Concerts & Tickets
Ticciati conducts Don Giovanni
- Mozart
Programme note
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756-1791)
Don GiovanniA concert performance of Mozart’s ever-green masterpiece is a doubly welcome event. First, because the music is so rich, so vivid, so graphic, that the drama stages itself in the mind’s eye of the listener. We can concentrate on the orchestra (no longer buried in the pit) as well as on the singers – and in no opera is the orchestra a more active participant in the action: an extra personage, at every moment abetting, questioning, deepening.
Second, because, with an opera notoriously difficult to stage well, a concert performance frees us from the distracting and distorting ideas commonly imposed on it by theatre producers baffled by its strange mixture of genres and by the enigmatic character and fascination/repulsiveness of its protagonist. Don Giovanni habitually brings out the worst in opera directors. How often do we see a production that does justice to its unique dual nature?
By the time Lorenzo da Ponte wrote the libretto, in the spring of 1787, the myth of Don Juan the godless libertine and enemy of society who suffers divine retribution had sunk to the level of crude pantomime – a horror story that, to sophisticated taste, was fit only for the fairground. The contemporary one-act opera Don Giovanni Tenorio, on which da Ponte based his text, is almost unrelievedly comic in style and tone. But Mozart had other intentions.
His Don Giovanni may be a comedy – comedy was Mozart’s natural environment (the opera ends with the surviving characters addressing the audience with the traditional moral, “This the fate of all evil-doers”). But it is always comedy with a difference. So he sees no reason why it should not include elements of tragedy as well as of the broadest humour, nor why an opera buffa should not have room for the supernatural.
The Stone Guest – the marble statue who nods his head and speaks and comes to supper – is as real to Mozart as the terrified servant who cowers under the table while his master fearlessly faces the divine visitant. In Mozart’s treatment of the scene there is no trace of the scepticism typical of the 18th century. He takes the myth absolutely seriously.
Mozart establishes his position at the outset, in the spine-chilling D-minor chord that launches the work and in the ominous throb of the rhythm and the wailing woodwind scales that follow. But he feels perfectly free to mix these genuinely frightening sounds and gestures with the material of pure farce.
Critics have objected to the burlesque scenes of the first half of Act 2, with their swapping of cloaks and hats, mistaken identities and all the other trappings of comic opera: Leporello dressing in his master’s clothes and deceiving the gullible Donna Elvira; Don Giovanni, disguised as his servant, beating up the peasant Masetto; Leporello, taken for Don Giovanni, coming within an ace of being killed. But such juxtapositions of terror and buffoonery are central to the whole work.
The pattern is laid down from the start. The tense, vehement overture (no trace here of the buffo manner of the overture to Figaro) leads straight into Leporello’s grumbling, boastful patter as he stands guard outside while his master attempts to ravish Donna Anna – patter which continues to undercut the fierce exchange between Anna and the masked Don; then the duel and the death of the Commendatore, followed by Leporello’s “Who’s dead – you or the old man?”, and then the discovery of the body and the oath of vengeance sworn by Anna and Ottavio – music that is no laughing matter, written in the death-haunted D minor that is one of the defining colours of the score.
At the same time Mozart, who loved jokes and leg-pulls, responds just as enthusiastically to the scope the story offers for laughter. In the finale, shortly before the arrival of the Stone Guest, the comedy descends to comic-strip level, as Leporello greedily covets his master’s supper: Leporello: “What huge mouthfuls – I’m almost fainting with hunger”. Giovanni: “Watching my mouthfuls, he’s almost fainting with hunger”. A moment later Elvira bursts in, begging him to repent before it’s too late. And, even as we laugh, our hair stands on end.
Perhaps no composer but Mozart could have achieved this fusion of such seemingly antithetical elements. In his hands they are of one substance (not least in the sinister, comic-tragic sextet - Leporello at Bay, dressed as his master - a movement that stands out even in an opera as abundant and momentous as this). We are so caught up in it, swept along by the prodigious momentum of the music, that there is no time to question it. It is what it is.
Don Giovanni sustains this ambiguity to the end. The visit of the Stone Guest and the damnation of the Don, and the awesome music they inspire, are followed, Shakespeareanly, by an epilogue in which life returns to normal. Or does it? They duly sing the moral: “The death of the wicked fits the life they led.” But the music’s writhing chromaticisms make it clear that they are still in thrall to the monster whom they believe divine retribution has rid them of. His fiery fingerprints are all over the final minutes of the opera. Their lives will never be the same again.
All the characters, and not only Don Giovanni, are like creatures in the grip of an overmastering obsession. And Mozart, never judging them, sympathising and identifying with them all, the Don included, lives their joys and griefs, their crimes and follies, to the full, in this most eventful and unclassifiable of all operas.
© David Cairns
- conductor
- Don Giovanni
- Don Ottavio
- Donna Elvira
- Donna Anna
- Zerlina
- Leporello
- Masetto
- Commendatore
- -
A landmark occasion to open the Season: Don Giovanni has been performed by no finer cast in Scotland since Mackerras conducted it at the Edinburgh International Festival in the 1990s. Ticciati brings all his Glyndebourne and Salzburg opera house experience to bear on this enthralling comedy of seduction, murder and damnation.
Mozart’s score includes some of his most gripping music alongside sparkling tunes that have become universal favourites: the duet ‘Là ci darem la mano’, the serenade ‘Deh, vieni alla finestra’ and the love song, ‘Dalla sua pace’ – not to mention that ‘Catalogue Aria’ listing some of the hundreds of women seduced and abandoned by Don Giovanni.
This performance will be held in memory of the Orchestra's Conductor Laureate, the late Sir Charles Mackerras.
Ticciati conducts Don Giovanni
- Mozart
Programme note
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756-1791)
Don GiovanniA concert performance of Mozart’s ever-green masterpiece is a doubly welcome event. First, because the music is so rich, so vivid, so graphic, that the drama stages itself in the mind’s eye of the listener. We can concentrate on the orchestra (no longer buried in the pit) as well as on the singers – and in no opera is the orchestra a more active participant in the action: an extra personage, at every moment abetting, questioning, deepening.
Second, because, with an opera notoriously difficult to stage well, a concert performance frees us from the distracting and distorting ideas commonly imposed on it by theatre producers baffled by its strange mixture of genres and by the enigmatic character and fascination/repulsiveness of its protagonist. Don Giovanni habitually brings out the worst in opera directors. How often do we see a production that does justice to its unique dual nature?
By the time Lorenzo da Ponte wrote the libretto, in the spring of 1787, the myth of Don Juan the godless libertine and enemy of society who suffers divine retribution had sunk to the level of crude pantomime – a horror story that, to sophisticated taste, was fit only for the fairground. The contemporary one-act opera Don Giovanni Tenorio, on which da Ponte based his text, is almost unrelievedly comic in style and tone. But Mozart had other intentions.
His Don Giovanni may be a comedy – comedy was Mozart’s natural environment (the opera ends with the surviving characters addressing the audience with the traditional moral, “This the fate of all evil-doers”). But it is always comedy with a difference. So he sees no reason why it should not include elements of tragedy as well as of the broadest humour, nor why an opera buffa should not have room for the supernatural.
The Stone Guest – the marble statue who nods his head and speaks and comes to supper – is as real to Mozart as the terrified servant who cowers under the table while his master fearlessly faces the divine visitant. In Mozart’s treatment of the scene there is no trace of the scepticism typical of the 18th century. He takes the myth absolutely seriously.
Mozart establishes his position at the outset, in the spine-chilling D-minor chord that launches the work and in the ominous throb of the rhythm and the wailing woodwind scales that follow. But he feels perfectly free to mix these genuinely frightening sounds and gestures with the material of pure farce.
Critics have objected to the burlesque scenes of the first half of Act 2, with their swapping of cloaks and hats, mistaken identities and all the other trappings of comic opera: Leporello dressing in his master’s clothes and deceiving the gullible Donna Elvira; Don Giovanni, disguised as his servant, beating up the peasant Masetto; Leporello, taken for Don Giovanni, coming within an ace of being killed. But such juxtapositions of terror and buffoonery are central to the whole work.
The pattern is laid down from the start. The tense, vehement overture (no trace here of the buffo manner of the overture to Figaro) leads straight into Leporello’s grumbling, boastful patter as he stands guard outside while his master attempts to ravish Donna Anna – patter which continues to undercut the fierce exchange between Anna and the masked Don; then the duel and the death of the Commendatore, followed by Leporello’s “Who’s dead – you or the old man?”, and then the discovery of the body and the oath of vengeance sworn by Anna and Ottavio – music that is no laughing matter, written in the death-haunted D minor that is one of the defining colours of the score.
At the same time Mozart, who loved jokes and leg-pulls, responds just as enthusiastically to the scope the story offers for laughter. In the finale, shortly before the arrival of the Stone Guest, the comedy descends to comic-strip level, as Leporello greedily covets his master’s supper: Leporello: “What huge mouthfuls – I’m almost fainting with hunger”. Giovanni: “Watching my mouthfuls, he’s almost fainting with hunger”. A moment later Elvira bursts in, begging him to repent before it’s too late. And, even as we laugh, our hair stands on end.
Perhaps no composer but Mozart could have achieved this fusion of such seemingly antithetical elements. In his hands they are of one substance (not least in the sinister, comic-tragic sextet - Leporello at Bay, dressed as his master - a movement that stands out even in an opera as abundant and momentous as this). We are so caught up in it, swept along by the prodigious momentum of the music, that there is no time to question it. It is what it is.
Don Giovanni sustains this ambiguity to the end. The visit of the Stone Guest and the damnation of the Don, and the awesome music they inspire, are followed, Shakespeareanly, by an epilogue in which life returns to normal. Or does it? They duly sing the moral: “The death of the wicked fits the life they led.” But the music’s writhing chromaticisms make it clear that they are still in thrall to the monster whom they believe divine retribution has rid them of. His fiery fingerprints are all over the final minutes of the opera. Their lives will never be the same again.
All the characters, and not only Don Giovanni, are like creatures in the grip of an overmastering obsession. And Mozart, never judging them, sympathising and identifying with them all, the Don included, lives their joys and griefs, their crimes and follies, to the full, in this most eventful and unclassifiable of all operas.
© David Cairns
- conductor
- Don Giovanni
- Don Ottavio
- Donna Elvira
- Donna Anna
- Zerlina
- Leporello
- Masetto
- Commendatore
- -
A landmark occasion to open the Season: Don Giovanni has been performed by no finer cast in Scotland since Mackerras conducted it at the Edinburgh International Festival in the 1990s. Ticciati brings all his Glyndebourne and Salzburg opera house experience to bear on this enthralling comedy of seduction, murder and damnation.
Mozart’s score includes some of his most gripping music alongside sparkling tunes that have become universal favourites: the duet ‘Là ci darem la mano’, the serenade ‘Deh, vieni alla finestra’ and the love song, ‘Dalla sua pace’ – not to mention that ‘Catalogue Aria’ listing some of the hundreds of women seduced and abandoned by Don Giovanni.
This performance will be held in memory of Orchestra's Conductor Laureate, the late Sir Charles Mackerras.
***Please note that online sales through Glasgow Concert Halls website are temporarily unavailable. Please call the box office on 0141 353 8000***
CL@SIX - Youthful Genius
- Mozart
Programme note
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756-1791)
Idomeneo Overture and Ballet MusicWhat were you creating when you were twenty-four? Well, if you were Mozart you would be writing your first opera seria (the old Baroque form of serious, rather than comic, opera). It was commissioned by the Elector Palatine, Carl Theodor whose Court, originally located in Mannheim, was now established in Munich since he subsequently inherited the Electorship of Bavaria. He maintained one of the finest orchestras in Europe, and had an opera company of exceptional skill. Mozart must have licked his lips with delight to land such a commission. Idomeneo became the chosen subject (based on an old libretto) – a father/son conflict that may have had especial resonance with Mozart given that his father, Leopold, was still trying to control his life. Mozart was ready for the challenge and opera seria was still the favoured mode in which to address serious subjects. But Mozart was Mozart and it was 1780. He proceeded to blow the stuffiness right out of the old form and transformed his Idomeneo into a theatrical event appropriate for the all-engaging Enlightenment attitudes of his time.
Here is just a hint of the subject matter: as a king it is never wise to make promises to an angry Neptune (God of the Sea) – such as promising to sacrifice the first person you see if only you could safely reach shore in a storm! Guess who the Cretan King Idomeneo sees first on finally landing on shore safely – his son Idamente! Horreur! The rest of the opera engages with ways in which to short-circuit such an unfortunate promise. But this is an Enlightenment opera which requires a happy ending. So, Ilia (the captured Trojan princess in love with Idamente) offers herself as sacrifice in place of Idamente – which softens Neptune’s heart (apparently Gods have one!) and all ends happily – which, of course sets in motion the de rigeur ballet. Tonight that includes a turbulent Chaconne (sea-monster in a rage!), followed by a Pas seul (lots of victorious string flourishes) a Passe-pied, a Gavotte and a Passacaille (as the citizens rejoice). The overture (by turns dramatic and brilliant) is a masterly early example of Mozart prefiguring the content of the opera which it precedes.
It has taken a long time for Idomeneo to escape the strait-jacket of being in an old operatic form but closer inspection shows Mozart’s Idomeneo leads the way to the grand dramatic operas of the nineteenth century by linking the usually separate sections of opera seria into a continuous dramatic unity. What a genius!
© David Gardner
- Schubert
Programme note
Franz Peter Schubert (1797-1828)
Symphony No 3 in D major, D200 (1815)Adagio maestoso – Allegro con brio
Allegretto
Menuetto: Vivace
Presto vivaceIf Schubert’s “heavenly lengths,” a description coined by Robert Schumann, represent the mature side of his genius, what are we to say about that brilliant teenage feat of compression, the Symphony No 3? Clearly it is not a masterpiece in the same sense as the 'Great' C major Symphony, but a masterpiece it undoubtedly is, driven by the same sort of irresistible energy as would propel the later symphony to its close. Even to hail it as a stepping stone to that tremendous outpouring of genius is scarcely enough, for the Symphony No 3 is tremendous in its own right. Its very directness, from the ominously hammered-out sonorities of the slow introduction to the swerving tarantella-like finale, guarantees its success. In a good performance, the thrust of its first movement and finale should be like a galvanic force, unimpeded by the sweetness of the slow movement (which is a short and lightweight allegretto rather than a full-blown andante or adagio) or by the bouncingly jovial minuet.
