RSNO Music Director Stéphane Denève in conversation with BBC Radio 3's Petroc Trelawny on the drivetime radio programme In Tune, which was broadcast on Thursday 2 September, can be listened to again online until Thursday 9 September.
They discuss the RSNO's BBC Prom at the Royal Albert Hall on Monday 6 September, the many merits of French composer Albert Roussel, and the RSNO's forthcoming survey of masterworks composed in the first decade of the 21st century , TEN OUT OF 10.
For John Whitener, with his first anniversary as RSNO Principal Tuba approaching, life is still full of surprises.
Since I joined the orchestra in November 2009 as Principal Tuba, the RSNO has asked me to do all matter of exciting and unusual things in addition to the privilege of working with one of the best orchestras in Europe. It was only my first day when the photographer for a publicity shoot asked me to hold both of my tubas as if I were a gunslinger and give him “my best John Wayne face”. And it was only a short time ago when I found myself in the pouring rain, standing on the back seat of a Mini cabriolet, holding my tuba and belting out La Donna e mobile to a crowd of reporters and television cameras on the front steps of the Glasgow Royal Concert Hall. Perhaps it’s because I secretly enjoy it, or maybe it’s because I’m “the new guy”, but it is more apparent than ever now that these unusual requests are certain to continue and further explore all things bizarre and wonderful with music here in Scotland.
Following the success of the RSNO’s inaugural Golf Day last year, we’re delighted to announce that this year’s event will take place on Thursday 26th August 2010. Guests will have the opportunity to play a round on the “championship” Carrick at Cameron House on Loch Lomond, alongside musicians of the Orchestra. It promises to be a great day out with the opportunity to relax and show off your golfing prowess on one of the country's finest courses, with its stunning greens and fabulous views.
Entry for a team of four costs £450.
The day includes coffee and bacon rolls at registration, refreshments and suprises en route and drinks and a three-course lunch served at the 19th hole. Funds raised on the day will support the RSNO’s new schools programmes.
For further information or to register a team please contact John McConnachie at
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or telephone 0141 225 3570 by Friday 6 August.
This event is kindly supported by Cameron House on Loch Lomond.
We caught up with conductor Jeff Tyzik before he hit our Scottish shore for our Summer Pops series. Learn more about Jeff and what he's going to be playing by listening to a conversation we had with him about wearing a kilt and playing his cornet on stage.
We're delighted that Dame Evelyn Glennie will be joining us for the Scottish Prom in Edinburgh and Glasgow. We managed a phone interview with her last month and have produced a podcast where you can learn more about the piece that was commissioned for her that will be making it's European debut. Written by Eric Ewazen, Song to the Banks of Ayr is based on the poetry of Robert Burns and has only had one outing at it's world premiere in the US earlier this Spring.
You can catch Dame Evelyn at the Scottish Prom in Glasgow on Saturday 26 June and Sunday 27 June at Edinburgh's Usher Hall.
If you've not yet bought a ticket, please become a Fan on facebook.com/royalScottishNationalOrchestra where you can retrieve a Code for discounted tickets for the New York, New York Summer Pops Concerts.
The RSNO Chorus is made up of over 200 dedicated singers who come together to perform with the RSNO each Season. This weekend the RSNO Chorus join the RSNO, soloists and conductor Stéphane Denève to perform Britten's War Requiem in Edinburgh and Glasgow.
Ian Bostridge, one of the world's finest lyric tenors, joins Stéphane Denève, the RSNO, RSNO Chorus, RSNO Junior Chorus, soprano Marina Rebeka and baritone Audun Iversen for what are sure to be two moving and emotional performances of Britten's War Requiem, in Edinburgh, 30 April, and Glasgow 1 May.
In the following article, Bostridge, who has performed the War Requiem on over fifty occasions, considers this profound and visceral work, beginning with an infamous snipe by fellow composer Igor Stravinsky...
"Kleenex at the ready… one goes from the critics to the music, knowing that if one should dare to disagree with ‘practically everyone’, one will be made to feel as if one had failed to stand up for ‘God Save the Queen’."
