Concerts & Tickets
Viennese New Year
- Nicolai, Walton, Tchaikovsky, Arditi, Da Falla, Offenbach, Suppé, J Strauss and Herbert
Programme note
Otto Nicolai (1810-1849)
The Merry Wives of Windsor: OvertureAmong the traditional events in the calendar of the Vienna Philharmonic, alongside its famous New Year’s Day celebration, is an annual Nicolai concert, dedicated to the memory of Otto Nicolai who founded the orchestra in 1842. Although he conducted the Vienna Philharmonic in the Overture to Die lustigen Weiber von Windsor (The Merry Wives of Windsor) in 1847, he died before he was able to witness the immense success the opera was to enjoy – not least in Vienna, where it retains its place in the repertoire alongside that other masterful version of Shakespeare’s comedy, Verdi’s Falstaff. The atmospheric material of the slow introduction to the Overture comes from the last scene, set at night by Herne’s Oak in Windsor Forest. As Falstaff’s tormentors enter, disguised as fairies, the tempo accelerates to allegro vivace, its lightly articulated main theme eventually being offset by a lovely lilting, waltz-like melody on violins – a melody which, though it is one of the best in the whole score, never appears in the opera itself.
William Walton (1902-1983)
2 Songs to Poems by Edith Sitwell (arr. by Nils-Petter Ankarblom)
Through gilded trellises
Old Sir FaulkThe work done by William Walton on Façade when he was barely in his twenties – creating with Edith Sitwell a uniquely inspired ‘entertainment’ for reciter and instrumental ensemble – set him up for life. For more than 50 years he was able to use and re-use its material for orchestral suites, ballets, piano pieces and songs. The idea of re-setting some of the Façade poems as songs rather than as recitations seems to have occurred to the composer in the mid-1920s but it wasn’t several years later that he definitively completed and published three of them in a version for voice and piano. The two to be heard on this occasion are performed in an orchestral arrangement by by Nils-Petter Ankarblom.
The reciter version of Through gilded Trellises was added to Façade for the first public performance at London’s Aeolian Hall in 1923 and has retained its place ever since. Its evocations of musical Andalusia are no less colourful and no less witty in the song version. Old Sir Faulk has been a favourite Façade item since it was first included in the entertainment in 1926, not least because it is such a brilliant and at the same time affectionate parody of the dance-hall music of the day.
Piotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky (1840-1893)
Excerpts from The Nutcracker Op.71 (arr. for chamber orchestra by Jonathan McPhee)
Miniature Overture
Divertissement:
Spanish Dance
Arabian Dance
Chinese Dance
Russian Dance
Dance of the Reed Pipes
Mother Gigogne
Grand Waltz and FinaleThe first performances of The Nutcracker, at the Mariinksy Theatre in St. Petersburg in December 1892 and January 1893, were well timed. Loosely based on E.T.A. Hoffmann’s story The Nutcracker and the Mouse-King, it is the essential seasonal entertainment, celebrating both childhood and the magic of Christmas. Whatever the season, however, it would not have achieved its present iconic status without Tchaikovsky’s enchanting, inexhaustibly melodious and often playful music. While it is best known through the Nutcracker Suite compiled for concert use by the composer himself, other selections can be equally as effective.
The Miniature Overture, which also opens Tchaikovsky’s own suite, is perfectly proportioned for a relatively short ballet and, in the absence of such heavy instruments as cellos and basses, appropriately light-hearted for the childish delights of the first scenes.
The Divertissement – much of which is familiar from the suite –is the entertainment presented in the second act of the ballet to the little-girl heroine Clara and the Nutcracker Prince on their state visit to the Kingdom of Sweets. The honoured guests are presented with chocolate in a stylish Spanish Dance beginning on trumpet and coloured inevitably by castanets, with coffee in an Arabian Dance by way of a languorously exotic Georgian lullaby, and with tea in a Chinese Dance scored for low-pitched bassoons and high-pitched flutes. After they have been amused by clowns in the Russian Dance, the guests are offered cakes to go with the coffee and tea: the connection between cakes and the flutes so prominently featured in the Dance of the Reed Pipes (nothing to do with fruit and nuts) is based on the fact that the French word ‘mirliton’ means both a toy wind instrument and a pastry filled with whipped cream. The comedy climax to the celebrations is provided by Mother Gigogne – an allusion to a figure not unlike the old woman who lived in a shoe who is represented here by two Parisian street songs.
A great composer of waltzes – who owed something of his mastery of the form to Johann Strauss’s seasons at the Pavlovsk Pavilion near St. Petersburg – Tchaikovsky wrote three outstanding examples for The Nutcracker. The last of them, Grand Waltz, comes from near the end of the ballet.
Luigi Arditi (1822–1903)
Il Bacio (The Kiss)Luigi Arditi was best known in his lifetime as an opera conductor, not least in London: “He can conduct anything,” Shaw wrote of him, “and come off without defeat.” He was also a considerable composer although he is remembered now not for his several operas but for just a handful of songs. The most familiar of them is Il Bacio which he dedicated to the soprano Marietta Piccolomini – in tribute, it seems from its Traviata waltz-time style, to her status as the most famous Violetta of her day.
Manuel de Falla (1876-1945)
The Three-Cornered Hat, Suite No.1:
Introduction – Afternoon: Allegretto
Dance of the Miller’s Wife: Allegro ma non troppo
The Corregidor – The Miller’s Wife – The Grapes: VivoManuel de Falla – a serious-minded Spaniard who was not very interested in theatrical glamour – was initially reluctant to work for Diaghilev and the Ballets Russes. He finally succumbed to persuasion, however, and made a ballet out of a mime play he had written a couple of years earlier. The first performance of The Three-Cornered Hat by the Ballets Russes at the Alhambra Theatre in London in July 1919, with authentic flamenco-inspired choreography by Massine and designs by no less an artist than Pablo Picasso, was a resounding success.
In the first of two concert suites later compiled by the composer the opening fanfare of the ballet, written to give the audience a chance to admire Picasso’s bull-ring curtain design, serves as a short Introduction. It is followed without a break by music from the first scene, Afternoon, which introduces the Miller with a broodingly sombre murciana low on clarinet and cor anglais and the Miller’s Wife with the beginning of a contrastingly bright jota high on first violins. The Corregidor, the pompous old magistrate with the three-cornered hat and lustful designs on the Miller’s Wife, also makes his first entry here in a briefly comic bassoon solo.
The Dance of the Miller’s Wife, an exuberantly orchestrated fandango combining high energy with sensual grace, is not calculated to dampen the magistrate’s ardour. He registers his reaction in another comic little bassoon solo and the Miller’s Wife gently mocks him with an old-style minuet. In the next scene, The Grapes, which also follows without a break, she teases him with the fruit she is picking from the vine outside the mill and leads him a dance in which, inevitably, he trips and falls to the ground. He leaves, much discomfited, and the Miller joins his Wife in a reprise of the fandango from the previous movement.
Jacques Offenbach (1819-1880)
Les Contes d’Hoffmann (The Tales of Hoffmann): ‘Les oiseaux dans la charmille’ (The Birds in the Bower)The Hoffmann of The Tales of Hoffmann is none other than the E.T.A. Hoffmann whose The Nutcracker and the Mouse-King indirectly inspired Tchaikovsky’s Nutcracker ballet. Offenbach’s last, serious rather than comic, opera is based on a play which presents Hoffmann as a participant in three of his own stories. In the first of them he falls in love with a remarkably life-like automated doll, Olympia, who has been programmed by her inventor to perform a coloratura aria ‘Les oiseaux dans la charmille’. If Hoffmann had had his wits about him he would have realised – from the ingeniously mechanical nature of the music or at least from the tendency of the clockwork to run down – that Olympia was a brilliant fake.
