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Master Pianist
- Mozart
Programme note
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756-1791)
Divertimento in F major, K138 (1772)I: Allegro
II: Andante
III: PrestoMozart’s musical education began at the age of three, as he watched while his sister, Maria-Anna, took lessons at the keyboard. She later remarked of this time: ‘He often spent much time at the clavier, picking out thirds, which he was always striking, and his pleasure showed that it sounded good... In the fourth year of his age his father, for a game as it were, began to teach him a few minuets and pieces at the clavier... He could play it faultlessly and with the greatest delicacy, and keeping exactly in time... At the age of five, he was already composing little pieces, which he played to his father who wrote them down.’ At the age of six Mozart was taken on performing tours throughout Europe where, along with his sister, he was introduced to members of the nobility and encouraged to perform his early compositions. When his father was promoted to Deputy Kappellmeister in 1763, Mozart took to the stage for the celebrations, with the Salzburg court chronicle recording that there was ‘vocal music by several virtuosos, among whom were, to everyone's astonishment, the new vice-Kapellmeister's little son, aged seven, and daughter, aged ten, performing on the harpsichord, the son likewise on the violin, as well as one could ever have hoped of him.
As well as developing his skills as a performer throughout these early years, Mozart also composed prolifically. His earliest compositions, a miniature Andante and Allegro K1a and 1b, were written in 1761, when he was five, and by the age of thirteen he had received his first opera commission. His tour of Europe also brought about several invitations to compose incidental music for celebratory occasions, often in the form of serenades or divertimenti. Often performed outside and usually intended as background music for a social gathering, the divertimento was, according to theorist Heinrich Christoph Koch ‘intended to please the ear rather than express different shades of emotion’. Comprising anything from one to nine movements, and scored for a range of musical ensembles from string trios to wind quintets, the divertimento was a wide-ranging genre that acted as a precursor for both the sonata and the sinfonia.
Mozart’s Divertimenti, K136-8, were composed in Salzburg before his final tour to Italy in 1772, although the inscription ‘Divertimento’ on the autograph was not written by Mozart. Since they are scored for string quartet or string orchestra, they have sometimes been referred to as ‘The Salzburg Symphonies’. The Divertimento in F major, K138, comprises three joyous movements, each in a major key, which carry the light-hearted character of the divertimento and the spirited optimism of Mozart’s youthful compositions. The elegant poise of the opening Allegro suggests the work may have been written for an occasion at the court in Salzburg, where Mozart took up a position as court musician the following year. At the work’s centre is a graceful Andante, whose poignant moments of expressive chromaticism demonstrate a composer mature beyond his years, while the work is concluded with a dazzling and inventive Presto.
© Jo Kirkbride
- 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
- Beethoven
Programme note
Ludwig van Beethoven )1770-1827)
Piano Concerto No 3 in C minor, Op 37 (1803)Allegro con brio
Largo
Rondo: AllegroWith his Third Piano Concerto, it used to be said, Beethoven greeted the birth of the nineteenth century. Among other things, his handwritten “1800” on the manuscript supplied proof of the work’s date of composition. This basic evidence was accepted as ample for a masterpiece which, compared with the two preceding piano concertos, in C major and B flat major, seemed nothing if not epoch-making. As we now know, however, the impressive Piano Concerto No 3 in Beethoven’s famously dramatic key of C minor was not written in 1800 at all, but three years later. The music with which he hailed the new century was his vivacious but rather less vanguard Symphony No 1 in C major.
In his meticulous study of Beethoven’s concertos, published in time for the millennium in 2000, the American scholar Leon Plantinga convincingly endorsed the later date, explaining how Beethoven’s written “1800” was actually “1803” and saying why the concerto fits the later date far better than the earlier one. Although, to the casual reader, three years in Beethoven’s seething career may not seem a long time, it is upon small details of this sort that our understanding of classical music is often founded. In this case, it seems clear that the C minor Piano Concerto came after, and not before, the dynamic idiosyncracy of the Second Symphony, the sweep of the "Tempest" Piano Sonata in D minor, the 'Eroica' Variations and the heart-rending confession, in his Heiligenstadt Testament of 1802, that he was going deaf.
But he was not yet so deaf that he was unable to play his own music in public, or was in danger of losing his status as the greatest pianist-composer in Europe. This was a work definitely written for himself to play, which he first did in April 1803 as part of the famous Viennese concert in which, after a seven-hour rehearsal, his oratorio Christ on the Mount of Olives and his Second Symphony also had their premieres. The music was no mere “comedy of manners”, as Edinburgh University’s distinguished musical authority Donald Francis Tovey once described the C major concerto. Here, as a more recent Beethoven scholar Maynard Solomon has proclaimed, was the composer’s first concerto to move away from exterior wit and refinement into a world of dramatic oratory.
The starkly stalking theme which launches the first movement unmistakably makes this point, as do the three explosive scales with which the soloist enters. Not even the warmth of the secondary theme in E flat major can dispel the prevailing tension of the music for long, but there is balm in the slow movement, whose opening theme, said Beethoven’s pupil Czerny, should sound like a “holy, distant, and celestial harmony.” The music remains radiantly suspended in the unrelated key of E major until its restless middle section brings fresh drama. If the closing rondo does contain comedy, it is comedy of a sardonic sort, resolved when, in the coda, the pace quickens, the metre changes, and C minor swings gleefully into C major.
© Conrad Wilson
- conductor/piano
Robert Levin is both international star performer and high-flying academic. Few people know more about the age of Mozart, Beethoven and Schubert than he does – but don’t expect a dusty lecture here! Levin’s researches have led him to conclude that Beethoven’s performances were more like jazz than today’s classical performances. One recent reviewer wondered, “Was Levin channeling the wild-maned Beethoven of contemporary portraits? His boldly spontaneous playing certainly made it seem so.” (Chicago Tribune).
This performance is part of the Perth Concert Series. The SCO returns to Perth Concert Hall on Thursday 5 January 2012 with New Year in Vienna.
Related audio clip
Beethoven Piano Concerto No. 3 - Rondo allegro - excerpt
Artur Pizarro plays the Rondo allegro from Beethoven's Piano Concerto No.3. Sir Charles Mackerras conducts.
Master Pianist
- Mozart
Programme note
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756-1791)
Divertimento in F major, K138 (1772)I: Allegro
II: Andante
III: PrestoMozart’s musical education began at the age of three, as he watched while his sister, Maria-Anna, took lessons at the keyboard. She later remarked of this time: ‘He often spent much time at the clavier, picking out thirds, which he was always striking, and his pleasure showed that it sounded good... In the fourth year of his age his father, for a game as it were, began to teach him a few minuets and pieces at the clavier... He could play it faultlessly and with the greatest delicacy, and keeping exactly in time... At the age of five, he was already composing little pieces, which he played to his father who wrote them down.’ At the age of six Mozart was taken on performing tours throughout Europe where, along with his sister, he was introduced to members of the nobility and encouraged to perform his early compositions. When his father was promoted to Deputy Kappellmeister in 1763, Mozart took to the stage for the celebrations, with the Salzburg court chronicle recording that there was ‘vocal music by several virtuosos, among whom were, to everyone's astonishment, the new vice-Kapellmeister's little son, aged seven, and daughter, aged ten, performing on the harpsichord, the son likewise on the violin, as well as one could ever have hoped of him.
As well as developing his skills as a performer throughout these early years, Mozart also composed prolifically. His earliest compositions, a miniature Andante and Allegro K1a and 1b, were written in 1761, when he was five, and by the age of thirteen he had received his first opera commission. His tour of Europe also brought about several invitations to compose incidental music for celebratory occasions, often in the form of serenades or divertimenti. Often performed outside and usually intended as background music for a social gathering, the divertimento was, according to theorist Heinrich Christoph Koch ‘intended to please the ear rather than express different shades of emotion’. Comprising anything from one to nine movements, and scored for a range of musical ensembles from string trios to wind quintets, the divertimento was a wide-ranging genre that acted as a precursor for both the sonata and the sinfonia.
