Elgar Cello Concerto 

Andrew Lewis   
In Memory   world premiere (c9’) 

Edward Elgar
Cello Concerto  (30’) 

INTERVAL  (20’) 

Felix Mendelssohn  
Symphony No. 3, ‘Scottish’  (40’) 

Gergely Madaras Conductor
Santiago Cañón-Valencia Cello

This concert is being recorded by BBC Radio 3 for future broadcast in ‘Radio 3 in Concert’. It will be available to stream or download for 30 days via BBC Sounds, where you can also find podcasts and music mixes. Visit bbc.co.uk/now for more information on future performances.

In Memory is a reflection on life with dementia, and especially the experience of unpaid family carers. Extracts from recorded conversations with family carers are woven into the fabric of the piece, forming its melodies, harmonies and rhythms.

The title In Memory carries different meanings. It is the sense of identity that resides in memory, and a memorial that marks its loss. It is the memories of those caring for people with dementia, memories of the person as they were, and more recent memories of the challenges their caring role now brings. It is also an invitation to keep in memory the dedication of the many thousands of unpaid family carers, whose work often goes unrecognised. Finally, the piece is offered in memory of all who have been lost to dementia, and as a celebration of what remains when all else is forgotten.

In Memory was commissioned by the BBC and Bangor University as part of Cerddoriaeth 100/Music 100, a year-long festival marking a century of music making at Bangor University. I am grateful to Joanna Griffiths, Sue Last and Mary Mitchell for generously sharing their thoughts and experiences. Their voices are the music of In Memory. 

… remember …
He doesn’t remember
… sadness, despair, guilt …

They didn’t understand
… just exhausting …
Life was closing in, and we’d barely started
… really frustrating …
People are on their knees caring

It’s wearing (… remember …)
Everything has to be planned (… remember …)
… very lonely …
Dementia’s part of my life, caring 24/7
… sadness, grief, despair (… remember …) in this caring role
… constant repetition, constant following you around,
it’s wearing
The person you love is disappearing from you

He doesn’t remember
He’ll turn round to me and say, ‘Where is she?’, and I’ll say ‘Who?’
‘My wife, where is she?’ – and I’m with him
It creeps up on you: I am a carer!
(…remember…)
I don’t want to be

… music …
He was looking at a newspaper or a magazine that I’d given him
And he was reading out loud, but singing what he was reading
The last few times he was talking it was in a sing-song voice
Whatever he said was in a sort of sing-songy, lilty way that was musical
He was sort of singing what he was saying
So he was just really enjoying singing
He loved classical music,
‘The Chorus of the Hebrew Slaves’, ‘Tannhäuser’
Music … seems to soothe him

He’s always had a very strong faith
… I pray … (… remember …)
… the 23rd Psalm … (… remember …)
… it’s a great comfort …

The LORD is my shepherd, I shall not want
He maketh me to lie down in green pastures
The LORD is my shepherd …
Though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death
I will fear no evil
For thou art with me …

_{Programme note © Andrew Lewis}

_{Website: www.andrewlewis.org.uk}

1 Adagio – Moderato –
2 Lento – Allegro molto
3 Adagio
4 Allegro – Moderato – Allegro, ma non troppo

Santiago Cañón-Valencia cello

‘I am lonely now & do not see music in the old way & cannot believe I shall complete any new work … Ambition I have none,’ wrote Elgar, little more than a year after completing his Cello Concerto in E minor. The concerto would become his last major work. With the exception of some small pieces of chamber music and a handful of transcriptions, Elgar wrote little of any consequence in the last 14 years of his life, though he began work on a whole array of new scores that were then abandoned, a piano concerto, a third symphony and an opera among them. His enthusiasm for composing had died along with his wife, Alice, who passed away just five months after the Cello Concerto was premiered. 

Alice’s death had not come as a surprise. In the months leading up to it, Elgar described how she ‘seemed to be fading away before one’s very eyes’. But, as her health diminished, so Elgar’s musical persona became more introspective. Having written almost nothing during the war years, the years 1918–19 yielded four of the most beautiful – and distinctive – works of his career. His Violin Sonata, String Quartet and Cello Concerto (all in E minor) and Piano Quintet in A minor were marked by their newly contemplative style, which Alice declared ‘wonderful’. The critics admired the new Elgar, too, although the premiere of the Cello Concerto, given by the London Symphony Orchestra at Queen’s Hall in October 1919, was nearly a disaster. With too much rehearsal time apparently having been given over to the other works on the programme, a reviewer for The Observer wrote: ‘Never, in all probability, has so great an orchestra made so lamentable an exhibition of itself … The work itself is lovely stuff, very simple – that pregnant simplicity that has come upon Elgar’s music in the last couple of years – but with a profound wisdom and beauty underlying its simplicity.’

In contrast to his Violin Concerto of 1910, which is grand, impassioned and – in Elgar’s own words – ‘too emotional’, the Cello Concerto is solemn, reflective and altogether more wistful. This is not a virtuoso concerto in any traditional sense, though it is still the soloist who carries the weight of the narrative. Here, the cellist is part-performer and part-narrator, opening the work with a bold piece of recitative that begins as a cry of anguish before quickly fading into melancholy. The orchestra, too, is pared back, its gentle echoes and hushed accompaniment never eclipsing the soloist’s wandering lines. While there are flashes of grandeur and even of lightness, notably in the scurrying second movement and the march-like finale, these moments seem to pass all too quickly, either swept away by another idea or undercut by a note of sadness. This is Elgar in a deep and thoughtful mode, unburdening himself as though he were afloat on a sea of improvisation.

