ICO Sundays 2021

Sunday 12th September 1.30pm

Sherwood Districts Football Club, 41 Chelmer St East, Chelmer

Conductor – Greta Hunter

Guest soloist – Ella Pysden, viola

Inspired works by forgotten composers: Raff, Hoffmeister & Méhul. Take a seat … relax, unwind and be inspired.

Violist Ella Pysden is a talented young performer and soloist, currently in year 12 at Brisbane State High School and is principal violist in the Queensland Youth Symphony. Come and hear the full range of the viola as Ella plays Franz Anton Hoffmeister’s Viola Concerto in D major with the ICO.

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

Program

Joachim Raff  – Sinfonietta for Winds op188 (3rd movement)

Hoffmeister – Viola Concerto in D major

 INTERVAL

Mehul – Symphony no 1 in G minor

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.

Ella Pysden – Viola Soloist

Violist and bassoonist, Ella Pysden is a talented young performer and soloist, currently in year 12 at Brisbane State High School under music merit, which enables her to engage in a wide range of orchestral and chamber music playing.

Ella completed the Associate in Music (AMusA) in 2019 with distinction, and currently holds the position of principal violist in the Queensland Youth Symphony.

Ella was winner of the intermediate Australian Strings Association (Queensland) Concerto Competition in 2018 and was one of the highly commended applicants in the Queensland Symphony Orchestra’s Young Instrumentalist Prize in 2021.

Ella has performed with the Queensland Youth Orchestra since 2017 and has participated in the Australian Youth Orchestra’s Young Symphonists Program in 2018 and 2019, as well as the National Music Camp in 2019 and 2020.  In 2021 Ella will be participating in the Australian Youth Orchestra’s Spring Camp.

A highlight of Ella’s career includes participating in a master class with Dr Robin Wilson from the Australian National Academy of Music’s Violin Faculty.

Ella plans to undertake a Bachelor of Music after graduating from high school.

Program Notes

Joachim Raff (1822 – 1882)

Sinfonietta for Winds Op.188 (3rd Movement)

Joachim Raff was born in Switzerland.  As a child, he showed great natural talent as a pianist, violinist and organist, and taught himself the rudiments of harmony and composition.  In 1840 while working as a teacher and composing music in his spare time, he sent some of his piano works to Mendelssohn, who was impressed and recommended them to his publisher.  Encouraged by this and other favourable reviews, he moved to Zürich in 1844 to start a career as a composer. His horrified father wrote “he has made nothing of himself but a begging musician”. His fears were proved correct: Raff was shortly after declared bankrupt.

While living in poverty in Zurich, Raff walked 80 kilometres to Basle to hear the famous Franz Liszt play.  He arrived in the pouring rain to find that all the tickets were sold. However, just before the concert began Lizst was told the extraordinary story of Raff’s determination to hear him play and insisted that he should be given a seat on the stage.  This incident was the start of a long relationship between the two in which Lizst employed Raff on a meagre wage as a secretary and copyist, but also helped him to promote his own music. The relationship was never easy.  Lizst was a tyrannical employer, making Raff work hard, and Raff resented his subservient role.  He was very poorly paid, and on one occasion, being committed to prison for debt, wrote that his cell was far more comfortable than his lodgings.  Gradually Raff’s reputation grew, and in 1851, his first opera “King Alfred” was performed three times in Weimar’s Hoftheater with Liszt’s help.

Raff was the first composer to use the name “Sinfonietta” for an orchestral work in several movements similar to a symphony, but shorter and lighter in content. His single example of the genre he created is indeed symphonic in style with seriousness of purpose and technical brilliance. The work however has a relaxed sunny nature and a lightness of touch in the scoring for a small wind band.  It was unique and popular in its time, and was clearly intended by Raff to be regarded as something greater than the wind serenades, which had been popular since Mozart’s time.

Program Notes by Portobello Orchestra – http://www.theportobelloorchestra.co.uk/ProgrammeNotes/RaffSinfonietta.php

Additional information –http://www.raff.org/music/detail/chamber/sin_etta.htm and

https://www.umwindorchestra.com/single-post/2017/12/05/Joachim-Raff-Sinfonietta-Op-188

Franz Anton Hoffmeister (1754 – 1812)

Viola Concerto in D major

Franz Anton Hoffmeister was a German composer and music publisher.  When just fourteen years old he arrived in Vienna to study law but was so entranced by the city’s rich and varied musical life that upon graduating he decided to devote his life to music.  By the 1780’s he had become one of the city’s most popular composers with an extensive and diverse catalogue of works to his credit.

