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Langree Conducts Beethoven
- Gluck
- Beethoven
Programme note
Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827)
Symphony No 4 in B flat major, Op 60 (1806)Adagio – Allegro vivace
Adagio
Allegro vivace
Allegro ma non troppoThe rule of thumb about Beethoven’s symphonies used to be that the odd-numbered ones were masculine, assertive, dramatic, heroic; the even-numbered ones feminine, lyrical, good-tempered, humorous – and, apart from the Pastoral, slightly less popular. Though Schumann hailed the Fourth Symphony as a “slender Grecian maiden”, it was always the Cinderella of the symphonies, never quite glamorous enough to distract attention from Nos 3 and 5, yet notable for its pace and its moments of pungency. To dismiss it as inferior would be a profound mistake. It is a work whose lyricism is constantly threatened by thudding rhythms and by patches of darkness from which the music emerges into sudden sunlight.
Composed in 1806, alongside the Fifth Symphony, it begins very differently with a slow, mysterious, somewhat ominous introduction whose apparent inactivity provoked Weber’s famous jeer about a few notes spread over five minutes. Certainly this veiled, hesitant music, with its probing harmonies and softly stalking tread, must have perplexed more people than Weber among its early listeners. But suddenly, with a series of loud upward thrusts, the pulse quickens and a hammering theme, previously hinted at, is stated boldly by the full orchestra. The Allegro section, filled with perky little woodwind themes and abrupt changes of direction, is at last in action. Though the music is sometimes reduced to the merest thread of tone, an immense crescendo over a drum-roll - one of the most exciting moments in the entire symphony - signals the start of the recapitulation.
In the Adagio, the rocking rhythm heard at the outset forms the movement’s steady heartbeat, sometimes soft, sometimes loud. Much admired by Berlioz, who said it seized him with emotion, the music sings and sighs its way towards a hauntingly nocturnal theme for clarinet with a tender, decoratively muted violin accompaniment.
Swinging cross-rhythms in the third movement show the title menuetto to be a Beethovenian understatement (though Furtwangler conducted it famously slowly). The music, in fact, is a sardonic scherzo, one of Beethoven’s double ones in which the trio section - a sweet pastoral interlude in which the oboe plays a star role - innovatively comes round twice.
Although Beethoven claimed that he learnt little from his composition lessons with Haydn, he provided his Fourth Symphony with a remarkably Haydnesque finale. The main theme and its spirited successors are spun right round the orchestra in exhilaratingly perpetual motion. Even the bassoon is granted a solo spot when, at the start of the recapitulation, it delivers its own whizzing version of the main theme.
© Conrad Wilson
- Beethoven
Programme note
Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827)
Mass in C major, Op 86 (1807)Kyrie
Gloria
Credo
Sanctus
Benedictus
Agnus DeiThe Viennese style was sustained by Haydn, after he had ceased writing symphonies, in a series of choral masterpieces culminating in The Creation and The Seasons. Beethoven, whom Haydn had described as an atheist, showed similar leanings when he interrupted his flow of orchestral music to compose his C major Mass between his fourth and fifth symphonies. His Missa Solemnis, twice as big, likewise imposed itself on him during a period when he was struggling to produce his Symphony No 9 and his last piano sonatas. In all these works - Beethoven’s as well as Haydn’s - the music is clearly that of a composer who thought symphonically as well as religiously. But Haydn’s, more than Beethoven’s, was also the music of a composer who thought operatically, and it is the operatic aspect of Haydn’s six masses that British audiences until recently found hard to take.
For Haydn the combining of seemingly conflicting sound worlds was never a problem. Instinctively, he saw church music as something theatrical and he wrote for operatic voices. Now that we have learned to listen to these works in the way Haydn intended, the music no longer sounds disturbingly frivolous. But Beethoven’s C major Mass, from a few years later, has never sounded frivolous. Though commissioned for liturgical use by Haydn’s former employer at Esterhaz, it was clearly meant for the concert hall rather than the church. Recognising that Beethoven’s mass was less operatic than he expected, Prince Esterhazy exclaimed: "My dear Beethoven, what is this you have done now?" Beethoven felt not only offended but humiliated. The performance failed and the work languished.
Yet it was the product of a deep study of the words and meaning of the Latin Mass, which Beethoven approached from his own private standpoint – which was the standpoint, as one choral authority has asserted, of someone who, unlike Bach, was forever on the quest of reinventing God. Though inevitably overshadowed by the much grander Missa Solemnis, it is a major work in its own right and the opening of the Kyrie, rising slowly out of the bass voices of the chorus until it reaches a sonorous forte, is one of the most profound passages in all Beethoven. A parallel idea opens the Credo, where the music moves rapidly from quiet doubt to affirmative belief. And when, after the tremors of the Agnus Dei, the mass is clinched by a return to the opening of the Kyrie, the message and the structure of the music are made clear.
In this work, as the American musicologist and pianist Charles Rosen has put it, Beethoven’s "conciliation of the contradictory stylistic forces in the setting of the mass is accomplished for the first time in European music since Bach." Accomplished it certainly is. Inspected from one angle, the work is thoroughly liturgical. Inspected from another, it is thoroughly symphonic, unmistakably the product of the greatest of all symphonists. Rosen calls it – like the Missa Solemnis – ‘frankly a concert piece,’ which solves in its opening bars the problem of pacing as if it had never existed.
But Beethoven, as the greatest of symphonists, was not unaware of its existence. The original manuscript, as Rosen points out, may have had no opening tempo indication, but a later copy is marked Andante con moto and in the published version this becomes Andante con moto assai vivace quasi allegretto ma non troppo. It may not fully clarify the matter, but it shows, as in some of the last works, how meticulously the composer thought about it.
© Conrad Wilson
- conductor
- soprano
- mezzo-soprano
- tenor
- bass
- -
This week and next combine into a rich treat for Beethoven lovers. Concerto, choral and symphonic music, all written within eight years of what we know as Beethoven’s ‘Middle Period’ – his 30s and early 40s. It could have been a time of unadulterated despair as he struggled with growing deafness and ill-health; but, musically, it emerged as a time of awe-inspiring musical revolution, triumph and hope.
Langree Conducts Beethoven
- Gluck
- Beethoven
Programme note
Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827)
Symphony No 4 in B flat major, Op 60 (1806)Adagio – Allegro vivace
Adagio
Allegro vivace
Allegro ma non troppoThe rule of thumb about Beethoven’s symphonies used to be that the odd-numbered ones were masculine, assertive, dramatic, heroic; the even-numbered ones feminine, lyrical, good-tempered, humorous – and, apart from the Pastoral, slightly less popular. Though Schumann hailed the Fourth Symphony as a “slender Grecian maiden”, it was always the Cinderella of the symphonies, never quite glamorous enough to distract attention from Nos 3 and 5, yet notable for its pace and its moments of pungency. To dismiss it as inferior would be a profound mistake. It is a work whose lyricism is constantly threatened by thudding rhythms and by patches of darkness from which the music emerges into sudden sunlight.
Composed in 1806, alongside the Fifth Symphony, it begins very differently with a slow, mysterious, somewhat ominous introduction whose apparent inactivity provoked Weber’s famous jeer about a few notes spread over five minutes. Certainly this veiled, hesitant music, with its probing harmonies and softly stalking tread, must have perplexed more people than Weber among its early listeners. But suddenly, with a series of loud upward thrusts, the pulse quickens and a hammering theme, previously hinted at, is stated boldly by the full orchestra. The Allegro section, filled with perky little woodwind themes and abrupt changes of direction, is at last in action. Though the music is sometimes reduced to the merest thread of tone, an immense crescendo over a drum-roll - one of the most exciting moments in the entire symphony - signals the start of the recapitulation.
In the Adagio, the rocking rhythm heard at the outset forms the movement’s steady heartbeat, sometimes soft, sometimes loud. Much admired by Berlioz, who said it seized him with emotion, the music sings and sighs its way towards a hauntingly nocturnal theme for clarinet with a tender, decoratively muted violin accompaniment.
Swinging cross-rhythms in the third movement show the title menuetto to be a Beethovenian understatement (though Furtwangler conducted it famously slowly). The music, in fact, is a sardonic scherzo, one of Beethoven’s double ones in which the trio section - a sweet pastoral interlude in which the oboe plays a star role - innovatively comes round twice.
Although Beethoven claimed that he learnt little from his composition lessons with Haydn, he provided his Fourth Symphony with a remarkably Haydnesque finale. The main theme and its spirited successors are spun right round the orchestra in exhilaratingly perpetual motion. Even the bassoon is granted a solo spot when, at the start of the recapitulation, it delivers its own whizzing version of the main theme.
© Conrad Wilson
- Beethoven
Programme note
Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827)
Mass in C major, Op 86 (1807)Kyrie
Gloria
Credo
Sanctus
Benedictus
Agnus DeiThe Viennese style was sustained by Haydn, after he had ceased writing symphonies, in a series of choral masterpieces culminating in The Creation and The Seasons. Beethoven, whom Haydn had described as an atheist, showed similar leanings when he interrupted his flow of orchestral music to compose his C major Mass between his fourth and fifth symphonies. His Missa Solemnis, twice as big, likewise imposed itself on him during a period when he was struggling to produce his Symphony No 9 and his last piano sonatas. In all these works - Beethoven’s as well as Haydn’s - the music is clearly that of a composer who thought symphonically as well as religiously. But Haydn’s, more than Beethoven’s, was also the music of a composer who thought operatically, and it is the operatic aspect of Haydn’s six masses that British audiences until recently found hard to take.
For Haydn the combining of seemingly conflicting sound worlds was never a problem. Instinctively, he saw church music as something theatrical and he wrote for operatic voices. Now that we have learned to listen to these works in the way Haydn intended, the music no longer sounds disturbingly frivolous. But Beethoven’s C major Mass, from a few years later, has never sounded frivolous. Though commissioned for liturgical use by Haydn’s former employer at Esterhaz, it was clearly meant for the concert hall rather than the church. Recognising that Beethoven’s mass was less operatic than he expected, Prince Esterhazy exclaimed: "My dear Beethoven, what is this you have done now?" Beethoven felt not only offended but humiliated. The performance failed and the work languished.
