Concerts & Tickets
Spring Serenade
- Haydn
Programme note
Joseph Haydn (1732-1809)
March for the Royal Society of Musicians (1791)With the death of his patron Prince Nikolaus Esterházy in February 1790, Haydn was freed from his increasingly onerous duties as Kapellmeister. The Prince’s successor, Prince Anton Esterházy, shared none of his father’s enthusiasm for music. He disbanded both the orchestra and choir, and granted Haydn a comfortable pension. Financially secure, and at the height of his creative powers, Haydn accepted an unexpected invitation to visit London from the impresario Johann Peter Salomon. Haydn was to receive £300 for a new opera, £300 for six new symphonies, a further £200 for their copyright, £200 for twenty other works and a guarantee of at least £200 from a benefit concert. When Mozart asked Haydn how at his advanced age (fifty-six!) he could travel to England speaking no language but German, Haydn replied, “but my language is understood everywhere.” Haydn left with Salomon almost immediately, and arrived in London on New Years Day 1791. Haydn’s visit – the first of three - was an unqualified success.
Haydn’s first London concert took place on 11 March 1791, in the Hanover Square Rooms. Haydn himself directed from the harpsichord, while Salomon led the orchestra. “Never, perhaps, was there a richer musical treat”, enthused the Morning Chronicle. “It is not wonderful that to souls capable of being touched by music, Haydn should be an object of homage and even idolatry; for like our own Shakespeare, he moves and governs the passions at his will.”
Soon after, Haydn was invited to the annual dinner of the Royal Society of Musicians. For the occasion, he composed a march for orchestra, the autograph of which is still preserved by the society. This tuneful work began life as a short piece for wind instruments - specifically, two clarinets, two bassoons, two horns, and a now-obsolete woodwind, the serpent - and timpani. Its original title was March for the Prince of Wales. For this occasion, Haydn arranged it for full orchestra, adding two flutes and strings.
The Royal Society for Musicians, whose current patron is Sir Peter Maxwell Davies, is Britain’s oldest musical charity. When it was founded, in 1738, as the “Fund for Decay’d Musicians”, 228 members signed its Declaration of Trust, including Arne, Boyce, Greene, Pepusch, Edward Purcell (son of Henry), Roseingrave, Sammartini, and, most valuably, Handel, who left £1,000 to the Society in his will. From the outset, dinners or 'Anniversary Festivals' were held, which often included performances of specially-written Marches.
© Stephen Strugnell
- Mozart
Programme note
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756–1791)
Violin Concerto No 5 in A major, K 219 'Turkish' (1775)Allegro aperto
Adagio
Tempo di Minuetto – Allegro – Tempo di MinuettoMozart’s father Leopold was the author of one of the most celebrated violin tutors of his day; so it is not surprising that when the son began to show a precocious aptitude for music, he should have taken up the violin – at the age of six, we are told, and without any formal teaching – as well as the piano. The instrument remained important to him in his youth, and indeed he played it regularly in the Salzburg court orchestra and on tours. It was only when he left the Salzburg court for Vienna in 1781, and so escaped from the direct influence of his father, that he concentrated his efforts as a public performer on the piano, reserving the violin (or more often the viola) for private musical parties.
Not surprisingly, all Mozart’s five concertos for solo violin date from his early years: the first probably from April 1773, the rest from the period between June and December 1775 – the months leading up to his twentieth birthday. It is known that some of the concertos were played by the Italian-born leader of the Salzburg orchestra, Antonio Brunetti; and there is a reference in one of Leopold Mozart’s letters to a concerto written for another Salzburg violinist, Johann Anton Kolb. But there is also evidence that Mozart himself played at least one of them in public; and it is easy to imagine that they reflect his own technique and personality as a violinist – not least in the many opportunities they present for improvised transitions as well as full-scale cadenzas.
Of the five concertos, the last – dated 20 December 1775 – is the most mature, and the most ambitious, despite having no more than the standard Salzburg orchestration of strings, two oboes and two horns. The first movement has the unusual marking of Allegro aperto, suggesting openness or straightforwardness; its most unusual feature is the soaring six-bar Adagio with which the solo violin makes its initial entry. The same tempo marking and mood, and the same concentration on the lyrical upper register of the solo instrument, mark the E major slow movement. The finale is a rondo in minuet time, which was a familiar enough way of ending a mid-eighteenth-century concerto; less expected is the appearance of a minor-key central episode in 2/4 time and in the currently fashionable “Turkish” style, with the usual noisy percussion impersonated by the cellos and basses. This movement also boasts one of Mozart’s wittiest endings.
© Anthony Burton
- Brahms
Programme note
Johannes Brahms (1833-1897)
Serenade No 1 in D major, Op 11 (1858)Allegro molto
Scherzo: Allegro non troppo
Adagio non troppo
Menuet I & II
Scherzo: Allegro
Rondo: AllegroYoung Brahms originally intended the first of his two orchestral serenades to be a nonet for wind and strings in the vein of Beethoven’s Septet or Schubert’s Octet - which may explain why, even in its more symphonic final version, its fourth and fifth movements seem to retain their chamber music affinities, with prominent, often pungent, wind parts.
Yet the effect of the work can also seem curiously suggestive of a Mahler symphony, or at least the sort of symphony Mahler might have written if he had been a 25-year-old genius living in Detmold in the year 1858. The bucolic drone of its opening bars provides a foretaste of the start of Mahler’s Symphony No 1 (in the same key), and the jovial horn theme has a distinctively Mahlerish stamp. Pastoral the serenade certainly is. No other big-scale work by Brahms, other than the Second Symphony in the same key, speaks quite so refreshingly of the open air. Why he eventually chose to inflate such intimate music into an orchestral work was perhaps typical of the uncertainty from which he persistently suffered. His Piano Concerto No 1, completed in the same year, had begun as a symphony before being transformed into the work we know. But the serenade, so long as it is played by a chamber orchestra rather than something weightier, retains much of its original lightness of touch, while gaining the extra richness of string tone that justified Brahms’s revision.
What gives the work its considerable length is not only its quantity of movements but also the large-scale symphonic processes required by the first movement, slow movement, and finale, as well as the sheer size of some of the themes. In contrast, the second movement, a shadowy minor-key scherzo prophetic of the equivalent movement in the Second Piano Concerto, is more concise, as are the pair of tiny, comical minuets and the second scherzo, clearly a joke inspired by Beethoven, and all the better for coming from a composer as supposedly serious as Brahms.
The larger movements, on the other hand, give the work the Brahmsian ballast it needs. The way the introductory drone bass keeps harmonically shifting ground as the horn theme moves towards the movement's first climax defines not only the symphonic scale of the music but also its al fresco serenade-like nature. The shape of the themes, their way of melting from four beats to three beats in the bar, is unmistakably Brahmsian, even at this early stage in his career.
But if the first movement is large, the adagio, with its gently rocking rhythm, is even larger. It is laid out in grandly unshortened sonata-form, with a rich array of themes, a full-scale development section, recapitulation and coda, as if it were a symphonic first movement played in slow motion.
Sir Donald Tovey, Edinburgh’s distinguished musical essayist, famously devoted one and a half pages of a programme note to this adagio, claiming in the process that the music owed much of its quality of tone to the brook in Beethoven’s Pastoral symphony, which here "flows into a wide river, passing through a remote key into a peaceful lake."
The rondo finale, though considerably shorter, is nevertheless far from perfunctory. The remarkable length of the springy main theme and its rollicking offshoots immediately suggests that the music will last just as long as it needs to, and so it does. The coda, said Tovey, is "triumphant," though to call it radiant and exhilarating might be even more apt.
© Conrad Wilson
- conductor
- violin
If you like your music melodious and big-hearted, with more than a hint of folk influence, Brahms’ Serenades are for you. They include some of his most immediately appealing music. Fischer deftly complements the First Serenade with works by the two composers who strongly influenced Brahms at the time of its writing.
Related audio clip
Brahms Serenade No 1 n D major Op 11 Rondo Allegro
Sir Charles Mackerras conducts the SCO in Brahms' Serenade No 1 in D major Op 11. The recording also features the composer's Serenade No 2 in A major, Op 16.
Spring Serenade
- Haydn
Programme note
Joseph Haydn (1732-1809)
March for the Royal Society of Musicians (1791)With the death of his patron Prince Nikolaus Esterházy in February 1790, Haydn was freed from his increasingly onerous duties as Kapellmeister. The Prince’s successor, Prince Anton Esterházy, shared none of his father’s enthusiasm for music. He disbanded both the orchestra and choir, and granted Haydn a comfortable pension. Financially secure, and at the height of his creative powers, Haydn accepted an unexpected invitation to visit London from the impresario Johann Peter Salomon. Haydn was to receive £300 for a new opera, £300 for six new symphonies, a further £200 for their copyright, £200 for twenty other works and a guarantee of at least £200 from a benefit concert. When Mozart asked Haydn how at his advanced age (fifty-six!) he could travel to England speaking no language but German, Haydn replied, “but my language is understood everywhere.” Haydn left with Salomon almost immediately, and arrived in London on New Years Day 1791. Haydn’s visit – the first of three - was an unqualified success.
Haydn’s first London concert took place on 11 March 1791, in the Hanover Square Rooms. Haydn himself directed from the harpsichord, while Salomon led the orchestra. “Never, perhaps, was there a richer musical treat”, enthused the Morning Chronicle. “It is not wonderful that to souls capable of being touched by music, Haydn should be an object of homage and even idolatry; for like our own Shakespeare, he moves and governs the passions at his will.”
Soon after, Haydn was invited to the annual dinner of the Royal Society of Musicians. For the occasion, he composed a march for orchestra, the autograph of which is still preserved by the society. This tuneful work began life as a short piece for wind instruments - specifically, two clarinets, two bassoons, two horns, and a now-obsolete woodwind, the serpent - and timpani. Its original title was March for the Prince of Wales. For this occasion, Haydn arranged it for full orchestra, adding two flutes and strings.
The Royal Society for Musicians, whose current patron is Sir Peter Maxwell Davies, is Britain’s oldest musical charity. When it was founded, in 1738, as the “Fund for Decay’d Musicians”, 228 members signed its Declaration of Trust, including Arne, Boyce, Greene, Pepusch, Edward Purcell (son of Henry), Roseingrave, Sammartini, and, most valuably, Handel, who left £1,000 to the Society in his will. From the outset, dinners or 'Anniversary Festivals' were held, which often included performances of specially-written Marches.
© Stephen Strugnell
- Mozart
Programme note
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756–1791)
Violin Concerto No 5 in A major, K 219 'Turkish' (1775)Allegro aperto
Adagio
Tempo di Minuetto – Allegro – Tempo di MinuettoMozart’s father Leopold was the author of one of the most celebrated violin tutors of his day; so it is not surprising that when the son began to show a precocious aptitude for music, he should have taken up the violin – at the age of six, we are told, and without any formal teaching – as well as the piano. The instrument remained important to him in his youth, and indeed he played it regularly in the Salzburg court orchestra and on tours. It was only when he left the Salzburg court for Vienna in 1781, and so escaped from the direct influence of his father, that he concentrated his efforts as a public performer on the piano, reserving the violin (or more often the viola) for private musical parties.
