Grime, Gordon & Goehr with Catherine Larsen-Maguire

Helen Grime  
Limina 12’

Michael Zev Gordon
Violin concerto 24'

INTERVAL: 20 minutes

Alexander Goehr
The Master Said, Op. 99 world premiere30’

Carolin Widmann violin
Mark Lewis Jones speaker

BBC National Orchestra of Wales
Catherine Larsen-Maguire conductor

The concert is being recorded for future broadcast on BBC Radio 3’s New Music Show, after which 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.

Limina was inspired by a scene from the Norwegian author Tarjei Vesaas’s 1963 novel The Ice Palace, in which a young girl explores the depths of a frozen waterfall, moving between its chambers in search of her lost friend. The title is taken from the Latin for ‘thresholds’ and, as she explores the waterfall’s hidden depths, we move with her across boundaries and between caves. But in this frozen, icy landscape the glassy surfaces reflect and distort the vantage points, so that we never quite know where we are. The thresholds lose their definition, the way ahead is never clear: we can hear the girl’s confusion as she flits between feelings of wonder and desperation.

Helen Grime’s score builds through a succession of layered fragments and sonorities that catch the light and bounce off one another, occasionally coalescing into huge shafts of light that illuminate the cavern. In the ‘bright, icy’ opening, woodwind and brass dominate, their piercing motifs overlapping to create a vast acoustic space above a wave of oscillating strings, the percussion and harp finding edges that glint and glimmer. As the journey becomes more urgent, however, the fragments begin to merge, the rhythms become more regular and insistent, and the work builds towards a moment of deep catharsis. Is this joy or simply acceptance? An exquisitely delicate coda, with filigree violin solos, leads us to a more contemplative space, yet the ominous toll of the tubular bell and bass drum imparts a deep sense of trepidation that never quite subsides. 

^{Programme note © Jo Kirkbride}

1 Very Still, Intense – Moderato
2 Spacious, Still – Lightly Dancing –   
3 Spacious – Gently Flowing – Always
Simple

Carolin Widmann violin

My concerto is in a conventional three-movement form. However, the standard formal pattern of fast–slow–fast is replaced by moderate–fast–slow; the first two movements open with similar material, which will surface again in the final one. 

Reshaping convention in this way comes from a desire to write music that is connected to the familiar and traditional while embracing the less familiar and the new. In this way, I hope to widen my means of expression and also to create fresh relationships between harmony and rhythm. In this concerto these mixtures form a long-range, expressive journey – moving from struggle to release, a recurring narrative in my music. 

The piece begins with a simple two-note, oscillating pattern on the solo violin. This music is stable and sweet, but also sounds strained because the soloist plays high up on the lowest string of the violin. The stability doesn’t last, and the main body of the movement is a striving flux of ideas – led by the soloist, increasingly echoed and amplified in the orchestra – which cannot settle. 

The second movement returns briefly to the quiet stability of the work’s opening, but it too quickly gives way to newly searching music. At first this is filled with rocking, repeating, even child-like patterns, emphasised by bright instrumental sonorities. But these sounds intensify and darken: the known leading to the less-known. 

At the end of the second movement, the earthy dance that has emerged lifts off into something more ethereal. However, before this can feel like real repose, the final movement cuts in. Twice more, triads interrupt. But the third time, variants of the oscillating motif from the first movement – first on the horns, then in the solo part – enter too, leading to an emotional climax and introspective cadenza on the solo violin. 

This releases, in turn, into a reprise of the two-note figure at its original pitch, answered by passages of gently intermingling orchestral lines. In the long, final settling, the soloist rises through the texture to reach the motif again, which reduces down to a single high A, insistently repeated. At the very end, the work’s opening harmony reappears. For me, it is both something re-found and heard anew. But it floats away almost before there is time for it to be fully registered.

When I initially worked with Carolin Widmann – today’s soloist, who gave the world premiere of the concerto with the BBC Symphony Orchestra in 2017 – she talked to me about how passionate she was to make the violin sing. It was inspiring to hear just how many nuances of singing she could bring to the instrument, intense and open, strained and fragile, passionate and vibrato-filled, delicate and almost innocent-sounding. I’ve tried to make the most of these different voices – to move from the habitual to paths less travelled and, at the concerto’s close, from struggle to a mood of contemplation.

^{Programme note © Michael Zev Gordon}

INTERVAL: 20 minutes

Mark Lewis Jones speaker

Alexander Goehr’s striking proclamation that ‘all art is new and all art is conservative’ is a pithy summation of his musical style. For Goehr, our relationship with the past is non-negotiable – we are all part of a tradition, however vehemently we might try to reject it. Goehr’s own music engages with the past in a more holistic way than perhaps any other composer of his generation. His absorption both of musical history and of other art forms is remarkable, revealing a deeply curious mindset. His works draw on a huge range of sources that extend from Japanese Noh theatre to Shakespearean literature and the paintings of Goya and da Vinci.

