Sinfonia of London/John Wilson

John Wilson’s revivified Sinfonia of London make their Barbican debut with a typically unorthodox programme.

The Italian theatrical tradition of the commedia dell’arte has given us enduring stock characters such as the clowns Harlequin and Pierrot, but rather less well-known is Harlequin’s servant, Scapino, a rascal who arranges his master’s amorous exploits – plus a few of his own. As John Wilson explains: ‘We get the word “escapade” from scapino and I think that tells us a lot. Walton captures the two sides of Scapino’s nature in his overture: the boisterous and the romantic. The central interlude which depicts Scapino a-wooing is some of Walton’s most ravishing music.’ Walton’s comedy overture was written in 1941 for large orchestral forces, which were trimmed down for the revised 1950 version.

A rather more sinister character emerged in the Arabian Nights in the form of the Sultan Shahryar. He was in the habit of killing his brides each morning until he was outwitted by the Sultana Scheherazade, who distracted him with a new story each evening, cunningly ending on a cliffhanger. After 1,001 nights he was persuaded to kick his deadly habit. Ravel first turned to the subject in an overture of 1898, returning to it five years later in a highly evocative song-cycle, full of voluptuous contours and exotic colours. The poems he set were by Tristan Klingsor (the Wagnerian pseudonym of Léon Leclère): the two were both part of an artistic group called Les Apaches, at whose meetings Ravel first heard Klingsor’s verses.

In ‘Asie’ Ravel sets the scene with shimmering strings and an oboe solo articulating quintessentially Eastern intervals, after which the mezzo-soprano languidly expresses the desire to see every exotic sight imaginable. Ravel the man could be reserved and enigmatic, but he relishes these seductive poems. As John Wilson puts it: ‘Ravel rarely reveals his inner soul in his music; there is often a veneer of meticulously crafted artifice. That’s not to say he isn’t sincere – far from it – he’s on record as saying the artificial is so much better than the real (or words to that effect). And he takes his fairy tales seriously and we are all the richer for it.’ In ‘La flûte enchantée’, a young girl hears a bittersweet, languorous flute serenade, played by her lover, while in ‘L’indifferent’ it is unclear whether the desired youth with eyes ‘as gentle as a girl’s’ is being addressed by a man or a woman – an ambiguity treated with gentle subtlety by Ravel.

Gershwin visited Paris in 1928, spending time with fellow composer Alban Berg and acquiring taxi-horns and Debussy scores to take home. An American in Paris was written the same year, a tone-poem described by Gershwin as: ‘really a rhapsodic ballet – it is written very freely and is the most modern music I’ve yet attempted’. He added that his intention was ‘to portray the impressions of an American visitor in Paris as he strolls about the city, listens to the various street noises and absorbs the French atmosphere’. John Wilson hails Gershwin’s ‘Good Tunes (tunes with a capital T), a personal, jazz-tinged harmonic language, an inventive sense of rhythm and an orchestral palette drawn from the sounds of his own time and place.

Dutilleux went to study in Paris in 1933 and developed a style that embraced influences from Ravel and Messiaen to jazz. Ravel’s use of bitonality (two keys at once) in Boléro may have influenced Dutilleux’s 1953 ballet score Le Loup (‘The Wolf’), described by John Wilson as ‘a wonderfully melodic, harmonically rich and thrillingly dramatic score. It falls right into your lap on first hearing and get better every time you listen to it. What more could you ask from a piece of music?’

Ravel’s musical personality was formed, in his own words, from ‘the clicking and roaring of my father’s machines’ (Joseph Ravel was an industrialist and inventor) and ‘the Spanish folk songs sung to me by my mother’, who was Basque. A bolero is a Spanish dance style which Ravel married with a mechanical aesthetic; he explained that ‘my Boléro owes its inception to a factory’ and longed to ‘stage it with a vast industrial works in the background’.

Ravel’s longtime friend Gustave Samazeuilh gave a vivid account of the conception of Boléro: ‘I had the delightful experience of seeing Ravel in a yellow dressing gown and scarlet bathing cap playing the theme of Boléro with one finger and saying to me, “Mme Rubinstein has commissioned a ballet from me. Don’t you think this tune has something insistent about it? I’m going to try and repeat it a good few times without any development while gradually building it up …”’

The dancer Ida Rubinstein had asked Ravel to orchestrate Albéniz’s great piano suite Iberia for a ballet – but copyright laws prevented it and Ravel instead produced an original composition, Boléro. Of the ballet version (much more of a rarity than the ubiquitous concert piece), John Wilson says: ‘Compared to the standard edition of the concert version, the 1928 ballet score contains slightly altered note lengths in both the melody and the accompanimental figures, extra percussion (triangle and castanets) in the last statement of the tune and, most notably, a pair of drummers who alternate with each statement of the theme and are placed on either side of the orchestra.’

