Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra: Online Concert Programme | Thu 27 February 2025
- Extended Concert Programme
Bristol Beacon presents
Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra with Mark Wigglesworth & Sir Stephen Hough
Thu 27 February 2025, 7.30pm
This evening’s performance:
Mark Wigglesworth Conductor
Sir Stephen Hough Piano
Walter van Dyk Narrator (Enigma Variations)
Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra
Brahms Symphony No. 3
Interval
Hough Piano Concerto, ‘The World of Yesterday’
Elgar Variations on an Original Theme, ‘Enigma’
Pre-concert talk hosted by music educator Jonathan James
Welcome
We are now well into our current Orchestral Season at Bristol Beacon, and we hope you were able to join us last year for memorable concerts by the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra, Sinfonia of London and the Hungarian Radio Symphony Orchestra.
This is my first season in my new role and I have been meeting many of our artists, audiences and supporters and enjoying the opportunity to get a clear sense of why these concerts are a celebrated and important part of our extensive music programme here at Bristol Beacon. The acoustics and the atmosphere in Beacon Hall receive many positive comments, and our guest artists are very complimentary about the warm and intimate feeling within our Hall.
Over the next few months we will be welcoming artists including Nicola Benedetti, Vikingur Ólafsson and Gianandrea Noseda. We look forward to a further visit from our Associate Artists, the London Symphony Orchestra, more from our Orchestra in Residence, the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra, and, towards the end of the season, the first ever visit from the Philippine Philharmonic Orchestra.
We will also welcome back the BBC Proms and BBC Radio 3 for another residency later this year, with programmes to be announced in due course.
Thank you so much for supporting our Orchestral Season and I hope you continue to enjoy these special concerts.
With best wishes,
Simon Wales
Chief Executive, Bristol Beacon
Johannes Brahms (1833-1897): Symphony No. 3 in F major
1. Allegro con brio
2. Andante
3. Poco allegretto
4. Allegro – Un poco sostenuto
By the early 1880s, Johannes Brahms was comfortably settled in his role as the most respected contemporary Austro-German composer of orchestral music. (Anton Bruckner was doing his best to rival Brahms’s efforts, but with little public or critical success.) Brahms had composed two symphonies in 1876 and 1877: the First was an epic project decades in the making, the Second a gorgeously lyrical work that took him mere months to complete. His choral piece Ein deutsches Requiem had secured him an international reputation, and his more recent Violin Concerto had been a hit in Britain as well as Germany, Austria and further afield.
Many of these large-scale pieces were composed during Brahms’s summer holidays – although they were not quite the restful periods that this description might suggest. May to October was a chance to escape from the city and the concert ‘season’ – to break free of performing and conducting engagements in favour of travel, exercise, relaxing with friends, and working in blissful silence. Brahms would usually rise very early, go walking, and then work throughout the day with frequent breaks for good strong coffee (which he brewed himself: his coffee ‘machines’ are on display in several Austrian and German museums!) and then time to socialise. But time alone was all-important: “I need complete solitude,” he wrote to a friend, “not only to achieve what is possible for me, but in order to be able to think about my things at all. That lies in my nature.”
The Third Symphony, Brahms’s op.90, in the key of F major, was largely composed in the summer of 1883 in Wiesbaden, to the south-west of Frankfurt, where he had several good friends nearby to visit between his labours. He then finished the piece in the autumn when he was once more at home in Vienna. As was his standard practice by this time, he next performed the piece to his friends in an arrangement for two pianos. This gave him a chance to test his work, garner opinions from trusted colleagues – and in due course provided a valuable resource for the distinguished conductor Hans Richter, who gave the first performance with the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra on 2 December 1883.
The grand swells of the Symphony’s opening immediately place us in uncertain territory – are we in a major key, or a minor one? – and Brahms continues to play with this ambiguity throughout the first movement, even after providing us with a brief lyrical reassurance that we are, technically at least, in F major. That sense of belonging ‘technically’ in a key persists for the rest of the Symphony, which is bound together by a three-note motif of F – A flat – F. For many years it was thought that the multiple appearances of these three notes indicated some kind of musical cipher, a code for a secret Brahmsian motto; but there is no evidence that this is in fact the case. Instead, the motif is there to unite that sweeping opening Allegro with a warm and generous Andante, the sinuous and driving finale – and of course the third-movement Allegretto, surely one of the most beautifully yearning melodies that Brahms ever wrote. Critics at the premiere predicted with such certainty that the piece would rapidly make its way from Vienna to concert halls around the world. And they were right.