The work could be described as a domestic symphony, though not in the same way as Richard Strauss’s Sinfonia Domestica. It is not about Schubert’s home life, though in one respect it comes close to that by being written for a Viennese neighbourhood orchestra, which had steadily grown from a family string quartet – with young Schubert himself as viola player - into something bigger, containing about twenty strings, along with woodwind, brass, and drums. These players gathered regularly to perform new music chez Schubert, or in larger premises owned by friends and acquaintances.
By the time he was eighteen, Schubert was already a prolific composer. Of the thousand-or-so pieces he had produced by the end of his short life, more than half were written before he was 21. But though his first symphonies were based on Viennese tradition as he knew it – with Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven among his models - their flavour was already recognisably Schubertian, so much so that the main theme of the first movement of the Third Symphony is almost identical to that of the first movement of the Great C major.
Yet, supreme melodist though he was, Schubert knew that symphonic themes did not have to be melodic – this one is confined to rhythm and harmony, and is in no way obviously “tuneful.” But the slow movement, with its gently ambling opening theme on strings and woodwind and its even more engaging successor on clarinet, is all melody. The minuet, fast enough to be a Beethoven scherzo, is characterised by its leaping offbeat accents and its songlike central trio section, with prominent woodwind. The racy finale, like the first movement, sticks almost entirely to a single extended melody - an obsessively hurtling dance of a sort Schubert would employ later in the finale of his Death and the Maiden quartet and that of his G major quartet, D887.
Shortly before his early death, Schubert decided that he needed a lesson in counterpoint from Simon Sechter, the Viennese pedagogue who reputedly composed a fugue a day and later became Bruckner’s teacher. The lesson, despite its sense of Viennese continuity, hardly seemed necessary. Schubert was by then in full command of his genius. His grasp of structure, as demonstrated by his last works, was already (at a time when Bruckner was still a three-year-old child) on a Brucknerian scale. Sechter had nothing to teach him.
© Conrad Wilson
- conductor
Truly this is a night for youthful genius. Mozart was around 24 years old and Schubert barely 18 at the time of writing their respective works. The symphony may sound like an effortless, delightful half hour – but we know it cost Schubert much effort and several rethinks. Mozart’s ballet music originally closed his opera Idomeneo, and hits a suitably festive tone to celebrate its happy ending.
New Romantics I
- Ives
Programme note
Charles Ives (1874-1954)
Three Places in New EnglandThe ‘St Gaudens' in Boston Common (Col. Shaw and his Colored Regiment)
Putnam's Camp, Redding, Connecticut
The Housatonic at StockbridgeSome years ago the news was full of speculation that trees absorb sound as they grew – and with the right apparatus we could tap into this woody archive and listen in to history. It was a silly season tale, but Three Places in New England has something of the quality of what we might have heard: it is a reflection on American history and place through sound.
Ives created the piece in 1913-14, but found it impossible to get a performance. Sixteen years later he was still trying, and even the International Society for Contemporary Music turned it down. So, being a wealthy man, he took matters into his own hands and paid for the premiere himself. Then toured Europe with it – to great acclaim. Each movement has a poem or prose introduction that clearly tells of Ives’ intentions. They are the best keys to the piece.
‘St Gaudens’ fuses celebrated battle songs (Battle Cry of Freedom, Marching through Georgia and Stephen Foster’s Old Black Joe) with spirituals (Jesus Loves Me) to create a musical comment on America’s attitude to race and colour. The preface goes:
Moving-Marching-Faces of Souls!
Marked with generations of pain,
Part-freers of a Destiny,
Slowly, restlessly-swaying us on with you
Towards another Freedom!
The man on horseback, carved from
A native quarry of the world Liberty
And from what your country was made.
You images of a Divine Law
Carve in the shadow of a saddened heart-
Never light abandoned-
Of an age and of a nation.
Above and beyond that compelling mass
Rises the drum-beat of the common-heart
In the silence of a strange and
Sounding afterglow
Moving-Marching-Faces of Souls!
Putnam’s Camp is a play of memories in the mind of a child at a picnic:Near Redding Center is a small park preserved as a Revolutionary Memorial; for here General Israel Putnam’s soldiers had their winter quarters in 1778-1779. Long rows of stone camp fire-places still remain to stir a child’s imagination. The hardships which the soldiers endured, and the agitation of a few hot-heads to break camp and march to the Hartford Assembly for relief, is a part of Redding history.
Here you hear both the picnic jollity and darker music of war – the child’s mind wanders further and further from the present, ultimately to a vision of the Goddess of Liberty. At the close he returns to the bright brass bands of the picnic. Among the tunes Ives plays with are Arkansas Traveler, Hail! Columbia, Massa’s in de Cold Ground, The Star Spangled Banner, Yankee Doodle and Semper Fidelis.
The Housatonic had its inspiration at one of the happiest times in Ives’ life. Shortly after their honeymoon in 1908, he and his wife Harmony walked along the Housatonic river in Massachusetts: “We walked in the meadows along the river, and heard the distant singing from the church across the river. The mist had not entirely left the river bed, and the colors, the running water, the banks and elm trees were something that one would always remember.”
© Svend Brown
- Adams
Programme note
John Adams (b. 1947)
The Wound-Dresser (1988)Walt Whitman spent the better part of the Civil War years in Washington, DC, living in a series of small, unfurnished rooms, all the time supported by the meagre salary of a federal clerkship. His sole, consuming passion was his self-appointed task of ministering to the tens of thousands of sick and maimed soldiers who crowded the hospitals in the surrounding area, many of them little more than unheated and unventilated canvas tents hurriedly constructed by the unprepared Army of the Potomac. Virtually every day, barring his own illness or ever-increasing exhaustion, Whitman rose early and went to the hospitals, going from ward to ward to visit with the sick and wounded young men. For those who were unable to do so, he wrote letters home. For others he provided small gifts of fruit, candy or tobacco. He dressed the wounds of the maimed and the amputees and often sat up throughout the night with the most agonising cases, almost all of whom he knew on a first-name basis. It was surely no poetic exaggeration when he later said that during these years many a young soldier had died in his, Walt Whitman’s, arms.
Because the scope of his work is so grand and inclusive, and because he yearned throughout his life to embrace the entire universe in his poems, it has been tempting for succeeding generations to appropriate Whitman for any number of causes or points of view. For instance, one would easily assume the poet’s sentiments to be fervently anti-war. In face this was not the case, as the poems in Drum-Taps reveal. This slim volume, the only literary work he allowed himself to compose during the war years, is remarkable honest in that it expresses not just the horror and degradation of war, but also the thrill of battle and the almost manic exhilaration of one caught up in a righteous cause. Whitman hated war – this particular war and all wars – but he was no pacifist. Like his ideal, Lincoln, he never ceased to believe in the Union’s cause and in the dreadful necessity of victory.
The Wound-Dresser is a setting for baritone voice and orchestra of a fragment from the poem of the same name. As always with Whitman, it is in the first person, and it is the most intimate, most graphic and most profoundly affecting evocation of the act of nursing the sick and the dying that I know of. It is also astonishingly free of any kind of hyperbole or amplified emotion, yet the detail of the imagery is of a precision that could only be attained by one who had been there.
The Wound-Dresser is not just about the Civil War; nor is it just about young men dying (although it is locally about both). It strikes me as a statement about human compassion of the kind that is acted out on a daily basis, quietly and unobtrusively and unselfishly and unfailingly. Another poem in the same volume states its theme in other words: “Those who love each other shall become invincible…”.
John Adams
22 December 1988 - Adams
Programme note
John Adams (b. 1947)
Son of Chamber Symphony (2008)Scored for mixed ensemble, Son of Chamber Symphony was commissioned by Stanford Lively Arts Stanford University, Carnegie Hall, and the San Francisco Ballet. Premiered by Alarm Will Sound under the baton of Alan Pierson on November 30, 2007 at Stanford University, Son of Chamber Symphony has also been choreographed (under the title Joyride) by Mark Morris, and was first performed by the San Francisco Ballet on April 23, 2008. Since its premiere, Son of Chamber Symphony has enjoyed several performances worldwide by ensembles such as AXIOM, Tapiola Sinfonetta, Voices of Change, the ASKO and Schoenberg ensembles and members of the Los Angeles Philharmonic.
“I composed it for a similar ensemble as the first chamber symphony. It shares certain qualities with its predecessor, although it doesn’t quite go to the extremes of aerobic virtuosity or contrapuntal density that the 1992 work does. The first movement features a sampled prepared piano sound, the ‘boing’, that sets the tone for the movement. At roughly the same time I was composing this movement I was also preparing Beethoven Symphony No 7 for performances in Baltimore, so Beethoven’s preoccupation with exceptionally compact rhythmic and intervallic motifs seem to have leaked into my own compositional processes. The final movement beings as a trope on the “news’ aria from Nixon in China but eventually runs off that path into new territory.” - John Adams
Facts:
- Written for Alarm Will Sound and intended for choreographic premiere by Mark Morris
- Follow-up to Adams’s Chamber Symphony (1992)Quotes:
“[Son of Chamber Symphony] …definitely revisits the world of the first Chamber Symphony… It’s a little funkier, maybe, but it’s still quite soloistically driven.”
— Alan Pierson
“Son is as difficult as his original chamber symphony, if not more so. The first movement sets out to the accompaniment of a rhythmic motif lifted from the Scherzo of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, then nervously yet confidently scurries all over the place, changing meters all the time. Absorbing its interesting details will require many listenings. The last movement is one of those Adams bucking-bronco blastoffs, riveting and full of surprises. …
“Son of Chamber Symphony has an assured future. Co-commissioned by Carnegie Hall and the San Francisco Ballet, it will receive its New York premiere in February. Choreography to it by Mark Morris will be unveiled in the spring. But even without such insurance, a kid with these goods should have no problem making his way in the world.”
— Los Angeles Times
“The scrappy, punkish processes of the Chamber Symphony have given way to a more unified vision. In Son of Chamber Symphony, all the instruments pull together to create a single overarching narrative - one with multiple strands, to be sure, but without the anarchic energy that can come from the clash of truly independent voices. The music, in other words, has become more symphonic than chamber. That produces a more orderly and comprehensible kind of rhetoric, and in the new work, ideas unfold with a compelling kind of logic.”
— San Francisco Chronicle
“…driven by spiky rhythms, chasing its own tail down trails that diverge, crisscross, vanish and re-emerge with a yelp… The second movement is different: those strumming, thrumming strings, quietly glowing, with chirruping winds and ravishing melody for first violin and cello. There are plumes of colour, hints of tango, maybe even boogie-woogie - and then the third movement with its telegraph rhythms and pulsing arpeggios (Nixon dancing?).”
— Mercury News
Reprinted by kind permission of Boosey & Hawkes.
John Adams: www.earbox.com
- Marshall
Programme note
Ingram Marshall (b. 1942)
Orphic Memories (2006)Written for the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra in New York in 2006, and premiered in Carnegie Hall in April 2007, this purely acousitc, modestly scaled orchestral 'tone poem' obliquely follows Orpheus' harrowing trip to the underworld. THe peice is no so much a descriptive narrative as a flood of memories that Orpheus has in the aftermath of his journey.
The music is about Memory itself. It is divided into five distinct sections: Decent, Stygian gates, Lost, Ascent and Hymn. The quotes and references to composers whose music has entered my memory band are intended as affectionate homage.
Orphic Memories was commissioned by the Cheswatyr New Music Initiative in collaboration with WNYC Radio and the American Music Center.
- conductor
- baritone
Minimalism gave back classical music its groove in the 1960s by rediscovering the joy of catchy dancing rhythms, hypnotic patterns and harmonies that speak straight to the heart.
It reconnected with popular music – jazz, rock and world traditions – and fused them with inspirations from the age of Bach and beyond. Over five decades it has matured into, arguably, the most significant new direction for music of our time. Adams and Marshall – key figures both – share a deeply seated Romanticism, drawing on the tradition of Copland, Sibelius and Ives; you hear them here in predominantly mellow, soulful mood.
Presented as part of MINIMAL, a long weekend of minimalist music at Glasgow's Concert Halls.
New Romantics I
- Ives
Programme note
Charles Ives (1874-1954)
Three Places in New EnglandThe ‘St Gaudens' in Boston Common (Col. Shaw and his Colored Regiment)
Putnam's Camp, Redding, Connecticut
The Housatonic at StockbridgeSome years ago the news was full of speculation that trees absorb sound as they grew – and with the right apparatus we could tap into this woody archive and listen in to history. It was a silly season tale, but Three Places in New England has something of the quality of what we might have heard: it is a reflection on American history and place through sound.
Ives created the piece in 1913-14, but found it impossible to get a performance. Sixteen years later he was still trying, and even the International Society for Contemporary Music turned it down. So, being a wealthy man, he took matters into his own hands and paid for the premiere himself. Then toured Europe with it – to great acclaim. Each movement has a poem or prose introduction that clearly tells of Ives’ intentions. They are the best keys to the piece.
‘St Gaudens’ fuses celebrated battle songs (Battle Cry of Freedom, Marching through Georgia and Stephen Foster’s Old Black Joe) with spirituals (Jesus Loves Me) to create a musical comment on America’s attitude to race and colour. The preface goes:
Moving-Marching-Faces of Souls!
Marked with generations of pain,
Part-freers of a Destiny,
Slowly, restlessly-swaying us on with you
Towards another Freedom!
The man on horseback, carved from
A native quarry of the world Liberty
And from what your country was made.
You images of a Divine Law
Carve in the shadow of a saddened heart-
Never light abandoned-
Of an age and of a nation.
Above and beyond that compelling mass
Rises the drum-beat of the common-heart
In the silence of a strange and
Sounding afterglow
Moving-Marching-Faces of Souls!
Putnam’s Camp is a play of memories in the mind of a child at a picnic:Near Redding Center is a small park preserved as a Revolutionary Memorial; for here General Israel Putnam’s soldiers had their winter quarters in 1778-1779. Long rows of stone camp fire-places still remain to stir a child’s imagination. The hardships which the soldiers endured, and the agitation of a few hot-heads to break camp and march to the Hartford Assembly for relief, is a part of Redding history.
