Training Orchestra

Programme notes

A warm welcome to this, our summer, concert. The Nottingham Youth Training Orchestra is very pleased to start this afternoon’s proceedings.

Berceuse and Finale from The Firebird

We begin the concert quietly with an arrangement of the Berceuse and Finale from Stravinsky’s The Firebird.

Diaghilev used Stravinsky’s music in his ballet which tells the tale of Prince Ivan who defeats the evil Kastchei with the help of the Firebird, a magical bird with beautiful plumage that shimmered like fire. She gives him one of her enchanted feathers after he spares her while out hunting in the forest. Ivan uses the feather to summon the Firebird to help him when he is being chased by Kastchei’s creatures. The bird uses her magic to make Kastchei and his creatures fall asleep so that the prince can rescue the imprisoned thirteen princesses, one whom falls in love with Ivan.

A gentle horn tune introduces the Berceuse, a lullaby, which takes us through to the rousing Finale, a celebration of everyone, in true folklore tradition, living happily ever after.

Respect

A change of pace as we play Respect, a song written and recorded by Otis Redding in 1965 and famously recorded in 1967 by Aretha Franklin, the version on which this arrangement is based.

Pictures At An Exhibition

*It would be much appreciated if applause could be saved until after the finale.

In 1874 the Russian composer Modest Mussorgsky visited an exhibition of art works created by his friend Viktor Hartmann. Hartmann, who was an artist and an architect, had died suddenly in 1873 and an exhibition of 400 of his works was set up in his honour at the Academy of Fine Arts in St. Petersburg.

Mussorgsky was so impressed by this exhibition that he composed his masterpiece Pictures At An Exhibition for piano but it was later orchestrated, most famously by Ravel. The work is in ten separate movements and depicts an imaginary journey through the art gallery, where the paintings of characters and scenes are described in music. Before each “painting” the composer uses a Promenade to represent the viewer at first entering the gallery and then progressing from picture to picture. Here we will be playing four of the pictures with a promenade between them:

First Promenade – we enter the gallery and eventually come across The Gnome, a piece depicting a little gnome running around on crooked legs. Hartmann’s sketch is thought to be a design for a nut cracker showing large ugly teeth. The lurching music with its constant changes of tempo suggests the movement of the gnome.

A quieter Promenade takes us to The Old Castle, a medieval castle, in front of which is a troubadour singing a plaintive song.

Another short Promenade leads us to a picture called Bydlo, which means cattle. The music clearly makes us think of a tired ox pulling an enormous wagon down a muddy uneven track.

A final Promenade and we arrive at the finale of the whole work – The Great Gate Of Kiev. This momentous piece shows the design Hartmann had envisaged for the city gates which unfortunately was never realised.