^{Programme note © Jo Kirbride}

_{Further Listening: Sheku Kanneh-Mason; London Symphony Orchestra, Sir Simon Rattle (Decca 4850241)
Further Reading: Elgar: The Music Maker Diana McVeagh (Boydell Press)}

INTERVAL: 20 minutes

1 Andante con moto – Allegro un poco agitato – Assai animato – Andante –
2 Vivace non troppo – 
3 Adagio – 
4 Allegro vivacissimo – Allegro maestoso assai

Mendelssohn began sketching his ‘Scottish’ Symphony on the same 1829 trip that spawned The Hebrides overture, inspired this time by a ruined chapel at Edinburgh’s Holyrood Palace. ‘Everything around is broken and mouldering, and the bright sky shines in,’ wrote the composer in a letter home. ‘I believe I found today in that old chapel the beginning of my “Scotch” symphony.’ The end was a long time coming: Mendelssohn wrestled with the piece for a couple of years, shelved it in frustration for a decade and only finished it in 1842, making it – despite its official number – the fifth and final symphony he completed. 

The work’s four movements are played without pause, and it doesn’t sound recognisably Scottish. Except, perhaps, for the rhythms of the melody that opens the fizzing second movement, the influence of traditional Scottish music is conspicuously absent: Mendelssohn, indeed, was uncharmed by the ‘so-called folk melodies’ of the British Isles (‘vulgar, out-of-tune trash’, he wrote of Welsh harp music). The third movement is archetypal Mendelssohn – stately and moving – but it’s the first and last movements that are the real meat of the piece. The first builds outwards from the melody Mendelssohn sketched at Holyrood; while the last, originally marked Allegro guerriero (‘Fast and warlike’), somehow finds its way from edgily nervous energy to rapturous triumph.

_{Programme note © Will Fulford-Jones}

_{Further Listening: City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra/Edward Gardner (Chandos CHSA5139)
Further Reading: Mendelssohn: A Life in Music
R. Larry Todd (OUP)}

Biographies

Gergely Madaras conductor

Gergely Madaras is Music Director of the Orchestre Philharmonique Royal de Liège. Together they perform across Belgium, as well as touring to the rest of Europe and to South America. They are currently celebrating the bicentenary of César Franck’s birth, performing his major operas, oratorios and symphonic works.

Other highlights this season include debuts with the London Philharmonic Orchestra, Orchestre Philharmonique de Radio France, Toulouse Capitole Orchestra, Orchestre National de Lille, Orchestre de Chambre de Paris, Orchestra della Svizzera Italiana and the Tokyo Metropolitan Symphony Orchestra. He returns to the Bamberg, Bournemouth and City of Birmingham Symphony orchestras and the Orchestra Sinfonica Nazionale della RAI. 

Recent highlights include engagements with the Budapest Festival Orchestra, Zurich Tonhalle Orchestra, Netherlands Philharmonic Orchestra, Orchestre National de Lyon, Filarmonica della Scala, Maggio Musicale and the Scottish and Munich Chamber orchestras. He has also worked with the Academy of Ancient Music. Further afield, he has appeared with the Houston, Melbourne and Queensland Symphony orchestras. 

In addition to conducting Classical and Romantic repertoire, he maintains a close relationship with contemporary music, collaborating with composers such as Sir George Benjamin, Péter Eötvös, György Kurtág and Pierre Boulez (for whom he was assistant conductor at the Lucerne Festival Academy 2011–13). 

He was the inaugural Sir Charles Mackerras Fellow at the English National Opera. Since then he has conducted critically acclaimed productions at the Dutch National Opera, Grand Théâtre de Genève and Hungarian State Opera. This season he makes his debut at La Monnaie, conducting Shostakovich’s The Nose.

He was born in Budapest in 1984 and first began studying folk music (aged 5) with the last generation of authentic Hungarian gypsy and peasant musicians. He went on to study classical flute, violin and composition at the Liszt Academy in Budapest, as well as conducting at the University of Music and Performing Arts in Vienna.

Santiago Cañón-Valencia cello

Santiago Cañón-Valencia has been praised as one of the most promising young cellists of his generation. Born in Bogotá in 1995, his major musical mentors have been Henryk Zarzycki in Colombia, James Tennant in New Zealand, Andres Diaz in the United States and Wolfgang Emanuel Schmidt at the Kronberg Academy for Young Soloists in Germany.

He has had many competition successes, including winning the Silver Medal and Audience Award at the 2019 Tchaikovsky Competition, and is currently a BBC Radio 3 New Generation Artist. 

He made his orchestral debut as a soloist when he was 6 and since then has appeared with all the major orchestras in his native Colombia, while his international solo career has taken him around the world to perform with orchestras such as the Mariinsky Orchestra with Valery Gergiev, Frankfurt Radio Orchestra with Christoph Eschenbach, Brussels Philharmonic with Stéphane Denève, St Petersburg Philharmonic with Nikolai Alexeev, Hungarian Radio Symphony Orchestra with János Kovács, Moscow Soloists with Yuri Bashmet, Orpheus Chamber Orchestra and Antwerp Symphony with Muhai Tang, among others.

Recent highlights include concertos in Colombia and Japan, as well as debuts with the Polish National Radio, RTVE and SWR Symphony orchestras and Prague Philharmonia, and appearances at the Dresden, Casals and Moritzburg festivals.

He is committed to new music and has premiered concertos by Carlos Izcaray and Jorge Pinzón, as well as giving the Colombian premiere of Ginastera’s Cello Concerto No. 2.

His debut recording Solo, released in 2013, was warmly acclaimed and has been followed by Russian cello sonatas and Diable vert with pianist Katherine Austin. A new album is due for release later this year.

Since 2011 he has been the recipient of the Mayra and Edmundo Esquenazi Scholarship through the Salvi Foundation.