Concerts & Tickets

Programme note

Edvard Grieg (1843-1907)
Symphony in C minor

Allegro molto
Adagio espressivo
Intermezzo
Allegro energico
Finale: Allegro molto vivace

When Grieg wrote “must never be performed” on the manuscript of his C minor Symphony, should that have been regarded as the end of the matter? Was he dissatisfied with the symphony because he had misgivings about the actual quality of the music, or simply because it represented what he called “a vanished Schumann-period of my life”?

It was the Danish composer Niels Gade who, in 1863, suggested to the twenty-year-old Grieg that he should try his hand at a symphony. According to his own later account in a newspaper interview, Grieg began work fired with enthusiasm, and had the first movement complete and fully scored in two weeks. The rest of the work took him considerably longer, and the score was not finished until May 1864. It received two complete performances during the next three years. In addition, the last three movements were played twice, and in 1865 Grieg made his debut as a conductor directing the two middle movements. These he later transcribed for piano duet and published as Two Symphonic Pieces, Op 14.

It seems to have been in 1867 that Grieg decided to withdraw the work, after hearing Symphony No 1 by Johan Svendsen (1840-1911). The two men were good friends, but in both personal and musical terms they were complete opposites. Grieg appears to have compared his effort unfavourably with Svendsen’s confident handling of the orchestra and of symphonic form, and it was not heard again nor published in his lifetime.

In 1978 the Grieg Hall was opened in the composer’s home city of Bergen, and permission was sought to play the symphony. This was refused by the trustees of the public library’s Grieg Collection, but the matter was taken out of their hands a couple of years later when a photocopy of the manuscript was smuggled into the Soviet Union and the work was played by the Moscow State Radio Orchestra in December 1980. With a ban on future performances now rendered pointless, the symphony was played in the Grieg Hall during the Bergen International Festival the following May.

After a short, dramatic introduction the first movement gets underway with a compactly energetic theme which contrasts with the warmly expansive melody that follows. This combination of lyricism and urgency pervades the whole movement.

The second movement breathes an air of unruffled calm. Two central episodes increase the pace and raise the emotional temperature only slightly, heightening rather than disturbing the overall tranquillity.

The Intermezzo is the movement which most strongly foreshadows the Grieg to come, its robust triple-time rhythms suggesting the traditional dance known as the Springdans which he was to use so often in his later music. The central trio section offers a more easy-going contrast.

The finale returns to the vigour of the first movement, but in C major and a mood of surging optimism (there is even a secondary theme which suggests a fleeting echo of the finale of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony). A hymn-like woodwind theme introduces a quieter central episode, but the symphony ends in a blaze of triumphant energy.

The symphony as a whole is not at all characteristic of Grieg’s mature style, in spite of occasional melodic or harmonic turns which suggest the direction his music would take later. But it does offer a fascinating glimpse of a young composer trying his hand at a large-scale work for the first time, and emerging with credit, even if he did decide that this was not where his future lay.

© Mike Wheeler

Programme note

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756–1791)
Symphony in D major after the Serenade, K320

Adagio maestoso – Allegro con spirito
Andantino
Finale: Presto 

Some of Mozart’s finest and least known orchestral music occurs in the serenades that he composed for various public and private occasions, usually outdoors, in his native Salzburg. Their generally celebratory and relaxed mood and their generous proportions make them difficult to fit into a standard concert programme these days. And indeed the same seems to have been true in Mozart’s time, because he extracted shorter pieces from several of his serenades for use in other contexts.

An example is the various offshoots of the seven-movement Serenade which he wrote in the summer of 1779 as Finalmusik to mark the end of the Salzburg University year. The complete work includes two minuets and trios (the second trio of the second minuet featuring a post-horn, after which the Serenade is nicknamed), which also occur in a separate Salzburg manuscript as music for dancing. The Serenade also contains a two-movement Concertante with a group of woodwind soloists, which Mozart performed as a separate piece in a concert in Vienna in March 1783. And the remaining three movements form a Symphony, which has survived in a printed edition of 1791 and several sets of manuscript parts, one of them copied in Vienna and with corrections in Mozart’s own handwriting – though we can only guess that he would have performed this too in one of his Viennese concert series.

The Symphony is scored for strings with oboes, bassoons and horns, trumpets and timpani. The first movement is a full-scale Allegro, without a repeat of the first section, but, unusually, with a slow introduction. The Allegro has a bustling first subject, and a second theme in which an expressive violin melody is repeatedly answered by a stern one-bar unison phrase, which then forms the bass line for a repeated gradual crescendo – a speciality of the famous Mannheim court orchestra, which Mozart had heard on his extended European journey in 1777/78. Another striking feature (anticipating Haydn’s 'Drum Roll' Symphony) is that the slow introduction is recalled at the start of the recapitulation, but adapted to the tempo of the Allegro. The slow movement is an Andantino in D minor, without the trumpets and drums: it is a serious, even sombre piece, with the major-key second subject transformed into the minor in the recapitulation. The finale is generally festive and energetic, but with a clucking second subject and some neat little touches of counterpoint to give the movement an extra dimension.

© Anthony Burton