Yet it was the product of a deep study of the words and meaning of the Latin Mass, which Beethoven approached from his own private standpoint – which was the standpoint, as one choral authority has asserted, of someone who, unlike Bach, was forever on the quest of reinventing God. Though inevitably overshadowed by the much grander Missa Solemnis, it is a major work in its own right and the opening of the Kyrie, rising slowly out of the bass voices of the chorus until it reaches a sonorous forte, is one of the most profound passages in all Beethoven. A parallel idea opens the Credo, where the music moves rapidly from quiet doubt to affirmative belief. And when, after the tremors of the Agnus Dei, the mass is clinched by a return to the opening of the Kyrie, the message and the structure of the music are made clear.
In this work, as the American musicologist and pianist Charles Rosen has put it, Beethoven’s "conciliation of the contradictory stylistic forces in the setting of the mass is accomplished for the first time in European music since Bach." Accomplished it certainly is. Inspected from one angle, the work is thoroughly liturgical. Inspected from another, it is thoroughly symphonic, unmistakably the product of the greatest of all symphonists. Rosen calls it – like the Missa Solemnis – ‘frankly a concert piece,’ which solves in its opening bars the problem of pacing as if it had never existed.
But Beethoven, as the greatest of symphonists, was not unaware of its existence. The original manuscript, as Rosen points out, may have had no opening tempo indication, but a later copy is marked Andante con moto and in the published version this becomes Andante con moto assai vivace quasi allegretto ma non troppo. It may not fully clarify the matter, but it shows, as in some of the last works, how meticulously the composer thought about it.
© Conrad Wilson
- conductor
- soprano
- mezzo-soprano
- tenor
- bass
- -
This week and next combine into a rich treat for Beethoven lovers. Concerto, choral and symphonic music, all written within eight years of what we know as Beethoven’s ‘Middle Period’ – his 30s and early 40s. It could have been a time of unadulterated despair as he struggled with growing deafness and ill-health; but, musically, it emerged as a time of awe-inspiring musical revolution, triumph and hope.
Chamber Concert
- Brahms
Programme note
Johannes Brahms 1833-1897
Sonata for clarinet and piano in F minor, Op 120, No 1 (1894)Allegro appassionato
Andante un poco adagio
Allegretto grazioso
VivaceSurrounded by death in the year 1894 - the conductor Hans von Bulow, the surgeon Theodor Billroth, and the Bach scholar Philipp Spitta were friends he lost in quick succession - Brahms in his sixties became increasingly aware that his days were numbered. His sister Elise died in 1892, as did his Viennese pupil and confidante Elisabet von Herzogenberg. Cholera claimed Tchaikovsky in 1893. But Clara Schumann, his friend (and maybe more than that) for forty years, was still alive - though not, as things turned out, for much longer. She died in April 1896, a year before Brahms himself.
With all this as their background, Brahms’ two clarinet sonatas - of which he also wrote fine alternative versions for viola, bringing a different, grainier, more shadowy tone quality to the music - wear an air of melancholy and nostalgia. Yet he was not wholly unhappy. A photograph of the period shows him posing on his birthday, with the cellist Robert Hausmann standing beside him and pretending to play the composer as if he were an enormous cello. The great clarinettist Richard Muhlfeld, also present, would be the recipient soon afterwards of the two sonatas, which he performed privately at Berchtesgarden with Brahms as pianist. But no doubt the subsequent performances at a Clara Schumann reunion in Frankfurt, ahead of their Viennese premiere in 1895, were what mattered most to the composer.
Muhlfeld, as we know, did much to revive Brahms’s dwindling inspiration in the years immediately before his demise. In 1891, Brahms had vowed to compose nothing more and had told his publisher Simrock that anything left behind in manuscript after his death was to be incinerated. Already a proficient destroyer of his own works, he had assured Simrock that he would find little with which to fulfil his request. But Brahms had reckoned without the experience of having Muhlfeld as his muse. As a result, he wrote his Clarinet Trio and the great Clarinet Quintet before producing the two sonatas in which his relationship with the instrument (and with the viola) was pared to its essence. This was music that cried out to be preserved.
Today we like to speak of the valedictory quality of these pieces. Indeed, the two sonatas, along with the Four Serious Songs, were to be his last major works. The music has a pensiveness that brings to mind Brahms’s comment about his solo piano pieces of the same period. “Even one listener,” he remarked, “is too many.”
Though marked Allegro appassionato, the first movement of the F minor Sonata is a sort of valse melancolique, a sustained, lyrical flow of melody, mostly subdued yet periodically flaring up with big piano chords in the old Brahmsian manner. The nocturnal Andante concentrates on stillness, with a musing theme, full of tender twists and turns, which haunts the entire course of the movement. Next comes a characteristic intermezzo of the gentlest sort, a sad dance evoking what sound like happier days. Then, in the finale, the music swings into F major for a cheerfully pattering rondo that only occasionally sinks back into the previous mood of Brahmsian regret.
© Conrad Wilson
- Brahms
Programme note
Johannes Brahms (1833-1897)
Four piano pieces
Intermezzo in A minor, Op 118, No 1 (1892)
Intermezzo in A major, Op 118, No 2 (1892)
Intermezzo in E-flat minor, Op 118, No 6 (1892)
Rhapsody in E-flat major, Op 119, No 4 (1892)Brahms, like Beethoven before deafness destroyed his career as a performer, was an inspired exponent of his own piano music. But although his youthful splendour as a pianist was what first attracted the attention of Robert and Clara Schumann when he dropped in on them in Dusseldorf as a 20-year-old tyro, he devoted substantial portions of his career thereafter to not writing for the piano, except in conjunction with other instruments.
His big early sonata, inaccurately numbered Opus 1, was the work he took to Schumann as a visiting card and so impressed the older composer with his playing that Schumann jotted in his diary: “Visit from Brahms, a genius.” His reference to the not yet portly newcomer as “a young eagle” confirmed his daughter Marie’s description of him as “a very young man, handsome as a picture, with long blond hair.” His arrival on the Schumann doorstep at 11am on 1 October 1853 seemed fateful enough to inspire Schumann to exclaim, characteristically but cryptically, that “this is he who should come.”
Yet Brahms’s most significant piano music came from the other end of his career and took the form of sets of short pieces, so succinct and so personal that they were like entries in some secret diary. With all his weightier works by then behind him, the music seemed a wonderful late crystallisation of all he had learned as a pianist-composer, revealing a new adventurousness that placed these pensive, harmonically unstable, often disturbing pieces on a par with Chopin’s similarly personal sets of mazurkas. His famous comment about them - “Even one listener is too many” - stresses that they were a celebration of solitude, music so private that when you hear it you feel yourself to be eavesdropping.
Of the six pieces that form Op 118, four are intermezzos - a favourite (though deliberately somewhat vague) Brahmsian term for something more likely to be slow than fast, featuring elements of ambiguity and irresolution, and containing melodies that do not always sit on top of the accompaniment but emerge eloquently from inside the texture. The first piece, typically marked “fast but not very,” does not immediately clarify what key it is in, reaching A minor by way of F major and C major, but requiring the music to be played “with much passion.”
Next, in Op 118, No 2, comes what is definitely an andante, though again there are ambiguities. Only when Brahms inverts the main theme does it fully blossom into something even more beautiful than it sounds at first. The final intermezzo, Op 118, No 6, in the six-flatted key of E-flat minor, is a further andante, profound in its melancholy. Once thought to be the intended slow movement of an unwritten symphony, it grows out of a wavery, wistful, clarinet-like theme that could have been meant for Richard Muhlfeld. Sung softly over a harplike, delicately rippling accompaniment. the music gradually intensifies before collapsing in what sounds like final despair.
The E-flat major Rhapsody, on the other hand, forms the powerful climax of the four last piano pieces, Op 119, a bold allegro risoluto showing that Brahms, when in the mood, still knew how to pound the piano, though the big blockbuster chords are sometimes pared back - this is late Brahms, after all - to reveal something more spectral.
© Conrad Wilson
- Kurtág
Programme note
Gyorgy Kurtag (b.1926)
Hommage a R. Sch., Op 15d, for clarinet, viola, and piano (1990)“The memory of Schumann is holy to me. The noble, pure artist ever endures as my ideal and I shall probably never be allowed to love a better person - and shall also, I hope, never witness the progress of such a dreadful fate from such ghastly proximity - nor have to share in enduring it.”
The words are not Kurtag’s but Brahms’. The “dreadful fate” to which he was referring was Schumann’s attempted suicide in the river Rhine in 1854 and subsequent death in a German asylum, events which between them cast their shadow over the rest of the younger composer’s life. Kurtag’s purely musical tribute came from the later vantage point of Budapest’s 1990 festival of contemporary music, for which this tiny trio was written, demanding the same instruments employed, either singly or in pairs, in the rest of this afternoon’s recital.
The nearest Brahms himself got to producing such a trio was in one of his last works, the poignant A minor masterpiece for clarinet, cello, and piano, Op 114, of which the Kurtag sounds in some ways like an oblique, disturbing, sharp-edged, sometimes savage condensation. It is music that manages to be as cryptic and fanciful as anything by Schumann himself, but is voiced in a musical language entirely Kurtag’s own. Of its five movements, the first four - each of them little more than a handful of gestures, imprints, ripples, flashes of counterpoint - evaporate almost as quickly as they begin. The fifth forms the work’s climax of unpredictability..
