Roxanna Panufnik initially composed Hora Bessarabia as a violin solo for the Yehudi Menuhin Violin Competition in 2016, writing that she had ‘drawn inspiration from Yehudi Menuhin’s love of Eastern European Gypsy music – using Romanian melodies and fiendish-but-fun Bulgarian Gypsy rhythms.’ The contest finalist Ariel Horowitz asked Panufnik to make an arrangement for her and the double-bass player Sebastian Zinca. The result is a piece in the form of a dance alternating slow and fast sections, the bass part adding a conversational element to what had been a solo piece. The slow passages resemble a Romanian ‘Doina’, improvisatory in feel with both instruments occasionally imitating the sound of a cimbalom, while the faster ‘Hora’ sections become increasingly animated, leading to the thrilling rhythmic charge of the closing bars. 

© Nigel Simeone

Richard Reed Parry is best known as a guitarist in the Canadian rock band Arcade Fire. Quartet for Heart and Breath is one of a series of pieces that Parry began work on during the band’s mammoth 2004-5 tour, that all have the same conceptual starting point: every note is played in sync with the heartbeat or breath of the musicians. While they are performing, the musicians wear stethoscopes under their clothes so they can clearly hear their own heartbeats, which in turn regulate their individual tempos. 

The idea for Parry’s concept came about through reaction. After listening to a tranche of electroacoustic music that didn’t he didn’t feel any profound connection to, Parry sought a way to make music intimately connected to musicians’ bodies. Rather than opting for repetitive rhythms or dance figures, he decided to go deeper, beyond the skill of trained musicians, and straight for corporeal intuition. He began conceiving music directly related to the involuntary aspects of bodily functions: the speed of breath, eyes blinking, hearts beating. 

When composing for others, Parry’s musical world brings together the minimal musical palettes of Steve Reich and Brian Eno, and the musical systems of John Cage. Parry was interested in the latter through his pieces like I Ching, which use chance procedures to gradually relinquish the control the composer has over the realisation of the work. The result here is a naturally jumbled collection of tumbling rhythms, that manages to find a surprisingly soothing character amid the chaos. 

Hugh Morris 2024 

Hannah Peel

Mercury Prize, Ivor Novello and Emmy-nominated, RTS and Music Producers Guild winning composer, with a flow of solo albums and collaborative releases, Hannah joins the dots between science, nature and the creative arts, through her explorative approach to electronic, classical and traditional music

From her own solo albums to composing soundtracks like Game of Thrones: The last Watch, or to orchestrating and conducting for artists like Paul Weller, her work is ambitious, forward-looking, always adapting and re-inventing new genres and hybrid musical forms

Hannah is a regular weekly broadcaster for BBC Radio 3’s Night Tracks

© Hannah Peel

The Almond Tree

This is a track from Hannah Peel’s 2011 debut album The Broken Wave, which she described as a collection of songs covering themes ranging from “joy and hope of falling in love through to the pain and loss of betrayal.” In 2018 The Almond Tree featured in the opening episode of the Channel 4 / Netflix series Kiss Me First.

Hannah performing The Almond Tree in 2011 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=piZCfrpa9kE

Iridescence and Tapetum lucidum (2023) are part of a cycle of ten pieces for piano, with Iridescence using the same piano preparations as Annea Lockwood’s Ear-Walking Woman. The sea permeates the movements of this piece – it is there and not there at the same time. Over the course of about four years, I lived in a very special house overlooking the Belfast Lough. According to some, it used to belong to a sea captain. On clear days, Scotland was visible just across the water with hills and wind turbines. The sound and smell of the sea was constant. Storms threw down tree branches and fling salt onto the windows. There were many birds: plump eiders, redshanks, oyster catchers, shags, guillemots, corvids and gulls dropping mollusk shells onto the rocks to get at the tender flesh inside. There were rock pools, crabs, limpets, snails; sea vegetables: dulce, sea radish, scurvy grass. Seals sunbathed and curved their tails into the air; sometimes, you saw little sea otters. Container ships huddled in the bay to wait out storms, their lights gleaming in the night. There was a little cove with the submerged cave, waves churning, cold-water swimmers in all seasons and weathers, starfish gleaming from the depths below, a whole unknown forest beneath the surface. Then, the beach: sadly, full of plastic, glass, golf balls, lighters, toys, bottles, and depending on rainfall, toilet paper. I am grateful to Bill Thompson’s cameo as captain of the CSS Alabama in 1864 on Tapetum lucidum.

