Rory MacDonald was born in Stirling and studied conducting with David Zinman, Jorma Panula and Oliver Knussen, after obtaining a first class honours degree in music from Cambridge University. Still in his mid-twenties, he has gained a wealth of experience working with some of Europe's most illustrious musicians and institutions. He is on the music staff of the Royal Opera house, Covent Garden, and in January 2006 he became Assistant Conductor at the Hallé Orchestra, where he is collaborating with Mark Elder and conducting the Hallé Youth Orchestra.

Please click here for Rory's full biography.

Alisa Weilerstein - 'cello

American cellist Alisa Weilerstein has attracted widespread attention for playing that combines a natural virtuosic command and technical precision with impassioned musicianship.

At only 26 years old, she is already a veteran on the classical music scene having performed with the nation’s top orchestras, given recitals in music capitals throughout the U.S. and Europe, and having regularly appeared at prestigious festivals.  She is also a dedicated performer of chamber music, having grown up immersed in the classical music culture with a family of musicians with whom she collaborated from an early age.

Please click here for Alisa's full biography.
 

Stravinsky saw Tchaikovsky for the only time at the Maryinsky Theatre, where Igor was to watch his father sing in Glinka’s ‘Ruslan and Ludmilla’. During the interval Igor’s mother pointed out Tchaikovsky, ‘I looked and saw a man with white hair, large shoulders, a corpulent back and this image has remained in the retina of my memory all my life’.

Stravinsky had known Tchaikovsky’s music since early childhood and so was delighted to respond to a commission in 1928 to compose a ballet for the Ida Rubinstein ballet company, based on Tchaikovsky’s music. It was planned for production in November 1928 on the 35th anniversary of the composer’s death. 

Stravinsky chose a story by Hans Christian Andersen, The Ice Maiden, the tale of a boy who is doomed by the Ice Maiden’s kiss. The music for the ballet was based on some lesser known songs and piano pieces by Tchaikovsky, but later Stravinsky claimed that he could not remember ‘which music is Tchaikovsky’s and which mine’. Research has identified some 14 sources for the ballet.

In 1945 Stravinsky made the 45-minute ballet into a four movement suite or divertimento, as he called it. There is little of the complex rhythm, savagery or dissonance of his earlier ballets – it is a loving amalgam of the two composers. 

I Sinfonia – based principally on Tchaikovsky’s song ‘Lullaby in a storm’ and also including fragments from ‘Winter Evening’. The song’s theme is introduced by various instruments playing the opening phrase, before oboe and then clarinet present the whole melody. The music becomes more agitated and rhythmic before, after a short pause, the original melody returns on the flute. A final burst of agitation leads us into

II Swiss Dances – where horns play the opening bars of  ‘Humoresque’, an early piano piece and provide a chugging dance. This is occasionally interrupted by melancholy string music. A trombone provides a new idea but the horns persist in chugging along.

‘The Peasant plays the concertina’ arrives full of delightful dissonances and cross rhythms on brass. Woodwind take over the horn’s chugging idea and its rhythm persists until a gentle waltz on clarinets comes on the scene, accompanied by a tricky horn melody that ‘yodels us into Switzerland’. All this material now parades before us – note the tuba doing its ‘oompah band’ imitation. The ‘chugging’ idea in the trombone tune takes us off into the distance ‘over the Alps and far away’. 

III Scherzo – a slow introduction of rather mysterious music leads to music based on ‘Scherzo humoresque’, an early piano piece. Another piano piece, ‘Feuillet d’album’, is introduced by the oboe as a more introvert idea but the more light-hearted mood dominates right up to the closing harp chords. 

IV Pas de Deux – a long introduction for harp, clarinet and cello is interrupted by a flute before the harp, clarinet & cello resume. The horn introduces a new idea that is taken up by the cello. Strings take over this romantic melody but the solo instruments are never far away. A faster central section on flutes and plucked strings injects a new mood into the music, then timpani introduce a more agitated section with trombone, trumpet and horn having their say. Three times sudden and abrupt chords for full orchestra signal the approaching end of the suite which ends on a positive unison note.
 

Wilhelm Fitzenhagen, considered to be the Grand master of the Russian Cello tradition, was Cello Professor at the Moscow Conservatoire and it was here that he met fellow Professor, Tchaikovsky.  Fitzenhagen’s chief claim to fame was that the ‘Rococo’ variations were written for him in 1876-77. The first performance took place on 30^th December 1877 and this was perhaps the only hearing of the piece as Tchaikovsky intended, until 1941 when it was performed in the original version and not in that of Wilhelm Fitzenhagen which had become so well known. 

Shortly after the first performance, Fitzenhagen considered the work ‘his piece’ and reshaped it into the form that will be performed this evening. Much of the detail of the solo cello part is his and was actually written into the original manuscript. He also dropped one entire variation, so that it had seven variations and not the original eight, shuffled the order of five of the remaining variations. All that was left as Tchaikovsky intended and in the right order were the introduction, the first two variations and the ending. 

Tchaikovsky had in fact asked Fitzenhagen to go through the piece but had forgotten to mention it to the publisher, Jurgenson, who wrote to Tchaikovsky, ‘Horrible Fitzenhagen insists on changing your cello piece. He wants to ‘cello’ it up and claims you gave him permission. Good God!’ After performing it in 1879, Fitzenhagen wrote to Tchaikovsky, ‘I produced a furore with your variations, I was recalled three times and Lizst said to me, “You carried me away. You played splendidly”!’ 