Mozart’s Divertimenti, K136-8, were composed in Salzburg before his final tour to Italy in 1772, although the inscription ‘Divertimento’ on the autograph was not written by Mozart. Since they are scored for string quartet or string orchestra, they have sometimes been referred to as ‘The Salzburg Symphonies’. The Divertimento in F major, K138, comprises three joyous movements, each in a major key, which carry the light-hearted character of the divertimento and the spirited optimism of Mozart’s youthful compositions. The elegant poise of the opening Allegro suggests the work may have been written for an occasion at the court in Salzburg, where Mozart took up a position as court musician the following year. At the work’s centre is a graceful Andante, whose poignant moments of expressive chromaticism demonstrate a composer mature beyond his years, while the work is concluded with a dazzling and inventive Presto.
© Jo Kirkbride
- 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
- Beethoven
Programme note
Ludwig van Beethoven )1770-1827)
Piano Concerto No 3 in C minor, Op 37 (1803)Allegro con brio
Largo
Rondo: AllegroWith his Third Piano Concerto, it used to be said, Beethoven greeted the birth of the nineteenth century. Among other things, his handwritten “1800” on the manuscript supplied proof of the work’s date of composition. This basic evidence was accepted as ample for a masterpiece which, compared with the two preceding piano concertos, in C major and B flat major, seemed nothing if not epoch-making. As we now know, however, the impressive Piano Concerto No 3 in Beethoven’s famously dramatic key of C minor was not written in 1800 at all, but three years later. The music with which he hailed the new century was his vivacious but rather less vanguard Symphony No 1 in C major.
In his meticulous study of Beethoven’s concertos, published in time for the millennium in 2000, the American scholar Leon Plantinga convincingly endorsed the later date, explaining how Beethoven’s written “1800” was actually “1803” and saying why the concerto fits the later date far better than the earlier one. Although, to the casual reader, three years in Beethoven’s seething career may not seem a long time, it is upon small details of this sort that our understanding of classical music is often founded. In this case, it seems clear that the C minor Piano Concerto came after, and not before, the dynamic idiosyncracy of the Second Symphony, the sweep of the "Tempest" Piano Sonata in D minor, the 'Eroica' Variations and the heart-rending confession, in his Heiligenstadt Testament of 1802, that he was going deaf.
But he was not yet so deaf that he was unable to play his own music in public, or was in danger of losing his status as the greatest pianist-composer in Europe. This was a work definitely written for himself to play, which he first did in April 1803 as part of the famous Viennese concert in which, after a seven-hour rehearsal, his oratorio Christ on the Mount of Olives and his Second Symphony also had their premieres. The music was no mere “comedy of manners”, as Edinburgh University’s distinguished musical authority Donald Francis Tovey once described the C major concerto. Here, as a more recent Beethoven scholar Maynard Solomon has proclaimed, was the composer’s first concerto to move away from exterior wit and refinement into a world of dramatic oratory.
The starkly stalking theme which launches the first movement unmistakably makes this point, as do the three explosive scales with which the soloist enters. Not even the warmth of the secondary theme in E flat major can dispel the prevailing tension of the music for long, but there is balm in the slow movement, whose opening theme, said Beethoven’s pupil Czerny, should sound like a “holy, distant, and celestial harmony.” The music remains radiantly suspended in the unrelated key of E major until its restless middle section brings fresh drama. If the closing rondo does contain comedy, it is comedy of a sardonic sort, resolved when, in the coda, the pace quickens, the metre changes, and C minor swings gleefully into C major.
© Conrad Wilson
- conductor/piano
Robert Levin is both international star performer and high-flying academic. Few people know more about the age of Mozart, Beethoven and Schubert than he does – but don’t expect a dusty lecture here! Levin’s researches have led him to conclude that Beethoven’s performances were more like jazz than today’s classical performances. One recent reviewer wondered, “Was Levin channeling the wild-maned Beethoven of contemporary portraits? His boldly spontaneous playing certainly made it seem so.” (Chicago Tribune).
Related audio clip
Beethoven Piano Concerto No. 3 - Rondo allegro - excerpt
Artur Pizarro plays the Rondo allegro from Beethoven's Piano Concerto No.3. Sir Charles Mackerras conducts.
Master Pianist
- Mozart
Programme note
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756-1791)
Divertimento in F major, K138 (1772)I: Allegro
II: Andante
III: PrestoMozart’s musical education began at the age of three, as he watched while his sister, Maria-Anna, took lessons at the keyboard. She later remarked of this time: ‘He often spent much time at the clavier, picking out thirds, which he was always striking, and his pleasure showed that it sounded good... In the fourth year of his age his father, for a game as it were, began to teach him a few minuets and pieces at the clavier... He could play it faultlessly and with the greatest delicacy, and keeping exactly in time... At the age of five, he was already composing little pieces, which he played to his father who wrote them down.’ At the age of six Mozart was taken on performing tours throughout Europe where, along with his sister, he was introduced to members of the nobility and encouraged to perform his early compositions. When his father was promoted to Deputy Kappellmeister in 1763, Mozart took to the stage for the celebrations, with the Salzburg court chronicle recording that there was ‘vocal music by several virtuosos, among whom were, to everyone's astonishment, the new vice-Kapellmeister's little son, aged seven, and daughter, aged ten, performing on the harpsichord, the son likewise on the violin, as well as one could ever have hoped of him.
As well as developing his skills as a performer throughout these early years, Mozart also composed prolifically. His earliest compositions, a miniature Andante and Allegro K1a and 1b, were written in 1761, when he was five, and by the age of thirteen he had received his first opera commission. His tour of Europe also brought about several invitations to compose incidental music for celebratory occasions, often in the form of serenades or divertimenti. Often performed outside and usually intended as background music for a social gathering, the divertimento was, according to theorist Heinrich Christoph Koch ‘intended to please the ear rather than express different shades of emotion’. Comprising anything from one to nine movements, and scored for a range of musical ensembles from string trios to wind quintets, the divertimento was a wide-ranging genre that acted as a precursor for both the sonata and the sinfonia.
Mozart’s Divertimenti, K136-8, were composed in Salzburg before his final tour to Italy in 1772, although the inscription ‘Divertimento’ on the autograph was not written by Mozart. Since they are scored for string quartet or string orchestra, they have sometimes been referred to as ‘The Salzburg Symphonies’. The Divertimento in F major, K138, comprises three joyous movements, each in a major key, which carry the light-hearted character of the divertimento and the spirited optimism of Mozart’s youthful compositions. The elegant poise of the opening Allegro suggests the work may have been written for an occasion at the court in Salzburg, where Mozart took up a position as court musician the following year. At the work’s centre is a graceful Andante, whose poignant moments of expressive chromaticism demonstrate a composer mature beyond his years, while the work is concluded with a dazzling and inventive Presto.
© Jo Kirkbride
- 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
- Beethoven
Programme note
Ludwig van Beethoven )1770-1827)
Piano Concerto No 3 in C minor, Op 37 (1803)Allegro con brio
Largo
Rondo: AllegroWith his Third Piano Concerto, it used to be said, Beethoven greeted the birth of the nineteenth century. Among other things, his handwritten “1800” on the manuscript supplied proof of the work’s date of composition. This basic evidence was accepted as ample for a masterpiece which, compared with the two preceding piano concertos, in C major and B flat major, seemed nothing if not epoch-making. As we now know, however, the impressive Piano Concerto No 3 in Beethoven’s famously dramatic key of C minor was not written in 1800 at all, but three years later. The music with which he hailed the new century was his vivacious but rather less vanguard Symphony No 1 in C major.
