Happy 2025!
programme notes
written by JASPER CROONEN
Leonard Bernstein West Side Story Overture (1957)
Andy Akiho Percussion Concerto (2019)
Antonín Dvořák Carnival Overture, op. 92 (1892)
Johann Strauss Jr. An der schönen blauen Donau (1866) / Pizzicato Polka (1869) / Unter Donner Und Blitz (1968) / Kaiser-Walzer (1889)
[discover also: curated by... Colin Currie]
[discover also: Podcast Classics for Kids]
[discover also: Documentary Gemma New]
[read also: Currie plays Akiho]
[all programme notes]
-----
05.01.2025 CONCERTGEBOUW BRUGGE
07.01.2025 SCHOUWBURG LEUVEN
08.01.2025 FLAGEY BRUSSEL
11.01.2025 CC DE SPIL ROESELARE
A ‘New Year’s concert’ evokes lively waltzes. The Blue Danube waltz, the Radetzky March, and by extension the works of the entire Strauss family are inextricably linked to the musical start of the new year. How this inseparable connection came about is explained below. Besides this, the Brussels Philharmonic has for several seasons now made a point of ushering in the new year not only with these evergreens, but also with music that is still a bit green. The New Year’s concert – which for many members of the audience marks their first encounter with classical music – thus becomes an occasion to promote the contemporary repertoire. This year, the Percussion Concerto by the American composer Andy Akiho is the centrepiece.
Happy New Year!
A gilded concert with a black edge
There is no classical music concert that speaks more to the imagination than the New Year’s concert of the Vienna Philharmonic. The splendour of the Golden Hall, adorned to the heights of brilliance – with floral arrangements more expensive than the average annual income of an Austrian – and the reassuring familiarity of the unmissable encores The blue Danube Waltz and the Radetzky March guarantee that an audience of a million tune in to the event on television on 1 January at exactly 11:15 am local time. Anyone who wishes to attend the spectacle in person can easily have to pay a thousand euros for a ticket.
With all its pomp and ceremony, the New Year’s Concert may be thought to be a centuries-old tradition. But no, the custom is not even a hundred years old. On 31 December 1939, music was used for the first time in the Austrian capital to ring in the new year – and that was also the only time that the concert took place on New Year’s Eve, rather than on New Year’s Day. The date was no coincidence: a few months earlier, the Second World War had broken out. It was with this new event that Nazi Germany sought to boost the morale of the soldiers on the front, and at the same time to fill its war coffers. The popular tunes of Johann Strauss and his relatives were in that sense ideal to get a great many people to get on their feet. At the end of the war, the Nazi past was soon forgotten, and the concert continued every year without interruption.
Eroticism in 3/4 time
Despite these dubious origins, there are few orchestras today that have not jumped on the bandwagon. 1 January is of course untouchable, and the Brussels Philharmonic has been celebrating since its existence the new year with music in the first few weeks of January. And, of course, the graceful waltzes are also an essential part of our programme.
Just like the New Year’s concert itself, the waltz is not all that old as a genre. In Southern Germany, there had been various local variants of a dance in ¾ time, to which, according to Goethe, ‘people were waltzing and circled round each other like spheres’. And yet, waltz was used in that era mainly as a verb. Only at the end of the 18th century did the waltz come to be known as a separate genre. The Journal des Luxus und der Moden devoted an article to nightlife in Berlin, where ‘waltzes and nothing but waltzes are now so much in fashion that at dances … one need only to waltz, and all is well.’
Nevertheless, there was also a good amount of criticism of the unbridled flamboyance. Seen through contemporary glasses, used to twerking rear-ends, half-naked video clips and sensual hip movements, it is hard to believe that the graceful oom-pah-pah in three-fourths time that seems outdated today was once the scandal of the ballroom.
Medical professionals worried about the speed at which the dancers were twirled around. But it was mainly the common folk who were critical of the ‘erotic character’ of the waltz. Partners had to hold each other far too close, and men often had to lift the women’s long dresses so as not to trip on the fabric in the whirlwind. That often made for offensive positions with too much exposed skin. In the darker corners of the dance floor, things could sometimes be even more indecent. Pamphlets were printed with fulminating titles like Proof that waltzing is an important source of our generation’s weakness of body and soul, and according to some sources, the waltz was even banned in certain places. Seen through contemporary glasses, used to twerking rear-ends, half-naked video clips and sensual hip movements, it is hard to believe that the graceful oom-pah-pah in three-fourths time that seems outdated today was once the scandal of the ballroom. Medical professionals worried about the speed at which the dancers were twirled around.
As is the case with many trends, the craze soon died out again at the beginning of the 19th century. Only the Viennese remained faithful practitioners of the waltz. Famous halls such as Zum Sperl and the monumental Apollo Hall, with a dance floor for 6,000 couples, opened their doors in the first decade of the century. For their enduring popularity, we have a new generation of composers to thank. Musicians like Johann Nepomuk Hummel, Joseph Lanner, and the Strauss family went on to give the waltz a more serious treatment. It was mainly the second generation of Strausses, with the brothers Johann and Josef at the helm, raised the waltz from something common to a more refined musical genre, with catchy tunes and inventive rhythms, and made the waltz into the elegant figurehead that it is today.
