BBC Symphony Orchestra

The BBC Symphony Orchestra (BBC SO) is a British orchestra based in London. Founded in 1930, it was the first permanent salaried orchestra in London, and is the only one of the city's five major symphony orchestras not to be self-governing. The BBC SO is the principal orchestra of the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC).

The orchestra was originally conceived in 1928 as a joint enterprise by the BBC and the conductor Sir Thomas Beecham, but the latter withdrew the next year; and the task of assembling and training the orchestra fell to the BBC's director of music, Adrian Boult. Among its guest conductors in its first years was Arturo Toscanini, who judged it the finest orchestra he had ever conducted. During and after the Second World War, Boult strove to maintain standards, but the senior management of the post-war BBC did not allocate the orchestra the resources to meet competition from new and well-funded rivals.

After Boult's retirement from the BBC in 1950, the orchestra went through a fallow period. Boult's successor, Sir Malcolm Sargent, was popular with the public but had poor rapport with his players, and orchestral morale dropped. Sargent's successor, Rudolf Schwarz, made little public impact, and although the BBC appointed high-profile chief conductors in the 1960s and 70s – Antal Doráti, Colin Davis, Pierre Boulez and Gennady Rozhdestvensky – the BBC SO remained underfunded and could not attract enough good players to rival the leading London orchestras.

Clarinet concerto

A clarinet concerto is a piece for clarinet and a large ensemble (such as an orchestra or concert band). Albert Rice has identified a work by Giuseppe Antonio Paganelli as possibly the earliest known concerto for solo clarinet; its score appears to be titled "Concerto per Clareto" and may date from 1733. It may, however, be intended for soprano chalumeau. There are earlier concerti grossi with concertino clarinet parts including two by Johann Valentin Rathgeber, published in 1728.

Famed publishing house Breitkopf & Härtel published the first clarinet concerto in 1772. The instrument's popularity soared and a flurry of early clarinet concertos ensued. Many of these early concertos have largely been forgotten, though German clarinettist Dieter Klocker specializes in these "lost" works. Famous clarinet concertos of the classical and early romantic era include those of Mozart, Carl Maria von Weber and Louis Spohr.

Relatively few clarinet concertos, or wind instrument concertos generally, were produced during the middle and late Romantic music era, but the form became more popular in the twentieth century, with famous clarinet concertos from Carl Nielsen, Copland, and the more recent ones by John Corigliano, John Adams, Kalevi Aho and John Williams.

Clarinet Concerto (Copland)

Aaron Copland's Clarinet Concerto was written between 1947 and 1949, although a first version was already available in 1948. This composition is also sometimes referred to as the Concerto for Clarinet, Strings and Harp. The concerto would later be choreographed by Jerome Robbins for the ballet Pied Piper (1951).

History

Composition

Soon after Copland composed his Symphony No. 3, in 1947 jazz clarinetist Benny Goodman commissioned him to write a concerto for clarinet. Goodman told Copland biographer Vivian Perlis:

I made no demands on what Copland should write. He had completely free rein, except that I should have a two-year exclusivity on playing the work. I paid two thousand dollars and that's real money. At the time there were not too many American composers to pick from... We never had much trouble except for a little fracas about the spot before the cadenza where he had written a repetition of some phrase. I was a little sticky about leaving it out—it was where the viola was the echo to give the clarinet a cue. But I think Aaron finally did leave it out... Aaron and I played the concerto quite a few times with him conducting, and we made two recordings"

Clarinet Concerto (Nielsen)

Carl Nielsen's Concerto for Clarinet and orchestra, op. 57 [D.F.129] was written for Danish clarinetist Aage Oxenvad in 1928. The concerto is presented in one long movement, with four distinct theme groups.

History

In 1921, Nielsen heard the Copenhagen Wind Quintet rehearsing some music by Mozart. He was struck by the tonal beauty and musicianship of this group, and he soon became intimately acquainted with its members. That same year, he wrote his Wind Quintet expressly for this ensemble. The last movement of this work is a theme and variations depicting in music the personalities of the five players and their respective instruments, much in the manner that Elgar portrayed his friends in the Enigma Variations.

Nielsen planned to carry the idea further; he wanted to write a concerto for each of his five friends. Only two of these compositions ever came into being. For Gilbert Jespersen, who succeeded Paul Hagemann as flautist of the Copenhagen Quintet, he wrote his Flute Concerto in 1926; two years later, he composed his Clarinet Concerto for the group's clarinettist, Aage Oxenvad. The latter work, completed August 15, 1928, was first heard in a private concert at the summer home of Carl Johan Michaelsen, in Humlebaek, on September 14, with Oxenvad as soloist and Emil Telmányi conducting. The same performers gave the premiere in Copenhagen on October 11 of that same year, when it met with a decidedly mixed reception. Since that time, it has gained much wider acceptance.

Orchestra

An orchestra (/ˈɔːrkᵻstrə/ or US /ˈɔːrˌkɛstrə/; Italian: [orˈkɛstra]) is a large instrumental ensemble used in classical music that contains sections of string (violin, viola, cello and double bass), brass, woodwind, and percussion instruments. Other instruments such as the piano and celesta may sometimes be grouped into a fifth section such as a keyboard section or may stand alone, as may the concert harp and, for 20th and 21st century compositions, electric and electronic instruments. The term orchestra derives from the Greek ὀρχήστρα, the name for the area in front of an ancient Greek stage reserved for the Greek chorus. The orchestra grew by accretion throughout the 18th and 19th centuries, but changed very little in composition during the course of the 20th century.