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T uxedo: Vasco ‘de’ Gama takes its title from Jean-Michel Basquiat’s iconic 1982–3 artwork Tuxedo, a collection of 16 diagrammatic block pieces that come together to form a figure adorned with Basquiat’s trademark three-point crown symbol. It highlights recurring notions of majesty in his output, as does the tuxedo itself, which is a garment associated with luxury and elegance.

A multitude of Basquiat’s thematic preoccupations are displayed in the intricate hand-drawn and -written iconographic detail, encompassing a variety of histories. Indeed, his reference to Vasco da Gama (written as ‘Vasco de Gama’), the first European to voyage to Asia by sea, offers a commentary on exploration and the seeds of globalisation and multiculturalism: two important themes in the context of the year 2020.

The music moves between bright and buoyant moments of high energy and expansive stillness, underpinned by the incorporated harmonicas, which also function as a nod to the blues. Basquiat often drew attention to historical and contemporary matters of the African Diaspora. In a similar fashion, I have included a transcription of ‘Wade in the Water’, a traditional African-American spiritual, for music box.

^{Programme note © Hannah Kendall}

³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ Singers
Nicholas Chalmers conductor

Setting a text to music is a precious process, and typically one in which the two components become so intertwined that one cannot exist without the other. But when, in 2000, Eric Whitacre composed a setting of Robert Frost’s 1922 poem ‘Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening’, he found himself barred from publishing the text. Frost’s poem was to remain under copyright until 2019, so Whitacre, having already crafted an a cappella choral setting of Frost’s words, was forced to change tack. Just a day after receiving the request to create new words to go with Whitacre's existing music, his friend, the poet Charles Anthony Silvestri, responded with the poem ‘Sleep’­ – a text which picks up on the themes of rest and resignation that underpin Frost’s poem, while deftly matching Whitacre’s original setting in structure, theme and tone.

Philip Cobb trumpet
Alison Teale cor anglais

Although Copland’s name is now synonymous with American music, it was thanks to his time spent studying with the modernists in Paris, and in particular to his lessons with Nadia Boulanger, that he was first persuaded to explore his American heritage. It was to be the making of him: when he returned to the USA in the mid-1920s, his music would become a vital cultural force, speaking directly to the average American citizen during the difficult years of the Great Depression.

Copland became iconic for his rousing Rodeo music and characterful appropriation of traditional folk song in his other two popular ballets, Billy the Kid and Appalachian Spring, but Quiet City is no less ‘American’ for its rather more understated score. It began life as incidental music for a 1939 play of the same name by Irwin Shaw. Billed as a ‘realistic fantasy’, Shaw’s play captures the shifting images of New York City by night – although in the end it was a flop and closed after only a few performances.

A year later Copland compiled the fragments he had composed for the play into a continuous orchestral score, adapting the original instrumentation (for trumpet, saxophone, clarinets and piano) for trumpet, cor anglais and string ensemble. The strings form an iridescent backdrop to the work, rising and falling in shifting swells to portray the changing face of the city. Above this, the lone trumpeter (who, in Shaw’s play, reminds the troubled protagonist of his brother cum alter ego) intones a mixed song of nostalgia and melancholy, regret and anxiety.

^{Programme note © Jo Kirkbride}

1 Allegro con brio
2 Marcia funebre: Adagio assai
3 Scherzo: Allegro vivace – Trio
4 Finale: Allegro molto – Poco andante – Presto

There is no getting away from it – Beethoven’s Third Symphony marks a significant turning point, not just for Beethoven’s own symphonic style, but for the language and history of Western classical music as a whole. In its unprecedented length, technical demands and sweeping aesthetic ideals, it far exceeds any symphony ever composed before. With his first two symphonies Beethoven had challenged the public, pushing the boundaries of form and harmony while developing strands first glimpsed in the works of Haydn and Mozart, but the ambition of the ‘Eroica’ Symphony is something else.

The defiance of the ‘Eroica’, the weightiness of its themes, the grandeur of its huge symphonic arch, fit are all so bound up with the renewed sense of purpose that Beethoven set out the year before in his letter known as the ‘Heiligenstadt Testament’ – in which he resolved to ‘remain firm and endure’ amid the onset of his deafness – that it is difficult to set them apart. But Beethoven gave away little about the symphony’s relation to his own personal state of mind. Instead, he dedicated the symphony to Napoleon, whose life and legacy are described over the course of its four movements: from the grand ambition and heroic struggles of the Allegro, through the projection of his death in the funereal Adagio, to the buoyant Scherzo and celebratory Finale, which together sound a note of hope for change, the brilliant new aftermath of the French Revolution.

However, following Napoleon’s decision to crown himself as Emperor, Beethoven withdrew the dedication, and the work was instead titled ‘Sinfonia eroica … composta per festeggiare il sovvenire di un grand Uomo (‘Heroic Symphony … composed to celebrate the memory of a great man’). And it is, truly, a heroic symphony. From the jolt of the opening chords to the clamour of the Finale, with its furious strings and vibrant brass fanfares, it is a celebration of the symphony as much as it is the story of any one man’s personal journey.

^{Programme note © Jo Kirkbride}