Concerts & Tickets
Germany Tour 2012 - Cologne
- Toshio HosokawaBlossoming (German premiere)
Programme note
- 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
- cello
- conductor
Principal Conductor Robin Ticciati directs the SCO in Cologne in a programme of music by Brahms and Schumann which features Scandinavian cellist Andreas Brantelid. The concert also includes the German première of Toshio Hosokawa's new work Blossoming II which will be given in the presence of the composer.
Germany Tour 2012 - Essen
- 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
Kit Armstrong piano
Principal Conductor Robin Ticciati directs the SCO in Essen in a programme of music by Berlioz and Brahms and joined by brilliant young pianist Kit Armstrong for Beethoven's Piano Concerto No 1.
Germany Tour 2012 - Wiesbaden
- 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
- cello
- conductor
Principal Conductor Robin Ticciati directs the SCO in Wiesbaden in a programme of music by Brahms and Berlioz and is joined by Scandinavian cellist Andreas Brantelid for Schumann's Cello Concerto.
Germany Tour 2012 - Mannheim
- 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
Kit Armstrong piano
Principal Conductor Robin Ticciati directs the SCO in Essen in a programme of music by Berlioz and Brahms and joined by brilliant young pianist Kit Armstrong for Beethoven's Piano Concerto No 1.
Germany Tour 2012 - Aachen
- 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
- cello
- conductor
Principal Conductor Robin Ticciati directs the SCO in Aachen in a programme of music by Brahms and Berlioz and is joined by Scandinavian cellist Andreas Brantelid for Schumann's Cello Concerto.
Germany Tour 2012 - Düsseldorf
- 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
Kit Armstrong piano
Principal Conductor Robin Ticciati directs the SCO in Essen in a programme of music by Berlioz and Brahms and joined by brilliant young pianist Kit Armstrong for Beethoven's Piano Concerto No 1.
Beethoven and Beamish
- Stravinsky
Programme note
Igor Stravinsky (1882-1971)
Concerto in E-flat ‘Dumbarton Oaks’Tempo guisto
Allegretto
Con motoWhile Stravinsky was in America in 1937, he received a commission to write a concerto for chamber orchestra from Mr and Mrs Robert Woods Bliss of Dumbarton Oaks, Washington DC – “a little something” in celebration of their forthcoming thirtieth wedding anniversary. Stravinsky responded with, in his own words, “a concert in the style of Bach’s Brandenburg Concertos” scored for flute, clarinet, bassoon, two horns and ten strings. The influence of Bach and of the Baroque concerto grosso is very evident, most particularly in the work’s highly contrapuntal texture and in the way in which all fifteen of the players function both as soloists and as members of the full ensemble.
“I studied and played Bach regularly during the composition”, Stravinsky later recalled, “and I was greatly attracted to the Brandenburg Concertos, especially the third, which I have also conducted. The first theme of my Concerto is, of course, very like Bach’s in that work, and so is my instrumentation – the three violins and three violas, both frequently divisi a tré (split into three), though not chordally as in Bach. I do not think, however, that Bach would have begrudged me the loan of these ideas and materials, as borrowing in this way was something he liked to do himself.”
The three short movements are performed without interruption. The first movement is predominantly polyphonic in texture, with characteristic brief motives intertwining and turning into a kind of fugue. The graceful slow movement, built up of the merest fragments of melody, provides a serene interlude between the more robust outer movements. Despite its march-like character the finale, like the first movement, builds to an exhilarating fugato climax.
Unfortunately, in May of 1938, when the premiere was due to take place, Stravinsky was undergoing a cure for tuberculosis and was unable to conduct. At his express wish, Nadia Boulanger was invited to take his place. Mrs Bliss, who attended all the rehearsals and who subsequently heard many performances of the concerto all over the world, considered Boulanger’s interpretation to be the “the most subtly interesting of all”.
© Stephen Strugnell
- Beamish
- Beethoven
Programme note
Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827)
Symphony No 7 in A major, Op 92 (1813)Poco sostenuto - Vivace
Allegretto
Presto
Allegro con brioWagner, in tribute to the relentless rhythmic vitality of Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony, hailed it as the "apotheosis of the dance." The same, with more justification, could be said of Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring, since it was intentionally written as dance music. Separated from each other by exactly a hundred years, each work could be called the rhythmic ne plus ultra of its time. The Rite caused a riot in Paris in 1913. The premiere of the Seventh Symphony in Vienna in 1813 convinced some listeners that Beethoven had gone mad, though its unstoppable verve, exhilarating yet awesome, prompted others to assume that it was inspired (like the Battle Symphony, included in the same programme) by the retreat of Napoleon and the promise of European peace. The concert in which it was first performed, indeed, was for the benefit of Austrian and Bavarian soldiers wounded at the battle of Hanau.
In itself, the music is never peaceful. There is scarcely a moment when the work is at rest. Even the slow movement proceeds with an inexorable tread, based on a repeated rhythm that shifts from section to section of the orchestra and is never absent. Each of the four movements, in fact, has its own dominating pulse. Unlike the Fifth Symphony, which moves steadily towards final triumph, the Seventh is a study in circling motion.
The big opening chords, followed by repeatedly rising scales for the strings that will ferociously return at top speed towards the end of the finale, create an impression of size and grandeur. Thereafter the swinging rhythm of the vivace section of the first movement acts like a dynamo that is never switched off. It even seethes softly throughout a famously extended passage for cellos and basses, before erupting with renewed force and whooping horns in the closing bars.
After the major-key brilliance of the first movement, the minor-key melancholy of its successor - audible in its very opening note - sounds funereal. Yet the pace is too fast for a funeral march, even if the structure is similar to that of the marcia funebre in the 'Eroica' symphony. There is solemnity here, rather than grief. The middle section, with its clarinet melody, is wistful, but the pulse is what matters and it underpins every change of mood and colour.
In the scherzo, the fast circling motion resumes. Since this is one of Beethoven’s extended scherzos with two separate trio sections - and, at the very end, an attempt to launch a third one - repetition is strongly emphasised. The rhythms continue to heave until five whiplash chords sever the continuity. But in the finale, described by Edinburgh's distinguished musical authority Donald Francis Tovey as a "triumph of Bacchic fury," it immediately resumes. Here, in the ceaseless interplay of short motifs and grinding repetitions, we are made more than ever aware of Beethoven’s obsessiveness, until the music finally hurtles into the abyss.
© Conrad Wilson
- conductor
- percussion
Joseph Swensen returns to the SCO with one of the works that blew Scottish audiences away when he first performed it with the Orchestra over a decade ago. Since then he has spent time with the latest critical edition of Beethoven's Seventh Symphony and this new performance promises fresh insights but undiminished power. The programme is rich in possibilities, not least Sally Beamish's hotly anticipated new concerto for the brilliant Colin Currie.