The Master Said, which today receives its world premiere, is a case in point, bringing together two seemingly disparate historical sources: the moral writings of the Chinese philosopher Confucius – the ‘Master’ of the work’s title – and Haydn’s seminal choral work, The Seven Last Words of Our Saviour on the Cross. Goehr finds in them a common ground, one that resonates with his own relationship with the past too: ‘The Master (Confucius) does not “know”, but seeks to learn from antiquity,’ he explains. ‘He does not memorise a great number of different things, but seeks their underlying unity. This all makes him, in his estimation, fit to teach others.’

Goehr adopts both the form of Haydn’s work – seven adagios for chamber orchestra, followed by a brief allegro – and its series of proclamations but, in place of Jesus’s final words, Goehr gives us Confucius’s teachings, intoned by a speaker. Conceptually, the work unfolds almost as a set of variations, with Confucius’s texts as the theme. Musically, too, we hear fragments that repeat and evolve, as though spun from a single thematic thread. A clipped, descending chromatic motif in the sparsely orchestrated opening movement evolves into a descending chromatic chain in the second, which in turn becomes inverted and extended before, in the final movement, returning to whence it came. The impression is of a series of musical splinters, each of which bears a passing relation to the other, never quite identical, never quite dissimilar – an echo of the ‘underlying unity’ of Confucius’s teachings. As the work unfolds, these ideas accumulate like hazy, near-forgotten memories, synching only in the closing bars. 

<sup>Programme note © Jo Kirkbride

Further Reading: Finding the Key: Selected Writings of Alexander Goehr Alexander Goehr (Faber)</sup>

Biographies

Catherine Larsen-Maguire conductor

Catherine Larsen-Maguire turned her focus exclusively to conducting in 2012 after 10 years as principal bassoon at Berlin’s Komische Oper. She has since become a sought-after conductor with orchestras in Europe and South America. 

Highlights this season includes debuts with tonight’s orchestra, the London Philharmonic Orchestra, Royal Northern Sinfonia and Geneva and Fribourg Chamber orchestras, as well as returns to the Slovenian Radio and Tenerife Symphony orchestras. 

Alongside standard repertoire she also has a special interest in contemporary music and has directed numerous premieres, including Gordon Kampe’s Gefährliche Operette for the Ruhrtriennale and the North American premiere of Sir James MacMillan’s Oboe Concerto with Nigel Shore. Recent collaborations include performances with Klangforum Wien, Ensemble Musikfabrik, Ensemble Resonanz, Ensemble Ascolta and ensemble unitedberlin, while this season sees her debut with Ensemble Modern at the Berlin Music Festival.

She also enjoys working with and training youth ensembles around the world; she was a jury member for the Besançon Competition in 2017 and 2019, and for five years held a guest professorship in conducting at the University of the Arts, Berlin.

Carolin Widmann violin

Carolin Widmann’s activities span the major classical concertos, new commissions, solo recitals, a wide variety of chamber music and period-instrument performances. 

Her many awards include, in 2017, the Bavarian State Prize for music.

Recent highlights include debuts with the Los Angeles Philharmonic under Esa-Pekka Salonen and Scottish Chamber Orchestra under Maxim Emelyanychev, as well as her New York debut play/directing the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra. She also returned to the Vienna Radio Symphony Orchestra and the WDR Symphony Orchestra Cologne. 

This season she appears with the Dresden and Munich Philharmonic orchestras, Deutsches Symphonie-Orchester Berlin, Orchestre Philharmonique de Radio France, Insula Orchestra and the Russian National Youth Orchestra, and undertakes a recital tour of Italy with pianist Dénes Várjon. Last month she premiered Georg Friedrich Haas’s new concerto with the Basle Chamber Orchestra.

She has worked with a distinguished roster of conductors, including Riccardo Chailly, Pablo Heras-Casado, Marek Janowski, Vladimir Jurowski, Sir Roger Norrington and Sir Simon Rattle. 

Since 2006 she has been professor of violin at Leipzig’s University of Music and Theatre.

Mark Lewis Jones speaker

BAFTA Cymru-winning actor Welsh Mark Lewis Jones is renowned for his television roles in Stella, National Treasure and Keeping Faith, as well as appearances in Hollywood films including Star Wars: The Last Jedi, Queen of the Desert and Gwen directed by William McGregor. 

 In 2016 he won a BAFTA Cymru Award for Best Actor in the film The Passing/Yr Ymadawiad and was nominated in the same category the following year for his role in The Lighthouse, directed by Chris Crow. 

 In 2019 he appeared in Carnival Row and The Crown (Netflix), Chernobyl (HBO) and The Accident (ITV), as well as in the feature filmes Apostle and The Good Liar.

 Most recently he has appeared in Gangs of London and Third Day (Sky) and The Pact (BBC).

 Forthcoming releases include Munich: The Edge of War, directed by Christian Schwochow, and Phantom of the Open, directed by Craig Roberts, both out soon. He will also star in the new series of Outlander, playing Tom Christie.