Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra: Online Concert Programme | Thu 12 Mar 2026

Frank Bridge (1879-1941): Summer

In the graveyard of Friston parish church, near Eastbourne, nestling beneath the east end wall is a gravestone bearing a simple inscription – ‘Frank Bridge Musician’. No further elaboration is necessary since Bridge was indeed just that. Apart from composition, his career embraced performance (he was the violist of the English String Quartet), conducting (he frequently deputised for Henry Wood) and teaching (he nurtured Britten’s prodigious talent.)

Arguably, no other British composer of the first half of the 20th century reveals such a remarkable stylistic journey in his music. His early works, culminating in the orchestral suite The Sea (1910-11) follow in the late-Romantic tradition. After a transitional period, revealing kinship with composers like Delius and Butterworth, exemplified by the tone poem Summer (1914-15), his abhorrence of the First World War, led to his music becoming intense and chromatic as in the Piano Sonata (1921-4). Bridge continued to pursue the sonata’s radical language, so that in his Third String Quartet (1926), for instance, he rubs shoulders with Berg. Also to this decade belong two orchestral masterpieces, Enter Spring (1927) and Oration (1930). Finding little favour, his late works languished and for some three decades after his death, his name was remembered largely through Britten’s homage to his mentor, the Variations on a Theme by Frank Bridge.

An affinity with nature is central to Bridge’s personality and being born and bred in Sussex he was drawn to express its landscape as witnessed in Summer, premiered in London on 13 March 1916, conducted by Bridge. Here he evokes the season on two levels. On the one hand he portrays the languor of a hot summer’s day with its stillness and hum of insects, and on the other his vision is one of atavistic mystery. It is as if he is glancing back in time, recalling subconsciously almost forgotten summer rituals now shrouded by the mists of time. The work is shaped from two ideas: the rustling string figurations of the opening, punctuated by celesta, harp and horns, and the magical theme which emerges from the haze on the oboe. From these gentle beginnings the web of Bridge’s design expands to two climaxes before fading in a shimmer of sensuous sound.

© Andrew Burn

Maurice Ravel (1875-1937): Piano Concerto in G major

1. Allegramente
2. Adagio assai
3. Presto

At the end of the 1920s Ravel embarked simultaneously on the composition of two piano concertos. This might seem a strange decision, but in fact each piece was different from the other in practically every way: in musical content and expression, as well as in the style of the piano writing. One concerto was a commission, set in a single movement, for the one-armed Viennese pianist Paul Wittgenstein, the other was a three-movement work contrasting swift-moving outer movements against a central Adagio. The composition of these concertos proceeded across some two years, and only in the autumn of 1931 were they completed, the G major Concerto coming slightly ahead of that for the left hand.

Although Ravel had declared his intention to perform the G major Concerto himself and feature it on a world tour, his declining health and technical limitations as a pianist caused him to change his mind. The first soloist and dedicatee was Marguerite Long, who with Ravel conducting gave the premiere at the Salle Pleyel in Paris on 14 January 1932.

Ravel regarded the Concerto in G major as ‘a divertissement written in the spirit of Mozart and Saint-Saëns’. The music’s brilliant style is soon established in the Allegramente first movement. The dexterity and lightness of the solo piano part is matched by the role of the first trumpet, while the structure is built around three clearly defined themes. The influence of lively jazzy rhythms is important, but the development finds room also for Ravel’s characteristic vein of tenderness. The closing bars are surely as exciting as can be found anywhere in the concerto literature, rising from the piano’s lowest register and moving with frenetic rhythmic intensity to reach a succession of powerful chords in full orchestra.

The pensive and deeply felt Adagio could hardly be more different. It seems that the Romance from Mozart’s Clarinet Quintet served as the model, though this is no mere adaptation. Instead, Ravel encourages the piano to dominate the movement, with a sustained melodic line that is thoroughly individual in character. The treatment of this material is typical of his obsession with formal and stylistic perfection. There is a special emphasis on precise accentuation, with a steady pulse and wonderfully tender phrasing. When the principal theme is restated after the central climax, it is played by the cor anglais against a beautifully decorative piano accompaniment, a moment of pure magic.