In his meticulous study of Beethoven’s concertos, published in time for the millennium in 2000, the American scholar Leon Plantinga convincingly endorsed the later date, explaining how Beethoven’s written “1800” was actually “1803” and saying why the concerto fits the later date far better than the earlier one. Although, to the casual reader, three years in Beethoven’s seething career may not seem a long time, it is upon small details of this sort that our understanding of classical music is often founded. In this case, it seems clear that the C minor Piano Concerto came after, and not before, the dynamic idiosyncracy of the Second Symphony, the sweep of the "Tempest" Piano Sonata in D minor, the 'Eroica' Variations and the heart-rending confession, in his Heiligenstadt Testament of 1802, that he was going deaf.
But he was not yet so deaf that he was unable to play his own music in public, or was in danger of losing his status as the greatest pianist-composer in Europe. This was a work definitely written for himself to play, which he first did in April 1803 as part of the famous Viennese concert in which, after a seven-hour rehearsal, his oratorio Christ on the Mount of Olives and his Second Symphony also had their premieres. The music was no mere “comedy of manners”, as Edinburgh University’s distinguished musical authority Donald Francis Tovey once described the C major concerto. Here, as a more recent Beethoven scholar Maynard Solomon has proclaimed, was the composer’s first concerto to move away from exterior wit and refinement into a world of dramatic oratory.
The starkly stalking theme which launches the first movement unmistakably makes this point, as do the three explosive scales with which the soloist enters. Not even the warmth of the secondary theme in E flat major can dispel the prevailing tension of the music for long, but there is balm in the slow movement, whose opening theme, said Beethoven’s pupil Czerny, should sound like a “holy, distant, and celestial harmony.” The music remains radiantly suspended in the unrelated key of E major until its restless middle section brings fresh drama. If the closing rondo does contain comedy, it is comedy of a sardonic sort, resolved when, in the coda, the pace quickens, the metre changes, and C minor swings gleefully into C major.
© Conrad Wilson
- conductor/piano
Robert Levin is both international star performer and high-flying academic. Few people know more about the age of Mozart, Beethoven and Schubert than he does – but don’t expect a dusty lecture here! Levin’s researches have led him to conclude that Beethoven’s performances were more like jazz than today’s classical performances. One recent reviewer wondered, “Was Levin channeling the wild-maned Beethoven of contemporary portraits? His boldly spontaneous playing certainly made it seem so.” (Chicago Tribune).
Related audio clip
Beethoven Piano Concerto No. 3 - Rondo allegro - excerpt
Artur Pizarro plays the Rondo allegro from Beethoven's Piano Concerto No.3. Sir Charles Mackerras conducts.
Chamber Concert with Robert Levin
- Haydn
Programme note
Joseph Haydn (1732-1809)
Symphony No 104 ‘The London’ (1795)Adagio - Allegro
Andante
Menuet: Allegro - Trio - Allegro
Finale: SpiritosoHaydn’s first and last symphonies are in the same key – D major – and contrasting the works highlights his astounding achievement. No 1 is an aristocratic diversion for small orchestra lasting little more than ten minutes, performed for a handful of guests in a palace. No 104 is a tour de force, 25 minutes of serious music written for a discriminating, large audience in a public concert hall - so requiring considerably more players. It is clear too that the public event – in this case Haydn’s last London concert - was much more lucrative than the private patronage. Haydn made enough from the performance of this symphony to more than triple the size of his entire savings after a long career in aristocratic service,
His last London concert demanded of Haydn a symphony of unsurpassed splendour, concentration and invention. From the first bar to the last there is a sense of intense and thorough musical thought. He never squanders notes and disdained composers who were spendthrift with ideas:
“Once I had seized upon an idea, my whole endeavour was to develop and sustain it in keeping with the rules of art. In this way I tried to keep going, and this is where so many of our new composers fall down. They string out one little piece after another, they break off when they have hardly begun, and nothing remains in the heart when one has listened to it.”
Haydn managed ‘to keep going’ here by deriving pretty well all the germinal ideas of all four movements from the quiet, unassuming opening melody. The Andante and Finale vary the falling opening phrase, while the Menuet opens with an echo of the second, rising motif. Tying everything together in this way could, in the wrong, uninspired hands, sound like a terribly arid, possibly academic exercise; but as with so many things, this is a case of ‘not what you do but how you do it’: Haydn’s thought is too beguiling to fall into that trap. Hearing this symphony can be like eavesdropping on a brilliant mind as it tosses ideas around.
The influence of Mozart is felt in the opening bars. The stark unison and growling timpani rolls seem to share something of the demonic monumentality of Don Giovanni. The energy and drive of the main body of the movement is wonderfully contrasted with the serenity of the slow movement. Beware though: as in other London Symphonies, Haydn explores an expansive and disparate landscape in his set of variations before coming to rest in leisurely fashion. The Menuet and Trio is a bucolic and good-natured moment of light relief before plunging into the melee of the Finale, based on a Croatian folk-tune from which Haydn creates a dazzling race to the finish.
© Svend Brown
- conductor/piano
- -
Robert Levin presents an illustrated lecture-recital about Salomon's arrangements of Haydn's London' Symphonies.
Among his many talents, Robert Levin is a fascinating speaker. Here he explores the chamber music versions of Haydn’s London symphonies, and includes a full performance of Symphony No 104 in its lilliputian version. Why were these arrangements made? How are they different from the original symphonies? How and where might they have been performed? Insights into Haydn’s social and musical world will abound.
Early Evening Concert
- flute
- clarinet
- piano
The Scottish Chamber Orchestra is Orchestra in Residence at the University of St Andrews. As part of this partnership, the two organisations are collaborating on a number of projects to complement the Orchestra’s five-concert season at the Younger Hall. One such collaboration is featuring SCO players and associates in this new Early Evening Concert Series.
SCO Principals Alison Mitchell (flute) and Maximiliano Martín (clarinet) and pianist Scott Mitchell perform music by Shostakovich, Martinu, Poulenc and Saint-Saëns.
Tickets are available on the door, or by calling 01334 462226.
For more information about the SCO's Orchestra in Residence click here.
Romantic Love Stories
- Gluck
Programme note
Christoph Willibald Gluck (1714-1787)
Overture to Alcest (1767)Gluck, together with his librettist, the poet and diplomat Ranieri da Calzabigi, is now chiefly remembered as one of the great reformers in the history of opera. Ideas that were hinted at in the first fruit of their partnership, Orfeo (1762), were voiced without reserve in Alceste (1767). Their stated aim was a ‘sublime simplicity’ (una bella sempicita) in which words, music and instrumentation should combine to help interpret the action, and not merely embellish it. The preface to Alceste, signed by Gluck but drafted by Calzabigi, is one of the most famous documents in the annals of opera:
“When I undertook to write the music for Alceste, I resolved to divest it entirely of all those abuses, introduced into it either by the mistaken vanity of singers, or by the too great complaisance of composers, which have so long disfigured Italian opera and made of the most splendid and most beautiful of spectacles the most ridiculous and wearisome. I have striven to restrict music to its true office of serving poetry by means of expression and by following the situations of the story, without interrupting the action or stifling it with a useless superfluity of ornaments. In short, I have sought to abolish all the abuses against which good sense and reason have long cried out in vain.”
The plot of Alceste loosely follows Euripides’ tragedy, and concerns Admetus, King of Pherae, whose life will only be spared if someone is willing to die in his place. Calzabigi wrote his play during the period of court mourning, following the death of Emperor Franz Stefan. To contemporary audiences, the self-sacrifice of Admetus’ wife, Alcestis, would have recalled the widowed empress Maria Theresia. Certainly Alcestis’ music is as unrelievedly sombre as Maria Theresia, whose protracted mourning lasted for fifteen years.