Not surprisingly, all Mozart’s five concertos for solo violin date from his early years: the first probably from April 1773, the rest from the period between June and December 1775 – the months leading up to his twentieth birthday. It is known that some of the concertos were played by the Italian-born leader of the Salzburg orchestra, Antonio Brunetti; and there is a reference in one of Leopold Mozart’s letters to a concerto written for another Salzburg violinist, Johann Anton Kolb. But there is also evidence that Mozart himself played at least one of them in public; and it is easy to imagine that they reflect his own technique and personality as a violinist – not least in the many opportunities they present for improvised transitions as well as full-scale cadenzas.
Of the five concertos, the last – dated 20 December 1775 – is the most mature, and the most ambitious, despite having no more than the standard Salzburg orchestration of strings, two oboes and two horns. The first movement has the unusual marking of Allegro aperto, suggesting openness or straightforwardness; its most unusual feature is the soaring six-bar Adagio with which the solo violin makes its initial entry. The same tempo marking and mood, and the same concentration on the lyrical upper register of the solo instrument, mark the E major slow movement. The finale is a rondo in minuet time, which was a familiar enough way of ending a mid-eighteenth-century concerto; less expected is the appearance of a minor-key central episode in 2/4 time and in the currently fashionable “Turkish” style, with the usual noisy percussion impersonated by the cellos and basses. This movement also boasts one of Mozart’s wittiest endings.
© Anthony Burton
- Brahms
Programme note
Johannes Brahms (1833-1897)
Serenade No 1 in D major, Op 11 (1858)Allegro molto
Scherzo: Allegro non troppo
Adagio non troppo
Menuet I & II
Scherzo: Allegro
Rondo: AllegroYoung Brahms originally intended the first of his two orchestral serenades to be a nonet for wind and strings in the vein of Beethoven’s Septet or Schubert’s Octet - which may explain why, even in its more symphonic final version, its fourth and fifth movements seem to retain their chamber music affinities, with prominent, often pungent, wind parts.
Yet the effect of the work can also seem curiously suggestive of a Mahler symphony, or at least the sort of symphony Mahler might have written if he had been a 25-year-old genius living in Detmold in the year 1858. The bucolic drone of its opening bars provides a foretaste of the start of Mahler’s Symphony No 1 (in the same key), and the jovial horn theme has a distinctively Mahlerish stamp. Pastoral the serenade certainly is. No other big-scale work by Brahms, other than the Second Symphony in the same key, speaks quite so refreshingly of the open air. Why he eventually chose to inflate such intimate music into an orchestral work was perhaps typical of the uncertainty from which he persistently suffered. His Piano Concerto No 1, completed in the same year, had begun as a symphony before being transformed into the work we know. But the serenade, so long as it is played by a chamber orchestra rather than something weightier, retains much of its original lightness of touch, while gaining the extra richness of string tone that justified Brahms’s revision.
What gives the work its considerable length is not only its quantity of movements but also the large-scale symphonic processes required by the first movement, slow movement, and finale, as well as the sheer size of some of the themes. In contrast, the second movement, a shadowy minor-key scherzo prophetic of the equivalent movement in the Second Piano Concerto, is more concise, as are the pair of tiny, comical minuets and the second scherzo, clearly a joke inspired by Beethoven, and all the better for coming from a composer as supposedly serious as Brahms.
The larger movements, on the other hand, give the work the Brahmsian ballast it needs. The way the introductory drone bass keeps harmonically shifting ground as the horn theme moves towards the movement's first climax defines not only the symphonic scale of the music but also its al fresco serenade-like nature. The shape of the themes, their way of melting from four beats to three beats in the bar, is unmistakably Brahmsian, even at this early stage in his career.
But if the first movement is large, the adagio, with its gently rocking rhythm, is even larger. It is laid out in grandly unshortened sonata-form, with a rich array of themes, a full-scale development section, recapitulation and coda, as if it were a symphonic first movement played in slow motion.
Sir Donald Tovey, Edinburgh’s distinguished musical essayist, famously devoted one and a half pages of a programme note to this adagio, claiming in the process that the music owed much of its quality of tone to the brook in Beethoven’s Pastoral symphony, which here "flows into a wide river, passing through a remote key into a peaceful lake."
The rondo finale, though considerably shorter, is nevertheless far from perfunctory. The remarkable length of the springy main theme and its rollicking offshoots immediately suggests that the music will last just as long as it needs to, and so it does. The coda, said Tovey, is "triumphant," though to call it radiant and exhilarating might be even more apt.
© Conrad Wilson
- conductor
- violin
If you like your music melodious and big-hearted, with more than a hint of folk influence, Brahms’ Serenades are for you. They include some of his most immediately appealing music. Fischer deftly complements the First Serenade with works by the two composers who strongly influenced Brahms at the time of its writing.
Related audio clip
Brahms Serenade No 1 n D major Op 11 Rondo Allegro
Sir Charles Mackerras conducts the SCO in Brahms' Serenade No 1 in D major Op 11. The recording also features the composer's Serenade No 2 in A major, Op 16.
Spring Serenade
- Haydn
Programme note
Joseph Haydn (1732-1809)
March for the Royal Society of Musicians (1791)With the death of his patron Prince Nikolaus Esterházy in February 1790, Haydn was freed from his increasingly onerous duties as Kapellmeister. The Prince’s successor, Prince Anton Esterházy, shared none of his father’s enthusiasm for music. He disbanded both the orchestra and choir, and granted Haydn a comfortable pension. Financially secure, and at the height of his creative powers, Haydn accepted an unexpected invitation to visit London from the impresario Johann Peter Salomon. Haydn was to receive £300 for a new opera, £300 for six new symphonies, a further £200 for their copyright, £200 for twenty other works and a guarantee of at least £200 from a benefit concert. When Mozart asked Haydn how at his advanced age (fifty-six!) he could travel to England speaking no language but German, Haydn replied, “but my language is understood everywhere.” Haydn left with Salomon almost immediately, and arrived in London on New Years Day 1791. Haydn’s visit – the first of three - was an unqualified success.
Haydn’s first London concert took place on 11 March 1791, in the Hanover Square Rooms. Haydn himself directed from the harpsichord, while Salomon led the orchestra. “Never, perhaps, was there a richer musical treat”, enthused the Morning Chronicle. “It is not wonderful that to souls capable of being touched by music, Haydn should be an object of homage and even idolatry; for like our own Shakespeare, he moves and governs the passions at his will.”
Soon after, Haydn was invited to the annual dinner of the Royal Society of Musicians. For the occasion, he composed a march for orchestra, the autograph of which is still preserved by the society. This tuneful work began life as a short piece for wind instruments - specifically, two clarinets, two bassoons, two horns, and a now-obsolete woodwind, the serpent - and timpani. Its original title was March for the Prince of Wales. For this occasion, Haydn arranged it for full orchestra, adding two flutes and strings.
The Royal Society for Musicians, whose current patron is Sir Peter Maxwell Davies, is Britain’s oldest musical charity. When it was founded, in 1738, as the “Fund for Decay’d Musicians”, 228 members signed its Declaration of Trust, including Arne, Boyce, Greene, Pepusch, Edward Purcell (son of Henry), Roseingrave, Sammartini, and, most valuably, Handel, who left £1,000 to the Society in his will. From the outset, dinners or 'Anniversary Festivals' were held, which often included performances of specially-written Marches.
© Stephen Strugnell
- Mozart
Programme note
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756–1791)
Violin Concerto No 5 in A major, K 219 'Turkish' (1775)Allegro aperto
Adagio
Tempo di Minuetto – Allegro – Tempo di MinuettoMozart’s father Leopold was the author of one of the most celebrated violin tutors of his day; so it is not surprising that when the son began to show a precocious aptitude for music, he should have taken up the violin – at the age of six, we are told, and without any formal teaching – as well as the piano. The instrument remained important to him in his youth, and indeed he played it regularly in the Salzburg court orchestra and on tours. It was only when he left the Salzburg court for Vienna in 1781, and so escaped from the direct influence of his father, that he concentrated his efforts as a public performer on the piano, reserving the violin (or more often the viola) for private musical parties.
Not surprisingly, all Mozart’s five concertos for solo violin date from his early years: the first probably from April 1773, the rest from the period between June and December 1775 – the months leading up to his twentieth birthday. It is known that some of the concertos were played by the Italian-born leader of the Salzburg orchestra, Antonio Brunetti; and there is a reference in one of Leopold Mozart’s letters to a concerto written for another Salzburg violinist, Johann Anton Kolb. But there is also evidence that Mozart himself played at least one of them in public; and it is easy to imagine that they reflect his own technique and personality as a violinist – not least in the many opportunities they present for improvised transitions as well as full-scale cadenzas.
Of the five concertos, the last – dated 20 December 1775 – is the most mature, and the most ambitious, despite having no more than the standard Salzburg orchestration of strings, two oboes and two horns. The first movement has the unusual marking of Allegro aperto, suggesting openness or straightforwardness; its most unusual feature is the soaring six-bar Adagio with which the solo violin makes its initial entry. The same tempo marking and mood, and the same concentration on the lyrical upper register of the solo instrument, mark the E major slow movement. The finale is a rondo in minuet time, which was a familiar enough way of ending a mid-eighteenth-century concerto; less expected is the appearance of a minor-key central episode in 2/4 time and in the currently fashionable “Turkish” style, with the usual noisy percussion impersonated by the cellos and basses. This movement also boasts one of Mozart’s wittiest endings.
© Anthony Burton
- Brahms
Programme note
Johannes Brahms (1833-1897)
Serenade No 1 in D major, Op 11 (1858)Allegro molto
Scherzo: Allegro non troppo
Adagio non troppo
Menuet I & II
Scherzo: Allegro
Rondo: AllegroYoung Brahms originally intended the first of his two orchestral serenades to be a nonet for wind and strings in the vein of Beethoven’s Septet or Schubert’s Octet - which may explain why, even in its more symphonic final version, its fourth and fifth movements seem to retain their chamber music affinities, with prominent, often pungent, wind parts.
Yet the effect of the work can also seem curiously suggestive of a Mahler symphony, or at least the sort of symphony Mahler might have written if he had been a 25-year-old genius living in Detmold in the year 1858. The bucolic drone of its opening bars provides a foretaste of the start of Mahler’s Symphony No 1 (in the same key), and the jovial horn theme has a distinctively Mahlerish stamp. Pastoral the serenade certainly is. No other big-scale work by Brahms, other than the Second Symphony in the same key, speaks quite so refreshingly of the open air. Why he eventually chose to inflate such intimate music into an orchestral work was perhaps typical of the uncertainty from which he persistently suffered. His Piano Concerto No 1, completed in the same year, had begun as a symphony before being transformed into the work we know. But the serenade, so long as it is played by a chamber orchestra rather than something weightier, retains much of its original lightness of touch, while gaining the extra richness of string tone that justified Brahms’s revision.
