Oxford University Sinfonietta

Patron: Esa-Pekka Salonen  ·  Principal Conductor: James Longstaffe

Past Concerts

Press

Classical Music "Première of the Fortnight"

Esa-Pekka Salonen is making a welcome return to these shores in more ways than one this fortnight. Just a day after he conducts Mahler Three with the Philharmonia in London, his Stockholm Diary will be given its UK première by the Oxford University Sinfonietta on 13 June. The virtuosic piece for string orchestra was originally commissioned by the Stockholm Concert Hall Foundation for the Stockholm Philharmonic Orchestra and Stockholm Chamber Orchestra to mark a major retrospective of his work at the Stockholm International Composer Festival in 2004.

'The title refers to Stockholm in several ways', says Salonen. It of course relates to the occasion, the festival that I promised to write it for. But Stockholm is also my second home really. My first job as a principal conductor was with the Swedish Radio Symphony Orchestra in the eighties and I spent happy years there. Unfortunately, I do not find the time to visit it that often these days, but I still feel an emotional connection to the place.'

Like most of Salonen's one-movement works, the piece's form is that of continuous variation. 'It is a series of different manifestations of certain kinds of harmonic progressions that appear and reappear throughout the piece,' he says. 'In this period the works I wrote shared certain harmonic structures and ideas. So there are echoes from several of the other pieces in it, including the orchestral piece Wing on Wing and Lachen verlernt for solo violin, which was premièred about a year before. Stockholm Diary is a last look at certain kinds of musical material - a farewell to those ideas before I started to develop in other directions.'

Salonen has known Peter Bassano, the current musical director of the university orchestra, since the early eighties, when he first conducted the Philharmonia - with whom Bassano played the trombone for 27 years. 'My brass quintet, Equale Brass, actually gave the first broadcast performance of his early work Sets,' says Bassano. 'He has been particularly encouraging since my career moved away from playing towards conducting. He put me in touch with Jorma Panula, his old conducting professor, and more recently, when I was appointed conductor of the Oxford University Sinfonietta, he accepted my invitation to become the orchestra's patron.'

'When Peter asked me to become the orchestra's patron I was happy to accept,' says Salonen. 'He is a very serious and good musician, but I also like his radical and far-reaching programming ideas, which cover a lot of historic ground.' A concept which will see Salonen's piece nestling alongside a Handel concerto grosso, Stravinsky's wind octet and John McCabe playing his own second piano concerto.

Talking about his own busy conducting career, Salonen describes finding the time to compose as 'the ongoing battle of my life. This was why I decided to step down from the LA Philharmonic - to give myself more time to compose. At the moment it's about 50-50 composing and conducting. But my goal is to be composing about 60% of the time. When I take over as principal conductor at the Philharmonia next year I will try to achieve that, conducting just them and doing very little guest conducting.'

Tom Walker
Classical Music magazine, 26th May 2007
Original

Review: Oxford University Sinfonietta with Paul Patterson

Concert in the Jacqueline du Pré Music Building on 26th February 2005

The Oxford University Sinfonietta gave a rousing concert yesterday. The historical span of the programme stretched from 1786, the year Mozart's 23rd Piano Concerto was first heard by excited audiences (and only three years before the French Revolution), all the way to 2002, when Paul Patterson performed his latest Cello concerto, which the composer himself has dubbed one of his greatest achievements.

Two other compositions were included in the concert: Samuel Barber's Knoxville: Summer of 1915 and Schoenberg's arrangement for chamber music of Mahler's Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen. Both pieces were admirably performed by the vocal soloists, Gwendolen Martin of Worcester College and Martin Bussey, the head of Academic and Choral Music at Chetham's School of Music, Manchester.

Successful as these pieces were, however, the two concertos really were the highlight of the evening. One is over two hundred years old, and the other is about two, yet neither one seemed limited by its age. Mozart's 23rd Piano Concerto was as fresh and invigorating as it has been since the day it was written, while Patterson's concerto, its ink still drying, never let up for a moment in its modern sense of energy and contrast.

Despite their respective merits, both pieces depend on new musicians and fresh talent. Without these, they would be neither played nor heard, and regardless of all the romantic sentiment that calls a great piece of music ‘immortal', a piece that is neither played nor heard soon dies, whether two or two hundred years old. Thankfully, the Oxford Sinfonietta has remembered all four of these pieces, and they are here to remind us of all that music once was and what it can be.

Matthew McConnell
The Cherwell, February 2005
Original

General information

The Oxford University Sinfonietta is supported by the Oxford University Faculty of Music and the Oxford University Music Society (OUMS). It is sponsored by PricewaterhouseCoopers.