L'Orchestre Symphonique de Montréal

Andrew Staniland
Born in Red Deer in 1977
Two movements for Orchestra

Andrew Staniland, Program Director for the Alliance for Canadian New Music Projects, has joined the music faculty at Memorial University in St John’s, Newfoundland in January 2010. His work as a composer has been broadcast in over 35 countries and has earned him many prestigious awards. He has served as Affiliate Composer to the Toronto Symphony Orchestra (2006-2009), composer in residence at the Centre de Création Musicale Iannis Xenakis (2005) and Affiliate Composer to the Canadian National Arts Centre Orchestra (2002-2004). He describes in the following words his "Two movements for Orchestra":

" 'Two movements for Orchestra' is my first major orchestral work, written in 2002, well before my appointment as Affiliate composer to the Toronto Symphony Orchestra, a position I held between 2006 and 2009.  Revisiting this early work was a refreshing experience that brought me back to a time when I was still discovering many of the great orchestral works. There are a number of unusual formal features that give this work its personality. As the title suggests, the work unfolds in two sections.  The two-movement form is one that has fascinated me for many years. There are few symphonic works in this form – Carl Neillsen’s magnificent 5th Symphony comes to mind.  The first movement, entitled Introduction, consists primarily of ascending melodic gestures, and concludes with a ghostly flute solo. The second section, entitled Lyrical, starts with angular and slightly disjointed textures from which  a  dramatic melodic descent emerges that gives way to a quiet and  haunting pointillistic retrospective of the entire work, like washed up sea shells on a beach after a storm. "

Joseph Haydn
Born March 31, 1732, in Rohrau an der Leitha
Died May 31, 1809, in Vienna

Symphony No. 104 in D major, “London,” Hob 1/104

Haydn’s life took a new turn in 1790 when the impresario Johann Peter Salomon showed up without warning at the composer’s door. “My name is Salomon. I’m here from London, and I’ve come to take you back with me,” he said, with no beating about the bush. “Tomorrow we’ll sign an agreement.” Haydn did not take long to make up his mind. He would write twelve symphonies for audiences in the British capital over the next five years, including this one, his last essay devoted to the genre. The work was given for the first time on May 4, 1795, under the direction of the composer, who included it in a highly profitable concert dedicated entirely to his own compositions. It met with instant public approval.

The work opens with a slow introduction, in a minor key, which gives way to the principal Allegro, whose single lilting theme is versatile enough that the composer can make varying use of it in the two movements that follow. The Andante, in A-B-A’ lied form, exudes classical elegance. The first section, devoted almost exclusively to the strings (a bassoon pays a brief visit), radiates a sense of calm, while the second, almost violent in its effect, is as dramatic as the first is peaceful. The third-movement minuet is sprinkled with syncopations and filled with humor, before a finale inspired by folk music takes wing over a drone bass.

Frédéric Chopin
Born March 1, 1810, in ?elazowa Wola, near Warsaw
Died October 17, 1849, in Paris

Piano Concerto No. 1 in E minor, Op. 11

In the romantic era, pianist-composers enriched the piano literature in an exceptional way: Schubert, Schumann, Brahms, Mendelssohn, Liszt – and above all Chopin. For him, music was a language capable of expressing everything: thoughts, feelings, sensations. Rather than treating the piano as a percussion instrument, he transformed it into a voice. “Under his fingers,” explain Mikuli and Koczalski in Jean-Jacques Eigeldinger’s Chopin vu par ses élèves (Chopin through the Eyes of His Students), “each musical phrase sounded like singing, and with such clarity that each note took on the meaning of a syllable, each bar that of a word, each phrase that of a thought.” André Gide, in his Notes on Chopin, summed up Chopin’s achievement this way: “Far from loading his emotion with notes, as Wagner did, for example, he loads each note with emotion – and I was about to say, with responsibility. And if, as I don’t doubt, there are greater musicians, there are no more perfect ones. So that the work of Chopin, scarcely more voluminous in its way than the poetic work of Baudelaire, is comparable to the Fleurs du mal through the intense concentration and meaning of the finest pieces that make it up, and through the extraordinary influence that one or the other, through those very qualities, could exert.”

Chopin dedicated just two concertos to his instrument of choice, both works of his younger years and composed before he left Warsaw. On September 22, 1830, his Concerto in E minor (the second one written, as it happened, but the first one published) was completed: “I’ve finished my second concerto,” he wrote his friend Tytus Woyciechowski, “and before it I find myself to be as ignorant as back when I still knew nothing of the keyboard. It is so original that I fear not succeeding in understanding it…” The work was premiered on October 11, 1830, at Warsaw’s National Theatre. The morning after the concert, he confided: “My concert yesterday was a success. I had no jitters at all; I played as though I were alone with myself. Everything went well. The hall was full. Deafening bravos…” On November 2, he left Warsaw. Short weeks later the November Uprising broke out, and Chopin never returned.

Richard Strauss
Born June11, 1864, in Munich
Died September 8, 1949, in Garmisch-Partenkirchen

Suite from Der Rosenkavalier

With The Knight of the Rose, an opera written to a libretto by the poet Hugo von Hofmannsthal and which had its premiere in Dresden on January 26, 1911, Richard Strauss yielded fully to his comic-lyric genius – the very essence of his personality, as his friend the novelist Romain Rolland would point out. Years later, in 1945, when American soldiers arrived to requisition his villa, the composer welcomed them with “I am the composer of Der Rosenkavalier” – as if the success of that work justified everything else.

The action unfolds in Vienna in the mid-eighteenth century and features Princess Werdenberg (also called the Marschallin), a mature woman in love with the very young Octavian, as well as Baron Ochs auf Lerchenau, engaged to the young Sophie. As a pledge of the baron’s love, he asks Octavian to carry a silver rose to Sophie, but she immediately succumbs to the teenager’s charms. After a number of developments, the Marschallin ends up by facing facts and allowing the union of the two lovebirds.

Several suites have been taken from the opera, and revive the main themes. The music is spontaneous, melodious and highly diversified, punctuated by shimmering waltz movements.

Lucie Renaud
Translated by Ron Rosenthall