As Gluck himself indicated, later in the preface, an overture should “apprise the spectators of the nature of the action that is to be represented”, and the magnificently gloomy overture to Alceste does exactly that. It is the first truly tragic introduction to an opera and the ancestor of an illustrious line, from the overture to Don Giovanni to Brahms’ Tragic Overture.
© Stephen Strugnell
- Berlioz
Programme note
Hector Berlioz (1803-1869)
Nuits d’Ete, Op 7 (1840-41)Villanelle
Le spectre de la rose
Sur les lagunes
Absence
Au cimetiere
L’ile inconnueAt one time people extolled the brassy brilliance of Berlioz in the belief that there was no more to his music than that. Today, however, we are equally aware of its inspired quietness. Even some of his grandest works make their most memorable effects by stealth. Thus in his Requiem the soft swishing of six pairs of cymbals in the Sanctus is as important as the outburst of the four brass bands in the Dies Irae. Yet not until he composed The Childhood of Christ did the French public recognise the restraint and chasteness of Berlioz’s output. The shock was so great that they thought he had mended his ways and changed his style - to which Berlioz patiently replied that it was only his subject he had changed.
But one thing that never altered was his devotion to song as an expression of his deepest musical feelings. The human voice inspired his most haunting and characteristic melodies, with their long spans and asymmetrical phrasing, their ability to compress a lifetime of melancholy into a few lines of music. Within his largest operas and choral works he always left space for things such as Hylas’s homesick lament in The Trojans or Marguerite’s ballad in The Damnation of Faust, whose simplicity of utterance strikes straight to the heart.
The most moving of all his songs are the six that form Les Nuits d’Ete and which he assembled as his Op 7, though as an orchestrated entity they date from later in his career than their low opus number implies. To call them a song cycle would be misleading, since they form no kind of narrative the way Schubert’s Schone Mullerin and Winterreise do. Yet they are undoubtedly unified by their subject matter, which explores aspects of romantic love, and by the fact that they are all based on poems by Berlioz’s friend Theophile Gautier, author of Histoire du Romantisme and proponent of ‘Art for Art’s Sake’.
Their structure moreover makes it essential that they be sung as a set, because only then can we appreciate that the music, after the pastoral sweetness of the opening song, sinks into an abyss of sadness from which it does not rise until (and even then somewhat uncertainly) it lands upon the ‘Unknown Island’ of the final song. The seemingly peaceful title of the work, Summer Nights, thus needs to be treated with caution. For Berlioz, such nights did not necessarily imply warmth and happy love but just as possibly the chill of a lagoon or the darkness of the grave.
Though the cycle An die Ferne Geliebte (To the distant loved one) by Berlioz’s adored Beethoven must surely have been a model for these songs, the music anticipates Mahler, Ravel, and Britten in its subtle use of the orchestra as accompanist, rather than the traditional piano. Not being a pianist, Berlioz was in this respect a pioneer, and nobody surpassed his ability to find the right instrumental shading for the mood of each song. Ideally, the music demands more than a single singer to do it justice. Berlioz himself specified different voices, though today a soprano or mezzo-soprano who has confidence in her compass and emotional range may tackle all six songs, as Maggie Teyte, Regine Crespin, and Janet Baker all did.
At any rate, the opening Villanelle demands both charm and wistfulness in its evocation of the dew-covered lilies and baskets of wild strawberries which are insufficient to conceal the transience of young love. For Berlioz - and again the singer needs to reflect the fact - the Spectre de la Rose meant more than it did to Weber in his Invitation to the Dance, though the story (of a rose returning as a spectre to haunt the dreams of the girl who wore it to her first ball) is the same.
But if the first two songs are to some extent equivocal, Sur les lagunes is not. Here the twin images of movement and sea, the ocean swell beneath the bereaved singer’s feet, are profoundly conveyed by way of the music’s grim F minor tonality, by the chillingly repeated three-note figure and the poem’s heartfelt refrain, “Ah without love to go off to sea.” As for Absence, the separation here is a matter of mountains and valleys, no less engulfing in their loneliness and in the desolation of empty space provided by the vast declamatory cadences of the melodic line.
After this grandly floating melody, Au cimetiere sinks us to the depths and to an almost tactile presence of death and doom, of white tomb and pale dove. Then, in L’ile inconnue, the nightmare passes and benign sea breezes blow us to the faithful shore where people love forever. Towards the end, however, the pace slows and a recognisable musical quotation from Absence suggests that things are perhaps less promising than they seem.
© Conrad Wilson
- Schumann
Programme note
Robert Schumann (1810-1856)
Symphony No 2 in CAllegro
Scherzo
Adagio espressivo
Finale - allegro molto vivaceSchumann began his second symphony (really his fifth large symphonic work) at a personally troubled and disturbed time. He was suffering the after-effects of a nervous breakdown and already showing some of the symptoms which were to haunt him for the rest of his tragically short life. He wrote in his household book complaining of "severe dizziness" and "singing in the ears" and, with Clara unwell too, the unhappy and telling phrase "the hypochondria of a married couple" occurs for the first time.
The symphony itself was sketched remarkably quickly. Just before the Christmas of 1845 Schumann wrote of being "struck with symphoniaca" and, in a state of feverish excitement, completed the sketch of the first movement in three days. By 28 December the sketch of the whole Symphony was complete. The orchestration took much longer and the full score was not completed until October 1846, three weeks before its Gewandhaus premiere on 5 November. Mendelssohn, rehearsing and conducting the work with his usual meticulous care, performed his last service for Schumann; he died a year to the day later, on 5 November 1847 - a coincidence not lost on the superstitious Schumann.
Reflecting, as it does, Schumann's state of mind, this is not an easy Symphony to either listen to or conduct. Writing to a conductor in 1848 Schumann himself makes this point:
“It was written in December 1845, while I was still half sick and I feel as though one must hear that in it. Nay I may say it was, so to speak, the resistance of the spirit which exercised a visible influence here and through which I sought to contend with my bodily state. The first movement is full of struggle and is very capricious and obstinate ... It was only in the last movement that I began to feel myself again and only after completing the whole work did I actually feel better. But otherwise, as I said before, it reminds me of a dark time. That my melancholy bassoon in the Adagio, written into that place with special affection, did not escape you, gave me the greatest pleasure.”
In a very compelling way, the symphony can be seen as the composer's own battle with mental instability: restless and troubled in the obsessive rhythm of the first movement, increasingly feverish in the moto perpetuo scherzo (here, as in Beethoven's Ninth, placed second to intensify the feeling of mounting frenzy), dark and haunting in the C minor Adagio and finally breaking into an uneasy victory in the Finale.
Binding the Symphony together are a number of recurrent ideas. Foremost of these is the 'motto' theme, softly intoned on the brass at the outset. This reappears at the close of both the first and second movements and sounds out triumphantly in the coda of the Finale. The solemn string scales which underpin this theme influence much of the subsequent material, notably in the scherzo's two trios. As a final dramatic touch, the strange, disquieting melody of the adagio reappears in an inspired transformation as the second subject of the Finale.
© Stephen Strugnell
- conductor
- mezzo-soprano
Secret love stories lie hidden here as Robin Ticciati continues his season-long pairing of Berlioz and Schumann. Berlioz’s ultra-Romantic songs were first orchestrated for his mistress, the singer Marie Recio. Schumann’s symphony pays tribute to the composer’s devoted wife Clara by including a melody which sets the phrase “Take, then, these songs of mine” from Beethoven’s love songs, An die ferne geliebte. To open, music by one of Berlioz’s idols – Gluck, in tempestuous mode.