In the early 1890s, on being asked by one of Fitzenhagen’s pupils if Tchaikovsky would restore his original ideas to the work, Tchaikovsky replied, ‘Oh, the hell with it. Let it stay the way it is.’ 

After an orchestral introduction that ends with the horn ‘inviting the cello onto the scene’, the cellist states the elegant and simple theme. The woodwind comment and then the cellist leads straight into Variation 1 where triplets dominate the writing for the soloist and woodwind pass comment once more. The variations that follow provide a vehicle for melody from the lowest to the highest register of the cello, with some dazzling virtuoso writing including a number of testing cadenzas and some extended luscious ‘romantic’ writing, before the tour de force of the exhilarating final bars.
 

‘Silent Woods’ derives from the fifth piano piece of ‘From the Bohemian Forest’  composed in 1883 and was  arranged for cello and orchestra in 1893 after another arrangement for cello and piano had become very popular. It is a lyrical piece with a main dreamlike theme that opens and closes the music. A lighter interlude provides contrast between these two sections.
 

By 1890 Antonín Dvořák, son of a village butcher and inn-keeper, probably thought that he had reached the heights as a composer. His music was performed throughout his native Bohemia & throughout Europe. He was showered with honours including a Doctorate of music from Cambridge University, but a telegram he received in 1891 from New York showed that his fame had spread even further. The telegram read: ‘Would you accept Director National Conservatory of Music, New York October 1892? Also lead six concerts of your work’.

Dvořák took little notice of the telegram but the sender, Mrs Jeanette Thurber, persisted and on finding that the Conservatory was open to all regardless of wealth or race, and that an annual salary of $15,000 was involved, Dvořák sailed to the New World in September 1892. 

Mrs Thurber, the wife of a millionaire grocer, had founded the American Opera Company and the National Conservatoire. Her aim in founding the latter was to establish a national American school of composition and to her Dvořák, being the leading nationalist composer in the world at that time, was the obvious target. 

He was based in America for the next three years and made friends and admirers and wrote a number of works including the symphony that has been described as a ‘picture postcard from a very homesick man’. He admired much in American life – Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show, the songs of Stephen Foster and the rhythms of ragtime – and worked hard to encourage the talent at the Conservatory: ‘the country is full of melody, original, sympathetic and varying in mood, colour and character to suit every phase of composition…. The new American school of music must strike its roots deeply into its own soil’. 

Dvořák was a very popular figure and the music he composed was enormously successful. After the first performance of the 9^th Symphony on 16^th December 1893, Dvořák wrote to his publisher, Simrock, ‘The people clapped so much I had to thank them from the box like a king’. 

I  Adagio – allegro molto – the slow introduction is a rather strange mixture of wistfulness and enormous energy. The music is punctuated by what one commentator has described as ‘ragtime rhythms’ from the wind and horns and from the timpani. What turns out to be the main theme of the first movement appears on horns and lower strings. More dramatic gestures, a shimmering pause and we are into the body of the movement with confident horns leading the way. Melody is everywhere and none of it is wasted as the music dances on its way.

 The second theme is introduced by the wind – a repetitive shuffling sort of tune – but is soon taken over by the strings. A third main theme appears, low down on the flute, that has been likened to ‘Swing low, sweet chariot’. This is the first of the main themes to be developed on horn, then piccolo and trumpet; everything is put to good use but it is this gentle theme that is transformed into a blaze of excitement by horns and trumpets while trombones throw the first theme into Dvořák’s compositional melting pot.

II Largo – this movement and the next were inspired by Longfellow’s ‘Song of Hiawatha’. The famous cor anglais melody (fitted to the words ‘Goin’Home’ much later by one of Dvořák’s pupils, William Fisher and memorably used in the ‘Hovis’ TV advert) probably originated in the sketches Dvořák made for a projected opera based on ‘Hiawatha’. Whether it is the funeral of Minnehaha or a love theme suggesting the wooing of Minnehaha by Hiawatha is open to debate. Two episodes form the rest of the movement: a rather plaintive melody and a perkier dance-like theme. The cor anglais melody returns for the peaceful ending (but not before trumpets and trombones blast out a combination of that theme and the main theme from the first movement) but this time on strings – two players from each section and then one player from violins, violas and cellos – before the opening chords reappear and peace returns.

III Scherzo – according to the composer this is the tribal dance of the Pau-Puk-Keewis, from his ideas for the projected opera ‘Hiawatha’. The timpani can be imagined as tom-toms and string chords could equally be stamping feet on the bare earth. There is a more gentle central section and of note is the ending of the movement where the horns remind us yet again of the main theme of the opening movement.

IV Allegro con fuoco – the opening has been likened to the departure of a steam train (one of Dvořák’s passions) and it serves as a fitting preparation for the grandeur of the main theme. A clarinet presents something more lyrical and this seems to be the signal for a veritable procession of themes both new and old, popping in from the previous three movements in new guises.

A calmer passage leads to another transformation of the main theme of the first movement, this time on the solo horn, before horn fanfares whisk the music into the final exciting pages, where familiar themes continue to reappear. The transformation of the gentle chords of the opening of the Largo into full orchestral splendour with hammering timpani forms the climax to this movement but not the end.

Themes continue to be mulled over and the two main themes from the first and the last movements blaze out simultaneously from the brass before the final few bars. Dvořák saves his biggest surprise for the final bar – a long woodwind chord that fades into the distance, leaving us with Dvořák’s ‘home thoughts from abroad’?

© Barry Sharkey 2008