by Andrew Gillett | 1 May 2023 | blog
Oh to have heard Teresa Stolz sing! Giuseppe Verdi, in his sixtieth year, was in Naples assisting in the production of his latest opera, Aida, when the lead soprano, Teresa Stolz became ill and everything was put on hold. Stolz (forty-one at the time) was his soprano of choice. (She performed the soprano solo in the first performance of his Requiem the following year – 1874.) His wife, Giuseppina Strepponi, had been a celebrated soprano too, but had retired. His first wife, Margherita Barezzi, had also been a singer. Surely the voices of the women that he knew and his relationships with them fed his musical imagination. The same could be said of Mozart, for sure, and many other composers. It is as if there is something of these women (and men of course) embedded, almost recorded, in the music. Could this be, in a way, a hugely respectful and fond way of appreciating and celebrating them that lasts forever? A debatable subject, for sure, especially bearing in mind their varying roles and reputations in the drama, but something worth debating, perhaps. Holed up in his hotel, the Grande Albergo delle Crocelle (favourite haunt of, amongst others, Casanova some time back), a beautiful spot by the sea, fifteen minutes walk from the theatre, Verdi must have been aware that there were some string players in the theatre orchestra with time on their hands and he proceeded to pen a large scale work for string quartet which had its first performance in the hotel. He was modest about its qualities but it is in reality an astonishingly assured and brilliant...
by Andrew Gillett | 28 Apr 2023 | blog
The music of Nino Rota (b. 1911 d. 1979) may not be a familiar name to concert audiences but such iconic films as The Godfather and La Dolce Vita will surely be well known to many. Rota wrote the soundtrack for these Federico Fellini directed films, as well as many other films such as Zeffirelli’s Romeo and Juliet. He is a hugely significant figure in the history of film making. In particular, he helped Italian film develop its unique character. Fellini called him his ‘most precious collaborator. He had a geometric imagination, a musical approach worthy of celestial spheres. He thus had no need to see images from my movies. I clearly realised he was not concerned with images at all. His world was inner, inside himself, and reality had no way to enter it.’ Rota was a prolific composer in other musical forms too – ballet, opera, concertos and chamber music. His Quartetto per archi (Quartet for strings) was written just after the Second World War, in the same period that he was writing his first film scores. There is definitely something rather atmospheric and filmic about this section in the last movement: http://www.divertimento.uk.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/04/YouCut_20230428_002039529.mp4 Perhaps it is possible to hear a reference to ceremonial courtly early music in the louder, livelier section here. As a student Rota had written a thesis on the Venetian Renaissance composer and music theorist, Gioseffo Zarlino. There is something of the celestial spheres suggested in the illustrations of Zarlino’s groundbreaking treatise, Le Institutioni Harmoniche, which must have appealed to Rota. (Zarlino was an exact Venetian contemporary of the painter Tintoretto, whose St...
by Andrew Gillett | 26 Apr 2023 | blog
Our Italian programme begins with the music of a courageous and determined eighteenth century woman. Maddalena Lombardini’s impoverished parents took her to audition for a place at the Ospedale di San Lazzaro dei Mendicanti, one of Venice’s charitable institutions for the poor, sick and orphaned, which also served as educational establishments. In particular, musical skills were nurtured, presumably with the expectation of the pupils’ involvement in the music in the chapel there. She was accepted. Lombardini was clearly a talented young musician and managed to get permission to have violin lessons with Tartini, violinist and musical theorist, who lived in Padua. She studied composition with Ferdinando Bertoni, choirmaster at the Ospedale. Her sights were soon set beyond the walls of the Ospedale. In order to be released from its confines she needed a dowry. She married another violinist composer, Lodovico Sirmen, and they left to tour Europe. They performed to acclaim in Turin, Paris and London, often playing their own compositions – concertos, duets, and no doubt quartets. A set of six quartets (we are playing No 6) published in Paris in 1769 was considered to have been co-written by the couple but more recently the authorship has been more clearly identified as being that of Maddalena herself. On the cusp of the early classical style that was being developed by Haydn, and contemporary with his earliest string quartets, there is still a flavour in her music of the courtly airs and graces that she would have encountered on her visits to the cultural capitals of Europe. Despite the early flowering of her talent and fame, she ultimately got...
by Andrew Gillett | 10 Feb 2023 | blog
Some years ago a scientific research group put out a request for antique objects, ornaments, artefacts, containing air that had been sealed in when they were made. The idea was that this air could be analysed for levels of pollution that existed in Victorian times, or whenever the object was made, in comparison with modern levels. The sealed air makes me think of the silences in Haydn’s music. Surrounded and sealed by the notes around them, Haydn’s silences are pockets of silence from the 18th century. We are connected to the silence that he experienced and that listeners have experienced and will experience whenever the piece is played. It is also, for some, a communal experience of awareness of a greater universal silence, in the listening present moment of a performance. (In a way, the silence gives us a more authentic experience of the 18th century than the actual notes, because the sounds that we hear are the result of interpretation and such things as the sounds of the instruments and styles of playing, which have changed – but silence hasn’t.) Haydn leads us to the silence, enabling it to grace our lives for a moment. Perhaps this is his greatest gift to us. There is another striking silence in this quartet – if silence can be striking. This one is particularly clever. It catches the players off guard – a deliberate banana skin moment when the music evaporates unexpectedly. Where has the music gone?! How are we going to get it back again? Silence rules. Everything comes out of silence and goes back into silence.. What follows this...
by Andrew Gillett | 2 Feb 2023 | blog
It is always good to come across composers who we have never heard of before but whose music comes to life with vivid immediacy when the bow strokes the string. One such composer is Ignacy Dobrzyński (born in what was then Polish-Ukraine), a fellow classmate of Frédéric Chopin at the Warsaw Conservatoire. Dobrzyński and Chopin were encouraged by their teacher Józef Elsner to incorporate polonaises, mazurkas and other traditional Polish folk music into their compositions. Their paths were ultimately very different. Chopin was at the forefront of the Romantic movement, his star ever rising. Dobrzyński, famous in his time, became rather lost in the foggy hinterland of less well known composers but his music deserves to be heard. We are pleased to be bringing his quartet in E minor op 7 to life. Dobrzyński doesn’t step far out of the magnetic field of Joseph Haydn’s influence in his quartet. Haydn’s op 50 no 5 is not one of his better known quartets but it is as supreme an example of quartet writing as any – succinct, unpredictable, fascinating. The dream-like slow movement holds its magical spell throughout its relatively brief appearance – a reverie in sound. What is the reverie about? Who knows?! This is surely one of the key elements of the very best art – that it offers our imagination opportunities to roam and dream without boundaries or foregone conclusions. Shostakovich’s music stimulates the imagination too. What is the link between the 7th string quartet dedication – to his recently deceased wife – and the music within this work? (He was by all accounts deeply distressed by...
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