What gives the work its considerable length is not only its quantity of movements but also the large-scale symphonic processes required by the first movement, slow movement, and finale, as well as the sheer size of some of the themes. In contrast, the second movement, a shadowy minor-key scherzo prophetic of the equivalent movement in the Second Piano Concerto, is more concise, as are the pair of tiny, comical minuets and the second scherzo, clearly a joke inspired by Beethoven, and all the better for coming from a composer as supposedly serious as Brahms.
The larger movements, on the other hand, give the work the Brahmsian ballast it needs. The way the introductory drone bass keeps harmonically shifting ground as the horn theme moves towards the movement's first climax defines not only the symphonic scale of the music but also its al fresco serenade-like nature. The shape of the themes, their way of melting from four beats to three beats in the bar, is unmistakably Brahmsian, even at this early stage in his career.
But if the first movement is large, the adagio, with its gently rocking rhythm, is even larger. It is laid out in grandly unshortened sonata-form, with a rich array of themes, a full-scale development section, recapitulation and coda, as if it were a symphonic first movement played in slow motion.
Sir Donald Tovey, Edinburgh’s distinguished musical essayist, famously devoted one and a half pages of a programme note to this adagio, claiming in the process that the music owed much of its quality of tone to the brook in Beethoven’s Pastoral symphony, which here "flows into a wide river, passing through a remote key into a peaceful lake."
The rondo finale, though considerably shorter, is nevertheless far from perfunctory. The remarkable length of the springy main theme and its rollicking offshoots immediately suggests that the music will last just as long as it needs to, and so it does. The coda, said Tovey, is "triumphant," though to call it radiant and exhilarating might be even more apt.
© Conrad Wilson
- conductor
- violin
If you like your music melodious and big-hearted, with more than a hint of folk influence, Brahms’ Serenades are for you. They include some of his most immediately appealing music. Fischer deftly complements the First Serenade with works by the two composers who strongly influenced Brahms at the time of its writing.
Related audio clip
Brahms Serenade No 1 n D major Op 11 Rondo Allegro
Sir Charles Mackerras conducts the SCO in Brahms' Serenade No 1 in D major Op 11. The recording also features the composer's Serenade No 2 in A major, Op 16.
Spring Serenade
- Haydn
Programme note
Joseph Haydn (1732-1809)
March for the Royal Society of Musicians (1791)With the death of his patron Prince Nikolaus Esterházy in February 1790, Haydn was freed from his increasingly onerous duties as Kapellmeister. The Prince’s successor, Prince Anton Esterházy, shared none of his father’s enthusiasm for music. He disbanded both the orchestra and choir, and granted Haydn a comfortable pension. Financially secure, and at the height of his creative powers, Haydn accepted an unexpected invitation to visit London from the impresario Johann Peter Salomon. Haydn was to receive £300 for a new opera, £300 for six new symphonies, a further £200 for their copyright, £200 for twenty other works and a guarantee of at least £200 from a benefit concert. When Mozart asked Haydn how at his advanced age (fifty-six!) he could travel to England speaking no language but German, Haydn replied, “but my language is understood everywhere.” Haydn left with Salomon almost immediately, and arrived in London on New Years Day 1791. Haydn’s visit – the first of three - was an unqualified success.
Haydn’s first London concert took place on 11 March 1791, in the Hanover Square Rooms. Haydn himself directed from the harpsichord, while Salomon led the orchestra. “Never, perhaps, was there a richer musical treat”, enthused the Morning Chronicle. “It is not wonderful that to souls capable of being touched by music, Haydn should be an object of homage and even idolatry; for like our own Shakespeare, he moves and governs the passions at his will.”
Soon after, Haydn was invited to the annual dinner of the Royal Society of Musicians. For the occasion, he composed a march for orchestra, the autograph of which is still preserved by the society. This tuneful work began life as a short piece for wind instruments - specifically, two clarinets, two bassoons, two horns, and a now-obsolete woodwind, the serpent - and timpani. Its original title was March for the Prince of Wales. For this occasion, Haydn arranged it for full orchestra, adding two flutes and strings.
The Royal Society for Musicians, whose current patron is Sir Peter Maxwell Davies, is Britain’s oldest musical charity. When it was founded, in 1738, as the “Fund for Decay’d Musicians”, 228 members signed its Declaration of Trust, including Arne, Boyce, Greene, Pepusch, Edward Purcell (son of Henry), Roseingrave, Sammartini, and, most valuably, Handel, who left £1,000 to the Society in his will. From the outset, dinners or 'Anniversary Festivals' were held, which often included performances of specially-written Marches.
© Stephen Strugnell
- Mozart
Programme note
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756–1791)
Violin Concerto No 5 in A major, K 219 'Turkish' (1775)Allegro aperto
Adagio
Tempo di Minuetto – Allegro – Tempo di MinuettoMozart’s father Leopold was the author of one of the most celebrated violin tutors of his day; so it is not surprising that when the son began to show a precocious aptitude for music, he should have taken up the violin – at the age of six, we are told, and without any formal teaching – as well as the piano. The instrument remained important to him in his youth, and indeed he played it regularly in the Salzburg court orchestra and on tours. It was only when he left the Salzburg court for Vienna in 1781, and so escaped from the direct influence of his father, that he concentrated his efforts as a public performer on the piano, reserving the violin (or more often the viola) for private musical parties.
Not surprisingly, all Mozart’s five concertos for solo violin date from his early years: the first probably from April 1773, the rest from the period between June and December 1775 – the months leading up to his twentieth birthday. It is known that some of the concertos were played by the Italian-born leader of the Salzburg orchestra, Antonio Brunetti; and there is a reference in one of Leopold Mozart’s letters to a concerto written for another Salzburg violinist, Johann Anton Kolb. But there is also evidence that Mozart himself played at least one of them in public; and it is easy to imagine that they reflect his own technique and personality as a violinist – not least in the many opportunities they present for improvised transitions as well as full-scale cadenzas.
Of the five concertos, the last – dated 20 December 1775 – is the most mature, and the most ambitious, despite having no more than the standard Salzburg orchestration of strings, two oboes and two horns. The first movement has the unusual marking of Allegro aperto, suggesting openness or straightforwardness; its most unusual feature is the soaring six-bar Adagio with which the solo violin makes its initial entry. The same tempo marking and mood, and the same concentration on the lyrical upper register of the solo instrument, mark the E major slow movement. The finale is a rondo in minuet time, which was a familiar enough way of ending a mid-eighteenth-century concerto; less expected is the appearance of a minor-key central episode in 2/4 time and in the currently fashionable “Turkish” style, with the usual noisy percussion impersonated by the cellos and basses. This movement also boasts one of Mozart’s wittiest endings.
© Anthony Burton
- Brahms
Programme note
Johannes Brahms (1833-1897)
Serenade No 1 in D major, Op 11 (1858)Allegro molto
Scherzo: Allegro non troppo
Adagio non troppo
Menuet I & II
Scherzo: Allegro
Rondo: AllegroYoung Brahms originally intended the first of his two orchestral serenades to be a nonet for wind and strings in the vein of Beethoven’s Septet or Schubert’s Octet - which may explain why, even in its more symphonic final version, its fourth and fifth movements seem to retain their chamber music affinities, with prominent, often pungent, wind parts.
Yet the effect of the work can also seem curiously suggestive of a Mahler symphony, or at least the sort of symphony Mahler might have written if he had been a 25-year-old genius living in Detmold in the year 1858. The bucolic drone of its opening bars provides a foretaste of the start of Mahler’s Symphony No 1 (in the same key), and the jovial horn theme has a distinctively Mahlerish stamp. Pastoral the serenade certainly is. No other big-scale work by Brahms, other than the Second Symphony in the same key, speaks quite so refreshingly of the open air. Why he eventually chose to inflate such intimate music into an orchestral work was perhaps typical of the uncertainty from which he persistently suffered. His Piano Concerto No 1, completed in the same year, had begun as a symphony before being transformed into the work we know. But the serenade, so long as it is played by a chamber orchestra rather than something weightier, retains much of its original lightness of touch, while gaining the extra richness of string tone that justified Brahms’s revision.
What gives the work its considerable length is not only its quantity of movements but also the large-scale symphonic processes required by the first movement, slow movement, and finale, as well as the sheer size of some of the themes. In contrast, the second movement, a shadowy minor-key scherzo prophetic of the equivalent movement in the Second Piano Concerto, is more concise, as are the pair of tiny, comical minuets and the second scherzo, clearly a joke inspired by Beethoven, and all the better for coming from a composer as supposedly serious as Brahms.
The larger movements, on the other hand, give the work the Brahmsian ballast it needs. The way the introductory drone bass keeps harmonically shifting ground as the horn theme moves towards the movement's first climax defines not only the symphonic scale of the music but also its al fresco serenade-like nature. The shape of the themes, their way of melting from four beats to three beats in the bar, is unmistakably Brahmsian, even at this early stage in his career.
But if the first movement is large, the adagio, with its gently rocking rhythm, is even larger. It is laid out in grandly unshortened sonata-form, with a rich array of themes, a full-scale development section, recapitulation and coda, as if it were a symphonic first movement played in slow motion.
Sir Donald Tovey, Edinburgh’s distinguished musical essayist, famously devoted one and a half pages of a programme note to this adagio, claiming in the process that the music owed much of its quality of tone to the brook in Beethoven’s Pastoral symphony, which here "flows into a wide river, passing through a remote key into a peaceful lake."
The rondo finale, though considerably shorter, is nevertheless far from perfunctory. The remarkable length of the springy main theme and its rollicking offshoots immediately suggests that the music will last just as long as it needs to, and so it does. The coda, said Tovey, is "triumphant," though to call it radiant and exhilarating might be even more apt.
© Conrad Wilson
- conductor
- violin
If you like your music melodious and big-hearted, with more than a hint of folk influence, Brahms’ Serenades are for you. They include some of his most immediately appealing music. Fischer deftly complements the First Serenade with works by the two composers who strongly influenced Brahms at the time of its writing.
Related audio clip
Brahms Serenade No 1 n D major Op 11 Rondo Allegro
Sir Charles Mackerras conducts the SCO in Brahms' Serenade No 1 in D major Op 11. The recording also features the composer's Serenade No 2 in A major, Op 16.
