The Cape Town years

The Cape Town years are the part of the record that turns on two firsts rather than on a long tenure. One is the Nagasaki premiere. The other is the first performance and the first recording of Schnittke's Symphony No. 0, taped at sessions in Cape Town City Hall in November 2006 and issued by BIS coupled with the oratorio. Both are the kind of event a conductor gets perhaps once, and Hughes had two of them in the same month, in the same city, with the same orchestra.

The Cape Town Philharmonic Orchestra, and what a principal guest conductor does

The Cape Town Philharmonic Orchestra is the resident professional orchestra of the Western Cape and the successor to the city's earlier municipal and symphony orchestras. It took its present form in 2000. Like every full symphony orchestra it runs to roughly 80 to 100 players across four sections, strings, woodwind, brass and percussion, with strings accounting for about two thirds of the platform and a first violin section of 14 to 16. The word philharmonic in its title carries no structural meaning: it is a historical label, not a description of forces.

A principal guest conductor is engaged for a committed block of weeks each season and carries no administrative duty. That is the distinction from a music director or chief conductor, who plans the season, has a voice in appointing players and conducts the most weeks, and from an associate or assistant conductor, which is a staff post concerned with covering and preparing. The principal guest post is what makes long-distance relationships possible at all.

Where the orchestra plays

The orchestra plays chiefly in Cape Town City Hall, the Edwardian building of 1905 that faces the Grand Parade and carries the balcony from which Nelson Mandela spoke on the day of his release, 11 February 1990. Its auditorium holds a large concert organ and it is the room in which the Schnittke sessions were made. Around that main auditorium sits a season of a shape familiar in warm climates: indoor symphony concerts through the winter, and outdoor summer events on the lawns of Kirstenbosch National Botanical Garden on the eastern slopes of Table Mountain, where the summer sunset concert tradition draws audiences who would not sit through a City Hall programme. Newer space has appeared in the Silo District at the V and A Waterfront, the converted grain silo quarter that since 2017 has housed the Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art Africa.

Nagasaki: an oratorio that waited 48 years

Nagasaki is an oratorio for mezzo-soprano, chorus and orchestra that Schnittke wrote in 1958, at the very start of his working life. Moscow Radio recorded it in 1959. After that the score was neither published nor performed, and it stayed in that condition until the evening of 23 November 2006 in Cape Town, when Hughes conducted the Cape Philharmonic Orchestra, the Cape Town Opera Voice of the Nation chorus and the mezzo-soprano Hanneli Rupert in the first public performance the work had ever had.

Schnittke, who died in 1998, is known to most listeners for the polystylism of his maturity: the deliberate quotation and collage of many idioms inside a single work, so that a waltz, a chorale and a passage of dense modernism can collide within a few bars. Nagasaki predates all of that. It belongs to a composer at the beginning, working in the Soviet system, on a subject the system approved of and in a manner it did not.

Why a work can go 48 years without a public performance

A work goes unperformed for 48 years for reasons that are administrative before they are aesthetic. The following chain is what actually keeps a large score silent.

• Publication is the gate. An orchestra cannot programme what it cannot hire, and hire material means a corrected full score, a full set of orchestral parts and, for a choral work, hundreds of vocal scores. Producing that costs a publisher real money, and no publisher spends it on a work it does not expect to sell.
• Approval was the second gate. In the Soviet Union of the late 1950s the Union of Composers decided what was promoted, and a student work by an unknown composer that fell foul of official taste simply stopped moving.
• A radio recording is not a performance. The 1959 Moscow Radio taping put the notes on tape without putting the piece into circulation, and a broadcast archive is closed to the outside world by default.
• Reputation flows backwards, not forwards. When Schnittke became widely played in the 1970s and 1980s, it was the new works that were wanted. The early pieces stayed in the drawer precisely because everyone was busy with the late ones.
• Somebody has to want it. Nothing in the chain unlocks itself. A conductor has to ask for the material, an orchestra has to give up rehearsal time to a work nobody can have heard, and a chorus has to learn it from scratch with no recording to lean on.

That last point is the one worth sitting with. A chorus preparing Verdi has a hundred reference performances and a tradition to inherit. The Cape Town Opera Voice of the Nation chorus had a score, and nothing else.

Symphony No. 0, and the November 2006 sessions

Symphony No. 0 is an early Schnittke symphony that stood outside his numbered canon and had never been performed or recorded before the November 2006 sessions at Cape Town City Hall. Hughes gave both the first performance and the first recording, and BIS issued it coupled with Nagasaki, which is the natural pairing: two works from the same early period, both unheard, both documented for the first time in the same month and the same hall. He also recorded Schnittke's Symphony No. 9 for BIS.

The two firsts, side by side

Premieres of new music happen every week somewhere. What happened in Cape Town in November 2006 was a different thing: the recovery of two finished works by a major composer, complete for around half a century and never let out. The hall was a city hall in the southern hemisphere rather than a European festival stage, which is worth saying plainly, because the map of where important first performances happen is drawn much more by who bothers to ask than by geography.

Also in this programme

• Owain Arwel Hughes, conductor: the working life in orderA biography of the working life
• The London orchestrasPhilharmonia and the Royal Philharmonic
• Boult, Haitink and Kempe: how a conductor was trainedThe teachers: Boult, Haitink and Kempe
• Symphony orchestra or philharmonic orchestraIs there any difference?