A CONCERT DEDICATED TO THE MEMORY OF DAVID OPPENHEIMER & KLAUS SCHILLER

SOUTHBANK SINFONIA

David Suchet and Simon Russell Beale present the Southbank Sinfonia conducted by Simon Over. Southbank Sinfonia is firmly established as Britain’s leading orchestral academy, providing the most talented musicians with a much-needed springboard into the profession.

A sensational evening of classical music and readings by prominent actors, in aid of Amnesty International and Rose Theatre Kingston.

The programme includes the overture from The Marriage of Figaro by Mozart as well as his Piano Concerto no.24 in C minor, K491, with pianist Alessio Bax. Young soprano Susanna Hurrell joins the orchestra for Ilse Weber’s Ich wandre durch Theresienstadt as well as the world premiere of Deborah by David Oppenheimer, plus Southbank Sinfonia alumnus Ksenia Berezina (violin) performs Gershwin’s sensational Porgy and Bess Suite.

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DAVID OPPENHEIMER

This concert is primarily dedicated to the memory of Klaus Schiller, who died on 9th July 2010 at the age of eighty-three. However, the Schiller Family have very kindly asked that it should also be dedicated to the memory of Klaus Schiller’s lifelong friend David Oppenheimer, who died in 1991 and whose composition, “Deborah”, for soprano and chamber orchestra, is part of this concert – the first time it has been performed by professional musicians.

David Oppenheimer was born in 1914 in Lowestoft, where he went to the same nursery school as Benjamin Britten, but he grew up in Manchester and Knutsford. He started composing while still at school, his early writings being very much in the styles of Bach, Mozart and Brahms. He won a scholarship to Balliol College, Oxford, to read Classics and then PPE but he spent much of his time studying in the music department, along with friends and contemporaries such as George Malcolm, John Gardner, Harry Blech and Edward Heath, with tutors that included Sydney Watson, Sir Thomas Armstrong, Ernest Walker and Sir Hugh Allen.

After he left University and in the years prior to the Second World War he intended to earn his living as a composer. He had various works performed during that period, including a cantata based on a Robert Herrick poem, Hesperides, and a number of songs for voice and orchestra. However, the choral work he had submitted for his B.Mus. degree, a powerful setting of Dunbar’s “Lament for the Makers”, was to remain unheard until October 1997, when it received its first performance, in Oxford, some six years after his death.

The reason why David Oppenheimer is virtually unknown as a composer is that soon after the Second World War, partly as a result of the experiences he had had during that period, he took the drastic decision to make a complete change of direction, giving up music and going back to Balliol to study medicine. It was at Oxford that he and fellow medical student Klaus Schiller met and became friends, completing their training together at the London Hospital in Whitechapel. Both of them went on to achieve world recognition with exceptionally distinguished medical careers, Klaus Schiller as consultant Gastroenterologist and David Oppenheimer , as head of the Neuropathology department at Oxford’s Radcliffe Infirmary, Fellow of Trinity College and Senior Lecturer at Oxford University.

There is no doubt that David Oppenheimer’s decision to give up music was a very painful one at the time; Sir Thomas Armstrong (Principal of the Royal Academy of Music 1955-1968) had greatly admired his work and described the decision as a great loss to music, but he stood by it throughout the early years of his medical career. It was only some 25 years later, in the early 1970’s, that he felt he could return, tentatively, to his first love. He began by revising several of his earlier works and, with the help of his pre-war Oxford friends, the harpsichordist and conductor George Malcolm and the composer John Gardner (who sadly died on 12th December 2011 at the age of 94), a number of his compositions were performed in the 1970s by amateur orchestras and Choral Societies. One of these was his work for chorus and orchestra, based on Herrick’s “Corinna Goes a Maying”, in which, to quote John Gardner, “his remarkable contrapuntal flair is unleashed happily upon an urgent and amorous poem”.

Another of David Oppenheimer’s compositions, which had its first performance some 30 years ago by amateur musicians at Piggott’s Music Camp near High Wycombe, is the work being performed in this concert. It was described at the time by fellow composer John Gardner as “an exquisitely subtle setting of Edith Sitwell’s “Deborah” for soprano and chamber orchestra, where the influence of Strauss is detectable”. In fact it is based on Edith Sitwell’s strange poem “The Little Ghost who Died for Love”. David Oppenheimer included the words of the poem in a memoir he wrote in 1988, saying:

“Many will dispute my belief that this is magical gibberish. I confess to having a special affection for it, as it provided the words for what I regard as my most successful musical setting …”

The poem was prefaced, helpfully, by the following short passage of prose:

‘Deborah Churchill, born 1678, was hanged in 1708 for shielding her lover after a duel in which he killed his opponent and then fled to Holland. According to the law at the time she was hanged in his stead. It is recorded that 'Though she died at peace with God, This malefactor could never understand the justice of her sentence, to the last moment of her life'.

To read The Little Ghost who Died for Love - click here

KLAUS SCHILLER

This concert is dedicated to the memory of Klaus Schiller, my father, and his close friend David Oppenheimer. Dad died on the 9th of July 2010 at the age of eighty-three. We had all expected him to live a great deal longer, he was superbly fit, in mind and body; in his eighty-first year, and after a hip replacement operation he happily scaled a two thousand metre mountain in the Austrian Tyrol, surrounded by his children, their partners and many grandchildren. He was born in Vienna in 1927. After the Nazis marched into Austria in 1938 he and his sister Verena were sent to live with their uncle Georg in Widdington Essex. His parents followed some months later. Dad later achieved a scholarship to Queen’s College Oxford, where he read medicine, and met his lifelong friend David Oppenheimer, (a polymath whose work ‘Deborah’ we are delighted to include in our programme). He met his wife Judy in 1960, his partner for the next fifty years. Dad eventually specialised in gastroenterology, and was an early pioneer of the fibre endoscope, an investigative tool for diseases of the gut which avoided dangerous abdominal surgery. He authored and co-authored several books which remain standard medical texts today. A rationalist, and a deeply compassionate and moral man, he found much of what he observed in the world upsetting, he could not abide cruelty, violence or political injustice, hence his support of Amnesty International. Music played a great part in his life, with regular visits to concerts and the opera, and at home listening to Mum play the piano. He is enormously missed, but I think he would be delighted to be remembered in this way, and for his memorial to perform the added function of raising money for Amnesty, and for the Rose, a theatre he visited often and with great pleasure.

Adrian Schiller