Zacharias and Schubert
- Schubert
Programme note
Franz Peter Schubert (1797-1828)
Piano Sonata in D Major, D850 (1825)Moderato
Andante poco moto
Scherzo: Allegro vivace
Rondo: Allegro vivace
The first thing to say about Schubert’s A minor Sonata, D845, is that it is the third of three sonatas he composed in that key, its predecessors being the adolescent D537 dating from 1817 and the brooding D784 of 1823. Yet Schubert’s development during his short life was never a straight line. “Sonata, what is your meaning?” is a question that has been asked of at least two of these works, whose similarities, starting with their shared key, are less striking than their differences. Their connections with Schubert the effortless spinner of songs, or with the so-called “cosy” Schubert of the genial dances and marches, today seem tenuous.Describing the material of Schubert’s symphonies and piano sonatas as “songlike” is something people still do, often unnecessarily. Much of the A minor Sonata, D845, is conspicuously not songlike at all. The music is motivic rather than melodic, and once you begin to hear Schubert in terms of motifs the melodies come second. In this respect, 1825 marked one of his turning points. It was the year of the Great C major Symphony, of the big D major and G major piano sonatas, and of the extended songs, such as those inspired by Scott’s Lady of the Lake. Extended forms were increasingly becoming a Schubert preoccupation, particularly in his chamber music. The A minor Sonata, it’s true, begins like a song without words, somewhat hesitant and skeletal in outline, and somewhat uncertain in mood. But soon this leads to a different sort of melody, something more chordal and pummelling, incorporating a series of repeated notes that rise a step or two but keep falling back on themselves. It is more of a rhythm than a theme, just as is the start of the allegro section of the first movement of the Great C major Symphony. The conflict between the sonata’s forlorn opening and the pounding of what comes next grows more pronounced as the music proceeds through various changes of key, until the pounding is all we are left with before the movement comes to its close with heavy chords.
The slow movement, a set of variations on a quiet tune with amen-like tendencies, mounts in tension, complexity and speed as it progresses. The scherzo is flaring and disjointed, its central trio section less lilting than we expect from Schubert at this point in a work. It leads to a grim, dark finale laden with what one authority has described as catastrophic grandeur - a fitting end, therefore, to what has gone before.
© Conrad Wilson
- Schubert
Programme note
Franz Peter Schubert (1797-1828)
Symphony No 9 in C major, D944 ‘The Great’ (1825-6)Andante – Allegro ma non troppo
Andante con moto
Scherzo: Allegro vivace
Allegro vivace
There was a time when Schubert’s Great C major symphony, as we have come to call it, was deemed unplayable. Performers were daunted not merely by what Schumann described as its "heavenly lengths," but also by the energy needed to keep the music airborne. Mendelssohn, who conducted its premiere in Leipzig a decade after Schubert’s death, prudently chose to abbreviate it. When he later took it to London, the players, faced with the equestrian string figuration in the finale, shamefully laughed him off the platform, thereby delaying its first British performance for another twelve years. Other orchestras proved equally scornful. Hornists – who in this work are the immediate recipients of one of Schubert’s greatest themes – dismissed it as tuneless.Yet the Great C major is nothing if not melodious, as well as masterly in its structural sweep. The entire work displays a discernibly progressive approach to symphonic form. The opening horn theme is spacious enough to occupy the whole slow introduction, just as the scherzo’s central trio section consists of a vast single melody, gloriously unfurled.
Out of the first movement's slow introduction springs an emphatically rhythmic, jerky theme, pummelling rather than songlike, followed by a swerve from major to minor for a quieter, more lyrical second subject on the woodwind. The momentum is never disrupted. The use of pianissimo trombones is a famous example of Schubert’s flair for instrumental colouring. From time to time the music explodes with vitality, nowhere more so than in the coda, in quicker tempo, which brings back the opening horn theme in exhilaratingly high relief.
The andante, with its wistful oboe theme, anticipates the trudging pulse of Schubert’s Winterreise cycle. Abrupt trombone chords add an air of impatience and the whole fabric of the movement is later torn apart by the unexpected violence of its climax – an example of what has been called Schubert’s "volcanic temper," a side of the composer only recently identified. After a stunned silence and some hesitant pizzicati, the flow of the music uneasily resumes.
The succeeding scherzo is a Viennese dance on a grand scale, relentless in its spinning energy and stamping rhythms, shot through with wisps of melody that keep getting thrust aside by the ceaseless motion. The finale sustains the momentum, galloping like a ride to the abyss. Not even the serene woodwind theme that forms the second subject provides respite, because the strings keep the rhythm constantly on the boil. A stupendous coda, filled with huge anvil strokes, brings the symphony to a fitting close.
© Conrad Wilson
- conductor/piano
Christian Zacharias could well be the only musician who could give this concert. One of the greatest living Schubertians, he is at the piano for the sonata and on the podium for the symphony. It’s a deeply enjoyable combination: Schubert up close and personal (he himself must have played this sonata), and also Schubert the visionary: the symphony was never heard in his lifetime because everyone believed it was too difficult to play. History tells a different tale.
Related audio clip
Schubert Symphony No. 9, D944, The Great - Finale - Allegro vivace - excerpt
Sir Charles Mackerras directs the SCO in Schubert's Symphony No 9. D944 'The Great'. Buy from the SCO Online Shop
Zacharias and Schubert
- Schubert
Programme note
Franz Peter Schubert (1797-1828)
Piano Sonata in D Major, D850 (1825)Moderato
Andante poco moto
Scherzo: Allegro vivace
Rondo: Allegro vivace
The first thing to say about Schubert’s A minor Sonata, D845, is that it is the third of three sonatas he composed in that key, its predecessors being the adolescent D537 dating from 1817 and the brooding D784 of 1823. Yet Schubert’s development during his short life was never a straight line. “Sonata, what is your meaning?” is a question that has been asked of at least two of these works, whose similarities, starting with their shared key, are less striking than their differences. Their connections with Schubert the effortless spinner of songs, or with the so-called “cosy” Schubert of the genial dances and marches, today seem tenuous.Describing the material of Schubert’s symphonies and piano sonatas as “songlike” is something people still do, often unnecessarily. Much of the A minor Sonata, D845, is conspicuously not songlike at all. The music is motivic rather than melodic, and once you begin to hear Schubert in terms of motifs the melodies come second. In this respect, 1825 marked one of his turning points. It was the year of the Great C major Symphony, of the big D major and G major piano sonatas, and of the extended songs, such as those inspired by Scott’s Lady of the Lake. Extended forms were increasingly becoming a Schubert preoccupation, particularly in his chamber music. The A minor Sonata, it’s true, begins like a song without words, somewhat hesitant and skeletal in outline, and somewhat uncertain in mood. But soon this leads to a different sort of melody, something more chordal and pummelling, incorporating a series of repeated notes that rise a step or two but keep falling back on themselves. It is more of a rhythm than a theme, just as is the start of the allegro section of the first movement of the Great C major Symphony. The conflict between the sonata’s forlorn opening and the pounding of what comes next grows more pronounced as the music proceeds through various changes of key, until the pounding is all we are left with before the movement comes to its close with heavy chords.
The slow movement, a set of variations on a quiet tune with amen-like tendencies, mounts in tension, complexity and speed as it progresses. The scherzo is flaring and disjointed, its central trio section less lilting than we expect from Schubert at this point in a work. It leads to a grim, dark finale laden with what one authority has described as catastrophic grandeur - a fitting end, therefore, to what has gone before.
© Conrad Wilson
- Schubert
Programme note
Franz Peter Schubert (1797-1828)
Symphony No 9 in C major, D944 ‘The Great’ (1825-6)Andante – Allegro ma non troppo
Andante con moto
Scherzo: Allegro vivace
Allegro vivace
There was a time when Schubert’s Great C major symphony, as we have come to call it, was deemed unplayable. Performers were daunted not merely by what Schumann described as its "heavenly lengths," but also by the energy needed to keep the music airborne. Mendelssohn, who conducted its premiere in Leipzig a decade after Schubert’s death, prudently chose to abbreviate it. When he later took it to London, the players, faced with the equestrian string figuration in the finale, shamefully laughed him off the platform, thereby delaying its first British performance for another twelve years. Other orchestras proved equally scornful. Hornists – who in this work are the immediate recipients of one of Schubert’s greatest themes – dismissed it as tuneless.Yet the Great C major is nothing if not melodious, as well as masterly in its structural sweep. The entire work displays a discernibly progressive approach to symphonic form. The opening horn theme is spacious enough to occupy the whole slow introduction, just as the scherzo’s central trio section consists of a vast single melody, gloriously unfurled.
Out of the first movement's slow introduction springs an emphatically rhythmic, jerky theme, pummelling rather than songlike, followed by a swerve from major to minor for a quieter, more lyrical second subject on the woodwind. The momentum is never disrupted. The use of pianissimo trombones is a famous example of Schubert’s flair for instrumental colouring. From time to time the music explodes with vitality, nowhere more so than in the coda, in quicker tempo, which brings back the opening horn theme in exhilaratingly high relief.
The andante, with its wistful oboe theme, anticipates the trudging pulse of Schubert’s Winterreise cycle. Abrupt trombone chords add an air of impatience and the whole fabric of the movement is later torn apart by the unexpected violence of its climax – an example of what has been called Schubert’s "volcanic temper," a side of the composer only recently identified. After a stunned silence and some hesitant pizzicati, the flow of the music uneasily resumes.
The succeeding scherzo is a Viennese dance on a grand scale, relentless in its spinning energy and stamping rhythms, shot through with wisps of melody that keep getting thrust aside by the ceaseless motion. The finale sustains the momentum, galloping like a ride to the abyss. Not even the serene woodwind theme that forms the second subject provides respite, because the strings keep the rhythm constantly on the boil. A stupendous coda, filled with huge anvil strokes, brings the symphony to a fitting close.
© Conrad Wilson
- conductor/piano
Christian Zacharias could well be the only musician who could give this concert. One of the greatest living Schubertians, he is at the piano for the sonata and on the podium for the symphony. It’s a deeply enjoyable combination: Schubert up close and personal (he himself must have played this sonata), and also Schubert the visionary: the symphony was never heard in his lifetime because everyone believed it was too difficult to play. History tells a different tale.
