Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra: Online Concert Programme | Fri 28 March 2025

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756-1791): The Magic Flute Overture

Die Zauberflöte (The Magic Flute) contains the widest range of musical styles that Mozart ever put into a single opera, and he employed a large orchestra, including trombones, to add solemnity in connection with the solemn quasi-masonic rites of Sarastro and his priests. As committed freemasons, Mozart and his librettist Emanuel Schikaneder filled the opera with masonic symbols: one such is the recurring stress on the number three. The characters include three boys and three ladies, the serpent is cut into three pieces, there are three doors on which the aspiring Prince Tamino must knock. The Overture, moreover, begins with three loud chords, representing, perhaps, the three knocks by which new members are admitted to the Masonic initiation ceremony. Thereafter the music develops with close attention to fugal textures, preparing the way for the earnestness which is an important aspect of the opera to follow.

© Terry Barfoot

Václav Trojan (1907-1983): Fairy Tales: Accordion Concerto

1. Let us Dance into the Fairy Tales, Allegro
2. The Sleepy Princess, Andante dolce
3. The Magic Box, Allegro leggiero
4. The Enchanted Princess, the Brave Prince and the Evil Dragon, Lento triste
5. The Naughty Roundabout, Vivace
6. The Sailor and the Enchanted Accordion, Tempo di valse
7. The Acrobatic Fairy Tale, Vivace

Václav Trojan studied organ and conducting at the Prague Conservatory, as well as composition with Jaroslav Křička, and he also participated in masterclasses with two of the leading Czech composers of the day, Joseph Suk and Vítěszlav Novák. His early career embraced teaching and arranging jazz and popular music, then from 1937 to 1945 he was the music manager for Prague Radio. In 1940 he came to prominence with his children’s opera, Kolotoč (‘Merry-go-round’) (1936-9) for which he was awarded  the Czech National Prize. After World War II, his skills composing music for animated films, particularly for those with the director Jiří Trnka, took his career in another direction. He was appointed composer for the State Cartoon Company (1945-6) and from 1949, lecturer in theatre and film at the Prague Academy. Among his best-known scores for animated puppet films are Špalíček (1947), The Emperor’s Nightingale (1949) and Prince Bayaya (1950). Other notable works include a ballet, A Midsummer’s Night’s Dream (1982)

Trojan’s music is imbued with a Neo-Classical flavour, and also draws on Czech traditional music. Ravel was also an influence, as is apparent in his Accordion Concerto, Fairy Tales, composed in 1959. Its music was drawn from another collaboration with Trnka, Kuťásk and Kutilka (1954) about two dolls, the former a boy and distinctly naughty, the latter a girl who is good as gold. Their adventures are watched by a clown.

Fairy Tales is redolent with music that is deftly scored, laced with good humour, overflowing with fresh melodic invention and, unsurprisingly, a flair for drama and characterisation. All in all, it is just hugely enjoyable fun. The first of its seven movements, ‘Let us Dance into the Fairy Tales’ has the character of a curtain-raiser that is breezy and nonchalant in mood. In ‘The Sleepy Princess’, the orchestra sets the scene with slow music depicting her sinking into somnolent slumber, before the soloist introduces a caressing lullaby. ‘The Magic Box’, is depicted by perky, jaunty music, including a distinct folk-like melody for the cor anglais.

With the fifth tale, ‘The Enchanted Princess, the Brave Prince and the Evil Dragon’, there is an imaginary story line – a princess in mortal danger from a monstrous dragon, saved by a Prince. The pitiful whimpering cries of the Princess are captured by the oboe, while the accordion brilliantly evokes the evil dragon, in twisting, sinister chromatic lines. But to a trumpet call, and a galloping rhythm on percussion, the hooves of the Prince’s steed are heard riding to the rescue.

After all that drama, a light-hearted contrast seems appropriate, ‘The Naughty Roundabout’, in which a fairground attraction seems to have a mind of its own, and just does not do what its operator expects it to, one suspects to the delight of the riders on the wooden horses.  ‘The Sailor and the Enchanted Accordion’, tells of a sailor, perhaps on shore leave finding an accordion on which he plays a dreamy waltz. Little does he know that it is enchanted as seductively the accordion draws him down into the depths of the sea for ever. With ‘The Acrobatic Fairy-Tale’, Trojan provides a perfect finale, a joyful galop including hints of the tales that have gone before, and a virtuosic dash to the finish.

