BBC CONCERT ORCHESTRA

Music of the Castle Guard and the Police of the Czech Republic
BBC Concert Orchestra
conductor Anna-Maria Helsing

The BBC Concert Orchestra is one of the ensembles operating under the BBC umbrella. Sir Charles Mackerras held the post of Principal Conductor of this ensemble for several years early in his conducting career. The concert programme reflects Mackerras’ burden on British music and his love of Janáček, whose Sinfonietta will be performed in collaboration with the Castle Guard Music and the Police.

The orchestra will play under the baton of its chief conductor Anna-Maria Helsing, an internationally respected Finnish conductor who has earned an excellent reputation through her work with leading Scandinavian orchestras and opera houses. In 1999, she won the International Competition for Young Artists in the field of 20th-century music in Warsaw. She was the first conductor to receive the Louis Spohr Medal in Seesen, Germany (2011). In 2023, she was appointed chief conductor of the BBC Concert Orchestra. Since this year, she has also been appointed chief conductor of the Finnish Vaasa City Orchestra. From 2010 to 2013, she was chief conductor of the Oulu Sinfonia orchestra, becoming the first woman ever to head a Finnish symphony orchestra.

At the opening ceremony, the Leoš Janáček Foundation will award the prestigious Sir Charles Mackerras Prize to a Czech conductor under the age of 40. Sir Charles Mackerras’ daughter, Catherine Mackerras, will attend the award ceremony.

The concert will be broadcast live by Český rozhlas Vltava.

Sir Charles Mackerras was born 100 years ago, on 17 November 1925, and this programme reflects some of his greatest musical enthusiasms. The overture Portsmouth Point by William Walton – composed in 1925 – was included in Mackerras’s first ever broadcast as a conductor, with the ABC Symphony Orchestra in Sydney on 16 December 1946.

Sir Charles had a long association with Elgar’s music, conducting it with orchestras in the United States, Australia, Vienna and Prague as well as in Britain. The Enigma Variations was a particular favourite, and he recorded it three times.
Elgar’s original idea for the Enigma Variations was a happy accident: improvising a tune on the piano for his wife, he then tried out various ways in which their friends might have played it. ‘Commenced in a spirit of humour and continued in deep seriousness’ (as Elgar wrote in 1911), the finished work was a turning point, establishing him as an important figure not only in Britain but also internationally.
The Enigma Variations are beautifully characterised, presenting musical portraits of people close to him. They range from tender and intimate depictions – above all the noble ‘Nimrod’ variation, portraying his friend and publisher August Jaeger – to humorous ones, such as the variation depicting Dan the dog (owned by George Sinclair, the organist of Hereford Cathedral) rushing down river banks and splashing in the water. The last variation is a self-portrait of Elgar himself – a stirring and exciting finale.

Mackerras had been known Gilbert and Sullivan’s comic operas since early childhood. As he recalled many years later, ‘Everyone in our family knew Gilbert and Sullivan by heart. All the operas, all the dialogue, and all the jokes … I still love them very much.’ One of his first great successes after settling in London was his arrangement of Sullivan’s music for the comic ballet Pineapple Poll. As a student, Mackerras had played the oboe for Gilbert and Sullivan seasons in Sydney, and this gave him an idea: ‘How wonderful it would be, I thought, to arrange these eminently danceable tunes into a sort of symphonic synthesis, and score them for full orchestra.’ In 1950, Mackerras was still in his mid-twenties, but his writing for large orchestral forces is supremely confident and colourful – bringing a new dimension to Sullivan’s music. The arrangement is also extremely clever and entertaining: one of Sullivan’s favourite tricks was to combine two tunes simultaneously in large ensembles and choruses, but what Mackerras does is to use the same technique combining tunes, but from different operas. The ballet was first performed at Sadler’s Wells Theatre in London on 13 March 1951 (four weeks before Mackerras led the British première of Janáček’s Káťa Kabanová) and it was an instant success. Soon afterwards he made the Suite performed in this concert.
Sir Charles Mackerras once said that ‘If I’ll be remembered for anything, it’ll be for Janáček.’ Of course, he is remembered for much more, but his advocacy of Janáček’s music – from the British première of Káťa Kabanová in 1951 to his final performances of The Cunning Little Vixen in 2010 – was of incomparable significance. Thanks to Sir Charles, Janáček’s works took their rightful place on the international stage.
He first conducted the Sinfonietta during a season in Cape Town, South Africa, in January 1959. Back in London, his first Janáček recording was made in July 1959, which included the Sinfonietta. One critic wrote of this record that ‘Mackerras shapes the movements so well… and at the close one feels on top of the world, elated and happy, in tune with the positive and affirmative quality of Janáček’s music.’ Mackerras was not only a great Janáček conductor, but also a scholar whose studied the original manuscripts (including the Sinfonietta) on visits to Brno. In 1980, Sir Charles made a new recording with the Vienna Philharmonic which was not only exciting, but also a more authentic realisation of Janáček’s score, the result of his discoveries in the manuscript sources. His first performed the Sinfonietta with a Czech orchestra was with the Brno Philharmonic on 7 October 1990, in the closing concert of that year’s Brno International Festival. Mackerras went on to perform it regularly with the Czech Philharmonic (including a recording in 2002). One of his last – and finest – performances of the Sinfonietta was with the BBC Philharmonic at the 2007 Proms. In June 1924, Janáček visited Kamila Stösslová, in Písek where they attended a military band concert including fanfares. This was the initial inspiration for the Sinfonietta, but there were others. Early in 1926, the newspaper Lidové noviny asked Janáček to compose some fanfares to celebrate the All-Sokol Rally due to take place in Prague that summer. The work then grew quickly into a five-movement piece. He finished it just before his only visit to London in May 1926 – an occasion recalled in the dedication of the Sinfonietta, ‘To Mrs Rosa Newmarch’, his most ardent British champion. Perhaps the most important inspiration for the Sinfonietta is Brno itself. At a rehearsal for the première in June 1926, Janáček jotted down movement titles on his copy of the programme: ‘Fanfares; The Castle; The Queen’s Monastery; The Street; The Town Hall.’ Over a year later, in December 1927, Janáček expanded those titles, linking them to the establishment of an independent Czechoslovak Republic in 1918: ‘It was the rebirth of 28 October 1918! I was part of it. I belonged to it … It was a vision of the greatness of our city – and it was from understanding this that my Sinfonietta was born – from my city of Brno! The world première was given by the Czech Philharmonic conducted by Václav Talich on 26 June 1926 – and its blazing fanfares have been resonating around the world ever since.

Nigel Simeone

Under the auspices of Matt Field, Ambassador of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland to the Czech Republic and is supported by the Leoš Janáček Fundation

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The concert cannot be bought as a part of the “Create the festival” subscription.