Related audio clip
Schubert Symphony No. 9, D944, The Great - Finale - Allegro vivace - excerpt
Sir Charles Mackerras directs the SCO in Schubert's Symphony No 9. D944 'The Great'. Buy from the SCO Online Shop
Zacharias and Schubert
- Schubert
Programme note
Franz Peter Schubert (1797-1828)
Piano Sonata in D Major, D850 (1825)Moderato
Andante poco moto
Scherzo: Allegro vivace
Rondo: Allegro vivace
The first thing to say about Schubert’s A minor Sonata, D845, is that it is the third of three sonatas he composed in that key, its predecessors being the adolescent D537 dating from 1817 and the brooding D784 of 1823. Yet Schubert’s development during his short life was never a straight line. “Sonata, what is your meaning?” is a question that has been asked of at least two of these works, whose similarities, starting with their shared key, are less striking than their differences. Their connections with Schubert the effortless spinner of songs, or with the so-called “cosy” Schubert of the genial dances and marches, today seem tenuous.Describing the material of Schubert’s symphonies and piano sonatas as “songlike” is something people still do, often unnecessarily. Much of the A minor Sonata, D845, is conspicuously not songlike at all. The music is motivic rather than melodic, and once you begin to hear Schubert in terms of motifs the melodies come second. In this respect, 1825 marked one of his turning points. It was the year of the Great C major Symphony, of the big D major and G major piano sonatas, and of the extended songs, such as those inspired by Scott’s Lady of the Lake. Extended forms were increasingly becoming a Schubert preoccupation, particularly in his chamber music. The A minor Sonata, it’s true, begins like a song without words, somewhat hesitant and skeletal in outline, and somewhat uncertain in mood. But soon this leads to a different sort of melody, something more chordal and pummelling, incorporating a series of repeated notes that rise a step or two but keep falling back on themselves. It is more of a rhythm than a theme, just as is the start of the allegro section of the first movement of the Great C major Symphony. The conflict between the sonata’s forlorn opening and the pounding of what comes next grows more pronounced as the music proceeds through various changes of key, until the pounding is all we are left with before the movement comes to its close with heavy chords.
The slow movement, a set of variations on a quiet tune with amen-like tendencies, mounts in tension, complexity and speed as it progresses. The scherzo is flaring and disjointed, its central trio section less lilting than we expect from Schubert at this point in a work. It leads to a grim, dark finale laden with what one authority has described as catastrophic grandeur - a fitting end, therefore, to what has gone before.
© Conrad Wilson
- Schubert
Programme note
Franz Peter Schubert (1797-1828)
Symphony No 9 in C major, D944 ‘The Great’ (1825-6)Andante – Allegro ma non troppo
Andante con moto
Scherzo: Allegro vivace
Allegro vivace
There was a time when Schubert’s Great C major symphony, as we have come to call it, was deemed unplayable. Performers were daunted not merely by what Schumann described as its "heavenly lengths," but also by the energy needed to keep the music airborne. Mendelssohn, who conducted its premiere in Leipzig a decade after Schubert’s death, prudently chose to abbreviate it. When he later took it to London, the players, faced with the equestrian string figuration in the finale, shamefully laughed him off the platform, thereby delaying its first British performance for another twelve years. Other orchestras proved equally scornful. Hornists – who in this work are the immediate recipients of one of Schubert’s greatest themes – dismissed it as tuneless.Yet the Great C major is nothing if not melodious, as well as masterly in its structural sweep. The entire work displays a discernibly progressive approach to symphonic form. The opening horn theme is spacious enough to occupy the whole slow introduction, just as the scherzo’s central trio section consists of a vast single melody, gloriously unfurled.
Out of the first movement's slow introduction springs an emphatically rhythmic, jerky theme, pummelling rather than songlike, followed by a swerve from major to minor for a quieter, more lyrical second subject on the woodwind. The momentum is never disrupted. The use of pianissimo trombones is a famous example of Schubert’s flair for instrumental colouring. From time to time the music explodes with vitality, nowhere more so than in the coda, in quicker tempo, which brings back the opening horn theme in exhilaratingly high relief.
The andante, with its wistful oboe theme, anticipates the trudging pulse of Schubert’s Winterreise cycle. Abrupt trombone chords add an air of impatience and the whole fabric of the movement is later torn apart by the unexpected violence of its climax – an example of what has been called Schubert’s "volcanic temper," a side of the composer only recently identified. After a stunned silence and some hesitant pizzicati, the flow of the music uneasily resumes.
The succeeding scherzo is a Viennese dance on a grand scale, relentless in its spinning energy and stamping rhythms, shot through with wisps of melody that keep getting thrust aside by the ceaseless motion. The finale sustains the momentum, galloping like a ride to the abyss. Not even the serene woodwind theme that forms the second subject provides respite, because the strings keep the rhythm constantly on the boil. A stupendous coda, filled with huge anvil strokes, brings the symphony to a fitting close.
© Conrad Wilson
- conductor/piano
Christian Zacharias could well be the only musician who could give this concert. One of the greatest living Schubertians, he is at the piano for the sonata and on the podium for the symphony. It’s a deeply enjoyable combination: Schubert up close and personal (he himself must have played this sonata), and also Schubert the visionary: the symphony was never heard in his lifetime because everyone believed it was too difficult to play. History tells a different tale.
Related audio clip
Schubert Symphony No. 9, D944, The Great - Finale - Allegro vivace - excerpt
Sir Charles Mackerras directs the SCO in Schubert's Symphony No 9. D944 'The Great'. Buy from the SCO Online Shop
Pastoral Symphony
- Dvořák
Programme note
Antonín Dvořák (1841–1904)
From Ten Legends, Op 59:No 1 in D minor: Allegretto
No 2 in G major: Molto moderato
No 3 in G minor: Allegretto giusto – Andante – Allegretto giusto
No 8 in F major: Un poco allegretto e grazioso
No 10 in B flat minor and major: AndanteDvořák gained his first international success in the years 1876-78, with the Moravian Duets – recommended by Brahms to his publisher Simrock – and then with the three Slavonic Rhapsodies and the first set of Slavonic Dances. Not long afterwards, in 1881, came a follow-up in the shape of the Ten Legends, again based on melodies which, while original, are of distinctly Slavonic cast. Sometimes these pieces seems to hint at an underlying narrative, and scholars have suggested that some of the themes may have been suggested by the rhythm of key lines in KJ Erben’s collection of folk-inspired ballads. But if Dvořák did have specific Czech legends in mind, he kept the information to himself – so we are left only with a general feeling of what the composer’s biographer Jarmil Burghauser called “forgotten stories of long-past, patriarchal times”.
Like the Slavonic Dances, the Legends were first written for piano duet and then orchestrated, with all Dvořák’s habitual skill and inventiveness. The strings are as ever the foundation of the score, with sections often divided into two parts to provide extra shades of colour. The woodwind – two each of flutes, oboes, clarinets and bassoons – all have moments of prominence as carriers of the melody, singly or in pairs. Dvořák’s use of four horns rather than two offers the possibility of rich harmonic filling-in in the middle of the orchestral texture, though the first horn is also used in its higher register for some striking solos. This basic orchestra is slightly augmented in some individual numbers – in tonight’s selection by timpani in No 1 and a triangle in No 3.
The first Legend sets off with a tune characterised by sturdy dance rhythms and strong dynamic contrasts; this all but disappears from the later stages of the piece, however, and the last word goes to the smooth melody of the middle section. The second piece has a graceful opening theme in three-bar phrases, a volatile middle section with a good deal of development, and a brief reprise leading to a calm ending. The third comes closer to the model of the Slavonic Dances, not only in its initial lithe dance rhythms, but also in its clear ternary (A–B–A) construction around a slower middle section (largely in five-bar phrases). No 8 begins in a gentle pastoral 6/8 time, but soon becomes more restless; the middle section includes passages in the cross-rhythms of the Czech furiant, anticipating the scherzo of Dvořák’s Seventh Symphony of 1884-85, as well as a somewhat Beethovenian melody which returns on horn in the coda. The final Legend alternates between an expressive minor-key melody, again soon pushing forward, and a calmer major-key idea; the coda reconciles the two with a delicate new major-key version of the opening theme, and a tinge of the minor just before the quiet ending.
Anthony Burton © 2010
- Ligeti
Programme note
György Ligeti (1923-2006)
Piano Concerto (1985-8)When György Ligeti died in 2006 aged 83, the world lost a musical genius. Despite Stalinist era restrictions, which put a brake on experimention in Eastern Europe, Ligeti emerged, with Lutoslawski, Penderecki and Kurtág, as a composer who forged his own language and influenced following generations.
Having lost members of his family in the Holocaust, Ligeti found it even more impossible to contemplate composing in Hungary after the 1956 crackdown. Like others, he fled to Vienna, and then worked with Stockhausen in Cologne and lectured in Germany (especially Hamburg) and Scandinavia.
His important works began appearing in the late 1950s, and were followed by a flurry of 1960s pieces that are already classics, leading on to the Chamber Concerto, Violin Concerto and Ramifications.
Tonight’s Piano Concerto, premiered in Graz and Vienna, belongs to a slightly later period. This fertile phase began after his opera Le Grand Macabre with the Horn Trio (1982). It was characterised less by massed blocks of sound and hyperactive clusterings (a feature he shared with Lutoslawski) and more by renewed emphasis on music’s traditional elements, including melody. The polytonality or atonality of Ligeti’s earlier works gave way to more of a traditional sense of key.
Ligeti’s substantial orchestra here include three notable features: translucent effects from using just single woodwind; a mind-boggling array of percussion, including crotales, tom-toms, a guiro (an Afro-American notched gourd), flexatone and chromonica, designed for one or two percussionists; and the use of an alto Ocarina, a hauntingly resonating, flute-like Central American instrument.
The concerto, which Ligeti described as "my most complex and difficult score so far" (20 years on, you needn’t be put off by that now!), is in five imaginitively contrasted movements, lasting around four minutes each apart from the slow Lento. Rather than functioning as a traditional concerto instrument, the piano joins in the textures, although not without a few highly effective cadenza-like passages.
The opening Vivace begins mechanically like an excitable perpetuo moto, with audible shades of Bartók. Urgent patterns remind us that Ligeti was interested with the repetitions of Central African music: the result is frenetic yet also attractive. Wood block, temple block and (later) flute-led woodwind join in with abandon: like Ravel’s Piano Concerto or Bolero, it sounds like the apotheosis of the dance, till it all suddenly evaporates.
Linked by a long-held note in double bass, the Lento’s desolate wailings of woodwind, especially ocarina, conjure an atmospheric woodland feeling. Is it owls or wolves, serene or threatening? The piano muses on an important descending pattern in low register; eerie harmonics and blaring brass get added. A shrill climax is reached and a short, uplifting trumpet solo intervenes before final stasis is reached over ocarina and lingering low brass.
Next the soloist intones a cantabile ‘song’ over a woodwind moto perpetuo. Here whole-tone patterns (related to the previous movement’s diatonic version) recall not just Debussy but also the sonorities of Tippett’s piano concerto. Later Bartók presides again (think of The Wooden Prince); and from then on, it’s all helter-skelter till the brief subsidence.
Although marked Allegro, the fourth section is in effect a second slow movement, punctuated by mysterious silences: Messiaen’s chirpy Catalogue des Oiseaux was maybe an influence; while later woodwind and brass eloboration again suggest the wilder decorative filigree of medieval music. The Finale’s ‘luminoso’ again evokes Debussy: despite the activity, the material is fragrant, with saxophone making its own contributions, and piano and brass increasingly violent and insistent before a mini-cadenza and coda-like envoi from everyone heralds the concerto’s sudden, clacking farewell.