Not for nothing has Kurtag - the now 85-year-old Romanian-born sensation of the Edinburgh Festival’s Brian McMaster years - been hailed as a collector of fragments, which he pieces together in some of his larger works (most memorably Kurtag’s Ghosts, in whose company the Italian pianist Marino Formenti has recently toured the world) into vast and compelling streams of consciousness. In Hommage a Robert Sch, the idea is pared to its minimum until, on reaching the eloquent finale, the music suddenly expands into a five-minute adagio which, in its context, seems to gain Mahlerian proportions, with eloquent utterances for clarinet and viola rising from the darkly funereal undertones of the piano part.
© Conrad Wilson
- Brahms
Programme note
Johannes Brahms (1833-1897)
Sonata in E-flat major, Op 120, No 2 (1894)Allegro amabile - Tranquillo
Allegro appassionato - Sostenuto
Andante con moto - Allegro - Piu tranquilloThe second of Brahms’s clarinet (or viola) sonatas is linked by its opus number to the first. The one, in fact, could be called the obverse of the other, and perhaps the best way to savour the second of them is just after hearing the first. Yet more often than not they are nowadays played separately, as if one of them is enough for a single programme, or for the resourcefulness of the performers - or, indeed, the stamina of the audience. Yet if one of them is presented in its original clarinet version, and the other in its viola alternative, the two works can sit very interestingly side by side. In this way, moreover, their juxtaposition can be specially illuminating, showing that the sombreness of the F minor Sonata, No 1, finds its resolution in the warmth of the E flat major, No 2. The first movement of the latter, an allegro to which the composer added the word “amabile” (meaning “amiable” or “sweet”), certainly brims with Brahmsian tenderness. It is a seamlessly flowing sonata-form structure in which the clarinet, or viola, plays what sounds almost like a singer’s role.
Yet in the succeeding scherzo - the last scherzo he was ever to compose - Brahms proved that he could still bite. Though the pace may seem, in many performances, rather slower than a marking such as Allegro molto appassionato might suggest, the piano’s big chords, ringing out in the key of E flat minor, give this movement a dark power deliberately at odds with the rueful waltz-theme that is its other special feature. The central trio section, in bright B major, can sound even more measured, before the scherzo returns.
The absence of a true slow movement is compensated for by the finale, a set of variations that progresses unhurriedly, as if Brahms were quite aware that these were the last variations - one of his favourite musical forms - he would ever write. The music is subdued, a study in gentle colours, rising in intensity only towards the end, when at last, however briefly, it shakes off what Nietzsche once chose to describe as Brahms’s “melancholy of impotence.”
© Conrad Wilson
- piano
- clarinet
- viola
Brahms, in the autumn of his life, came close to giving up composing altogether. The love of three instruments in particular – viola, clarinet and piano – dispelled his gloom and continued to inspire him right into his last days. This concert celebrates those late works: theirs is a world of deep mellow harmonies, touching melody, sweeping musical argument spiked with bursts of pure dance and nostalgic echoes of the gypsy music that so inspired Brahms as a young man.
Emperor and Eroica
- Cherubini
- Beethoven
Programme note
Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827)
Piano Concerto No 5 in E flat major, Op 73, ‘Emperor’ (1809)Allegro
Adagio un poco mosso -
Rondo: Allegro ma non troppoBeethoven did not intend his 'Emperor' concerto to be another 'Eroica' symphony. The title was not his own, and he would have been shocked to know that that was how posterity would identify his last completed piano concerto. Yet there is no doubt that when he composed it in 1809, Napoleon was on his mind. “What a disturbing life around me: nothing but drums, cannons, soldiers, disasters of all sorts”, he scribbled in response to the occupation of Vienna by French troops, while covering his head with blankets to protect the remnants of his hearing.
In such a context, the work’s nickname seems perfectly apt. There is an imperial splendour about the orchestra’s opening chords, each of them unleashing a torrential piano solo. After this preliminary trial of strength, the orchestra proceeds to deliver the first movement’s militant main theme, succeeded by a chain of clearly defined subsidiary themes, the most important of them played by the strings in the minor, and repeated smoothly by the horns in the major.
When the piano re-enters, it is with a quiet chromatic scale, a trill, and a decorated version of the main theme. But in the course of the taut central section of the movement, the forces are pitted more strenuously against each other, sometimes exploding in a giant burst of octaves, of a sort later composers would copy. When the solo cadenza is reached, it comes with another innovation – instead of being left to the pianist’s imagination, it is a built-in feature of the music.
In contrast, nothing could be more peaceful than the hymnlike beauty of the Adagio. Apart from the dreamily descending triplets with which the soloist enters, the movement is devoted entirely to its opening melody, which on each repetition is bathed in different light but which, for all its apparent simplicity, cost Beethoven immense trouble to write. In the closing bars of the movement, the piano gropes its way towards the robust but tricky main theme of the finale, a vigorous rondo which Beethoven asked to be played “not too fast”. A jerky rhythm, prophetic of the first movement of the Seventh Symphony, plays an important role. Towards the close this is softly tapped out by the kettledrums, against gradually fading chords from the soloist. Just as the music seems about to vanish, the players rally and bring the concerto to a resounding close.
Beethoven himself never played the Emperor concerto in public. Popular theory declares that he was by then too deaf to do so; but in fact his priorities were changing. His career as a composer was what now mattered most to him, along with his determination to ensure that his works were accurately published, sometimes (as in the case of the Fourth Piano Concerto) even before they were publicly performed. The man who had been the greatest pianist of his period was now very definitely the greatest composer.
© Conrad Wilson
- Beethoven
Programme note
Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827)
Symphony No 3 in E flat, 'Eroica' (1806)Allegro con brio
Marcia funebre: Adagio assai
Scherzo – Allegro vivace
Finale – Allegro molto"I live only in my notes, and with one work barely finished, the other is already started; the way I write now I often find myself working on three, four things at the same time."
— Ludwig van Beethoven
While still writing the Second Symphony, Beethoven started on his Third, another work from that dark Heiligenstadt Testament year (though any connection to Beethoven’s personal struggle with deafness has been utterly eclipsed by the story of its dedication).
For Beethoven, this symphony was Revolutionary as well as revolutionary. The original title page simply read 'Buonaparte' at the top and 'Luigi van Beethoven' at the foot. Beethoven’s admiration for the Corsican was no secret, which must have been a little risky. After all, he lived in the heart of the Hapsburg Empire, whose dominions were deeply threatened by all that Napoleon represented. And, in spite of his 'republican' passions, he was highly dependent on the goodwill of aristocrats. This very symphony had its earliest try-out performances at a private concert in a grand ballroom of a grand palace, in the heart of reactionary Vienna.
Beethoven’s respect for Bonaparte was famously dashed when the Corsican proclaimed himself emperor. Ferdinand Ries, Beethoven’s friend, reports:
"...[Beethoven] flew into a rage and cried out: 'Is he too, then, nothing more than an ordinary human being? Now he, too, will trample on all the rights of man and indulge only his ambition. He will exalt himself above all others, become a tyrant!' "
Ries goes on to say that Beethoven then ripped the title page of this piece in two and threw it on the floor. Ries, like many of Beethoven’s friends, was apt to dramatise his recollections, but we have further evidence of Beethoven’s disappointment. Writing to the publisher Hoffmeister in 1802, he responded indignantly to a suggestion that he write a "Revolutionary" sonata:
Well, perhaps at the time of the revolutionary fever such a thing might have been possible, but now, when everything is trying to slip back into the old rut, now that Bonaparte has concluded his Concordat with the Pope – to write a sonata of that kind?
Yet Beethoven did not definitively change the symphony’s dedication until 1806, when orchestral parts were finally published. Perhaps a lingering nostalgia for what Bonaparte had once represented stayed his hand.
‘Eroica’ undoubtedly is the most apt title for the piece. It encapsulates not only the spirit of the times and Napoleonic Europe, but also the extent of Beethoven’s musical achievement. The scale and ambition of this piece set it apart from anything he (or anyone else) had previously written. The form of the classical symphony he had inherited from Haydn and Mozart is easily recognisable, but with a drama and sense of conflict that go far beyond their work. He freely embraces ugliness as well as beauty, coarseness as well as great refinement, violence as well as concord, brute force as well as masterly craftsmanship. His instrumental palate – enriched by three horns instead of the usual two – is astounding, full of martial effects and the generous use of timpani and brass. With this work, Beethoven paved the way for Romantic-era composers Schumann, Bruckner and Mahler, and redefined what 'symphony' meant.
Igor Stravinsky, of all people, was flattered to note that some listeners had drawn a parallel between the opening notes of his pivotal 20th-century work, Rite of Spring, and the ‘Eroica’. Few works in the history of music are considered more significant and revolutionary than these two.
© Svend Brown
- conductor
- piano
Hear Beethoven alongside the contemporary he most admired (Cherubini’s Requiem was sung at Beethoven’s funeral), as the great man celebrates both an emperor and a revolutionary in the same evening. Llŷr Williams’ Beethoven is not to be missed. He recently completed his first full cycle of the piano sonatas to huge acclaim, and brings immense authority but also something fascinatingly unworldly to this music.
Emperor and Eroica
- Cherubini
- Beethoven
Programme note
Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827)
Piano Concerto No 5 in E flat major, Op 73, ‘Emperor’ (1809)Allegro
Adagio un poco mosso -
Rondo: Allegro ma non troppoBeethoven did not intend his 'Emperor' concerto to be another 'Eroica' symphony. The title was not his own, and he would have been shocked to know that that was how posterity would identify his last completed piano concerto. Yet there is no doubt that when he composed it in 1809, Napoleon was on his mind. “What a disturbing life around me: nothing but drums, cannons, soldiers, disasters of all sorts”, he scribbled in response to the occupation of Vienna by French troops, while covering his head with blankets to protect the remnants of his hearing.
In such a context, the work’s nickname seems perfectly apt. There is an imperial splendour about the orchestra’s opening chords, each of them unleashing a torrential piano solo. After this preliminary trial of strength, the orchestra proceeds to deliver the first movement’s militant main theme, succeeded by a chain of clearly defined subsidiary themes, the most important of them played by the strings in the minor, and repeated smoothly by the horns in the major.