Here you hear both the picnic jollity and darker music of war – the child’s mind wanders further and further from the present, ultimately to a vision of the Goddess of Liberty. At the close he returns to the bright brass bands of the picnic. Among the tunes Ives plays with are Arkansas Traveler, Hail! Columbia, Massa’s in de Cold Ground, The Star Spangled Banner, Yankee Doodle and Semper Fidelis.
The Housatonic had its inspiration at one of the happiest times in Ives’ life. Shortly after their honeymoon in 1908, he and his wife Harmony walked along the Housatonic river in Massachusetts: “We walked in the meadows along the river, and heard the distant singing from the church across the river. The mist had not entirely left the river bed, and the colors, the running water, the banks and elm trees were something that one would always remember.”
© Svend Brown
- Adams
Programme note
John Adams (b. 1947)
The Wound-Dresser (1988)Walt Whitman spent the better part of the Civil War years in Washington, DC, living in a series of small, unfurnished rooms, all the time supported by the meagre salary of a federal clerkship. His sole, consuming passion was his self-appointed task of ministering to the tens of thousands of sick and maimed soldiers who crowded the hospitals in the surrounding area, many of them little more than unheated and unventilated canvas tents hurriedly constructed by the unprepared Army of the Potomac. Virtually every day, barring his own illness or ever-increasing exhaustion, Whitman rose early and went to the hospitals, going from ward to ward to visit with the sick and wounded young men. For those who were unable to do so, he wrote letters home. For others he provided small gifts of fruit, candy or tobacco. He dressed the wounds of the maimed and the amputees and often sat up throughout the night with the most agonising cases, almost all of whom he knew on a first-name basis. It was surely no poetic exaggeration when he later said that during these years many a young soldier had died in his, Walt Whitman’s, arms.
Because the scope of his work is so grand and inclusive, and because he yearned throughout his life to embrace the entire universe in his poems, it has been tempting for succeeding generations to appropriate Whitman for any number of causes or points of view. For instance, one would easily assume the poet’s sentiments to be fervently anti-war. In face this was not the case, as the poems in Drum-Taps reveal. This slim volume, the only literary work he allowed himself to compose during the war years, is remarkable honest in that it expresses not just the horror and degradation of war, but also the thrill of battle and the almost manic exhilaration of one caught up in a righteous cause. Whitman hated war – this particular war and all wars – but he was no pacifist. Like his ideal, Lincoln, he never ceased to believe in the Union’s cause and in the dreadful necessity of victory.
The Wound-Dresser is a setting for baritone voice and orchestra of a fragment from the poem of the same name. As always with Whitman, it is in the first person, and it is the most intimate, most graphic and most profoundly affecting evocation of the act of nursing the sick and the dying that I know of. It is also astonishingly free of any kind of hyperbole or amplified emotion, yet the detail of the imagery is of a precision that could only be attained by one who had been there.
The Wound-Dresser is not just about the Civil War; nor is it just about young men dying (although it is locally about both). It strikes me as a statement about human compassion of the kind that is acted out on a daily basis, quietly and unobtrusively and unselfishly and unfailingly. Another poem in the same volume states its theme in other words: “Those who love each other shall become invincible…”.
John Adams
22 December 1988 - Adams
Programme note
John Adams (b. 1947)
Son of Chamber Symphony (2008)Scored for mixed ensemble, Son of Chamber Symphony was commissioned by Stanford Lively Arts Stanford University, Carnegie Hall, and the San Francisco Ballet. Premiered by Alarm Will Sound under the baton of Alan Pierson on November 30, 2007 at Stanford University, Son of Chamber Symphony has also been choreographed (under the title Joyride) by Mark Morris, and was first performed by the San Francisco Ballet on April 23, 2008. Since its premiere, Son of Chamber Symphony has enjoyed several performances worldwide by ensembles such as AXIOM, Tapiola Sinfonetta, Voices of Change, the ASKO and Schoenberg ensembles and members of the Los Angeles Philharmonic.
“I composed it for a similar ensemble as the first chamber symphony. It shares certain qualities with its predecessor, although it doesn’t quite go to the extremes of aerobic virtuosity or contrapuntal density that the 1992 work does. The first movement features a sampled prepared piano sound, the ‘boing’, that sets the tone for the movement. At roughly the same time I was composing this movement I was also preparing Beethoven Symphony No 7 for performances in Baltimore, so Beethoven’s preoccupation with exceptionally compact rhythmic and intervallic motifs seem to have leaked into my own compositional processes. The final movement beings as a trope on the “news’ aria from Nixon in China but eventually runs off that path into new territory.” - John Adams
Facts:
- Written for Alarm Will Sound and intended for choreographic premiere by Mark Morris
- Follow-up to Adams’s Chamber Symphony (1992)Quotes:
“[Son of Chamber Symphony] …definitely revisits the world of the first Chamber Symphony… It’s a little funkier, maybe, but it’s still quite soloistically driven.”
— Alan Pierson
“Son is as difficult as his original chamber symphony, if not more so. The first movement sets out to the accompaniment of a rhythmic motif lifted from the Scherzo of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, then nervously yet confidently scurries all over the place, changing meters all the time. Absorbing its interesting details will require many listenings. The last movement is one of those Adams bucking-bronco blastoffs, riveting and full of surprises. …
“Son of Chamber Symphony has an assured future. Co-commissioned by Carnegie Hall and the San Francisco Ballet, it will receive its New York premiere in February. Choreography to it by Mark Morris will be unveiled in the spring. But even without such insurance, a kid with these goods should have no problem making his way in the world.”
— Los Angeles Times
“The scrappy, punkish processes of the Chamber Symphony have given way to a more unified vision. In Son of Chamber Symphony, all the instruments pull together to create a single overarching narrative - one with multiple strands, to be sure, but without the anarchic energy that can come from the clash of truly independent voices. The music, in other words, has become more symphonic than chamber. That produces a more orderly and comprehensible kind of rhetoric, and in the new work, ideas unfold with a compelling kind of logic.”
— San Francisco Chronicle
“…driven by spiky rhythms, chasing its own tail down trails that diverge, crisscross, vanish and re-emerge with a yelp… The second movement is different: those strumming, thrumming strings, quietly glowing, with chirruping winds and ravishing melody for first violin and cello. There are plumes of colour, hints of tango, maybe even boogie-woogie - and then the third movement with its telegraph rhythms and pulsing arpeggios (Nixon dancing?).”
— Mercury News
Reprinted by kind permission of Boosey & Hawkes.
John Adams: www.earbox.com
- Marshall
Programme note
Ingram Marshall (b. 1942)
Orphic Memories (2006)Written for the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra in New York in 2006, and premiered in Carnegie Hall in April 2007, this purely acousitc, modestly scaled orchestral 'tone poem' obliquely follows Orpheus' harrowing trip to the underworld. THe peice is no so much a descriptive narrative as a flood of memories that Orpheus has in the aftermath of his journey.
The music is about Memory itself. It is divided into five distinct sections: Decent, Stygian gates, Lost, Ascent and Hymn. The quotes and references to composers whose music has entered my memory band are intended as affectionate homage.
Orphic Memories was commissioned by the Cheswatyr New Music Initiative in collaboration with WNYC Radio and the American Music Center.
- conductor
- baritone
Minimalism gave back classical music its groove in the 1960s by rediscovering the joy of catchy dancing rhythms, hypnotic patterns and harmonies that speak straight to the heart. It reconnected with popular music – jazz, rock and world traditions – and fused them with inspirations from the age of Bach and beyond. Over five decades it has matured into, arguably, the most significant new direction for music of our time.
Adams and Marshall – key figures both – share a deeply seated Romanticism, drawing on the tradition of Copland, Sibelius and Ives; you hear them here in predominantly mellow, soulful mood.
Minimal: Icarus at the Edge of Time - Family Concert
- Glass
Programme note
Brian Greene is a celebrated physicist as well as a best selling children’s author and he’s made it his mission to make science as fun and spectacular as he can. Here he has joined forces with another global star, Philip Glass to create a spectacular sound and vision extravaganza. Take your seats for a eye-popping trip into deep space as Glass’s spectacular musical score dances, thunders and swoops around you with a cutting edge film by Al and Al transporting you deep into space.
Discover what happens to Icarus, a young lad on an epic space voyage. He spots a black hole outside the spaceship and goes to explore – flying to a hairsbreadth above the point of no return. But that’s just the start of his adventure; when tries to return to the spaceship in what he believes to be a few minutes after leaving it, he gradually realises that many thousands of years have elapsed…
Commissioned and produced by World Science Festival (New York) with the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation and Southbank Centre (London) with the Royal Society. Co-commissioned by Associazione Festival della Scienza with the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra and Glasgow’s Concert Halls.
As part of Glasgow Concert Halls Minimal celebrations the Orchestra and conductor Baldur Brönnimann perform the multi-media work Icarus at the Edge of Time – which features a film created and directed by cutting-edge digital artists Al and Al set to music by Philip Glass.
Presented at Glasgow Royal Concert Hall on Sunday 17 October (3pm and 4.15pm), Icarus at the Edge of Time is an adaptation of celebrated physicist Brian Greene’s book of the same name – it is a re-imagining of a classic Greek myth, but rather than Icarus travelling towards the sun, a boy approaches a black hole and emerges from his journey thousands of years later.
This performance will be a spectacular family concert, narrated by actor Billy Boyd, with ticket-holders having the chance enjoy an interactive Science Fair of hands-on exhibits before and after the show.
Minimal: Reich/Glass
- Glass
Programme note
Brian Greene is a celebrated physicist as well as a best selling children’s author and he’s made it his mission to make science as fun and spectacular as he can. Here he has joined forces with another global star, Philip Glass to create a spectacular sound and vision extravaganza. Take your seats for a eye-popping trip into deep space as Glass’s spectacular musical score dances, thunders and swoops around you with a cutting edge film by Al and Al transporting you deep into space.
Discover what happens to Icarus, a young lad on an epic space voyage. He spots a black hole outside the spaceship and goes to explore – flying to a hairsbreadth above the point of no return. But that’s just the start of his adventure; when tries to return to the spaceship in what he believes to be a few minutes after leaving it, he gradually realises that many thousands of years have elapsed…
Commissioned and produced by World Science Festival (New York) with the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation and Southbank Centre (London) with the Royal Society. Co-commissioned by Associazione Festival della Scienza with the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra and Glasgow’s Concert Halls.
The SCO performs in the multi-media work Icarus at the Edge of Time as part of the closing event of Glasgow Concert Halls Minimal weekend.
Closing this concert, and the weekend is a performance of Philip Glass’s brand new work, Icarus at the Edge of Time for grown-ups narrated by actor Billy Boyd. Drawing on Brian Greene’s book about blackholes, string theory and relativity, Glass has fashioned a spectacular symphonic score, while hot video artists, Al and Al have created spectacular Hubble telescope inspired visuals to tell the tale.
Mozart at the Piano I
- Beethoven
Programme note
Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827)
Scenes from Prometheus (1801)Overture
Pastorale (Allegro)
Solo della Signora Casentini (Andantino - Adagio - Allegro)
Finale (Allegretto - Allegro molto)Though his Seventh Symphony was nicknamed by Wagner “The Apotheosis of the Dance,” Beethoven and ballet seem like a contradiction in terms. Yet by the age of 31 he had composed two such scores. The first, his early Ritterballet, was merely hackwork, ghost-written for his friend Count Waldstein; but Prometheus, a few years later, was altogether more ambitious, and one of his first big Viennese successes.
Its full title, Die Geschopfe des Prometheus, has been variously translated as the Creatures, or the Creations, or the Children of Prometheus, but the story has little to do with the mythical hero who was chained to a rock, where an eagle tore at his liver until Hercules rescued him. Beethoven’s Prometheus suffers no such hardship. A more idealistic figure, he seemed something of a classical Lord Reith, who “drove ignorance from the people, and gave them manners, customs, and morals.” In Act One of this full-length ballet, he brings two statues to life. In Act Two, he delivers them to Parnassus to be instructed by Apollo and the Muses and endowed with the blessings of culture.
Sir Donald Tovey, Edinburgh University’s famous musical essayist, considered large tracts of the score to be “monotonously frivolous,” but he was being too severe. Haydn, meeting Beethoven in the street, supposedly praised the music, to which Beethoven replied: “Oh, dear Papa, you are too good, but mine is no Creation by a long shot.” The words may sound improbable, but Maynard Solomon, best of Beethoven’s modern biographers, has quoted them without reservation. The ballet in our own time has had a new lease of life, and several of the sixteen dances - not least the striking interlude for the ballerina Maria Casentini, with its solo cello and plashing harp - have regained a small place in the orchestral repertoire.
As for the overture, it has long enjoyed a separate existence as a concert piece. It is similar in style to Mozart’s Cosi fan tutte overture, and to the first movement of Beethoven’s own First Symphony, which he wrote around the same time. Each has a slow introduction, starting provocatively on a discord and continuing with a flowing, tender melody; and each then unleashes a racy, sparkling allegro, exhilarating in its momentum.
The sweet-toned Pastorale movement, which follows, anticipates the glow of the finale of the Pastoral Symphony. But - after the romantic Casentini solo - what the finale of Prometheus more startlingly anticipates is nothing less than the finale of the Eroica Symphony, with its famous Napoleon (or in this case Prometheus) theme, which for a time so obsessed Beethoven that he employed it in several of his works before bringing it to a state of symphonic perfection in the Eroica itself.
© Conrad Wilson
- Mozart
Programme note
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart 1756-1791
Piano Concerto in B flat major, K595 (1791)Allegro
Larghetto
Allegro"Everything is cold for me – ice cold," wrote Mozart at the start of what was to be the last year of his life. He was not referring to the Viennese weather. His fame as Europe’s finest pianist-composer, who had brought the art of the piano concerto to its zenith, was dwindling. He had cash-flow problems, though these were in the process of being resolved. He was suffering from depression. But, as Meynard Solomon declared in his great Mozart biography, he "somehow managed to stem the drift into silence". He did so with a chain of masterpieces whose sheer quantity and variety - from The Magic Flute to the most subtle sequences of ballroom dances - he had not previously surpassed.