© Roderic Dunnet
- Beethoven
Programme note
Ludwig van Beethoven (1770–1827)
Symphony No 6 in F, Op 68, 'Pastoral' (1807-08)Allegro ma non troppo - The awakening of happy feelings on arriving in the country
Andante molto moto - By the brook
Allegro - The joyful gathering of country folk
Allegro - Thunderstorm
Allegretto - Shepherds' thanksgiving after the stormComposers have been evoking nature in music as long as they have been writing it down — and probably well before that. Birds, storms, streams and sunrises are a common feature of many 18th-century works, most famously (now, at least) in Vivaldi’s Four Seasons. So this piece, written in 1807-08 looked back to a grand tradition, but at the same time was one of the most original and influential works of the 19th century. It is hard to imagine the nature pictures of Berlioz, Mendelssohn, Wagner, and Strauss without it.
The debate about how important it is too know the ‘story’ behind the music will never end. Beethoven himself was conflicted. This is the only one of his symphonies that follows an explicit program. "Pastoral Symphony, or Recollections of Country Life," he wrote at the head of the score, and each movement has its own tale to tell. Yet, in the sketches for the piece he wrote, "All painting in instrumental music is lost if it is pushed too far” and “Anyone with a notion of country life can discern for himself the composer’s intentions without many titles. . . . The whole will be recognized as a matter more of feeling than of painting in sounds." But it is hard not to think he is protesting too much. He clearly enjoyed imitating birdsong in the second movement (nightingale, cuckoo and quail). And his buffoonish village band is affectionately portrayed in the third movement: who knows which band inspired this hilarious vignette, or how much they drank before they played!
Tchaikovsky used to insist that Beethoven’s Fifth has just as obvious a story as the Pastoral though it is not put into words. Certainly, there are striking similarities between the two pieces. Both were first heard in the same enormously long concert in 1808. The audience who endured the many hours in a cold theatre could have been forgiven for believing Beethoven had created an altogether new form, so dramatically do these pieces differ from any symphony that they may have heard previously. Notably, both symphonies close with a linked sequence of movements, huge expanses of sound in which Beethoven explores startling transitions and expressive effects. He also asks for an unusually large orchestra in both symphonies, including trombones, piccolo and contrabassoon – none of which were standard for the time. Yet, in both pieces he holds these extra instruments in reserve until dramatic points late in the piece. The differences between the works are equally striking. The kinetic energy that crackles through the opening bars of the Fifth does not let up until the close; the question posed in its opening bars is not truly answered until the finale, some 20 minutes later. In the Sixth, by contrast, there is hardly a straight line. Harmony is soft, its arguments deceptively discursive. Beethoven dwells on picturesque details and allows lovely moments to flower, seemingly without concern for the overall picture. At least that is the illusion Beethoven creates. More than any other symphony of his, this offers repose.
© Svend Brown
- conductor
- piano
Ticciati’s first Beethoven with the SCO shares the programme with Dvořák’s immensely likeable Legends and a 20th century classic by one of the greatest composers of our time. Ligeti is very unusual in that he wears his sense of humour on his sleeve. Even in his weightiest work there is room for a clownish moment or quirky feature. Here he requires slide-whistle, ocarina and kazoo and sets the pianist one of the most virtuoso tests imaginable. Not to be missed.
Related audio clip
Beethoven Symphony No. 6 in F Major 'Pastoral' - Thunderstorm - excerpt
The Orchestra performed Beethoven's Symphonies Nos 1-8 at the 2006 Edinburgh International Festival, under Sir Charles Mackerras. The performances were recorded by Hyperion and released as a 5-disc CD box set. The Philarmonia Orchestra perform Symphony No 9. Buy from the SCO Online Shop.
Pastoral Symphony
- Dvořák
Programme note
Antonín Dvořák (1841–1904)
From Ten Legends, Op 59:No 1 in D minor: Allegretto
No 2 in G major: Molto moderato
No 3 in G minor: Allegretto giusto – Andante – Allegretto giusto
No 8 in F major: Un poco allegretto e grazioso
No 10 in B flat minor and major: AndanteDvořák gained his first international success in the years 1876-78, with the Moravian Duets – recommended by Brahms to his publisher Simrock – and then with the three Slavonic Rhapsodies and the first set of Slavonic Dances. Not long afterwards, in 1881, came a follow-up in the shape of the Ten Legends, again based on melodies which, while original, are of distinctly Slavonic cast. Sometimes these pieces seems to hint at an underlying narrative, and scholars have suggested that some of the themes may have been suggested by the rhythm of key lines in KJ Erben’s collection of folk-inspired ballads. But if Dvořák did have specific Czech legends in mind, he kept the information to himself – so we are left only with a general feeling of what the composer’s biographer Jarmil Burghauser called “forgotten stories of long-past, patriarchal times”.
Like the Slavonic Dances, the Legends were first written for piano duet and then orchestrated, with all Dvořák’s habitual skill and inventiveness. The strings are as ever the foundation of the score, with sections often divided into two parts to provide extra shades of colour. The woodwind – two each of flutes, oboes, clarinets and bassoons – all have moments of prominence as carriers of the melody, singly or in pairs. Dvořák’s use of four horns rather than two offers the possibility of rich harmonic filling-in in the middle of the orchestral texture, though the first horn is also used in its higher register for some striking solos. This basic orchestra is slightly augmented in some individual numbers – in tonight’s selection by timpani in No 1 and a triangle in No 3.
The first Legend sets off with a tune characterised by sturdy dance rhythms and strong dynamic contrasts; this all but disappears from the later stages of the piece, however, and the last word goes to the smooth melody of the middle section. The second piece has a graceful opening theme in three-bar phrases, a volatile middle section with a good deal of development, and a brief reprise leading to a calm ending. The third comes closer to the model of the Slavonic Dances, not only in its initial lithe dance rhythms, but also in its clear ternary (A–B–A) construction around a slower middle section (largely in five-bar phrases). No 8 begins in a gentle pastoral 6/8 time, but soon becomes more restless; the middle section includes passages in the cross-rhythms of the Czech furiant, anticipating the scherzo of Dvořák’s Seventh Symphony of 1884-85, as well as a somewhat Beethovenian melody which returns on horn in the coda. The final Legend alternates between an expressive minor-key melody, again soon pushing forward, and a calmer major-key idea; the coda reconciles the two with a delicate new major-key version of the opening theme, and a tinge of the minor just before the quiet ending.
Anthony Burton © 2010
- Ligeti
Programme note
György Ligeti (1923-2006)
Piano Concerto (1985-8)When György Ligeti died in 2006 aged 83, the world lost a musical genius. Despite Stalinist era restrictions, which put a brake on experimention in Eastern Europe, Ligeti emerged, with Lutoslawski, Penderecki and Kurtág, as a composer who forged his own language and influenced following generations.
Having lost members of his family in the Holocaust, Ligeti found it even more impossible to contemplate composing in Hungary after the 1956 crackdown. Like others, he fled to Vienna, and then worked with Stockhausen in Cologne and lectured in Germany (especially Hamburg) and Scandinavia.
His important works began appearing in the late 1950s, and were followed by a flurry of 1960s pieces that are already classics, leading on to the Chamber Concerto, Violin Concerto and Ramifications.
Tonight’s Piano Concerto, premiered in Graz and Vienna, belongs to a slightly later period. This fertile phase began after his opera Le Grand Macabre with the Horn Trio (1982). It was characterised less by massed blocks of sound and hyperactive clusterings (a feature he shared with Lutoslawski) and more by renewed emphasis on music’s traditional elements, including melody. The polytonality or atonality of Ligeti’s earlier works gave way to more of a traditional sense of key.
Ligeti’s substantial orchestra here include three notable features: translucent effects from using just single woodwind; a mind-boggling array of percussion, including crotales, tom-toms, a guiro (an Afro-American notched gourd), flexatone and chromonica, designed for one or two percussionists; and the use of an alto Ocarina, a hauntingly resonating, flute-like Central American instrument.
The concerto, which Ligeti described as "my most complex and difficult score so far" (20 years on, you needn’t be put off by that now!), is in five imaginitively contrasted movements, lasting around four minutes each apart from the slow Lento. Rather than functioning as a traditional concerto instrument, the piano joins in the textures, although not without a few highly effective cadenza-like passages.
The opening Vivace begins mechanically like an excitable perpetuo moto, with audible shades of Bartók. Urgent patterns remind us that Ligeti was interested with the repetitions of Central African music: the result is frenetic yet also attractive. Wood block, temple block and (later) flute-led woodwind join in with abandon: like Ravel’s Piano Concerto or Bolero, it sounds like the apotheosis of the dance, till it all suddenly evaporates.
Linked by a long-held note in double bass, the Lento’s desolate wailings of woodwind, especially ocarina, conjure an atmospheric woodland feeling. Is it owls or wolves, serene or threatening? The piano muses on an important descending pattern in low register; eerie harmonics and blaring brass get added. A shrill climax is reached and a short, uplifting trumpet solo intervenes before final stasis is reached over ocarina and lingering low brass.
Next the soloist intones a cantabile ‘song’ over a woodwind moto perpetuo. Here whole-tone patterns (related to the previous movement’s diatonic version) recall not just Debussy but also the sonorities of Tippett’s piano concerto. Later Bartók presides again (think of The Wooden Prince); and from then on, it’s all helter-skelter till the brief subsidence.
Although marked Allegro, the fourth section is in effect a second slow movement, punctuated by mysterious silences: Messiaen’s chirpy Catalogue des Oiseaux was maybe an influence; while later woodwind and brass eloboration again suggest the wilder decorative filigree of medieval music. The Finale’s ‘luminoso’ again evokes Debussy: despite the activity, the material is fragrant, with saxophone making its own contributions, and piano and brass increasingly violent and insistent before a mini-cadenza and coda-like envoi from everyone heralds the concerto’s sudden, clacking farewell.
© Roderic Dunnet
- Beethoven
Programme note
Ludwig van Beethoven (1770–1827)
Symphony No 6 in F, Op 68, 'Pastoral' (1807-08)Allegro ma non troppo - The awakening of happy feelings on arriving in the country
Andante molto moto - By the brook
Allegro - The joyful gathering of country folk
Allegro - Thunderstorm
Allegretto - Shepherds' thanksgiving after the stormComposers have been evoking nature in music as long as they have been writing it down — and probably well before that. Birds, storms, streams and sunrises are a common feature of many 18th-century works, most famously (now, at least) in Vivaldi’s Four Seasons. So this piece, written in 1807-08 looked back to a grand tradition, but at the same time was one of the most original and influential works of the 19th century. It is hard to imagine the nature pictures of Berlioz, Mendelssohn, Wagner, and Strauss without it.
The debate about how important it is too know the ‘story’ behind the music will never end. Beethoven himself was conflicted. This is the only one of his symphonies that follows an explicit program. "Pastoral Symphony, or Recollections of Country Life," he wrote at the head of the score, and each movement has its own tale to tell. Yet, in the sketches for the piece he wrote, "All painting in instrumental music is lost if it is pushed too far” and “Anyone with a notion of country life can discern for himself the composer’s intentions without many titles. . . . The whole will be recognized as a matter more of feeling than of painting in sounds." But it is hard not to think he is protesting too much. He clearly enjoyed imitating birdsong in the second movement (nightingale, cuckoo and quail). And his buffoonish village band is affectionately portrayed in the third movement: who knows which band inspired this hilarious vignette, or how much they drank before they played!