Xenia Pestova Bennet

Oscar Peterson was born in Montreal, Canada, and took piano lessons from the Hungarian Paul de Marky, who belonged to a direct line of pianists leading back to Franz Liszt. But it was jazz, especially boogie-woogie, that beguiled Peterson, and after quitting high school he soon became a go-to session player. He was invited to New York to perform in the prestigious series Jazz at the Philharmonic, and then throughout his life toured the world with his many groups, making landmark recordings of live and studio performances.

(Back Home Again in) Indiana is a jazz standard composed by James Hanley in 1917, that has been recorded by many great musicians. With Oscar Peterson, his performances of Indiana were often a way to demonstrate his incredible technique, with almost comical speeds that draw on the older boogie-woogie style he so loved.

© Music in the Round

Franz Schubert’s ‘Ständchen’ (‘A serenade’) was originally a lied for solo voice and piano. Composed in 1826, it is a setting of the ‘song’ in Act 2, Scene 3 of Shakespeare’s Cymbeline. Evoking the coming of morning, the song begins: “Hark, hark, the lark at heaven’s gate sings, / and Phoebus ‘gins arise, / His steeds to water at those springs / on chalic’d flowers that lies”. Franz Liszt arranged Schubert’s ‘Ständchen’ for solo piano in 1838, including it as “Ständchen von Shakespeare” in his 12 Lieder von Franz Schubert. 

Another arrangement of vocal music, J. S. Bach’s ‘Die Seele ruht in Jesu Händen’ (‘The soul rests in Jesus’ hands’) was originally composed as an aria for his Cantata BWV 127. Written for a service on Estomihi (the Sunday before Lent), it is performed here in a transcription by the distinguished English-born American pianist and teacher, Harold Bauer.   

Liszt’s arrangement of Robert Schuman’s ‘Widmung’ (‘dedication’) for his ‘Liebeslied’ (or ‘Love Song’) preserves the lyrical emotion of the original while adding his own pianistic virtuosity. Gifted to his fiancé Clara as a wedding present, Schuman’s song is expanded and transformed; whereas Schuman’s ‘Widmung’ ends quietly, Liszt’s ‘Liebeslied’ finishes with a final pianistic flurry.  

Schubert wrote eight Impromptus, published in two sets of four – the first set (op. 90) was published during the composer’s lifetime, the second was published posthumously as Op. 142. Composed in 1827, the Four Impromptus Op. 90 D. 899 are a cornerstone of the piano repertoire. The first, in C minor, blends elements of sonata, variation, and through-composed structures. The second Impromptu in E♭ major is a swift ‘moto perpetuo’ with a ternary (or ABA) form. The third is a flowing and meditative piece in G♭ major, characterized by long melodic lines, while the fourth and final Impromptu, in A♭ major, is characterized by cascading arpeggios and a chordal response. 

Like Liszt, Sergei Vasilyevich Rachmaninov was a virtuoso pianist as well as a composer. Widely considered one of the finest pianists of his day, Rachmaninov’s pianistic talents can be heard in his writing for the instrument. The Ten Preludes, Op. 23, composed in 1901 and 1903, is part of a full suite of 24 preludes in all the major and minor keys. The Prelude in D Major is No. 4 in the collection. Marked andante cantabile (moderate and flowing with a lyrical quality), the short composition is in ternary form with an opening theme, developed in a middle section, returning at the end. Also performed is the Prelude in G Sharp minor Op.32 No.12. Among the composer’s most atmospheric pieces for piano, opening right-hand arpeggios fall across a distinctly Russian melody. The Prelude in G Major Op.32 No.5 is the most famous of the set, with its march-like outer sections contrasted by a more lyrical middle section. Rachmaninov himself had huge hands – stretching a 13th (an octave plus a 6th, or from middle C to a high A) – so would have had no difficulty bringing out the melody in the inner voice of the middle section.  

