Saturday 19 October 2024

7.00 pm

Bishops Hill Adult Community College

Rayleigh Road

Brentwood
Essex CM13 1BD

Modest Mussorgsky             A Night on Bare Mountain
Pyotr Tchaikovsky                 Variations on a Rococo Theme
Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov     Scheherazade

Conductor:             Bradley Winand
Cello:                       Chloe Winand

Tickets £15, Under 18 £1 (on door, card only).  Book in advance at wegottickets or (cash only) at Shenfield Wine Company, 86 Hutton Road, Shenfield CM15 8NB.  A limited number of earlybird tickets are available for £12 until a week before the concert.

Parking is free at Bishops Hill Adult Community College.

This concert is dedicated to the memory of Leigh Thomas, our principal oboe for many years, who sadly died earlier this month. 

Programme Notes

Modest Mussorgsky (1839-1881)
Night on Bare Mountain (1867, arr 1886 by Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov)
After Mussorgsky’s early death from chronic severe alcoholism, his friend Rimsky-Korsakov edited and completed many of his works for publication. This vivid musical depiction of a witches’ sabbath on Bare (or Bald) Mountain, a mountain near Kyiv, has become Mussorgsky’s best known piece, even though the version normally performed (as tonight) is largely a composition by Rimsky-Korsakov based on a reworking for chorus by Mussorgsky of his early work.  Audience members may remember the scary animated sequence that accompanied the work (in an arrangement by Leopold Stokowski) in the 1940 Walt Disney film Fantasia.

Pyotr Tchaikovsky (1840-1983)
Variations on a Rococo Theme (1877)
Cello soloist: Chloe Winand

Mozart was Tchaikovsky’s idol and this work for solo cello and orchestra is a homage to the earlier composer.  The theme on which the variations are composed is rococo in style but was composed by Tchaikovsky.  The work had an unhappy early history.  It was written for the German cellist Wilhelm Fitzenhagen, one of Tchaikovsky’s fellow professors at the Moscow Conservatoire.  While Tchaikovsky was away, he rewrote much of the cello part, re-ordered the sequence of the variations (ditching one entirely) and sent his revised version to the publishers without telling the composer.  Furious but faced with the fait accompli,Tchaikovsky acquiesced and it is this version that is usually performed.  The light scoring allows the virtuoso solo part to come through the orchestral textures.

Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov (1844-1908)
Scheherazade (1888)
Scheherazade is one of the great orchestral showpieces of dazzling drama, colour and emotion.  

Inspired by the Middle Eastern folktales of the 1001 Nights in which the fierce sultan, bruised by earlier deceptions, is diverted from his usual practice of executing his bride after their first night by Scheherazade, the daughter of the sultan’s vizier and the last surviving virgin at court.  She recounts such an intriguing bedtime story that he wants to hear the continuation the following night, for 1001 consecutive nights.  By the end, the sultan relents from his cruel intentions and, as in the best folk tales, they live happily ever after.

Rimsky-Korsakov dallied with titles and a synopsis for the four movements but in his final edition, decided for no titles and to let the music speak for itself.  The sultan is represented by a stern orchestral motif, first heard at the beginning, and Scheherezade by the solo violin that intervenes periodically in different moods, returning at the end to have the triumphant last word.