© Katy Hamilton
Stephen Hough (b. 1961): Piano Concerto, ‘The World of Yesterday’
1. Prelude and Cadenza
2. Waltz Variations
3. Tarantella Appassionata
This twenty-minute piano concerto is based on two motives. The first of these opens the work, heard in its simplest form in violins and flutes, all white-notes, not a cloud in the sky. In bar three clarinet and harp answer with a germ of the second motive, a chain of rising triads, also in purest C major, which will later become the Waltz. The Prelude slowly begins to blush with richer harmonies and increasing energy, until the piano enters to play an extended cadenza. After a while the energy of its ragged, splashing virtuosity dissipates and we hear the second motive as a slow, disarmingly sweet-toothed waltz – with a hint of Bill Evans perhaps.
This turns out to be a premonition of the real Waltz section as the strings enter playing the sixteen-bar theme in its full, decadently seductive form. There follow seven variations on this waltz where the pianist is mainly accompanist, providing a sparkle of decorative commentary. An eighth variation begins with a cranking up of tempo until, back in C major, we hear both themes waltzing together, glistening with glockenspiel. A further acceleration tumbles us into the Tarantella.
Now the waltz theme is squashed into staccato chords punctuated by xylophone flashes of the first theme. The energy works itself into a frenzy of agitation, propelling the music to a sudden silence, after which we hear the first theme, back in C major but flaring with fanfares and flourishes. The music increases in emotional intensity until the two themes are heard again, now stretched to a new height of sentimental ardour. A lurch of acceleration returns us hastily to the tarantella and from there, inexorably, to the frenetic, blazing conclusion of the piece, horns blaring and piano gnashing.
‘The World of Yesterday’ … a subtitle with several meanings. It is borrowed from Stefan Zweig’s eponymous memoir with its celebration of Viennese culture before the First World War: the world as it used to be; nostalgia as both literal and legend. But this title became a tag for me, representing the history of the piano concerto form itself: invented to be a touring piece for composers who were also pianists, a visiting card on the road. From Mozart, its most prolific exponent, to Beethoven, Mendelssohn, Chopin, right through to the mid-20th century’s virtuosos, Rachmaninov, Prokofiev and Bartók, to be a pianist was to write a piano concerto. A world of yesterday indeed.
© Stephen Hough
Edward Elgar (1857-1934): Variations on an Original Theme, ‘Enigma’
The Variations on an Original Theme (‘Enigma’) op.36, is a brilliantly varied portrait gallery of Elgar’s friends, family and neighbours. The musical caricatures contain some of the most charming and deeply felt music Elgar ever penned and these are elaborated upon in this unique performance, which features excerpts from Edward Elgar’s own writings which have been specially compiled by Mark Wigglesworth, and will be spoken by actor Walter van Dyk.
Commonly known just as the Enigma Variations, Elgar composed this, his first major masterpiece during 1898 and 1899. The conceit behind the work was that each variation depicted friends and associates, mainly from the area around Malvern, and hence the dedication on the score ‘to my Friends pictured within’. Hans Richter conducted the first performance at St James’s Hall, London, on 19 June 1899: such was its immediate success that overnight Elgar became recognized as a leading figure in British musical life.
Elgar maintained that the ‘enigma’ behind the work was twofold: the source of the theme itself, and a second associated with all the variations, but which is not actually played. The first enigma seems easy to solve: the theme is the composer himself, its opening probably based upon the rhythm of his own name. But the second enigma must retain its mystery, though suggestions include Auld Lang Syne and God Save the King. More important is the music’s stature; for here Elgar fuses his success as a composer of small-scale salon music with an imaginative and skillful larger view.
The movements are as follows:
1. Theme: Andante
2. Var I. C.A.E. L’istesso tempo
3. Var II. H.D.S-P. Allegro
4. Var III. R.B.T. Allegretto
5. Var IV. W.M.B. Allegro di Molto
6. Var V. R.P.A. Moderato
7. Var VI. Ysobel. Andantino
8. Var VII. Troyte. Presto
9. Var VIII. W.N. Allegretto
10. Var IX. Nimrod. Adagio
11. Var X. Dorabella. Intermezzo. Allegretto
12. Var XI. G.R.S. Allegro di molto
13. Var XII. B.G.N. Andante
14. Var XIII. *** Romanza. Moderato
15. Var XIV. E.D.U. Finale. Allegro
© BSO
Mark Wigglesworth
Conductor
Mark Wigglesworth is recognised internationally for his masterly interpretations both in the opera house and in the concert hall, highly detailed performances that combine a finely considered architectural structure with great sophistication and rare beauty. As a highly respected conductor he has forged many enduring relationships with orchestras and opera companies across the world, conducting repertoire ranging from Mozart to Boulez.
