Vaughan Williams' perennially popular depiction of a lark is played by Amalia Hall. Douglas Lilburn's terse Third Symphony and the complete Lemminkäinen Legends by Jean Sibelius complete the programme. Tobias Ringborg conducts.
Amalia Hall Photo: Supplied by OW
LILBURN: Symphony No 3
The Symphony No. 3 of Douglas Lilburn was completed in 1961, in response to a sabbatical from Victoria University of Wellington.
It’s one of the most enigmatic of Lilburn’s compositions. Lilburn didn’t give much help — he was never one to talk much about his works. He did say that this was ‘a harsh, didactic, personalised piece of searching rhetoric’, and, perhaps a little more helpfully, that he associated it with a landscape of New Zealand – the meeting of land and sea near his cottage at Paekakariki.
Others have given their own thoughts. The conductor John Hopkins felt it to be a self-portrait of the composer. He even went as far as to say that the march section is Lilburn battling the elements in Willis Street, Wellington, “out in an anorak looking weather-beaten but striding out as he used to love to do.”
VAUGHAN WILLIAMS: The Lark Ascending
Vaughan Williams was inspired by the poem of the same name by George Meredith and he plucked certain lines from the poem to inscribe the score, as follows:
He rises and begins to round,
He drops the silver chain of sound
Of many links without a break,
In chirrup, whistle, slur and shake.
For singing till his heaven fills,
’T is love of earth that he instils,
And ever winging up and up,
Our valley is his golden cup,
And he the wine which overflows
To lift us with him as he goes.
Till lost on his aërial rings
In light, and then the fancy sings.
The work was composed in 1914 for piano and violin but remained unperformed til Vaughn Williams’ return from serving as an ambulance driver in the war. It was premiered in 1920 in its duo form by its dedicatee, Marie Hall, who had some hand in its final shape. An international star of the violin, she also gave the work’s first performance in its orchestral form the following year.
ELGAR arr Amalia Hall: La capricieuse
Played as an encore by Amalia Hall accompanied by the string quartet of Miranda Adams, James Jin, Julie Park, and David Garner.
SIBELIUS: Lemminkäinen Suite
This is a collection of four symphonic poems which each depict an episode from the life of the mythic Finnish hero Lemminkäinen, the central figure of the Kalevala, the national epic of Finland.
The work was born from a dogged effort by Sibelius to compose in the operatic form, inspired by Wagner’s belief that music without words could not ‘satisfy mankind’.
Sibelius completed an overture for an opera in 1893, (this would be repurposed as The Swan of Tuonela - the second movement in tonight’s suite) but he was distracted by other composing and also advice that the treatment lacked the dramatic punch required for the stage.
After further efforts, Sibelius drifted from the idea of an opera, becoming absorbed instead in the works of Liszt and writing to his wife: "Liszt’s musical standpoint is the one that comes closest to me. That [concept of a] symphonic poem."
He added three more movements: Lemminkäinen and the Maidens of the Island, Lemminkäinen in Tuonela, and Lemminkäinen’s Return. And by 1897 the Lemminkäinen Suite was ready for premiere.
Tuonela is the underworld realm of the dead in Finnish mythology.
Sibelius kept The Swan of Tuonela and the fourth movement, Lemminkäinen’s Return, in his repertoire but dropped the other two movements, never conducting them himself again.
In 1935, he let these be performed once more but with the interruption of the war the full suite remained unpublished in 1954.
"It happened as it happened", Sibelius commented "because certain gentlemen did not like my legends."
Recorded by RNZ Concert
Producer: Tim Dodd
Engineer: Rangi Powick