Related audio clip
Beethoven Symphony No 7 in A major Op 92: Allegretto (excerpt)
The Orchestra performed Beethoven's Symphonies Nos 1-8 at the 2006 Edinburgh International Festival, under Sir Charles Mackerras. The performances were recorded by Hyperion and released as a 5-disc CD box set. The Philarmonia Orchestra perform Symphony No 9. Buy from the SCO Online Shop.
Beethoven and Beamish
- Stravinsky
Programme note
Igor Stravinsky (1882-1971)
Concerto in E-flat ‘Dumbarton Oaks’Tempo guisto
Allegretto
Con motoWhile Stravinsky was in America in 1937, he received a commission to write a concerto for chamber orchestra from Mr and Mrs Robert Woods Bliss of Dumbarton Oaks, Washington DC – “a little something” in celebration of their forthcoming thirtieth wedding anniversary. Stravinsky responded with, in his own words, “a concert in the style of Bach’s Brandenburg Concertos” scored for flute, clarinet, bassoon, two horns and ten strings. The influence of Bach and of the Baroque concerto grosso is very evident, most particularly in the work’s highly contrapuntal texture and in the way in which all fifteen of the players function both as soloists and as members of the full ensemble.
“I studied and played Bach regularly during the composition”, Stravinsky later recalled, “and I was greatly attracted to the Brandenburg Concertos, especially the third, which I have also conducted. The first theme of my Concerto is, of course, very like Bach’s in that work, and so is my instrumentation – the three violins and three violas, both frequently divisi a tré (split into three), though not chordally as in Bach. I do not think, however, that Bach would have begrudged me the loan of these ideas and materials, as borrowing in this way was something he liked to do himself.”
The three short movements are performed without interruption. The first movement is predominantly polyphonic in texture, with characteristic brief motives intertwining and turning into a kind of fugue. The graceful slow movement, built up of the merest fragments of melody, provides a serene interlude between the more robust outer movements. Despite its march-like character the finale, like the first movement, builds to an exhilarating fugato climax.
Unfortunately, in May of 1938, when the premiere was due to take place, Stravinsky was undergoing a cure for tuberculosis and was unable to conduct. At his express wish, Nadia Boulanger was invited to take his place. Mrs Bliss, who attended all the rehearsals and who subsequently heard many performances of the concerto all over the world, considered Boulanger’s interpretation to be the “the most subtly interesting of all”.
© Stephen Strugnell
- Beamish
- Beethoven
Programme note
Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827)
Symphony No 7 in A major, Op 92 (1813)Poco sostenuto - Vivace
Allegretto
Presto
Allegro con brioWagner, in tribute to the relentless rhythmic vitality of Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony, hailed it as the "apotheosis of the dance." The same, with more justification, could be said of Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring, since it was intentionally written as dance music. Separated from each other by exactly a hundred years, each work could be called the rhythmic ne plus ultra of its time. The Rite caused a riot in Paris in 1913. The premiere of the Seventh Symphony in Vienna in 1813 convinced some listeners that Beethoven had gone mad, though its unstoppable verve, exhilarating yet awesome, prompted others to assume that it was inspired (like the Battle Symphony, included in the same programme) by the retreat of Napoleon and the promise of European peace. The concert in which it was first performed, indeed, was for the benefit of Austrian and Bavarian soldiers wounded at the battle of Hanau.
In itself, the music is never peaceful. There is scarcely a moment when the work is at rest. Even the slow movement proceeds with an inexorable tread, based on a repeated rhythm that shifts from section to section of the orchestra and is never absent. Each of the four movements, in fact, has its own dominating pulse. Unlike the Fifth Symphony, which moves steadily towards final triumph, the Seventh is a study in circling motion.
The big opening chords, followed by repeatedly rising scales for the strings that will ferociously return at top speed towards the end of the finale, create an impression of size and grandeur. Thereafter the swinging rhythm of the vivace section of the first movement acts like a dynamo that is never switched off. It even seethes softly throughout a famously extended passage for cellos and basses, before erupting with renewed force and whooping horns in the closing bars.
After the major-key brilliance of the first movement, the minor-key melancholy of its successor - audible in its very opening note - sounds funereal. Yet the pace is too fast for a funeral march, even if the structure is similar to that of the marcia funebre in the 'Eroica' symphony. There is solemnity here, rather than grief. The middle section, with its clarinet melody, is wistful, but the pulse is what matters and it underpins every change of mood and colour.
In the scherzo, the fast circling motion resumes. Since this is one of Beethoven’s extended scherzos with two separate trio sections - and, at the very end, an attempt to launch a third one - repetition is strongly emphasised. The rhythms continue to heave until five whiplash chords sever the continuity. But in the finale, described by Edinburgh's distinguished musical authority Donald Francis Tovey as a "triumph of Bacchic fury," it immediately resumes. Here, in the ceaseless interplay of short motifs and grinding repetitions, we are made more than ever aware of Beethoven’s obsessiveness, until the music finally hurtles into the abyss.
© Conrad Wilson
- conductor
- percussion
Joseph Swensen returns to the SCO with one of the works that blew Scottish audiences away when he first performed it with the Orchestra over a decade ago. Since then he has spent time with the latest critical edition of Beethoven’s 7th Symphony and this new performance promises fresh insights but undiminished power. The programme is rich in possibilities, not least Sally Beamish’s hotly anticipated new concerto for the brilliant Colin Currie
Related audio clip
Beethoven Symphony No 7 in A major Op 92: Allegretto (excerpt)
The Orchestra performed Beethoven's Symphonies Nos 1-8 at the 2006 Edinburgh International Festival, under Sir Charles Mackerras. The performances were recorded by Hyperion and released as a 5-disc CD box set. The Philarmonia Orchestra perform Symphony No 9. Buy from the SCO Online Shop.
Chamber Concert
- Poulenc
- Bach
- Bach
- -
- Principal Cello
Critics have called the SCO Chorus ‘brilliant’ and ‘stylish’ – without doubt they are one of Scotland’s premier choirs. Here they make a rare appearance away from the Orchestra with an hour of choral music including Bach’s moving motet: Jesu, meine Freude. Poulenc makes a perfect complement – quite as beautiful but with a spirit that seems to look yet further back in time to Medieval music in its crystalline purity.