Franz von Suppé (1819-1895)
Banditenstreiche (Bandit Pranks): OvertureAlthough Johann Strauss is the hero of Viennese operetta – and in his lifetime he had no serious rival – its father figure was Franz von Suppé. If most of the dozens of operettas he wrote are now remembered only by their overtures, it is not so much because the operettas are inferior as because the overtures are so very good. The overture to Banditenstreiche, for example, is irresistible, from its opening fanfares to the following march and, above all, the charming clarinet melody that twice stops the show – the second time just before a coda which demonstrates that if Suppé couldn’t beat Offenbach he could certainly join him.
Josef Strauss (1827–70)
Eislauf (Ice-Skating) Polka schnell Op.261If Josef Strauss had not been plagued by illness, which resulted in his death at the age of 43, and if he had been as ambitious as Johann and Eduard, he might well have turned out the greatest composer of the three. Certainly, if Johann was the waltz king of Vienna, Josef was the polka prince. While he excelled in the Polka française (or slow polka) and the hybrid Polka-mazur (or polka-mazurka) he could produce as boisterous a Polka schnell (or quick polka) as either of his brothers when the occasion required. If his exhilarating Eislauf polka is based on personal experience he must have been quite a danger on the ice-rink.
Josef Strauss
Stiefmütterchen (Pansies) Polka mazur Op.183Josef’s speciality was the Polka-mazur (or polka-mazurka), which so ingeniously and so gracefully combines the polka step with the uneven triple-time of the mazurka. Inspired like many of his dances by a natural object, Stiefmütterchen is a characteristically attractive example, above all in its melodious anticipation of the Parisian valse lente and not least in its lingering, pastoral ending.
Johann Strauss I (1804–49)
Indianer-Galopp (Indian Galop)A forerunner and close relation of both the Viennese polka and the French can-can, the galop was perhaps the most energetic of all ballroom dances in the first half of the 19th century. Before the polka overtook it in popularity the elder Johann Strauss wrote dozens of galops, many including some novelty element such as the exotic sounds and harmonies in the outer sections of the Indian Galop.
Johann Strauss II (1825-99)
Zigeneurin-Quadrille (The Bohemian Girl Quadrille) Op.24Most of Johann II’s quadrilles were written in the early stages in his career when it was still fashionable to take tunes from popular scores by other composers and present them as a sequence of polka-like ballrom dances. The Zigeunerin-Quadrille was written in 1846 as a tribute to Balfe’s The Bohemian Girl which opened in a Viennese production (as Die Zigeunerin) in July of that year and and ran successfully until March 1848.
Johann Strauss II
Satanella-Polka Op.124Another imported theatrical sensation was the ballet Satanella which was first seen in Vienna in 1853 with the she-devil title role taken by Marie Taglioni. Johann II was not slow to capitalise on its success, presenting a ‘Satanella Ball’ in the Sofiensaal and making use of Pugni and Hertel’s melodic material in both a polka and a quadrille.
Johann Strauss II
Frühlingsstimmen (Voices of Spring) Op.410The Viennese waltz, as Johann Strauss I developed it and his even more talented son Johann Strauss II perfected it, is not just a one-tune affair. Like Voices of Spring, it might consist of many as four distinct waltz-time sections in succession, each one of them based on two different themes. Clearly, as the composer of well over 100 waltzes (not including those in his operettas), Johann II was a uniquely resourceful melodist. Voices of Spring is outstanding for the quality of its tunes, not least the sensitively syncopated and delicately scored first theme of the second section. Although, unlike some others among Johann II’s more ambitious waltzes, Voices of Spring has no introduction, it does have a coda to recall the vigorous opening theme and put a brilliant ending to the piece.
Victor Herbert (1859–1924)
The Enchantress: ‘I want to be a prima donna’The paradox of the song ‘I want to be a prima donna – from Victor Herbert’s musical The Enchantress, which opened on Broadway in 1911 – is that you really can’t sing it unless you are already a prima donna…
Johann Strauss II
An der schönen blauen Donau (The Blue Danube) Op.314This most famous of all Viennese waltzes – written originally in a rather different form for the Vienna Men’s Choral Association in 1867 – consists of as many as five distinct waltz-time sections in succession, each one of them based on two different themes and none of them recalled before the sequence is complete. What gives it its symphonic stature is the slow introduction with its seductive anticipations of the main theme and, following the fifth waltz, the splendid coda which recalls and briefly develops the main themes of four of the five sections, referring back to the leisurely introduction and effortlessly completing a perfectly integrated, flowing construction.
© Gerald Larner
- conductor
- soprano
Nicolae Moldoveanu has a true Viennese touch when it comes to the music of the Strauss family. Expect familiar favourites (it just would not be New Year without The Blue Danube) and one or two surprises along the way, all in fine spirits to toast 2010.
Viennese New Year
- Nicolai, Walton, Tchaikovsky, Arditi, Da Falla, Offenbach, Suppé, J Strauss and Herbert
Programme note
Otto Nicolai (1810-1849)
The Merry Wives of Windsor: OvertureAmong the traditional events in the calendar of the Vienna Philharmonic, alongside its famous New Year’s Day celebration, is an annual Nicolai concert, dedicated to the memory of Otto Nicolai who founded the orchestra in 1842. Although he conducted the Vienna Philharmonic in the Overture to Die lustigen Weiber von Windsor (The Merry Wives of Windsor) in 1847, he died before he was able to witness the immense success the opera was to enjoy – not least in Vienna, where it retains its place in the repertoire alongside that other masterful version of Shakespeare’s comedy, Verdi’s Falstaff. The atmospheric material of the slow introduction to the Overture comes from the last scene, set at night by Herne’s Oak in Windsor Forest. As Falstaff’s tormentors enter, disguised as fairies, the tempo accelerates to allegro vivace, its lightly articulated main theme eventually being offset by a lovely lilting, waltz-like melody on violins – a melody which, though it is one of the best in the whole score, never appears in the opera itself.
William Walton (1902-1983)
2 Songs to Poems by Edith Sitwell (arr. by Nils-Petter Ankarblom)
Through gilded trellises
Old Sir FaulkThe work done by William Walton on Façade when he was barely in his twenties – creating with Edith Sitwell a uniquely inspired ‘entertainment’ for reciter and instrumental ensemble – set him up for life. For more than 50 years he was able to use and re-use its material for orchestral suites, ballets, piano pieces and songs. The idea of re-setting some of the Façade poems as songs rather than as recitations seems to have occurred to the composer in the mid-1920s but it wasn’t several years later that he definitively completed and published three of them in a version for voice and piano. The two to be heard on this occasion are performed in an orchestral arrangement by by Nils-Petter Ankarblom.
The reciter version of Through gilded Trellises was added to Façade for the first public performance at London’s Aeolian Hall in 1923 and has retained its place ever since. Its evocations of musical Andalusia are no less colourful and no less witty in the song version. Old Sir Faulk has been a favourite Façade item since it was first included in the entertainment in 1926, not least because it is such a brilliant and at the same time affectionate parody of the dance-hall music of the day.
Piotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky (1840-1893)
Excerpts from The Nutcracker Op.71 (arr. for chamber orchestra by Jonathan McPhee)
Miniature Overture
Divertissement:
Spanish Dance
Arabian Dance
Chinese Dance
Russian Dance
Dance of the Reed Pipes
Mother Gigogne
Grand Waltz and FinaleThe first performances of The Nutcracker, at the Mariinksy Theatre in St. Petersburg in December 1892 and January 1893, were well timed. Loosely based on E.T.A. Hoffmann’s story The Nutcracker and the Mouse-King, it is the essential seasonal entertainment, celebrating both childhood and the magic of Christmas. Whatever the season, however, it would not have achieved its present iconic status without Tchaikovsky’s enchanting, inexhaustibly melodious and often playful music. While it is best known through the Nutcracker Suite compiled for concert use by the composer himself, other selections can be equally as effective.
The Miniature Overture, which also opens Tchaikovsky’s own suite, is perfectly proportioned for a relatively short ballet and, in the absence of such heavy instruments as cellos and basses, appropriately light-hearted for the childish delights of the first scenes.