Rachmaninov’s set of Six moments musicaux were composed when he was just 23 years old. Keen to demonstrate his mastery of musical forms, as well as his virtuosity as a pianist, the third movement (in B minor) is the emotional heart of the set with a brooding melody played low on the piano, under wide, open chords. The 5 Morceaux de fantaisie (or ‘fantasy pieces’) were composed when Rachmaninov was younger still (aged 19) in 1892 and are dedicated to Anton Arensky, Rachmaninov’s harmony teacher at the Moscow Conservatory. The opening Elegy consists of gentle arpeggios and a deeply melancholic melody. 

Hildegard von Bingen was a 12th-century abbess and polymath, active as a composer, writer, and mystic. Her piece ‘O frondens virga’ (‘O blossoming branch’) was composed as a psalm antiphon for the Virgin Mary. It is performed here in an arrangement by the pianist, Marie-Luise Hinrichs.  

Giacomo Puccini’s ‘Piccolo Valzer’ (‘Little Waltz’) was published in 1894. The inspiration for the work was said to be the rocking of a boat on Lake Massaciuccoli, where Puccini loved to go fishing. It was subsequently re-elaborated by the composer and became one of the best-known opera arias, Musetta’s solo ‘Quando me n’vo’ in La Bohème. 

Samuel Coleridge-Taylor’s ‘Deep River’ was written in 1904 as part of the composer’s 24 Negro Spirituals. Coleridge-Taylor is reported to have said of the collection: “what Brahms has done for the Hungarian folk music, Dvorak for the Bohemian, and Grieg for the Norwegian, I have tried to do for these Negro Melodies”. 

Margaret Bonds arranged over fifty African-American spirituals for various instruments. The piano work ‘Troubled Water’ is based on the spiritual ‘Wade in the Water’ which was associated with Songs of the Underground Railroad, work songs used by slaves in the nineteenth century to share coded information for escape. Beginning with energetic, syncopated rhythms in the left hand, leading into the recognizable theme in the spiritual, the piece then thickens, with Bonds weaving in jazz-inspired sonorities. 

When Kathryn Stott performed this programme at the Aldeburgh Festival in June 2024, it was billed as a concert of ‘Musical Postcards’. That’s a good description of a recital which explores the huge range of her repertoire, starting with the first prelude and fugue from The Well-Tempered Clavier by Johann Sebastian Bach (1685–1750) and ending with a brand-new piece by Graham Fitkin which was given its world premiere at the Aldeburgh concert on 21 June. Lili Boulanger (1893–1918) composed her Thème et variations in 1914 but the work remained unknown until its rediscovery led to its first performance (and publication) in 1993. The theme (marked ‘avec douleur, mais noble’) is presented without accompaniment and eight variations follow, each treating the theme (or part of it) in imaginative ways that are entirely characteristic of Boulanger.

Caroline Potter has noted that the work was modelled on the Thème et variations, Op. 73 by Gabriel Fauré (1845–1924) who was Boulanger’s teacher and a family friend. Fauré’s Barcarolle No. 4, Op. 44, was composed in 1886 and dedicated to Mme Ernest Chausson. Quietly poetic in mood, it is full of the rich harmonic surprises and fluid melodies that are so typical of Fauré’s music. Maurice Ravel (1875–1937) was one of Fauré’s most imaginative pupils and he wrote Jeux d’eau – among the most evocative and brilliant of all ‘water’ pieces for piano – in 1901, with a dedication ‘à mon cher maître Gabriel Fauré’.

Edvard Grieg (1843–1907) composed Wedding Day at Troldhaugen to celebrate his silver wedding anniversary with his wife Nina in 1896 and it was included in Book VIII of Grieg’s Lyric Pieces the following year, when it acquired its definitive title (Grieg has originally called it ‘The well-wishers are coming’). The Argentine Astor Piazzolla (1921–1992), creator of the nuevo tango which fused traditional tango with elements of jazz and classical styles, composed Milonga del Ángel in 1965, and it is heard here in a later piano transcription by the Japanese pianist Kyoko Yamamoto. Inspired by a visit to Leipzig in 1950 to celebrate the 200th anniversary of Bach’s death, Dmitri Shostakovich (1906–75) modelled his Preludes and Fugues Op. 87 on Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier, even including some quotations as well as following Bach’s design of preludes and fugues in each of the major and minor keys. Completed on 23 February 1951, the D minor Prelude and Fugue ends the entire set with a stern prelude followed by a highly elaborate double fugue (which also includes allusions to Bach’s Art of Fugue) deploying a formidable array of contrapuntal techniques. The whole set was first performed in April and May 1951 at a private concert for the Soviet Union of Composers and heard in public in December 1952, played by Tatiana Nikolayeva, for whom the Preludes and Fugues had been composed.