Romantic Love Stories
- Gluck
Programme note
Christoph Willibald Gluck (1714-1787)
Overture to Alcest (1767)Gluck, together with his librettist, the poet and diplomat Ranieri da Calzabigi, is now chiefly remembered as one of the great reformers in the history of opera. Ideas that were hinted at in the first fruit of their partnership, Orfeo (1762), were voiced without reserve in Alceste (1767). Their stated aim was a ‘sublime simplicity’ (una bella sempicita) in which words, music and instrumentation should combine to help interpret the action, and not merely embellish it. The preface to Alceste, signed by Gluck but drafted by Calzabigi, is one of the most famous documents in the annals of opera:
“When I undertook to write the music for Alceste, I resolved to divest it entirely of all those abuses, introduced into it either by the mistaken vanity of singers, or by the too great complaisance of composers, which have so long disfigured Italian opera and made of the most splendid and most beautiful of spectacles the most ridiculous and wearisome. I have striven to restrict music to its true office of serving poetry by means of expression and by following the situations of the story, without interrupting the action or stifling it with a useless superfluity of ornaments. In short, I have sought to abolish all the abuses against which good sense and reason have long cried out in vain.”
The plot of Alceste loosely follows Euripides’ tragedy, and concerns Admetus, King of Pherae, whose life will only be spared if someone is willing to die in his place. Calzabigi wrote his play during the period of court mourning, following the death of Emperor Franz Stefan. To contemporary audiences, the self-sacrifice of Admetus’ wife, Alcestis, would have recalled the widowed empress Maria Theresia. Certainly Alcestis’ music is as unrelievedly sombre as Maria Theresia, whose protracted mourning lasted for fifteen years.
As Gluck himself indicated, later in the preface, an overture should “apprise the spectators of the nature of the action that is to be represented”, and the magnificently gloomy overture to Alceste does exactly that. It is the first truly tragic introduction to an opera and the ancestor of an illustrious line, from the overture to Don Giovanni to Brahms’ Tragic Overture.
© Stephen Strugnell
- Berlioz
Programme note
Hector Berlioz (1803-1869)
Nuits d’Ete, Op 7 (1840-41)Villanelle
Le spectre de la rose
Sur les lagunes
Absence
Au cimetiere
L’ile inconnueAt one time people extolled the brassy brilliance of Berlioz in the belief that there was no more to his music than that. Today, however, we are equally aware of its inspired quietness. Even some of his grandest works make their most memorable effects by stealth. Thus in his Requiem the soft swishing of six pairs of cymbals in the Sanctus is as important as the outburst of the four brass bands in the Dies Irae. Yet not until he composed The Childhood of Christ did the French public recognise the restraint and chasteness of Berlioz’s output. The shock was so great that they thought he had mended his ways and changed his style - to which Berlioz patiently replied that it was only his subject he had changed.
But one thing that never altered was his devotion to song as an expression of his deepest musical feelings. The human voice inspired his most haunting and characteristic melodies, with their long spans and asymmetrical phrasing, their ability to compress a lifetime of melancholy into a few lines of music. Within his largest operas and choral works he always left space for things such as Hylas’s homesick lament in The Trojans or Marguerite’s ballad in The Damnation of Faust, whose simplicity of utterance strikes straight to the heart.
The most moving of all his songs are the six that form Les Nuits d’Ete and which he assembled as his Op 7, though as an orchestrated entity they date from later in his career than their low opus number implies. To call them a song cycle would be misleading, since they form no kind of narrative the way Schubert’s Schone Mullerin and Winterreise do. Yet they are undoubtedly unified by their subject matter, which explores aspects of romantic love, and by the fact that they are all based on poems by Berlioz’s friend Theophile Gautier, author of Histoire du Romantisme and proponent of ‘Art for Art’s Sake’.
Their structure moreover makes it essential that they be sung as a set, because only then can we appreciate that the music, after the pastoral sweetness of the opening song, sinks into an abyss of sadness from which it does not rise until (and even then somewhat uncertainly) it lands upon the ‘Unknown Island’ of the final song. The seemingly peaceful title of the work, Summer Nights, thus needs to be treated with caution. For Berlioz, such nights did not necessarily imply warmth and happy love but just as possibly the chill of a lagoon or the darkness of the grave.
Though the cycle An die Ferne Geliebte (To the distant loved one) by Berlioz’s adored Beethoven must surely have been a model for these songs, the music anticipates Mahler, Ravel, and Britten in its subtle use of the orchestra as accompanist, rather than the traditional piano. Not being a pianist, Berlioz was in this respect a pioneer, and nobody surpassed his ability to find the right instrumental shading for the mood of each song. Ideally, the music demands more than a single singer to do it justice. Berlioz himself specified different voices, though today a soprano or mezzo-soprano who has confidence in her compass and emotional range may tackle all six songs, as Maggie Teyte, Regine Crespin, and Janet Baker all did.
At any rate, the opening Villanelle demands both charm and wistfulness in its evocation of the dew-covered lilies and baskets of wild strawberries which are insufficient to conceal the transience of young love. For Berlioz - and again the singer needs to reflect the fact - the Spectre de la Rose meant more than it did to Weber in his Invitation to the Dance, though the story (of a rose returning as a spectre to haunt the dreams of the girl who wore it to her first ball) is the same.
But if the first two songs are to some extent equivocal, Sur les lagunes is not. Here the twin images of movement and sea, the ocean swell beneath the bereaved singer’s feet, are profoundly conveyed by way of the music’s grim F minor tonality, by the chillingly repeated three-note figure and the poem’s heartfelt refrain, “Ah without love to go off to sea.” As for Absence, the separation here is a matter of mountains and valleys, no less engulfing in their loneliness and in the desolation of empty space provided by the vast declamatory cadences of the melodic line.
After this grandly floating melody, Au cimetiere sinks us to the depths and to an almost tactile presence of death and doom, of white tomb and pale dove. Then, in L’ile inconnue, the nightmare passes and benign sea breezes blow us to the faithful shore where people love forever. Towards the end, however, the pace slows and a recognisable musical quotation from Absence suggests that things are perhaps less promising than they seem.
© Conrad Wilson
- Schumann
Programme note
Robert Schumann (1810-1856)
Symphony No 2 in CAllegro
Scherzo
Adagio espressivo
Finale - allegro molto vivaceSchumann began his second symphony (really his fifth large symphonic work) at a personally troubled and disturbed time. He was suffering the after-effects of a nervous breakdown and already showing some of the symptoms which were to haunt him for the rest of his tragically short life. He wrote in his household book complaining of "severe dizziness" and "singing in the ears" and, with Clara unwell too, the unhappy and telling phrase "the hypochondria of a married couple" occurs for the first time.
The symphony itself was sketched remarkably quickly. Just before the Christmas of 1845 Schumann wrote of being "struck with symphoniaca" and, in a state of feverish excitement, completed the sketch of the first movement in three days. By 28 December the sketch of the whole Symphony was complete. The orchestration took much longer and the full score was not completed until October 1846, three weeks before its Gewandhaus premiere on 5 November. Mendelssohn, rehearsing and conducting the work with his usual meticulous care, performed his last service for Schumann; he died a year to the day later, on 5 November 1847 - a coincidence not lost on the superstitious Schumann.
Reflecting, as it does, Schumann's state of mind, this is not an easy Symphony to either listen to or conduct. Writing to a conductor in 1848 Schumann himself makes this point:
“It was written in December 1845, while I was still half sick and I feel as though one must hear that in it. Nay I may say it was, so to speak, the resistance of the spirit which exercised a visible influence here and through which I sought to contend with my bodily state. The first movement is full of struggle and is very capricious and obstinate ... It was only in the last movement that I began to feel myself again and only after completing the whole work did I actually feel better. But otherwise, as I said before, it reminds me of a dark time. That my melancholy bassoon in the Adagio, written into that place with special affection, did not escape you, gave me the greatest pleasure.”