The Divertissement – much of which is familiar from the suite –is the entertainment presented in the second act of the ballet to the little-girl heroine Clara and the Nutcracker Prince on their state visit to the Kingdom of Sweets. The honoured guests are presented with chocolate in a stylish Spanish Dance beginning on trumpet and coloured inevitably by castanets, with coffee in an Arabian Dance by way of a languorously exotic Georgian lullaby, and with tea in a Chinese Dance scored for low-pitched bassoons and high-pitched flutes. After they have been amused by clowns in the Russian Dance, the guests are offered cakes to go with the coffee and tea: the connection between cakes and the flutes so prominently featured in the Dance of the Reed Pipes (nothing to do with fruit and nuts) is based on the fact that the French word ‘mirliton’ means both a toy wind instrument and a pastry filled with whipped cream. The comedy climax to the celebrations is provided by Mother Gigogne – an allusion to a figure not unlike the old woman who lived in a shoe who is represented here by two Parisian street songs.
A great composer of waltzes – who owed something of his mastery of the form to Johann Strauss’s seasons at the Pavlovsk Pavilion near St. Petersburg – Tchaikovsky wrote three outstanding examples for The Nutcracker. The last of them, Grand Waltz, comes from near the end of the ballet.
Luigi Arditi (1822–1903)
Il Bacio (The Kiss)Luigi Arditi was best known in his lifetime as an opera conductor, not least in London: “He can conduct anything,” Shaw wrote of him, “and come off without defeat.” He was also a considerable composer although he is remembered now not for his several operas but for just a handful of songs. The most familiar of them is Il Bacio which he dedicated to the soprano Marietta Piccolomini – in tribute, it seems from its Traviata waltz-time style, to her status as the most famous Violetta of her day.
Manuel de Falla (1876-1945)
The Three-Cornered Hat, Suite No.1:
Introduction – Afternoon: Allegretto
Dance of the Miller’s Wife: Allegro ma non troppo
The Corregidor – The Miller’s Wife – The Grapes: VivoManuel de Falla – a serious-minded Spaniard who was not very interested in theatrical glamour – was initially reluctant to work for Diaghilev and the Ballets Russes. He finally succumbed to persuasion, however, and made a ballet out of a mime play he had written a couple of years earlier. The first performance of The Three-Cornered Hat by the Ballets Russes at the Alhambra Theatre in London in July 1919, with authentic flamenco-inspired choreography by Massine and designs by no less an artist than Pablo Picasso, was a resounding success.
In the first of two concert suites later compiled by the composer the opening fanfare of the ballet, written to give the audience a chance to admire Picasso’s bull-ring curtain design, serves as a short Introduction. It is followed without a break by music from the first scene, Afternoon, which introduces the Miller with a broodingly sombre murciana low on clarinet and cor anglais and the Miller’s Wife with the beginning of a contrastingly bright jota high on first violins. The Corregidor, the pompous old magistrate with the three-cornered hat and lustful designs on the Miller’s Wife, also makes his first entry here in a briefly comic bassoon solo.
The Dance of the Miller’s Wife, an exuberantly orchestrated fandango combining high energy with sensual grace, is not calculated to dampen the magistrate’s ardour. He registers his reaction in another comic little bassoon solo and the Miller’s Wife gently mocks him with an old-style minuet. In the next scene, The Grapes, which also follows without a break, she teases him with the fruit she is picking from the vine outside the mill and leads him a dance in which, inevitably, he trips and falls to the ground. He leaves, much discomfited, and the Miller joins his Wife in a reprise of the fandango from the previous movement.
Jacques Offenbach (1819-1880)
Les Contes d’Hoffmann (The Tales of Hoffmann): ‘Les oiseaux dans la charmille’ (The Birds in the Bower)The Hoffmann of The Tales of Hoffmann is none other than the E.T.A. Hoffmann whose The Nutcracker and the Mouse-King indirectly inspired Tchaikovsky’s Nutcracker ballet. Offenbach’s last, serious rather than comic, opera is based on a play which presents Hoffmann as a participant in three of his own stories. In the first of them he falls in love with a remarkably life-like automated doll, Olympia, who has been programmed by her inventor to perform a coloratura aria ‘Les oiseaux dans la charmille’. If Hoffmann had had his wits about him he would have realised – from the ingeniously mechanical nature of the music or at least from the tendency of the clockwork to run down – that Olympia was a brilliant fake.
Franz von Suppé (1819-1895)
Banditenstreiche (Bandit Pranks): OvertureAlthough Johann Strauss is the hero of Viennese operetta – and in his lifetime he had no serious rival – its father figure was Franz von Suppé. If most of the dozens of operettas he wrote are now remembered only by their overtures, it is not so much because the operettas are inferior as because the overtures are so very good. The overture to Banditenstreiche, for example, is irresistible, from its opening fanfares to the following march and, above all, the charming clarinet melody that twice stops the show – the second time just before a coda which demonstrates that if Suppé couldn’t beat Offenbach he could certainly join him.
Josef Strauss (1827–70)
Eislauf (Ice-Skating) Polka schnell Op.261If Josef Strauss had not been plagued by illness, which resulted in his death at the age of 43, and if he had been as ambitious as Johann and Eduard, he might well have turned out the greatest composer of the three. Certainly, if Johann was the waltz king of Vienna, Josef was the polka prince. While he excelled in the Polka française (or slow polka) and the hybrid Polka-mazur (or polka-mazurka) he could produce as boisterous a Polka schnell (or quick polka) as either of his brothers when the occasion required. If his exhilarating Eislauf polka is based on personal experience he must have been quite a danger on the ice-rink.
Josef Strauss
Stiefmütterchen (Pansies) Polka mazur Op.183Josef’s speciality was the Polka-mazur (or polka-mazurka), which so ingeniously and so gracefully combines the polka step with the uneven triple-time of the mazurka. Inspired like many of his dances by a natural object, Stiefmütterchen is a characteristically attractive example, above all in its melodious anticipation of the Parisian valse lente and not least in its lingering, pastoral ending.
Johann Strauss I (1804–49)
Indianer-Galopp (Indian Galop)A forerunner and close relation of both the Viennese polka and the French can-can, the galop was perhaps the most energetic of all ballroom dances in the first half of the 19th century. Before the polka overtook it in popularity the elder Johann Strauss wrote dozens of galops, many including some novelty element such as the exotic sounds and harmonies in the outer sections of the Indian Galop.
Johann Strauss II (1825-99)
Zigeneurin-Quadrille (The Bohemian Girl Quadrille) Op.24Most of Johann II’s quadrilles were written in the early stages in his career when it was still fashionable to take tunes from popular scores by other composers and present them as a sequence of polka-like ballrom dances. The Zigeunerin-Quadrille was written in 1846 as a tribute to Balfe’s The Bohemian Girl which opened in a Viennese production (as Die Zigeunerin) in July of that year and and ran successfully until March 1848.
Johann Strauss II
Satanella-Polka Op.124Another imported theatrical sensation was the ballet Satanella which was first seen in Vienna in 1853 with the she-devil title role taken by Marie Taglioni. Johann II was not slow to capitalise on its success, presenting a ‘Satanella Ball’ in the Sofiensaal and making use of Pugni and Hertel’s melodic material in both a polka and a quadrille.
Johann Strauss II
Frühlingsstimmen (Voices of Spring) Op.410The Viennese waltz, as Johann Strauss I developed it and his even more talented son Johann Strauss II perfected it, is not just a one-tune affair. Like Voices of Spring, it might consist of many as four distinct waltz-time sections in succession, each one of them based on two different themes. Clearly, as the composer of well over 100 waltzes (not including those in his operettas), Johann II was a uniquely resourceful melodist. Voices of Spring is outstanding for the quality of its tunes, not least the sensitively syncopated and delicately scored first theme of the second section. Although, unlike some others among Johann II’s more ambitious waltzes, Voices of Spring has no introduction, it does have a coda to recall the vigorous opening theme and put a brilliant ending to the piece.