Hoffmeister wrote prolifically in many genres. His concertos are interesting for their diversity and quality.  His flute concertos found a ready market among amateur musicians, whereas his two viola concertos in D and B flat, likely composed during 1780’s or early 1790’s, enjoyed only limited circulation on account of the scarcity of viola soloists.  In these concertos the full range of the viola is exploited with Hoffmeister delighting as much in the silvery upper register of the instrument as in its warm, rich lower register.  There are few viola concertos from the late eighteenth century and none, with the exception of Hoffmeister’s two works, by a prominent Viennese composer. Thus, his concertos assume an even greater historical importance than the majority of his other works in the genre.

As a composer Hoffmeister was highly respected by his contemporaries. This is evident from the entry in Gerber’s Neues Lexikon der Tonkünstler published around the time of Hoffmeister’s death in 1812:

“If you were to take a glance at his many and varied works, then you would have to admire the diligence and the cleverness of this composer… He earned for himself a well-deserved and widespread reputation through the original content of his works, which are not only rich in emotional expression but also distinguished by the interesting and suitable use of instruments and through good practicability. For this last trait we have to thank his knowledge of instruments, which is so evident that you might think that he was a virtuoso on all of the instruments for which he wrote.”

Program Notes by Allan Badley – https://www.naxos.com/mainsite/blurbs_reviews.asp?item_code=8.572162&catNum=572162&filetype=About%20this%20Recording&language=English

Étienne Méhul (1763 – 1817)

Symphony No.1 in G minor

Etienne Mehul (1763-1817) was in his day France’s most popular composer at the time of the French Revolution.  He was famous for his operas writing about thirty, but these works, and the rest of his output, is scarcely performed nowadays.

Mehul was born at Givet, Ardennes and showed talent for music early.  He studied hard and even wrote three early operas strictly for practice.  A fourth was accepted by the Opera in Paris but got put on hold.  He had early support from Gluck but otherwise had a tough time making a mark in the music world.  When the fourth opera was finally performed in 1790, it met with great success and Mehul became a household name.  Audience and critics were also impressed with Méhul’s Symphony No. 1 in G minor when it was played by the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra conducted Mendelssohn in 1838.

Mehul’s four symphonies are in some respects anchored in the classical mould (structurally) but are prophetic in that they point to a romanticism in a way early and early-middle Beethoven does.  It is unlikely Mehul was imitating Beethoven, and may not have even heard Beethoven’s works, yet they share many innovative characteristics: bold melody and harmonic transitions, wide dynamics, and a sense of the heroic drama.   There are similarities in the first movement of the Beethoven C minor Symphony and the last movement of the Mehul G minor Symphony, both completed in 1808.  Yet there is no evidence either composer heard the other’s work, and Beethoven had been toying with the germ of the 5th for years anyway.  It is unlikely Mehul knew Beethoven was doing this.  The movement also has a good deal in common, especially in the accompaniment figures, with the Mozart “Great” G minor Symphony.

Mehul was hyper-critical, and revised his symphonies extensively before publication.  A pre-Symphony No. 1 was destroyed by the composer, although parts have survived.  The first movement of an attempted 5th symphony survives as well.  

In 1795 Mehul was appointed to the Paris Conservatoire. Seven years later he was admitted to the Legion of Honor.  His operas were translated into at least nine different languages.  But as he grew older his health began to give way, and he became discouraged and bitter.  He died of consumption.  As the years went on, Europe became swept away in the music of Berlioz, Liszt and others who stretched the bounds far beyond where Mehul had left them, and his star faded. He is buried in Paris.

Program Notes – https://www.kith.org/jimmosk/misc.html 

Additional information by Symetrie – https://symetrie.com/en/titles/symphonie-1-mehul and Alan Beggerow – https://muswrite.blogspot.com/2013/09/mehul-symphony-no1-in-g-minor.html

Indooroopilly Chamber Orchestra

Conductor – Greta Hunter

Vioal Soloist – Ella Pysden

Master of Ceremonies – Cassandra D’Arcy (ICO Committee Member)

Flute

Ailsa Harris

Kymberley Jones

Julie Stanton

Isabella Weiss

Clarinet

Denise Hobson

Colleen Rowe

Bassoon

Angela Cook

Sarah Wagner

Horn

Paul Brisbane

John MacGinley

Piano

Gary Hunt

Timpani and Percussion

Janine Kesting