Beethoven Five (St Andrews)
- Schumann
Programme note
Robert Schumann (1810-1856)
Overture: Scenes from Goethe’s Faust (1844/53)Goethe’s Faust Parts I & II overwhelmed so many European composers that it clearly hit the deepest of Romantic nerves. Taking just the obvious ones in chronological order we have Spohr’s opera Faust (1813); Wagner’s Faust Overture (1840/44/55); Schumann’s Scenes from Goethe’s Faust (1844/53); Berlioz’s La damnation de Faust (1845/46); Gounod’s opera Faust (1850); Liszt’s Eine Faust-Symphonie (1854/57); Boito’s opera Mephistopheles (1865/76); Mahler’s Symphony No 8 (1906); and Busoni’s opera Dr Faustus (1916/24). Thus, the middle of the nineteenth century was when Goethe’s influence on the Romantic movement was at its zenith (1849 was the centenary of Goethe’s birth) and Schumann was right there in the thick of it. Liszt, having become Kapellmeister at the Court of Weimar, conducted the Apotheosis section of Schumann’s score on August 29th, 1849. (This was before the great ideological rift between Schumann and Liszt). Simultaneously Leipzig and Dresden were also presented with Schumann’s music. It was a success – much to the surprise of the composer who said “I only wish I could have had Faust’s mantle for that day. In order to be everywhere and hear everything. How strange, the piece lay five years in my desk. Nobody knew anything about it, and I myself had almost forgotten its existence – and now in this unusual celebration it had come to light!”
Most other composers kept to the more approachable Part I of Goethe’s Faust, but Schumann, with his mystical sensibilities was drawn to the more unstageable closing scenes of Part II – Faust’s Transfiguration (which is why he opted for a choral work rather than an operatic one. Mahler took a similar option with the second part of his monumental Symphony No 8.) The score did not come easily – he began it in 1844 but his inspiration came fitfully. 1847 and 1848 saw more sections added. He completed Part 1 (mainly concerned with Gretchen) in 1849 and titled his score Scenes from Goethe’s Faust.
The performance of the Apotheosis (Part 3) lit the proverbial fire under Schumann who quickly completed Part 2 (dealing with Faust). But then Schumann paused once again. His style had changed along the way – Parts 1 and 2 were more operatic than the oratorio style of the earlier Part 3. (Perish the thought, given the developing enmity between the Schumann and Wagner camps, but clearly Wagner’s dramatic ideas had had an effect on Schumann’s creative imagination in the meantime). Then, near the end of 1853, Schumann added the dark, brooding, tense and turbulent Overture in D minor which, given the great conflict between good and evil depicted in Faust, sets the tone for what is to come. It had taken him nine years to see this epic project through to completion, and, as it sadly turned out, it was only just in time, as two months later Schumann threw himself into the Rhine at Düsseldorf in a failed suicide attempt – and spent his last remaining years in an asylum.
The complete work was given its first performance posthumously by Ferdinand Hiller who conducted it in Cologne on 13 January 1862. It was a huge, and influential, success.
© David Gardner
- Berlioz
Programme note
Hector Berlioz (1803-1869)
La Mort de Cléopâtre (1849)Although the Prix de Rome was something that every young French composer seriously coveted - for the prestige, the money and the privilege of two years residence at the Villa Medici in Rome - very few of the winning entries have become part of the standard repertoire. This is not so much because the outstanding students of their day like Charles Gounod, Georges Bizet and Jules Massenet were incapable of producing anything of lasting interest as because the rules of the competition and the conservatism of the jurors virtually precluded any display of originality or individuality.
Berlioz went in for the Prix de Rome four times in four successive years and finally won it in 1830 with La Mort de Sardanaple, which was not the best of his Prix de Rome cantatas but the most obedient. The most inspired of the four is La Mort de Cléopâtre, which so offended the jury in 1829 that rather than give their approval to such an unruly score they chose not to award a first prize at all that year. Up to a point, one can sympathise with those "grave and reverend signors" who, listening to the piano transcription (as the rules required) of an essentially orchestral conception and hearing harmonic transgressions not even the dreaded Beethoven would have perpetrated, must have been severely baffled by the work.
Interestingly, however, the notoriously severe Director of the Paris Conservatoire, Luigi Cherubini, was one of the small minority who voted for it. As a not unprogressive opera composer himself, he no doubt had to acknowledge the dramatic intensity in the swirling figuration and urgent syncopations of the instrumental introduction, the eloquence of Cleopatra's opening recitative and the pathos of the following near-aria. It is difficult to imagine, on the other hand what even the most liberal academic could have made of the central 'Méditation' (which was to be recycled in Lélio two years later) with its ominously strummed rhythms, its macabre trombone colours and its weird harmonic progressions. As for the naturalistic rather than conventionally emphatic ending - after the fatal snake-bite the music just dies away on an erratic and failing pulse - that demonstration of Berlioz's genius was the ultimate offence as far as most of the jurors were concerned.
© Gerald Larner
- Beethoven
Programme note
Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827)
Symphony No 5 in C minor, Op 67 (1808)Allegro con brio
Andante con moto
Allegro
Allegro"Three G's and an E flat. Simple. Baby simple. Anybody could do it. Maybe." Leonard Bernstein's famously laconic comment on the first four notes of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony spotlit the astounding effect in this work of a motif the composer had already employed, to quite different effect, in his third and fourth piano concertos. Beethoven's own comment, as quoted by his unreliable friend Schindler, was that in the Fifth Symphony the notes represented Fate rapping at the door. The description went down in history, though it prompted the Austrian theorist Heinrich Schenker to ask whether the same motif in the fourth piano concerto therefore represented Fate rapping at a different door or whether someone else was doing the rapping. In fact the motif was a regular Beethoven fingerprint during a certain period in his career, though he never used it to more potent effect than in the Fifth Symphony, where it pervades the opening movement and returns in both the scherzo and finale. It is a motif which, in any case, had already been employed by Cherubini in his Hymne du Pantheon, as Beethoven surely knew.
The thematic unity of the first movement of the Fifth Symphony is nevertheless one of its strongest features, transcending not only Cherubini's but Beethoven's own previous use of it. Hurled at us at start of the work, it makes its point unequivocally and goes on making it. Not even the plaintive little oboe cadenza which quietly intrudes at the height of the action can impede its progress for long. But whether, as has often been claimed, the music's inexorably marching motion represents Austria expelling the French is hard to say. Certainly, although some listeners are unwilling to see it that way, this is a profoundly militaristic work, and the brassy fanfares in the slow movement, the screeching piccolo and braying trombones in the finale, are in themselves enough to demonstrate this. Not for nothing did a member of the Napoleonic guard, on hearing it for the first time, feel impelled to spring to his feet at the start of the finale crying: "C'est l'empereur." Though that would suggest he had got the wrong end of the stick, it was for the right reasons. The music is ceremonial, victorious, exultant, even brutal in a way that the composer did not always feel to be necessary.