Tchaikovsky used to insist that Beethoven’s Fifth has just as obvious a story as the Pastoral though it is not put into words. Certainly, there are striking similarities between the two pieces. Both were first heard in the same enormously long concert in 1808. The audience who endured the many hours in a cold theatre could have been forgiven for believing Beethoven had created an altogether new form, so dramatically do these pieces differ from any symphony that they may have heard previously. Notably, both symphonies close with a linked sequence of movements, huge expanses of sound in which Beethoven explores startling transitions and expressive effects. He also asks for an unusually large orchestra in both symphonies, including trombones, piccolo and contrabassoon – none of which were standard for the time. Yet, in both pieces he holds these extra instruments in reserve until dramatic points late in the piece. The differences between the works are equally striking. The kinetic energy that crackles through the opening bars of the Fifth does not let up until the close; the question posed in its opening bars is not truly answered until the finale, some 20 minutes later. In the Sixth, by contrast, there is hardly a straight line. Harmony is soft, its arguments deceptively discursive. Beethoven dwells on picturesque details and allows lovely moments to flower, seemingly without concern for the overall picture. At least that is the illusion Beethoven creates. More than any other symphony of his, this offers repose.
© Svend Brown
- conductor
- piano
Ticciati’s first Beethoven with the SCO shares the programme with Dvořák’s immensely likeable Legends and a 20th century classic by one of the greatest composers of our time. Ligeti is very unusual in that he wears his sense of humour on his sleeve. Even in his weightiest work there is room for a clownish moment or quirky feature. Here he requires slide-whistle, ocarina and kazoo and sets the pianist one of the most virtuoso tests imaginable. Not to be missed.
Related audio clip
Beethoven Symphony No. 6 in F Major 'Pastoral' - Thunderstorm - excerpt
The Orchestra performed Beethoven's Symphonies Nos 1-8 at the 2006 Edinburgh International Festival, under Sir Charles Mackerras. The performances were recorded by Hyperion and released as a 5-disc CD box set. The Philarmonia Orchestra perform Symphony No 9. Buy from the SCO Online Shop.
Pastoral Symphony
- Dvořák
Programme note
Antonín Dvořák (1841–1904)
From Ten Legends, Op 59:No 1 in D minor: Allegretto
No 2 in G major: Molto moderato
No 3 in G minor: Allegretto giusto – Andante – Allegretto giusto
No 8 in F major: Un poco allegretto e grazioso
No 10 in B flat minor and major: AndanteDvořák gained his first international success in the years 1876-78, with the Moravian Duets – recommended by Brahms to his publisher Simrock – and then with the three Slavonic Rhapsodies and the first set of Slavonic Dances. Not long afterwards, in 1881, came a follow-up in the shape of the Ten Legends, again based on melodies which, while original, are of distinctly Slavonic cast. Sometimes these pieces seems to hint at an underlying narrative, and scholars have suggested that some of the themes may have been suggested by the rhythm of key lines in KJ Erben’s collection of folk-inspired ballads. But if Dvořák did have specific Czech legends in mind, he kept the information to himself – so we are left only with a general feeling of what the composer’s biographer Jarmil Burghauser called “forgotten stories of long-past, patriarchal times”.
Like the Slavonic Dances, the Legends were first written for piano duet and then orchestrated, with all Dvořák’s habitual skill and inventiveness. The strings are as ever the foundation of the score, with sections often divided into two parts to provide extra shades of colour. The woodwind – two each of flutes, oboes, clarinets and bassoons – all have moments of prominence as carriers of the melody, singly or in pairs. Dvořák’s use of four horns rather than two offers the possibility of rich harmonic filling-in in the middle of the orchestral texture, though the first horn is also used in its higher register for some striking solos. This basic orchestra is slightly augmented in some individual numbers – in tonight’s selection by timpani in No 1 and a triangle in No 3.
The first Legend sets off with a tune characterised by sturdy dance rhythms and strong dynamic contrasts; this all but disappears from the later stages of the piece, however, and the last word goes to the smooth melody of the middle section. The second piece has a graceful opening theme in three-bar phrases, a volatile middle section with a good deal of development, and a brief reprise leading to a calm ending. The third comes closer to the model of the Slavonic Dances, not only in its initial lithe dance rhythms, but also in its clear ternary (A–B–A) construction around a slower middle section (largely in five-bar phrases). No 8 begins in a gentle pastoral 6/8 time, but soon becomes more restless; the middle section includes passages in the cross-rhythms of the Czech furiant, anticipating the scherzo of Dvořák’s Seventh Symphony of 1884-85, as well as a somewhat Beethovenian melody which returns on horn in the coda. The final Legend alternates between an expressive minor-key melody, again soon pushing forward, and a calmer major-key idea; the coda reconciles the two with a delicate new major-key version of the opening theme, and a tinge of the minor just before the quiet ending.
Anthony Burton © 2010
- Ligeti
Programme note
György Ligeti (1923-2006)
Piano Concerto (1985-8)When György Ligeti died in 2006 aged 83, the world lost a musical genius. Despite Stalinist era restrictions, which put a brake on experimention in Eastern Europe, Ligeti emerged, with Lutoslawski, Penderecki and Kurtág, as a composer who forged his own language and influenced following generations.
Having lost members of his family in the Holocaust, Ligeti found it even more impossible to contemplate composing in Hungary after the 1956 crackdown. Like others, he fled to Vienna, and then worked with Stockhausen in Cologne and lectured in Germany (especially Hamburg) and Scandinavia.
His important works began appearing in the late 1950s, and were followed by a flurry of 1960s pieces that are already classics, leading on to the Chamber Concerto, Violin Concerto and Ramifications.
Tonight’s Piano Concerto, premiered in Graz and Vienna, belongs to a slightly later period. This fertile phase began after his opera Le Grand Macabre with the Horn Trio (1982). It was characterised less by massed blocks of sound and hyperactive clusterings (a feature he shared with Lutoslawski) and more by renewed emphasis on music’s traditional elements, including melody. The polytonality or atonality of Ligeti’s earlier works gave way to more of a traditional sense of key.
Ligeti’s substantial orchestra here include three notable features: translucent effects from using just single woodwind; a mind-boggling array of percussion, including crotales, tom-toms, a guiro (an Afro-American notched gourd), flexatone and chromonica, designed for one or two percussionists; and the use of an alto Ocarina, a hauntingly resonating, flute-like Central American instrument.
The concerto, which Ligeti described as "my most complex and difficult score so far" (20 years on, you needn’t be put off by that now!), is in five imaginitively contrasted movements, lasting around four minutes each apart from the slow Lento. Rather than functioning as a traditional concerto instrument, the piano joins in the textures, although not without a few highly effective cadenza-like passages.
The opening Vivace begins mechanically like an excitable perpetuo moto, with audible shades of Bartók. Urgent patterns remind us that Ligeti was interested with the repetitions of Central African music: the result is frenetic yet also attractive. Wood block, temple block and (later) flute-led woodwind join in with abandon: like Ravel’s Piano Concerto or Bolero, it sounds like the apotheosis of the dance, till it all suddenly evaporates.
Linked by a long-held note in double bass, the Lento’s desolate wailings of woodwind, especially ocarina, conjure an atmospheric woodland feeling. Is it owls or wolves, serene or threatening? The piano muses on an important descending pattern in low register; eerie harmonics and blaring brass get added. A shrill climax is reached and a short, uplifting trumpet solo intervenes before final stasis is reached over ocarina and lingering low brass.
Next the soloist intones a cantabile ‘song’ over a woodwind moto perpetuo. Here whole-tone patterns (related to the previous movement’s diatonic version) recall not just Debussy but also the sonorities of Tippett’s piano concerto. Later Bartók presides again (think of The Wooden Prince); and from then on, it’s all helter-skelter till the brief subsidence.
Although marked Allegro, the fourth section is in effect a second slow movement, punctuated by mysterious silences: Messiaen’s chirpy Catalogue des Oiseaux was maybe an influence; while later woodwind and brass eloboration again suggest the wilder decorative filigree of medieval music. The Finale’s ‘luminoso’ again evokes Debussy: despite the activity, the material is fragrant, with saxophone making its own contributions, and piano and brass increasingly violent and insistent before a mini-cadenza and coda-like envoi from everyone heralds the concerto’s sudden, clacking farewell.
© Roderic Dunnet
- Beethoven
Programme note
Ludwig van Beethoven (1770–1827)
Symphony No 6 in F, Op 68, 'Pastoral' (1807-08)Allegro ma non troppo - The awakening of happy feelings on arriving in the country
Andante molto moto - By the brook
Allegro - The joyful gathering of country folk
Allegro - Thunderstorm
Allegretto - Shepherds' thanksgiving after the stormComposers have been evoking nature in music as long as they have been writing it down — and probably well before that. Birds, storms, streams and sunrises are a common feature of many 18th-century works, most famously (now, at least) in Vivaldi’s Four Seasons. So this piece, written in 1807-08 looked back to a grand tradition, but at the same time was one of the most original and influential works of the 19th century. It is hard to imagine the nature pictures of Berlioz, Mendelssohn, Wagner, and Strauss without it.
The debate about how important it is too know the ‘story’ behind the music will never end. Beethoven himself was conflicted. This is the only one of his symphonies that follows an explicit program. "Pastoral Symphony, or Recollections of Country Life," he wrote at the head of the score, and each movement has its own tale to tell. Yet, in the sketches for the piece he wrote, "All painting in instrumental music is lost if it is pushed too far” and “Anyone with a notion of country life can discern for himself the composer’s intentions without many titles. . . . The whole will be recognized as a matter more of feeling than of painting in sounds." But it is hard not to think he is protesting too much. He clearly enjoyed imitating birdsong in the second movement (nightingale, cuckoo and quail). And his buffoonish village band is affectionately portrayed in the third movement: who knows which band inspired this hilarious vignette, or how much they drank before they played!
Tchaikovsky used to insist that Beethoven’s Fifth has just as obvious a story as the Pastoral though it is not put into words. Certainly, there are striking similarities between the two pieces. Both were first heard in the same enormously long concert in 1808. The audience who endured the many hours in a cold theatre could have been forgiven for believing Beethoven had created an altogether new form, so dramatically do these pieces differ from any symphony that they may have heard previously. Notably, both symphonies close with a linked sequence of movements, huge expanses of sound in which Beethoven explores startling transitions and expressive effects. He also asks for an unusually large orchestra in both symphonies, including trombones, piccolo and contrabassoon – none of which were standard for the time. Yet, in both pieces he holds these extra instruments in reserve until dramatic points late in the piece. The differences between the works are equally striking. The kinetic energy that crackles through the opening bars of the Fifth does not let up until the close; the question posed in its opening bars is not truly answered until the finale, some 20 minutes later. In the Sixth, by contrast, there is hardly a straight line. Harmony is soft, its arguments deceptively discursive. Beethoven dwells on picturesque details and allows lovely moments to flower, seemingly without concern for the overall picture. At least that is the illusion Beethoven creates. More than any other symphony of his, this offers repose.
