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Grażyna Bacewicz Concerto for String Orchestra 15’
Laurence Osborn Schiller’s Piano (world premiere) 30’

Zubin Kanga Piano, keyboard, live electronics (Schiller’s Piano)
Aaron Holloway-Nahum Conductor (Schiller’s Piano)

Rakhi Singh Director, violin
Martyn Jackson Violin
Martha-Maria Mitu Violin
Ellie Consta Violin
Roman Lytwyniw Violin

Marie Schreer Violin
Lily Whitehurst Violin
Rosemary Attree Violin
Dylan Edge Violin

Alex Mitchell Viola
Carol Ella Viola
Alistair Vennart Viola

Christian Elliott Cello
Hannah Roberts Cello
Peggy Nolan Cello

Alice Durrant Double bass
Diane Clark Double bass

A virtuoso violinist, a prolific writer, and a composer of stylish, vigorous music, Grażyna Bacewicz was a well-respected Polish musician of the early to mid 20th century, knowledge of whom is continuing to grow outside of her native country. Of her many works—including seven violin concertos, three symphonies, and a host of chamber music—the Concerto for String Orchestra ranks among her finest: a characterful, distinctive work that packs a lot in fifteen minutes.

Composer Witold Lutosławski described this piece as the “highlight of that ‘no-nonsense’ period in Grażyna’s oeuvre”; accordingly, this is music that feels alive from the first moment. Where the first theme introduces a pain-filled sawing idea, the second feels jovial and rustic. The sound is like Shostakovich but wrapped more tightly, ideas and feelings compressed into a smaller space—a great deal of ground is covered in a first movement lasting under five minutes. After an imperceptibly quiet opening, a solo cello emerges in the second movement, with a mournful melody that begins a dialogue between quiet moments of solo introspection and ravishing full ensemble textures. The final movement returns to that spirited, slightly edgy character heard in the first.

HUGH MORRIS

I. Allegro
II. Andante
III. Vivo

Collective ultras will remember Laurence Osborn’s ‘Coin Op Automata’ from 2021, a piece for harpsichord and string quartet where the mechanical met the human in an exploration of both the charming idea of coin-operated creatures in museum cabinets, and the materiality and mechanics of instruments. ‘Schiller’s Piano’, a new concerto for keyboards and string orchestra, starts from a similar place—for piano doubling MIDI keyboard, it too is concerned with mechanics and materials, principally the deconstruction then fresh reconstruction of its keyboard subject. But conceptually, it has much deeper roots.

In 1942, Friedrich Schiller’s furniture—including the piano of the title—was transported to the Buchenwald concentration camp. The original furniture was stored underground, safeguarding the artefacts for future generations, with newly made replicas presented as totems of German history. But the piano made at Buchenwald was just a shell, Osborn notes in his own introduction to the piece: “Its interior is a void.”

This example served as both an apt metaphor for Nazi-era art, and a jumping-off point with lots of compositional possibilities. Describing the new piece, Osborn says that the piano materialises in many states of being: “Real and imagined, untouched and destroyed.” With help from fellow composer Jocelyn Campbell, Osborn created a detailed set of sounds or “patches” based on manipulated recordings of the piano’s physical components—wood, brass, felt and wire—that are triggered by the MIDI keyboard in tandem with the acoustic piano. This is composition that plays out through density: find yourself in the form by following how tightly packed or sparsely laid out these textures sound.

As well as these sounds that contort the piano’s materials, Osborn also uses field recordings, prepared from a research trip to Buchenwald and from time spent with archival material. In the penultimate movement, listen for a very quiet rendition of ‘Das Buchenwaldlied’, a song written in 1938 for the concentration camp, which quickly became a place of quiet resistance through lyrics that spoke of freedom and hope. Osborn recreates this atmosphere in the score: “We must feel as if we are witnessing something private,” he writes above this section.

‘Schiller’s Piano’ was co-commissioned by Zubin Kanga and Manchester Collective. Zubin co-commissioned the work as part of Cyborg Soloists, with the support of a UKRI Future Leaders Fellowship and Royal Holloway, University of London. The premiere is supported by the Vaughan Williams Foundation.

HUGH MORRIS

1. Prelude
2. Wood I
3. Wood II
4. Brass
5. Felt
6. Wire
7. Postlude

“This is a piece from the heart,” Tchaikovsky wrote of his ‘Serenade’. Written in the autumn of 1880, around the same time as his ‘1812 Overture’, Tchaikovsky composed the first movement as an imitation of Mozart: “I should be delighted if I thought I had in any way approached my model.”. It comes in the form of a sonatina, a shortened form of the sonata without the central development section. The third, meanwhile, opens with a figure that expands and contracts; an increasingly agitated theme replaces it, before retreating into the opening material to close.

The ‘Serenade’ is one of Tchaikovsky’s most popular and regularly performed pieces. Why perform it the same way again? Through the second half, expect what Rakhi Singh calls “smoothing the edges” — short transitions between pieces that blur boundaries. Listen as Tchaikovsky’s glassy harmonic finish joins with Caroline Shaw’s delicate textures, and later on as ‘Stem’ morphs into the chugging sounds of Wojciech Kilar, to create a new span of music that’s constantly transitioning.

HUGH MORRIS

For many years, Caroline Shaw has been writing music as gifts for people or companions to moments and ideas. This four-movement piece originally for string quartet—half of which is heard here in a version for string orchestra—was a gift to a single tree: an evergreen she found on a walk in a forest on Galiano Island in British Columbia. To the tree, she gives two gentle, simple pieces using common elements from Shaw’s palette: glistening string textures, quietly trembling lines that spiral out into expansive arpeggios, impulsive lurches between tonalities, and a collective rhythmic freedom that feels a bit like a psalm. Like glass, these short pieces at first seem delicate and translucent, but prove through time to be remarkably resilient.

HUGH MORRIS

I. Moss
II. Stem

Grażyna Bacewicz and Wojciech Kilar end up as kind of bookends for this concert: both were composers active in the 20th century, both studied with legendary teacher Nadia Boulanger, and both were Polish with complicated family histories around the question of nationhood. And on this programme, Bacewicz and Kilar both settle on rhythm as the primary vehicle for their musical expression.

Kilar spent most of his life composing film music, making a breakthrough with the score for the Francis Ford Coppola film Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1992). Where Bacewicz was writing outside of the idea of music as image, Kilar embraced it to the full, even in non-cinematic music such as this picturesque piece for string orchestra. Despite being composed in 1989, this music could well be a hundred years older. With reaching lyrical lines and forward-focused rhythms adding to its programmatic feeling—‘Orawa’ references both the mountainous region of the Slovak-Polish border, and the river that flows through it—this could well be a companion piece to Bedřich Smetana’s famous river piece, ‘The Moldau’.

HUGH MORRIS