This eclectic concert samples some of the best and most entertaining musical celebrations by six different composers spanning almost 300 years. We offer three “B”s from Germany, two composers called Max, two musical borrowers, two Englishmen (of sorts) and a New Englander. We have celebrations of joy and friendship, a wedding, the fourth of July, an honorary degree and a royal procession by barge, as well as a celebration of the wonderful ability of the solo violin to transport us to a higher plane. Enjoy!

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George Frideric Handel (1685-1759)

Suite for Orchestra (from the Water Music: 1717)

Arranged Hamilton Harty: Allegro, Bourrèe, Horn-pipe, Allegro deciso.

Visions of a powdered wig, and the solemn sounds of Messiah and other serious works tend to give us a false impression of Handel the man. In fact, he was a rather portly, good-natured humorous man who preferred to ridicule rather than castigate wayward performers, servants or tradesmen. In those far-off days, long before recordings were possible, it was normal in music composition not only to borrow from one’s own earlier works but to plagiarize others. Handel, even more than Bach, was a master at it. This practice, coupled with his great speed of composition and hard work, accounts for the vast output he was able to leave before going blind in his later years.

Handel was born in Halle, Germany in 1685 (the same year as J.S. Bach) and as a young musician found employment with the man whom, through one of those quirks of which English history abounds, was destined to become King George II of England. At the time of the Water Music, his employer’s father, the very unpopular George I, was on the throne. After several political catastrophes, including the infamous South Sea Bubble (a forerunner of the Enron scandal), the King was keen to improve his popularity and planned a royal procession by barge on the Thames. Relations between father and son were extremely bad at all times but the King made a shrewd decision by asking his son’s director of music Handel to provide an accompaniment for the event. The rest, as they say, is history.

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Max Bruch (1838-1920)

Violin Concerto in G minor: 3rd movement (1867)

Finale: Allegro Energico

Max Bruch was born in Köln (Cologne) five years after Brahms and lived in that illustrious composer’s shadow all his life. Yet the relatively few works which are still performed are true masterpieces. This is especially true of the G minor violin concerto for which he is best known. It stands in the top bracket of works in the genre. However, Bruch himself was not entirely happy with its reputation, feeling that his later works were not given their due on account of the success of the first violin concerto. Like Brahms, Bruch was an outspoken critic of the “New Music” of Wagner and Liszt and was even more conservative in his compositional technique than Brahms. He loved folk music and incorporated folk tunes into many of his compositions, for example the Scottish Fantasy. In addition to his musical output, his legacy can be counted in terms of his students, including Vaughan Williams and Respighi.

Time permits only one movement from this wonderful concerto, but we hope that this will suffice to get you hooked!

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Peter Maxwell Davies (born 1934)

An Orkney Wedding with Sunrise (1985)

Sir Peter Maxwell Davies, known more simply as “Max”, is one of the leading composers of our time. His extensive output includes many major, serious works including four operas, two ballets, two musical theater works, fourteen concertos, five large-scale choral works and eight symphonies! He has also written several lighter orchestral works of which An Orkney Wedding with Sunrise is perhaps the best known. In addition, he is a busy international conductor, having worked with many of the leading orchestras of the world, including the BSO. And, like a latter-day Carl Orff, Max the former teacher has shown his love for and commitment to the musical education of children by writing many pieces for non-specialist musicians.

Max was born in Salford (Greater Manchester) in England but since 1971 has lived in Orkney, the group of islands off the North coast of Scotland. He has been inspired there by the rugged beauty of the land, the mix of Gaelic and Norse culture and particularly by the writing and poetry of native Orcadian George Mackay Brown. Max’s official web site, which is well organized and full of information, excerpts, etc. is at: http://www.MaxOpus.com/ .

In the composer’s own program note,

Orkney Wedding was written for the Boston Pops Orchestra as a commission for its centenary, and conducted at the first performance by John Williams. It is a picture postcard record of an actual wedding I attended on Hoy in Orkney. 

At the outset, we hear the guests arriving, out of extremely bad weather, at the hall. This is followed by the processional, where the guests are solemnly received by the bride and bridegroom, and presented with their first glass of whisky. The band tunes up, and we get on with the dancing proper. This becomes ever wilder, as all concerned feel the results of the whisky, until the lead fiddle can hardly hold the band together any more. We leave the hall into the cold night, with echoes of the processional music in our ears, and as we walk home across the island, the sun rises, over Caithness, to a glorious dawn. The sun is represented by the highland bagpipes, in full traditional splendour.