Victor Herbert (1859–1924)
The Enchantress: ‘I want to be a prima donna’The paradox of the song ‘I want to be a prima donna – from Victor Herbert’s musical The Enchantress, which opened on Broadway in 1911 – is that you really can’t sing it unless you are already a prima donna…
Johann Strauss II
An der schönen blauen Donau (The Blue Danube) Op.314This most famous of all Viennese waltzes – written originally in a rather different form for the Vienna Men’s Choral Association in 1867 – consists of as many as five distinct waltz-time sections in succession, each one of them based on two different themes and none of them recalled before the sequence is complete. What gives it its symphonic stature is the slow introduction with its seductive anticipations of the main theme and, following the fifth waltz, the splendid coda which recalls and briefly develops the main themes of four of the five sections, referring back to the leisurely introduction and effortlessly completing a perfectly integrated, flowing construction.
© Gerald Larner
- conductor
- soprano
Nicolae Moldoveanu has a true Viennese touch when it comes to the music of the Strauss family. Expect familiar favourites (it just would not be New Year without The Blue Danube) and one or two surprises along the way, all in fine spirits to toast 2010. The SCO debuts in its new Dumfries venue, DG One.
Viennese New Year
- Nicolai, Walton, Tchaikovsky, Arditi, Da Falla, Offenbach, Suppé, J Strauss and Herbert
Programme note
Otto Nicolai (1810-1849)
The Merry Wives of Windsor: OvertureAmong the traditional events in the calendar of the Vienna Philharmonic, alongside its famous New Year’s Day celebration, is an annual Nicolai concert, dedicated to the memory of Otto Nicolai who founded the orchestra in 1842. Although he conducted the Vienna Philharmonic in the Overture to Die lustigen Weiber von Windsor (The Merry Wives of Windsor) in 1847, he died before he was able to witness the immense success the opera was to enjoy – not least in Vienna, where it retains its place in the repertoire alongside that other masterful version of Shakespeare’s comedy, Verdi’s Falstaff. The atmospheric material of the slow introduction to the Overture comes from the last scene, set at night by Herne’s Oak in Windsor Forest. As Falstaff’s tormentors enter, disguised as fairies, the tempo accelerates to allegro vivace, its lightly articulated main theme eventually being offset by a lovely lilting, waltz-like melody on violins – a melody which, though it is one of the best in the whole score, never appears in the opera itself.
William Walton (1902-1983)
2 Songs to Poems by Edith Sitwell (arr. by Nils-Petter Ankarblom)
Through gilded trellises
Old Sir FaulkThe work done by William Walton on Façade when he was barely in his twenties – creating with Edith Sitwell a uniquely inspired ‘entertainment’ for reciter and instrumental ensemble – set him up for life. For more than 50 years he was able to use and re-use its material for orchestral suites, ballets, piano pieces and songs. The idea of re-setting some of the Façade poems as songs rather than as recitations seems to have occurred to the composer in the mid-1920s but it wasn’t several years later that he definitively completed and published three of them in a version for voice and piano. The two to be heard on this occasion are performed in an orchestral arrangement by by Nils-Petter Ankarblom.
The reciter version of Through gilded Trellises was added to Façade for the first public performance at London’s Aeolian Hall in 1923 and has retained its place ever since. Its evocations of musical Andalusia are no less colourful and no less witty in the song version. Old Sir Faulk has been a favourite Façade item since it was first included in the entertainment in 1926, not least because it is such a brilliant and at the same time affectionate parody of the dance-hall music of the day.
Piotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky (1840-1893)
Excerpts from The Nutcracker Op.71 (arr. for chamber orchestra by Jonathan McPhee)
Miniature Overture
Divertissement:
Spanish Dance
Arabian Dance
Chinese Dance
Russian Dance
Dance of the Reed Pipes
Mother Gigogne
Grand Waltz and FinaleThe first performances of The Nutcracker, at the Mariinksy Theatre in St. Petersburg in December 1892 and January 1893, were well timed. Loosely based on E.T.A. Hoffmann’s story The Nutcracker and the Mouse-King, it is the essential seasonal entertainment, celebrating both childhood and the magic of Christmas. Whatever the season, however, it would not have achieved its present iconic status without Tchaikovsky’s enchanting, inexhaustibly melodious and often playful music. While it is best known through the Nutcracker Suite compiled for concert use by the composer himself, other selections can be equally as effective.
The Miniature Overture, which also opens Tchaikovsky’s own suite, is perfectly proportioned for a relatively short ballet and, in the absence of such heavy instruments as cellos and basses, appropriately light-hearted for the childish delights of the first scenes.
The Divertissement – much of which is familiar from the suite –is the entertainment presented in the second act of the ballet to the little-girl heroine Clara and the Nutcracker Prince on their state visit to the Kingdom of Sweets. The honoured guests are presented with chocolate in a stylish Spanish Dance beginning on trumpet and coloured inevitably by castanets, with coffee in an Arabian Dance by way of a languorously exotic Georgian lullaby, and with tea in a Chinese Dance scored for low-pitched bassoons and high-pitched flutes. After they have been amused by clowns in the Russian Dance, the guests are offered cakes to go with the coffee and tea: the connection between cakes and the flutes so prominently featured in the Dance of the Reed Pipes (nothing to do with fruit and nuts) is based on the fact that the French word ‘mirliton’ means both a toy wind instrument and a pastry filled with whipped cream. The comedy climax to the celebrations is provided by Mother Gigogne – an allusion to a figure not unlike the old woman who lived in a shoe who is represented here by two Parisian street songs.
A great composer of waltzes – who owed something of his mastery of the form to Johann Strauss’s seasons at the Pavlovsk Pavilion near St. Petersburg – Tchaikovsky wrote three outstanding examples for The Nutcracker. The last of them, Grand Waltz, comes from near the end of the ballet.
Luigi Arditi (1822–1903)
Il Bacio (The Kiss)Luigi Arditi was best known in his lifetime as an opera conductor, not least in London: “He can conduct anything,” Shaw wrote of him, “and come off without defeat.” He was also a considerable composer although he is remembered now not for his several operas but for just a handful of songs. The most familiar of them is Il Bacio which he dedicated to the soprano Marietta Piccolomini – in tribute, it seems from its Traviata waltz-time style, to her status as the most famous Violetta of her day.
Manuel de Falla (1876-1945)
The Three-Cornered Hat, Suite No.1:
Introduction – Afternoon: Allegretto
Dance of the Miller’s Wife: Allegro ma non troppo
The Corregidor – The Miller’s Wife – The Grapes: VivoManuel de Falla – a serious-minded Spaniard who was not very interested in theatrical glamour – was initially reluctant to work for Diaghilev and the Ballets Russes. He finally succumbed to persuasion, however, and made a ballet out of a mime play he had written a couple of years earlier. The first performance of The Three-Cornered Hat by the Ballets Russes at the Alhambra Theatre in London in July 1919, with authentic flamenco-inspired choreography by Massine and designs by no less an artist than Pablo Picasso, was a resounding success.
In the first of two concert suites later compiled by the composer the opening fanfare of the ballet, written to give the audience a chance to admire Picasso’s bull-ring curtain design, serves as a short Introduction. It is followed without a break by music from the first scene, Afternoon, which introduces the Miller with a broodingly sombre murciana low on clarinet and cor anglais and the Miller’s Wife with the beginning of a contrastingly bright jota high on first violins. The Corregidor, the pompous old magistrate with the three-cornered hat and lustful designs on the Miller’s Wife, also makes his first entry here in a briefly comic bassoon solo.
The Dance of the Miller’s Wife, an exuberantly orchestrated fandango combining high energy with sensual grace, is not calculated to dampen the magistrate’s ardour. He registers his reaction in another comic little bassoon solo and the Miller’s Wife gently mocks him with an old-style minuet. In the next scene, The Grapes, which also follows without a break, she teases him with the fruit she is picking from the vine outside the mill and leads him a dance in which, inevitably, he trips and falls to the ground. He leaves, much discomfited, and the Miller joins his Wife in a reprise of the fandango from the previous movement.
