Concerts & Tickets

Programme note

Franz Schreker (1878-1934)
Kammersymphonie (Chamber Symphony) (1916)

After many years left languishing in obscurity, Franz Schreker’s works are once more receiving the attention and adulation that they attracted during his lifetime. During the early years of the Weimar Republic, Schreker’s fame was at its peak and his operas were performed more often than those of any other composer – with only the exception of Richard Strauss. His opera Der ferne Klang was the turning point in his career and remains one of the seminal works of the twentieth century, cited by Arnold Schoenberg in his Harmonielehre for its daring use of harmonic juxtapositions. Schreker’s imaginative and subtle use of timbre, rich orchestral textures and dramatic operatic characterisations would also have a profound influence on the likes of Alban Berg, Ernst Krenek and Karol Szymanowski.

Sadly, the rise of National Socialism during the 1930s brought about the cancellation of many performances of his works, and with it the loss of many of his scores and secondary sources. Schreker was also soon forced to stand down from his position as Director of the Musikhochschule in Berlin and shortly afterwards died of a stroke at the age of just 56. In just a short space of time the reception of his music changed from having been hailed as the future of German opera to being considered little more than a historical quirk, marginalised and overlooked by posterity.

Of the music which has survived and is now being revived in the concert hall, Schreker’s Kammersymphonie has become one of his most popular orchestral works. Written in just one movement, it is emblematic of the richness of his late style and the precision of orchestration which proved so influential for his contemporaries. Alongside single winds, harp, celeste, harmonium, piano and percussion, Schreker subdivides the strings into no less than ten parts to create a dense and intricately-woven orchestral texture. At times, as many as 22 independent lines may be heard amidst the ensemble, though Schreker often employs subtle instrumental doublings, so that one instrument may appear to merge seamlessly into another.

While these lush and detailed orchestrations, coupled with his colourful harmonic palette, demonstrate the influences of Debussy, Mahler, Wagner and Strauss, it is Schreker’s distinctive mixture of romanticism, naturalism, symbolism and expressionism that make his music unique – straddling the boundaries of stylistic change that characterised the first half of the twentieth century. Writing in 1919, three years after completing the Kammersymphonie, Schreker declared: "I am a sound-artist, a sound-dreamer, a sound-aesthete and have no melody whatsoever."

© Jo Kirkbride

Programme note

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756-1791)
Piano Concerto No 24 in C minor, K491

Allegro
Larghetto
Allegretto

Most of Mozart’s piano concertos have been described as 'unique,' but some, it could be said, are more unique than others. Allowing for the misuse of the word – Mozart, after all, composed almost thirty such works – what is it that makes the C minor concerto so special? First, it is the only one he composed in that particular key, and one of only two he composed in the minor. Moreover it is the only one that both begins and ends in the minor (the D minor concerto closes merrily in the major). But there is something else – less frequently acknowledged by commentators – which makes it different. This is the fact that the stark and stealthy opening theme employs all twelve notes of the chromatic scale – a feature of the music which so fascinated the twentieth-century German composer Klebe that he used Mozart’s theme as a twelve-note series in a symphony for strings written in 1953.

The C minor concerto so preoccupied Mozart that he interrupted the composition of The Marriage of Figaro to write it in the spring of 1786, giving its first performance himself at a concert in Vienna’s Burgtheater. It was his last major appearance as a soloist. The fickle Viennese had heard enough of his virtuosity and, though three more concertos lay ahead, he was by then "losing ground", as a recent biographer has put it, and was "no longer needed" as a concert performer.

Yet Beethoven, on first hearing the C minor concerto, famously said "Ah, we shall never be able to do anything like this" (when played in a nineteenth-century manner the music can indeed sound quite Beethovenian). Whether we should think of it as a "tragic’" concerto, however, rather depends on what can be said to constitute tragedy in a piece of abstract music. Certainly there is a ghostly pathos about the first movement, with its painfully stabbing dissonances, which sometimes erupts into violence, just as there is something strangely wraithlike about the progress of the finale. Sounding like a sombre, hesitant march, to which the mirthlessly dancing measures of the closing pages add no shred of comfort, this closing set of variations is all the more disturbing after the sunlit relief of the major-key slow movement, where the repetitions of the absurdly and treacherously simple main theme are interwoven with some of Mozart’s most touchingly lovely woodwind detail.

© Conrad Wilson

Programme note

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756-1791)
Piano Concerto in G major, K453 (1784)

Allegro
Andante
Allegretto – Presto

By the time he composed this concerto, Mozart had lost interest in Paris as a possible domicile and had settled in Vienna, thus depriving himself of foretastes of the French Revolution in 1789. Writing his subversive opera The Marriage of Figaro at long range soon after this evening’s concerto, he managed to sidestep the censor, even although the revolutionary Beaumarchais play was banned in Vienna. Whether he would have been so lucky in Paris was another matter, but in 1784 he had other things on his mind. He was well into the great series of Viennese piano concertos which he had launched in 1782, and was at work on the six string quartets he dedicated to Haydn. In addition he became a Viennese Freemason, moved house twice between January and September, and was ill for three weeks with a fever suspiciously like the one which eventually killed him.

