highlighting of elements which the performer may feel are obviously “Schubertian” (beautiful melodies, nostalgia, poignancy, depression, emotional volte-faces, rage, joy etc) rather than allowing oneself the freedom to appreciate that this music is so much greater than the sum of its parts.

Here is Inon Barnatan in the final movement of the D959, a reading I particularly like for his clarity and appreciation of the articulation, coupled with a real sense of the joy inherent in this music

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The next edition of the Scottish International Piano Competition will take place 1-10 September 2017. This prestigious competition, which takes place every three years, attracts many of the world’s brilliant young pianists to Scotland.

Thirty competitors, aged 18-30, will take part in a series of recital programmes and a concerto final before an international jury of musicians and pianists chaired by Professor Aaron Shorr, Head of Keyboard and Collaborative Piano at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland (RCS).

Ten competitors then take part in the semi-final and from these three are selected to play a concerto with the Royal Scottish National Orchestra, conducted by Thomas Sondergard, in the final round. The first prize of £10,000 carries with it the Frederic Lamond Gold Medal and an invitation to perform with the RSNO in their 2018 season.

Each round of the Competition will be played on a different piano: a Bosendorfer, a Fazioli and a Steinway, each generously provided by the manufacturer, which creates a variety of experience for the competitors and the audience.

The semifinalists will also perform a newly commissioned work by Gordon McPherson, Head of Composition at RCS, which provides a particularly intriguing challenge as pianists will have to interpret the new piece through the printed music alone. Commissioning new works has been an integral part of past Scottish International Piano Competition and has involved composers including Thea Musgrave and Rory Boyle.

logoSince launching in 1986, the competition has enabled many talented young musicians to gain recognition at an early stage in their professional careers, many of whom have gone on to international acclaim including Tom Poster (2007), Katya Apekisheva (1998), Charles Owen (1995), Susan Tomes (second prize, 1986) and Graeme McNaught (first ever winner, 1986)

The closing date for applications is 31 March 2017.

www.scottishinternationalpianocompetition.com