Beethoven, who had once contemplated settling in Paris rather than Vienna, held famously self-contradictory views on Napoleon, as well as possessing a considerable admiration for French music. It was Berlioz, a Frenchman, who said that Beethoven's ability to sustain such a height of effect in this work was prodigious. Yet it took a long time - four years, from 1804 until 1808 - for him to shape the music to his satisfaction. The slow movement, originally conceived as a sort of lumbering minuet, eventually became a theme and variations through whose notes a hint of minuet motion remained discernible. The scherzo, originally an extended movement on the lines of those of the fourth and seventh symphonies, eventually grew shorter. The finale, linked to the scherzo by ghostly drum taps and stealthy strings, announces itself with the most famous burst of C major in musical history, but later refers back to the ghostly passage already heard.
Yet the work as a whole is not purely about progress from the darkness of C minor to the sunshine of the major key. The four notes with which it opens - those three G's and and an E flat - are not specifically in the key of C minor at all. Nor are they played by the full orchestra, though that is the effect which their initial statement on strings and clarinets manages to convey. Beethoven's Fifth may be the most often performed of all his symphonies, but it still has the power to surprise.
© Conrad Wilson
- conductor
- mezzo-soprano
Ticciati combines Beethoven’s blazing symphony with a deep personal passion: Schumann’s Faust, which ranked among the composer’s greatest popular successes during his lifetime. The programme is also a showcase of Scottish talent as Karen Cargill performs Berlioz’s tragic and dramatic scena, which she will also perform in the Orchestra’s subsequent tour to Spain.
Related audio clip
Beethoven Symphony No 5 in C minor Op 67: Allegro con brio
The Orchestra performed Beethoven's Symphonies Nos 1-8 at the 2006 Edinburgh International Festival, under Sir Charles Mackerras. The performances were recorded by Hyperion and released as a 5-disc CD box set. The Philarmonia Orchestra perform Symphony No 9. Buy from the SCO Online Shop.
Beethoven Five
- Schumann
Programme note
Robert Schumann (1810-1856)
Overture: Scenes from Goethe’s Faust (1844/53)Goethe’s Faust Parts I & II overwhelmed so many European composers that it clearly hit the deepest of Romantic nerves. Taking just the obvious ones in chronological order we have Spohr’s opera Faust (1813); Wagner’s Faust Overture (1840/44/55); Schumann’s Scenes from Goethe’s Faust (1844/53); Berlioz’s La damnation de Faust (1845/46); Gounod’s opera Faust (1850); Liszt’s Eine Faust-Symphonie (1854/57); Boito’s opera Mephistopheles (1865/76); Mahler’s Symphony No 8 (1906); and Busoni’s opera Dr Faustus (1916/24). Thus, the middle of the nineteenth century was when Goethe’s influence on the Romantic movement was at its zenith (1849 was the centenary of Goethe’s birth) and Schumann was right there in the thick of it. Liszt, having become Kapellmeister at the Court of Weimar, conducted the Apotheosis section of Schumann’s score on August 29th, 1849. (This was before the great ideological rift between Schumann and Liszt). Simultaneously Leipzig and Dresden were also presented with Schumann’s music. It was a success – much to the surprise of the composer who said “I only wish I could have had Faust’s mantle for that day. In order to be everywhere and hear everything. How strange, the piece lay five years in my desk. Nobody knew anything about it, and I myself had almost forgotten its existence – and now in this unusual celebration it had come to light!”
Most other composers kept to the more approachable Part I of Goethe’s Faust, but Schumann, with his mystical sensibilities was drawn to the more unstageable closing scenes of Part II – Faust’s Transfiguration (which is why he opted for a choral work rather than an operatic one. Mahler took a similar option with the second part of his monumental Symphony No 8.) The score did not come easily – he began it in 1844 but his inspiration came fitfully. 1847 and 1848 saw more sections added. He completed Part 1 (mainly concerned with Gretchen) in 1849 and titled his score Scenes from Goethe’s Faust.
The performance of the Apotheosis (Part 3) lit the proverbial fire under Schumann who quickly completed Part 2 (dealing with Faust). But then Schumann paused once again. His style had changed along the way – Parts 1 and 2 were more operatic than the oratorio style of the earlier Part 3. (Perish the thought, given the developing enmity between the Schumann and Wagner camps, but clearly Wagner’s dramatic ideas had had an effect on Schumann’s creative imagination in the meantime). Then, near the end of 1853, Schumann added the dark, brooding, tense and turbulent Overture in D minor which, given the great conflict between good and evil depicted in Faust, sets the tone for what is to come. It had taken him nine years to see this epic project through to completion, and, as it sadly turned out, it was only just in time, as two months later Schumann threw himself into the Rhine at Düsseldorf in a failed suicide attempt – and spent his last remaining years in an asylum.
The complete work was given its first performance posthumously by Ferdinand Hiller who conducted it in Cologne on 13 January 1862. It was a huge, and influential, success.
© David Gardner
- Gruber
Programme note
Heinz Karl Gruber (b. 1943)
Nebelsteinmusik, for violin and strings (Violin Concerto No 2)Ingredients: the music of Berg, Stravinsky, jazz, cabaret and pop. Stir thoroughly, and wait for an appropriate moment, then dish out – and there you have the music of the prize-winning Austrian composer Heinz Karl Gruber. Along with fellow Austrian Kurt Schwertsik, Gruber co-founded the MOB art & tone ART ensemble in 1968. They wanted to provide an audience-friendly antidote to the dogmatic style of modern music in the 1960s and to create something audience-friendly – and if it was also fun, witty, even sardonic, so much the better!
The composer has provided the following note: “Nebelsteinmusik was commissioned by the Alban Berg Foundation, and is built from two thematic ideas: firstly a passage from the Andante Amoroso of Berg’s Lyric Suite where the tone row emerges clearly as melody and hints at its full harmonic richness, and secondly a musical anagram on the name of my former teacher, friendly critic and mentor, Gottfried von Einem. The anagram produced a six-note diatonic row which provided a fitting contrast to the chromatic nature of the Berg material, and it was between these two opposing poles that my music evolved. The work is named after Nebelstein, von Einem’s own local mountain in the wooded region of Lower Austria and, in evocation of Berg’s Andante Amoroso, the score is dedicated to Gottfried von Einem “For his seventieth birthday, with love”.