From Ottoman cymbals to tuned rice bowls
The Big Bang of percussion
It is remarkable that percussionists, who traditionally sit at the very back of the orchestra, are now moving front and centre. While percussion was, in many cultures around the world, the essence of music-making, percussion instruments have long played a peripheral role in Western European symphonic music. Only in the second half of the 18th century did this group of instruments first begin to take on a leading role. Many cultural aficionados across the continent at the time became enamoured of Ottoman Janissary music. Mozart’s famous “Rondo Alla Turca”, the third movement of his Eleventh Piano Sonata, may well be the best-known example of this musical mania. It is not so much the piano part, but the shrill cymbals that characterise this music. Thanks to Joseph Haydn, Christoph Gluck and Mozart (who used cymbals in his opera Die Entführung aus dem Serail), the instrument soon surpassed its role as provider of local colour, and earned a permanent place in the orchestra.
Around the same time, the timpani also burst forth from their purely rhythmical role. It is true that beating drums covered with a stretched membrane has a longer history in the orchestra. For example, Jean-Baptiste Lully and Henry Purcell had already used them in the late 17th century in their music, and Bach wrote the cantata Tönet, ihr Pauken! Erschallet, Trompeten! in 1746, in which the timpani logically were given an important place. When these composers used drum rolls, however, these had a supporting signal function. Only in Beethoven did the timpanists also play a melodic and harmonic role, with the membranes of the various drums tuned to different notes.
From that time onward, the gates for percussion were definitively opened. Composers devoted ever more attention to percussion parts. The players were given increasingly prominent roles and also had an ever larger arsenal to work with. The xylophone – which was known in Europe since the 16th century – was given the main role in Camille Saint-Saëns’ Danse Macabre; Tchaikovsky used tinkling celestas and thundering cannons in The Nutcracker and the 1812 Overture respectively; Liszt, in his First Piano Concerto, wrote a solo for the triangle.
This deluge of new instruments continued unabated in the 20th century: Richard Strauss, Gustav Mahler, Darius Milhaud and Edgard Varèse ... these are but a few of the innovators who expanded the percussion section with rattles, whips, wind machines and claves. New techniques of playing on already established instruments were also developed. For example, in their entry in the Encyclopædia Britannica, Edmund Addison Bowles and Sibyl Marcuse gave, by way of example, the changes in the ways of using the gong, that “was played on the rim with a triangle beater in Richard Strauss' Die Frau ohne Schatten, set in vibration by a violin bow in Krzysztof Penderecki's Dimensions of Time and Silence, and lowered into a tub of water in John Cage’s Double Music.”
The lone soloist
And yet percussion remains, despite its explosion, mainly in a background role. Percussionists do have a more explicit role in the symphonic repertoire, but they rarely break out of that role entirely. That changed only at the end of the last century, when composers began to recognize the solo potential of percussion instruments. Colin Currie – the soloist at the New Year’s concert – has been one of the driving forces behind this evolution. His career may have begun at the National Youth Orchestras of Scotland and the European Union Youth Orchestra, it was clear early on that Currie was capable of much more. In 1994, he was the first percussionist ever to reach the finals of the prestigious BBC Young Musician of the Year prize in Britain … a sign of things to come.
For Currie would soon focus his energies on a solo career. In an interview with the online magazine PercWorks, he explained how he changed course as a student.
“Starting at the Royal Academy of Music, I had one main goal, and that was to be an orchestral musician. This changed during my studies, however – there were many unexpected influences and opportunities which affected me, not least of all the musical mentorship of British composer Steve Martland, who encouraged a more individual and creative streak in me. I simultaneously joined his ensemble and began my concerto career, all within a few weeks, and without knowing it, my direction was changing quickly and irreversibly.”
Bang On (A Can) Everything
Since the solo repertoire for percussion was almost non-existent, Currie has come to play a pioneering role in the creation of new works: Elliott Carter, Jennifer Higdon, Bruno Mantovani, Nico Mulhy, Julia Wolfe, Kalevi Aho … all wrote music for the Scottish virtuoso. The American composer Andy Akiho is one of the most recent additions to this impressive list. In 2019, he wrote his Percussion Concerto while Currie was artist-in-residence at the symphony orchestra of Akiho’s home state of Oregon.
The fact that Akiho ventured to write a percussion concerto should not be surprising. The composer is himself a percussionist, and learned the tricks of the trade at the summer courses of the New York band Bang On A Can, and while still a student had gone with open ears in search of the many different sounds that the percussion section could produce. It is remarkable how Akiho found mainly non-Western societies to his liking; in an online interview he recounted how he joined in with West African and Brazilian ensembles. His great love for the steel drum also dates back to his schooldays. Akiho even moved for a period to Trinidad and Tobago to immerse himself entirely in the island nation’s national instrument.
In his concerto, Akiho’s personal development merges with that of percussion music in the past centuries. In the first movement, the soloist plays on thirteen ceramic bowls, one for each chromatic note in an octave. What’s more, Currie plays on this unusual instrumentarium with wooden chopsticks, which gives the music a softness that is rarely associated with percussion. In the interlude (that is not on the programme in Brussels), the composer promotes a toy piano to the rank of a percussion instrument, while the third movement, ‘Steel’, is a clear allusion to Akiho’s great love, although the steel in the hands of the soloist in this case is a glockenspiel, rather than a steel drum.
Now that the instruments played by the percussionist have seen such expansion and the player has increasingly been brought to the fore, you may wonder where the boundaries lie for percussionists. Or whether there is any need for boundaries at all. The composer Tan Dun had written his Water Concerto back in 1998, in which the percussion instrument is water and its various sounds. Akiho himself wrote a composition in which the percussion in question consisted of statues by sculptor Jun Kaneko. Because of the multiplicity of instruments that are front and centre, percussion concertos are often highly visual performances.
For Akiho, however, that is far from essential; the music and the immensely rich sounds that percussion can create remain his driving force.