In a very compelling way, the symphony can be seen as the composer's own battle with mental instability: restless and troubled in the obsessive rhythm of the first movement, increasingly feverish in the moto perpetuo scherzo (here, as in Beethoven's Ninth, placed second to intensify the feeling of mounting frenzy), dark and haunting in the C minor Adagio and finally breaking into an uneasy victory in the Finale.
Binding the Symphony together are a number of recurrent ideas. Foremost of these is the 'motto' theme, softly intoned on the brass at the outset. This reappears at the close of both the first and second movements and sounds out triumphantly in the coda of the Finale. The solemn string scales which underpin this theme influence much of the subsequent material, notably in the scherzo's two trios. As a final dramatic touch, the strange, disquieting melody of the adagio reappears in an inspired transformation as the second subject of the Finale.
© Stephen Strugnell
- conductor
- mezzo-soprano
Secret love stories lie hidden here as Robin Ticciati continues his season-long pairing of Berlioz and Schumann. Berlioz’s ultra-Romantic songs were first orchestrated for his mistress, the singer Marie Recio. Schumann’s symphony pays tribute to the composer’s devoted wife Clara by including a melody which sets the phrase “Take, then, these songs of mine” from Beethoven’s love songs, An die ferne geliebte. To open, music by one of Berlioz’s idols – Gluck, in tempestuous mode.
Keyboard Titans
- Beethoven
Programme note
Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827)
Coriolan Overture, Op 62Allegro con brio
Like Beethoven's overtures to Egmont, Leonore and The Ruins of Athens, the Coriolan Overture was originally written for the theatre. It was composed in 1807 for a performance, not of Shakespeare's Coriolanus, but of Heinrich von Collin's Coriolan. Collin was a minor official in the Austrian government, and his play appears to have had sufficient merit to enjoy sporadic appearances in Vienna during the early years of the century. Whether his friend Beethoven saw any of these productions, or merely read the play, is unknown. What is certain is that the composer wrote this overture five years after the play's premiere, and that there is only one recorded instance of the overture being presented in connection with a production of the play: at the Burgtheater in Vienna on 24 April 1807.
The historical Coriolanus was a rebellious Roman general who lived in the fifth century BC. According to Plutarch, Coriolanus, during a time of famine, argued that grain should not be distributed to the plebian masses unless they abolished their newly-established Tribune. For this, he and his family were banished from Rome and took refuge among the Volsci - whom Coriolanus eventually aided in their war with the Romans. His mother, Volumnia, and wife, Virgilia, pleaded with him to spare the city of his birth. This he did, but was killed by the Volsci for his treachery.
Coriolanus's frustrated rage, and the conflicts he confronts, are fully explored in the overture, and give rise to some of the most explosive and violent music Beethoven ever wrote. The opening loud chords represent Coriolanus's brash and unbending defiance, and the rising theme which follows, in the significant, tragic key of C minor (the key of the Fifth Symphony), shows his struggle with destiny. In contrast, the plaintive second theme is in the key of E flat major, the heroic key of the Eroica Symphony. Its descending structure and more lyrical quality would seem to represent Volumina as she pleads with her son to spare Rome. The interplay between these two diametrically opposed themes creates a tension that finds its resolution only in Coriolanus's inevitable downfall. Three final fading pizzicato notes mirror the overture's triumphant opening.
© Stephen Strugnell
- Beethoven
Programme note
Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827)
Piano Concerto No 2 in B flat major, Op 19 (1785-1801)Allegro con brio
Adagio
Finale: Molto allegroTradition declares Beethoven’s Second Piano Concerto to be in reality his first. In fact it is his only piano concerto to be correctly numbered. Though believed to date from around 1795, by which time he had left his native Bonn and settled in Vienna, it was probably sketched in his hometown ten years earlier. There it had been preceded in 1783 by an even more junior piano concerto, written in E flat major (the future key of the Emperor concerto) upon which no number has been bestowed, but which still receives an occasional performance, particularly in Germany.
The impressive concerto in C major, complete with trumpets and drums and long established as No 1, is in fact his third, just as his third is his fourth, and so on. Whether this evening’s work in B flat major, which we identify as No 2, really requires a number is disputable, since it is as much a piece of juvenilia as the rest of his early Bonn output. But it is keenly etched and full of invention brilliant enough to suggest that, had he never moved to Vienna, Beethoven would still have become a composer of consequence. Though it was not a work he claimed to be proud of, he was sufficiently interested in it to perform it in Prague in 1798 and to go on revising it up to 1801.
The start of the first movement, more lightly scored than that of the C major concerto, succinctly provides the feel of the music, for in the space of a couple of phrases it supplies a brisk orchestral call to attention and a graceful answer from the violins. When the soloist enters it is not with one of the themes already heard but with an entirely new one – an idea Beethoven appropriated from Mozart, whose concertos he revered. But the movement also points the way to Beethoven’s more audacious symphonic style, not least through its abrupt and surprising modulations. The forward-looking cadenza, which Beethoven added some years later, is even more surprising in attitude.
The Adagio, hailed by Beethoven’s pupil Czerny as a “dramatic vocal scene”, is broad and expressive, with a main theme played first by the strings before being taken up by the soloist, who then proceeds to a graceful tributary theme loaded with decorations. But the most striking moment is to come, when the piano breaks free from the orchestra to play a remarkable recitative-like passage in bare, single notes, marked con gran espressione. The orchestra steals back with atmospheric references to the main theme, and the movement ends quietly.
The finale is a spirited rondo, with a bumpy main theme bounced out by the soloist. An episode involving a cycle of broken octaves on the piano leads to a new, forward-looking, rather Schumannesque tune, and then to a grinding, syncopated passage taken through several minor keys. After a last return to the main theme, the concerto ends with a rippling decrescendo on the piano, followed by five affirmative bars for the orchestra.
© Conrad Wilson
- Mozart
Programme note
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756-1791)
Symphony No 41 in C major, K551, Jupiter (1788)Allegro vivace
Andante cantabile
Menuetto: Allegro
Molto allegroC major is Mozart’s Olympian key, nowhere more so than in the last and most dazzling of his symphonies, K551, traditionally known as the Jupiter. Though the title was not Mozart’s – the astute Johann Salomon, Haydn’s London impresario, is said to have thought of it – it is thoroughly in keeping with a work which progresses from a seemingly simple opening flourish to a finale which is an unsurpassed example of sustained polyphonic panache.
During the summer of 1788, when it was written, all was not well with Mozart. For financial reasons, he had moved house to the Viennese suburbs, though he could still, as he said, afford a cab into town. However, in spite of what he called "black thoughts," inspiration was running high. The superb symphonic triptych of which the Jupiter forms the completion was composed - for no obvious reason - between June and August, though some of the music was probably already in his head, along with the great C minor Adagio and Fugue for strings and two of his finest piano trios.
But if the use of conventional eighteenth-century odds and ends in the Jupiter Symphony – the first movement’s initial call to attention and the four notes which launch and propel the finale – suggest that it was written in haste, what Mozart does with these sounds anything but rushed. Everything, indeed, seems fashioned with the utmost poise, and with the most precise sense of timing. The way the first movement’s opening phrase returns, after a mere twenty bars, in counterpoint with a chirpy woodwind overlay and a glowing horn part is an example of how classical formality in this symphony becomes witty and sublime. Even the insertion, at one point in the movement, of what sounds like a merry little afterthought of a melody - it was written earlier that year for a baritone friend (the first Viennese Don Giovanni) to sing in different composer’s opera - is transformed into a stroke of genius.
The nocturnal slow movement, with its atmospherically muted strings, exquisite wind parts, and moods gradually less calm than they seem to begin with, maintains the inspiration. Even the silky opening theme proves subject to disruption. The idiosyncratic minuet, too, has something unstable about its stomping dance-beat, puncturing the suavity of the violin line. The central trio section is notable for its preliminary use of the four-note motif which will serve as the finale's launching-pad. But it is in the finale itself - a contrapuntal juggling act in which more and more balls are tossed into the air and effortlessly spun - that the symphony conspicuously reaches its exhilaratingly relentless apotheosis.