IGOR STRAVINSKY’S crotchety response to the overwhelming success of Benjamin Britten’s War Requiem (1962) is easy to dismiss as envy, the master’s fear of losing his powers in the face of the younger generation. Stravinsky had written The Rite of Spring (1913), the musical work which, more than any other, seems to express the savagery of 20th-century conflict, an unbridled musical depiction of primitive blood sacrifice. This iconic masterpiece (originally entitled The Great Sacrifice) had its premiere littleover a year before the outbreak of World War I. It has come to be seen, like Holst’s ‘Mars, Bringer of War’ (completed before August 1914), from The Planets (1918), as a portent.
As if he was scared by what he had summoned into being, Stravinsky’s style and musical philosophy underwent a radical change after 1914. The war was not to be addressed directly; and Stravinsky’s L’Histoire du soldat, written in its last year, is not an emotionally engaged contemporary manifesto but rather a quirky and detached modernist fairytale. The poised classicism of Stravinsky’s later work, his adoption of a sort of formalism and dogged insistence that music could not express anything but itself were symptomatic of the retreat from romanticism of any sort that the war had induced, a highbrow incarnation of Noël Coward, the Jazz Age and Bright Young Things. ‘Goodbye to All That’, in Robert Graves’s words. In that sense, Britten’s War Requiem, and all the brouhaha surrounding it, the ‘Battle of Britten’ as Stravinsky called it, must have seemed distastefully direct and, in its engagement with savagery, a return to the aesthetic of The Rite of Spring. In a diary entry in 1931, a student Britten wrote of a performance of the latter work, ‘Sacre – bewildering and terrifying. I didn’t really enjoy it, but I think it’s incredibly marvellous and arresting’.
World War I did not really touch Britten, except in a more general sense. He was too young (born in November 1913) to remember its course or its rigours, and his close family did not suffer the losses that afflicted so many others. He grew up as an artist, of course, in an atmosphere of post-war disillusionment, of irony and detachment, but three things served to mitigate this: first, and essentially, his self-confessed romanticism as a composer; secondly, and despite his progressive interests, his upbringing in a musical culture which was insulated from continental modernism; and thirdly, his view of the artist’s social responsibility, forged in the Auden circle in which he moved in the 1930s and allied to his long-standing and apparently visceral pacifism.
All of these currents feed into the War Requiem, which is a culmination in Britten’s work and, rather like The Rite of Spring for Stravinsky, a stylistic turning point. It quite consciously works with register and style to achieve a synthesis between public statement and private questioning which is, formally, masterly. The sound and fury of the settings of the Latin mass text itself, with that Stravinskian rhythmic drive and Verdian theatricality, are set against chamber settings of war poetry by Wilfred Owen which combine the instrumental and gestural economy of modernism with the interiority and sheer melody of the romantic. The piece somehow symbolizes reconciliation through the seamless interweaving of Germanic and non-Germanic conceptions of aesthetics, the metaphysical in concert with the human and contingent. For this was how the cultural aspect of the European civil war had manifested itself, a struggle, as the Germans had it, between Kultur and Zivilisation. The War Requiem seems to transcend all this, a hymn of healing as much as a manifesto of pacifism.
If Stravinsky was latching onto something about the War Requiem which he distrusted – that an occasional work decrying the European wars of the first half of the 20th century was bound to be, in his terms if not ours, sentimental – his scoffing at the popular acclaim it attracted was perceptive. For Britten himself was arguably unsettled by the scale of public success – his last opera, Death in Venice (1973), is in part a study of an artist hollowed out by celebrity – and after the War Requiem forged a more austere and less crowd-pleasing style.But the War Requiem remains, justly, a much-performed and appreciated work, one of the few classical compositions written after 1945 to have had a continuous place in audience affections, and a growing place in the repertory. I first performed it in 1994 in commemoration of the bombing of Freiburg 50 years before, and while some of the performances in which I have taken part have had similar occasional, commemorative significance, most have not. I have now performed it 50 times, probably more than any other piece in my repertory. It moved audiences and performers in 1962 and, 63 years after the end of World War II, 46 years after its composition for the reconsecration of Coventry Cathedral, it continues to speak.