Highlights have included performances with the Berlin Philharmonic, Royal Concertgebouw, London Symphony, Boston Symphony, New York Philharmonic, Philadelphia Orchestra, Chicago Symphony, Los Angeles Philharmonic, Cleveland Orchestra, and Tokyo Symphony. Recordings include a critically acclaimed cycle of the Shostakovich Symphonies with the BBC National Orchestra of Wales and the Netherlands Radio Philharmonic, Mahler’s Sixth and Tenth Symphonies with the Melbourne Symphony, a disc of English music with the Sydney Symphony, Britten’s Peter Grimes with Glyndebourne, and the Brahms Piano Concertos with Stephen Hough.
In opera, Wigglesworth has enjoyed long relationships with The Royal Opera House, Covent Garden (Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg, Rise and Fall of Mahagonny, From the House of the Dead, La Clemenza di Tito, Hansel and Gretel) and English National Opera (Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk, Cosi fan Tutti, Falstaff, Katya Kabanova, Parsifal, Force of Destiny, Magic Flute, Jenufa, Don Giovanni, Lulu) and operatic engagements elsewhere include The Metropolitan Opera, New York (The Marriage of Figaro, Orfeo) as well as at The Bavarian State Opera, Opéra National de Paris, and the Teatro Real, Madrid. In 2017 he received the Olivier Award for Outstanding Achievement in Opera.
He has written articles for The Guardian and The Independent, and made a six-part TV series for the BBC entitled Everything to Play For. His book The Silent Musician: Why Conducting Matters is published by Faber & Faber and has been translated into Spanish and Chinese. He has held positions as Associate Conductor of the BBC Symphony, Principal Guest Conductor of the Swedish Radio Symphony and the Adelaide Symphony, Music Director of the BBC National Orchestra of Wales and English National Opera and in September 2024 became Chief Conductor of the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra.
Sir Stephen Hough
Piano
Named by The Economist as one of Twenty Living Polymaths, Sir Stephen Hough combines a distinguished career of a concert pianist with those of a composer and writer. In recognition of his contribution to cultural life, he became the first classical performer to be given a MacArthur Fellowship, and was awarded a Knighthood for Services to Music in the Queen’s Birthday Honours 2022.
In a career spanning over 40 years, Stephen Hough has played regularly with most of the world’s leading orchestras, including televised and filmed appearances with the Berlin, London, China, Seoul and New York Philharmonic Orchestras, and the Concertgebouw, Budapest Festival and the NHK Symphony Orchestras. He has been a regular guest of recital series and festivals including Carnegie Hall’s Stern Auditorium, London’s Royal Festival Hall, Salzburg, Verbier, La Roque-d’Anthéron, Aspen, Tanglewood, Aldeburgh and Edinburgh.
He began his 2024/25 concert season with his 30th appearance at the BBC Proms, performing at Last Night of the Proms to a live audience of 6,000 and televised audience of 3.5 million. Over the course of the season Hough performs over 80 concerts on four continents, including opening Philharmonia Orchestra’s season at the Royal Festival Hall, performances with the Cleveland Orchestra, performing a solo recital at Barbican Centre and giving the world premiere of his Willa Cather-inspired Piano Quintet at Lincoln Center’s David Geffen Hall. Following the 2024 world premiere of his own Piano Concerto (The World of Yesterday), named after Stefan Zweig’s memoir, Hough brings the work to Adelaide, Bournemouth, Oregon, Singapore and Vermont Symphony Orchestras.
Hough’s discography of 70 recordings has garnered awards including the Diapason d’Or de l’Année, several Grammy nominations, and eight Gramophone Awards including Record of the Year and the Gold Disc. For Hyperion he has recorded the complete piano concertos of Beethoven, Brahms, Liszt, Mendelssohn, Rachmaninov, Saint-Saëns and Tchaikovsky as well as celebrated solo recordings of the Final Piano Pieces of Brahms, Chopin’s complete nocturnes, waltzes, ballades and scherzi, as well as recitals of Schumann, Schubert, Franck, Debussy and Mompou. Upcoming releases include a Liszt Album, a recital of encores, including arrangements made for Lang Lang’s Disney project, and Hough’s own Piano Concerto.