At the beginning of January he completed the last of his piano concertos, K595 in B flat major. His Clarinet Concerto, his last great string quintet, his last two operas, and a group of haunting miniatures - the Little German Cantata, the touching Ave Verum Corpus, the music for mechanical organ, the last few songs - still lay ahead, as also did the great unfinished Requiem. Though the last piano concerto has been thought to possess the quality of a "transfigured farewell" - a very apt phrase with which to describe it - there is not the slightest evidence that Mozart himself thought about it that way, or that when he wrote it he was more than usually aware of his own impending demise. Those who say the music contains intimations of Mozart’s death are merely being wise after the event. His death-consciousness applied to the fate of all humanity.
Yet after the glitter of the ceremonial Coronation Concerto, written three years previously, there is undoubtedly something very pared-down about K595, something conspicuously inward-looking about its mood. Its orchestration, with just a single flute, two oboes, two bassoons, two horns and strings, but no clarinets and certainly no trumpets and drums, is almost minimalist by Mozart’s standards at the time. Even the movement headings - Allegro, Larghetto, Allegro - are reduced to single words. All this seems significant, but whether it signifies death or what might have been the start of a new phase in Mozart’s output of concertos is another matter.
Whatever else he had in mind - and it seemed quite a lot - further piano concertos at that point looked unlikely. When he played K595 on 4 March 1791, it was destined to be his last public appearance as a solo pianist before his death nine months later. The person who made it possible was an old acquaintance - the successful clarinettist Joseph Baehr - who slotted it into a concert in which Mozart was quite clearly not the star. The programme, given in the hall of a restaurant owner round the corner from Mozart’s apartment, featured Baehr himself as the main attraction. Next in importance was the singer Aloysia Lange, Mozart’s sister-in-law, whom he had loved and once hoped to marry. The information that "Herr Kapellmeister Mozart will play a concerto on the fortepiano" came third in line.
Did the work’s murmuring, unhurried opening make its mark? Were the downward scales and chromaticisms thought to possess a forlorn wraithlike eloquence? Was the flow of the music, in which one theme merges with the next, perceived to be beautifully sustained or did the audience fail to grasp such extraordinary continuity of line? Mozart’s own cadenza, written into the score, adds to the first movement’s special unity, as does the similarly personal cadenza in the finale.
The simplicity of the slow movement, which one distinguished but sometimes imperceptive authority on Mozart’s concertos has deemed to be a sign of waning inspiration, is perfectly in keeping with the veiled beauty of the rest of the work. Even the buoyant main theme of the rondo finale, which in an earlier concerto might have sounded like a vigorous hunting motif, has a delicacy appropriate to the intimacy of the music. It is no surprise that Mozart employed almost the same melody in one of his last songs, entitled "Longing for Spring".
Though it might seem sentimental to point out that 1791’s was to be Mozart’s last spring, the poignancy of the music makes the temptation irresistible. Yet there is also a lightweight muscularity about this movement which makes it possible to draw quite different conclusions about its meaning. In Mozart's last piano concerto, as in so many of its great predecessors, ambiguity reigns supreme.
© Conrad Wilson
- Mendelssohn
Programme note
Felix Mendelssohn (1809-1847)
Hebrides Overture (1829-32)Great composers who visited Britain in the nineteenth century seldom ventured as far north as Scotland. Berlioz nearly made it in 1853, when it was suggested he perform Mendelssohn’s Elijah with the Glasgow Choral Union, but the singers refused to have him as conductor. Chopin certainly made it in 1848, though the journey nearly killed him. But it was Mendelssohn whose Scottish tour in 1829 was the most productive of its kind ever undertaken by a composer from elsewhere.
Not only did Holyrood Palace inspire the opening of his Scottish Symphony (a theme which, aptly enough, was to reappear under the title of Bad Weather at the start of another of his works) but the sight of Fingal’s Cave on the island of Staffa obviously bowled him over during his voyage to the Hebrides. In a letter to his family, he spoke of how "extraordinarily" the scene affected him, and he enclosed 21 bars of music which, he said, had sprung to mind there. These were the first bars of the Hebrides overture, though the rest of the work was not completed until he reached Italy the following year. It was then, as one of his biographers later commented, “among the laurels and orange groves that his thoughts and affections carried him back to the waves of the North Sea.”
Most of the music of the overture is built from the undulating, repeated phrase with which it opens. Wagner described the piece as an "aquarelle," and compared one passage to the wailing of sea-winds. But perhaps, in saying this, he was thinking ahead to his own Flying Dutchman overture - Mendelssohn’s, for most of the way, is a seascape recollected in tranquillity, and not even the spiky woodwind in the work's inspired middle section nor the rough waves that rise towards the end (where the pace quickens, the strings hurtle along in semiquavers, and trumpets and drums add an element of menace) are allowed to disrupt the formal perfection of the score.
When the storm subsides, we can expect the little introductory motif to be still there, and so it is. It has already provided a link with the theme of the second subject, first heard on bassoons and cellos and subsequently, in a poetically extended form, on the clarinets. Sir Donald Tovey, in one of his famous essays, declared this to be quite the greatest melody Mendelssohn ever wrote, but notice how it makes its point in the first place without disturbing the natural flow of the music. Facile? Subtle? There may be works by Mendelssohn that tread a tightrope between these qualities, but the grey and silver beauty of the Hebrides overture shows the hand of a master.
© Conrad Wilson
- Mozart
Programme note
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756-1791)
Piano Concerto No 20 in D minor, K466Allegro
Romance
Allegro assaiIt is not difficult to understand why the nineteenth century kept Mozart’s D minor piano concerto on the concert platform while ignoring many of his other works, for it is quintessentially Romantic in nature.
Mozart’s D minor concerto is dark and surprising in its outer movements while cradling a central slow movement of such tender lyricism that it would take a heart of steel not to succumb to its blandishments. The turbulence of the opening movement is offset by a Rondo finale that is full of irregularities – it even harks back to the tempestuous first movement. The unusual (for Mozart) addition of two trumpets and timpani to the orchestra for this concerto also contributes to the drama. But when all is said and done, Mozart cannot resist providing us with a ‘happy ending’ by concluding his masterpiece triumphantly in D major.
Given the unsettling parry and thrust of this concerto, it is astonishing to learn that the copyists were still busy writing out the orchestral parts the day before the concert. The orchestral musicians must have been the very best in Vienna, for the ever-critical Leopold Mozart (who arrived just in time to hear his son give the first performance of the concerto in Vienna in February 1785) noted how wonderfully the entire subscription concert had been performed – and the orchestral parts are no mere trifling accompaniment. The writing for both soloist and orchestra is powerful and dramatic, with the orchestra playing an equally important part in the musical development of the work. It is not hard to hear why Beethoven, who performed this concerto frequently, should have been so attracted to this magnificent specimen of Mozart’s art – but then, so are we all.
K466 has always been a regular visitor to the concert platform, and will continue to be so as long as we have ears! It is a perfect example of why music can so deeply touch human emotions while mere words can only hope to scratch the surface. But then, that is why Mozart is one of the immortals – his music goes straight to the heart.
© David Gardner
- piano/director
- violin/director
The 2010-11 St Andrews Season is opened by the great Polish pianist Piotr Anderszewski, who has established a wonderful rapport with the SCO over recent years.
Here they offer a chance to measure the sheer richness of Mozart’s musical imagination by performing two utterly different piano concertos, juxtaposing the stormy, operatic drama of K466 and the near Beethovenian breadth of K595 – Mozart’s last piano concerto.
Mozart at the Piano I
- Beethoven
Programme note
Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827)
Scenes from Prometheus (1801)Overture
Pastorale (Allegro)
Solo della Signora Casentini (Andantino - Adagio - Allegro)
Finale (Allegretto - Allegro molto)Though his Seventh Symphony was nicknamed by Wagner “The Apotheosis of the Dance,” Beethoven and ballet seem like a contradiction in terms. Yet by the age of 31 he had composed two such scores. The first, his early Ritterballet, was merely hackwork, ghost-written for his friend Count Waldstein; but Prometheus, a few years later, was altogether more ambitious, and one of his first big Viennese successes.
Its full title, Die Geschopfe des Prometheus, has been variously translated as the Creatures, or the Creations, or the Children of Prometheus, but the story has little to do with the mythical hero who was chained to a rock, where an eagle tore at his liver until Hercules rescued him. Beethoven’s Prometheus suffers no such hardship. A more idealistic figure, he seemed something of a classical Lord Reith, who “drove ignorance from the people, and gave them manners, customs, and morals.” In Act One of this full-length ballet, he brings two statues to life. In Act Two, he delivers them to Parnassus to be instructed by Apollo and the Muses and endowed with the blessings of culture.
Sir Donald Tovey, Edinburgh University’s famous musical essayist, considered large tracts of the score to be “monotonously frivolous,” but he was being too severe. Haydn, meeting Beethoven in the street, supposedly praised the music, to which Beethoven replied: “Oh, dear Papa, you are too good, but mine is no Creation by a long shot.” The words may sound improbable, but Maynard Solomon, best of Beethoven’s modern biographers, has quoted them without reservation. The ballet in our own time has had a new lease of life, and several of the sixteen dances - not least the striking interlude for the ballerina Maria Casentini, with its solo cello and plashing harp - have regained a small place in the orchestral repertoire.
As for the overture, it has long enjoyed a separate existence as a concert piece. It is similar in style to Mozart’s Cosi fan tutte overture, and to the first movement of Beethoven’s own First Symphony, which he wrote around the same time. Each has a slow introduction, starting provocatively on a discord and continuing with a flowing, tender melody; and each then unleashes a racy, sparkling allegro, exhilarating in its momentum.
The sweet-toned Pastorale movement, which follows, anticipates the glow of the finale of the Pastoral Symphony. But - after the romantic Casentini solo - what the finale of Prometheus more startlingly anticipates is nothing less than the finale of the Eroica Symphony, with its famous Napoleon (or in this case Prometheus) theme, which for a time so obsessed Beethoven that he employed it in several of his works before bringing it to a state of symphonic perfection in the Eroica itself.
© Conrad Wilson
- Mozart
Programme note
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart 1756-1791
Piano Concerto in B flat major, K595 (1791)Allegro
Larghetto
Allegro"Everything is cold for me – ice cold," wrote Mozart at the start of what was to be the last year of his life. He was not referring to the Viennese weather. His fame as Europe’s finest pianist-composer, who had brought the art of the piano concerto to its zenith, was dwindling. He had cash-flow problems, though these were in the process of being resolved. He was suffering from depression. But, as Meynard Solomon declared in his great Mozart biography, he "somehow managed to stem the drift into silence". He did so with a chain of masterpieces whose sheer quantity and variety - from The Magic Flute to the most subtle sequences of ballroom dances - he had not previously surpassed.
At the beginning of January he completed the last of his piano concertos, K595 in B flat major. His Clarinet Concerto, his last great string quintet, his last two operas, and a group of haunting miniatures - the Little German Cantata, the touching Ave Verum Corpus, the music for mechanical organ, the last few songs - still lay ahead, as also did the great unfinished Requiem. Though the last piano concerto has been thought to possess the quality of a "transfigured farewell" - a very apt phrase with which to describe it - there is not the slightest evidence that Mozart himself thought about it that way, or that when he wrote it he was more than usually aware of his own impending demise. Those who say the music contains intimations of Mozart’s death are merely being wise after the event. His death-consciousness applied to the fate of all humanity.
Yet after the glitter of the ceremonial Coronation Concerto, written three years previously, there is undoubtedly something very pared-down about K595, something conspicuously inward-looking about its mood. Its orchestration, with just a single flute, two oboes, two bassoons, two horns and strings, but no clarinets and certainly no trumpets and drums, is almost minimalist by Mozart’s standards at the time. Even the movement headings - Allegro, Larghetto, Allegro - are reduced to single words. All this seems significant, but whether it signifies death or what might have been the start of a new phase in Mozart’s output of concertos is another matter.
Whatever else he had in mind - and it seemed quite a lot - further piano concertos at that point looked unlikely. When he played K595 on 4 March 1791, it was destined to be his last public appearance as a solo pianist before his death nine months later. The person who made it possible was an old acquaintance - the successful clarinettist Joseph Baehr - who slotted it into a concert in which Mozart was quite clearly not the star. The programme, given in the hall of a restaurant owner round the corner from Mozart’s apartment, featured Baehr himself as the main attraction. Next in importance was the singer Aloysia Lange, Mozart’s sister-in-law, whom he had loved and once hoped to marry. The information that "Herr Kapellmeister Mozart will play a concerto on the fortepiano" came third in line.
Did the work’s murmuring, unhurried opening make its mark? Were the downward scales and chromaticisms thought to possess a forlorn wraithlike eloquence? Was the flow of the music, in which one theme merges with the next, perceived to be beautifully sustained or did the audience fail to grasp such extraordinary continuity of line? Mozart’s own cadenza, written into the score, adds to the first movement’s special unity, as does the similarly personal cadenza in the finale.
The simplicity of the slow movement, which one distinguished but sometimes imperceptive authority on Mozart’s concertos has deemed to be a sign of waning inspiration, is perfectly in keeping with the veiled beauty of the rest of the work. Even the buoyant main theme of the rondo finale, which in an earlier concerto might have sounded like a vigorous hunting motif, has a delicacy appropriate to the intimacy of the music. It is no surprise that Mozart employed almost the same melody in one of his last songs, entitled "Longing for Spring".
Though it might seem sentimental to point out that 1791’s was to be Mozart’s last spring, the poignancy of the music makes the temptation irresistible. Yet there is also a lightweight muscularity about this movement which makes it possible to draw quite different conclusions about its meaning. In Mozart's last piano concerto, as in so many of its great predecessors, ambiguity reigns supreme.
© Conrad Wilson
- Mendelssohn
Programme note
Felix Mendelssohn (1809-1847)
Hebrides Overture (1829-32)Great composers who visited Britain in the nineteenth century seldom ventured as far north as Scotland. Berlioz nearly made it in 1853, when it was suggested he perform Mendelssohn’s Elijah with the Glasgow Choral Union, but the singers refused to have him as conductor. Chopin certainly made it in 1848, though the journey nearly killed him. But it was Mendelssohn whose Scottish tour in 1829 was the most productive of its kind ever undertaken by a composer from elsewhere.
