Largo – Allegro – Andante – Presto

Combining the vast power of the organ with the instrumental colours of the orchestra has remained a rare and neglected art. The Organ Concerto by Francis Poulenc (1899–1963), with its juxtaposition of dashing wit and sombre profundity, proves the medium’s power. One of Poulenc’s five essays in keyboard and orchestra writing, which also include a harpsichord work, Le Concert champêtre, the Organ Concerto was dedicated to that great patroness Princesse Edmond de Polignac, daughter of sowing machine inventor Isaac Singer. Originally she commissioned the composer Jean Françaix, but he was too busy to write the concerto. Poulenc’s work was thought to date from 1938, though there is some evidence to suggest it was started in 1935. The concerto was first performed in the Princesse de Polignac’s salon, conducted by Nadia Boulanger, and received its public première on 21 June 1939 in Paris with Maurice Duruflé as soloist and Roger Desormière conducting. Duruflé is thanked by Poulenc in the title page of the concerto for his help with the organ registrations. The concerto gained great success in America, where Poulenc toured with baritone Pierre Bernac regularly from 1948.

The concerto has become one of Poulenc’s most performed orchestral pieces; it is represents a point of transition in his creative career. While not leading directly to the ‘mature style’ of his Stabat Mater (1950) and opera The Carmelites (1953–56), the concerto’s serious and solemn dimension does reflect an aspect of Poulenc's art at which previously he had merely hinted. In 1936 Poulenc was affected deeply by the death of his friend Pierre-Octave Ferroud in a car accident. He returned the Catholic faith and his musical style changed profoundly. The concerto stands alongside such religious works as Litanies à la Vièrge noire as the first where a more sombre style manifests itself. However, if the concerto was started in 1935, Ferroud’s death cannot by itself account for Poulenc's change of style.

The structure of the concerto defies convention, and is a ‘fantasie’, possibly inspired by the fantasias of 18^th-Century composer Buxtehude. It is one continuous movement, with motivic connections between its sections. In this way, Poulenc, more used to writing miniatures, was able to thread together a coherent work. This concerto is also richly contrapuntal in places, something almost unique in Poulenc’s œuvre. The scoring for strings, timpani and organ is very unusual, especially as until then Poulenc generally had avoided using stringed instruments. However, here the strings are used with the verve, brilliance and idiosyncrasy that would characterise Poulenc’s masterpieces of the 1940s, the Sinfonietta and Piano Concerto.

                                                         Deborah Lee

Interval

Shostakovich’s Chamber Symphony, arranged by Rudolf Barshai, expands his Eighth String Quartet for full string orchestra. Composed in only three days in 1960, this is his music at its most powerful and epitomises his life’s work, both spiritually and literally: its themes are derived from pieces composed throughout his career, forming a musical autobiography that connects his First and Tenth Symphonies, First ’Cello Concerto, Piano Trio, and opera Lady Macbeth of Mtsinsk. The first theme is his own motto – DSCH (D – E-flat – C – B in Cyrillic script), heard previously in his Tenth Symphony. The music was inspired by a commission for the film Five Days, Five Nights, about the bombing of Dresden. Shostakovich visited the city in the summer of 1960: profoundly moved by the destruction he witnessed, he composed the piece in three of the most intensely creative days of his life. However, the Dresden context gives only the most obvious layer of meaning. According to Izvestia, the music was ‘dedicated to the victims of fascism and war’; it is also possible to hear in the work a lament for the tragedy of the Russian people’s suffering under Communism.

The solemn, lamenting character of the first movement, dominated by the DSCH motif and a second, a tightly chromatic melody introduced by solo violin, and a more serene idea, is shattered rudely by the second movement’s unceasing evocation of a musical hell. Fast and furious, DSCH is now screamed out by in the high register of the violins, before it exhausts itself, leading directly to the third movement, a skeletal ‘danse macabre’. A contrasting middle section introduces a theme from the First ’Cello Concerto, reappearing as a connection to the fourth movement. Now we hear a Jewish melody and a folk song, ‘Languishing in Prison’, whose significance needs no explanation. The final movement echoes the first, but now slowly dies away into a cold silence.