Graham Fitikin (b. 1963) composed Scent in 2007, originally for the harpist Ruth Wall. The pianist Stephen Hough (b. 1961) included his hugely entertaining and ingenious transcription of ‘My Favorite Things’ from The Sound of Music by Richard Rodgers (1902–79) on one of his earliest recital discs, bringing Lisztian pyrotechnics to Broadway. When Caroline Shaw (b. 1982) composed Gustave Le Gray in 2012, she was inspired by Chopin’s Mazurka Op. 17 No. 4 – one of his most harmonically inventive earlier pieces – and included direct references to it in her own work. Shaw herself described it as ‘a multi-layered portrait of Op. 17 No. 4 using some of Chopin’s ingredients overlaid and hinged together with my own.’ The original Mazurka by Fryderyk Chopin (1810–49) was first published in Paris in 1834. It is a spellbinding kind of dance poem, full of ambiguity and quiet longing, some astonishingly daring harmonies and a trajectory which begins and ends in uncertain silence. Molly on the Shore by the Australian Percy Grainger (1882–1961) was based on two traditional Irish reels and written in 1907 as a birthday present for Grainger’s mother. He first composed it for strings, then made an orchestral version in 1914 and the present piano transcription in 1918. He later made further versions for military band (1920) and for two pianos (1947).

Carl Vine (b. 1954) is another Australian composer, and his Anne Landa Preludes were written in 2006 in memory of Anne Landa (who died in 2002 at the age of 55), particularly her passionate encouragement of young Australian pianists. The first of the preludes is ‘Short Story’ described by Vine as follows: ‘The prelude contains a story. But the drama emerges through its own internal logic rather than from a specific series of predetermined events’. Graham Fitkin composed Rapid Unscheduled Disassembly specifically for Kathryn Stott’s farewell recitals, taking his title from the euphemism used by Elon Musk’s SpaceX when its rockets blew up in 2015 and 2023 (though the phrase probably goes back to the 1960s when NASA used similar terminology to describe earlier explosions). As Stott said in a recent interview, ‘My one request to Graham was, this will be the last notes I play in public, so keep that in mind!’ 

Let’s get our concert off to a dancing start! Libertango is a fun mix of tango and jazz, full of energy and rhythm. Close your eyes and imagine dancers moving quickly—sometimes fast, sometimes slow, but always exciting! It was written by Astor Piazzolla, a musical rule-breaker from Argentina in South America, who loved to take the traditional dance music of the tango and twist it into something new and thrilling

Elegy for Ukraine was composed in March 2022 especially for the recorderist John Turner. The outer sections are based on a modal prayer-like melody, whilst the central section is more agitated with the piano depicting a mysterious, flowing river. Fragments of two Ukrainian laments are woven into the piece: ‘Plyve Kacha Po Tysyni’ [the duckling swims in the Tisza] and ‘In the Grove, by the Danube’. An adapted version exists for violin.

© Jeremy Pike

Élégie. Paisiblement sans presser
Scherzo. Très animé
Déploration. Très calme

Poulenc described the elements of the Oboe Sonata – his last major work – as follows: ‘The first movement is elegiac, the second scherzando, and the last a sort of liturgical chant.’ The form of the Sonata is slow–fast–slow with its most original feature being the finale, a deeply-felt ‘Déploration’. This eloquent tribute was dedicated to the memory of Serge Prokofiev, but it was first performed at the Strasbourg Festival on 8 June 1963 by Pierre Pierlot and Jacques Février as a memorial to Poulenc himself who had died earlier in the year.