Not only did Holyrood Palace inspire the opening of his Scottish Symphony (a theme which, aptly enough, was to reappear under the title of Bad Weather at the start of another of his works) but the sight of Fingal’s Cave on the island of Staffa obviously bowled him over during his voyage to the Hebrides. In a letter to his family, he spoke of how "extraordinarily" the scene affected him, and he enclosed 21 bars of music which, he said, had sprung to mind there. These were the first bars of the Hebrides overture, though the rest of the work was not completed until he reached Italy the following year. It was then, as one of his biographers later commented, “among the laurels and orange groves that his thoughts and affections carried him back to the waves of the North Sea.”
Most of the music of the overture is built from the undulating, repeated phrase with which it opens. Wagner described the piece as an "aquarelle," and compared one passage to the wailing of sea-winds. But perhaps, in saying this, he was thinking ahead to his own Flying Dutchman overture - Mendelssohn’s, for most of the way, is a seascape recollected in tranquillity, and not even the spiky woodwind in the work's inspired middle section nor the rough waves that rise towards the end (where the pace quickens, the strings hurtle along in semiquavers, and trumpets and drums add an element of menace) are allowed to disrupt the formal perfection of the score.
When the storm subsides, we can expect the little introductory motif to be still there, and so it is. It has already provided a link with the theme of the second subject, first heard on bassoons and cellos and subsequently, in a poetically extended form, on the clarinets. Sir Donald Tovey, in one of his famous essays, declared this to be quite the greatest melody Mendelssohn ever wrote, but notice how it makes its point in the first place without disturbing the natural flow of the music. Facile? Subtle? There may be works by Mendelssohn that tread a tightrope between these qualities, but the grey and silver beauty of the Hebrides overture shows the hand of a master.
© Conrad Wilson
- Mozart
Programme note
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756-1791)
Piano Concerto No 20 in D minor, K466Allegro
Romance
Allegro assaiIt is not difficult to understand why the nineteenth century kept Mozart’s D minor piano concerto on the concert platform while ignoring many of his other works, for it is quintessentially Romantic in nature.
Mozart’s D minor concerto is dark and surprising in its outer movements while cradling a central slow movement of such tender lyricism that it would take a heart of steel not to succumb to its blandishments. The turbulence of the opening movement is offset by a Rondo finale that is full of irregularities – it even harks back to the tempestuous first movement. The unusual (for Mozart) addition of two trumpets and timpani to the orchestra for this concerto also contributes to the drama. But when all is said and done, Mozart cannot resist providing us with a ‘happy ending’ by concluding his masterpiece triumphantly in D major.
Given the unsettling parry and thrust of this concerto, it is astonishing to learn that the copyists were still busy writing out the orchestral parts the day before the concert. The orchestral musicians must have been the very best in Vienna, for the ever-critical Leopold Mozart (who arrived just in time to hear his son give the first performance of the concerto in Vienna in February 1785) noted how wonderfully the entire subscription concert had been performed – and the orchestral parts are no mere trifling accompaniment. The writing for both soloist and orchestra is powerful and dramatic, with the orchestra playing an equally important part in the musical development of the work. It is not hard to hear why Beethoven, who performed this concerto frequently, should have been so attracted to this magnificent specimen of Mozart’s art – but then, so are we all.
K466 has always been a regular visitor to the concert platform, and will continue to be so as long as we have ears! It is a perfect example of why music can so deeply touch human emotions while mere words can only hope to scratch the surface. But then, that is why Mozart is one of the immortals – his music goes straight to the heart.
© David Gardner
- piano/director
- violin/director
There are two chances this Season to measure the sheer richness of Mozart’s musical imagination by hearing two utterly different piano concertos side by side during the same evening (see also the concert on 7 April).
Anderszewski juxtaposes the stormy, operatic drama of K466 and the near Beethovenian breadth of K595 – Mozart’s last piano concerto.
Mozart at the Piano I
- Beethoven
Programme note
Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827)
Scenes from Prometheus (1801)Overture
Pastorale (Allegro)
Solo della Signora Casentini (Andantino - Adagio - Allegro)
Finale (Allegretto - Allegro molto)Though his Seventh Symphony was nicknamed by Wagner “The Apotheosis of the Dance,” Beethoven and ballet seem like a contradiction in terms. Yet by the age of 31 he had composed two such scores. The first, his early Ritterballet, was merely hackwork, ghost-written for his friend Count Waldstein; but Prometheus, a few years later, was altogether more ambitious, and one of his first big Viennese successes.
Its full title, Die Geschopfe des Prometheus, has been variously translated as the Creatures, or the Creations, or the Children of Prometheus, but the story has little to do with the mythical hero who was chained to a rock, where an eagle tore at his liver until Hercules rescued him. Beethoven’s Prometheus suffers no such hardship. A more idealistic figure, he seemed something of a classical Lord Reith, who “drove ignorance from the people, and gave them manners, customs, and morals.” In Act One of this full-length ballet, he brings two statues to life. In Act Two, he delivers them to Parnassus to be instructed by Apollo and the Muses and endowed with the blessings of culture.
Sir Donald Tovey, Edinburgh University’s famous musical essayist, considered large tracts of the score to be “monotonously frivolous,” but he was being too severe. Haydn, meeting Beethoven in the street, supposedly praised the music, to which Beethoven replied: “Oh, dear Papa, you are too good, but mine is no Creation by a long shot.” The words may sound improbable, but Maynard Solomon, best of Beethoven’s modern biographers, has quoted them without reservation. The ballet in our own time has had a new lease of life, and several of the sixteen dances - not least the striking interlude for the ballerina Maria Casentini, with its solo cello and plashing harp - have regained a small place in the orchestral repertoire.
As for the overture, it has long enjoyed a separate existence as a concert piece. It is similar in style to Mozart’s Cosi fan tutte overture, and to the first movement of Beethoven’s own First Symphony, which he wrote around the same time. Each has a slow introduction, starting provocatively on a discord and continuing with a flowing, tender melody; and each then unleashes a racy, sparkling allegro, exhilarating in its momentum.
The sweet-toned Pastorale movement, which follows, anticipates the glow of the finale of the Pastoral Symphony. But - after the romantic Casentini solo - what the finale of Prometheus more startlingly anticipates is nothing less than the finale of the Eroica Symphony, with its famous Napoleon (or in this case Prometheus) theme, which for a time so obsessed Beethoven that he employed it in several of his works before bringing it to a state of symphonic perfection in the Eroica itself.
© Conrad Wilson
- Mozart
Programme note
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756-1791)
Piano Concerto in B flat major, K595 (1791)Allegro
Larghetto
Allegro"Everything is cold for me – ice cold," wrote Mozart at the start of what was to be the last year of his life. He was not referring to the Viennese weather. His fame as Europe’s finest pianist-composer, who had brought the art of the piano concerto to its zenith, was dwindling. He had cash-flow problems, though these were in the process of being resolved. He was suffering from depression. But, as Meynard Solomon declared in his great Mozart biography, he "somehow managed to stem the drift into silence". He did so with a chain of masterpieces whose sheer quantity and variety - from The Magic Flute to the most subtle sequences of ballroom dances - he had not previously surpassed.
At the beginning of January he completed the last of his piano concertos, K595 in B flat major. His Clarinet Concerto, his last great string quintet, his last two operas, and a group of haunting miniatures - the Little German Cantata, the touching Ave Verum Corpus, the music for mechanical organ, the last few songs - still lay ahead, as also did the great unfinished Requiem. Though the last piano concerto has been thought to possess the quality of a 'transfigured farewell' - a very apt phrase with which to describe it - there is not the slightest evidence that Mozart himself thought about it that way, or that when he wrote it he was more than usually aware of his own impending demise. Those who say the music contains intimations of Mozart’s death are merely being wise after the event. His death-consciousness applied to the fate of all humanity.
Yet after the glitter of the ceremonial Coronation concerto, written three years previously, there is undoubtedly something very pared-down about K595, something conspicuously inward-looking about its mood. Its orchestration, with just a single flute, two oboes, two bassoons, two horns and strings, but no clarinets and certainly no trumpets and drums, is almost minimalist by Mozart’s standards at the time. Even the movement headings - 'Allegro', 'Larghetto', 'Allegro' - are reduced to single words. All this seems significant, but whether it signifies death or what might have been the start of a new phase in Mozart’s output of concertos is another matter.
Whatever else he had in mind - and it looked like quite a lot - further piano concertos at that point looked unlikely. When he played K595 on 4 March 1791, it was destined to be his last public appearance as a solo pianist before his death nine months later. The person who made it possible was an old acquaintance - the successful clarinettist Joseph Baehr - who slotted it into a concert in which Mozart was quite clearly not the star. The programme, given in the hall of a restaurant owner round the corner from Mozart’s apartment, featured Baehr himself as the main attraction. Next in importance was the singer Aloysia Lange, Mozart’s sister-in-law, whom he had loved and once hoped to marry. The information that "Herr Kapellmeister Mozart will play a concerto on the fortepiano" came third in line.
Did the work’s murmuring, unhurried opening make its mark? Were the downward scales and chromaticisms thought to possess a forlorn wraithlike eloquence? Was the flow of the music, in which one theme merges with the next, perceived to be beautifully sustained or did the audience fail to grasp such extraordinary continuity of line? Mozart’s own cadenza, written into the score, adds to the first movement’s special unity, as does the similarly personal cadenza in the finale.
The simplicity of the slow movement, which one distinguished but sometimes imperceptive authority on Mozart’s concertos has deemed to be a sign of waning inspiration, is perfectly in keeping with the veiled beauty of the rest of the work. Even the buoyant main theme of the rondo finale, which in an earlier concerto might have sounded like a vigorous hunting motif, has a delicacy appropriate to the intimacy of the music. It is no surprise that Mozart employed almost the same melody in one of his last songs, entitled 'Longing for Spring'.
Though it might seem sentimental to point out that 1791’s was to be Mozart’s last spring, the poignancy of the music makes the temptation irresistible. Yet there is also a lightweight muscularity about this movement which makes it possible to draw quite different conclusions about its meaning. In Mozart's last piano concerto, as in so many of its great predecessors, ambiguity reigned supreme.
© Conrad Wilson
- Mendelssohn
Programme note
Felix Mendelssohn (1809-1847)
Hebrides Overture (1829-32)Great composers who visited Britain in the nineteenth century seldom ventured as far north as Scotland. Berlioz nearly made it in 1853, when it was suggested he perform Mendelssohn’s Elijah with the Glasgow Choral Union, but the singers refused to have him as conductor. Chopin certainly made it in 1848, though the journey nearly killed him. But it was Mendelssohn whose Scottish tour in 1829 was the most productive of its kind ever undertaken by a composer from elsewhere.
Not only did Holyrood Palace inspire the opening of his Scottish Symphony (a theme which, aptly enough, was to reappear under the title of Bad Weather at the start of another of his works) but the sight of Fingal’s Cave on the island of Staffa obviously bowled him over during his voyage to the Hebrides. In a letter to his family, he spoke of how "extraordinarily" the scene affected him, and he enclosed 21 bars of music which, he said, had sprung to mind there. These were the first bars of the Hebrides overture, though the rest of the work was not completed until he reached Italy the following year. It was then, as one of his biographers later commented, “among the laurels and orange groves that his thoughts and affections carried him back to the waves of the North Sea.”
Most of the music of the overture is built from the undulating, repeated phrase with which it opens. Wagner described the piece as an "aquarelle," and compared one passage to the wailing of sea-winds. But perhaps, in saying this, he was thinking ahead to his own Flying Dutchman overture - Mendelssohn’s, for most of the way, is a seascape recollected in tranquillity, and not even the spiky woodwind in the work's inspired middle section nor the rough waves that rise towards the end (where the pace quickens, the strings hurtle along in semiquavers, and trumpets and drums add an element of menace) are allowed to disrupt the formal perfection of the score.
When the storm subsides, we can expect the little introductory motif to be still there, and so it is. It has already provided a link with the theme of the second subject, first heard on bassoons and cellos and subsequently, in a poetically extended form, on the clarinets. Sir Donald Tovey, in one of his famous essays, declared this to be quite the greatest melody Mendelssohn ever wrote, but notice how it makes its point in the first place without disturbing the natural flow of the music. Facile? Subtle? There may be works by Mendelssohn that tread a tightrope between these qualities, but the grey and silver beauty of the Hebrides overture shows the hand of a master.
© Conrad Wilson
- Mozart
Programme note
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756-1791)
Piano Concerto No 20 in D minor, K466Allegro
Romance
Allegro assaiIt is not difficult to understand why the nineteenth century kept Mozart’s D minor piano concerto on the concert platform while ignoring many of his other works, for it is quintessentially Romantic in nature.
Mozart’s D minor concerto is dark and surprising in its outer movements while cradling a central slow movement of such tender lyricism that it would take a heart of steel not to succumb to its blandishments. The turbulence of the opening movement is offset by a Rondo finale that is full of irregularities – it even harks back to the tempestuous first movement. The unusual (for Mozart) addition of two trumpets and timpani to the orchestra for this concerto also contributes to the drama. But when all is said and done, Mozart cannot resist providing us with a ‘happy ending’ by concluding his masterpiece triumphantly in D major.
Given the unsettling parry and thrust of this concerto, it is astonishing to learn that the copyists were still busy writing out the orchestral parts the day before the concert. The orchestral musicians must have been the very best in Vienna, for the ever-critical Leopold Mozart (who arrived just in time to hear his son give the first performance of the concerto in Vienna in February 1785) noted how wonderfully the entire subscription concert had been performed – and the orchestral parts are no mere trifling accompaniment. The writing for both soloist and orchestra is powerful and dramatic, with the orchestra playing an equally important part in the musical development of the work. It is not hard to hear why Beethoven, who performed this concerto frequently, should have been so attracted to this magnificent specimen of Mozart’s art – but then, so are we all.
K466 has always been a regular visitor to the concert platform, and will continue to be so as long as we have ears! It is a perfect example of why music can so deeply touch human emotions while mere words can only hope to scratch the surface. But then, that is why Mozart is one of the immortals – his music goes straight to the heart.
© David Gardner
- piano/director
- violin/director
There are two chances this Season to measure the sheer richness of Mozart’s musical imagination by hearing two utterly different piano concertos side by side during the same evening (see also the concert on 8 April).
