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BPO Programme (v2) 24 OCT 2010:Layout 1 24/10/10 08:55 Page 6 Programme notes BY PETER BACK © 2010 Peer Gynt Suite No. 1 Edvard Grieg (1843 – 1907) Morning The Death of Ase Anitra’s Dance In the Hall of the Mountain King The hero of Peer Gynt, Henrik Ibsen’s extraordinary verse-drama, is a vain, boastful egotist and a chronic liar. Peer Gynt is part satire, part philosophical meditation and part knockabout comedy. When Ibsen decided to adapt Peer Gynt for the stage, he sought from the outset the collaboration of Edvard Grieg, already in his early thirties Norway’s leading composer. For the first performance in 1876 and for subsequent revivals, Grieg wrote altogether some twenty-three items of incidental music. Later he revised and re-orchestrated eight of them to form two suites for the concert hall. Peer Gynt lives alone with his aged mother, Ase. He invades the wedding ceremony of his former girlfriend, Ingrid, whom he abducts to the mountains. She deserts him and he becomes an outlaw. Attacked by trolls in the hall of the mountain king, he is saved only by the sound of church bells and the trolls take flight. He sets up home in a hut in the woods where he is followed by the lovely Solveig, who is in love with him. He deserts her, returning home in time for the death of his mother. He spends many years in America, Morocco and Egypt before returning home an old, wasted man, who finds redemption through the constancy and devotion of Solveig. For many, Morning conjures up a picture of a fresh, sunlit Scandinavian morning. In the drama, it accompanies Peer Gynt in Africa, no longer a Norwegian mountain lad but an opportunist middle-aged capitalist. Muted strings and a simple, repeated rhythmic pattern provide a moving musical background for the Death of Ase. Anitra’s Dance is an exotic mazurka for muted strings and triangle, danced by a Bedouin chief’s daughter with whom Peer dallies during his African adventures. In the Hall of the Mountain King accompanies Peer’s terrified escape from the malignant trolls of the Norwegian uplands. Flute Concerto Carl Nielsen (1865-1931) Allegro moderato Allegretto – Adagio ma non troppo – Allegretto – Tempo di marcia Carl Nielsen was born into a large and extremely poor family on the island of Fyn, off the coast of Denmark. A primitive feeling for nature, implanted in him during
BPO Programme (v2) 24 OCT 2010:Layout 1 24/10/10 08:55 Page 7 his childhood years, gave him a sense of identity with the Danish soil. He distilled the essence of the Danish temperament in music with an unsentimental directness of expression. His music is disciplined, with constructive clarity as well as humanity and warmth. He was an independent thinker and it is totally in character that he developed an individual style that went against the trends of the day. He had a genuine concern for the integrity of his art, believing that a composer reveals himself through his music. He wrote about ‘the riddle of why music . . . both reveals and rewards its man [the composer]. If he aims high, it helps him . . . But if he is stupid, conceited, commonplace or sentimental, the fact will be revealed with almost brutal clarity.’ Around the early 1900s Nielsen began to structure his works more on classical lines while continuing to draw on the late Romantic idiom, merging it with current trends in orchestration, chromaticism and atonality. His music can move from the calmly ecstatic to the tempestuous, sometimes quite suddenly. Such unpredictability is an inevitable aspect of his humanity. The emotional content is always easy to identify with, as one would expect from a man who felt himself to be just like any other man. Having composed his wind quintet in 1922, Nielsen planned a series of solo concertos for each of the wind quintet instruments. He managed to complete only two, one for flute and the other for clarinet. His preoccupation with the individuality of instruments is summed up in a statement he made around this time: ‘I think on the basis of the instruments themselves – in a way I creep into them. One can very well say that the instruments have a soul . . .’ Nielsen completed the Flute Concerto in 1926; it was premièred in Paris with Ravel and Honegger in the audience. The Concerto was written for Holger Gilbert Jespersen, a man who cherished refinement and hated vulgarity. Surprising therefore to find a bass trombone introduced into a ‘respectable’ orchestra of Mozartian proportions. Was this Nielsen’s joke at Jespersen’s expense? The trombone attempts to disrupt the serious, pastoral mood of the opening – much to the flute’s evident chagrin. Sanity is restored and the flute alone and in dialogue with others (especially the clarinet) indulges in some exquisite passages of musical poetry. The second movement opens with an allegretto that alternates with a powerful adagio until the bass trombone interrupts once more with a march tune. In the brilliantly innovative conclusion the trombone assists the flute but has a final joke with some very ‘improper’ glissandi.
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