Programme and performers

William Walton Scapino
Maurice Ravel Shéhérazade
1 Asie
2 La flûte enchantée
3 L’indifférent
George Gershwin An American in Paris

Henri Dutilleux Le Loup
Tableau 1 La baraque foraine: Les mystifications
Tableau 2 La chambre nuptiale: La Belle et la Bête
Tableau 3 La forêt d’hiver: Danse d’amour –
Danse de mort
Maurice Ravel Boléro (original ballet version)

Sinfonia of London
John Wilson conductor
Alice Coote mezzo-soprano

Shéhérazade

1. Asie
Asie, Asie, Asie,
Vieux pays merveilleux des contes de
nourrice,
Où dort la fantaisie comme une impératrice
En sa forêt tout emplie de mystère.

Je voudrais m’en aller avec la goëlette
Qui se berce ce soir dans le port,
Mystérieuse et solitaire,
Et qui déploie enfin ses voiles violettes
Comme un immense oiseau de nuit dans
le ciel d’or.

Je voudrais m’en aller vers les îles de fleurs,
En écoutant chanter la mer perverse
Sur un vieux rythme ensorceleur.

Je voudrais voir Damas et les villes
de Perse
Avec les minarets légers dans l’air;
Je voudrais voir de beaux turbans de soie
Sur des visages noirs aux dents claires;

Je voudrais voir des yeux sombres d’amour
Et des prunelles brillantes de joie
En des peaux jaunes comme des oranges;
Je voudrais voir des vêtements de velours
Et des habits à longues franges.

Je voudrais voir des calumets entre des
bouches
Tout entourées de barbe blanche;
Je voudrais voir d’âpres marchands aux
regards louches,
Et des cadis, et des vizirs
Qui du seul mouvement de leur doigt qui
se penche
Accorde vie ou mort au gré de leur désir.

Je voudrais voir la Perse, et l’Inde, et puis
la Chine,
Les mandarins ventrus sous les ombrelles,
Et les princesses aux mains fines,
Et les lettrés qui se querellent
Sur la poésie et sur la beauté;

Je voudrais m’attarder au palais enchanté
Et comme un voyageur étranger
Contempler à loisir des paysages peints

Sur des étoffes en des cadres de sapin
Avec un personnage au milieu d’un verger;

Je voudrais voir des assassins souriant
Du bourreau qui coupe un cou d’innocent

Avec son grand sabre courbé d’Orient.
Je voudrais voir des pauvres et des reines;
Je voudrais voir des roses et du sang;
Je voudrais voir mourir d’amour ou bien de haine.

Et puis m’en revenir plus tard
Narrer mon aventure aux curieux de rêves
En élevant comme Sindbad ma vieille tasse
arabe
De temps en temps jusqu’à mes lèvres
Pour interrompre le conte avec art …

2. La flûte enchantée
L’ombre est douce et mon maître dort,
Coiffé d’un bonnet conique de soie
Et son long nez jaune en sa barbe blanche.

Mais moi, je suis éveillée encor
Et j’écoute au dehors
Une chanson de flûte où s’épanche
Tour à tour la tristesse ou la joie,

Un air tour à tour langoureux ou frivole,
Que mon amoureux chéri joue,
Et quand je m’approche de la croisée
Il me semble que chaque note s’envole
De la flûte vers ma joue
Comme un mystérieux baiser.

3. L’indifférent
Tes yeux sont doux comme ceux d’une fille,
Jeune étranger,
Et la courbe fine
De ton beau visage de duvet ombragé
Est plus séduisante encor de ligne.

Ta lèvre chante sur le pas de ma porte
Une langue inconnue et charmante
Comme une musique fausse …
Entre!
Et que mon vin te réconforte …

Mais non, tu passes
Et de mon seuil je te vois t’éloigner
Me faisant un dernier geste avec grâce,
Et la hanche légèrement ployée
Par ta démarche féminine et lasse …

Tristan Klingsor (Léon Leclère, 1874–1966),
reproduced by kind permission of Editions
Durand SA, Paris/United Music Publishers Ltd

1. Asia
O Asia, Asia, Asia,
magic land of nursery tales,

where fantasy, like an empress, sleeps
in her forest full of mystery.

I would like to set sail with the schooner
that lies rocking in the harbour this night.
Mysterious and alone,
it unfurls at last its purple sails
like a huge night-bird in
the golden sky.

I would like to set sail for the isles of flowers,
listening to the song of the brutal sea
to an ancient spell-like beat.

I would like to see Damascus and the towns
of Persia,
their dainty minarets tall in the air;
I would like to see fine turbans of silk
above black faces with gleaming teeth;

I would like to see eyes dark with love
and pupils bright with joy
against skins colourful as oranges;
I would like to see velvet clothes
and fringed dresses.

I would like to see pipes in
mouths
encircled by white beards;
I would like to see greedy merchants with
scheming eyes,
cadis and viziers
who with a snap of their fingers

dispense at will life or death.

I would like to see Persia, India and
China too,
pot-bellied mandarins beneath parasols,
princesses with slender hands
and scholars debating
poetry and beauty;

I would like to linger in the enchanted palace
and like a foreign wayfarer
contemplate at my ease landscapes daubed

on canvases in frames of pine,
a lone person in an orchard’s midst;

I would like to see assassins smiling
as the executioner slices off an innocent’s
head
with the great curved sabre of the East.
I would like to see paupers and queens;
I would like to see roses and blood;
I would like to see men die of love or of hate.