Anderszewski juxtaposes the stormy, operatic drama of K466 and the near Beethovenian breadth of K595 – Mozart’s last piano concerto.
This concert will be recorded for BBC Radio 3's Performance on 3, to be broadcast on Thursday 28 October at 7pm.
Mozart at the Piano I
- Beethoven
Programme note
Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827)
Scenes from Prometheus (1801)Overture
Pastorale (Allegro)
Solo della Signora Casentini (Andantino - Adagio - Allegro)
Finale (Allegretto - Allegro molto)Though his Seventh Symphony was nicknamed by Wagner “The Apotheosis of the Dance,” Beethoven and ballet seem like a contradiction in terms. Yet by the age of 31 he had composed two such scores. The first, his early Ritterballet, was merely hackwork, ghost-written for his friend Count Waldstein; but Prometheus, a few years later, was altogether more ambitious, and one of his first big Viennese successes.
Its full title, Die Geschopfe des Prometheus, has been variously translated as the Creatures, or the Creations, or the Children of Prometheus, but the story has little to do with the mythical hero who was chained to a rock, where an eagle tore at his liver until Hercules rescued him. Beethoven’s Prometheus suffers no such hardship. A more idealistic figure, he seemed something of a classical Lord Reith, who “drove ignorance from the people, and gave them manners, customs, and morals.” In Act One of this full-length ballet, he brings two statues to life. In Act Two, he delivers them to Parnassus to be instructed by Apollo and the Muses and endowed with the blessings of culture.
Sir Donald Tovey, Edinburgh University’s famous musical essayist, considered large tracts of the score to be “monotonously frivolous,” but he was being too severe. Haydn, meeting Beethoven in the street, supposedly praised the music, to which Beethoven replied: “Oh, dear Papa, you are too good, but mine is no Creation by a long shot.” The words may sound improbable, but Maynard Solomon, best of Beethoven’s modern biographers, has quoted them without reservation. The ballet in our own time has had a new lease of life, and several of the sixteen dances - not least the striking interlude for the ballerina Maria Casentini, with its solo cello and plashing harp - have regained a small place in the orchestral repertoire.
As for the overture, it has long enjoyed a separate existence as a concert piece. It is similar in style to Mozart’s Cosi fan tutte overture, and to the first movement of Beethoven’s own First Symphony, which he wrote around the same time. Each has a slow introduction, starting provocatively on a discord and continuing with a flowing, tender melody; and each then unleashes a racy, sparkling allegro, exhilarating in its momentum.
The sweet-toned Pastorale movement, which follows, anticipates the glow of the finale of the Pastoral Symphony. But - after the romantic Casentini solo - what the finale of Prometheus more startlingly anticipates is nothing less than the finale of the Eroica Symphony, with its famous Napoleon (or in this case Prometheus) theme, which for a time so obsessed Beethoven that he employed it in several of his works before bringing it to a state of symphonic perfection in the Eroica itself.
© Conrad Wilson
- Mozart
Programme note
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart 1756-1791
Piano Concerto in B flat major, K595 (1791)Allegro
Larghetto
Allegro"Everything is cold for me – ice cold," wrote Mozart at the start of what was to be the last year of his life. He was not referring to the Viennese weather. His fame as Europe’s finest pianist-composer, who had brought the art of the piano concerto to its zenith, was dwindling. He had cash-flow problems, though these were in the process of being resolved. He was suffering from depression. But, as Meynard Solomon declared in his great Mozart biography, he "somehow managed to stem the drift into silence". He did so with a chain of masterpieces whose sheer quantity and variety - from The Magic Flute to the most subtle sequences of ballroom dances - he had not previously surpassed.
At the beginning of January he completed the last of his piano concertos, K595 in B flat major. His Clarinet Concerto, his last great string quintet, his last two operas, and a group of haunting miniatures - the Little German Cantata, the touching Ave Verum Corpus, the music for mechanical organ, the last few songs - still lay ahead, as also did the great unfinished Requiem. Though the last piano concerto has been thought to possess the quality of a "transfigured farewell" - a very apt phrase with which to describe it - there is not the slightest evidence that Mozart himself thought about it that way, or that when he wrote it he was more than usually aware of his own impending demise. Those who say the music contains intimations of Mozart’s death are merely being wise after the event. His death-consciousness applied to the fate of all humanity.
Yet after the glitter of the ceremonial Coronation Concerto, written three years previously, there is undoubtedly something very pared-down about K595, something conspicuously inward-looking about its mood. Its orchestration, with just a single flute, two oboes, two bassoons, two horns and strings, but no clarinets and certainly no trumpets and drums, is almost minimalist by Mozart’s standards at the time. Even the movement headings - Allegro, Larghetto, Allegro - are reduced to single words. All this seems significant, but whether it signifies death or what might have been the start of a new phase in Mozart’s output of concertos is another matter.
Whatever else he had in mind - and it seemed quite a lot - further piano concertos at that point looked unlikely. When he played K595 on 4 March 1791, it was destined to be his last public appearance as a solo pianist before his death nine months later. The person who made it possible was an old acquaintance - the successful clarinettist Joseph Baehr - who slotted it into a concert in which Mozart was quite clearly not the star. The programme, given in the hall of a restaurant owner round the corner from Mozart’s apartment, featured Baehr himself as the main attraction. Next in importance was the singer Aloysia Lange, Mozart’s sister-in-law, whom he had loved and once hoped to marry. The information that "Herr Kapellmeister Mozart will play a concerto on the fortepiano" came third in line.
Did the work’s murmuring, unhurried opening make its mark? Were the downward scales and chromaticisms thought to possess a forlorn wraithlike eloquence? Was the flow of the music, in which one theme merges with the next, perceived to be beautifully sustained or did the audience fail to grasp such extraordinary continuity of line? Mozart’s own cadenza, written into the score, adds to the first movement’s special unity, as does the similarly personal cadenza in the finale.
The simplicity of the slow movement, which one distinguished but sometimes imperceptive authority on Mozart’s concertos has deemed to be a sign of waning inspiration, is perfectly in keeping with the veiled beauty of the rest of the work. Even the buoyant main theme of the rondo finale, which in an earlier concerto might have sounded like a vigorous hunting motif, has a delicacy appropriate to the intimacy of the music. It is no surprise that Mozart employed almost the same melody in one of his last songs, entitled "Longing for Spring".
Though it might seem sentimental to point out that 1791’s was to be Mozart’s last spring, the poignancy of the music makes the temptation irresistible. Yet there is also a lightweight muscularity about this movement which makes it possible to draw quite different conclusions about its meaning. In Mozart's last piano concerto, as in so many of its great predecessors, ambiguity reigns supreme.
© Conrad Wilson
- Mendelssohn
Programme note
Felix Mendelssohn (1809-1847)
Hebrides Overture (1829-32)Great composers who visited Britain in the nineteenth century seldom ventured as far north as Scotland. Berlioz nearly made it in 1853, when it was suggested he perform Mendelssohn’s Elijah with the Glasgow Choral Union, but the singers refused to have him as conductor. Chopin certainly made it in 1848, though the journey nearly killed him. But it was Mendelssohn whose Scottish tour in 1829 was the most productive of its kind ever undertaken by a composer from elsewhere.
Not only did Holyrood Palace inspire the opening of his Scottish Symphony (a theme which, aptly enough, was to reappear under the title of Bad Weather at the start of another of his works) but the sight of Fingal’s Cave on the island of Staffa obviously bowled him over during his voyage to the Hebrides. In a letter to his family, he spoke of how "extraordinarily" the scene affected him, and he enclosed 21 bars of music which, he said, had sprung to mind there. These were the first bars of the Hebrides overture, though the rest of the work was not completed until he reached Italy the following year. It was then, as one of his biographers later commented, “among the laurels and orange groves that his thoughts and affections carried him back to the waves of the North Sea.”
Most of the music of the overture is built from the undulating, repeated phrase with which it opens. Wagner described the piece as an "aquarelle," and compared one passage to the wailing of sea-winds. But perhaps, in saying this, he was thinking ahead to his own Flying Dutchman overture - Mendelssohn’s, for most of the way, is a seascape recollected in tranquillity, and not even the spiky woodwind in the work's inspired middle section nor the rough waves that rise towards the end (where the pace quickens, the strings hurtle along in semiquavers, and trumpets and drums add an element of menace) are allowed to disrupt the formal perfection of the score.
When the storm subsides, we can expect the little introductory motif to be still there, and so it is. It has already provided a link with the theme of the second subject, first heard on bassoons and cellos and subsequently, in a poetically extended form, on the clarinets. Sir Donald Tovey, in one of his famous essays, declared this to be quite the greatest melody Mendelssohn ever wrote, but notice how it makes its point in the first place without disturbing the natural flow of the music. Facile? Subtle? There may be works by Mendelssohn that tread a tightrope between these qualities, but the grey and silver beauty of the Hebrides overture shows the hand of a master.
© Conrad Wilson
- Mozart
Programme note
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756-1791)
Piano Concerto No 20 in D minor, K466Allegro
Romance
Allegro assaiIt is not difficult to understand why the nineteenth century kept Mozart’s D minor piano concerto on the concert platform while ignoring many of his other works, for it is quintessentially Romantic in nature.
Mozart’s D minor concerto is dark and surprising in its outer movements while cradling a central slow movement of such tender lyricism that it would take a heart of steel not to succumb to its blandishments. The turbulence of the opening movement is offset by a Rondo finale that is full of irregularities – it even harks back to the tempestuous first movement. The unusual (for Mozart) addition of two trumpets and timpani to the orchestra for this concerto also contributes to the drama. But when all is said and done, Mozart cannot resist providing us with a ‘happy ending’ by concluding his masterpiece triumphantly in D major.
Given the unsettling parry and thrust of this concerto, it is astonishing to learn that the copyists were still busy writing out the orchestral parts the day before the concert. The orchestral musicians must have been the very best in Vienna, for the ever-critical Leopold Mozart (who arrived just in time to hear his son give the first performance of the concerto in Vienna in February 1785) noted how wonderfully the entire subscription concert had been performed – and the orchestral parts are no mere trifling accompaniment. The writing for both soloist and orchestra is powerful and dramatic, with the orchestra playing an equally important part in the musical development of the work. It is not hard to hear why Beethoven, who performed this concerto frequently, should have been so attracted to this magnificent specimen of Mozart’s art – but then, so are we all.
K466 has always been a regular visitor to the concert platform, and will continue to be so as long as we have ears! It is a perfect example of why music can so deeply touch human emotions while mere words can only hope to scratch the surface. But then, that is why Mozart is one of the immortals – his music goes straight to the heart.
© David Gardner
- piano/director
- violin/director
The 2010/11 Aberdeen Concert Season is opened by the great Polish pianist Piotr Anderszewski, who has established a wonderful rapport with the SCO over recent years. Here they offer a chance to measure the sheer richness of Mozart’s musical imagination by performing two utterly different piano concertos, juxtaposing the stormy, operatic drama
of K466 and the near Beethovenian breadth of K595 – Mozart’s last piano concerto.
SCO American Tour 2010
- Beethoven
Programme note
Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827)
Scenes from Prometheus (1801)Overture
Pastorale (Allegro)
Solo della Signora Casentini (Andantino - Adagio - Allegro)
Finale (Allegretto - Allegro molto)Though his Seventh Symphony was nicknamed by Wagner “The Apotheosis of the Dance,” Beethoven and ballet seem like a contradiction in terms. Yet by the age of 31 he had composed two such scores. The first, his early Ritterballet, was merely hackwork, ghost-written for his friend Count Waldstein; but Prometheus, a few years later, was altogether more ambitious, and one of his first big Viennese successes.
Its full title, Die Geschopfe des Prometheus, has been variously translated as the Creatures, or the Creations, or the Children of Prometheus, but the story has little to do with the mythical hero who was chained to a rock, where an eagle tore at his liver until Hercules rescued him. Beethoven’s Prometheus suffers no such hardship. A more idealistic figure, he seemed something of a classical Lord Reith, who “drove ignorance from the people, and gave them manners, customs, and morals.” In Act One of this full-length ballet, he brings two statues to life. In Act Two, he delivers them to Parnassus to be instructed by Apollo and the Muses and endowed with the blessings of culture.
Sir Donald Tovey, Edinburgh University’s famous musical essayist, considered large tracts of the score to be “monotonously frivolous,” but he was being too severe. Haydn, meeting Beethoven in the street, supposedly praised the music, to which Beethoven replied: “Oh, dear Papa, you are too good, but mine is no Creation by a long shot.” The words may sound improbable, but Maynard Solomon, best of Beethoven’s modern biographers, has quoted them without reservation. The ballet in our own time has had a new lease of life, and several of the sixteen dances - not least the striking interlude for the ballerina Maria Casentini, with its solo cello and plashing harp - have regained a small place in the orchestral repertoire.
As for the overture, it has long enjoyed a separate existence as a concert piece. It is similar in style to Mozart’s Cosi fan tutte overture, and to the first movement of Beethoven’s own First Symphony, which he wrote around the same time. Each has a slow introduction, starting provocatively on a discord and continuing with a flowing, tender melody; and each then unleashes a racy, sparkling allegro, exhilarating in its momentum.
The sweet-toned Pastorale movement, which follows, anticipates the glow of the finale of the Pastoral Symphony. But - after the romantic Casentini solo - what the finale of Prometheus more startlingly anticipates is nothing less than the finale of the Eroica Symphony, with its famous Napoleon (or in this case Prometheus) theme, which for a time so obsessed Beethoven that he employed it in several of his works before bringing it to a state of symphonic perfection in the Eroica itself.
© Conrad Wilson
- Mozart
Programme note
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756-1791)
Piano Concerto in B flat major, K595 (1791)Allegro
Larghetto
Allegro"Everything is cold for me – ice cold," wrote Mozart at the start of what was to be the last year of his life. He was not referring to the Viennese weather. His fame as Europe’s finest pianist-composer, who had brought the art of the piano concerto to its zenith, was dwindling. He had cash-flow problems, though these were in the process of being resolved. He was suffering from depression. But, as Meynard Solomon declared in his great Mozart biography, he "somehow managed to stem the drift into silence". He did so with a chain of masterpieces whose sheer quantity and variety - from The Magic Flute to the most subtle sequences of ballroom dances - he had not previously surpassed.