Jacques Offenbach (1819-1880)
Les Contes d’Hoffmann (The Tales of Hoffmann): ‘Les oiseaux dans la charmille’ (The Birds in the Bower)The Hoffmann of The Tales of Hoffmann is none other than the E.T.A. Hoffmann whose The Nutcracker and the Mouse-King indirectly inspired Tchaikovsky’s Nutcracker ballet. Offenbach’s last, serious rather than comic, opera is based on a play which presents Hoffmann as a participant in three of his own stories. In the first of them he falls in love with a remarkably life-like automated doll, Olympia, who has been programmed by her inventor to perform a coloratura aria ‘Les oiseaux dans la charmille’. If Hoffmann had had his wits about him he would have realised – from the ingeniously mechanical nature of the music or at least from the tendency of the clockwork to run down – that Olympia was a brilliant fake.
Franz von Suppé (1819-1895)
Banditenstreiche (Bandit Pranks): OvertureAlthough Johann Strauss is the hero of Viennese operetta – and in his lifetime he had no serious rival – its father figure was Franz von Suppé. If most of the dozens of operettas he wrote are now remembered only by their overtures, it is not so much because the operettas are inferior as because the overtures are so very good. The overture to Banditenstreiche, for example, is irresistible, from its opening fanfares to the following march and, above all, the charming clarinet melody that twice stops the show – the second time just before a coda which demonstrates that if Suppé couldn’t beat Offenbach he could certainly join him.
Josef Strauss (1827–70)
Eislauf (Ice-Skating) Polka schnell Op.261If Josef Strauss had not been plagued by illness, which resulted in his death at the age of 43, and if he had been as ambitious as Johann and Eduard, he might well have turned out the greatest composer of the three. Certainly, if Johann was the waltz king of Vienna, Josef was the polka prince. While he excelled in the Polka française (or slow polka) and the hybrid Polka-mazur (or polka-mazurka) he could produce as boisterous a Polka schnell (or quick polka) as either of his brothers when the occasion required. If his exhilarating Eislauf polka is based on personal experience he must have been quite a danger on the ice-rink.
Josef Strauss
Stiefmütterchen (Pansies) Polka mazur Op.183Josef’s speciality was the Polka-mazur (or polka-mazurka), which so ingeniously and so gracefully combines the polka step with the uneven triple-time of the mazurka. Inspired like many of his dances by a natural object, Stiefmütterchen is a characteristically attractive example, above all in its melodious anticipation of the Parisian valse lente and not least in its lingering, pastoral ending.
Johann Strauss I (1804–49)
Indianer-Galopp (Indian Galop)A forerunner and close relation of both the Viennese polka and the French can-can, the galop was perhaps the most energetic of all ballroom dances in the first half of the 19th century. Before the polka overtook it in popularity the elder Johann Strauss wrote dozens of galops, many including some novelty element such as the exotic sounds and harmonies in the outer sections of the Indian Galop.
Johann Strauss II (1825-99)
Zigeneurin-Quadrille (The Bohemian Girl Quadrille) Op.24Most of Johann II’s quadrilles were written in the early stages in his career when it was still fashionable to take tunes from popular scores by other composers and present them as a sequence of polka-like ballrom dances. The Zigeunerin-Quadrille was written in 1846 as a tribute to Balfe’s The Bohemian Girl which opened in a Viennese production (as Die Zigeunerin) in July of that year and and ran successfully until March 1848.
Johann Strauss II
Satanella-Polka Op.124Another imported theatrical sensation was the ballet Satanella which was first seen in Vienna in 1853 with the she-devil title role taken by Marie Taglioni. Johann II was not slow to capitalise on its success, presenting a ‘Satanella Ball’ in the Sofiensaal and making use of Pugni and Hertel’s melodic material in both a polka and a quadrille.
Johann Strauss II
Frühlingsstimmen (Voices of Spring) Op.410The Viennese waltz, as Johann Strauss I developed it and his even more talented son Johann Strauss II perfected it, is not just a one-tune affair. Like Voices of Spring, it might consist of many as four distinct waltz-time sections in succession, each one of them based on two different themes. Clearly, as the composer of well over 100 waltzes (not including those in his operettas), Johann II was a uniquely resourceful melodist. Voices of Spring is outstanding for the quality of its tunes, not least the sensitively syncopated and delicately scored first theme of the second section. Although, unlike some others among Johann II’s more ambitious waltzes, Voices of Spring has no introduction, it does have a coda to recall the vigorous opening theme and put a brilliant ending to the piece.
Victor Herbert (1859–1924)
The Enchantress: ‘I want to be a prima donna’The paradox of the song ‘I want to be a prima donna – from Victor Herbert’s musical The Enchantress, which opened on Broadway in 1911 – is that you really can’t sing it unless you are already a prima donna…
Johann Strauss II
An der schönen blauen Donau (The Blue Danube) Op.314This most famous of all Viennese waltzes – written originally in a rather different form for the Vienna Men’s Choral Association in 1867 – consists of as many as five distinct waltz-time sections in succession, each one of them based on two different themes and none of them recalled before the sequence is complete. What gives it its symphonic stature is the slow introduction with its seductive anticipations of the main theme and, following the fifth waltz, the splendid coda which recalls and briefly develops the main themes of four of the five sections, referring back to the leisurely introduction and effortlessly completing a perfectly integrated, flowing construction.
© Gerald Larner
- conductor
- soprano
Nicolae Moldoveanu has a true Viennese touch when it comes to the music of the Strauss family. Expect familiar favourites (it just would not be New Year without The Blue Danube) and one or two surprises along the way, all in fine spirits to toast 2010.
Viennese New Year
- Nicolai, Walton, Tchaikovsky, Arditi, Da Falla, Offenbach, Suppé, J Strauss and Herbert
Programme note
Otto Nicolai (1810-1849)
The Merry Wives of Windsor: OvertureAmong the traditional events in the calendar of the Vienna Philharmonic, alongside its famous New Year’s Day celebration, is an annual Nicolai concert, dedicated to the memory of Otto Nicolai who founded the orchestra in 1842. Although he conducted the Vienna Philharmonic in the Overture to Die lustigen Weiber von Windsor (The Merry Wives of Windsor) in 1847, he died before he was able to witness the immense success the opera was to enjoy – not least in Vienna, where it retains its place in the repertoire alongside that other masterful version of Shakespeare’s comedy, Verdi’s Falstaff. The atmospheric material of the slow introduction to the Overture comes from the last scene, set at night by Herne’s Oak in Windsor Forest. As Falstaff’s tormentors enter, disguised as fairies, the tempo accelerates to allegro vivace, its lightly articulated main theme eventually being offset by a lovely lilting, waltz-like melody on violins – a melody which, though it is one of the best in the whole score, never appears in the opera itself.
William Walton (1902-1983)
2 Songs to Poems by Edith Sitwell (arr. by Nils-Petter Ankarblom)
Through gilded trellises
Old Sir FaulkThe work done by William Walton on Façade when he was barely in his twenties – creating with Edith Sitwell a uniquely inspired ‘entertainment’ for reciter and instrumental ensemble – set him up for life. For more than 50 years he was able to use and re-use its material for orchestral suites, ballets, piano pieces and songs. The idea of re-setting some of the Façade poems as songs rather than as recitations seems to have occurred to the composer in the mid-1920s but it wasn’t several years later that he definitively completed and published three of them in a version for voice and piano. The two to be heard on this occasion are performed in an orchestral arrangement by by Nils-Petter Ankarblom.
The reciter version of Through gilded Trellises was added to Façade for the first public performance at London’s Aeolian Hall in 1923 and has retained its place ever since. Its evocations of musical Andalusia are no less colourful and no less witty in the song version. Old Sir Faulk has been a favourite Façade item since it was first included in the entertainment in 1926, not least because it is such a brilliant and at the same time affectionate parody of the dance-hall music of the day.
Piotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky (1840-1893)
Excerpts from The Nutcracker Op.71 (arr. for chamber orchestra by Jonathan McPhee)
Miniature Overture
Divertissement:
Spanish Dance
Arabian Dance
Chinese Dance
Russian Dance
Dance of the Reed Pipes
Mother Gigogne
Grand Waltz and FinaleThe first performances of The Nutcracker, at the Mariinksy Theatre in St. Petersburg in December 1892 and January 1893, were well timed. Loosely based on E.T.A. Hoffmann’s story The Nutcracker and the Mouse-King, it is the essential seasonal entertainment, celebrating both childhood and the magic of Christmas. Whatever the season, however, it would not have achieved its present iconic status without Tchaikovsky’s enchanting, inexhaustibly melodious and often playful music. While it is best known through the Nutcracker Suite compiled for concert use by the composer himself, other selections can be equally as effective.
The Miniature Overture, which also opens Tchaikovsky’s own suite, is perfectly proportioned for a relatively short ballet and, in the absence of such heavy instruments as cellos and basses, appropriately light-hearted for the childish delights of the first scenes.
The Divertissement – much of which is familiar from the suite –is the entertainment presented in the second act of the ballet to the little-girl heroine Clara and the Nutcracker Prince on their state visit to the Kingdom of Sweets. The honoured guests are presented with chocolate in a stylish Spanish Dance beginning on trumpet and coloured inevitably by castanets, with coffee in an Arabian Dance by way of a languorously exotic Georgian lullaby, and with tea in a Chinese Dance scored for low-pitched bassoons and high-pitched flutes. After they have been amused by clowns in the Russian Dance, the guests are offered cakes to go with the coffee and tea: the connection between cakes and the flutes so prominently featured in the Dance of the Reed Pipes (nothing to do with fruit and nuts) is based on the fact that the French word ‘mirliton’ means both a toy wind instrument and a pastry filled with whipped cream. The comedy climax to the celebrations is provided by Mother Gigogne – an allusion to a figure not unlike the old woman who lived in a shoe who is represented here by two Parisian street songs.
A great composer of waltzes – who owed something of his mastery of the form to Johann Strauss’s seasons at the Pavlovsk Pavilion near St. Petersburg – Tchaikovsky wrote three outstanding examples for The Nutcracker. The last of them, Grand Waltz, comes from near the end of the ballet.
Luigi Arditi (1822–1903)
Il Bacio (The Kiss)Luigi Arditi was best known in his lifetime as an opera conductor, not least in London: “He can conduct anything,” Shaw wrote of him, “and come off without defeat.” He was also a considerable composer although he is remembered now not for his several operas but for just a handful of songs. The most familiar of them is Il Bacio which he dedicated to the soprano Marietta Piccolomini – in tribute, it seems from its Traviata waltz-time style, to her status as the most famous Violetta of her day.
Manuel de Falla (1876-1945)
The Three-Cornered Hat, Suite No.1:
Introduction – Afternoon: Allegretto
Dance of the Miller’s Wife: Allegro ma non troppo
The Corregidor – The Miller’s Wife – The Grapes: VivoManuel de Falla – a serious-minded Spaniard who was not very interested in theatrical glamour – was initially reluctant to work for Diaghilev and the Ballets Russes. He finally succumbed to persuasion, however, and made a ballet out of a mime play he had written a couple of years earlier. The first performance of The Three-Cornered Hat by the Ballets Russes at the Alhambra Theatre in London in July 1919, with authentic flamenco-inspired choreography by Massine and designs by no less an artist than Pablo Picasso, was a resounding success.
In the first of two concert suites later compiled by the composer the opening fanfare of the ballet, written to give the audience a chance to admire Picasso’s bull-ring curtain design, serves as a short Introduction. It is followed without a break by music from the first scene, Afternoon, which introduces the Miller with a broodingly sombre murciana low on clarinet and cor anglais and the Miller’s Wife with the beginning of a contrastingly bright jota high on first violins. The Corregidor, the pompous old magistrate with the three-cornered hat and lustful designs on the Miller’s Wife, also makes his first entry here in a briefly comic bassoon solo.
The Dance of the Miller’s Wife, an exuberantly orchestrated fandango combining high energy with sensual grace, is not calculated to dampen the magistrate’s ardour. He registers his reaction in another comic little bassoon solo and the Miller’s Wife gently mocks him with an old-style minuet. In the next scene, The Grapes, which also follows without a break, she teases him with the fruit she is picking from the vine outside the mill and leads him a dance in which, inevitably, he trips and falls to the ground. He leaves, much discomfited, and the Miller joins his Wife in a reprise of the fandango from the previous movement.
Jacques Offenbach (1819-1880)
Les Contes d’Hoffmann (The Tales of Hoffmann): ‘Les oiseaux dans la charmille’ (The Birds in the Bower)The Hoffmann of The Tales of Hoffmann is none other than the E.T.A. Hoffmann whose The Nutcracker and the Mouse-King indirectly inspired Tchaikovsky’s Nutcracker ballet. Offenbach’s last, serious rather than comic, opera is based on a play which presents Hoffmann as a participant in three of his own stories. In the first of them he falls in love with a remarkably life-like automated doll, Olympia, who has been programmed by her inventor to perform a coloratura aria ‘Les oiseaux dans la charmille’. If Hoffmann had had his wits about him he would have realised – from the ingeniously mechanical nature of the music or at least from the tendency of the clockwork to run down – that Olympia was a brilliant fake.
Franz von Suppé (1819-1895)
Banditenstreiche (Bandit Pranks): OvertureAlthough Johann Strauss is the hero of Viennese operetta – and in his lifetime he had no serious rival – its father figure was Franz von Suppé. If most of the dozens of operettas he wrote are now remembered only by their overtures, it is not so much because the operettas are inferior as because the overtures are so very good. The overture to Banditenstreiche, for example, is irresistible, from its opening fanfares to the following march and, above all, the charming clarinet melody that twice stops the show – the second time just before a coda which demonstrates that if Suppé couldn’t beat Offenbach he could certainly join him.
Josef Strauss (1827–70)
Eislauf (Ice-Skating) Polka schnell Op.261If Josef Strauss had not been plagued by illness, which resulted in his death at the age of 43, and if he had been as ambitious as Johann and Eduard, he might well have turned out the greatest composer of the three. Certainly, if Johann was the waltz king of Vienna, Josef was the polka prince. While he excelled in the Polka française (or slow polka) and the hybrid Polka-mazur (or polka-mazurka) he could produce as boisterous a Polka schnell (or quick polka) as either of his brothers when the occasion required. If his exhilarating Eislauf polka is based on personal experience he must have been quite a danger on the ice-rink.
Josef Strauss
Stiefmütterchen (Pansies) Polka mazur Op.183Josef’s speciality was the Polka-mazur (or polka-mazurka), which so ingeniously and so gracefully combines the polka step with the uneven triple-time of the mazurka. Inspired like many of his dances by a natural object, Stiefmütterchen is a characteristically attractive example, above all in its melodious anticipation of the Parisian valse lente and not least in its lingering, pastoral ending.
Johann Strauss I (1804–49)
Indianer-Galopp (Indian Galop)A forerunner and close relation of both the Viennese polka and the French can-can, the galop was perhaps the most energetic of all ballroom dances in the first half of the 19th century. Before the polka overtook it in popularity the elder Johann Strauss wrote dozens of galops, many including some novelty element such as the exotic sounds and harmonies in the outer sections of the Indian Galop.
Johann Strauss II (1825-99)
Zigeneurin-Quadrille (The Bohemian Girl Quadrille) Op.24Most of Johann II’s quadrilles were written in the early stages in his career when it was still fashionable to take tunes from popular scores by other composers and present them as a sequence of polka-like ballrom dances. The Zigeunerin-Quadrille was written in 1846 as a tribute to Balfe’s The Bohemian Girl which opened in a Viennese production (as Die Zigeunerin) in July of that year and and ran successfully until March 1848.