And then later, homeward bound,
my tale narrate to those who thrive on dreams,
raising like Sinbad my old
Arab cup
to my lips now and then
in an adroit interruption of my tale …

2. The Enchanted Flute
The shade is cool and my master sleeps,
a cone-shaped cap of silk upon his head,
his long yellow nose thrust in his white beard.

But I, awoken once more,
hear from afar
a flute song spreading
in turn sadness and joy,

a tune, now languorous, now shallow,
that my dear love plays,
and when I near the casement
each note seems to fly
from the flute to my cheek
like a mysterious kiss.

3. The Indifferent One
Your eyes are as gentle as a girl’s,
O unknown youth,
and the soft curve
of your exquisite face shaded with down
is in its contours more seductive still.

On my doorstep your lips sing
in a strange yet beguiling tongue,
like music out of tune …
Enter!
Let my wine refresh you …

But no, you go,
and from my threshold I watch you leave,
a last graceful wave in my direction,
your hips slightly swaying
in your languid, feminine gait …

Translation reproduced by kind permission of
Virgin Classics

Artist biographies

Sinfonia of London rose to fame in the 1950s as the leading recording orchestra of the day, appearing in the musical credits of more than 300 films, including the 1958 soundtrack by Bernard Herrmann for Hitchcock’s Vertigo, and on countless gramophone records, among them Colin Davis’s first discs of Mozart symphonies and John Barbirolli’s celebrated recording of English string music. Relaunched in 2018 by the British conductor John Wilson, the orchestra brings together outstanding musicians who meet several times a year for specific projects. It includes a significant number of principals and leaders from orchestras based both in the UK and abroad, alongside notable soloists and members of distinguished chamber ensembles.

The orchestra’s debut recording, of Korngold’s Symphony in F sharp (2019), received numerous five-star reviews, was nominated for a Gramophone Award and won a 2020 BBC Music Magazine Award. Escales, its second release, was devoted to French orchestral works and chosen as Disc of the Month by Gramophone. Respighi’s Roman Trilogy (2020) garnered a second BBC Music Magazine Award.

Last year Sinfonia of London made its live debut at the BBC Proms and released two further highly acclaimed recordings – English Music for Strings and an album of works by Dutilleux, the latter going on to win the performers a BBC Music Magazine Award for the third year in a row.

Further acclaimed releases since then have included a disc of orchestral works by Ravel, which earlier this year won a Gramophone Award; Metamorphosen, featuring masterpieces for string orchestra by Richard Strauss, Korngold and Schreker; a disc of music by John Ireland; Hollywood Soundstage, a celebration of the golden age of Hollywood; and Rachmaninov’s Symphony No 3, the first in a projected Rachmaninov cycle.

In 2022 Sinfonia of London and John Wilson returned to the BBC Proms for an all-British programme that culminated in Elgar’s Enigma Variations.

Mezzo-soprano Alice Coote is regarded as one of the great artists of our day, equally acclaimed on the great operatic stages as in concert and recital.

The recital platform is central to her musical life. She performs throughout the UK, Europe and the US, at leading venues including Wigmore Hall (where she has been a resident artist), BBC Proms, Amsterdam Concertgebouw, Vienna Konzerthaus, Lincoln Center and Carnegie Hall. Most recently, she sang Schubert’s Winterreise at the Stars of the White Nights Festival in St Petersburg.

In the opera house she is renowned for her assumptions of both male and female characters. In the UK she has appeared at English National Opera, Scottish Opera, Welsh National Opera, Glyndebourne and the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden. Internationally she has sung at Opéra de Paris, Teatro Real, Madrid, Dutch National Opera, Grand Théâtre de Genève, Bayerische Staatsoper, Oper Frankfurt, Zurich Opera, the Salzburg Festival, Lyric Opera of Chicago, Seattle Opera, LA Opera, San Francisco Opera, Canadian Opera Company and the Metropolitan Opera, New York.

Operatic highlights this season include concert performances of Orfeo in Orfeo ed Euridice with Opera North and Madame de Croissy (Dialogues des Carmélites) at the Metropolitan Opera. On the concert platform, she sings Verdi’s Requiem, Elgar’s Sea Pictures, The Dream of Gerontius and The Apostles and Mahler’s Das Lied von der Erde with leading orchestras and conductors, including Sir Mark Elder, Sir John Eliot Gardiner and Sir Andrew Davis.

Her many recordings and DVDs include Mahler song-cycles and Symphony No 2, lieder by Schubert and Schumann, The Power of Love: An English Songbook, L’heure exquise: A French Songbook, The Dream of Gerontius and The Apostles, Brahms’s Alto Rhapsody, Messiah, Alcina, Hansel and Gretel, L’incoronazione di Poppea, Lucrezia Borgia and Ariadne auf Naxos.

In 2018 she was awarded an OBE for services Jiyang Chen to music.

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Sinfonia of London/John Wilson

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Programme and performers

Programme and performers

Shéhérazade

Artist biographies