The forthcoming Ealing Symphony Orchestra season is a celebration of the ESO’s 90th birthday and is entitled “Unfinished Business”. Each programme has a work that has an element of unfinished business to it. The ‘Unfinished Business’ in this, the opening concert, is that Bartók died before completing his viola concerto.
Malcolm Arnold’s Symphony No. 6, composed in 1967, is his shortest symphony (about 25 minutes), has three movements, and was premiered the following year with the composer on the podium. The first of the three movements suggests improvisational jazz – an influence often found in Arnold’s music – and in the second we have once again a powerful Mahleresque funeral march. The third is replete with brass fanfares, and ends, as did the Symphony No. 5, with bells, but here they are triumphant.
When Béla Bartók died in September 1945, he left a partially completed viola concerto commissioned by the violist William Primrose. While no definitive version of the work exists, this concerto has become arguably the most-performed viola concerto in the world. It is a profoundly lyrical, spiritual and life-affirming work. In those sad, final years Bartók found within himself a capacity for expressing warmth and joy that listeners continue to marvel at 50 years later. The first movement is the most complete and fully developed, and shows Bartók at the height of his musical powers. The lyrical second movement is deeply spiritual in feeling, but the folk-music inspired fire of the finale is no less full of life.
Our soloist for the concerto, Juliet Jopling, studied at the Mozarteum in Salzburg with Thomas Riebl, with Ferenc Rados at the International Musicians’ Seminar at Prussia Cove, and with David Takeno while at Trinity College, Cambridge. Jopling has appeared as a soloist with many orchestras, including the Philharmonia with Jan Latham Koenig, the Brandenburg Philharmonia and the London Soloists Chamber Orchestra. Solo and chamber music broadcasts for BBC Radio 3 and radio stations throughout Europe include a live broadcast of Walton’s Viola Concerto for Classic FM.
There is a monumental, larger-than-life breadth to Tchaikovsky’s Symphony No. 4. It is similar to an epic, where all essential questions of human existence are brought forth and examined with a life-or-death intensity.
In the first movement, the fanfare, representing Fate, creates a memorable terrifying opening. The emotional openness and daring intensity of this music are incredible. The second movement is of a reflective, melancholic nature. Tchaikovsky recreates the feeling of a Russian landscape. The material he uses is original, but inspired by Russian folklore. The third movement resembles a paintingg, an arabesque, a dance of shadows. It shows an unprecedented 97-note-long pizzicato passage for the string basses and one of the world’s shortest, but most nightmarish, solos of exceptional difficulty for piccolo. And the finale? It’s full of excitement and intoxication with life – a rush of energy beyond control which takes virtuosity to the edge of what is possible.
We hope you can join us for the start of yet another exciting season.