At the beginning of January he completed the last of his piano concertos, K595 in B flat major. His Clarinet Concerto, his last great string quintet, his last two operas, and a group of haunting miniatures - the Little German Cantata, the touching Ave Verum Corpus, the music for mechanical organ, the last few songs - still lay ahead, as also did the great unfinished Requiem. Though the last piano concerto has been thought to possess the quality of a 'transfigured farewell' - a very apt phrase with which to describe it - there is not the slightest evidence that Mozart himself thought about it that way, or that when he wrote it he was more than usually aware of his own impending demise. Those who say the music contains intimations of Mozart’s death are merely being wise after the event. His death-consciousness applied to the fate of all humanity.
Yet after the glitter of the ceremonial Coronation concerto, written three years previously, there is undoubtedly something very pared-down about K595, something conspicuously inward-looking about its mood. Its orchestration, with just a single flute, two oboes, two bassoons, two horns and strings, but no clarinets and certainly no trumpets and drums, is almost minimalist by Mozart’s standards at the time. Even the movement headings - 'Allegro', 'Larghetto', 'Allegro' - are reduced to single words. All this seems significant, but whether it signifies death or what might have been the start of a new phase in Mozart’s output of concertos is another matter.
Whatever else he had in mind - and it looked like quite a lot - further piano concertos at that point looked unlikely. When he played K595 on 4 March 1791, it was destined to be his last public appearance as a solo pianist before his death nine months later. The person who made it possible was an old acquaintance - the successful clarinettist Joseph Baehr - who slotted it into a concert in which Mozart was quite clearly not the star. The programme, given in the hall of a restaurant owner round the corner from Mozart’s apartment, featured Baehr himself as the main attraction. Next in importance was the singer Aloysia Lange, Mozart’s sister-in-law, whom he had loved and once hoped to marry. The information that "Herr Kapellmeister Mozart will play a concerto on the fortepiano" came third in line.
Did the work’s murmuring, unhurried opening make its mark? Were the downward scales and chromaticisms thought to possess a forlorn wraithlike eloquence? Was the flow of the music, in which one theme merges with the next, perceived to be beautifully sustained or did the audience fail to grasp such extraordinary continuity of line? Mozart’s own cadenza, written into the score, adds to the first movement’s special unity, as does the similarly personal cadenza in the finale.
The simplicity of the slow movement, which one distinguished but sometimes imperceptive authority on Mozart’s concertos has deemed to be a sign of waning inspiration, is perfectly in keeping with the veiled beauty of the rest of the work. Even the buoyant main theme of the rondo finale, which in an earlier concerto might have sounded like a vigorous hunting motif, has a delicacy appropriate to the intimacy of the music. It is no surprise that Mozart employed almost the same melody in one of his last songs, entitled 'Longing for Spring'.
Though it might seem sentimental to point out that 1791’s was to be Mozart’s last spring, the poignancy of the music makes the temptation irresistible. Yet there is also a lightweight muscularity about this movement which makes it possible to draw quite different conclusions about its meaning. In Mozart's last piano concerto, as in so many of its great predecessors, ambiguity reigned supreme.
© Conrad Wilson
- Mendelssohn
Programme note
Felix Mendelssohn (1809-1847)
Hebrides Overture (1829-32)Great composers who visited Britain in the nineteenth century seldom ventured as far north as Scotland. Berlioz nearly made it in 1853, when it was suggested he perform Mendelssohn’s Elijah with the Glasgow Choral Union, but the singers refused to have him as conductor. Chopin certainly made it in 1848, though the journey nearly killed him. But it was Mendelssohn whose Scottish tour in 1829 was the most productive of its kind ever undertaken by a composer from elsewhere.
Not only did Holyrood Palace inspire the opening of his Scottish Symphony (a theme which, aptly enough, was to reappear under the title of Bad Weather at the start of another of his works) but the sight of Fingal’s Cave on the island of Staffa obviously bowled him over during his voyage to the Hebrides. In a letter to his family, he spoke of how "extraordinarily" the scene affected him, and he enclosed 21 bars of music which, he said, had sprung to mind there. These were the first bars of the Hebrides overture, though the rest of the work was not completed until he reached Italy the following year. It was then, as one of his biographers later commented, “among the laurels and orange groves that his thoughts and affections carried him back to the waves of the North Sea.”
Most of the music of the overture is built from the undulating, repeated phrase with which it opens. Wagner described the piece as an "aquarelle," and compared one passage to the wailing of sea-winds. But perhaps, in saying this, he was thinking ahead to his own Flying Dutchman overture - Mendelssohn’s, for most of the way, is a seascape recollected in tranquillity, and not even the spiky woodwind in the work's inspired middle section nor the rough waves that rise towards the end (where the pace quickens, the strings hurtle along in semiquavers, and trumpets and drums add an element of menace) are allowed to disrupt the formal perfection of the score.
When the storm subsides, we can expect the little introductory motif to be still there, and so it is. It has already provided a link with the theme of the second subject, first heard on bassoons and cellos and subsequently, in a poetically extended form, on the clarinets. Sir Donald Tovey, in one of his famous essays, declared this to be quite the greatest melody Mendelssohn ever wrote, but notice how it makes its point in the first place without disturbing the natural flow of the music. Facile? Subtle? There may be works by Mendelssohn that tread a tightrope between these qualities, but the grey and silver beauty of the Hebrides overture shows the hand of a master.
© Conrad Wilson
- Mozart
Programme note
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756-1791)
Piano Concerto No 20 in D minor, K466Allegro
Romance
Allegro assaiIt is not difficult to understand why the nineteenth century kept Mozart’s D minor piano concerto on the concert platform while ignoring many of his other works, for it is quintessentially Romantic in nature.
Mozart’s D minor concerto is dark and surprising in its outer movements while cradling a central slow movement of such tender lyricism that it would take a heart of steel not to succumb to its blandishments. The turbulence of the opening movement is offset by a Rondo finale that is full of irregularities – it even harks back to the tempestuous first movement. The unusual (for Mozart) addition of two trumpets and timpani to the orchestra for this concerto also contributes to the drama. But when all is said and done, Mozart cannot resist providing us with a ‘happy ending’ by concluding his masterpiece triumphantly in D major.
Given the unsettling parry and thrust of this concerto, it is astonishing to learn that the copyists were still busy writing out the orchestral parts the day before the concert. The orchestral musicians must have been the very best in Vienna, for the ever-critical Leopold Mozart (who arrived just in time to hear his son give the first performance of the concerto in Vienna in February 1785) noted how wonderfully the entire subscription concert had been performed – and the orchestral parts are no mere trifling accompaniment. The writing for both soloist and orchestra is powerful and dramatic, with the orchestra playing an equally important part in the musical development of the work. It is not hard to hear why Beethoven, who performed this concerto frequently, should have been so attracted to this magnificent specimen of Mozart’s art – but then, so are we all.
K466 has always been a regular visitor to the concert platform, and will continue to be so as long as we have ears! It is a perfect example of why music can so deeply touch human emotions while mere words can only hope to scratch the surface. But then, that is why Mozart is one of the immortals – his music goes straight to the heart.
© David Gardner
- piano/director
- violin/director
Piotr Anderszewski juxtaposes the stormy, operatic drama of K466 and the near Beethovenian breadth of K595 – Mozart’s last piano concerto.
For more information, click here
SCO American Tour 2010
- Beethoven
Programme note
Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827)
Scenes from Prometheus (1801)Overture
Pastorale (Allegro)
Solo della Signora Casentini (Andantino - Adagio - Allegro)
Finale (Allegretto - Allegro molto)Though his Seventh Symphony was nicknamed by Wagner “The Apotheosis of the Dance,” Beethoven and ballet seem like a contradiction in terms. Yet by the age of 31 he had composed two such scores. The first, his early Ritterballet, was merely hackwork, ghost-written for his friend Count Waldstein; but Prometheus, a few years later, was altogether more ambitious, and one of his first big Viennese successes.
Its full title, Die Geschopfe des Prometheus, has been variously translated as the Creatures, or the Creations, or the Children of Prometheus, but the story has little to do with the mythical hero who was chained to a rock, where an eagle tore at his liver until Hercules rescued him. Beethoven’s Prometheus suffers no such hardship. A more idealistic figure, he seemed something of a classical Lord Reith, who “drove ignorance from the people, and gave them manners, customs, and morals.” In Act One of this full-length ballet, he brings two statues to life. In Act Two, he delivers them to Parnassus to be instructed by Apollo and the Muses and endowed with the blessings of culture.
Sir Donald Tovey, Edinburgh University’s famous musical essayist, considered large tracts of the score to be “monotonously frivolous,” but he was being too severe. Haydn, meeting Beethoven in the street, supposedly praised the music, to which Beethoven replied: “Oh, dear Papa, you are too good, but mine is no Creation by a long shot.” The words may sound improbable, but Maynard Solomon, best of Beethoven’s modern biographers, has quoted them without reservation. The ballet in our own time has had a new lease of life, and several of the sixteen dances - not least the striking interlude for the ballerina Maria Casentini, with its solo cello and plashing harp - have regained a small place in the orchestral repertoire.
As for the overture, it has long enjoyed a separate existence as a concert piece. It is similar in style to Mozart’s Cosi fan tutte overture, and to the first movement of Beethoven’s own First Symphony, which he wrote around the same time. Each has a slow introduction, starting provocatively on a discord and continuing with a flowing, tender melody; and each then unleashes a racy, sparkling allegro, exhilarating in its momentum.
The sweet-toned Pastorale movement, which follows, anticipates the glow of the finale of the Pastoral Symphony. But - after the romantic Casentini solo - what the finale of Prometheus more startlingly anticipates is nothing less than the finale of the Eroica Symphony, with its famous Napoleon (or in this case Prometheus) theme, which for a time so obsessed Beethoven that he employed it in several of his works before bringing it to a state of symphonic perfection in the Eroica itself.
© Conrad Wilson
- Mozart
Programme note
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart 1756-1791
Piano Concerto in B flat major, K595 (1791)Allegro
Larghetto
Allegro"Everything is cold for me – ice cold," wrote Mozart at the start of what was to be the last year of his life. He was not referring to the Viennese weather. His fame as Europe’s finest pianist-composer, who had brought the art of the piano concerto to its zenith, was dwindling. He had cash-flow problems, though these were in the process of being resolved. He was suffering from depression. But, as Meynard Solomon declared in his great Mozart biography, he "somehow managed to stem the drift into silence". He did so with a chain of masterpieces whose sheer quantity and variety - from The Magic Flute to the most subtle sequences of ballroom dances - he had not previously surpassed.
At the beginning of January he completed the last of his piano concertos, K595 in B flat major. His Clarinet Concerto, his last great string quintet, his last two operas, and a group of haunting miniatures - the Little German Cantata, the touching Ave Verum Corpus, the music for mechanical organ, the last few songs - still lay ahead, as also did the great unfinished Requiem. Though the last piano concerto has been thought to possess the quality of a "transfigured farewell" - a very apt phrase with which to describe it - there is not the slightest evidence that Mozart himself thought about it that way, or that when he wrote it he was more than usually aware of his own impending demise. Those who say the music contains intimations of Mozart’s death are merely being wise after the event. His death-consciousness applied to the fate of all humanity.
Yet after the glitter of the ceremonial Coronation Concerto, written three years previously, there is undoubtedly something very pared-down about K595, something conspicuously inward-looking about its mood. Its orchestration, with just a single flute, two oboes, two bassoons, two horns and strings, but no clarinets and certainly no trumpets and drums, is almost minimalist by Mozart’s standards at the time. Even the movement headings - Allegro, Larghetto, Allegro - are reduced to single words. All this seems significant, but whether it signifies death or what might have been the start of a new phase in Mozart’s output of concertos is another matter.
Whatever else he had in mind - and it seemed quite a lot - further piano concertos at that point looked unlikely. When he played K595 on 4 March 1791, it was destined to be his last public appearance as a solo pianist before his death nine months later. The person who made it possible was an old acquaintance - the successful clarinettist Joseph Baehr - who slotted it into a concert in which Mozart was quite clearly not the star. The programme, given in the hall of a restaurant owner round the corner from Mozart’s apartment, featured Baehr himself as the main attraction. Next in importance was the singer Aloysia Lange, Mozart’s sister-in-law, whom he had loved and once hoped to marry. The information that "Herr Kapellmeister Mozart will play a concerto on the fortepiano" came third in line.
Did the work’s murmuring, unhurried opening make its mark? Were the downward scales and chromaticisms thought to possess a forlorn wraithlike eloquence? Was the flow of the music, in which one theme merges with the next, perceived to be beautifully sustained or did the audience fail to grasp such extraordinary continuity of line? Mozart’s own cadenza, written into the score, adds to the first movement’s special unity, as does the similarly personal cadenza in the finale.
The simplicity of the slow movement, which one distinguished but sometimes imperceptive authority on Mozart’s concertos has deemed to be a sign of waning inspiration, is perfectly in keeping with the veiled beauty of the rest of the work. Even the buoyant main theme of the rondo finale, which in an earlier concerto might have sounded like a vigorous hunting motif, has a delicacy appropriate to the intimacy of the music. It is no surprise that Mozart employed almost the same melody in one of his last songs, entitled "Longing for Spring".
Though it might seem sentimental to point out that 1791’s was to be Mozart’s last spring, the poignancy of the music makes the temptation irresistible. Yet there is also a lightweight muscularity about this movement which makes it possible to draw quite different conclusions about its meaning. In Mozart's last piano concerto, as in so many of its great predecessors, ambiguity reigns supreme.
© Conrad Wilson
- Mendelssohn
Programme note
Felix Mendelssohn (1809-1847)
Hebrides Overture (1829-32)Great composers who visited Britain in the nineteenth century seldom ventured as far north as Scotland. Berlioz nearly made it in 1853, when it was suggested he perform Mendelssohn’s Elijah with the Glasgow Choral Union, but the singers refused to have him as conductor. Chopin certainly made it in 1848, though the journey nearly killed him. But it was Mendelssohn whose Scottish tour in 1829 was the most productive of its kind ever undertaken by a composer from elsewhere.