The brief final Presto sets off with a side-drum roll and rapid piano chords. Very soon the jazz influence is felt once more, a reminder perhaps of Ravel’s friendship with George Gershwin. Now the preoccupations are virtuosity combining with pointed wit, along with harmonies whose dissonant clashes often bring an acid tang. In this darting moto perpetuo, other considerations are secondary.

© Terry Barfoot

Sergei Rachmaninov (1873-1943): Symphony No. 3

1. Lento – Allegro moderato
2. Adagio ma non troppo – Allegro vivace – Tempo come prima
3. Allegro – Allegro vivace – Allegro

It was with a heavy heart that Rachmaninov decided to emigrate from Russia in 1917. He had accepted that the country he loved so much was changing beyond all recognition and would no longer be a place where he could express himself as either a man or a musician. After a year in Stockholm and Copenhagen, he sailed with his wife and daughters to America where, as the greatest pianist of his day, he would make a lucrative living from giving concerts and making recordings.

Nevertheless, though he may well have enjoyed the glamorous lifestyle that being a star virtuoso afforded, Rachmaninov always felt profoundly connected to his homeland and a nostalgic longing for his cultural roots took its toll. ‘There is a burden heavier to me than any other,’ he said. ‘It is that I have no country.’

He felt isolated as a composer as well. Schönberg and Stravinsky had also emigrated to the United States, but Rachmaninov struggled to be part of their modernist approaches. ‘I feel like a ghost wandering in a world grown alien,’ he wrote. ‘I cannot cast out the old way of writing and I cannot acquire the new. I have made an intense effort to feel the musical manner of today, but it will not come to me.’ Rachmaninov’s reluctance to embrace the musical avant-garde may have garnered him some snooty detractors over the years but remaining true to his beliefs hasn’t done him any harm in the long run. He believed ‘a composer’s music should express the country of his birth, his love affairs, his religion, the books that have influenced him, the pictures he loves. It should be the sum total of a composer’s experience.’ It is encouraging that a composer so honest in making sure his music was so personal is still the most popular composer of the 20th century.

During the summers, Rachmaninov recuperated from the exertion of his concert tours at a beautiful villa he had built by the shores of Lake Lucerne in Switzerland. It was here in 1935 that he set about writing his Third Symphony, something he had been contemplating doing for many years. His First Symphony, composed in 1897, had been such a disaster that he almost gave up writing music altogether. His Second, ten years later, was so successful that he was paralysed by the pressure of trying to follow it. It seems his personal and musical confidence was threatened by both failure and success, and he had not written a purely orchestral work for 25 years.

It is perhaps understandable then that the symphony should begin with a tentative dipping of a toe into uncertain waters. But once the opening mysterious melody (one that returns in different guises throughout the piece) has been played by just three musicians, an orchestral flourish launches us into a movement of great brilliance and panache. To continue the aquatic metaphor, ‘It’s lovely once you’re in!’ The whole movement bathes us in a warm glow of lyricism, underpinned by sensual harmonies expressed through crystal clear and transparent orchestration.

In his piano concertos Rachmaninov had often written a central movement which contained both slow and fast music. Such structural economy must have appealed to him because this is a model he adopted in his Third Symphony too. The combination of slow movement and scherzo brings the romantic Russian face to face with American pizzazz. Though there seems no animosity between the two, it is perhaps significant that Rachmaninov chooses to give the last word to his dark and longing soul rather than the helter-skelter of contemporary trans-Atlantic life.

The finale bursts into life with an effervescent celebration of swirling Russian dance rhythms and amorous expressions of tenderness and passion. And a boisterous fugue maintains the sense of joyful song and dance. A work that began with nostalgia, has ended in thrilling resolve. Premiered in November 1936, at first, the symphony struggled to gain popularity. Audiences seem to have been upset as much by the work’s sentimentality as they were by the concise clarity of thought that goes alongside it. For me it is this very juxtaposition that makes the piece one of Rachmaninov’s greatest works. It is precisely the economy of means that gives the emotion such power. I can well imagine the composer at his villa in Lucerne, looking to the East with melancholic longing, and at the West’s optimism and luxury, while all the while surrounded by Swiss cool efficiency and sophistication. It is the combination of all three states of mind that makes his Third Symphony such a complete experience.

© Mark Wigglesworth