Yuri Bashmet and the Moscow Soloists Chamber Orchestra

The Mozart-like gift of Benjamin Britten (1913–1976) is beyond all doubt. He began composing music at the age of five. “I remember my first essay,” he recalled many years later, “there were hundreds of dots scattered all over the page, connected by long lines and pretty arches…My subsequent attempts were more connected with sound. I started playing the piano and I wrote poems with complex harmonies, each of them lasting no longer then twenty seconds…” By the age of fourteen, his portfolio as a composer, in addition to songs and pieces for piano, included half a dozen string quartets, ten piano sonatas and oratorios… Of course, the composer did not have mercy on all of these youthful efforts. But when his student years passed at the Royal College of Music in London, from which Britten graduated as a composer and as a pianist, he set his sights on his first steps as a composer. In 1934 he completed The Simple Symphony, Op. 4.

In a brief foreword to the score, Britten wrote “The Simple Symphony was composed from material from works by composers aged between nine and twelve… Basically I took sections with no changes, though the development of the theme is new in many places. The score for string orchestra has been written fully by the composer himself.” In the footnotes to each movement, the composer denotes the source from which this or that theme was taken. On the very first page of The Boisterous Bourée in sonata form (the bourée is an old French dance which, along with other dances, joined instrumental suites in the 17^th century) he highlights the main part: “From Piano Suite No 1, 1926”. The note for the songful, secondary part is denoted as “Song, 1923”. The second movement of the symphony Playful Pizzicato in three-part form is framed by the theme of the 1924 Piano Scherzo. The middle section (trio) is constructed from material from the 1924 Song. The slow movement of the cycle Sentimental Saraband is based on two themes – the bleak, Handel-like melody, the theme from Piano Suite No 3 from 1925 and the mournful, lyrical Waltz for Piano from 1923. The Frolicsome Finale borrows the principal theme from Piano Suite No 9, and the secondary theme from a Song from 1925. On the whole, Britten’s The Simple Symphony bears witness to the young composer’s grasp of orchestral cognition, instrumentation and of the fully independent conversion of classical forms.

Britten’s art forms the undoubted peak of the English musical Renaissance of the 20th century. His constant and lifelong references to British musical tradition, in particular to the music of “Britain’s Orpheus” Henry Purcell are, therefore, not by mere chance (a version of the opera Dido and Aeneas, Variation and Fugue on a Theme by Purcell for Orchestra). Then there comes Lacrymae, Op. 48 (1950), which Britten himself defined as “Reflections on a Song of Dowland, for viola and piano” (the composer’s version is for viola and strings). Dowland was Shakespeare’s favourite composer, a virtuoso lute player, the man who wrote the collection of Songs and Arias accompanied by lute and viola da gamba, a brilliant master of the Elizabethan era. The chain of variations of differing character – one of Britten’s most frequently employed forms – gives promise of a meeting with distinguished music.

John Woolrich (born 1954), one of the most vivid figures in contemporary British music, follows Britten’s example. A writer of orchestral and chamber music and of works for musical theatre, Woolrich is one of the most frequently performed composers. It suffices to say that to date there have been over one hundred and fifty performances of Ulysses Awakes (1989) in dozens of countries, thanks to the musical beauty of the opera by the great Monteverdi and Woolrich’s expert transcription. According to the composer of this contemporary version, “there are two long arias at the start of Monteverdi’s opera Il ritorno d’Ulisse in patria: one is performed by Penelope, the other by Ulisse, who awakes on the shore of his native island. In my ‘retelling’ the mezzo sings the role of Ulysses.”

The music of Alfred Schnittke (1934–1998) today is acclaimed as an artistic expression of an already gone yet still remembered age, as a musical diary of a supremely talented – let us not be afraid of the word: genial – contemporary, who bore witness to the latter half of the twentieth century. And like any evidence of a great Master, like Time, recorded in sounds, Schnittke’s works – let us express the hope – already belong to Eternity. The composer himself, speaking of other musicians, underlined the moral function of music, he saw in it a “key to the overwhelming brevity of physical life – the everlasting nature of spiritual life.”

Monologue for Viola and String Orchestra (1989) was dedicated by Alfred Schnittke to the constant performer of his works, the outstanding violist Yuri Bashmet (four years earlier the Violin Concerto had been dedicated to him, and it immediately won unheard-of popularity). The Moscow Soloists ensemble and conductor Yuri Bashmet took part in the first performance of the Monologue on the 4^th of June 1989 in Bonn, at the Beethoven Hall. The restrained, bleak, “Hamletianly” expressive and philosophically highly significant Monologue is thus so closely linked to musically transfigured speech that at times it appears that this “word” is being addressed to the audience. Yet at the same time it is also a self-extended “inner speech” (a phrase used by Alexander Etkind) and a passionate, devout prayer.

In the works of Joseph Haydn (1732–1809) the symphony travelled the path from early, as yet completely undemanding examples (in the literal sense, a sinfonia is a consonance that delights the ears) to well developed, dramatic and integral compositions. Haydn established the unshakeable canon of the four-movement symphony, introducing into it his beloved minuet – not affected and courtly, but somewhat rough and of the common people. He ultimately developed the sonata-allegro form for the first movement of a symphonic cycle. He brought the symphony to a wide audience, through references to the different peoples of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. He broadened the scope of the genre and each of his symphonies took on individual features of its own. This is true in particular of such masterpieces as the final twelve London Symphonies.

Already from this point it is but a step to Beethoven’s heroic flights, to the daring symphonic concepts of the Romantics. Symphony No 104 in D Major (1795) completes the grandiose list of Haydn’s achievements in the genre of the symphony, for the next two centuries, if not for all time, which he had established as the greatest genre of all in music.

Iosif Raiskin