Concerts & Tickets

Programme note

Serge Koussevitzky (1874-1951)
Concerto for Double Bass and Orchestra in F-sharp minor (1905)

Few musicians manage to pursue a successful career in more than one musical discipline, but those who do are often celebrated as leaders in their field – one thinks of composer-conductors Richard Strauss and Gustav Mahler, and modern performer-conductors Daniel Barenboim and Thomas Zehetmair. Fewer still manage to combine their interests as successfully as Serge Koussevitzky, who enjoyed a remarkable and diverse career as a composer, performer, conductor, publisher and arranger, and commissioned many of the twentieth century’s most seminal works.

Koussevitzky began his musical career as a double-bassist, becoming principal bass with the Bolshoi Theatre orchestra in 1901 before developing a successful career as a recitalist. But on marrying the daughter of a rich tea merchant in 1905, Koussevitzky resigned from his position with the Bolshoi, and decided to concentrate on his recital appearances and his growing interest in conducting. After just two years of private conducting lessons, Koussevitzky used his new-found wealth to hire the Berlin Philharmonic and make his conducting debut – with none other than Rachmaninov as the soloist in his own Piano Concerto No 2. Encouraged by the response, he went on to set up his own orchestra and publishing firm, making the promotion of contemporary Russian composition by the likes of Stravinsky, Prokofiev, Scriabin and Rachmaninov a priority. When he was appointed conductor of the Boston Symphony Orchestra in 1924 he continued to champion new music, and commissioned works including Ravel’s Piano Concerto in G, Stravinsky’s Symphony of Psalms and Prokofiev’s Symphony No 4 to celebrate the orchestra’s 50th anniversary. He remains best known, however, for commissioning Ravel’s orchestral arrangement of Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition (originally written for piano) which is still regarded as one of the most popular arrangements in the orchestral repertoire.

Throughout his career as a performer Koussevitzky sought to extend the breadth of music available for the double bass, leading to a wealth of his own transcriptions for the instrument which remain important parts of the modern repertoire. In 1902, he set about composing his own concerto for double bass, which was premiered in 1905 by the Moscow Philharmonic. Rather than a virtuosic display piece, the concerto is a more understated, lyrical work that speaks of his passion for the instrument. Looking back on the work in a newspaper article from 1954, his widow wrote: ‘He likened the inner voice of the sound of the strings to cords of the natural instrument – the human voice. Listening to the great singers of his day, trying to imitate their vocal art, he was not merely playing on a string instrument, he was singing through the voice of the double bass.’ Its three movements resonate with the music he loved – Rachmaninov, Tchaikovsky and Glinka – while its heartfelt folk-like melodies sing of his native Russia.

© Jo Kirkbride

Programme note

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756-1791)
Overture, The Impresario K486 (1786)

It wasn’t as if Mozart had time on his hands. He was in the middle of composing The Marriage of Figaro, and had just completed his Piano Concerto No 22 in E-flat, and the six string quartets dedicated to Haydn. But an Imperial command could hardly be ignored. Emperor Joseph II planned festivities in the Orangery at his palace at Schönbrunn as part of the 1786 state visit by the joint rulers of the Austrian Netherlands, the Duke and Archduchess (who was the Emperor’s sister) von Sachsen-Teschen. Emperor Joseph wanted a German Singspiel with which to entertain his guests.

He turned to Mozart and Gottlieb Stephanie, who had worked so successfully together on The Abduction from the Seraglio in 1782, even if he had let it be known that it contained “too many notes”! The result was The Impresario – a much lighter squib than The Abduction. It is based on a well-used plot of an impresario with trouble backstage – in this case, two feuding sopranos! They get an aria each to ‘display’ their wares, there is a tenor who attempts to intercede and a buffo bass. The plot was soon out-dated as Stephanie had made liberal reference in his libretto to local theatrical goings-on. And there wasn’t a great deal of music either (just five items in all), but what there was found Mozart in the full flood of his genius. The Overture, at least, has never left the concert platform – it is simply too vibrant to park on a dusty library shelf.