© Conrad Wilson
- conductor
- piano
A real treat for lovers of piano music: Fleisher, a living legend of the keyboard, is now in his 80s but still shines as pianist, conductor, mentor and teacher. For this, his SCO debut, he conducts while his pupil Angelich plays Beethoven’s youthful concerto.
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Related audio clip
Mozart Symphony No. 41 in C major ('Jupiter'), K. 551- Molto Allegro - excerpt
Sir Charles Mackerras conducts the SCO in Mozart's final symphony, No 41 in C major 'Jupiter'. Buy from the SCO Online Shop.
Keyboard Titans
- Beethoven
Programme note
Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827)
Coriolan Overture, Op 62Allegro con brio
Like Beethoven's overtures to Egmont, Leonore and The Ruins of Athens, the Coriolan Overture was originally written for the theatre. It was composed in 1807 for a performance, not of Shakespeare's Coriolanus, but of Heinrich von Collin's Coriolan. Collin was a minor official in the Austrian government, and his play appears to have had sufficient merit to enjoy sporadic appearances in Vienna during the early years of the century. Whether his friend Beethoven saw any of these productions, or merely read the play, is unknown. What is certain is that the composer wrote this overture five years after the play's premiere, and that there is only one recorded instance of the overture being presented in connection with a production of the play: at the Burgtheater in Vienna on 24 April 1807.
The historical Coriolanus was a rebellious Roman general who lived in the fifth century BC. According to Plutarch, Coriolanus, during a time of famine, argued that grain should not be distributed to the plebian masses unless they abolished their newly-established Tribune. For this, he and his family were banished from Rome and took refuge among the Volsci - whom Coriolanus eventually aided in their war with the Romans. His mother, Volumnia, and wife, Virgilia, pleaded with him to spare the city of his birth. This he did, but was killed by the Volsci for his treachery.
Coriolanus's frustrated rage, and the conflicts he confronts, are fully explored in the overture, and give rise to some of the most explosive and violent music Beethoven ever wrote. The opening loud chords represent Coriolanus's brash and unbending defiance, and the rising theme which follows, in the significant, tragic key of C minor (the key of the Fifth Symphony), shows his struggle with destiny. In contrast, the plaintive second theme is in the key of E flat major, the heroic key of the Eroica Symphony. Its descending structure and more lyrical quality would seem to represent Volumina as she pleads with her son to spare Rome. The interplay between these two diametrically opposed themes creates a tension that finds its resolution only in Coriolanus's inevitable downfall. Three final fading pizzicato notes mirror the overture's triumphant opening.
© Stephen Strugnell
- Beethoven
Programme note
Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827)
Piano Concerto No 2 in B flat major, Op 19 (1785-1801)Allegro con brio
Adagio
Finale: Molto allegroTradition declares Beethoven’s Second Piano Concerto to be in reality his first. In fact it is his only piano concerto to be correctly numbered. Though believed to date from around 1795, by which time he had left his native Bonn and settled in Vienna, it was probably sketched in his hometown ten years earlier. There it had been preceded in 1783 by an even more junior piano concerto, written in E flat major (the future key of the Emperor concerto) upon which no number has been bestowed, but which still receives an occasional performance, particularly in Germany.
The impressive concerto in C major, complete with trumpets and drums and long established as No 1, is in fact his third, just as his third is his fourth, and so on. Whether this evening’s work in B flat major, which we identify as No 2, really requires a number is disputable, since it is as much a piece of juvenilia as the rest of his early Bonn output. But it is keenly etched and full of invention brilliant enough to suggest that, had he never moved to Vienna, Beethoven would still have become a composer of consequence. Though it was not a work he claimed to be proud of, he was sufficiently interested in it to perform it in Prague in 1798 and to go on revising it up to 1801.
The start of the first movement, more lightly scored than that of the C major concerto, succinctly provides the feel of the music, for in the space of a couple of phrases it supplies a brisk orchestral call to attention and a graceful answer from the violins. When the soloist enters it is not with one of the themes already heard but with an entirely new one – an idea Beethoven appropriated from Mozart, whose concertos he revered. But the movement also points the way to Beethoven’s more audacious symphonic style, not least through its abrupt and surprising modulations. The forward-looking cadenza, which Beethoven added some years later, is even more surprising in attitude.
The Adagio, hailed by Beethoven’s pupil Czerny as a “dramatic vocal scene”, is broad and expressive, with a main theme played first by the strings before being taken up by the soloist, who then proceeds to a graceful tributary theme loaded with decorations. But the most striking moment is to come, when the piano breaks free from the orchestra to play a remarkable recitative-like passage in bare, single notes, marked con gran espressione. The orchestra steals back with atmospheric references to the main theme, and the movement ends quietly.
The finale is a spirited rondo, with a bumpy main theme bounced out by the soloist. An episode involving a cycle of broken octaves on the piano leads to a new, forward-looking, rather Schumannesque tune, and then to a grinding, syncopated passage taken through several minor keys. After a last return to the main theme, the concerto ends with a rippling decrescendo on the piano, followed by five affirmative bars for the orchestra.
© Conrad Wilson
- Mozart
Programme note
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756-1791)
Symphony No 41 in C major, K551, Jupiter (1788)Allegro vivace
Andante cantabile
Menuetto: Allegro
Molto allegroC major is Mozart’s Olympian key, nowhere more so than in the last and most dazzling of his symphonies, K551, traditionally known as the Jupiter. Though the title was not Mozart’s – the astute Johann Salomon, Haydn’s London impresario, is said to have thought of it – it is thoroughly in keeping with a work which progresses from a seemingly simple opening flourish to a finale which is an unsurpassed example of sustained polyphonic panache.
During the summer of 1788, when it was written, all was not well with Mozart. For financial reasons, he had moved house to the Viennese suburbs, though he could still, as he said, afford a cab into town. However, in spite of what he called "black thoughts," inspiration was running high. The superb symphonic triptych of which the Jupiter forms the completion was composed - for no obvious reason - between June and August, though some of the music was probably already in his head, along with the great C minor Adagio and Fugue for strings and two of his finest piano trios.
But if the use of conventional eighteenth-century odds and ends in the Jupiter Symphony – the first movement’s initial call to attention and the four notes which launch and propel the finale – suggest that it was written in haste, what Mozart does with these sounds anything but rushed. Everything, indeed, seems fashioned with the utmost poise, and with the most precise sense of timing. The way the first movement’s opening phrase returns, after a mere twenty bars, in counterpoint with a chirpy woodwind overlay and a glowing horn part is an example of how classical formality in this symphony becomes witty and sublime. Even the insertion, at one point in the movement, of what sounds like a merry little afterthought of a melody - it was written earlier that year for a baritone friend (the first Viennese Don Giovanni) to sing in different composer’s opera - is transformed into a stroke of genius.
The nocturnal slow movement, with its atmospherically muted strings, exquisite wind parts, and moods gradually less calm than they seem to begin with, maintains the inspiration. Even the silky opening theme proves subject to disruption. The idiosyncratic minuet, too, has something unstable about its stomping dance-beat, puncturing the suavity of the violin line. The central trio section is notable for its preliminary use of the four-note motif which will serve as the finale's launching-pad. But it is in the finale itself - a contrapuntal juggling act in which more and more balls are tossed into the air and effortlessly spun - that the symphony conspicuously reaches its exhilaratingly relentless apotheosis.