As a composer, Hough’s Fanfare Toccata was commissioned for the 2022 Van Cliburn International Piano Competition and performed by all 30 competitors. His 2021 String Quartet No.1 Les Six Rencontres, was written for and recorded by the Takács Quartet for Hyperion Records. Hough’s body of songs, choral and instrumental works have been commissioned by Musée du Louvre, National Gallery of London, Westminster Abbey, Westminster Cathedral, the Wigmore Hall, the Genesis Foundation, Gilmore International Keyboard Festival, the Walter W. Naumburg Foundation, BBC Sounds, and the Berlin Philharmonic Wind Quintet. His music is published by Josef Weinberger Ltd.
As an author, Hough’s memoir Enough: Scenes from Childhood, was published by Faber & Faber in Spring 2023. It follows his 2019 collection of essays Rough Ideas: Reflections on Music and More which received a Royal Philharmonic Society Award and was named one of the Financial Times’ Books of the Year. His novel The Final Retreat was published in 2018 (Sylph Editions). He has also written for The New York Times, The Telegraph, The Times, The Guardian and the Evening Standard. Hough is an Honorary Bencher of the Middle Temple, an Honorary Member of the Royal Philharmonic Society, an Honorary Fellow of Cambridge University’s Girton College, the International Chair of Piano Studies and a Companion of the Royal Northern College of Music, and is on the faculty of The Juilliard School in New York.
Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra
One of the UK’s best-loved orchestras, Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra is known for championing the role of culture in people’s lives. Based at Lighthouse, Poole, the Orchestra is resident in Bristol, Exeter, Portsmouth, Southampton, and Yeovil, and performs in towns and villages across the region. As a leading arts charity, it is the largest cultural provider in the Southwest of England, serving one of the biggest and most diverse regions in the UK.
Mark Wigglesworth’s appointment as Chief Conductor (from autumn 2024) builds on the BSO’s reputation for the highest quality music-making; the Orchestra boasts an enviable list of named conductors, including Principal Guest Conductor Chloé Van Soeterstède, Marin Alsop, David Hill MBE, Kirill Karabits, and Andrew Litton.
Highlights of the season include concerto and chamber performances from Artist-in-Residence Alena Baeva and collaborations with Calleva Assistant Conductor, Enyi Okpara. Plus, the Orchestra’s celebrated Digital Concert series continues into its fifth year.
Known for championing access to high-quality music for all, the BSO leads hundreds of community-based events each year, from award-winning work in health and care settings to partnerships with schools and music education hubs. In the 2024/25 season, it deepens its reach into local communities, including a new partnership with Dorset County Hospital.
bsolive.com
Orchestra Credits
Violin 1
Amyn Merchant (Leader)
Mark Derudder
Edward Brenton
Kate Turnbull §
Magdalena Gruca-Broadbent
Jennifer Curiel §
Isabella Fleming
Kate Hawes §
Joan Martinez
Catriona Hepburn
Emma Martin
Elena Abad
Edward Mccullagh
Rowan Patterson
Violin 2
Carol Paige *
Ricky Gore
June Lee
Maren Bosma
Vicky Berry §
Eddy Betancourt
Rebecca Burns
Lara Carter §
Boglarka Gyorgy
Hannah Renton
Steven Crichlow
Janice Thorgilson
Viola
Yukiko Ogura
Raquel Lopez Bolivar
James Hogg (T)
Judith Preston §
Liam Buckley
Peter Fenech (T)
Ben Norris (T)
Alison Kay
Stephanie Chambers
Annie-May Page
Cello
Jesper Svedberg *
Auriol Evans
Hannah Arnold
Philip Collingham Ω
Rebecca McNaught
Kate Keats
Desmond Neysmith
Judith Burgin
Double Bass
David Daly * §
Nicole Carstairs §
Ben du Toit
Mike Chaffin
Jane Ferns §
Martin Henderson
Flute
Anna Pyne *
Jenny Farley
(Owain Bailey)
Piccolo
Owain Bailey *
Oboe
Edward Kay * §
Holly Randall
Clarinet
Barry Deacon *
Cara Doyle
Bassoon
Tammy Thorn *
Emma Selby
Contra Bassoon
Kim Murphy
Horn
Eleanor Blakeney (T)
Ruth Spicer §
Edward Lockwood §
Kevin Pritchard §
Alex Willett
Trumpet
Paul Bosworth *
Peter Turnbull §
David Ward
Peter Mankarious
Trombone
Kevin Morgan * §
Robb Tooley
Bass Trombone
Joe Arnold
Tuba
Stuart Beard
Timpani
Daniel Gonzalez Estevez (T)
Percussion
Matt King * §
Ben Lewis
Helen Edordu
Harp
Eluned Pierce * §
* Section Principal
§ Long Service Award
Ω Diversity Champion