Johann Strauss II
Satanella-Polka Op.124Another imported theatrical sensation was the ballet Satanella which was first seen in Vienna in 1853 with the she-devil title role taken by Marie Taglioni. Johann II was not slow to capitalise on its success, presenting a ‘Satanella Ball’ in the Sofiensaal and making use of Pugni and Hertel’s melodic material in both a polka and a quadrille.
Johann Strauss II
Frühlingsstimmen (Voices of Spring) Op.410The Viennese waltz, as Johann Strauss I developed it and his even more talented son Johann Strauss II perfected it, is not just a one-tune affair. Like Voices of Spring, it might consist of many as four distinct waltz-time sections in succession, each one of them based on two different themes. Clearly, as the composer of well over 100 waltzes (not including those in his operettas), Johann II was a uniquely resourceful melodist. Voices of Spring is outstanding for the quality of its tunes, not least the sensitively syncopated and delicately scored first theme of the second section. Although, unlike some others among Johann II’s more ambitious waltzes, Voices of Spring has no introduction, it does have a coda to recall the vigorous opening theme and put a brilliant ending to the piece.
Victor Herbert (1859–1924)
The Enchantress: ‘I want to be a prima donna’The paradox of the song ‘I want to be a prima donna – from Victor Herbert’s musical The Enchantress, which opened on Broadway in 1911 – is that you really can’t sing it unless you are already a prima donna…
Johann Strauss II
An der schönen blauen Donau (The Blue Danube) Op.314This most famous of all Viennese waltzes – written originally in a rather different form for the Vienna Men’s Choral Association in 1867 – consists of as many as five distinct waltz-time sections in succession, each one of them based on two different themes and none of them recalled before the sequence is complete. What gives it its symphonic stature is the slow introduction with its seductive anticipations of the main theme and, following the fifth waltz, the splendid coda which recalls and briefly develops the main themes of four of the five sections, referring back to the leisurely introduction and effortlessly completing a perfectly integrated, flowing construction.
© Gerald Larner
- conductor
- soprano
Nicolae Moldoveanu has a true Viennese touch when it comes to the music of the Strauss family. Expect familiar favourites (it just would not be New Year without The Blue Danube) and one or two surprises along the way, all in fine spirits to toast 2010.
Mackerras, Mozart and Strauss
- Mozart
Programme note
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756–1791)
Symphony No 35 in D major, K385 'Haffner' (1782)Allegro con spirito
Andante
Menuetto and Trio
PrestoSigmund Haffner, merchant and Burgomaster in Mozart’s home town of Salzburg, was responsible for commissioning two of the composer’s major works: the Serenade K250, for his daughter’s wedding in 1776; and this Symphony, for the celebrations of the raising of his son to the nobility, in the summer of 1782. By then, Mozart had moved from Salzburg to Vienna, and was very busy with other work. He accepted the commission – which came via his father, who had remained in Salzburg – with some reluctance, and sent off the score in instalments over the following few weeks. Later, he asked for it back, so that he could perform the work in his concert series in Vienna; and on receiving it in February 1783, he was surprised by the quality of the music he had written in such haste. “My new Haffner Symphony has positively amazed me, for I had forgotten every note of it,” he wrote to his father. “It must surely make a splendid effect.”
In its original form the work was less a symphony then a serenade, containing an introductory March (which has survived as K408 No 2) and two minuets, one each side of the Andante; but for the Vienna performance Mozart reduced it to the normal four-movement plan of the symphony. At the same time, he augmented the original scoring – for oboes, bassoons, horns, trumpets, timpani and strings – with optional parts for flutes and clarinets in the outer movements. An unusual feature of the orchestral writing of the first Allegro is the way the trumpets and drums are used not only, as usual, in brilliant tutti sections, but also on a couple of occasions in quiet minor-key passages; this is one of a number of features which give an unexpected and un-serenade-like depth to this generally festive movement. The wind section is reduced to oboes, bassoons and horns in the G major Andante – which, with its proliferation of decorative detail, is the most obviously serenade-like movement in the Symphony – and also in the Trio section of the sturdy Minuet. As for the finale, one striking feature of its scoring is the frequent doubling of the cello part by the bassoons, often even when there are no other wind instruments playing: at the Presto tempo prescribed by Mozart – and he told his father the movement should be played “as fast as possible” – this keeps the fingers and tongues of the two bassoonists very busy indeed!
© Anthony Burton
- Strauss
- Strauss
Programme note
Richard Strauss (1864-1949)
Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme (1918)Overture
Minuet
The Fencing Master
Entrance and Dance of the Tailors
Minuet of Lully
Courante
Entry of Cleonte
Intermezzo – Prelude to Act 2
The DinnerRichard Strauss’s music for Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme began life in an unusual form: a short opera based on the myth of Ariadne, prefaced by scenes from Molière’s play Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme (1670), for which Strauss supplied a sparkling score paying homage to Jean-Baptiste Lully, who wrote the original music for the Molière play.
This farrago was not judged a success, so Strauss rewrote Ariadne auf Naxos, and recast the earlier scenes as a baroque-style concert suite which pastiches the bizarre and pretentious social climber, Monsieur Jordain, who was the focus and butt of Melière’s play.
Strauss’s suite is enchantment itself, and the way he artfully embellishes his 17th and 18th century models is part of its enduring charm. The bustling Overture reveals the busy preparations for a grand reception which Monsieur Jordain is hosting. Everyone seems to be falling over one another, until later a lovely melody emerges on the oboe.
The poise of the Dancing Master’s charming Minuet is deceptive, for Jordain proves an ungainly pupil. The Fencing Master, too, has a hard time teaching his awkward pupil, but the movement reveals plenty of dashing swagger and spirited swordsmanship.
Following their dapper entry several happy-go-lucky tailors measure Monsieur Jordain, and an entrancing violin solo depicts the deft Master Tailor, while gargantuan brass mimics his clumsy client. Next comes Lully’s hauntingly beautiful Minuet, charmingly decorated by Strauss with a violin solo, and a tripping Courante, in which the whole orchestra joins.
For the lulled Entry of Cleonte (Monsieur Jordain’s prospective son-in-law) Strauss serves up an adaptation of Lully’s Sarabande, which transforms into a lively dance rather like a chirpy hornpipe, with two piccolos. The repeated Sarabande is all the nobler for warm low strings and the addition of brass, which claims the last word.
The Prelude to Act 2, with its ravishing echoes of Der Rosenkavalier, evokes the arrival of distinguished guests, and furnishes a charming intermezzo (with lulling cello solo) until the Dinner is served amid much hustle and bustle. Plenty of unexpected dishes are evoked by sly allusion to works by Meyerbeer, Wagner, Strauss and even Verdi! The capping ‘surprise’ comes when a serving lad jumps out and dances to a skittish Viennese waltz, by way of a scintillating farewell.
© Roderic Dunnett
- conductor
- horn
An evening of music by Richard Strauss, who could only be delighted with this concert. His devotion to Mozart verged on the fanatical, and you can hear it everywhere in this programme. With as distinguished a pair of interpreters as Mackerras and Vlatković, this promises to be one of the finest, most entertaining, sunny and heart-warming concerts of the season.
Related audio clip
Mozart Symphony No 35, K385 'Haffner' - Finale - Presto - excerpt
Jukka-Pekka Saraste directs the SCO in Mozart's Symphony No 35, K385 'Haffner', released on Virgin Classics
Mackerras, Mozart and Strauss
- Mozart
Programme note
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756–1791)
Symphony No 35 in D major, K385 'Haffner' (1782)Allegro con spirito
Andante
Menuetto and Trio
PrestoSigmund Haffner, merchant and Burgomaster in Mozart’s home town of Salzburg, was responsible for commissioning two of the composer’s major works: the Serenade K250, for his daughter’s wedding in 1776; and this Symphony, for the celebrations of the raising of his son to the nobility, in the summer of 1782. By then, Mozart had moved from Salzburg to Vienna, and was very busy with other work. He accepted the commission – which came via his father, who had remained in Salzburg – with some reluctance, and sent off the score in instalments over the following few weeks. Later, he asked for it back, so that he could perform the work in his concert series in Vienna; and on receiving it in February 1783, he was surprised by the quality of the music he had written in such haste. “My new Haffner Symphony has positively amazed me, for I had forgotten every note of it,” he wrote to his father. “It must surely make a splendid effect.”