© Conrad Wilson
- conductor
- piano
A real treat for lovers of piano music: Fleisher, a living legend of the keyboard, is now in his 80s but still shines as pianist, conductor, mentor and teacher. For this, his SCO debut, he conducts while his pupil Angelich plays Beethoven’s youthful concerto.
Related audio clip
Mozart Symphony No. 41 in C major ('Jupiter'), K. 551- Molto Allegro - excerpt
Sir Charles Mackerras conducts the SCO in Mozart's final symphony, No 41 in C major 'Jupiter'. Buy from the SCO Online Shop.
Keyboard Titans
- Beethoven
Programme note
Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827)
Coriolan Overture, Op 62Allegro con brio
Like Beethoven's overtures to Egmont, Leonore and The Ruins of Athens, the Coriolan Overture was originally written for the theatre. It was composed in 1807 for a performance, not of Shakespeare's Coriolanus, but of Heinrich von Collin's Coriolan. Collin was a minor official in the Austrian government, and his play appears to have had sufficient merit to enjoy sporadic appearances in Vienna during the early years of the century. Whether his friend Beethoven saw any of these productions, or merely read the play, is unknown. What is certain is that the composer wrote this overture five years after the play's premiere, and that there is only one recorded instance of the overture being presented in connection with a production of the play: at the Burgtheater in Vienna on 24 April 1807.
The historical Coriolanus was a rebellious Roman general who lived in the fifth century BC. According to Plutarch, Coriolanus, during a time of famine, argued that grain should not be distributed to the plebian masses unless they abolished their newly-established Tribune. For this, he and his family were banished from Rome and took refuge among the Volsci - whom Coriolanus eventually aided in their war with the Romans. His mother, Volumnia, and wife, Virgilia, pleaded with him to spare the city of his birth. This he did, but was killed by the Volsci for his treachery.
Coriolanus's frustrated rage, and the conflicts he confronts, are fully explored in the overture, and give rise to some of the most explosive and violent music Beethoven ever wrote. The opening loud chords represent Coriolanus's brash and unbending defiance, and the rising theme which follows, in the significant, tragic key of C minor (the key of the Fifth Symphony), shows his struggle with destiny. In contrast, the plaintive second theme is in the key of E flat major, the heroic key of the Eroica Symphony. Its descending structure and more lyrical quality would seem to represent Volumina as she pleads with her son to spare Rome. The interplay between these two diametrically opposed themes creates a tension that finds its resolution only in Coriolanus's inevitable downfall. Three final fading pizzicato notes mirror the overture's triumphant opening.
© Stephen Strugnell
- Beethoven
Programme note
Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827)
Piano Concerto No 2 in B flat major, Op 19 (1785-1801)Allegro con brio
Adagio
Finale: Molto allegroTradition declares Beethoven’s Second Piano Concerto to be in reality his first. In fact it is his only piano concerto to be correctly numbered. Though believed to date from around 1795, by which time he had left his native Bonn and settled in Vienna, it was probably sketched in his hometown ten years earlier. There it had been preceded in 1783 by an even more junior piano concerto, written in E flat major (the future key of the Emperor concerto) upon which no number has been bestowed, but which still receives an occasional performance, particularly in Germany.
The impressive concerto in C major, complete with trumpets and drums and long established as No 1, is in fact his third, just as his third is his fourth, and so on. Whether this evening’s work in B flat major, which we identify as No 2, really requires a number is disputable, since it is as much a piece of juvenilia as the rest of his early Bonn output. But it is keenly etched and full of invention brilliant enough to suggest that, had he never moved to Vienna, Beethoven would still have become a composer of consequence. Though it was not a work he claimed to be proud of, he was sufficiently interested in it to perform it in Prague in 1798 and to go on revising it up to 1801.
The start of the first movement, more lightly scored than that of the C major concerto, succinctly provides the feel of the music, for in the space of a couple of phrases it supplies a brisk orchestral call to attention and a graceful answer from the violins. When the soloist enters it is not with one of the themes already heard but with an entirely new one – an idea Beethoven appropriated from Mozart, whose concertos he revered. But the movement also points the way to Beethoven’s more audacious symphonic style, not least through its abrupt and surprising modulations. The forward-looking cadenza, which Beethoven added some years later, is even more surprising in attitude.
The Adagio, hailed by Beethoven’s pupil Czerny as a “dramatic vocal scene”, is broad and expressive, with a main theme played first by the strings before being taken up by the soloist, who then proceeds to a graceful tributary theme loaded with decorations. But the most striking moment is to come, when the piano breaks free from the orchestra to play a remarkable recitative-like passage in bare, single notes, marked con gran espressione. The orchestra steals back with atmospheric references to the main theme, and the movement ends quietly.
The finale is a spirited rondo, with a bumpy main theme bounced out by the soloist. An episode involving a cycle of broken octaves on the piano leads to a new, forward-looking, rather Schumannesque tune, and then to a grinding, syncopated passage taken through several minor keys. After a last return to the main theme, the concerto ends with a rippling decrescendo on the piano, followed by five affirmative bars for the orchestra.
© Conrad Wilson
- Mozart
Programme note
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756-1791)
Symphony No 41 in C major, K551, Jupiter (1788)Allegro vivace
Andante cantabile
Menuetto: Allegro
Molto allegroC major is Mozart’s Olympian key, nowhere more so than in the last and most dazzling of his symphonies, K551, traditionally known as the Jupiter. Though the title was not Mozart’s – the astute Johann Salomon, Haydn’s London impresario, is said to have thought of it – it is thoroughly in keeping with a work which progresses from a seemingly simple opening flourish to a finale which is an unsurpassed example of sustained polyphonic panache.
During the summer of 1788, when it was written, all was not well with Mozart. For financial reasons, he had moved house to the Viennese suburbs, though he could still, as he said, afford a cab into town. However, in spite of what he called "black thoughts," inspiration was running high. The superb symphonic triptych of which the Jupiter forms the completion was composed - for no obvious reason - between June and August, though some of the music was probably already in his head, along with the great C minor Adagio and Fugue for strings and two of his finest piano trios.
But if the use of conventional eighteenth-century odds and ends in the Jupiter Symphony – the first movement’s initial call to attention and the four notes which launch and propel the finale – suggest that it was written in haste, what Mozart does with these sounds anything but rushed. Everything, indeed, seems fashioned with the utmost poise, and with the most precise sense of timing. The way the first movement’s opening phrase returns, after a mere twenty bars, in counterpoint with a chirpy woodwind overlay and a glowing horn part is an example of how classical formality in this symphony becomes witty and sublime. Even the insertion, at one point in the movement, of what sounds like a merry little afterthought of a melody - it was written earlier that year for a baritone friend (the first Viennese Don Giovanni) to sing in different composer’s opera - is transformed into a stroke of genius.
The nocturnal slow movement, with its atmospherically muted strings, exquisite wind parts, and moods gradually less calm than they seem to begin with, maintains the inspiration. Even the silky opening theme proves subject to disruption. The idiosyncratic minuet, too, has something unstable about its stomping dance-beat, puncturing the suavity of the violin line. The central trio section is notable for its preliminary use of the four-note motif which will serve as the finale's launching-pad. But it is in the finale itself - a contrapuntal juggling act in which more and more balls are tossed into the air and effortlessly spun - that the symphony conspicuously reaches its exhilaratingly relentless apotheosis.
© Conrad Wilson
- conductor
- piano
A real treat for lovers of piano music: Fleisher, a living legend of the keyboard, is now in his 80s but still shines as pianist, conductor, mentor and teacher. For this, his SCO debut, he conducts while his pupil Angelich plays Beethoven’s youthful concerto.
Related audio clip
Mozart Symphony No. 41 in C major ('Jupiter'), K. 551- Molto Allegro - excerpt
Sir Charles Mackerras conducts the SCO in Mozart's final symphony, No 41 in C major 'Jupiter'. Buy from the SCO Online Shop.
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