ICO Sundays 2021

Sunday 20th June 1.30pm

Sherwood Districts Football Club, 41 Chelmer St East, Chelmer

Conductor – Greta Hunter

Guest soloist – Alexandra Elvin, double bass

Welcome back to our ICO Sundays 2021 series. Bizet, Fauré and Koussevitsky. Romanticism, masks and clowns. The double bass as a solo instrument. Come revel with us!

It is rare to see the double bass take centre stage as solo instrument with orchestra, so it is a pleasure to welcome Alexandra (Lexie) Elvin to perform Serge Koussevitzky’s Double Bass Concerto in F-sharp minor with the ICO.

The bar is open prior to the concert for drinks and light snacks. The bistro will open during and after the concert. Enjoy our Gold Class concert service.

Program

Gabriel Faure – Masques et Bergamasques suite, Op.112

Serge Koussevitzky – Double Bass Concerto Op.3

 INTERVAL

Bizet – Symphony no 1 in C major (movements 1, 2 & 3)

JOIN US AT THE BAR FOR A DRINK AFTER THE PERFORMANCE

Greta Hunter – Conductor

Greta Hunter is a flutist, music educator, conductor, and musical director of three community ensembles in Brisbane.

Greta holds a Bachelor of Music with first class honours majoring in Classical Flute Performance from the University of Queensland.  She held the 2018 position of principal flute with the Queensland Youth Symphony (QYS) after previously performing as the orchestra’s principal piccolo.  Greta has toured regularly with the QYO Chamber Orchestra and in 2017 performed with the QYS on its major international tour to China and Germany.  She is the flute specialist tutor at the Westside Christian College, Brisbane.

Greta is an experienced conductor with a passion for community music.  In 2019 she attended the Melbourne Youth Orchestra’s conductor development program, and the advanced conducting program at the Australian Choral Conductors Education and Training (ACCET) Summer School.  Greta has also attended the Australian Conducting Academy in Tasmania and the Zlin International Conducting Masterclass in the Czech Republic, and was invited to guest conduct the QYS in its 2018 Strings Sensations concert.

Greta is the musical director and conductor of the Indooroopilly Chamber Orchestra, Songshine Choir and Queensland Korean Junior Strings.

Alexandra Elvin – Double Bass Soloist

Double bassist, Alexandra (Lexie) Elvin is a versatile musician and a talented performer and soloist, currently enrolled in a dual Bachelor of Music/Science at the University of Queensland (UQ) with a major in pure mathematics.

Lexie first began learning piano at age 7, adding double bass at age 9, and later vocals, achieving an excellent standard of musicianship, notably 8th grade piano and 6th grade modern voice with high distinction in 2018, and finalist in the UQ’s Sleath Prize for Strings (2019) and Pollet Prize for Strings (2020 and 2021). 

Now 19-years-old, Lexie is principal double bass with UQ’s Symphony Orchestra and Pulse Chamber Orchestra.  She also performs with the Queensland Youth Symphony (QYS), Australian Youth Orchestra (AYO), Queensland Baroque, Queensland Youth Orchestra’s chamber ensemble, Opera Queensland, Ipswich City Orchestra, and the Cadenza Chamber Players working with the Lynch and Patterson Theatre Group.  In 2021 she was section leader of the Alexander orchestra at the AYO music camp and will be playing in both Winter and Summer seasons of the AYO.  Lexie recently began working as a casual double bassist with the Queensland Symphony Orchestra (QSO) and has worked alongside Justin Bullock and Dušan Walkowicz in a joint UQSO/QSO project of Beethoven symphony 9.

Lexie has the privilege of studying double bass under renowned double bassist, Phoebe Russell, and previously with Dr Michael O’Loghlin.  A highlight of her career has been playing with Phoebe Russell and Ken Poggioli in joint QYS/QSO performances, and in masterclasses with double bassists, Maria Krykov, Luis Cabrera and Damien Eckersley.

You can follow Lexie on Instagram – https://www.instagram.com/lexie_double_bass/

Program Notes

Gabriel Fauré (1845 – 1924)

Masques et Bergamasques, Suite op. 112

Towards the end of his life, French composer, Gabriel Fauré struggled with increasing frailty and deafness. In fact, sounds had become seriously distorted, with high and low notes “sounding painfully out of tune.”  When Prince Albert I of Monaco approached Fauré in 1918 to commission a short dramatic work for the Monte Carlo theatre, the composer was simply not interested. It took the intervention of Camille Saint-Saëns—who had actually suggested the commission to Prince Albert in the first place—for Fauré to properly engage.

In collaboration with theatre director Raoul Gunsbourg and the librettist René Fauchois, Fauré was to provide the music for a brief divertissement performed at the Monté Carlo theatre. The program of the Divertissement, later to become known as “Masques et Bergamasques” reads, “The story of Masques is very simple. The characters Harlequin, Gilles and Colombine, whose task is usually to amuse the aristocratic audience, take their turn at being spectators at a ‘fête galante’ on the island of Cythera. The lords and ladies, who as a rule applaud their efforts, now unwittingly provide them with entertainment by their coquettish behaviour.”

