Contents
- Welcome
- Maurice Ravel (1875 – 1937): Pavane pour une infante défunte (6 minutes)
- Benjamin Britten (1913 – 1976): Les Illuminations (18 minutes)
- Ravel: Ma mère l’Oye – Mother Goose, complete ballet (29 minutes)
- Meet Julia Bullock
- Esa-Pekka Salonen: biography
- Julia Bullock: biography
- Les Illuminations: texts & translation
Welcome
We’re so excited to be back on stage at the Royal Festival Hall. This may not have been the situation any of us had in mind when we were planning Esa-Pekka Salonen’s last season as our Principal Conductor, a position he has held since 2008. But it seems appropriate that Esa-Pekka, a musician who has always embraced technology as a way of bringing great music to the widest possible audience, should be at the helm for one of our first livestreamed concerts.
We’re also delighted that Julia Bullock was able to travel to the UK to make her Philharmonia and Southbank Centre debut. We hope you’ll be keen to hear more of her voice – as a singer and as a passionate advocate for the arts – after this concert.
Please share your thoughts on the performance on social media, using the hashtag #PhilharmoniaLive.
Header image: Julia Bullock © Allison Michael Orenstein
Maurice Ravel (1875 – 1937): Pavane pour une infante défunte (1899, orch. 1909)
Maurice Ravel and his generation witnessed the carnage of the First World War and the emergence of jazz and popular music. Born in the 19th century, they looked on as the modern world emerged before their eyes in the 20th.
Ravel was excited by the possibilities of music’s vastly expanding vocabulary. But he was also a nostalgic man who cherished the elegance of bygone dances and the melancholy of simplicity.
The two are combined in Ravel’s Pavane for a Dead Princess (Pavane pour une infante défunte). It was written for piano in 1899 while Ravel was still a student. The composer was impressionable at the time, which shows in simple, lucid music that would have been advocated by his teachers.
But the Pavane has deeper residual emotions. The composer claimed the title was entirely abstract, chosen for its atmosphere and assonance. Still, as the simple horn melody is borne across the rhythmic underlay of an old aristocratic dance, it’s easy to sense the beauty and naivety of youth being carried off forever.
The work was dedicated to a princess very much alive: Ravel’s patron, the Princesse de Polignac. The composer orchestrated the piece in 1909, shortly before starting work on Mother Goose.
Benjamin Britten (1913 – 1976): Les Illuminations, Op. 18 (1939 – 1940) to texts by Arthur Rimbaud (1854 – 1891)
- Fanfare
- Villes
- (a) Phrase (b) Antique
- Royauté
- Marine
- Interlude
- Being Beauteous
- Parade
- Départ
In May 1939, Benjamin Britten and his partner Peter Pears set sail for America from Southampton. The plan was for a permanent relocation, but three years later they were back home in England. It was a pivotal time during which Britten was learning about himself – his sexual orientation, creative abilities and love for East Anglia included.
A vital catalyst in those life lessons was the poet WH Auden, who had directed Britten towards verse by Arthur Rimbaud. Auden sensed that Britten would respond to Rimbaud – an adolescent, bisexual symbolist poet from France and muse to Paul Verlaine. On a train journey in 1938, Britten promised the soprano Sophie Wyss that he would set a cycle of Rimbaud poems for her to sing. In March the following year, just before crossing the Atlantic, Britten completed settings of Rimbaud’s ‘Marine’ and ‘Being Beauteous’.
In America, Britten was in need of work and income. The composer’s publisher Ralph Hawkes had successfully floated the idea of a full Rimbaud cycle to Paul Sacher, a Swiss millionaire with a taste for commissioning music. Britten duly completed the set of nine songs outside New York, sending the score back across the Atlantic for Wyss to perform at the Wigmore Hall on 30 January 1940.
"It was something in the setting of the foreign language which enabled me to have the freedom which … in my own language wouldn’t have existed..." Benjamin Britten
Squeezing the job around other commissions, Britten had composed the songs out of sequence. He re-ordered them later on, composing the occasional bridge passage when clashing keys would have caused a bump in the road.
It helps that the fragmentary poems are linked by an epigraph: “I alone hold the key to this savage parade”. The line rings out in the cycle’s first vocal statement, on just three notes, after its opening string fanfare. The line’s associated musical motif is another unifying feature: a potent combination of B-flat and E major chords that gives the music its iridescent edge, like lime juice squeezed onto a salad.