© David Gardner

Programme note

Carl Maria von Weber (1786-1826)
Bassoon Concerto in F major, Op 127 (1811, rev 1822)

Allegro ma non troppo
Adagio
Rondo: Allegro

Younger than Beethoven, older than Schubert, Weber died earlier than either of his two great contemporaries. Hampered by ill-health – he had the misfortune to be tubercular from birth – he never won the laurels that lay almost within his grasp. As a German opera composer, the best of his kind before Wagner, he suffered from feeble librettos which reduced potential masterpieces to miserable might-have-beens. Schubert, who as an opera composer had libretto problems of his own, recognised Euryanthe as a dud the moment he heard it in Vienna in 1823, and lost Weber’s friendship through telling him so. Yet it was a dud of a special sort, filled with glorious music, as also were Oberon and (the closest Weber got to a masterpiece) the atmospheric Der Freischutz.

In smaller forms, on the other hand, he excelled. Significantly, the overtures to these operas are better than the works themselves. His Konzertstuck is a brilliantly compressed piano concerto, brimming with invention. His clarinet concertos are marvellously poetic products of a German romantic imagination, and the work in this evening’s programme is that choicest of rarities, a bassoon concerto which is nor meant merely to make you laugh. What it does do, and with high success, is suspend you in a state of constant surprise. The start of the first movement, with its martial rhythms and thwacking drums, sounds quite Beethovenian, at least until it swerves in a different direction and the soloist enters playing something other than a piano.

Weber’s solo bassoon, or so the music suggests, is a bit of a singer, nimble-voiced and wide-compassed, a tenor with a bottom register and some airy top notes. So it is natural that the first movement seems to keep wanting to turn into an operatic aria, and the slow movement could actually be one. This short romanze forms the lyrical heart of the work, again somewhat Beethovenian in manner but singing with Weber’s own expressively nasal voice. The rondo finale sustains the illusion that we are listening to something vocal, but on instrumental terms, too, it is music of great polish and wit.

© Conrad Wilson

Programme note

Carl Maria von Weber (1786-1826)

Concertino for horn and orchestra in E minor, Op 45
(1806, rev 1815)

Adagio – Andante con moto –
Recit: Adagio – Polacca

Like Mozart before him and Brahms after him, Weber had a penchant for certain instruments, the horn and clarinet being two (in addition to the piano) that ranked high in his estimation. Numerous passages in Weber’s operas – such as the poetic chorus of horns in the slow introduction to the Freischütz overture – reveal his responsiveness to horn timbres, but his enthusiasm went further than that, as his E minor Horn Concertino confirms.

As with Mozart, and indeed with Brahms, most of Weber’s instrumental pieces were written with specific players in mind, in this case the Karlsruhe hornist Dautrevaux. Like the Clarinet Quintet which Weber composed for the great Heinrich Baermann, this is a work designed for a virtuoso, and when he revised it in 1815 for a different soloist (Rauch from Munich) he made sure that the music retained, and even increased, all its original panache. In fact the work is positively encyclopaedic in its range of ostentatious effects, and although, as its title implies, the result is not a full-scale concerto, it is nothing if not demanding in its compression of one instrumental challenge after another.

The layout of contrasted sections – slow introduction, theme and (increasingly elaborate) variations, solo recitative, brilliantly leaping final polonaise – is of a kind that appealed strongly to Weber, who tended to see all music in operatic terms and employed the instrumental format most famously in his splendid Konzertstück for piano and orchestra. The most striking moment in the present work comes in the section of recitative, which has, as its climax, a passage where the hornist is asked to play chords, a feat achieved by humming notes above or below the ones actually played. This sets up chord-like resonances of a sort that Weber, like some other composers of his period, recognised as worth exploiting.

© Conrad Wilson