“The title of the first movement, This is my theme, is that of a jazz recording which appeared on a shellac disc around 1943. It was much admired among von Einem’s circle of friends, including his former teacher Boris Blacher, and the copy was passed around in secret, for records such as this were of course on the Nazi-Index … The second movement’s title, In time with the heartbeat, refers to the underlying pulse of the second movement of Einem’s Piano Concerto Op 20, wonderfully lyrical music which has always struck me as a model expression of totally unsentimental affection. The third movement is a Cadenza whose rhythmic structuring is drawn from techniques employed in the last movement of Einem’s Concerto for Orchestra Op 4, the jazz-influenced work which was banned by Goebbels after its Berlin premiere in 1944. Cadenza leads without a break into the final movement, Concertino, which begins with an exact quotation from von Einem’s Concerto and recalls my childhood enthusiasm for von Einem’s skill in stretching large melodic arches over passages of complex rhythmic patterning, whilst also providing a lively apotheosis of my mentor.”
The première of Nebelsteinmusik was at the St Florian Festival, Austria in 1988. The violin soloist and director was Ernest Kovacic (for whom the work was written) with the Vienna Symphony Chamber Orchestra. The composer revised Nebelsteinmusik in 1992.
HK Gruber, born in 1943, was once a member of the Vienna Boys’ Choir, he is a jazz enthusiast from his student days and became a professional double bass player. He is also a chassonnier in his famous 1978 work Frankenstein!!, a ‘pan-demonium’ which is a setting of children’s verses by his friend, the absurdist poet HC Artmann. In September 2009 HK Gruber was appointed composer/conductor of the BBC Philharmonic Orchestra.
© David Gardner
- Berlioz
Programme note
Hector Berlioz (1803-1869)
Rêverie et Caprice, Opus 8 (1841)Berlioz had set his hopes on the success of his opera Benvenuto Cellini at the Paris Opéra in 1839 – but it was not to be. It seemed no-one liked it – musicians, singers, the Opéra management, and finally the Director, Charles-Edmond Duponchel all made it plain during rehearsals that they hated it. So, in despair, Berlioz withdrew Benvenuto after just a few performances in March 1839. It was clearly a venture that was ahead of its time as these days Benvenuto is hailed as a masterpiece. But even before this sad end to the production, Berlioz had had troubles with his singers. The soprano took objection to her Act 1 Cavatina: Ah, que l’amour une fois dans le cœur. Consequently, Berlioz replaced it with an alternative aria.
In the time-honoured tradition of composers, however, Berlioz saw no reason to waste a good tune, so when an opportunity to put on an orchestral concert came along he recast the Cavatina into a Romance for violin and orchestra as a vehicle for his Belgian friend, the virtuoso violinist Alexandre-Joseph Artôt. It was published as Rêverie et caprice, Op 8 in 1841. Artôt and Berlioz gave the première on February 1st, 1842 in the Salle Vivienne, Paris. It didn’t get a particularly warm reception on that occasion but that has not deterred many famous soloists from adding it their repertoires – the likes of Menuhin, Szigeti, Grumiaux, Suk, Perlman, and now Ehnes have all recorded it. Musically it does exactly what the title suggests – it is a reverie with some flashes of animation. The violin sings reflectively over an orchestration that is typical of Berlioz – which is to say, it’s magical!
© David Gardner
- Beethoven
Programme note
Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827)
Symphony No 5 in C minor, Op 67 (1808)Allegro con brio
Andante con moto
Allegro
Allegro"Three G's and an E flat. Simple. Baby simple. Anybody could do it. Maybe." Leonard Bernstein's famously laconic comment on the first four notes of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony spotlit the astounding effect in this work of a motif the composer had already employed, to quite different effect, in his third and fourth piano concertos. Beethoven's own comment, as quoted by his unreliable friend Schindler, was that in the Fifth Symphony the notes represented Fate rapping at the door. The description went down in history, though it prompted the Austrian theorist Heinrich Schenker to ask whether the same motif in the fourth piano concerto therefore represented Fate rapping at a different door or whether someone else was doing the rapping. In fact the motif was a regular Beethoven fingerprint during a certain period in his career, though he never used it to more potent effect than in the Fifth Symphony, where it pervades the opening movement and returns in both the scherzo and finale. It is a motif which, in any case, had already been employed by Cherubini in his Hymne du Pantheon, as Beethoven surely knew.
The thematic unity of the first movement of the Fifth Symphony is nevertheless one of its strongest features, transcending not only Cherubini's but Beethoven's own previous use of it. Hurled at us at start of the work, it makes its point unequivocally and goes on making it. Not even the plaintive little oboe cadenza which quietly intrudes at the height of the action can impede its progress for long. But whether, as has often been claimed, the music's inexorably marching motion represents Austria expelling the French is hard to say. Certainly, although some listeners are unwilling to see it that way, this is a profoundly militaristic work, and the brassy fanfares in the slow movement, the screeching piccolo and braying trombones in the finale, are in themselves enough to demonstrate this. Not for nothing did a member of the Napoleonic guard, on hearing it for the first time, feel impelled to spring to his feet at the start of the finale crying: "C'est l'empereur." Though that would suggest he had got the wrong end of the stick, it was for the right reasons. The music is ceremonial, victorious, exultant, even brutal in a way that the composer did not always feel to be necessary.
Beethoven, who had once contemplated settling in Paris rather than Vienna, held famously self-contradictory views on Napoleon, as well as possessing a considerable admiration for French music. It was Berlioz, a Frenchman, who said that Beethoven's ability to sustain such a height of effect in this work was prodigious. Yet it took a long time - four years, from 1804 until 1808 - for him to shape the music to his satisfaction. The slow movement, originally conceived as a sort of lumbering minuet, eventually became a theme and variations through whose notes a hint of minuet motion remained discernible. The scherzo, originally an extended movement on the lines of those of the fourth and seventh symphonies, eventually grew shorter. The finale, linked to the scherzo by ghostly drum taps and stealthy strings, announces itself with the most famous burst of C major in musical history, but later refers back to the ghostly passage already heard.
Yet the work as a whole is not purely about progress from the darkness of C minor to the sunshine of the major key. The four notes with which it opens - those three G's and and an E flat - are not specifically in the key of C minor at all. Nor are they played by the full orchestra, though that is the effect which their initial statement on strings and clarinets manages to convey. Beethoven's Fifth may be the most often performed of all his symphonies, but it still has the power to surprise.
© Conrad Wilson
- conductor
- violin
Ticciati combines Beethoven’s blazing symphony with a deep personal passion: Schumann’s Faust, which ranked among the composer’s greatest popular successes during his lifetime. Between the two, Gruber’s compelling response to German music during some of the darkest years of the Third Reich. Following this concert, Ticciati and the Orchestra head off on tour to Spain with more Beethoven.