Stravinsky’s attack is occasionally resurrected – most trenchantly in recent times perhaps by the critic and novelist Philip Hensher (librettist of Thomas Adès’s Powder Her Face), who described the War Requiem as ‘a terrible, literary sort of din’. ‘We all know’, he wrote in The Guardian, ‘what we think of the First World War: it’s very sad. We all know what we think of Wilfred Owen’s early death: it’s very sad. And since the War Requiem is about these two deeply moving things, it must, therefore, be deeply moving itself, mustn’t it?’
The War Requiem uses Owen’s poetry for its own purposes, aesthetic and ideological (the poet-soldier Owen was no pacifist), but the piece is not in any sense about Owen. We are told nothing about him, although words from a projected preface to his poems do stand on the front page of the score as epigraph: ‘My subject is War and the pity of War. The Poetry is in the pity… All a poet can do today is warn.’ Warning through pity – this is at odds with the Stravinskian aesthetic, dangerously personal, dangerously engaged. ‘Some of my right-wing friends loathed it’, Britten is reported to have said, ‘“though the music is superb, of course”, they’d say. But that’s neither here nor there to me. The message is what counts.’
The War Requiem is, overtly, and perhaps surprisingly, about World War I. ‘The idea of the W.R. did come off I think’, Britten wrote to his sister, ‘and how one thinks of that bloody 1914–18 war especially – I hope it’ll make people think a bit.’ This is unexpected in a piece whose commission originated in the destruction of Coventry in 1940. Indeed Britten seems to veer away from addressing many of the experiences of World War II in his War Requiem. He chose an English, a German and a Russian soloist, in his own words, as ‘representatives of the three nations that had suffered most during the war’. This was a brilliant aesthetic gambit – the reconciliation of old enemies, English and German presided over by the searing Russian soprano, embodying at times a cruel and somehow alien God, at times an unbearable weight of lamentation – but an odd sentiment to express in view of the Holocaust, Hiroshima and Nagasaki or the invasion of Poland. Britten had responded darkly and savagely to his one direct experience of the horrors of war – his visit to Belsen with Yehudi Menuhin in 1945 – with a work, The Holy Sonnets of John Donne for voice and piano (1945), much of which pulsates with guilt, sin and self-loathing. Britten’s return to 1914–18 reflects both the immense significance of that war as the beginning of all the horrors of the 20th century, and a catastrophe which musicians of the time had not been able adequately or directly to address; but also, I think, the awkwardness and wariness of a pacifist who had experienced the second war, seen its horrors but had been present only as a bystander.
In the end, as I have experienced it in performance, and despite Britten’s apparent commitment to its pacifist ‘message’, the War Requiem is about far more than 20th-century war and its horrors. It looks death in the face and presents a terrifying vision of implacable holiness in, for example, the Sanctus. The religion of humanity and the religion of the saints confront each other and achieve an ambiguous resolution.
This article is an extract from the recent publication A Part of History: Aspects of the British Experience of the First World War (Continuum, 2008) and appears courtesy of Ian Bostridge and Continuum International Publishing Group.
For more information on Britten's War Requiem, the following short video (courtesy of the Britten-Pears Foundation) is a fascinating introduction to this great work:
Classical Brit Nominee Steven Osborne’s flight has been cancelled due to the large ash cloud and Martin Roscoe will be performing Mozart’s Piano Concerto No.27 with us at the Sands Centre, Carlisle.
As orchestral musicians we are used to playing in concert halls in an orchestra of up to 90 people so the experience of community music making in a trio was always going to feel completely different. To be able to take our music away from the concert hall and into the places people live, work or socialise is a privilege as well as a challenge. Whenever we do a community performance we are made to feel very welcome and the hospitality almost always includes a cup of tea - the way to a musicians's heart! When we play informally the audience are always so kind with their thanks and appreciation which is why it really does feel like a privilege to be able to perform in such a relaxed setting. Our challenge is to engage our audience and we feel the responsibility for this and try to make each community performance relevant to its uniqueness.