© Nigel Simeone 2015

Très vite et emporté

Divertissement. Andantino

Finale. Prestissimo

The Sextet for piano, flute, oboe, clarinet, bassoon and horn was a work over which Poulenc lavished a great deal of time and effort – the final results did not come easily or quickly. First performed in its original version at an all-Poulenc concert at the Salle Chopin in Paris on 19 June 1931 (and described in the Chesterian magazine as one of two ‘intelligent and lovely’ new compositions heard that evening), Poulenc reworked the Sextet several times before it reached a definitive form in 1939. On 29 August 1939 he wrote to Marie-Blanche Polignac that he had ‘thoroughly revised my entire Sextet (now very good)’. The result of this decade of reflection and rewriting is indeed ‘very good’: Poulenc’s most imposing chamber work is notable from the outset for its muscularity and seriousness – though the central ‘Divertissement’ provides an oasis of Mozartian repose – and, after an almost wild Prestissimo, the finale closes with an epilogue notable for its solemn stillness: Stravinsky-like austerity here is softened by Poulenc’s more emollient harmonic language. The first performance of the Sextet in its finished form took place during the early months of the German Occupation of Paris, on 9 December 1940, at a concert given by the Association de Musique Contemporaine, with Poulenc at the piano and the Quintette à vent de Paris. Poulenc kept the manuscript to himself during the years of the war and eventually sent it to Wilhelm Hansen in Copenhagen for publication in 1945. This brought to an end what Poulenc’s biographer Carl B. Schmidt has aptly described as ‘one of the most complicated compositional sagas of Poulenc’s career.’ Poulenc recorded the Sextet not with the original French players, but with the Philadelphia Wind Quintet in March 1960, during one of his last visits to the United States.

Nigel Simeone © 2010

Poulenc wrote this Sonata in September 1922 – it is one of his three early sonatas for wind instruments without piano. The first performance took place at a concert on 4 January 1923, in which Poulenc’s music was played alongside Satie’s La Belle Excentrique and Socrate. Among those present (along with Satie and Poulenc) were two of the great patrons of modern music, Misia Sert and Serge Diaghilev. The Sonata was particularly admired by Stravinsky (not always a fan of Poulenc’s music), who wrote to fellow composer Georges Auric in November 1922 after seeing the manuscript of this work and another of Poulenc’s sonatas from the same time. “I very much loved the music of these two sonatas,” Stravinsky said, “very fresh music where the originalist of Poulenc manifests itself as it does in none of his other works. Moreover, this music is very, very French.” 

© Nigel Simeone

The rediscovery of the African-American composer Florence Price (1897–1953) has not only revealed an impressive body of symphonic music but also a number of songs including The Glory of the Day was in Her Face (on a poem by James Weldon Johnson) and Song to the Dark Virgin (from her 1941 collection Songs of the Weary Blues, four settings of Langston Hughes, the great poet of the Harlem Renaissance).  

Nigel Simeone © 2024 

The rediscovery of the African-American composer Florence Price (1897–1953) has not only revealed an impressive body of symphonic music but also a number of songs including The Glory of the Day was in Her Face (on a poem by James Weldon Johnson) and Song to the Dark Virgin (from her 1941 collection Songs of the Weary Blues, four settings of Langston Hughes, the great poet of the Harlem Renaissance).  

Nigel Simeone © 2024 

Prokofiev composed this piece for clarinet, string quartet and piano in 1919, while he was on tour in the USA. It was commissioned by the Zimro Ensemble, a Russian group who had recently arrived in America. The ‘Hebrew’ themes Prokofiev used were very probably composed by Simeon Bellison, the group’s clarinettist. The premiere was given by Prokofiev with the Zimro Ensemble in New York on 2 February 1920.

Nigel Simeone 2014

In 1936 Prokofiev was asked by Natalya Sats, Director of the Moscow Children’s Theatre, to write a piece that would introduce children to the instruments of the orchestra. The Prokofiev scholar Simon Morrison describes the creative process in detail: a poetic text was rejected by the composer who devised his own, in consultation with Sats, calling it How Pioneer Peter Caught the Wolf – a tale of a brave Soviet boy scout defying the orders of his grandfather to rescue the bird from the cat, and to see the wolf brought to justice.  