Related audio clip
Beethoven Symphony No 5 in C minor Op 67: Allegro con brio
The Orchestra performed Beethoven's Symphonies Nos 1-8 at the 2006 Edinburgh International Festival, under Sir Charles Mackerras. The performances were recorded by Hyperion and released as a 5-disc CD box set. The Philarmonia Orchestra perform Symphony No 9. Buy from the SCO Online Shop.
Beethoven Five
- Schumann
Programme note
Robert Schumann (1810-1856)
Overture: Scenes from Goethe’s Faust (1844/53)Goethe’s Faust Parts I & II overwhelmed so many European composers that it clearly hit the deepest of Romantic nerves. Taking just the obvious ones in chronological order we have Spohr’s opera Faust (1813); Wagner’s Faust Overture (1840/44/55); Schumann’s Scenes from Goethe’s Faust (1844/53); Berlioz’s La damnation de Faust (1845/46); Gounod’s opera Faust (1850); Liszt’s Eine Faust-Symphonie (1854/57); Boito’s opera Mephistopheles (1865/76); Mahler’s Symphony No 8 (1906); and Busoni’s opera Dr Faustus (1916/24). Thus, the middle of the nineteenth century was when Goethe’s influence on the Romantic movement was at its zenith (1849 was the centenary of Goethe’s birth) and Schumann was right there in the thick of it. Liszt, having become Kapellmeister at the Court of Weimar, conducted the Apotheosis section of Schumann’s score on August 29th, 1849. (This was before the great ideological rift between Schumann and Liszt). Simultaneously Leipzig and Dresden were also presented with Schumann’s music. It was a success – much to the surprise of the composer who said “I only wish I could have had Faust’s mantle for that day. In order to be everywhere and hear everything. How strange, the piece lay five years in my desk. Nobody knew anything about it, and I myself had almost forgotten its existence – and now in this unusual celebration it had come to light!”
Most other composers kept to the more approachable Part I of Goethe’s Faust, but Schumann, with his mystical sensibilities was drawn to the more unstageable closing scenes of Part II – Faust’s Transfiguration (which is why he opted for a choral work rather than an operatic one. Mahler took a similar option with the second part of his monumental Symphony No 8.) The score did not come easily – he began it in 1844 but his inspiration came fitfully. 1847 and 1848 saw more sections added. He completed Part 1 (mainly concerned with Gretchen) in 1849 and titled his score Scenes from Goethe’s Faust.
The performance of the Apotheosis (Part 3) lit the proverbial fire under Schumann who quickly completed Part 2 (dealing with Faust). But then Schumann paused once again. His style had changed along the way – Parts 1 and 2 were more operatic than the oratorio style of the earlier Part 3. (Perish the thought, given the developing enmity between the Schumann and Wagner camps, but clearly Wagner’s dramatic ideas had had an effect on Schumann’s creative imagination in the meantime). Then, near the end of 1853, Schumann added the dark, brooding, tense and turbulent Overture in D minor which, given the great conflict between good and evil depicted in Faust, sets the tone for what is to come. It had taken him nine years to see this epic project through to completion, and, as it sadly turned out, it was only just in time, as two months later Schumann threw himself into the Rhine at Düsseldorf in a failed suicide attempt – and spent his last remaining years in an asylum.
The complete work was given its first performance posthumously by Ferdinand Hiller who conducted it in Cologne on 13 January 1862. It was a huge, and influential, success.
© David Gardner
- Gruber
Programme note
Heinz Karl Gruber (b. 1943)
Nebelsteinmusik, for violin and strings (Violin Concerto No 2)Ingredients: the music of Berg, Stravinsky, jazz, cabaret and pop. Stir thoroughly, and wait for an appropriate moment, then dish out – and there you have the music of the prize-winning Austrian composer Heinz Karl Gruber. Along with fellow Austrian Kurt Schwertsik, Gruber co-founded the MOB art & tone ART ensemble in 1968. They wanted to provide an audience-friendly antidote to the dogmatic style of modern music in the 1960s and to create something audience-friendly – and if it was also fun, witty, even sardonic, so much the better!
The composer has provided the following note: “Nebelsteinmusik was commissioned by the Alban Berg Foundation, and is built from two thematic ideas: firstly a passage from the Andante Amoroso of Berg’s Lyric Suite where the tone row emerges clearly as melody and hints at its full harmonic richness, and secondly a musical anagram on the name of my former teacher, friendly critic and mentor, Gottfried von Einem. The anagram produced a six-note diatonic row which provided a fitting contrast to the chromatic nature of the Berg material, and it was between these two opposing poles that my music evolved. The work is named after Nebelstein, von Einem’s own local mountain in the wooded region of Lower Austria and, in evocation of Berg’s Andante Amoroso, the score is dedicated to Gottfried von Einem “For his seventieth birthday, with love”.
“The title of the first movement, This is my theme, is that of a jazz recording which appeared on a shellac disc around 1943. It was much admired among von Einem’s circle of friends, including his former teacher Boris Blacher, and the copy was passed around in secret, for records such as this were of course on the Nazi-Index … The second movement’s title, In time with the heartbeat, refers to the underlying pulse of the second movement of Einem’s Piano Concerto Op 20, wonderfully lyrical music which has always struck me as a model expression of totally unsentimental affection. The third movement is a Cadenza whose rhythmic structuring is drawn from techniques employed in the last movement of Einem’s Concerto for Orchestra Op 4, the jazz-influenced work which was banned by Goebbels after its Berlin premiere in 1944. Cadenza leads without a break into the final movement, Concertino, which begins with an exact quotation from von Einem’s Concerto and recalls my childhood enthusiasm for von Einem’s skill in stretching large melodic arches over passages of complex rhythmic patterning, whilst also providing a lively apotheosis of my mentor.”
The première of Nebelsteinmusik was at the St Florian Festival, Austria in 1988. The violin soloist and director was Ernest Kovacic (for whom the work was written) with the Vienna Symphony Chamber Orchestra. The composer revised Nebelsteinmusik in 1992.
HK Gruber, born in 1943, was once a member of the Vienna Boys’ Choir, he is a jazz enthusiast from his student days and became a professional double bass player. He is also a chassonnier in his famous 1978 work Frankenstein!!, a ‘pan-demonium’ which is a setting of children’s verses by his friend, the absurdist poet HC Artmann. In September 2009 HK Gruber was appointed composer/conductor of the BBC Philharmonic Orchestra.