When the piano re-enters, it is with a quiet chromatic scale, a trill, and a decorated version of the main theme. But in the course of the taut central section of the movement, the forces are pitted more strenuously against each other, sometimes exploding in a giant burst of octaves, of a sort later composers would copy. When the solo cadenza is reached, it comes with another innovation – instead of being left to the pianist’s imagination, it is a built-in feature of the music.
In contrast, nothing could be more peaceful than the hymnlike beauty of the Adagio. Apart from the dreamily descending triplets with which the soloist enters, the movement is devoted entirely to its opening melody, which on each repetition is bathed in different light but which, for all its apparent simplicity, cost Beethoven immense trouble to write. In the closing bars of the movement, the piano gropes its way towards the robust but tricky main theme of the finale, a vigorous rondo which Beethoven asked to be played “not too fast”. A jerky rhythm, prophetic of the first movement of the Seventh Symphony, plays an important role. Towards the close this is softly tapped out by the kettledrums, against gradually fading chords from the soloist. Just as the music seems about to vanish, the players rally and bring the concerto to a resounding close.
Beethoven himself never played the Emperor concerto in public. Popular theory declares that he was by then too deaf to do so; but in fact his priorities were changing. His career as a composer was what now mattered most to him, along with his determination to ensure that his works were accurately published, sometimes (as in the case of the Fourth Piano Concerto) even before they were publicly performed. The man who had been the greatest pianist of his period was now very definitely the greatest composer.
© Conrad Wilson
- Beethoven
Programme note
Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827)
Symphony No 3 in E flat, 'Eroica' (1806)Allegro con brio
Marcia funebre: Adagio assai
Scherzo – Allegro vivace
Finale – Allegro molto"I live only in my notes, and with one work barely finished, the other is already started; the way I write now I often find myself working on three, four things at the same time."
— Ludwig van Beethoven
While still writing the Second Symphony, Beethoven started on his Third, another work from that dark Heiligenstadt Testament year (though any connection to Beethoven’s personal struggle with deafness has been utterly eclipsed by the story of its dedication).
For Beethoven, this symphony was Revolutionary as well as revolutionary. The original title page simply read 'Buonaparte' at the top and 'Luigi van Beethoven' at the foot. Beethoven’s admiration for the Corsican was no secret, which must have been a little risky. After all, he lived in the heart of the Hapsburg Empire, whose dominions were deeply threatened by all that Napoleon represented. And, in spite of his 'republican' passions, he was highly dependent on the goodwill of aristocrats. This very symphony had its earliest try-out performances at a private concert in a grand ballroom of a grand palace, in the heart of reactionary Vienna.
Beethoven’s respect for Bonaparte was famously dashed when the Corsican proclaimed himself emperor. Ferdinand Ries, Beethoven’s friend, reports:
"...[Beethoven] flew into a rage and cried out: 'Is he too, then, nothing more than an ordinary human being? Now he, too, will trample on all the rights of man and indulge only his ambition. He will exalt himself above all others, become a tyrant!' "
Ries goes on to say that Beethoven then ripped the title page of this piece in two and threw it on the floor. Ries, like many of Beethoven’s friends, was apt to dramatise his recollections, but we have further evidence of Beethoven’s disappointment. Writing to the publisher Hoffmeister in 1802, he responded indignantly to a suggestion that he write a "Revolutionary" sonata:
Well, perhaps at the time of the revolutionary fever such a thing might have been possible, but now, when everything is trying to slip back into the old rut, now that Bonaparte has concluded his Concordat with the Pope – to write a sonata of that kind?
Yet Beethoven did not definitively change the symphony’s dedication until 1806, when orchestral parts were finally published. Perhaps a lingering nostalgia for what Bonaparte had once represented stayed his hand.
‘Eroica’ undoubtedly is the most apt title for the piece. It encapsulates not only the spirit of the times and Napoleonic Europe, but also the extent of Beethoven’s musical achievement. The scale and ambition of this piece set it apart from anything he (or anyone else) had previously written. The form of the classical symphony he had inherited from Haydn and Mozart is easily recognisable, but with a drama and sense of conflict that go far beyond their work. He freely embraces ugliness as well as beauty, coarseness as well as great refinement, violence as well as concord, brute force as well as masterly craftsmanship. His instrumental palate – enriched by three horns instead of the usual two – is astounding, full of martial effects and the generous use of timpani and brass. With this work, Beethoven paved the way for Romantic-era composers Schumann, Bruckner and Mahler, and redefined what 'symphony' meant.
Igor Stravinsky, of all people, was flattered to note that some listeners had drawn a parallel between the opening notes of his pivotal 20th-century work, Rite of Spring, and the ‘Eroica’. Few works in the history of music are considered more significant and revolutionary than these two.
© Svend Brown
- conductor
- piano
Hear Beethoven alongside the contemporary he most admired (Cherubini’s Requiem was sung at Beethoven’s funeral), as the great man celebrates both an emperor and a revolutionary in the same evening. Llŷr Williams’ Beethoven is not to be missed. He recently completed his first full cycle of the piano sonatas to huge acclaim, and brings immense authority but also something fascinatingly unworldly to this music.
Emperor and Eroica
- Cherubini
- Beethoven
Programme note
Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827)
Piano Concerto No 5 in E flat major, Op 73, ‘Emperor’ (1809)Allegro
Adagio un poco mosso -
Rondo: Allegro ma non troppoBeethoven did not intend his 'Emperor' concerto to be another 'Eroica' symphony. The title was not his own, and he would have been shocked to know that that was how posterity would identify his last completed piano concerto. Yet there is no doubt that when he composed it in 1809, Napoleon was on his mind. “What a disturbing life around me: nothing but drums, cannons, soldiers, disasters of all sorts”, he scribbled in response to the occupation of Vienna by French troops, while covering his head with blankets to protect the remnants of his hearing.
In such a context, the work’s nickname seems perfectly apt. There is an imperial splendour about the orchestra’s opening chords, each of them unleashing a torrential piano solo. After this preliminary trial of strength, the orchestra proceeds to deliver the first movement’s militant main theme, succeeded by a chain of clearly defined subsidiary themes, the most important of them played by the strings in the minor, and repeated smoothly by the horns in the major.
When the piano re-enters, it is with a quiet chromatic scale, a trill, and a decorated version of the main theme. But in the course of the taut central section of the movement, the forces are pitted more strenuously against each other, sometimes exploding in a giant burst of octaves, of a sort later composers would copy. When the solo cadenza is reached, it comes with another innovation – instead of being left to the pianist’s imagination, it is a built-in feature of the music.
In contrast, nothing could be more peaceful than the hymnlike beauty of the Adagio. Apart from the dreamily descending triplets with which the soloist enters, the movement is devoted entirely to its opening melody, which on each repetition is bathed in different light but which, for all its apparent simplicity, cost Beethoven immense trouble to write. In the closing bars of the movement, the piano gropes its way towards the robust but tricky main theme of the finale, a vigorous rondo which Beethoven asked to be played “not too fast”. A jerky rhythm, prophetic of the first movement of the Seventh Symphony, plays an important role. Towards the close this is softly tapped out by the kettledrums, against gradually fading chords from the soloist. Just as the music seems about to vanish, the players rally and bring the concerto to a resounding close.
Beethoven himself never played the Emperor concerto in public. Popular theory declares that he was by then too deaf to do so; but in fact his priorities were changing. His career as a composer was what now mattered most to him, along with his determination to ensure that his works were accurately published, sometimes (as in the case of the Fourth Piano Concerto) even before they were publicly performed. The man who had been the greatest pianist of his period was now very definitely the greatest composer.
© Conrad Wilson
- Beethoven
Programme note
Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827)
Symphony No 3 in E flat, 'Eroica' (1806)Allegro con brio
Marcia funebre: Adagio assai
Scherzo – Allegro vivace
Finale – Allegro molto"I live only in my notes, and with one work barely finished, the other is already started; the way I write now I often find myself working on three, four things at the same time."
— Ludwig van Beethoven
While still writing the Second Symphony, Beethoven started on his Third, another work from that dark Heiligenstadt Testament year (though any connection to Beethoven’s personal struggle with deafness has been utterly eclipsed by the story of its dedication).
For Beethoven, this symphony was Revolutionary as well as revolutionary. The original title page simply read 'Buonaparte' at the top and 'Luigi van Beethoven' at the foot. Beethoven’s admiration for the Corsican was no secret, which must have been a little risky. After all, he lived in the heart of the Hapsburg Empire, whose dominions were deeply threatened by all that Napoleon represented. And, in spite of his 'republican' passions, he was highly dependent on the goodwill of aristocrats. This very symphony had its earliest try-out performances at a private concert in a grand ballroom of a grand palace, in the heart of reactionary Vienna.
Beethoven’s respect for Bonaparte was famously dashed when the Corsican proclaimed himself emperor. Ferdinand Ries, Beethoven’s friend, reports:
"...[Beethoven] flew into a rage and cried out: 'Is he too, then, nothing more than an ordinary human being? Now he, too, will trample on all the rights of man and indulge only his ambition. He will exalt himself above all others, become a tyrant!' "
Ries goes on to say that Beethoven then ripped the title page of this piece in two and threw it on the floor. Ries, like many of Beethoven’s friends, was apt to dramatise his recollections, but we have further evidence of Beethoven’s disappointment. Writing to the publisher Hoffmeister in 1802, he responded indignantly to a suggestion that he write a "Revolutionary" sonata:
Well, perhaps at the time of the revolutionary fever such a thing might have been possible, but now, when everything is trying to slip back into the old rut, now that Bonaparte has concluded his Concordat with the Pope – to write a sonata of that kind?
Yet Beethoven did not definitively change the symphony’s dedication until 1806, when orchestral parts were finally published. Perhaps a lingering nostalgia for what Bonaparte had once represented stayed his hand.
