ICO 2023 season – Sundays @ 1pm

This concert is dedicated to David Teakle and Noel Milliken

Sunday 18th June 1.00pm @ Sherwood State School, cnr Oxley and Sherwood Rds, Sherwood

Conductor – Greta Hunter

Cello soloist – Stirling Hall

Fauré’s air of charming reticence in the Pelléas et Mélisande Suite; Schumann’s lush and lyrical Cello concerto in A minor; and Sullivan’s vibrant and tuneful music for The Merchant of Venice. Welcome to our third Sundays @ 1pm concert in 2023.

This concert is dedicated to David Teakle and Noel Milliken. Noel and David helped make the Indooroopilly Chamber Orchestra what it is today, and we are delighted to honour them with Schumann’s cello concerto. Please click here to read about David and Noel’s contributions to community music in Brisbane

Program

Fauré – Pelléas et Mélisande Suite

Schumann – Cello Concerto in A minor, Op. 129

INTERVAL

Sullivan – Incidental music to The Merchant of Venice – “Masquerade”.

Greta Hunter – Conductor

Greta Hunter

Greta Hunter is a Brisbane based conductor and flute specialist. She holds a Bachelor of Music (BMus(hons)) from the University of Queensland, majoring in flute performance, and currently studies Orchestral Conducting with the Cardiff International Academy of Conducting and Mark Shapiro (The Julliard School). 

Greta holds the position of conductor with the Indooroopilly Chamber Orchestra (ICO), where she connects players to great orchestral works most often from the 18th – 20th centuries. With ICO, Greta creates valuable opportunities for outstanding young musicians to rehearse and perform concertos and solo works with a full orchestra. She is equally at home with choral music and is currently the musical director of Songshine Choir. Greta also works with school and community youth ensembles as well as being regularly invited to guest conduct other instrumental and vocal ensembles around Brisbane.

Greta is a flute specialist tutor at St Peter’s Lutheran College (Indooroopilly) and Westside Christian College. She is passionate about developing technique and musicianship and incorporates a multidisciplinary approach to her teaching, where she utilises and combines flute pedagogy with vocal pedagogy. Greta incorporates this approach to develop technique and musicianship for flutists and choristers alike and has seen significant positive benefits across both disciplines.

Greta is driven by the underlying philosophy that everyone deserves to experience meaningful music making. Through her work as both a conductor and flute specialist tutor, Greta guides people to explore the possibilities of expression through music and ultimately to engage with music in a deeper and more meaningful way.

Stirling Hall – cello

Cellist, Stirling Hall is in his first year at the Queensland Conservatorium, Griffith University. He studies with Hyung Suk Bae, Associate Principal Cello in the QSO, and with György Déri, Senior Lecturer in Cello at the Conservatorium. He is currently the Principal Cello in the Queensland Youth Symphony Orchestra and is looking forward to touring with the QYS to Europe and Singapore in 2023. He has also played with the Australian Youth Orchestra, participating in the 2022 Young Symphonists, the 2023 National Music Camp in Adelaide, and the 2023 Autumn Season in Perth.

Stirling began playing the cello when he was 8 and grew up in a musical family – his three siblings also having studied music at the Conservatorium. In 2020 he was awarded his AMusA with Distinction at the age of 15. In 2021 he received the ‘Most Promising Strings Player’ Award at the Redlands Eisteddfod, and in 2022 he received the Enoggera & District Eisteddfod Bursary Instrumental Prize. In 2022 he was also a finalist in the Queensland Symphony Orchestra Young Instrumentalist Prize.

Stirling has played with the Cadenza Chamber Players and has performed as soloist with the Moreton Bay Symphony Orchestra in 2018, at the ‘Opera on the Lawn’ at historic Ormiston House in 2022, and also at the Morning Music at the Old Museum Building in 2022.

Program Notes

Gabriel Fauré (1845-1924)

Pelléas et Mélisande, Suite Op. 80

Fauré composed incidental music for an English production of Maeterlinck’s Pelléas et Mélisande in 1898, which was premiered in London with Fauré conducting. The air of charming reticence that runs through much of Fauré’s music is to be found in his incidental music for Maeterlinck. 

Three movements, the Prélude, Fileuse, and the Molto Adagio, were published in 1901 as the Suite from Pelléas et Mélisande (Op. 80), with a dedication to the Princesse Edmond de Polignac. The three movement Suite received its first performance in 1902 in Paris. Fauré added the Sicilienne for a new edition in 1909, which had been composed in 1895 as a work for cello and piano and orchestrated in 1898 for the incidental music. Though Fauré certainly never thought of the Suite as a symphony, it remains his best known and most frequently performed symphonic composition.

The first movement serves as the prelude for the play, painting its misty colours with a few dramatic outbursts that may hint at the impetuous Golaud. The movement ends with a transition to the opening scene of the play, in which Golaud, lost while hunting, comes across the mysterious Mélisande by a fountain deep in the woods. Even before the overture ends we hear Golaud’s hunting horn signalling his arrival.  