© David Gardner
- Berlioz
Programme note
Hector Berlioz (1803-1869)
Rêverie et Caprice, Opus 8 (1841)Berlioz had set his hopes on the success of his opera Benvenuto Cellini at the Paris Opéra in 1839 – but it was not to be. It seemed no-one liked it – musicians, singers, the Opéra management, and finally the Director, Charles-Edmond Duponchel all made it plain during rehearsals that they hated it. So, in despair, Berlioz withdrew Benvenuto after just a few performances in March 1839. It was clearly a venture that was ahead of its time as these days Benvenuto is hailed as a masterpiece. But even before this sad end to the production, Berlioz had had troubles with his singers. The soprano took objection to her Act 1 Cavatina: Ah, que l’amour une fois dans le cœur. Consequently, Berlioz replaced it with an alternative aria.
In the time-honoured tradition of composers, however, Berlioz saw no reason to waste a good tune, so when an opportunity to put on an orchestral concert came along he recast the Cavatina into a Romance for violin and orchestra as a vehicle for his Belgian friend, the virtuoso violinist Alexandre-Joseph Artôt. It was published as Rêverie et caprice, Op 8 in 1841. Artôt and Berlioz gave the première on February 1st, 1842 in the Salle Vivienne, Paris. It didn’t get a particularly warm reception on that occasion but that has not deterred many famous soloists from adding it their repertoires – the likes of Menuhin, Szigeti, Grumiaux, Suk, Perlman, and now Ehnes have all recorded it. Musically it does exactly what the title suggests – it is a reverie with some flashes of animation. The violin sings reflectively over an orchestration that is typical of Berlioz – which is to say, it’s magical!
© David Gardner
- Beethoven
Programme note
Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827)
Symphony No 5 in C minor, Op 67 (1808)Allegro con brio
Andante con moto
Allegro
Allegro"Three G's and an E flat. Simple. Baby simple. Anybody could do it. Maybe." Leonard Bernstein's famously laconic comment on the first four notes of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony spotlit the astounding effect in this work of a motif the composer had already employed, to quite different effect, in his third and fourth piano concertos. Beethoven's own comment, as quoted by his unreliable friend Schindler, was that in the Fifth Symphony the notes represented Fate rapping at the door. The description went down in history, though it prompted the Austrian theorist Heinrich Schenker to ask whether the same motif in the fourth piano concerto therefore represented Fate rapping at a different door or whether someone else was doing the rapping. In fact the motif was a regular Beethoven fingerprint during a certain period in his career, though he never used it to more potent effect than in the Fifth Symphony, where it pervades the opening movement and returns in both the scherzo and finale. It is a motif which, in any case, had already been employed by Cherubini in his Hymne du Pantheon, as Beethoven surely knew.
The thematic unity of the first movement of the Fifth Symphony is nevertheless one of its strongest features, transcending not only Cherubini's but Beethoven's own previous use of it. Hurled at us at start of the work, it makes its point unequivocally and goes on making it. Not even the plaintive little oboe cadenza which quietly intrudes at the height of the action can impede its progress for long. But whether, as has often been claimed, the music's inexorably marching motion represents Austria expelling the French is hard to say. Certainly, although some listeners are unwilling to see it that way, this is a profoundly militaristic work, and the brassy fanfares in the slow movement, the screeching piccolo and braying trombones in the finale, are in themselves enough to demonstrate this. Not for nothing did a member of the Napoleonic guard, on hearing it for the first time, feel impelled to spring to his feet at the start of the finale crying: "C'est l'empereur." Though that would suggest he had got the wrong end of the stick, it was for the right reasons. The music is ceremonial, victorious, exultant, even brutal in a way that the composer did not always feel to be necessary.
Beethoven, who had once contemplated settling in Paris rather than Vienna, held famously self-contradictory views on Napoleon, as well as possessing a considerable admiration for French music. It was Berlioz, a Frenchman, who said that Beethoven's ability to sustain such a height of effect in this work was prodigious. Yet it took a long time - four years, from 1804 until 1808 - for him to shape the music to his satisfaction. The slow movement, originally conceived as a sort of lumbering minuet, eventually became a theme and variations through whose notes a hint of minuet motion remained discernible. The scherzo, originally an extended movement on the lines of those of the fourth and seventh symphonies, eventually grew shorter. The finale, linked to the scherzo by ghostly drum taps and stealthy strings, announces itself with the most famous burst of C major in musical history, but later refers back to the ghostly passage already heard.
Yet the work as a whole is not purely about progress from the darkness of C minor to the sunshine of the major key. The four notes with which it opens - those three G's and and an E flat - are not specifically in the key of C minor at all. Nor are they played by the full orchestra, though that is the effect which their initial statement on strings and clarinets manages to convey. Beethoven's Fifth may be the most often performed of all his symphonies, but it still has the power to surprise.
© Conrad Wilson
- conductor
- violin
Ticciati combines Beethoven’s blazing symphony with a deep personal passion: Schumann’s Faust, which ranked among the composer’s greatest popular successes during his lifetime. Between the two, Gruber’s compelling response to German music during some of the darkest years of the Third Reich. Following this concert, Ticciati and the Orchestra head off on tour to Spain with more Beethoven.
Related audio clip
Beethoven Symphony No 5 in C minor Op 67: Allegro con brio
The Orchestra performed Beethoven's Symphonies Nos 1-8 at the 2006 Edinburgh International Festival, under Sir Charles Mackerras. The performances were recorded by Hyperion and released as a 5-disc CD box set. The Philarmonia Orchestra perform Symphony No 9. Buy from the SCO Online Shop.
Spain Tour 2012
- Schumann
Programme note
Robert Schumann (1810-1856)
Overture: Scenes from Goethe’s Faust (1844/53)Goethe’s Faust Parts I & II overwhelmed so many European composers that it clearly hit the deepest of Romantic nerves. Taking just the obvious ones in chronological order we have Spohr’s opera Faust (1813); Wagner’s Faust Overture (1840/44/55); Schumann’s Scenes from Goethe’s Faust (1844/53); Berlioz’s La damnation de Faust (1845/46); Gounod’s opera Faust (1850); Liszt’s Eine Faust-Symphonie (1854/57); Boito’s opera Mephistopheles (1865/76); Mahler’s Symphony No 8 (1906); and Busoni’s opera Dr Faustus (1916/24). Thus, the middle of the nineteenth century was when Goethe’s influence on the Romantic movement was at its zenith (1849 was the centenary of Goethe’s birth) and Schumann was right there in the thick of it. Liszt, having become Kapellmeister at the Court of Weimar, conducted the Apotheosis section of Schumann’s score on August 29th, 1849. (This was before the great ideological rift between Schumann and Liszt). Simultaneously Leipzig and Dresden were also presented with Schumann’s music. It was a success – much to the surprise of the composer who said “I only wish I could have had Faust’s mantle for that day. In order to be everywhere and hear everything. How strange, the piece lay five years in my desk. Nobody knew anything about it, and I myself had almost forgotten its existence – and now in this unusual celebration it had come to light!”