‘Eroica’ undoubtedly is the most apt title for the piece. It encapsulates not only the spirit of the times and Napoleonic Europe, but also the extent of Beethoven’s musical achievement. The scale and ambition of this piece set it apart from anything he (or anyone else) had previously written. The form of the classical symphony he had inherited from Haydn and Mozart is easily recognisable, but with a drama and sense of conflict that go far beyond their work. He freely embraces ugliness as well as beauty, coarseness as well as great refinement, violence as well as concord, brute force as well as masterly craftsmanship. His instrumental palate – enriched by three horns instead of the usual two – is astounding, full of martial effects and the generous use of timpani and brass. With this work, Beethoven paved the way for Romantic-era composers Schumann, Bruckner and Mahler, and redefined what 'symphony' meant.
Igor Stravinsky, of all people, was flattered to note that some listeners had drawn a parallel between the opening notes of his pivotal 20th-century work, Rite of Spring, and the ‘Eroica’. Few works in the history of music are considered more significant and revolutionary than these two.
© Svend Brown
- conductor
- piano
Hear Beethoven alongside the contemporary he most admired (Cherubini’s Requiem was sung at Beethoven’s funeral), as the great man celebrates both an emperor and a revolutionary in the same evening. Llŷr Williams’ Beethoven is not to be missed. He recently completed his first full cycle of the piano sonatas to huge acclaim, and brings immense authority but also something fascinatingly unworldly to this music.
Serenade (St Andrews)
- Berlioz
Programme note
Hector Berlioz (1803-1869)
Love Scene, Romeo and Juliet (1839)Berlioz, having won the Prix de Rome and now en route to his year at the Villa Medici, paused in Florence in 1831 to see Bellini’s new opera on the subject of Romeo and Juliet at the historic Teatro Pergola. He disliked it intensely. As he remarked caustically in his memoirs: “...in the libretto, no ball at the Capulets, no trace of Mercutio, no garrulous nurse, no grave and tranquil hermit, no balcony scene, no sublime soliloquy for Juliet as she takes the hermit’s phial, no duet in the cell between the banished Romeo and the disconsolate friar, no Shakespeare, nothing - a botched piece of work, mangled, disfigured, arranged. And in the music, where was the double chorus of Montagues and Capulets, where the passion of the two lovers, the great orchestral outbursts, the vivid instrumental patterns, the new and searching melodies, the bold progressions lending colour to the scene, the unexpected modulations? Where was the musical drama, the dramatic music, that such poetry should give birth to?”
Eight years later, back in France, Berlioz rectified Bellini’s worst omissions by completing his own Romeo and Juliet, which was not an opera, nor even an opera in disguise, but a “dramatic symphony,” the third of four such works he composed, all of them fascinating, none of them conventional. The first was the Symphonie Fantastique, with which Robin Ticciati and the SCO launched their current Scottish season. Paganini commissioned the second (Harold in Italy) with a major part for solo viola which the celebrated virtuoso deemed too slight to be worth performing. But he later regretted his hasty decision, and his subsidy of 20,000 francs gave Berlioz the freedom to embark on his third symphony, Romeo and Juliet, the longest and structurally most complex of the four works, the last of which was the Grande Symphonie Funebre et Triomphale for military band with strings and chorus, dating from 1840.
In a full performance, Berlioz’s Romeo and Juliet requires not only an orchestra but three solo singers (none of them, however, portraying Romeo or Juliet) plus a double chorus and semi-chorus - an array of forces that must have been one of the reasons why, at least to begin with, the work as an entity was heard less often than it deserved. Orchestral fragments (the portrait of Romeo alone, the grand feast of the Capulets, the filigree Queen Mab scherzo) were considered quite sufficient, though even the exquisite love scene, lasting about eighteen minutes, was feared to be too long for frequent performance. As recently as the nineteen-fifties the complete score was still a great rarity and an outdoor account of it in the Cour Carre of the Louvre, heard by the writer of this programme-note as a schoolboy, served (despite the performance’s memorable ineptitude) as an indelible introduction to a masterpiece which, as the years pass, has come to seem greater and greater.
Berlioz himself regarded it, he said, as the equivalent of his beloved Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony - and not merely because it ended with a choral finale. But only one of the two works has an actual story to tell, and the way Berlioz tells it is what makes his Romeo and Juliet the masterpiece it is. Even in excerpt form, thanks to the composer’s use of the orchestra as an expressive commentator on the drama, the music rivets attention.
The love scene, third of the work’s seven movements, forms the heart of the matter, a rapt, haunting, extended adagio in which the orchestra conveys all the warmth, perfume, and hush of the Verona night. The music, more a meditation than a dialogue, is Berlioz’s masterly response to Shakespeare’s balcony scene, a profound confirmation of his belief that instrumental language was “richer, more varied, less restricted” - and certainly more potent - than any operatic love duet. Indeed, in the complete score, Berlioz relies on the voices, like the orchestra, to provide a commentary on the action.
The music starts atmospherically with an evocation of the distant voices of the Capulets leaving the ball. Thereafter the focus is entirely on the young lovers, Romeo via the sound of horn and cellos, Juliet via the strains of flute and cor anglais. The strands of theme sway softly in A major, growing sometimes more palpitating, returning at other times to a state of loving tranquillity. The music gleams and shimmers as magically as only Berlioz’s music can. Wagner, to his credit, adored Berlioz’s Romeo and Juliet, calling it the revelation of a new world of music, to which he replied quarter of a century later with Tristan and Isolde.
© Conrad Wilson
- Schumann
Programme note
Robert Schumann (1810-1856)
Cello Concerto in A minor, Op 129 (1850)Nicht zu schnell (not too fast)
Langsam (slow)
Sehr lebhaft (very lively)Schumann, it used to be said, composed only one great concerto – the masterpiece for piano and orchestra in A minor – of which the two subsequent works were pale shadows. The Cello Concerto, being in the same key, easily laid itself open to this sort of criticism, and the Violin Concerto in D minor fell into the sad musicological category known as "not worth performing."
Yet it is the Cello Concerto’s links with the Piano Concerto that make it such a fascinating follow-up. No less lyrical than its predecessor, it is no less resourceful in its employment of thematic integration. The continuity of its three movements – the entire work is designed to be played without a break – may have been an idea already employed by Mendelssohn, but Schumann gives it added coherence through his cyclic use of the main theme. Moreover, and not unimportantly, it was the first cello concerto to have been written by a major composer in more than half a century.
Why, then, has one of Schumann’s most established British biographers dismissed this concerto as "lacking real driving power"? The desire to give the solo instrument space to flower can admittedly make the music sound directionless, but only if the performers fail to resolve the resultant tempo problems. Impatiently speeding through the purely orchestral passages can too easily sound like escaping from a traffic jam.
Yet a degree of contrast between orchestral vitality and soloistic reflection does form part of the work's natural structure, as also of Schumann's own split musical personality, represented by the (extrovert) Florestan and (introvert) Eusebius characterisations he employed in so much of his music. In this respect, however, another of the work's problems could seem to lie in its date of composition, 1850 being supposedly one of the less happy turning points in Schumann's life, signifying waning genius if not yet the plunge into mental collapse which followed a few years later.
Nor did Schumann’s own modest description of the work as really "a Concertstuck [Concert Piece] for cello with orchestral accompaniment" do the music any favours. It merely prompted listeners to assume that it was something less than a concerto, and that the cello part was all that counted. In fact the three opening chords for woodwind and pizzicato strings are no less important than the cello’s wide-spanning theme which follows. They certainly pervade the tender slow movement, which may seem little more than an extended bridge passage – though being by Schumann a typically poetic one, calling for a second solo cello – between the first movement and finale.
The lead-in to the latter is a passionate, recitative-like version of the first movement’s opening cello theme, and the finale itself is structurally remarkable for its inclusion of a delayed cadenza, performed in tempo and accompanied by the orchestra as introduction to the coda. It was an idea which Elgar would later use with profit near the end of his Violin Concerto.
Despite Clara Schumann's enthusiasm for the music (“it seems to me to be written in true cello style”) the work did not receive its first performance, by an undistinguished soloist, until 1860, four years after the composer's death. But its important position in Schumann’s output has at last been recognised. In the repertoire of cello concertos, it is a major work.
© Conrad Wilson
- Brahms
Programme note
Johannes Brahms (1833-1897)
Serenade No 1 in D major, Op 11 (1858)Allegro molto
Scherzo: Allegro non troppo
Adagio non troppo
Menuet I & II
Scherzo: Allegro
Rondo: AllegroYoung Brahms originally intended the first of his two orchestral serenades to be a nonet for wind and strings in the vein of Beethoven’s Septet or Schubert’s Octet - which may explain why, even in its more symphonic final version, its fourth and fifth movements seem to retain their chamber music affinities, with prominent, often pungent, wind parts.
Yet the effect of the work can also seem curiously suggestive of a Mahler symphony, or at least the sort of symphony Mahler might have written if he had been a 25-year-old genius living in Detmold in the year 1858. The bucolic drone of its opening bars provides a foretaste of the start of Mahler’s Symphony No 1 (in the same key), and the jovial horn theme has a distinctively Mahlerish stamp. Pastoral the serenade certainly is. No other big-scale work by Brahms, other than the Second Symphony in the same key, speaks quite so refreshingly of the open air. Why he eventually chose to inflate such intimate music into an orchestral work was perhaps typical of the uncertainty from which he persistently suffered. His Piano Concerto No 1, completed in the same year, had begun as a symphony before being transformed into the work we know. But the serenade, so long as it is played by a chamber orchestra rather than something weightier, retains much of its original lightness of touch, while gaining the extra richness of string tone that justified Brahms’s revision.
What gives the work its considerable length is not only its quantity of movements but also the large-scale symphonic processes required by the first movement, slow movement, and finale, as well as the sheer size of some of the themes. In contrast, the second movement, a shadowy minor-key scherzo prophetic of the equivalent movement in the Second Piano Concerto, is more concise, as are the pair of tiny, comical minuets and the second scherzo, clearly a joke inspired by Beethoven, and all the better for coming from a composer as supposedly serious as Brahms.