He wrote the music very quickly, in less than a week, and tried it out on the piano with a group of schoolchildren, who were delighted – as they were by the full instrumental version when it was subsequently performed at the Moscow Children’s Theatre. However, the official premiere for adults on 2 May 1936 was, according to Morrison, ‘lacklustre’. Prokofiev’s detailed instructions, written while he was working on the piece, explain what he set out to achieve:  

Each character of this tale is represented by a corresponding instrument in the orchestra: the bird by a flute, the duck by an oboe, the cat by a clarinet playing staccato in a low register, the grandfather by a bassoon, the wolf by three horns, Peter by the string quartet, the shooting of the hunters by the timpani and bass drum. Before an orchestral performance it is desirable to show these instruments to the children and to play on them the corresponding leitmotivs. Thereby, the children learn to distinguish the sonorities of the instruments during the performance of this tale. 

And so they have ever since. Peter soon reached a vast international audience thanks to the private performance Prokofiev gave to Walt Disney in 1938. This chamber version was written by David Matthews in 1936. 

© Nigel Simeone 2015 

Tema con variazioni
Andante energico
Allegro sostenuto, ma con brio
Adagio pesante
Allegro precipitato, ma non troppo presto
Andantino

Prokofiev’s Quintet Op.39 of 1924 incorporates music from Trapeze, a ballet he composed at the same time. Written while Prokofiev was living in Paris for a company that could only afford a small instrumental ensemble, the original ballet comprised eight movements of which six were used in the Quintet. The language is often astringent but Prokofiev is highly imaginative in the way he uses limited resources to the fullest possible effect. After a Theme and Variations that moves from a deadpan opening to frenetic energy before returning to the music of the start, the second movement opens with a double bass solo before some rather acidic writing for the whole ensemble. The short Allegro sostenuto, ma con brio is a witty scherzo-type movement that is followed by the darkest part of the Quintet, a brooding Adagio pesante notable for some unusual instrumental colours including sul ponticello string writing. The Allegro precipitato is another brilliant, highly animated exploration of intriguing sonorities, while the concluding Andante is more stately to begin with, becoming a little livelier in the central section, and ending vigorously, with the parts marked tumultuoso e precipitato.

In 1947 Prokofiev heard a young Mstislav Rostropovich, aged twenty at the time, performing his First Cello Concerto. Prokofiev decided to compose a piece especially for him and the result was the Cello Sonata, written in 1949, to be performed by Rostropovich and pianist Sviatoslav Richter. After a tedious process of playing the work to the Soviet Composer’s Union to ensure that the new sonata was not ‘hostile to the spirit of the people’, they were finally allowed to give the premiere at the Moscow Conservatory on 1 March 1950. It was well received, with Prokofiev’s friend and colleague Nikolai Miaskovsky described the sonata as ‘a miraculous piece of music.’ 

The first movement opens with a brooding theme in the cello’s lowest register, gradually emerging from the depths before arriving at a slightly quicker section and a dramatic climax, then a return to the opening material and a coda which eventually subsides on to quiet C major chords. The second movement begins with a theme on the piano and its short rhythmic cells soon generate further ideas in a dialogue between cello and piano. A central section introduces a contrasting idea in triple time before the initial ideas return. The finale shifts effortlessly through a bewildering range of keys while maintaining an almost constant sense of momentum. A brief respite comes before the exciting close, which Prokofiev published in two versions (one less technically demanding than the other), bringing the work to a powerful conclusion in C major.  

© Nigel Simeone

Storiella d’amore (1883)
Sole e amore (1888)
E l’uccellino (1899)
Canto d’anime (1904)
Avanti Urania! (1896)

Storiella d’amore was Puccini’s first published work, printed in the magazine La musica popolare on 4 October 1883, with a note from the publisher proudly announcing that it was ‘a work by the young maestro Giacomo Puccini, one of the most distinguished students to graduate this year from the Milan Conservatory.’ Originally a song for voice and piano, it contains some intriguing pre-echoes of Mimi’s Act One aria from La bohème. 

Sole e amore from 1888 has even more explicit links with the same opera: the tune of this song is identical to that of the Quartet in Act Three. 

The charming E l’uccellino was written in 1899 as a cradle song for the infant son of a friend.  