Mozart once said of his piano music that it should ‘flow like oil.’ It is a description which fits some aspects of the G major Piano Concerto, a magnificent large-scale work whose intimacy of tone can make it sound smaller, slighter, and smoother than it really is. Mozart composed it not for himself but for one of his star pupils, Barbara Ployer, known as "Babette," which is one reason why it is sometimes described as a "feminine" work. Such terms, however, should be applied to Mozart with caution. He himself called it a concerto "to make you perspire," and Arthur Hutchings was not the only Mozart authority to point out that Ployer must have had to work very hard at the triplets in the finale, "unless the piece was taken much more slowly than we take it nowadays."

Even the famous music-box analogy, applied to the supposedly "tinkling" themes of the first movement and finale, is only half true. It would require a very special music-box to deal with the subtle modulations of the first movement’s opening theme, which cause the music to sigh as well as tinkle. In fact this movement is an astounding study in thematic interplay, and one of the first great landmarks of Mozart’s mature Viennese style. Not only does it employ a multiplicity of keyboard devices, but its sound-world is distinctly operatic, with some strange, disturbing foretastes of Don Giovanni planted amid the filigree detail.

The slow movement is similarly vocal, but perhaps more chaste and churchlike than operatically emotional. Yet its calm beauty is constantly threatened, in very Mozartian fashion, by the number of troubled modulations the music undergoes and by the nocturnal shadows in which it is often cloaked. Again the world of Don Giovanni seems not far distant.

But a different opera pervades the finale, which is a theme and variations supposedly inspired by the song of a pet starling – though more probably it was Mozart who taught his starling to sing it. From starling to birdman clearly required no great stretch of his imagination, and the music anticipated here is conspicuously Papageno’s in The Magic Flute. Yet the five variations are not just decorated versions of the theme but real creative feats of the imagination, comic, touching, and true to the whole nature of the piano concerto as Mozart envisaged it.

Nor does the increase of speed from allegretto to presto in the course of the finale imply that the movement has reached its coda. What it has reached is tantamount to a second finale – Mozart actually added the inscription "finale" at this point – making the music seem like the concerto equivalent of one of his operatic multiple finales, in which the pace increases step by step, with exhilarating comic effect.

© Conrad Wilson

Programme note

Robert Schumann (1810-1856)
Cello Concerto in A minor, Op 129 (1850)

Nicht zu schnell (not too fast)
Langsam (slow)
Sehr lebhaft (very lively)

Schumann, it used to be said, composed only one great concerto – the masterpiece for piano and orchestra in A minor – of which the two subsequent works were pale shadows. The Cello Concerto, being in the same key, easily laid itself open to this sort of criticism, and the Violin Concerto in D minor fell into the sad musicological category known as "not worth performing."

Yet it is the Cello Concerto’s links with the Piano Concerto that make it such a fascinating follow-up. No less lyrical than its predecessor, it is no less resourceful in its employment of thematic integration. The continuity of its three movements – the entire work is designed to be played without a break – may have been an idea already employed by Mendelssohn, but Schumann gives it added coherence through his cyclic use of the main theme. Moreover, and not unimportantly, it was the first cello concerto to have been written by a major composer in more than half a century. 

Why, then, has one of Schumann’s most established British biographers dismissed this concerto as "lacking real driving power"? The desire to give the solo instrument space to flower can admittedly make the music sound directionless, but only if the performers fail to resolve the resultant tempo problems. Impatiently speeding through the purely orchestral passages can too easily sound like escaping from a traffic jam.

Yet a degree of contrast between orchestral vitality and soloistic reflection does form part of the work's natural structure, as also of Schumann's own split musical personality, represented by the (extrovert) Florestan and (introvert) Eusebius characterisations he employed in so much of his music. In this respect, however, another of the work's problems could seem to lie in its date of composition, 1850 being supposedly one of the less happy turning points in Schumann's life, signifying waning genius if not yet the plunge into mental collapse which followed a few years later.

Nor did Schumann’s own modest description of the work as really "a Concertstuck [Concert Piece] for cello with orchestral accompaniment" do the music any favours. It merely prompted listeners to assume that it was something less than a concerto, and that the cello part was all that counted. In fact the three opening chords for woodwind and pizzicato strings are no less important than the cello’s wide-spanning theme which follows. They certainly pervade the tender slow movement, which may seem little more than an extended bridge passage – though being by Schumann a typically poetic one, calling for a second solo cello – between the first movement and finale.