The larger movements, on the other hand, give the work the Brahmsian ballast it needs. The way the introductory drone bass keeps harmonically shifting ground as the horn theme moves towards the movement's first climax defines not only the symphonic scale of the music but also its al fresco serenade-like nature. The shape of the themes, their way of melting from four beats to three beats in the bar, is unmistakably Brahmsian, even at this early stage in his career.
But if the first movement is large, the adagio, with its gently rocking rhythm, is even larger. It is laid out in grandly unshortened sonata-form, with a rich array of themes, a full-scale development section, recapitulation and coda, as if it were a symphonic first movement played in slow motion.
Sir Donald Tovey, Edinburgh’s distinguished musical essayist, famously devoted one and a half pages of a programme note to this adagio, claiming in the process that the music owed much of its quality of tone to the brook in Beethoven’s Pastoral symphony, which here "flows into a wide river, passing through a remote key into a peaceful lake."
The rondo finale, though considerably shorter, is nevertheless far from perfunctory. The remarkable length of the springy main theme and its rollicking offshoots immediately suggests that the music will last just as long as it needs to, and so it does. The coda, said Tovey, is "triumphant," though to call it radiant and exhilarating might be even more apt.
© Conrad Wilson
- conductor
- cello
On the eve of its departure for a major tour of Germany, the SCO is joined by the prodigious cellist, Andreas Brantelid, for Schumann’s autumnal concerto. This is an evening of music by his friends – Berlioz and Brahms are as different in their music and personalities as it is possible to be, but both enjoyed Schumann’s deepest affection and respect. Brahms’ youthful serenade makes a delightful complement to Berlioz’s impassioned outpouring.
Serenade
- Berlioz
Programme note
Hector Berlioz (1803-1869)
Love Scene, Romeo and Juliet (1839)Berlioz, having won the Prix de Rome and now en route to his year at the Villa Medici, paused in Florence in 1831 to see Bellini’s new opera on the subject of Romeo and Juliet at the historic Teatro Pergola. He disliked it intensely. As he remarked caustically in his memoirs: “...in the libretto, no ball at the Capulets, no trace of Mercutio, no garrulous nurse, no grave and tranquil hermit, no balcony scene, no sublime soliloquy for Juliet as she takes the hermit’s phial, no duet in the cell between the banished Romeo and the disconsolate friar, no Shakespeare, nothing - a botched piece of work, mangled, disfigured, arranged. And in the music, where was the double chorus of Montagues and Capulets, where the passion of the two lovers, the great orchestral outbursts, the vivid instrumental patterns, the new and searching melodies, the bold progressions lending colour to the scene, the unexpected modulations? Where was the musical drama, the dramatic music, that such poetry should give birth to?”
Eight years later, back in France, Berlioz rectified Bellini’s worst omissions by completing his own Romeo and Juliet, which was not an opera, nor even an opera in disguise, but a “dramatic symphony,” the third of four such works he composed, all of them fascinating, none of them conventional. The first was the Symphonie Fantastique, with which Robin Ticciati and the SCO launched their current Scottish season. Paganini commissioned the second (Harold in Italy) with a major part for solo viola which the celebrated virtuoso deemed too slight to be worth performing. But he later regretted his hasty decision, and his subsidy of 20,000 francs gave Berlioz the freedom to embark on his third symphony, Romeo and Juliet, the longest and structurally most complex of the four works, the last of which was the Grande Symphonie Funebre et Triomphale for military band with strings and chorus, dating from 1840.
In a full performance, Berlioz’s Romeo and Juliet requires not only an orchestra but three solo singers (none of them, however, portraying Romeo or Juliet) plus a double chorus and semi-chorus - an array of forces that must have been one of the reasons why, at least to begin with, the work as an entity was heard less often than it deserved. Orchestral fragments (the portrait of Romeo alone, the grand feast of the Capulets, the filigree Queen Mab scherzo) were considered quite sufficient, though even the exquisite love scene, lasting about eighteen minutes, was feared to be too long for frequent performance. As recently as the nineteen-fifties the complete score was still a great rarity and an outdoor account of it in the Cour Carre of the Louvre, heard by the writer of this programme-note as a schoolboy, served (despite the performance’s memorable ineptitude) as an indelible introduction to a masterpiece which, as the years pass, has come to seem greater and greater.
Berlioz himself regarded it, he said, as the equivalent of his beloved Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony - and not merely because it ended with a choral finale. But only one of the two works has an actual story to tell, and the way Berlioz tells it is what makes his Romeo and Juliet the masterpiece it is. Even in excerpt form, thanks to the composer’s use of the orchestra as an expressive commentator on the drama, the music rivets attention.
The love scene, third of the work’s seven movements, forms the heart of the matter, a rapt, haunting, extended adagio in which the orchestra conveys all the warmth, perfume, and hush of the Verona night. The music, more a meditation than a dialogue, is Berlioz’s masterly response to Shakespeare’s balcony scene, a profound confirmation of his belief that instrumental language was “richer, more varied, less restricted” - and certainly more potent - than any operatic love duet. Indeed, in the complete score, Berlioz relies on the voices, like the orchestra, to provide a commentary on the action.
The music starts atmospherically with an evocation of the distant voices of the Capulets leaving the ball. Thereafter the focus is entirely on the young lovers, Romeo via the sound of horn and cellos, Juliet via the strains of flute and cor anglais. The strands of theme sway softly in A major, growing sometimes more palpitating, returning at other times to a state of loving tranquillity. The music gleams and shimmers as magically as only Berlioz’s music can. Wagner, to his credit, adored Berlioz’s Romeo and Juliet, calling it the revelation of a new world of music, to which he replied quarter of a century later with Tristan and Isolde.
© Conrad Wilson
- Beethoven
Programme note
Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827)
Piano Concerto No 1 in C major, Op 15 (1795)Allegro con brio
Largo
Rondo: Allegro scherzandoThe image of Beethoven purveyed by a famously irreverent portrait is that of a deaf, irascible recluse, surrounded by squalor, hammering at a piano with a spilt inkwell on the lid and a chamber pot on the floor. But when he wrote his first two piano concertos he was not like that at all. He had arrived in Vienna as an ambitious young provincial composer, already winning fame as a pianist and improviser, potentially the best in Europe.
Yet the pianos on which he performed in 1795 were limited in their resources, and his first two concertos – which were published in reverse order, tonight’s really being the second – should be heard in that context. Nevertheless the instruments had a classical charm that breathed through his frequently impatient music. They were light in tone, with fragile strings and leather-covered hammers, resulting in quick, clear, sparkling articulation.
Listening to the C major concerto, we should keep these facts in mind. This is not the 'Emperor' concerto, because Beethoven could not have written that music at that time. But we can still hear it as the work of a wilful virtuoso who knew how to shock. The opening is a deliberate tease, a soft ear-tickling march that is soon explosively repeated. Marching rhythms, emphasised by trumpets and drums in what the musical essayist Donald Francis Tovey called Beethoven’s “best British Grenadiers style”, are a feature of the music, but the second theme is more flowing, and when the soloist finally enters it is with a graceful little theme that is heard once and once only. This, too, is a tease, though the first movement generally follows the classical concerto design of a double exposition (one for orchestra, the other involving the soloist), an exploratory middle section, and a recapitulation culminating in the soloist’s cadenza (Beethoven offered a choice of three) followed by a coda.
The Adagio, specially geared for the famous legato tone of Beethoven’s playing, is a kind of operatic aria in the warm key of A-flat, romantic and spiritual in a manner then typical of the composer, with a special role for a clarinet as second soloist – a pioneering development in the context of a classical concerto.
The Rondo finale likewise has its Beethovenian fingerprints, the most notable being the aggressively pounding humour of the main theme and the sheer gusto with which every idea is propelled. In one episode, famous for its swinging offbeat rhythm, the voice of the one-time Hollywood star, Carmen Miranda, singing “Tico, Tico” has been identified by a distinguished Beethoven authority. Once you spot the connection you will never forget it. The ending is Beethoven’s final tease. The piano starts a slow fade, horns and oboes chorus a fond farewell, and the orchestra hammers home its final message.
© Conrad Wilson
- Brahms
Programme note
Johannes Brahms (1833-1897)
Serenade No 1 in D major, Op 11 (1858)Allegro molto
Scherzo: Allegro non troppo
Adagio non troppo
Menuet I & II
Scherzo: Allegro
Rondo: AllegroYoung Brahms originally intended the first of his two orchestral serenades to be a nonet for wind and strings in the vein of Beethoven’s Septet or Schubert’s Octet - which may explain why, even in its more symphonic final version, its fourth and fifth movements seem to retain their chamber music affinities, with prominent, often pungent, wind parts.
Yet the effect of the work can also seem curiously suggestive of a Mahler symphony, or at least the sort of symphony Mahler might have written if he had been a 25-year-old genius living in Detmold in the year 1858. The bucolic drone of its opening bars provides a foretaste of the start of Mahler’s Symphony No 1 (in the same key), and the jovial horn theme has a distinctively Mahlerish stamp. Pastoral the serenade certainly is. No other big-scale work by Brahms, other than the Second Symphony in the same key, speaks quite so refreshingly of the open air. Why he eventually chose to inflate such intimate music into an orchestral work was perhaps typical of the uncertainty from which he persistently suffered. His Piano Concerto No 1, completed in the same year, had begun as a symphony before being transformed into the work we know. But the serenade, so long as it is played by a chamber orchestra rather than something weightier, retains much of its original lightness of touch, while gaining the extra richness of string tone that justified Brahms’s revision.