Canto d’anime has links to Puccini’s lifelong fascination with technology – whether fast cars, speedboats or, in this case, the gramophone: this song, with words by Luigi Illica (librettist of Bohème, Tosca and Madama Butterfly) was commissioned by the Gramophone Company who subsequently issued a recording of it. 

Marked ‘Allegro spigliato’ (‘Fast and breezy’), Avanti Urania! was composed in 1896 to celebrate the acquisition of a handsome steamboat called Urania by Puccini’s friend, the industrialist Marchese Ginori-Lisci. 

© Nigel Simeone

She Loves and She Confesses Too
O Solitude
Mad Bess 

Benjamin Britten was a great admirer of his fellow British composer Henry Purcell and created ‘realizations’ of Purcell’s songs for voice and piano. These are not just accompaniments, but rather a re-imagining of the baroque continuo part, adding modern harmonic sensibilities while respecting the original vocal line. 

Britten’s setting of She Loves and She Confesses Too is a notable example of his efforts to realize and revive the music of the 17th-century composer. The song sets a poem by Abraham Cowley (1618–1667), and describes the direct, almost military, triumph of love after a lady finally confesses her affection. 

O solitude is set using a ‘ground bass’, a short theme in the bass line that constantly repeats – in this case 28 times. The Purcell original is thought to date from the mid-1680s, and sets a translation of Antoine Girard de Saint’s La solitude. Britten paints its words through plaintive falling intervals, meandering passages and a wonderful use of the lowest register of the voice for ‘as only death can cure’. 

One of Purcell’s ‘mad-songs’, Mad Bess was published in 1683. In Britten’s hands, it becomes a complex piece that has a deliberate craziness with many different sections and constant twists and turns in a short space of time. The singer and piano parts are often independent of each other, and Britten uses the opportunity to bring the words, such as ‘flaming eyes’, to life. 

Purcell composed this Chacony in about 1680, probably to be played by the Twenty-Four Violins, the string orchestra established by Charles II (imitating the similar ensemble set up by Louis XIV at Versailles). Its purpose was likely to have been to accompany dancing at court or perhaps as incidental music for a play. Britten was a fervent admirer of Purcell’s music and he began this arrangement for string quartet or string orchestra in late 1947, conducting the first performance in Zurich on 30 January 1948. In 1963, he made some revisions and the score was published in 1965. In the preface to that edition, Britten wrote the following about the work: ‘The theme, first of all in the basses, moves in a stately fashion from a high to a low G. It is repeated many times in the bass with varying textures above. It then starts moving around the orchestra. There is a quaver version with heavy chords above it, which provides the material for several repetitions. There are some free and modulating versions of it, and a connecting passage leads to a forceful and rhythmic statement in G minor. The conclusion of the piece is a pathetic variation, with dropping semi-quavers and repeated “soft” – Purcell’s own instruction.’ 

Nigel Simeone, 2022 

Purcell’s fifteen Fantasias, originally written for viols in 3, 4, 6 and 7 parts, were probably all composed in 1680. The style of this music – imitating the vocal motet – comes from a tradition of instrumental fantasia-writing that goes back to the Renaissance. Yet despite the self-imposed restrictions of the genre, and its apparent anachronism, Purcell reinvents this form with music of extraordinary beauty and expressiveness. The Fantasias in this evening’s concert were all written for four voices, emphasizing the link between these concise and concentrated masterpieces and the emergence of the string quartet in the next century.

Nigel Simeone 2013

Henry Purcell (1659–1695) was one of the most celebrated English composers of the Baroque era. Among his remarkable works is a series of Fantasias (or Fancies), composed in 1680 when Purcell was only 21 years old. Showcasing his profound skill with contrapuntal writing – in which each of the instrument’s melodic lines work both independently and as part of the musical-whole – the Fantasias are considered among the finest examples of the form and are regarded by many to be the ‘jewel in the crown of English consort music’. This wasn’t always the case, however. When Purcell composed these works, the Fantasia was quite unfashionable. King Charles II is said to have had ‘an utter detestation of Fancys’. Out of favour in the Royal court, Purcell’s Fantasias were therefore likely intended to be performed in domestic settings. Originally written for three viols, they are here transcribed for string trio (violin, viola, and cello).