Britten had set the French language before, but doing so at this juncture – as his mature musical style was blossoming – proved an astute move. “It was something in the setting of the foreign language which enabled me to have the freedom which … in my own language wouldn’t have existed,” the composer later reflected.
Vivid imagery infests the music that follows, even when Rimbaud’s poetry is aloof and misted with eroticism. The music veers from the contemplative to the grotesque, almost every bar of it offering rare and sympathetic insight into Rimbaud’s words.
"... a gesture of uncomplicated, reciprocated love..."
The series of shifting moods in ‘Villes’ is beguiling – a restless gamble through cityscapes resembling Rimbaud’s gallivanting through Europe with Verlaine. Britten’s biographer Paul Kildea describes ‘Antique’ as “a gesture of uncomplicated, reciprocated love.” A twisting march taunts the love song ‘Being Beauteous’, in which a wounded creature takes its leave of the earth.
Despite intending the cycle for a soprano, Britten dedicated the latter song to Pears – a man for whom he was discovering a deep love even as he wrote Les Illuminations. Pears, a tenor, would become one of its major exponents.
Ravel: Ma mère l’Oye – Mother Goose, complete ballet (1910 – 1911)
- Prélude – Très lent
- Premier tableau – Danse du rouet et scène (Dance of the Spinning Wheel & scene)
- Deuxième tableau – Pavane de la belle au bois dormant (Sleeping Beauty’s Pavane)
- Interlude
- Troisième tableau – Les entretiens de la belle et de la bête (Conversations of Beauty and the Beast)
- Interlude
- Quatrième tableau – Petit Poucet (Tom Thumb)
- Interlude
- Cinquième tableau – Laideronnette, impératrice des Pagodes (Little Ugly, Empress of the Pagodas)
- Interlude
- Sixième tableau – Le jardin féerique (The Fairy Garden)
Even as an adult, Ravel maintained a childish naivety and enthusiasm. He often disappeared during dinner parties only to be found playing with toys in the nursery or entertaining their occupants with stories.
Two of his biggest fans in that regard were Mimi and Jean – children of his friends the Godebskis. Ravel created the two-pianist piece Mother Goose (Ma mère l’Oye) for the siblings, basing the set of five piano miniatures on classic fairytales he’d read them. Ravel hoped the children would premiere the piece, but nerves got the better of them and the task fell to professionals in April 1910.
“My plan to recreate the poetry of childhood in these pieces … led me to simplify my style and lighten the texture of my writing,” recalled Ravel shortly after that first performance. In 1911, he orchestrated the five movements.
That same year Jacques Rouché of the Théâtre des Arts decided Ravel’s musical fairytales would make a good ballet. Rouché commissioned an expanded, balletic version of the orchestrated suite, which was first danced on 29 January 1912.
The ballet version contains far more music and much more theatre, including the magical aura of birdsong, mysterious horn calls and plenty of sonic fairy-dust from the orchestra’s strings. What makes it a masterpiece, observes Ravel’s biographer Roger Nichols, is that Ravel “perfectly matched the limitations of style with expression.”
Ravel composed a new prelude and interludes and changed the order of the stories. According to Nichols, the staged ballet began as the Good Fairy kissed the sleeping princess on the forehead and gave her the stories of Mother Goose for her dreams.
"My plan to recreate the poetry of childhood in these pieces … led me to simplify my style and lighten the texture of my writing..." Maurice Ravel
After ‘Prélude’ dims the theatre lights, we hear the whirling ‘Dance of the Spinning Wheel’ in which the figure of Princess Florine pricks her finger and is lulled to sleep.
With scene-changing interludes in between them, more stories follow. First comes another take on the Renaissance dance that is the pavane, this one depicting Beauty and the Beast, as if asleep in a secret garden. Their story is then elucidated in a waltz: the beast growls awkwardly in the bass until a piano glissando (a rapid sweep of notes) transforms him into a charming prince.
Next we join ‘Tom Thumb’, losing his way in the forest after the birds gobble up the trail of bread he’d left to lead him out again. His winding path, increasingly confused, is depicted in music that changes gait and bar-length. Birds tweet over the top.