Lady Elgar wrote after the first performance of Introduction and Allegro by the London Symphony Orchestra on 8 March 1905 at the Queen’s Hall: ‘Many people think it the finest thing he has written, the quartet comes in with so beautiful an effect, the peroration towards the end is fine’. This is Elgar at his most virtuosic, but it is the private side of his imagination that characterises the music rather than the public image portrayed in the Pomp and Circumstances Marches. From the first chord, the piece explodes into life with immense rhetorical power; no less than four themes are presented in the introduction alone. The fourth of these is a melancholy tune first played by the solo viola. This melody, possibly influenced by Welsh national anthem Hen Wlad fy Nhadau, had come to Elgar during a holiday in West Wales in 1901. A bright, major-key version of the introduction’s second melody starts the main allegro section, contrasted with bustling semi-quaver figure, followed by a return of the opening fanfare statement. It leads not to a conventional ‘development’, but to what Elgar described as ‘a devil of a fugue’, followed by a shortened recapitulation of the earlier allegro section. The movement ends with a grand reprise of the ‘Welsh’ theme, now heard with the full power of solo quartet and string orchestra combined.

James Ross

Clive Driskill-Smith was born in 1978 and studied at Eton and Christ Church, Oxford, where he read music and was organ scholar from 1996 to 1999. He began organ studies at 15, and during his gap year was organ scholar at Winchester Cathedral and assistant at Winchester Cathedral. He studied with David Sanger, and on gaining the FRCO diploma was awarded the prestigious Limpus Prize and Worshipful Company of Musicians' Silver Medal. He won the Royal College of Organist’s 2000 ‘Performer of the Year’ prize, playing with the BBC Philharmonic Orchestra, and now gives frequent recitals in Britain and abroad. As a pianist, Clive studied with Andrew Haigh, holds an ARCM diploma and has performed concertos including Beethoven's Emperor with the Christ Church Festival Orchestra in 1999. He is currently a postgraduate and assistant organist at Christ Church, where he becomes Sub-Organist in September 2001.

Alexander Ffinch was educated at Sedbergh School, Cumbria and studied organ from aged twelve. In 1990 he was awarded a place at the Royal College of Music to study with Nicholas Danby and subsequently won the organ scholarship to Keble College, Oxford. Currently he studies with Thomas Trotter and is developing a successful solo career in Britain and beyond. Recently engagements have included the Birmingham Town Hall series and at King's College, Cambridge; he has been Resident Recitalist at Lancaster Town Hall since 1995. In 1996 he was a finalist in the Dublin International Organ Competition, and he holds posts as Assistant Organist at St. Catherine's College, Cambridge, and at Uppingham School.

James Ross was a scholar at Harrow School and Christ Church, Oxford, where he studied both history and music, and wrote a doctorate on French opera, winning the Sir Donald Tovey Memorial Prize. He has conducted the Christ Church Festival Orchestra since 1993. In 1996 he was assistant for Bernard Haitink’s Don Carlos recording with the Royal Opera, in 1998, a finalist in the BBC Philharmonic’s Conducting Competition and has worked with orchestras in France, Canada, Hungary, the Czech Republic, Bosnia, where he has toured twice with the Sarajevo Philharmonic, and most recently in Sri Lanka. He is Music Director of the Welwyn Garden City Orchestra and Chorus, Associate Conductor of Midland Youth Orchestra in Birmingham, writes for Opera Magazine, English Historical Review and Music and Letters, and is a co-author of French Music Since Berlioz, published next year.

Aidan Thomson, leader, was born in Glasgow in 1975 and began playing the violin aged five. In 1989 he began studying with Clive Thomas at the Junior School of the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama, where he co-lead the First Orchestra and Chamber Orchestra; more recently he has studied with Diana Cummings. He won a place at Magdalen College, Oxford in 1992 to read music, won a demyship (scholarship) the following year and graduated with a first in 1995. Subsequently he gained an M.Mus. at King's College, London, before returning to Magdalen in 1997, where he is currently working towards a doctorate on English and German reception of Elgar before 1914. In 1997 he led the National Youth Orchestra of Scotland, of which he had been a member for many years, when they made a recording of Elgar's First Symphony. Back in Oxford he leads the Christ Church Festival Orchestra and the Orchestra at St. Mary Magdalen, with whom he performed Beethoven's Violin Concerto in February 2000. He also plays piano, organ, and teaches at the Faculty of Music in Oxford.