The lead-in to the latter is a passionate, recitative-like version of the first movement’s opening cello theme, and the finale itself is structurally remarkable for its inclusion of a delayed cadenza, performed in tempo and accompanied by the orchestra as introduction to the coda. It was an idea which Elgar would later use with profit near the end of his Violin Concerto.

Despite Clara Schumann's enthusiasm for the music (“it seems to me to be written in true cello style”) the work did not receive its first performance, by an undistinguished soloist, until 1860, four years after the composer's death. But its important position in Schumann’s output has at last been recognised. In the repertoire of cello concertos, it is a major work.

© Conrad Wilson

Programme note

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756-1791)
Voi che sapete from Le Nozze di Figaro, K 492

Le Nozze di Figaro – The Marriage of Figaro, or, more colloquially, ‘Figaro’s Wedding’ – was the first of Mozart’s three comic operas to Italian librettos by Lorenzo Da Ponte. It seems to have been Mozart’s idea to write an opera based on the 1778 play by Beaumarchais, a project which he and Da Ponte undertook during the autumn of 1785 without a formal commission – indeed at some risk, because the play’s subversive portrayal of the aristocracy had led to it being banned in Vienna. But Da Ponte, as court poet, was able to persuade the Emperor that his operatic version was less incendiary, and the work was mounted at the Burgtheater in Vienna in May 1786. Although it was initially a success, the Viennese audience soon tired of it. But a second production in Prague the following season was a smash hit, and set the work on the way to the permanent place in the repertoire that it has enjoyed ever since.

For many music-lovers, Figaro is the perfect opera, at one and the same time a political statement (despite Da Ponte’s reassurances), a slick farce and a much deeper comedy of rifts and reconciliations, and all clothed in gloriously inventive and sympathetically characterised music. The opera is set in Count Almaviva’s palace outside Seville, and takes place on the wedding day of the Count’s manservant Figaro and the Countess’s maid Susanna: the Count attempts to seduce Susanna, reviving the old aristocratic droit de seigneur, but she, Figaro and the Countess conspire in various permutations to expose him as a philanderer. The cast-list is unusually rich in minor characters who play a significant part in the intrigues. Among them is the Count’s young page Cherubino, drawn by his raging hormones into adoration for all women, but especially his godmother the Countess. The role, a classic ‘breeches part’ for mezzo-soprano, includes two solo numbers – the second of which is the ‘arietta’ Voi che sapete.

This is presented as a song which Cherubino has written to sing to the Countess, with Susanna playing the guitar. The accompaniment is represented by pizzicato strings, while the wind section – flute, oboe, clarinet, bassoon and a pair of horns – provides an introduction and support for the vocal line. The flute and oboe also throw in what sound like occasional giggles. But the aria’s excursions into remote keys, some of them minor, indicate that Cherubino is taking himself – and Mozart is therefore taking Cherubino – perfectly seriously.

© Anthony Burton

Programme note

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756–1791)
Symphony No 35 in D major, K385 'Haffner' (1782)

Allegro con spirito
Andante
Menuetto and Trio
Presto

Sigmund Haffner, merchant and Burgomaster in Mozart’s home town of Salzburg, was responsible for commissioning two of the composer’s major works: the Serenade K250, for his daughter’s wedding in 1776; and this Symphony, for the celebrations of the raising of his son to the nobility, in the summer of 1782. By then, Mozart had moved from Salzburg to Vienna, and was very busy with other work. He accepted the commission – which came via his father, who had remained in Salzburg – with some reluctance, and sent off the score in instalments over the following few weeks. Later, he asked for it back, so that he could perform the work in his concert series in Vienna; and on receiving it in February 1783, he was surprised by the quality of the music he had written in such haste. “My new Haffner Symphony has positively amazed me, for I had forgotten every note of it,” he wrote to his father. “It must surely make a splendid effect.”

In its original form the work was less a symphony then a serenade, containing an introductory March (which has survived as K408 No 2) and two minuets, one each side of the Andante; but for the Vienna performance Mozart reduced it to the normal four-movement plan of the symphony. At the same time, he augmented the original scoring – for oboes, bassoons, horns, trumpets, timpani and strings – with optional parts for flutes and clarinets in the outer movements. An unusual feature of the orchestral writing of the first Allegro is the way the trumpets and drums are used not only, as usual, in brilliant tutti sections, but also on a couple of occasions in quiet minor-key passages; this is one of a number of features which give an unexpected and un-serenade-like depth to this generally festive movement. The wind section is reduced to oboes, bassoons and horns in the G major Andante – which, with its proliferation of decorative detail, is the most obviously serenade-like movement in the Symphony – and also in the Trio section of the sturdy Minuet. As for the finale, one striking feature of its scoring is the frequent doubling of the cello part by the bassoons, often even when there are no other wind instruments playing: at the Presto tempo prescribed by Mozart – and he told his father the movement should be played “as fast as possible” – this keeps the fingers and tongues of the two bassoonists very busy indeed!