What gives the work its considerable length is not only its quantity of movements but also the large-scale symphonic processes required by the first movement, slow movement, and finale, as well as the sheer size of some of the themes. In contrast, the second movement, a shadowy minor-key scherzo prophetic of the equivalent movement in the Second Piano Concerto, is more concise, as are the pair of tiny, comical minuets and the second scherzo, clearly a joke inspired by Beethoven, and all the better for coming from a composer as supposedly serious as Brahms.
The larger movements, on the other hand, give the work the Brahmsian ballast it needs. The way the introductory drone bass keeps harmonically shifting ground as the horn theme moves towards the movement's first climax defines not only the symphonic scale of the music but also its al fresco serenade-like nature. The shape of the themes, their way of melting from four beats to three beats in the bar, is unmistakably Brahmsian, even at this early stage in his career.
But if the first movement is large, the adagio, with its gently rocking rhythm, is even larger. It is laid out in grandly unshortened sonata-form, with a rich array of themes, a full-scale development section, recapitulation and coda, as if it were a symphonic first movement played in slow motion.
Sir Donald Tovey, Edinburgh’s distinguished musical essayist, famously devoted one and a half pages of a programme note to this adagio, claiming in the process that the music owed much of its quality of tone to the brook in Beethoven’s Pastoral symphony, which here "flows into a wide river, passing through a remote key into a peaceful lake."
The rondo finale, though considerably shorter, is nevertheless far from perfunctory. The remarkable length of the springy main theme and its rollicking offshoots immediately suggests that the music will last just as long as it needs to, and so it does. The coda, said Tovey, is "triumphant," though to call it radiant and exhilarating might be even more apt.
© Conrad Wilson
- conductor
- piano
On the eve of its departure for a major tour of Germany, the SCO is joined by the prodigious Lars Vogt, very much in his home territory with Beethoven’s concerto. Berlioz and Brahms are as different in their music and personalities as it is possible to be, but they shared a complicated admiration for Beethoven. Brahms’ youthful serenade makes a delightful complement to Berlioz’s impassioned outpouring.
Serenade
- Berlioz
Programme note
Hector Berlioz (1803-1869)
Love Scene, Romeo and Juliet (1839)Berlioz, having won the Prix de Rome and now en route to his year at the Villa Medici, paused in Florence in 1831 to see Bellini’s new opera on the subject of Romeo and Juliet at the historic Teatro Pergola. He disliked it intensely. As he remarked caustically in his memoirs: “...in the libretto, no ball at the Capulets, no trace of Mercutio, no garrulous nurse, no grave and tranquil hermit, no balcony scene, no sublime soliloquy for Juliet as she takes the hermit’s phial, no duet in the cell between the banished Romeo and the disconsolate friar, no Shakespeare, nothing - a botched piece of work, mangled, disfigured, arranged. And in the music, where was the double chorus of Montagues and Capulets, where the passion of the two lovers, the great orchestral outbursts, the vivid instrumental patterns, the new and searching melodies, the bold progressions lending colour to the scene, the unexpected modulations? Where was the musical drama, the dramatic music, that such poetry should give birth to?”
Eight years later, back in France, Berlioz rectified Bellini’s worst omissions by completing his own Romeo and Juliet, which was not an opera, nor even an opera in disguise, but a “dramatic symphony,” the third of four such works he composed, all of them fascinating, none of them conventional. The first was the Symphonie Fantastique, with which Robin Ticciati and the SCO launched their current Scottish season. Paganini commissioned the second (Harold in Italy) with a major part for solo viola which the celebrated virtuoso deemed too slight to be worth performing. But he later regretted his hasty decision, and his subsidy of 20,000 francs gave Berlioz the freedom to embark on his third symphony, Romeo and Juliet, the longest and structurally most complex of the four works, the last of which was the Grande Symphonie Funebre et Triomphale for military band with strings and chorus, dating from 1840.
In a full performance, Berlioz’s Romeo and Juliet requires not only an orchestra but three solo singers (none of them, however, portraying Romeo or Juliet) plus a double chorus and semi-chorus - an array of forces that must have been one of the reasons why, at least to begin with, the work as an entity was heard less often than it deserved. Orchestral fragments (the portrait of Romeo alone, the grand feast of the Capulets, the filigree Queen Mab scherzo) were considered quite sufficient, though even the exquisite love scene, lasting about eighteen minutes, was feared to be too long for frequent performance. As recently as the nineteen-fifties the complete score was still a great rarity and an outdoor account of it in the Cour Carre of the Louvre, heard by the writer of this programme-note as a schoolboy, served (despite the performance’s memorable ineptitude) as an indelible introduction to a masterpiece which, as the years pass, has come to seem greater and greater.
Berlioz himself regarded it, he said, as the equivalent of his beloved Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony - and not merely because it ended with a choral finale. But only one of the two works has an actual story to tell, and the way Berlioz tells it is what makes his Romeo and Juliet the masterpiece it is. Even in excerpt form, thanks to the composer’s use of the orchestra as an expressive commentator on the drama, the music rivets attention.
The love scene, third of the work’s seven movements, forms the heart of the matter, a rapt, haunting, extended adagio in which the orchestra conveys all the warmth, perfume, and hush of the Verona night. The music, more a meditation than a dialogue, is Berlioz’s masterly response to Shakespeare’s balcony scene, a profound confirmation of his belief that instrumental language was “richer, more varied, less restricted” - and certainly more potent - than any operatic love duet. Indeed, in the complete score, Berlioz relies on the voices, like the orchestra, to provide a commentary on the action.
The music starts atmospherically with an evocation of the distant voices of the Capulets leaving the ball. Thereafter the focus is entirely on the young lovers, Romeo via the sound of horn and cellos, Juliet via the strains of flute and cor anglais. The strands of theme sway softly in A major, growing sometimes more palpitating, returning at other times to a state of loving tranquillity. The music gleams and shimmers as magically as only Berlioz’s music can. Wagner, to his credit, adored Berlioz’s Romeo and Juliet, calling it the revelation of a new world of music, to which he replied quarter of a century later with Tristan and Isolde.
© Conrad Wilson
- Beethoven
Programme note
Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827)
Piano Concerto No 1 in C major, Op 15 (1795)Allegro con brio
Largo
Rondo: Allegro scherzandoThe image of Beethoven purveyed by a famously irreverent portrait is that of a deaf, irascible recluse, surrounded by squalor, hammering at a piano with a spilt inkwell on the lid and a chamber pot on the floor. But when he wrote his first two piano concertos he was not like that at all. He had arrived in Vienna as an ambitious young provincial composer, already winning fame as a pianist and improviser, potentially the best in Europe.
Yet the pianos on which he performed in 1795 were limited in their resources, and his first two concertos – which were published in reverse order, tonight’s really being the second – should be heard in that context. Nevertheless the instruments had a classical charm that breathed through his frequently impatient music. They were light in tone, with fragile strings and leather-covered hammers, resulting in quick, clear, sparkling articulation.
Listening to the C major concerto, we should keep these facts in mind. This is not the 'Emperor' concerto, because Beethoven could not have written that music at that time. But we can still hear it as the work of a wilful virtuoso who knew how to shock. The opening is a deliberate tease, a soft ear-tickling march that is soon explosively repeated. Marching rhythms, emphasised by trumpets and drums in what the musical essayist Donald Francis Tovey called Beethoven’s “best British Grenadiers style”, are a feature of the music, but the second theme is more flowing, and when the soloist finally enters it is with a graceful little theme that is heard once and once only. This, too, is a tease, though the first movement generally follows the classical concerto design of a double exposition (one for orchestra, the other involving the soloist), an exploratory middle section, and a recapitulation culminating in the soloist’s cadenza (Beethoven offered a choice of three) followed by a coda.
The Adagio, specially geared for the famous legato tone of Beethoven’s playing, is a kind of operatic aria in the warm key of A-flat, romantic and spiritual in a manner then typical of the composer, with a special role for a clarinet as second soloist – a pioneering development in the context of a classical concerto.
The Rondo finale likewise has its Beethovenian fingerprints, the most notable being the aggressively pounding humour of the main theme and the sheer gusto with which every idea is propelled. In one episode, famous for its swinging offbeat rhythm, the voice of the one-time Hollywood star, Carmen Miranda, singing “Tico, Tico” has been identified by a distinguished Beethoven authority. Once you spot the connection you will never forget it. The ending is Beethoven’s final tease. The piano starts a slow fade, horns and oboes chorus a fond farewell, and the orchestra hammers home its final message.
© Conrad Wilson
- Brahms
Programme note
Johannes Brahms (1833-1897)
Serenade No 1 in D major, Op 11 (1858)Allegro molto
Scherzo: Allegro non troppo
Adagio non troppo
Menuet I & II
Scherzo: Allegro
Rondo: AllegroYoung Brahms originally intended the first of his two orchestral serenades to be a nonet for wind and strings in the vein of Beethoven’s Septet or Schubert’s Octet - which may explain why, even in its more symphonic final version, its fourth and fifth movements seem to retain their chamber music affinities, with prominent, often pungent, wind parts.
Yet the effect of the work can also seem curiously suggestive of a Mahler symphony, or at least the sort of symphony Mahler might have written if he had been a 25-year-old genius living in Detmold in the year 1858. The bucolic drone of its opening bars provides a foretaste of the start of Mahler’s Symphony No 1 (in the same key), and the jovial horn theme has a distinctively Mahlerish stamp. Pastoral the serenade certainly is. No other big-scale work by Brahms, other than the Second Symphony in the same key, speaks quite so refreshingly of the open air. Why he eventually chose to inflate such intimate music into an orchestral work was perhaps typical of the uncertainty from which he persistently suffered. His Piano Concerto No 1, completed in the same year, had begun as a symphony before being transformed into the work we know. But the serenade, so long as it is played by a chamber orchestra rather than something weightier, retains much of its original lightness of touch, while gaining the extra richness of string tone that justified Brahms’s revision.
