Come and experience the SBSO in a more intimate setting at the DeBartolo Performing Arts Center. The newly renamed June H. Edwards Mosaic Series, formally known as “Chamber”, includes three exceptional concerts.
This new title encompasses the Series’ diverse, exciting and unique nature, which will continue to present a collage of works for chamber orchestra and ensembles.
Join the Symphony in-person or virtually as they take the stage to perform Beethoven, Clyne, and Haydn.
In-person tickets Are now on sale.
Virtual Stage Access provides viewing the live performance from the comfort of your home. The stream access is available for one week after the concert.
Ludwig Beethoven
Coriolan Overture
Anna Clyne
Sound and Fury
Franz Joseph Haydn
Symphony No. 60 in C major, “Il Distratto”
Sound and Fury
(2019)
Queens Hall, Edinburgh
Scottish Chamber Orchestra / Pekka Kuusisto
Sound and Fury draws upon two great works of art for its inspiration: Haydn’s Symphony No. 60 (“Il Distratto”) and Shakespeare’s Macbeth. The piece was premiered by the Scottish Chamber Orchestra on a program that included this Haydn symphony.
“ll Distratto” incorporates Haydn’s music for Le Distrait, a play by Jean-François Regnard, so it seemed fitting to draw inspiration from both musical and literary sources for Sound and Fury. To begin, I listened to “lI Distratto” many times and on a single sheet of paper, I wrote down the key elements that caught my ear, which ranged from rhythmic gestures to melodic ideas, harmonic progressions, and even a musical joke (Haydn brings the feverish final prestissimo to a grinding halt for the violins to re-tune). I chose between one and four elements from each of the six movements and developed them though my own lens – layering, stretching, fragmenting and looping. Whilst experienced as one complete movement, Sound and Fury is also structured in six sub-sections that follow the same trajectory of “ll Distratto.”
In the fifth section of Sound and Fury I looped a harmonic progression from Haydn’s Adagio in “ll Distratto,” and this provides a bed of sound to support the delivery of “Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow…,” the last soliloquy delivered by Macbeth upon learning of his wife’s death, and from which this work takes its title.
Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,
To the last syllable of recorded time;
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!
Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player,
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,
And then is heard no more. It is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.
The connection to Shakespeare’s play emerged gradually during the writing process, but especially after watching a recording of a 1979 masterclass with Sir Ian McKellen analyzing this soliloquy’s imagery and rhythmic use of language. Time lies at the heart of it – “hereafter … time … tomorrow … to day … yesterday …” and music […]