Not only did Holyrood Palace inspire the opening of his Scottish Symphony (a theme which, aptly enough, was to reappear under the title of Bad Weather at the start of another of his works) but the sight of Fingal’s Cave on the island of Staffa obviously bowled him over during his voyage to the Hebrides. In a letter to his family, he spoke of how "extraordinarily" the scene affected him, and he enclosed 21 bars of music which, he said, had sprung to mind there. These were the first bars of the Hebrides overture, though the rest of the work was not completed until he reached Italy the following year. It was then, as one of his biographers later commented, “among the laurels and orange groves that his thoughts and affections carried him back to the waves of the North Sea.”
Most of the music of the overture is built from the undulating, repeated phrase with which it opens. Wagner described the piece as an "aquarelle," and compared one passage to the wailing of sea-winds. But perhaps, in saying this, he was thinking ahead to his own Flying Dutchman overture - Mendelssohn’s, for most of the way, is a seascape recollected in tranquillity, and not even the spiky woodwind in the work's inspired middle section nor the rough waves that rise towards the end (where the pace quickens, the strings hurtle along in semiquavers, and trumpets and drums add an element of menace) are allowed to disrupt the formal perfection of the score.
When the storm subsides, we can expect the little introductory motif to be still there, and so it is. It has already provided a link with the theme of the second subject, first heard on bassoons and cellos and subsequently, in a poetically extended form, on the clarinets. Sir Donald Tovey, in one of his famous essays, declared this to be quite the greatest melody Mendelssohn ever wrote, but notice how it makes its point in the first place without disturbing the natural flow of the music. Facile? Subtle? There may be works by Mendelssohn that tread a tightrope between these qualities, but the grey and silver beauty of the Hebrides overture shows the hand of a master.
© Conrad Wilson
- Mozart
Programme note
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756-1791)
Piano Concerto No 20 in D minor, K466Allegro
Romance
Allegro assaiIt is not difficult to understand why the nineteenth century kept Mozart’s D minor piano concerto on the concert platform while ignoring many of his other works, for it is quintessentially Romantic in nature.
Mozart’s D minor concerto is dark and surprising in its outer movements while cradling a central slow movement of such tender lyricism that it would take a heart of steel not to succumb to its blandishments. The turbulence of the opening movement is offset by a Rondo finale that is full of irregularities – it even harks back to the tempestuous first movement. The unusual (for Mozart) addition of two trumpets and timpani to the orchestra for this concerto also contributes to the drama. But when all is said and done, Mozart cannot resist providing us with a ‘happy ending’ by concluding his masterpiece triumphantly in D major.
Given the unsettling parry and thrust of this concerto, it is astonishing to learn that the copyists were still busy writing out the orchestral parts the day before the concert. The orchestral musicians must have been the very best in Vienna, for the ever-critical Leopold Mozart (who arrived just in time to hear his son give the first performance of the concerto in Vienna in February 1785) noted how wonderfully the entire subscription concert had been performed – and the orchestral parts are no mere trifling accompaniment. The writing for both soloist and orchestra is powerful and dramatic, with the orchestra playing an equally important part in the musical development of the work. It is not hard to hear why Beethoven, who performed this concerto frequently, should have been so attracted to this magnificent specimen of Mozart’s art – but then, so are we all.
K466 has always been a regular visitor to the concert platform, and will continue to be so as long as we have ears! It is a perfect example of why music can so deeply touch human emotions while mere words can only hope to scratch the surface. But then, that is why Mozart is one of the immortals – his music goes straight to the heart.
© David Gardner
- piano/director
- violin/director
Piotr Anderszewski juxtaposes the stormy, operatic drama of K466 and the near Beethovenian breadth of K595 – Mozart’s last piano concerto.
For more information, click here
SCO American Tour 2010
- Beethoven
Programme note
Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827)
Scenes from Prometheus (1801)Overture
Pastorale (Allegro)
Solo della Signora Casentini (Andantino - Adagio - Allegro)
Finale (Allegretto - Allegro molto)Though his Seventh Symphony was nicknamed by Wagner “The Apotheosis of the Dance,” Beethoven and ballet seem like a contradiction in terms. Yet by the age of 31 he had composed two such scores. The first, his early Ritterballet, was merely hackwork, ghost-written for his friend Count Waldstein; but Prometheus, a few years later, was altogether more ambitious, and one of his first big Viennese successes.
Its full title, Die Geschopfe des Prometheus, has been variously translated as the Creatures, or the Creations, or the Children of Prometheus, but the story has little to do with the mythical hero who was chained to a rock, where an eagle tore at his liver until Hercules rescued him. Beethoven’s Prometheus suffers no such hardship. A more idealistic figure, he seemed something of a classical Lord Reith, who “drove ignorance from the people, and gave them manners, customs, and morals.” In Act One of this full-length ballet, he brings two statues to life. In Act Two, he delivers them to Parnassus to be instructed by Apollo and the Muses and endowed with the blessings of culture.
Sir Donald Tovey, Edinburgh University’s famous musical essayist, considered large tracts of the score to be “monotonously frivolous,” but he was being too severe. Haydn, meeting Beethoven in the street, supposedly praised the music, to which Beethoven replied: “Oh, dear Papa, you are too good, but mine is no Creation by a long shot.” The words may sound improbable, but Maynard Solomon, best of Beethoven’s modern biographers, has quoted them without reservation. The ballet in our own time has had a new lease of life, and several of the sixteen dances - not least the striking interlude for the ballerina Maria Casentini, with its solo cello and plashing harp - have regained a small place in the orchestral repertoire.
As for the overture, it has long enjoyed a separate existence as a concert piece. It is similar in style to Mozart’s Cosi fan tutte overture, and to the first movement of Beethoven’s own First Symphony, which he wrote around the same time. Each has a slow introduction, starting provocatively on a discord and continuing with a flowing, tender melody; and each then unleashes a racy, sparkling allegro, exhilarating in its momentum.
The sweet-toned Pastorale movement, which follows, anticipates the glow of the finale of the Pastoral Symphony. But - after the romantic Casentini solo - what the finale of Prometheus more startlingly anticipates is nothing less than the finale of the Eroica Symphony, with its famous Napoleon (or in this case Prometheus) theme, which for a time so obsessed Beethoven that he employed it in several of his works before bringing it to a state of symphonic perfection in the Eroica itself.
© Conrad Wilson
- Mozart
Programme note
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart 1756-1791
Piano Concerto in B flat major, K595 (1791)Allegro
Larghetto
Allegro"Everything is cold for me – ice cold," wrote Mozart at the start of what was to be the last year of his life. He was not referring to the Viennese weather. His fame as Europe’s finest pianist-composer, who had brought the art of the piano concerto to its zenith, was dwindling. He had cash-flow problems, though these were in the process of being resolved. He was suffering from depression. But, as Meynard Solomon declared in his great Mozart biography, he "somehow managed to stem the drift into silence". He did so with a chain of masterpieces whose sheer quantity and variety - from The Magic Flute to the most subtle sequences of ballroom dances - he had not previously surpassed.
At the beginning of January he completed the last of his piano concertos, K595 in B flat major. His Clarinet Concerto, his last great string quintet, his last two operas, and a group of haunting miniatures - the Little German Cantata, the touching Ave Verum Corpus, the music for mechanical organ, the last few songs - still lay ahead, as also did the great unfinished Requiem. Though the last piano concerto has been thought to possess the quality of a "transfigured farewell" - a very apt phrase with which to describe it - there is not the slightest evidence that Mozart himself thought about it that way, or that when he wrote it he was more than usually aware of his own impending demise. Those who say the music contains intimations of Mozart’s death are merely being wise after the event. His death-consciousness applied to the fate of all humanity.
Yet after the glitter of the ceremonial Coronation Concerto, written three years previously, there is undoubtedly something very pared-down about K595, something conspicuously inward-looking about its mood. Its orchestration, with just a single flute, two oboes, two bassoons, two horns and strings, but no clarinets and certainly no trumpets and drums, is almost minimalist by Mozart’s standards at the time. Even the movement headings - Allegro, Larghetto, Allegro - are reduced to single words. All this seems significant, but whether it signifies death or what might have been the start of a new phase in Mozart’s output of concertos is another matter.
Whatever else he had in mind - and it seemed quite a lot - further piano concertos at that point looked unlikely. When he played K595 on 4 March 1791, it was destined to be his last public appearance as a solo pianist before his death nine months later. The person who made it possible was an old acquaintance - the successful clarinettist Joseph Baehr - who slotted it into a concert in which Mozart was quite clearly not the star. The programme, given in the hall of a restaurant owner round the corner from Mozart’s apartment, featured Baehr himself as the main attraction. Next in importance was the singer Aloysia Lange, Mozart’s sister-in-law, whom he had loved and once hoped to marry. The information that "Herr Kapellmeister Mozart will play a concerto on the fortepiano" came third in line.
Did the work’s murmuring, unhurried opening make its mark? Were the downward scales and chromaticisms thought to possess a forlorn wraithlike eloquence? Was the flow of the music, in which one theme merges with the next, perceived to be beautifully sustained or did the audience fail to grasp such extraordinary continuity of line? Mozart’s own cadenza, written into the score, adds to the first movement’s special unity, as does the similarly personal cadenza in the finale.
The simplicity of the slow movement, which one distinguished but sometimes imperceptive authority on Mozart’s concertos has deemed to be a sign of waning inspiration, is perfectly in keeping with the veiled beauty of the rest of the work. Even the buoyant main theme of the rondo finale, which in an earlier concerto might have sounded like a vigorous hunting motif, has a delicacy appropriate to the intimacy of the music. It is no surprise that Mozart employed almost the same melody in one of his last songs, entitled "Longing for Spring".
Though it might seem sentimental to point out that 1791’s was to be Mozart’s last spring, the poignancy of the music makes the temptation irresistible. Yet there is also a lightweight muscularity about this movement which makes it possible to draw quite different conclusions about its meaning. In Mozart's last piano concerto, as in so many of its great predecessors, ambiguity reigns supreme.
© Conrad Wilson
- Mendelssohn
Programme note
Felix Mendelssohn (1809-1847)
Hebrides Overture (1829-32)Great composers who visited Britain in the nineteenth century seldom ventured as far north as Scotland. Berlioz nearly made it in 1853, when it was suggested he perform Mendelssohn’s Elijah with the Glasgow Choral Union, but the singers refused to have him as conductor. Chopin certainly made it in 1848, though the journey nearly killed him. But it was Mendelssohn whose Scottish tour in 1829 was the most productive of its kind ever undertaken by a composer from elsewhere.
Not only did Holyrood Palace inspire the opening of his Scottish Symphony (a theme which, aptly enough, was to reappear under the title of Bad Weather at the start of another of his works) but the sight of Fingal’s Cave on the island of Staffa obviously bowled him over during his voyage to the Hebrides. In a letter to his family, he spoke of how "extraordinarily" the scene affected him, and he enclosed 21 bars of music which, he said, had sprung to mind there. These were the first bars of the Hebrides overture, though the rest of the work was not completed until he reached Italy the following year. It was then, as one of his biographers later commented, “among the laurels and orange groves that his thoughts and affections carried him back to the waves of the North Sea.”
Most of the music of the overture is built from the undulating, repeated phrase with which it opens. Wagner described the piece as an "aquarelle," and compared one passage to the wailing of sea-winds. But perhaps, in saying this, he was thinking ahead to his own Flying Dutchman overture - Mendelssohn’s, for most of the way, is a seascape recollected in tranquillity, and not even the spiky woodwind in the work's inspired middle section nor the rough waves that rise towards the end (where the pace quickens, the strings hurtle along in semiquavers, and trumpets and drums add an element of menace) are allowed to disrupt the formal perfection of the score.
When the storm subsides, we can expect the little introductory motif to be still there, and so it is. It has already provided a link with the theme of the second subject, first heard on bassoons and cellos and subsequently, in a poetically extended form, on the clarinets. Sir Donald Tovey, in one of his famous essays, declared this to be quite the greatest melody Mendelssohn ever wrote, but notice how it makes its point in the first place without disturbing the natural flow of the music. Facile? Subtle? There may be works by Mendelssohn that tread a tightrope between these qualities, but the grey and silver beauty of the Hebrides overture shows the hand of a master.
© Conrad Wilson
- Mozart
Programme note
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756-1791)
Piano Concerto No 20 in D minor, K466Allegro
Romance
Allegro assaiIt is not difficult to understand why the nineteenth century kept Mozart’s D minor piano concerto on the concert platform while ignoring many of his other works, for it is quintessentially Romantic in nature.
Mozart’s D minor concerto is dark and surprising in its outer movements while cradling a central slow movement of such tender lyricism that it would take a heart of steel not to succumb to its blandishments. The turbulence of the opening movement is offset by a Rondo finale that is full of irregularities – it even harks back to the tempestuous first movement. The unusual (for Mozart) addition of two trumpets and timpani to the orchestra for this concerto also contributes to the drama. But when all is said and done, Mozart cannot resist providing us with a ‘happy ending’ by concluding his masterpiece triumphantly in D major.
Given the unsettling parry and thrust of this concerto, it is astonishing to learn that the copyists were still busy writing out the orchestral parts the day before the concert. The orchestral musicians must have been the very best in Vienna, for the ever-critical Leopold Mozart (who arrived just in time to hear his son give the first performance of the concerto in Vienna in February 1785) noted how wonderfully the entire subscription concert had been performed – and the orchestral parts are no mere trifling accompaniment. The writing for both soloist and orchestra is powerful and dramatic, with the orchestra playing an equally important part in the musical development of the work. It is not hard to hear why Beethoven, who performed this concerto frequently, should have been so attracted to this magnificent specimen of Mozart’s art – but then, so are we all.
K466 has always been a regular visitor to the concert platform, and will continue to be so as long as we have ears! It is a perfect example of why music can so deeply touch human emotions while mere words can only hope to scratch the surface. But then, that is why Mozart is one of the immortals – his music goes straight to the heart.
© David Gardner
- piano/director
- violin/director
Piotr Anderszewski juxtaposes the stormy, operatic drama of K466 and the near Beethovenian breadth of K595 – Mozart’s last piano concerto.
For more information, click here
Subscribe to concerts
Save money with an SCO concert subscription and get a free concert, £5 CD voucher and many other benefits.
Support Us
Become an SCO Patron, join the 250 Society, take advantage of sponsorship opportunities or our Corporate Members scheme.