It’s an interesting coincidence that in consecutive concerts we are playing two of the darkest symphonies in the repertoire: Mahler’s Sixth and Vaughan Williams’ Fourth. But although they share a tragic tone, it’s easy to over-simplify the links to the composers’ lives. Mahler’s Sixth was written in one of the happiest times of his life, and although in hindsight it can be seen as a premonition of the death of his first child and the onset of heart disease, its origins remain obstinately more abstract. Similarly, Vaughan Williams’ masterpiece, premiered in 1934, has often been interpreted to reflect the storm clouds that were gathering over Europe at this time. Yet Vaughan Williams specifically denied this – or any other – programmatic interpretation of the work. Confronted by a puzzled public, the composer repeatedly refused to provide any clue to its “meaning”, other than to say that it was what he felt like writing at the time. Perhaps the same applies to Mahler’s Sixth, and we do composers a terrible disservice by looking too hard for for roots in their lives and worlds?
However you choose to interpret the 4th Symphony, it’s hard to think of any major symphony in the repertoire which is so unremittingly bleak. Even Mahler 6 manages moments of repose and warmth on its emotional journey. But Vaughan Williams’ Fourth has a studied intensity to it which grips you like a manacle from the first dramatic chords and never lets you go. The slow movement, with its solemn tread so reminiscent of Sibelius, inhabits a very lonely place, but more remarkable still is the finale. With its rumbustuous opening march, Vaughan Williams dares us to hope for a triumphant outcome – but it is not to be. Half way through the movement, a grim Shostakovich-esque motto appears in the brass, and with growing defiance and increasingly clashing counterpoint, the music drives straight over the cliff, plumetting into an abyss from which no return is possible.
Vaughan Williams’ Fourth occupies a rather solitary place in 20th century British music. History books tend to focus on its daring musical language, but it’s equally interesting to hypothesise that it comes from a place deep inside the composer’s psyche that even he didn’t want to deal with. It’s completely exhilarating in its sheer strangeness, with a terrifying conclusion that forces us to stare our fears in the face, and – like waking up from a nightmare – look at our own lives with some gratitude.
Thursday 25th March, Glasgow Royal Concert Hall, 7.30pm
This week we have Stéphane Denève conducting Mahler 6 in Glasgow on Thursday 11 March and Edinburgh on Friday 12 March.
No two concerts are ever the same but with this programme that's certainly the case. There has been some discussion over the sequence of the movements that make up Mahler's Sixth Symphony and in acknowledgement of this we're going to try something different. On Thursday you can experience the Allegro-Andante-Scherzo -Finale and in Edinburgh the more frequently recorded Allegro-Scherzo-Andante-Finale.
We would very much like your feedback on this, indeed if you're able to attend both concerts and experience first hand the differences we'd be delighted but appreciate this may not be a very practical solution for many of you.
What an interesting couple of weeks this has been. Touring across Europe and now gearing up for a one country remit of our Out and About week. Out and About week takes place across one week in the year when all members of the Orchestra participate in a variety of performances and workshops across different regions.
This year sees the Orchestra head north to Aberdeen and Aberdeenshire for a week emerged in local communities and education settings. There are some similarities between our activities that have taken us to some of Europe’s finest concert halls and our education and community work that this year culminates in our Out and About week in Aberdeen and Aberdeenshire.
Following the success of the first three years of our assistant conductor scheme, the RSNO seeks to appoint a talented conductor to a three year contract, commencing in autumn 2010. The Assistant Conductor will assist in rehearsal and serve as cover conductor for the Music Director and guest conductors; serve as primary conductor for all educational and children’s programming; represent the RSNO at public events; and be an active participant in engaging audiences and communities throughout Scotland. The Assistant Conductor will benefit from ongoing professional evaluation and support of the Music Director, guest conductors, and player-mentors in the Orchestra; will gain first-hand experience of working in a large organisation; and will develop conducting, leadership and public address skills required of conductors today. The successful candidate will be a talented conductor capable of rehearsing and conducting concerts to a high standard with limited rehearsal time, be committed to engaging with audiences and the public, and will maintain his or her principal place of residence in Scotland. Salary is negotiable.