© Andrew Burn

Thomas de Hartmann (1884-1956): Fairy Tales

1. Introduction, Andante con moto
2. Verlioka the Monster, Lento – Allegro
3. The Little Peasant, Lento assai
4. Ivan Tsarevitch, Largo cantabile
5. The Witch’s House on Hen’s Legs, Misterioso
6. The Wonderful Gusli, Largo
7. Baba Yaga the Witch, Moderato
8. Alenooshka’s Lullaby, Larghetto
9. The Seven League Boots, Con moto
10. The Princess, Larghetto
11. Kasstchei the Deathless, Lento
12. The Ride of Ivan Tsarevitch, Presto
13. The Solemn Entrance, Solemne

Originally, conceived for piano, de Hartmann’s Fairy Tales, was composed in 1936, and takes the form of a suite comprising an Introduction and twelve vivid vignettes. It was published the following year and performed in Paris, England and Italy. In his preface to the work, de Hartmann wrote: “With these Fairy Tales it was the wish of the author to bring the Western man in touch with Eastern Fairy Tales through music. The charm of these Tales lies in the fantasy of the images, the interest of the story, the sparks of humour, the popular spirit, and the deep wisdom, all of which elements are found generously sprinkled through them. The hero, Ivan Tsarevitch, who has the task to reach the Kingdom of the Seven Marvels, the Kingdom of Light and Life, saves the Princess (the Soul) from Death, and aided by the forces of super- natural Wisdom surmounts all the difficulties and succeeds in reaching it”.

In a letter, de Hartmann revealed that it was Rachmaninov who encouraged him to orchestrate the work which he undertook in 1937. Almost two decades later, at the request of Leopold Stokowski, he made the version being performed tonight which is for slightly smaller instrumentation, and as noted by the de Hartmann expert, Efrem Marder, has some of the themes played by different instruments. With Stokowski conducting and narrating, the work was first performed in 1956 by the Houston Symphony orchestra at three children’s concerts.

The tales that de Hartmann chose to evoke have their origins in Ukraine and Russia and are cleverly arranged in a sequence suggesting a narrative thread. Several movements of the piano version have descriptive expanded titles which the composer shortened when he orchestrated the work. As they undoubtedly add a further dimension to de Hartmann’s portraits, they are included in the descriptions of the movements that follow.

Fairy Tales starts with an Introduction, subtitled ‘Alenooshka’s Lullaby’. Woodwinds play a chant-like melody, as if saying ‘Once upon a Time’. In the second half, the solo viola personifies Alenooshka herself. A slimy string phrase and spiky woodwind send shivers down the spine as ‘Verlioka the Monster’ appears. By contrast, jaunty, playful clarinets introduce ‘The Little Peasant as Big as a Thumb with Moustaches Seven Miles long’. To a trumpet fanfare, the hero  Prince ‘Ivan Tsarevitch’, makes his entry, his music noble and courageous.

The fourth tale, ‘The Witches House on Hen’s Legs’, is a familiar title from another famous Russian piano piece, Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition. With a tempo marking of Misterioso (Mysterious), a folk-like oboe melody reveals Baba Yaga, the Witch. Piano and harp combine to  represent ‘The Wonderful Gusli’, a zither-like eastern Slavic folk instrument which Ivan Tsarevitch plays. Of him Hartmann commented ‘What characterizes these Tales is the charm and attraction which Ivan exercises, depends neither on his beauty nor his virile strength, but on his spirit and on the manner in which he plays his gusli’. Mussorgsky combined both Baba Yaga’s house and her flight in his evocation, de Hartmann gives her an energetic separate movement; the title says it all: ‘Baba Yaga the Witch Goes a-Galloping through the Forest in her Mortar, Pounding it with her pestle and sweeping away all trace of herself with a broom’.

Two short portraits follow for strings alone. In ‘Alenooshka’s Lullaby’, a tender melody for solo violin, is offset by the other strings muted. It refers to the folktale of Alenooshka and her brother Ivanushka, who together outwit an evil witch, whereas pizzicato strings conjure ‘The Seven League Boots’, which in Ukrainian and Russian folklore, allows anyone donning them to walk and run at an amazing pace.

De Hartmann specified that the remaining tales were to be played without a break beginning with ‘The Princess of Whom one never Tires of Admiring’. Brought to life by a solo clarinet, she is saved from certain death by Ivan’s bravery. Enigmatic string and wind chords announce ‘Kasstchei the Deathless’, an archetypal character of Russian folklore who conceals on his person a spell to prevent him being killed, and is usually depicted as having malevolent powers. Rimsky-Korsakov used this legend as the basis of his opera Kashchey the Immortal.

Bassoons, muted strings and sidedrum initiate the ‘The Ride of Ivan Tsarevitch and the Princess on the Back of the Grey Wolf to the Kingdom of Marvels’. Finally, trumpets and horns announce ‘The Solemn Entrance of Ivan Tsarevitch and the Princess into the Kingdom of Marvels’, the melodic ideas seemingly from the same stock of folk tunes Stravinsky  used in Petrushka. In a subtle twist of mood, though, the music quietens, becomes more unworldly, as if reflecting what de Hartmann described as ‘the profound and esoteric ideas’ enshrined within the final pages of his Fairy Tales.