In its original form the work was less a symphony then a serenade, containing an introductory March (which has survived as K408 No 2) and two minuets, one each side of the Andante; but for the Vienna performance Mozart reduced it to the normal four-movement plan of the symphony. At the same time, he augmented the original scoring – for oboes, bassoons, horns, trumpets, timpani and strings – with optional parts for flutes and clarinets in the outer movements. An unusual feature of the orchestral writing of the first Allegro is the way the trumpets and drums are used not only, as usual, in brilliant tutti sections, but also on a couple of occasions in quiet minor-key passages; this is one of a number of features which give an unexpected and un-serenade-like depth to this generally festive movement. The wind section is reduced to oboes, bassoons and horns in the G major Andante – which, with its proliferation of decorative detail, is the most obviously serenade-like movement in the Symphony – and also in the Trio section of the sturdy Minuet. As for the finale, one striking feature of its scoring is the frequent doubling of the cello part by the bassoons, often even when there are no other wind instruments playing: at the Presto tempo prescribed by Mozart – and he told his father the movement should be played “as fast as possible” – this keeps the fingers and tongues of the two bassoonists very busy indeed!
© Anthony Burton
- Strauss
- Strauss
Programme note
Richard Strauss (1864-1949)
Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme (1918)Overture
Minuet
The Fencing Master
Entrance and Dance of the Tailors
Minuet of Lully
Courante
Entry of Cleonte
Intermezzo – Prelude to Act 2
The DinnerRichard Strauss’s music for Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme began life in an unusual form: a short opera based on the myth of Ariadne, prefaced by scenes from Molière’s play Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme (1670), for which Strauss supplied a sparkling score paying homage to Jean-Baptiste Lully, who wrote the original music for the Molière play.
This farrago was not judged a success, so Strauss rewrote Ariadne auf Naxos, and recast the earlier scenes as a baroque-style concert suite which pastiches the bizarre and pretentious social climber, Monsieur Jordain, who was the focus and butt of Melière’s play.
Strauss’s suite is enchantment itself, and the way he artfully embellishes his 17th and 18th century models is part of its enduring charm. The bustling Overture reveals the busy preparations for a grand reception which Monsieur Jordain is hosting. Everyone seems to be falling over one another, until later a lovely melody emerges on the oboe.
The poise of the Dancing Master’s charming Minuet is deceptive, for Jordain proves an ungainly pupil. The Fencing Master, too, has a hard time teaching his awkward pupil, but the movement reveals plenty of dashing swagger and spirited swordsmanship.
Following their dapper entry several happy-go-lucky tailors measure Monsieur Jordain, and an entrancing violin solo depicts the deft Master Tailor, while gargantuan brass mimics his clumsy client. Next comes Lully’s hauntingly beautiful Minuet, charmingly decorated by Strauss with a violin solo, and a tripping Courante, in which the whole orchestra joins.
For the lulled Entry of Cleonte (Monsieur Jordain’s prospective son-in-law) Strauss serves up an adaptation of Lully’s Sarabande, which transforms into a lively dance rather like a chirpy hornpipe, with two piccolos. The repeated Sarabande is all the nobler for warm low strings and the addition of brass, which claims the last word.
The Prelude to Act 2, with its ravishing echoes of Der Rosenkavalier, evokes the arrival of distinguished guests, and furnishes a charming intermezzo (with lulling cello solo) until the Dinner is served amid much hustle and bustle. Plenty of unexpected dishes are evoked by sly allusion to works by Meyerbeer, Wagner, Strauss and even Verdi! The capping ‘surprise’ comes when a serving lad jumps out and dances to a skittish Viennese waltz, by way of a scintillating farewell.
© Roderic Dunnett
- conductor
- horn
An evening of music by Richard Strauss, who could only be delighted with this concert. His devotion to Mozart verged on the fanatical, and you can hear it everywhere in this programme. With as distinguished a pair of interpreters as Mackerras and Vlatković, this promises to be one of the finest, most entertaining, sunny and heart-warming concerts of the season.
Related audio clip
Mozart Symphony No 35, K385 'Haffner' - Finale - Presto - excerpt
Jukka-Pekka Saraste directs the SCO in Mozart's Symphony No 35, K385 'Haffner', released on Virgin Classics
CL@SIX - A Little Night Music
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- Mozart
Programme note
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756-1791)
Eine kleine Nachtmusik (1787)Eine kleine Nachtmusik is really a symphony for strings in disguise. It stands at an intriguing junction in the history of music. ‘Nachtmusik’ could be many kinds of piece performed as part of an night’s entertainment, before or after supper. They might be small, for just a handful of players or grand, for full orchestra; they could feature anything from 3 to as many as 8 or 9 movements. In comparison, the symphony was a new-comer. Again, in Mozart’s time ‘Symphony’ could mean a number of things – it could simply be an operatic overture or it could be a stand alone piece. Why am I telling you all this? Because, within 20 years of Mozart’s death, Nachtmusik as a genre would be entirely eclipsed by the symphony which would become the most important instrumental genre of the 19th century.
© Svend Brown
- Schubert
Programme note
Franz Schubert (1796-1828)
Andantino (Rosamunde) (1823)Schubert undertook the commission to write incidental music for Rosamunde in 1823, at a time when he was already over-stretched. As a result, sections of the score are clearly recycled from other works, including this Entr’acte whose material also appears in his string quartet, D 804. The full script does not survive, so we can throw only limited light on his dramatic intent: it was played before the final act which opens on the heroine, Rosamunde, contentedly tending her sheep.
© Svend Brown
- Dvořák
Programme note
Antonín Dvořák (1841-1904)
Nocturne in B major for String Orchestra, Op 40Dvořák was not content with the original version of this piece, for string quartet; nor the next, for string quintet; nor the next for violin and piano. But he championed this final version for orchestral strings. The earliest versions were called Andante religioso, and something of a spiritual quality surrounds the music. Dvorak relishes darker colours, which gives the music a kinship with the Wagner of Parsifal - undoubtedly one of the most discussed works of the period.
© Svend Brown
- Mozart
Programme note
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756-1791)
Symphony No 34, K 338 (1780)Allegro vivace
Andante di molto
Allegro vivaceThis was the last symphony Mozart wrote in Salzburg. If that sounds a bit unremarkable, consider how much Mozart hated the place. For him it represented failure: he had been forced to return to there as a last resort after years travelling Europe and not securing a lucrative post anywhere else. 1780 was to be the year when he changed his life. In the November he travelled to Munich to create an opera, Idomeneo. Then, he did not return home but went on to Vienna. By the following May he had still not returned home and was sacked from Salzburg. By then, though, he had already tasted his first successes in Vienna. Which work gave him that success? This one. It was performed at a concert in April 1781 and Mozart wrote to his father that “… the symphony conducted by [Giuseppe] Bono went magnifique, and enjoyed a great success.” Bono seems to have used a monster orchestra in Vienna: forty violins, double winds, ten violas, ten double basses, eight ‘cellos and six bassoons.
© Svend Brown
- violin/director
Fancy an hour of delightful, relaxing music of the very top quality to start off your evening in the best possible manner? Look no further: Alexander Janiczek directs these Viennese favourites (with the added bonus of Dvořák’s atmospheric Notturno) – and no-one understands this music better.
Related audio clip
Mozart Serenade for Strings No 13 in G major, KV525 - Eine kleine Nachtmusik - Allegro - excerpt
Mozart's Serenade for Strings No 13 in G major, KV525, 'Eine kleine Nachtmusik' is performed by the SCO under the baton of Raymond Leppard
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