‘Little Ugly, Empress of the Pagodas’ depicts the empress being entertained in the bathtub accompanied by ‘little musicians’ (for Ravel, the sparkling mechanics of a music box). The composer tweaks the standard major scale to give it a pentatonic (five-note) flavour, a technique favoured by European composers aiming to create an ‘oriental’ sound.
"... the grown man looks back at the time that he too could believe in a magic garden..."
The final episode comes from Ravel’s own imagination: a party in a fairy garden, enchanting but for the note of nostalgia that creeps in. For Nichols, “the grown man looks back at the time that he too could believe in a magic garden.” All are liberated with the cleansing brightness of C major, which brings the curtain down.
Notes by Andrew Mellor © Philharmonia Orchestra/Andrew Mellor
Meet Julia Bullock
"I love art because I want to be enriched, engaged and entrenched in what is happening all around me. That’s why I feel the act of making music is socially conscious at its core."
This will be your debut performing with the Philharmonia Orchestra. What are you looking forward to?
I look forward to being with other musicians, making music in real time, reacting, and engaging in a collective effort to communicate. The last public performance I had with an audience before COVID-19 was Les Illuminations in San Francisco with Esa-Pekka Salonen, and it was wonderful! But it will be exciting to keep exploring with him and the Philharmonia Orchestra.
Can you describe your interpretive work with the text of Les Illuminations, where Rimbaud’s poetry can at times be quite impenetrable?
This material isn’t intended to confuse or confound. It’s called The Illuminations! I thought about Rimbaud and how he lived before writing these words. Not even 20 years old, he continually felt the need to escape, living homeless, going to jail as a teenager... He attempted to find security in environments that didn’t embrace him. He was frustrated by hypocrisy while seeking solace, sometimes in dangerous people, places and things. That’s all in this text. When the messages seem mangled and fractured, that’s just an invitation to sort through it.
"Every interpretive choice is derived from the text itself, which cycles through themes that are wild, raucous, sensitive, violent, prideful, doubtful, critical, cynical, transcendent, deranged, stunned, sublime, resolved, peaceful."
But what I mostly read and interpret in Rimbaud’s writing – and in Britten’s realisation – is an intense, furious seeking; and a demand, or maybe insistence, for honesty.
Les Illuminations was written in French but set to music by an Englishman. Does that present a vocal challenge as a soloist, and how do you approach it?
At some moments I do have to fight to ensure that the words are clear and comprehensible, but that’s the case with all sung repertoire! It feels good to work for it––to stretch and pull and wrestle to be understood. It’s part of the power written into the piece. (Additionally, Rimbaud wrote much of Les Illuminations in the UK, providing English titles to the poems, and I’m sure that Britten knew this.)
What has it been like working with conductor Esa-Pekka Salonen on this piece?
Intuitive. Informative. Instructive. Intense. Inquisitive. Irritating. Insistent. Incandescent. Illuminating.
You have done extensive curatorial work, often with a focus on activism and social consciousness. What role does political engagement play in arts and culture?
I do not love art because I am looking to be distracted, diverted, or relieved of life’s difficulties. I love art because I want to be enriched, engaged and entrenched in what is happening all around me. That’s why I feel the act of making music is socially conscious at its core.
Art, culture and politics are about an almost obsessive devotion to examination. When I think about the artists whose work I love and respect, most are evaluating the patterns and practices of themselves and the world around them. Their commitment is fierce and unforgiving. I’m just following their example.
"Intuitive. Informative. Instructive. Intense. Inquisitive. Irritating. Insistent. Incandescent. Illuminating..." Julia Bullock on working with Esa-Pekka Salonen
Esa-Pekka Salonen
“... tremendous technique, intellect, charm and musicality...” The Times
Back in 1983, an unknown young Finnish conductor made his Philharmonia debut at the Royal Festival Hall in London, stepping in at a few days’ notice to conduct Mahler’s epic Symphony No. 3.
Esa-Pekka Salonen has been part of the life of the Philharmonia ever since, and this season is the last in his remarkable 13-season term as Principal Conductor and Artistic Advisor. Throughout his tenure he has worked relentlessly to redefine what classical music can be in the 21st century.