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Johannes Brahms (1833-1897)

Academic Festival Overture (1880) Op. 80

Brahms had already declined one honorary doctorate of music – from Cambridge – on account of being too busy to make the journey from Vienna, when he was nominated in 1879 for the same degree by the University of Breslau (now Wroclaw in Poland), the chief city of Silesia, at that time part of the German empire. Apparently, the learned professors had little knowledge of this Brahms other than that he was from Hamburg, was a musician and, perhaps most significantly, had snubbed the great University of Cambridge! This time he was able to accept, since the degree could be conferred in absentia. The regents of Breslau did however expect some kind of thanks, typically in the form of a Latin address. Instead Brahms gave them one of his greatest compositions: the Akademische Fest-Overtüre. It employs the biggest orchestra of any of his works, and is a brilliant and decidedly irreverent arrangement of student tunes. It culminates in a hearty rendition of “Gaudeamus igitur” (let us therefore rejoice) so that at least part of his thank you was based on Latin.

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Charles Ives (1874-1954)

Fourth of July

Given Ives’ extensive musical training, his fourteen years as a church organist, and his prolific output in composition and of course his reputation as America’s leading composer of “art” music in the twentieth century, you might reasonably conclude that Ives was a professional musician. But in fact he made his living as an insurance executive in New York. Most of his huge output was therefore written in his spare time! He was born in Danbury, CT and throughout his life retained a special affinity with New England. His family was one of the most respected professional families in Danbury with its sons typically going into law, government and so on. Charles and his father George, who had been the youngest bandmaster in the Civil war, were, somewhat unexpectedly, musically talented. Charles, a keen athlete in his youth (baseball and football), went up to Yale when he was 19, thereafter moving to New York to pursue his very successful career in insurance.

Ives’ music is something of an acquired taste but it responds well to familiarity and study, especially as he was, like his great predecessor Handel, an inveterate borrower of tunes. In Ives’ case, however, he interweaves fragments of familiar themes into the overall pattern. Often these fragments are heavily disguised and part of the fun of listening to an Ives piece is to try to identify these musical tidbits as they go by.

The Fourth of July is actually the third of four separate pieces loosely collected together under the title “A Symphony: New England Holidays” but more frequently played separately than together – which was fine with the composer. It was written mainly during the period 1911-13 although it underwent several revisions before its first performance in 1932 in Paris. In all, there are, apparently, 17 quotations from various familiar and not-so-familiar tunes, the most prominent being: The Red, White, and Blue; the Battle Hymn of the Republic; and Yankee Doodle. Ives’ own program notes follow:

It’s a boy’s Fourth – no historical orations – no patriotic grandiloquence by grown-ups – no program in his yard. But he knows what he’s celebrating – better than some of the county politicians – and he celebrates in his own way – with a patriotism nearer kin to nature than jingoism.

It starts in the quiet of the midnight before and grows raucous with the sun. Everybody know what it’s like – if everybody doesn’t: cannon on the green, village band on Main St., firecrackers under tin cans, shanks mixed on cornets, strings around big toes, torpedoes, church bells, lost-finger, fifes, clam chowder, a prize-fight, burnt shins, parades (in and out of step), saloons all closed (more drunks than usual) baseball game (Danbury All-Stars vs. Beaver Brook Boys), pistols, mobbed umpire, Red White and Blue, runaway horse – and the day ends with the sky-rocket over the church steeple, just after the annual explosion sets the Town Hall on fire. All this is not in the music – not now!

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Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1829)

Ode to Joy: Symphony No. 9 – 4^th Movement (excerpts) (1825) Op. 125

Presto – [various tempi] – Allegro assai – [cut] – Prestíssimo.

It is almost ten years since SPM, together with four soloists, the Salisbury Singers and SPM Chorale, performed this monumental work in its entirety. For this concert, we perform non-vocal excerpts from the fourth movement, particularly the lovely orchestral introduction to the Ode to Joy, joined by Westborough & Sudbury public schools music students. Beethoven and his ninth symphony, of course, need no introduction!