Most other composers kept to the more approachable Part I of Goethe’s Faust, but Schumann, with his mystical sensibilities was drawn to the more unstageable closing scenes of Part II – Faust’s Transfiguration (which is why he opted for a choral work rather than an operatic one. Mahler took a similar option with the second part of his monumental Symphony No 8.) The score did not come easily – he began it in 1844 but his inspiration came fitfully. 1847 and 1848 saw more sections added. He completed Part 1 (mainly concerned with Gretchen) in 1849 and titled his score Scenes from Goethe’s Faust.
The performance of the Apotheosis (Part 3) lit the proverbial fire under Schumann who quickly completed Part 2 (dealing with Faust). But then Schumann paused once again. His style had changed along the way – Parts 1 and 2 were more operatic than the oratorio style of the earlier Part 3. (Perish the thought, given the developing enmity between the Schumann and Wagner camps, but clearly Wagner’s dramatic ideas had had an effect on Schumann’s creative imagination in the meantime). Then, near the end of 1853, Schumann added the dark, brooding, tense and turbulent Overture in D minor which, given the great conflict between good and evil depicted in Faust, sets the tone for what is to come. It had taken him nine years to see this epic project through to completion, and, as it sadly turned out, it was only just in time, as two months later Schumann threw himself into the Rhine at Düsseldorf in a failed suicide attempt – and spent his last remaining years in an asylum.
The complete work was given its first performance posthumously by Ferdinand Hiller who conducted it in Cologne on 13 January 1862. It was a huge, and influential, success.
© David Gardner
- Berlioz
Programme note
Hector Berlioz (1803-1869)
La Mort de Cléopâtre (1849)Although the Prix de Rome was something that every young French composer seriously coveted - for the prestige, the money and the privilege of two years residence at the Villa Medici in Rome - very few of the winning entries have become part of the standard repertoire. This is not so much because the outstanding students of their day like Charles Gounod, Georges Bizet and Jules Massenet were incapable of producing anything of lasting interest as because the rules of the competition and the conservatism of the jurors virtually precluded any display of originality or individuality.
Berlioz went in for the Prix de Rome four times in four successive years and finally won it in 1830 with La Mort de Sardanaple, which was not the best of his Prix de Rome cantatas but the most obedient. The most inspired of the four is La Mort de Cléopâtre, which so offended the jury in 1829 that rather than give their approval to such an unruly score they chose not to award a first prize at all that year. Up to a point, one can sympathise with those "grave and reverend signors" who, listening to the piano transcription (as the rules required) of an essentially orchestral conception and hearing harmonic transgressions not even the dreaded Beethoven would have perpetrated, must have been severely baffled by the work.
Interestingly, however, the notoriously severe Director of the Paris Conservatoire, Luigi Cherubini, was one of the small minority who voted for it. As a not unprogressive opera composer himself, he no doubt had to acknowledge the dramatic intensity in the swirling figuration and urgent syncopations of the instrumental introduction, the eloquence of Cleopatra's opening recitative and the pathos of the following near-aria. It is difficult to imagine, on the other hand what even the most liberal academic could have made of the central 'Méditation' (which was to be recycled in Lélio two years later) with its ominously strummed rhythms, its macabre trombone colours and its weird harmonic progressions. As for the naturalistic rather than conventionally emphatic ending - after the fatal snake-bite the music just dies away on an erratic and failing pulse - that demonstration of Berlioz's genius was the ultimate offence as far as most of the jurors were concerned.
© Gerald Larner
- Beethoven
Programme note
Ludwig van Beethoven (1770–1827)
Symphony No 6 in F, Op 68, 'Pastoral' (1807-08)Allegro ma non troppo - The awakening of happy feelings on arriving in the country
Andante molto moto - By the brook
Allegro - The joyful gathering of country folk
Allegro - Thunderstorm
Allegretto - Shepherds' thanksgiving after the stormComposers have been evoking nature in music as long as they have been writing it down — and probably well before that. Birds, storms, streams and sunrises are a common feature of many 18th-century works, most famously (now, at least) in Vivaldi’s Four Seasons. So this piece, written in 1807-08 looked back to a grand tradition, but at the same time was one of the most original and influential works of the 19th century. It is hard to imagine the nature pictures of Berlioz, Mendelssohn, Wagner, and Strauss without it.
The debate about how important it is too know the ‘story’ behind the music will never end. Beethoven himself was conflicted. This is the only one of his symphonies that follows an explicit program. "Pastoral Symphony, or Recollections of Country Life," he wrote at the head of the score, and each movement has its own tale to tell. Yet, in the sketches for the piece he wrote, "All painting in instrumental music is lost if it is pushed too far” and “Anyone with a notion of country life can discern for himself the composer’s intentions without many titles. . . . The whole will be recognized as a matter more of feeling than of painting in sounds." But it is hard not to think he is protesting too much. He clearly enjoyed imitating birdsong in the second movement (nightingale, cuckoo and quail). And his buffoonish village band is affectionately portrayed in the third movement: who knows which band inspired this hilarious vignette, or how much they drank before they played!
Tchaikovsky used to insist that Beethoven’s Fifth has just as obvious a story as the Pastoral though it is not put into words. Certainly, there are striking similarities between the two pieces. Both were first heard in the same enormously long concert in 1808. The audience who endured the many hours in a cold theatre could have been forgiven for believing Beethoven had created an altogether new form, so dramatically do these pieces differ from any symphony that they may have heard previously. Notably, both symphonies close with a linked sequence of movements, huge expanses of sound in which Beethoven explores startling transitions and expressive effects. He also asks for an unusually large orchestra in both symphonies, including trombones, piccolo and contrabassoon – none of which were standard for the time. Yet, in both pieces he holds these extra instruments in reserve until dramatic points late in the piece. The differences between the works are equally striking. The kinetic energy that crackles through the opening bars of the Fifth does not let up until the close; the question posed in its opening bars is not truly answered until the finale, some 20 minutes later. In the Sixth, by contrast, there is hardly a straight line. Harmony is soft, its arguments deceptively discursive. Beethoven dwells on picturesque details and allows lovely moments to flower, seemingly without concern for the overall picture. At least that is the illusion Beethoven creates. More than any other symphony of his, this offers repose.
© Svend Brown
- conductor
- mezzo-soprano
Robin Ticciati directs the SCO and Scottish mezzo soprano Karen Cargill in a programme of music by Schumann, Berlioz and Beethoven.
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