What gives the work its considerable length is not only its quantity of movements but also the large-scale symphonic processes required by the first movement, slow movement, and finale, as well as the sheer size of some of the themes. In contrast, the second movement, a shadowy minor-key scherzo prophetic of the equivalent movement in the Second Piano Concerto, is more concise, as are the pair of tiny, comical minuets and the second scherzo, clearly a joke inspired by Beethoven, and all the better for coming from a composer as supposedly serious as Brahms.
The larger movements, on the other hand, give the work the Brahmsian ballast it needs. The way the introductory drone bass keeps harmonically shifting ground as the horn theme moves towards the movement's first climax defines not only the symphonic scale of the music but also its al fresco serenade-like nature. The shape of the themes, their way of melting from four beats to three beats in the bar, is unmistakably Brahmsian, even at this early stage in his career.
But if the first movement is large, the adagio, with its gently rocking rhythm, is even larger. It is laid out in grandly unshortened sonata-form, with a rich array of themes, a full-scale development section, recapitulation and coda, as if it were a symphonic first movement played in slow motion.
Sir Donald Tovey, Edinburgh’s distinguished musical essayist, famously devoted one and a half pages of a programme note to this adagio, claiming in the process that the music owed much of its quality of tone to the brook in Beethoven’s Pastoral symphony, which here "flows into a wide river, passing through a remote key into a peaceful lake."
The rondo finale, though considerably shorter, is nevertheless far from perfunctory. The remarkable length of the springy main theme and its rollicking offshoots immediately suggests that the music will last just as long as it needs to, and so it does. The coda, said Tovey, is "triumphant," though to call it radiant and exhilarating might be even more apt.
© Conrad Wilson
- conductor
- piano
On the eve of its departure for a major tour of Germany, the SCO is joined by the prodigious Lars Vogt, very much in his home territory with Beethoven’s concerto. Berlioz and Brahms are as different in their music and personalities as it is possible to be, but they shared a complicated admiration for Beethoven. Brahms’ youthful
serenade makes a delightful complement to Berlioz’s impassioned outpouring.
CL@SIX: A Lark Ascending
- Mendelssohn
Programme note
Felix Mendelssohn (1809-1847)
Overture, Son and Stranger (1829)The Hebrides, A Calm Sea and Prosperous Voyage were the works with which Mendelssohn developed the art of the concert overture, transforming it, in each case, into a seascape of infinite beauty and atmosphere. In his earlier Son and Stranger overture, written when he was twenty, he was content to be spiritedly precocious, though no longer quite so startlingly precocious as he had been as the young composer of the Octet for strings, in which he had declared his genius at the age of sixteen, prompting the pianist Charles Rosen in our own day to call him “the greatest child prodigy the history of Western music has ever known”.
Son and Stranger is not a concert overture. Also known as The Rover’s Return and, more accurately, as Die Heimkehr aus der Fremde (The Return from Abroad), it is that rare thing in Mendelssohn’s output an actual operatic overture, designed for a family singspiel celebrating his parents’ silver wedding anniversary on Boxing Day 1829, with roles for his sisters Fanny and Rebekka and an audience of 120 people. Though Mendelssohn never intended the work to be publicly performed, his critic friend Henry Chorley later edited the score and found a market for it in English translation after the composer’s death.
The story, of a travelling pedlar who disguises himself as the son of a local magistrate returning home after six years, is slight. But the music, little more than a series of songs, is charming enough to have won the work occasional performances in England, Germany, and recently America. The overture, crafted with fine Mendelssohnian polish, consists of a slow introduction in pastoral vein followed by a spirited allegro. The slow introduction briefly returns at the end. No tunes from the operetta itself are incorporated.
© Conrad Wilson
- Vaughan Williams
Programme note
Ralph Vaughan Williams (1872-1958)
Romance for violin and orchestra, The Lark Ascending (1914-21)Vaughan Williams, among other things, was the voice of English musical pastoralism. Or, to put it in a different though not dissimilar way, he was the sound of an oboe with muted strings in the background. The latter description, coming from a distinguished Vaughan Williams authority, is apt, even if the loveliest of all his pastoral pieces - the one in which the rustic side of his personality reached its moment of high sublimity - replaces the oboe with a violin and the muted strings with a wider range of instruments. Yet if you happen to believe that a lark was also in the mind of Joseph Haydn when he composed the first movement of his Lark Quartet in 1790, then it is clear that he, too, thought of the songbird in soaringly violinistic terms.
For all its sweetness of utterance, Vaughan Williams’s little Romance, as he called it, took six years to reach its perfected form. With a poem by George Meredith (1828-1909) as its inspiration, it was sketched first as a duet for violin and piano in 1914, the year of the outbreak of the First World War. After serving in an ambulance unit of the Royal Army Medical Corps, the composer rewrote it for violin and small orchestra, in which form it was dedicated to the English violinist Marie Hall and first played by her in 1921. Two flutes, one obligatory oboe, two clarinets, two bassoons, two horns, triangle, and strings, muted or otherwise, now supplied the exquisite tapestry of its background.
Whatever people today think of Meredith’s words - the titles of two of his novels, The Egoist and The Ordeal of Richard Feverel, perhaps say more than his poetry - Vaughan Williams transcended them with music of the most hauntingly evocative sort. The poem on its own, weighed down by rhyming couplets, is admittedly a problem. It starts as follows: “He rises and begins to round/He drops the silver chain of sound/Of many links without a break/In chirrup, whistle, slur and shake.” And it closes: “Till lost on his aerial rings/In light, and then the fancy sings.”
Vaughan Williams’ opening bars, and the way they rise into the main theme, are a miracle of airy succinctness which makes Meredith seem earthbound in comparison. The chiming triangle, the singing woodwind, and above all the constantly rhapsodic spiralling of the solo line all contribute to a musical idyll in which words seem irrelevant.
© Conrad Wilson
- Schubert
Programme note
Franz Schubert (1797-1828)
Symphony No 5 in B-flat major, D485 (1816)Allegro
Andante con moto
Menuetto: Allegro molto
Allegro vivaceSchubert’s Fifth is not like Beethoven’s Fifth. Though written in the same city, it takes the progress of the Viennese symphony backwards rather than forwards, but does it so entrancingly that nobody should care. Schubert was, after all, only nineteen when he composed it, and the players at his disposal were members of what has been called a “neighbourhood” orchestra, with Schubert himself playing viola.
Not until his Unfinished, in 1822, did Schubert produce a genuinely vanguard symphony. Yet to suggest that the Unfinished displayed a wholly new side of his personality would be misleading. The signs were already there, in the volatile energy of the second and third symphonies and in the implications of the 'Tragic' (No 4 in C minor). In No 5, he poured some of his airiest melodies into a limpidly classical mould, half Haydn and half Mozart, yet made it sound utterly Schubertian.
Sir Donald Tovey, Edinburgh’s famous essayist, called it “a pearl of great price”, adding that no academic criticism had yet been produced that could pick holes in this “little” symphony. But was Tovey’s use of the word “little” not in itself a criticism? And perhaps somewhat patronising? Symphony orchestras take pains to preserve the special lightness of the music, luminously scored for one flute, two oboes, two bassoons, two horns, and strings – which once won it the nickname (a further gibe?) of the “Symphony without trumpets and drums.”
It is, in fact, a chamber symphony, as the finely balanced string and wind textures suggest. The first movement and finale are short, but have a vitality behind their grace which makes up for their brevity. The slow movement, especially if its repeated sections are included, is certainly not brief, but it is very beautiful. Though the main theme, according to Tovey, is “Schubertised Mozart” (yet another criticism?) it goes through modulations that are deeply Schubertian.
The third movement – more of a scherzo than a minuet – opens starkly in G minor before proceeding to a lilting waltzlike trio section in the major. It may recall Mozart’s 40th symphony, one of Schubert’s favourite works, but the fingerprints are again Schubert’s own.
© Conrad Wilson
- violin/director
Nothing captures the mystical, melancholy yearning aspect of Vaughan Williams more intensely than his transcendental masterpiece, The Lark Ascending. The generous acoustic of St Cuthbert’s will allow it to soar sensationally. Janiczek frames it with young men's music: both Mendelssohn and Schubert were around 20 years old when they wrote their respective pieces. The Mendelssohn's a particularly delightful rarity – the overture from an operetta he wrote to celebrate his parents’ silver wedding.
Early Evening Concert
- Schumann
Programme note
Robert Schumann (1810-1856)
Adagio and Allegro, Op 70 (1849)As music critic of the Allgemeine Musikalische Zeitung, Schumann deplored the prevailing German taste for what he regarded as superficial salon pieces. His own domestic music, of which - particularly in 1849 - he composed an abundance, was an object lesson in poetic feeling, expressed with a finesse that showed him to be far more responsive to instrumental colouring than history has given him credit for.
Though the piano was his primary instrumental voice, it shared the limelight in the first movement of his piano concerto with one of the most exquisite clarinet solos ever penned; and his enthusiasm for the still fairly new-fangled valve horn resulted in his fine Adagio and Allegro, Op 70, a pioneering and challenging work which loses none of its magic when played, as it sometimes is, by a viola, or cello, or oboe, or violin.
Indeed the music adapts itself chameleon-like to whatever instrument is playing it, its lyricism - with the piano as binding factor - emerging unimpaired. On the horn, it’s true, it sounds like concert music, on the clarinet or cello like something more private. But the contrast between dreamy adagio and vigorous allegro, and how the different instruments deal with it, is what matters. Such contrasts are fundamental to Schumann, displaying a cleavage in his personality that was as psychological as it was musical. Composed in the year of Chopin’s death, the music evokes a world of lights and half-lights which Schumann’s Franco-Polish contemporary would undoubtedly have understood.
© Conrad Wilson
- Brahms
- Ligeti
- horn
- 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 Principal Horn Alec Frank Gemmill and pianist Simon Smith perform a programme which includes music by Brahms, Ligeti and Schumann.
Tickets are available on the door, or by calling 01334 462226.
For more information about the SCO's Orchestra in Residence click here.
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