© Anthony Burton

Programme note

Gioachino Rossini: (1792–1868):
The Barber of Seville Overture

Two Arias:
Cruda Sorte (L’Italiana in Algieri)
Una voce poco fa (Barber of Seville)

The story of the first performance of Rossini’s The Barber of Seville (1816) would itself make a great comedy. At 24, Rossini was a veteran and accepted the commission to deliver an opera within 5 weeks. Then his impresario died, but the show had to go on to provide for his widow and children. Then the regular audience took against the project, because they liked Paisiello’s version; then, at the premiere, a singer fell on his face while coming on-stage, and had to sing his opening number through a big nose bleed; next, a cat got onstage and terrorised the cast with its claws; finally, the tenor added a recital of Spanish guitar songs to his scene. By now, the house was in uproar, and any chance of a fair hearing was long gone. Rossini left at the interval claiming to be ill. He did not attend the second night, which was a shame because it was a whole different affair: people listened, and what they heard they liked. Well-wishers had to rouse him from his bed (sickbed, he claimed) to acknowledge his triumph.

It is no wonder Rossini retired to bed. Quite apart from the shenanigans around the performance, a great deal was expected of any opera composer at the time. He had to be on the spot, steering around the demands of singers, bargaining with producers, attending rehearsals and delivering rewrites where required. It was a lot like Broadway theatre is today, a high-stress, energy-consuming business. For years, Rossini thrived on it and produced something like 40 operas in 18 years. The price of this productivity was that he, like many jobbing opera composers before him, became very adept at recycling his own music. In one case, most of one opera (Il viaggio a Reims, 1825) became another (Le Comte Ory of 1828). For The Barber of Seville, the only serious bit of recycling was the overture. It first appeared before the tragedy Aureliano in Palmira in 1813. It re-surfaced, much re-orchestrated, to raise the curtain on a second tragedy, this time set in London: Elizabeth, Queen of England. Quite why Rossini then thought the same music suitable to open a French farce set in southern Spain is a mystery but his instinct was good, and now it is hard to think of this music in any other context but The Barber of Seville.

The Italian Girl in Algiers is another opera that came about through a last minute crisis. A composer called Coccia had failed to deliver a piece – Rossini stepped into the breach and completed the new work in just under a month.

It belongs to the genre of operas that combined exotic locations and comic plots: Mozart’s hit opera The Abduction from the Seraglio was among the most successful. In Seraglio, a European nobleman rescues his beloved from an amorous Pasha. In Rossini it is the woman who comes to rescue the man, and right from the very first notes of this, her very first aria, you can tell that she, Isabella, is not the sort to be trifled with. She has been shipwrecked on the coast of Algeria. Unbeknownst to her, the local Pasha (who has enslaved her beloved Lindoro) recently expressed his wish to spice up the Harem with a fiery Italian so his pirates (who take her captive) are all too delighted to discover her. In Cruda sorte, she both laments her fate and shows her mettle. In despair she is quite a force, and when she lets rip in the more defiance she is devastating: more than a match for any man. The role of Isabella was written for celebrated mezzo called Marietta Marcolini, a singer with whom Rossini had worked many times before. He created 5 roles for her, all of which reflect both her formidable technique, and her comic acting. She was famous for being able to turn effortlessly from deep seriousness to comedy – as this aria demands.

There is a large book to be written about what the characters of operatic heroines tell us about contemporary attitudes to women. It is interesting that Isabella – a formidable woman to be sure – was such a hit with audiences when, according to one notable writer – Stendahl – it was the forthrightness of Rosina in her first aria in The Barber of Seville that enraged the crowd. She is a young girl, the ward of Dr Bartolo, and most of the plot hinges on her plot to escape his clutches and marry the man she loves. Stendahl says that to the Romans… “The first aria for Rosina, ‘Io sono docile’, appeared entirely out of character. They charged Rossini with having substituted the pertness of a virago for the complainings of a gentle and love-sick girl.” Later in the same memoir he himself complains of a ‘want of delicacy,’ not just in the aria, but in the portrayal of Rosina altogether. Shame he had so little ear for Ropssini’s brilliance in putting such a gulf between Rosina’s submissive words and the forthright way she sings them. It is a great gag, and also yields an opportunity for some sensational coloratura. At this time, the composer wrote the aria to fit the voice of the singer (while today mostly a composer writes what he wants, then they try to find a singer who can do it), so we should thank the original Rosina, Geltrude Righetti for inspiring such wonderful writing in Rossini.

© Svend Brown