© Andrew Burn

Composer profile

By any standards, the life of Thomas Alexandrovich de Hartmann was extraordinary. Born in Khoruzhivka, Ukraine, on 3 October 1885, of Russian aristocratic stock, he demonstrated musical gifts from an early age. Nevertheless, family tradition dictated that, aged nine, he join the military academy in St Petersburg. Fortunately, he was still able to continue his music studies, composition with Arensky, and later, at the St Petersburg Conservatoire, he honed his pianistic skills and studied counterpoint with Taneyev.

In 1906, aged 21, his ballet, The Scarlet Flower was staged in St Petersburg to great acclaim. Immediately after he moved to Munich to study conducting with Felix Mottl. There he met and collaborated with the modernist painter Vassily Kandinsky. Returning to Russia, de Hartmann met and married Olga Arkada Schumacher, daughter of a German diplomat. In 1916, a chance meeting with the Caucasian mystic philosopher and spiritual leader Georgi Ivanovitch Gurdjieff was to change the course of their lives.

After the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, the de Hartmanns fled to Tbilisi, Georgia, where they were reunited with Gurdjieff who, in effect, became their guru, and they, for the next twelve years, were members of his commune. In Tbilisi de Hartmann taught at the conservatoire and also became director of the city’s opera house. Following Gurdjieff, the de Hartmanns lived in Constantinople and Berlin, before the commune finally settled in France, near Fontainbleau. Music was integral to the daily routine of meditation and exercises, with de Hartmann composing piano pieces to accompany them. Later, they were collected under the title Sacred Music.

In 1929, the increasingly unpredictable Gurdjieff severed his connection with several of his earliest followers including the de Hartmanns who never met him again. They moved to a village near Paris, where to provide a steady income during the 1930s and the Second World War, de Hartmann composed film music, but also wrote various concert works. His music was taken up by the cellist, Pablo Casals, and by Eugène Bigot, conductor of the renowned Concerts Lamoureux, with whom Hartmann played his Piano Concerto after the war.

In 1950 the de Hartmanns moved to New York, where he composed, taught and gave lectures. At a lecture in London he met the architect Frank Lloyd Wright who had married one of Gurdjieff’s followers, and this led to a period where the de Hartmanns joined Wright’s architectural commune, Taliesin West, in Arizona. Returning to New York, Thomas and Olga wrote a memoir of Gurdjieff. De Hartmann died suddenly on the 28 March 1956 leaving a legacy including four symphonies, operas, concertos, symphonic poems, chamber, instrumental works and songs. Olga survived him for a further twenty three years keeping the flame of his music alight.

© Andrew Burn

Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky (1840-1893): Francesca da Rimini

In common with the majority of nineteenth century composers, Tchaikovsky frequently found inspiration in literary or dramatic sources.  His ten operas and three ballets confirm his interest in the theatre; and it was as a possible subject for an opera that he originally considered the story of Francesca da Rimini. (In fact it was a Russian of the next generation, Sergei Rachmaninov, who actually brought such a project to fulfilment). Tchaikovsky, however, eventually decided to use the idea as the basis for a symphonic poem, and he began to plan the details of it while on a visit to Paris at the end of 1875.  He continued working on these sketches through the following year, at the same time as composing his first ballet, Swan Lake, and Francesca da Rimini (which he described as a Fantasia after Dante) was completed in November 1876. The first performance was given in Moscow in March 1877.

As a preface to the score Tchaikovsky placed a quotation from the Fifth Canto of Dante’s Inferno, from which the following extract indicates the nature of the music’s expressive range, even of its essential nature: ‘Dante enters Hell’s Second Circle.  There he encounters the souls of those who abandoned themselves to sensual pleasure and whose punishment consists in being exposed in eternal darkness to raging tempests, just as they used to give way in life to the tempest of sensual lust.  Among these unfortunates he recognises Francesca da Rimini, who recounts her story…There is no greater sorrow than to be mindful of happy times when in misery.’

The music sets out with a lengthy introduction, brooding and gloomy. There follows a masterly depiction of the raging fires of Hell, achieved by means of violent percussion, syncopated rhythms, rushing scales in the strings and blazing brass.  At the heart of the work is an extended Andante section which contrasts fundamentally with all this fury. It is a deeply felt evocation of Francesca’s love for Paolo, and recalls Dante’s words which moved Tchaikovsky so much: “There is no greater sorrow than to be mindful of happy times when in misery”.  A clarinet cadenza leads on to one of the composer’s most poignant melodies, its expressive depths enhanced by the wonderful orchestration.  Eventually the reverie comes to its end and the fires of Hell return, building to a final climax of even greater ferocity.

© Terry Barfoot