© Svend Brown
- conductor
- piano
Ticciati’s first Beethoven with the SCO shares the programme with Dvořák’s immensely likeable Legends and a 20th century classic by one of the greatest composers of our time. Ligeti is very unusual in that he wears his sense of humour on his sleeve. Even in his weightiest work there is room for a clownish moment or quirky feature. Here he requires slide-whistle, ocarina and kazoo and sets the pianist one of the most virtuoso tests imaginable. Not to be missed..
Related audio clip
Beethoven Symphony No. 6 in F Major 'Pastoral' - Thunderstorm - excerpt
The Orchestra performed Beethoven's Symphonies Nos 1-8 at the 2006 Edinburgh International Festival, under Sir Charles Mackerras. The performances were recorded by Hyperion and released as a 5-disc CD box set. The Philarmonia Orchestra perform Symphony No 9. Buy from the SCO Online Shop.
Symphonies of the North
- Ligeti
Programme note
György Ligeti (1923-2006)
Concerto Românesc (1951)What is so fascinating about this rip-roaring early work is that it reveals Ligeti composing in a vein that contrasts starkly with the avant garde processes he was to evolve during the late 1950s and 1960s, and which were to play such an important role in the evolution of new music in the second half of the Twentieth Century. One might compare Lutoslawski’s early Lacrymosa, which is indebted to his Polish predecessor Szymanowski in much the same way that Ligeti here honours the memory of Bela Bartók. Likewise Ligeti’s piano music of the early 1950s pays homage to Bartók's collection Mikrokosmos.
The world Ligeti so vividly evokes here is that of Romanian folk music. The western part of modern Romania (Ligeti was born in Dicsöszentmárton – Romanian Târnäveni - and educated at the Conservatoire in Cluj, or in Hungarian, Kolozsvár), was for centuries a part of the Hungarian empire, while the East (Wallachia, Moldavia and Bessarabia) enjoyed some measure of independence. Indeed, it may be slightly misleading to speak of any single type of ‘folk music’ in this region, for each different aria – Romanian Transylvania, The Hungarian Palic country, Hungary’s northern borderlands abutting Slovakia and the Ukraine, and the Hungarian Puszta (the horse-rearing plains to the south, lying between the rivers Danube and Tisza) all had their own distinctive folk melodies.
Amongst his childhood experiences in his native Transylvania (now north west Romania) Ligeti remembered a wild band of musicians wearing animal masks bursting its way into the family courtyard and playing lively, dissonant folk tunes on violin and bagpipes; and even earlier, as a small boy of three, being fascinated when he encountered, in the Carpathian Mountains, a player of the alpine horn (called a bucium, after the Latin).
Ligeti’s Concert Românesc opens with a reflective Andantino or Larghetto, launched shyly by upper then lower strings, followed by woodwind, whose sad modal harmonies and open fifths suggest a medieval underlay (although there are also surprising affinities with Copland’s treatment of Appalachian folk music!). The bustling Allegro Vivace is very much in the spirit of Bartók’s thrusting Romanian Dances: piccolo and clarinet both have their say, and there’s a cheerful echo of that folk violin Ligeti encountered as a boy. The Adagio, embracing sad horn calls and a plaintive, oriental-hued cor anglais melody, just briefly blossoms, conjuring up memories of Kodály’s full-blooded Hungarian dance suites, before dying away in eerie spirals of intertwining woodwind.
The final movement, Molto vivace, is the longest, and here we find Ligeti at last spreading his composer’s wings and scampering into the more sophisticated world of Bartók’s The Wooden Prince or The Miraculous Mandarin: the dance element is heavily syncopated, with string and woodwind soloists alternately assuming the lead, rather like expressive jazz musicians. But there’s a surprise. Near the close, the dance just won’t let go: there is an exciting and utterly unexpected coda, in which the orchestra fails to muffle the high-riding solo violin, and we hear the music (amid mysterious horn calls) wander off into the distance, almost as if it were evanescing or being reabsorbed into the atmosphere, as electricity - before it is silenced by an abrupt farewell.
© Roderic Dunnett
- Tüür
Programme note
Erkki-Sven Tüür (b.1959)
Symphony No 8 world premiereSCO commission with funding from the Scottish Government.
I composed the Eighth Symphony at the suggestion of my good friend Olari Elts; it was commissioned by the Scottish Chamber Orchestra. Considering the instrumentation of the orchestra (double woodwinds, 2 trumpets, two French horns, one percussionist and strings) it almost seems like a chamber symphony. Indeed, there are several chamber-like passages, but the intense tectonic shifts between sound masses are equally important. Thus, I simply added it to the list of my symphonies without granting it a separate “chamber symphony” status.
One of the ideas guiding the internal psychological development logic of this symphony might be the creation of structure and then bringing it to life. In other words, the initial dominating objective and detached observation gradually grows more subjective and, hopefully, more involved and passionate.
As for musical form, the Eighth Symphony is divided into three movements, all of them performed attacca.
The key motif (1-1-1) X, which forms the foundation for musical development throughout the composition, consists of three ascending minor second intervals with a ‘knocking’ rhythm. This is followed by a micro-polyphonic ‘sound cloud’, Y based on the same intervals, which is interrupted by the next ‘knocking’. These two elements are similar in terms of intervals, but opposites in terms of character and rhythm, evolving into contrasting realms of sound. Everything that ensues is an alternation of focus between X and Y. The first movement, in turn, consists of three parts. The first part is fast, intense, and plays with shifts in various types of texture. The interval range gradually expands, introducing the major second, then the minor third, major third, etc. (1—2—3—4 etc).
This so-called ‘expansion’ also becomes a key principle for the development of linear processes throughout the whole symphony. The second part of the first movement is chamber-like music enriched with several intertwining solo passages. This zooms in on the world represented by Y. The third part returns to the motifs originating from X, but much more fiercely.
The second movement begins with a complete standstill, while taking the developments of Y under even greater scrutiny. Unlike the beginning of the first movement, this section is dominated by descending elements. The initially frozen world begins to ‘warm up’ slowly; at some point, the melodic line that evolves from yet another intervallic expansion starts to resemble archaic Estonian folk songs.
The third movement presents somewhat surreal (dance-like!) surprises that culminate into co-functionality between X and Y, whereas the three-note motifs performed by strings have undergone a tremendous expansion compared to their starting point.
The constant sense of ‘being on the road’, organic development and fluidity is crucial for this music. Taking note of the brief description above is optional, not obligatory. Trust your intuition, sharpen your attention and let the energy springing from the music speak to you. The best approach I can recommend is prejudice-free listening. Thus, everyone can create their very own unique story while listening to this music.
Erkki-Sven Tüür
(Translation from Estonian Pirjo Püvi)
- Sibelius
Programme note
Jean Sibelius (1865-1957)
Symphony No 3 in C, Op 52 (1907)Allegro moderato
Andantino con moto, quasi allegretto
Moderato – allegro (ma non tanto) - allegroWith the Third, Sibelius’ symphonic thinking finally turned the corner towards which his music had been moving during the first years of the twentieth century. His Second Symphony, of 1901-2, was a big expansive work in the romantic-nationalist mould. But even here there were signs of a more classical approach to symphonic construction. In its tautness and concision the Third Symphony confirms the new emphasis and lays out the ground for later developments.
It started to take shape in Sibelius’ mind in 1904. He began serious work on it in September, but he then appears to have diverted his attention to other projects. By December 1906 he was fully immersed in the symphony again, writing to his publisher “my whole being is consumed by it.” Even so, he was unable to finish the score in time for the planned first performance, which he was to have conducted in March 1907 in London at the invitation of the Royal Philharmonic Society. Instead, the premiere was given in Helsinki in September. Perhaps by way of compensation, Sibelius recorded a link with this country by dedicating the symphony to the composer Granville Bantock. Bantock had been one of the first British musicians to champion Sibelius’s work, and was his generous host when he made his first visit to this country in 1905.
With its lack of any kind of introduction, the contrast between the Third and the first two symphonies is apparent immediately. It sets off with a crisp, energetic theme on the cellos and basses with no preliminary scene-setting or, to start with, supporting harmonies. Its sharp melodic and rhythmic outline launches the symphony with a confidence and sense of purpose that has no need of attention-grabbing rhetoric. The rather melancholy cello theme that emerges later seems to be constantly turning in on itself, but it eventually gets swept up into the music’s forward-driving energy. Suddenly, a mysterious string passage leads us into a half-lit region of soft horn chords and solo woodwind figures. But the initial energy is still there, mainly in the strings, quietly driving the music forward to the return of the opening theme, which is almost submerged in the movement’s big sonorous climax.
The second movement has the deceptive air of a light-weight intermezzo between the two outer movements. Its gently ruminative, rhythmically ambiguous theme (are there two beats in the bar or three?) is both melancholy and playful at the same time. An accelerating passage for pizzicato strings prompts a brief flurry of more focussed activity, before the opening music returns to close the movement.
It is the third movement, a scherzo that gradually takes on the function and character of a finale, that most clearly points the direction in which Sibelius’ concern for compact structures was to lead. It begins with what seem to be unconnected scraps of material - a brief wisp of a theme for solo oboe, an energised wavy line on the violas, a quiet but trenchant little figure on the cellos and basses. But it is out of these that Sibelius builds this extraordinarily original and impressive movement. Echoes of the second movement on flutes, then oboes, slow the music down briefly, before it picks up speed again, generating the powerful momentum that is to drive the music inexorably forward.
Eventually, hints of a new idea start appearing on the cellos, then violas. This continues to grow, becoming a broad, purposeful, striding theme that dominates the second half of the movement. The conclusion, succinct almost to the point of understatement, is all of a piece with the character of the symphony as a whole. In this connection it is worth remembering that it was in 1907, the year the Third Symphony was premiered, that Sibelius has his famous conversation with Mahler, in which he said that what he admired in symphonic form was “its style and severity...and the profound logic that created an inner connection between all the motifs.” With the Third Symphony Sibelius was firmly engaged in the task of paring his musical style down to its essentials.
© Mike Wheeler
- conductor
“My pieces are abstract dramas in sound, with characters and an extremely dynamic chain of events; they unfold in a space that is constantly shifting, expanding and contracting…” A perfect characterisation of Sibelius’ symphonies? In fact, it is Erkki-Sven Tüür speaking of his own music. What affinities and contrasts may be revealed between symphonies written a century apart, from nations separated by only a thin strip of water – Finland and Estonia?
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