Instead of composing new music for just a few performances, Fauré reworked and expanded on this 1902 Fête Galante by linking together previously composed songs, instrumental and choral pieces. The Monté Carlo production was a huge success, and it soon made its way to the Opéra-Comique in Paris. Over the next thirty years it was performed more than 100 times, and puzzled scholars suggest, “It is paradoxical that Fauré’s most frequently performed stage work is also his least ambitious.” In the event, the Monté Carlo entertainment featured eight pieces, but in order to bring his music to a wider audience, Fauré fashioned an orchestral suite in four movements that he published as Masques et Bergamasques, Op. 112. The suite premiered at a Paris Conservatory concert in 1919, and it became one of Fauré’s most popular works.

Program notes by Georg Predota

Serge Koussevitzky (1874 –1951)

Double Bass Concerto in F-sharp minor, Op. 3

Serge Koussevitzk was a Russian-born conductor, composer and double-bassist.  Although known for his long tenure as music director of the Boston Symphony Orchestra from 1924 to 1949, he started out as a touring double-bass virtuoso. Sometime between 1902 and 1905, he composed a concerto for his instrument, possibly with the help of Reyngol’d Glière.  The work, instead of following the most progressive tendencies of its time is a ripe example of Russian romanticism. Koussevitzky dedicated the concerto to his fiancée and gave its premiere in Moscow, and he played it subsequently in Germany, Paris, and Boston.

The concerto falls into the conventional three movements, beginning with an allegro that opens with a declamatory, Tchaikovsky-like theme succinctly stated by the orchestra, and answered by a short bass recitative. The soloist takes up the opening motto, presenting it lyrically yet passionately. The solo line seamlessly threads its way into related material sounding very much like passages of the Dvorák Cello Concerto, and eventually offers a songful second subject.  Koussevitzky dwells on this Dvorákian material without providing a full development, then fashions a modest bridge to the andante, which sounds much like an aria from a Tchaikovsky opera.  Here, for the first time, the composer periodically takes the instrument into its lower range, but only briefly, usually in the course of weaving the melody up and down the staff.  For the most part, Koussevitzky exploits the instrument’s middle and upper ranges, where it projects better, and is careful not to let the woodwind-tinged orchestration overpower the bass. A full pause precedes the third movement, another allegro, which begins with the same declamatory theme as the first movement. The bass picks up this melody more ardently than before, and adheres to its contours more closely as it proceeds through a loose, rhapsodic restatement of the opening movement.

Program Notes by Bartje Bartmans

Additional information – https://americansymphony.org/concert-notes/double-bass-concerto-1905/

Georges Bizet (1838 – 1875)

Symphony in C (1855)

Georges Bizet was a French composer of the romantic era, best known for his opera “Carmen”.   Bizet wrote the Symphony in C at 17 years of age, revealing his talent for melodic invention, thematic handling and orchestration.  Cast in the familiar four movements of a classic-early romantic symphony, this work uses a modest standard instrumentation, without trombones, tuba, or percussion, except for timpani.  It is clearly Mozartian, with all of the virtues of the earlier composer.

The main theme of the first movement is a spritely three-note motive that enters after the single opening chord.  In the best Mozart manner, the second theme, heard first in the oboe, is typically more lyrical and restrained.  The development starts with a few notes by the solo horn.  After a working through of both themes, an arpeggio in the horn tells us the recapitulation is at hand, and this little romp is over.  After a soft, mysterious introduction with horn chords and octave leaps in the woodwinds, the melancholy main idea is heard in the oboe over staccato “walking” strings.  It is tempting to hear presentiments of the “Spanish” style of the composer, from eighteen years later in Carmen.

Bizet’s mastery of harmonic colour is heard in the modulations that carry the sensuous lyricism.  Contrast is necessary from this delicious sound, so Bizet gives us a little fugue, beginning in the strings.  Soon, the opening lyric oboe returns to wrap up this remarkable essay that belied the composer’s youth.  A cheerful, dancing scherzo is next, but the interesting feature is the diversion of the middle section.

Another feature of Bizet’s maturity that some may recognize are the rustic “open” fifths in the low strings that accompany the woodwind activity above.   This is an allusion to peasant, or other “exotic” musical traditions that Bizet would employ with great facility, later on in his career.

The last movement opens with a kind of perpetual motion activity in the strings.  Wind fanfares announce the obligatory lyric second idea, and we’re off to the races.  The movement is a simple sonata form like the first, and after sizzling development, there’s a gallop to the end that features all of the familiar material.  Bizet, with a total absence of youthful pretentiousness, produced a work of mastery, charm, and grace.

Program notes by Bartje Bartmans and William Runyan

Additional information – https://www.hollywoodbowl.com/musicdb/pieces/3886/symphony-in-c

Indooroopilly Chamber Orchestra

Conductor – Greta Hunter

Guest Double Bass Soloist – Alexandra Elvin

Master of Ceremonies – Colleen Rowe (ICO President)

Flute

Julie Stanton

Isabella Weiss

Oboe

Clint Fox

Kyren Luostarinen

Clarinet

Denise Hobson

Colleen Rowe

Bassoon

Angela Cook

Sarah Wagner

Horn

Nicole Blackett

David Innes

John MacGinley

Bob Townsend

Piano

Gary Hunt

Timpani and Percussion

Janine Kesting