He has collaborated with the Philharmonia on groundbreaking ways to present orchestral music, including large-scale interactive installations The Virtual Orchestra, Universe of Sound and Re:Rite, an acclaimed iPad app, The Orchestra; and a virtual reality experience featuring the piece that first brought him to us, Mahler’s Symphony No. 3.
He has programmed outstanding, critically-acclaimed series examining social and cultural history through the prism of music – among the most memorable are Vienna: City of Dreams, Paris: City of Light, Stravinsky: Myths and Rituals, and Weimar Berlin: Bittersweet Metropolis. And he has led the Philharmonia on tours to Japan, China, Taiwan, Korea, Russia, the USA, and all over Europe.
Alongside his position with the Philharmonia, Esa-Pekka is also Conductor Laureate for both the Swedish Radio Symphony Orchestra and the Los Angeles Philharmonic, where he was Music Director from 1992 until 2009. He is the Artist in Association at the Finnish National Opera and Ballet. He recently joined the faculty of LA’s Colburn School, where he leads the Negaunee Conducting Programme (in partnership with the Philharmonia). He co-founded the annual Baltic Sea festival, serving as Artistic Director from 2003 to 2018. In the 2020/21 season he takes up the baton as Music Director of the San Francisco Symphony.
He is renowned as a composer as well as a conductor – his music has been praised for its “tremendous technique, intellect, charm and musicality” (The Times), and his Violin Concerto won a Grawemeyer Award. He spends part of each year composing, deep in the Finnish countryside, and when he’s not working internationally, is based in Los Angeles.
Julia Bullock
"... young, highly successful, politically engaged – but not least is her ability to inject each note she sings with a sense of grace and urgency, lending her performances the feel of being both of the moment and incredibly timeless..." Vanity Fair
American classical singer Julia Bullock is “a musician who delights in making her own rules” (The New Yorker). Combining versatile artistry with a probing intellect and commanding stage presence, she has, in her early 30s, already headlined productions and concerts at some of the preeminent arts institutions worldwide.
An innovative programmer whose artistic curation is in high demand, her curatorial positions include collaborative partner of Esa-Pekka Salonen in 2020-21, his inaugural season as Music Director of the San Francisco Symphony; 2019-20 Artist-in-Residence of the same orchestra; Artist-in-Residence of London’s Guildhall School for the 2020-22 seasons; opera-programming host of new broadcast channel All Arts; founding core member of the American Modern Opera Company (AMOC); and 2018-19 Artist-in-Residence of New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Also a prominent voice of social consciousness and activism, Bullock is, as Vanity Fair notes, “young, highly successful, [and] politically engaged”, with the “ability to inject each note she sings with a sense of grace and urgency, lending her performances the feel of being both of the moment and incredibly timeless.”
Bullock has made key operatic debuts at San Francisco Opera in the world premiere of Girls of the Golden West, Santa Fe Opera in Doctor Atomic, Festival d’Aix-en-Provence and Dutch National Opera in The Rake’s Progress, and at the English National Opera, Spain’s Teatro Real, and Russia’s Bolshoi Theatre in the title role of The Indian Queen. In concert, she has collaborated with the Philharmonia Orchestra and Esa-Pekka Salonen; the Los Angeles Philharmonic and Gustavo Dudamel; the San Francisco Symphony and both Salonen and Michael Tilson Thomas; the New York Philharmonic and Alan Gilbert; the Boston Symphony Orchestra and Andris Nelsons; Japan’s NHK Symphony and Paavo Järvi; and both the Berlin Philharmonic and London Symphony Orchestra with Sir Simon Rattle.
Her recital highlights include appearances at New York’s Carnegie Hall, Boston’s Celebrity Series, Washington’s Kennedy Center, and the Mostly Mozart and Ojai Music festivals, where she joined Roomful of Teeth and the International Contemporary Ensemble for the world premiere of Josephine Baker: A Portrait. This was the prototype for Perle Noire: Meditations for Joséphine, a work conceived by Bullock in collaboration with Peter Sellars, and written for her by Tyshawn Sorey and Claudia Rankine.
Bullock’s growing discography includes Doctor Atomic, recorded with the composer conducting the BBC Symphony Orchestra, and West Side Story, captured live with Tilson Thomas and the San Francisco Symphony, both of which were nominated for Grammy Awards.
Les Illuminations: texts & translation
Arthur Rimbaud (1854 – 91), with translations & annotations by Julia Bullock