The second movement called La Fileuse, The Spinner, served as the entr’acte before Act III, where the triplet turn provides the background hum of the spinning wheel.

The Sicilienne is characterised by the rocking rhythm of that delicate Italian dance known as the siciliano. Its grace and gentle reflection is entirely appropriate to the mysterious world of the play, even though this movement was composed independently five years earlier.

The final Molto Adagio is a quiet, touching depiction of the death of Mélisande.

Program Notes: Steven Ledbetter https://musi.franklin.uga.edu/sites/default/files/2018-03-08%20UGASO.pdf

Robert Schumann (1810-1856)

Concerto in A Minor for Cello and Orchestra, Op. 129

All of Schumann’s major works for cello come from a period late in his lifetime, just before his mental anguish began to send his life into a spiralling descent. The Cello Concerto was written in a span of two weeks in 1850 when he had other things on his mind. His wife Clara wrote in her diary that Schumann “composed a concerto for violoncello that pleased me very much. It appears to be written in the true violoncello style.”  By this she probably meant that the primary characteristic of the piece, especially the first two movements, is its lush lyricism used in place of the dramatic confrontations between soloist and orchestra that are typical of Romantic concertos. 

When Clara returned to the concerto the following year, she was not disappointed, writing, “I have played Robert’s Violoncello Concerto again and thus procured for myself a truly musical and happy hour. The romantic quality, the flight, the freshness and the humour, and also the highly interesting interweaving of cello and orchestra are, indeed, wholly ravishing, and what euphony and what deep sentiment are in all the melodic passages!”

The music of the concerto is quintessential 19th-century Romanticism, full of passion, angst, and fire. In the first movement, the orchestration is sensitive to the cello’s low register, and after playing three introductory chords, the orchestra drops back and allows the broad and passionate first theme in the cello to take center stage. An orchestral tutti leads to the bright C major second theme in triplet rhythm. The development also draws upon a triplet motive and includes a horn solo that hints at the main theme. Following a return in F# minor, the true recapitulation comes in and instead of leading to a cadenza and coda, guides the music to a short transition section that serves to bridge the first movement to the F major movement without a break.

The tender lyricism of the first movement is matched in the second. The two movements together have been praised for their continuous flow of intimate melody. The movement, in A-B-A form, features a particularly inventive use of the cello that at one point plays an unusual double-stop melody and at another participates in an exchange with the orchestral cello. Again, the end of the movement serves as a bridge to the third, recalling the main themes previously heard.

The vigorous rondo theme in the finale consists of a three-chord motive, somewhat reminiscent of the opening of the piece but now presented much more forcefully, interspersed with cello arpeggios. In this movement, there is much more interaction between the cello and orchestra, with phrases constantly being exchanged and answered, and the continuity of the piece is emphasised with allusions to the first movement theme in the horn and clarinet. At the end, the cello is finally given its virtuosic cadenza, particularly striking for its use of the lower register of the instrument.

Program notes:- Jon Kochavi https://www.svmusicfestival.org/program_notes/alisa-weilerstein-plays-schumann-program-notes/

Arthur Sullivan (1842 – 1900)

The Merchant of Venice Suite

Arthur Sullivan was born in London, the son of the bandmaster to the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst. By the age of 8 he had already learnt to play all of the instruments in his father’s band and at 14 he won the first Mendelssohn Scholarship to the Royal Academy of Music. This scholarship allowed him to study at the Leipzig Conservatoire. 

The music to The Merchant of Venice was written for a production of the play at the Prince’s Theatre, Manchester. It concentrates on a single scene, a lavish masque during which Jessica and Lorenzo make their elopement. The following was written by Sullivan’s friend George Grove, editor of the dictionary of music, for a performance given at Crystal Palace in 1871:-

‘When the music begins, the stage is empty and night is approaching. The distant cry of the gondoliers echoing along the canals, and the voices of the masquers as they approach nearer and nearer are all depicted in the music. A lover serenades his mistress, the masquers gradually throng the ground, and the revelry begins. The dances are first a bourrée, the old-fashioned heavy measure; next a grotesque dance for Pierrots and Harlequins; and thirdly a general dance in modern waltz rhythm. Night has settled down on the scene when Jessica makes her escape; after this the fun waxes furious, and midst the glare of torches, the glitter of coloured lanterns, and the shouts and songs of the revellers, the curtain descends.’

The success of the music meant that it was often played without an accompanying production, and a suite consisting of four movements was regularly performed during the composer’s lifetime.

Program notes:- Willo Horsbrugh https://www.bhso.org.uk/work/sullivanthe-merchant-of-venice-suite/

Indooroopilly Chamber Orchestra

Flute

Zoe Ingram

Kymberley Jones

Midori Matsumura

Clarinet

Ryan Evans

Colleen Rowe

Bassoon

Jarrah Newman

Kirsten Wilson

Horn

John MacGinley

Bob Townsend

Piano

Gary Hunt

Timpani and Percussion

Janine Kesting