Auditions by invitation to be held in Glasgow on 7 May 2010. Highly qualified applicants please send a letter of interest, CV, repertoire list, video work sample, and full contact information for three professional references by 30 March to:
Assistant Conductor Search Royal Scottish National Orchestra 73 Claremont Street Glasgow G3 7JB
Incomplete or late submissions will not be considered.
We're delighted to welcome our Conductor Laureate, Neeme Järvi back to the RSNO this week. He's been busy at the Glasgow Royal Concert Hall, recording and rehearsing with the full compliment of the Royal Scottish National Orchestra. He was our Principal conductor from 1984 to 1988 so he's no stranger to the venues they'll be playing this week. Perth Concert Hall this evening, followed by Usher Hall in Edinburgh tomorrrow and finishing up in Glasgow on Saturday evening.
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Ian Bostridge, one of the world's finest lyric tenors, joins Stéphane Denève, the RSNO, RSNO Chorus, RSNO Junior Chorus, soprano Marina Rebeka and baritone Audun Iversen for what are sure to be two moving and emotional performances of Britten's War Requiem, in 
Classical Brit Nominee Steven Osborne’s flight has been cancelled due to the large ash cloud and Martin Roscoe will be performing Mozart’s Piano Concerto No.27 with us at the Sands Centre, Carlisle.
As orchestral musicians we are used to playing in concert halls in an orchestra of up to 90 people so the experience of community music making in a trio was always going to feel completely different. To be able to take our music away from the concert hall and into the places people live, work or socialise is a privilege as well as a challenge. Whenever we do a community performance we are made to feel very welcome and the hospitality almost always includes a cup of tea - the way to a musicians's heart! When we play informally the audience are always so kind with their thanks and appreciation which is why it really does feel like a privilege to be able to perform in such a relaxed setting. Our challenge is to engage our audience and we feel the responsibility for this and try to make each community performance relevant to its uniqueness.
It’s an interesting coincidence that in consecutive concerts we are playing two of the darkest symphonies in the repertoire: Mahler’s Sixth and Vaughan Williams’ Fourth. But although they share a tragic tone, it’s easy to over-simplify the links to the composers’ lives. Mahler’s Sixth was written in one of the happiest times of his life, and although in hindsight it can be seen as a premonition of the death of his first child and the onset of heart disease, its origins remain obstinately more abstract. Similarly, Vaughan Williams’ masterpiece, premiered in 1934, has often been interpreted to reflect the storm clouds that were gathering over Europe at this time. Yet Vaughan Williams specifically denied this – or any other – programmatic interpretation of the work. Confronted by a puzzled public, the composer repeatedly refused to provide any clue to its “meaning”, other than to say that it was what he felt like writing at the time. Perhaps the same applies to Mahler’s Sixth, and we do composers a terrible disservice by looking too hard for for roots in their lives and worlds?
What an interesting couple of weeks this has been. Touring across Europe and now gearing up for a one country remit of our Out and About week. Out and About week takes place across one week in the year when all members of the Orchestra participate in a variety of performances and workshops across different regions.
Following the success of the first three years of our assistant conductor scheme, the RSNO seeks to appoint a talented conductor to a three year contract, commencing in autumn 2010. The Assistant Conductor will assist in rehearsal and serve as cover conductor for the Music Director and guest conductors; serve as primary conductor for all educational and children’s programming; represent the RSNO at public events; and be an active participant in engaging audiences and communities throughout Scotland. The Assistant Conductor will benefit from ongoing professional evaluation and support of the Music Director, guest conductors, and player-mentors in the Orchestra; will gain first-hand experience of working in a large organisation; and will develop conducting, leadership and public address skills required of conductors today. 
