Concerts & Tickets

Programme note

Ludwig van Beethoven 1770-1827

Piano Concerto No 2 in B flat major, Op 19 (1785-95)

Allegro con brio

Adagio

Finale: Molto allegro

Tradition declares Beethoven’s Second Piano Concerto to be in reality his first. In fact it is his only piano concerto to be correctly numbered. Though believed to date from around 1795, by which time he had left his native Bonn and settled in Vienna, it was probably sketched in his hometown ten years earlier. There it had been preceded in 1783 by an even more junior piano concerto, written in E flat major (the future key of the Emperor concerto) upon which no number has been bestowed, but which still receives an occasional performance, particularly in Germany.

The impressive concerto in C major, complete with trumpets and drums and long established as No 1, is in fact his third, just as his third is his fourth, and so on. Whether this evening’s work in B flat major, which we identify as No 2, really requires a number is disputable, since it is as much a piece of juvenilia as the rest of his early Bonn output. But it is keenly etched and full of invention brilliant enough to suggest that, had he never moved to Vienna, Beethoven would still have become a composer of consequence. Though it was not a work he claimed to be proud of, he was sufficiently interested in it to perform it in Prague in 1798 and to go on revising it up to 1801.

The start of the first movement, more lightly scored than that of the C major concerto, succinctly provides the feel of the music, for in the space of a couple of phrases it supplies a brisk orchestral call to attention and a graceful answer from the violins. When the soloist enters it is not with one of the themes already heard but with an entirely new one – an idea Beethoven appropriated from Mozart, whose concertos he revered. But the movement also points the way to Beethoven’s more audacious symphonic style, not least through its abrupt and surprising modulations. The forward-looking cadenza, which Beethoven added some years later, is even more surprising in attitude.

The Adagio, hailed by Beethoven’s pupil Czerny as a “dramatic vocal scene”, is broad and expressive, with a main theme played first by the strings before being taken up by the soloist, who then proceeds to a graceful tributary theme loaded with decorations. But the most striking moment is to come, when the piano breaks free from the orchestra to play a remarkable recitative-like passage in bare, single notes, marked con gran espressione. The orchestra steals back with atmospheric references to the main theme, and the movement ends quietly.

The finale is a spirited rondo, with a bumpy main theme bounced out by the soloist. An episode involving a cycle of broken octaves on the piano leads to a new, forward-looking, rather Schumannesque tune, and then to a grinding, syncopated passage taken through several minor keys. After a last return to the main theme, the concerto ends with a rippling decrescendo on the piano, followed by five affirmative bars for the orchestra.

© Conrad Wilson

Programme note

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

Allegro ma non troppo
Adagio
Rondo: Allegro

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

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

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

© Conrad Wilson

Programme note

Carl Maria von Weber (1786-1826)
Clarinet Concerto No 1 in F minor, Op 73 (1811)

Allegro
Adagio ma non troppo
Rondo: Allegretto

Like Mozart before him and Brahms after him, Weber loved the clarinet and wrote with maximum eloquence for what at the time was still a fairly novel single-reed member of the woodwind family. Numerous passages in his operas reveal his responsiveness to its sound, but his enthusiasm went further than that, as his two clarinet concertos, clarinet concertino, and sublime Mozart-inspired clarinet quintet all confirm.

As with Mozart, and indeed with Brahms, most of this music was written with one particular player in mind – not Mozart’s gloriously gifted Anton Stadler, who was by then on the brink of death, nor Brahms’ self-taught Richard Muhlfeld, who was not yet born, but Heinrich Baermann, famed as the ‘Rubini of the clarinet’ because he rivalled the great Italian tenor in richness, beauty, and phenomenal compass.

Though Baermann started as a bandsman in the Prussian Life Guards and was captured by Napoleon at the Battle of Jena, he survived to become the leading clarinettist of his day, hailed by Weber for his "welcome homogeneity" from top to bottom of the register. His abilities were exploited by this evening’s concerto, with its brilliant, agile top notes and sudden plunges into shadow. Weber, even in this early work, was a great and natural orchestrator, a quality he shared with Schubert, who lacked Weber’s professional experience as a conductor but possessed a similarly profound feeling for instrumental timbre.

Yet if either of these composers had been just an orchestral colourist, his music would not arrest us today the way it does. In Weber’s case, the individuality of his sound world makes him seem prophetic of Berlioz and Mahler, both of whom adored him. It is a sound which fits his ideas like a glove, as the sombre, jerky, minor-key restlessness of the first movement of this concerto instantly proclaims, before the clarinet makes its poignant entry. The slow movement has as its highpoint a passage for clarinet against an exquisite horn chorale (the horn being another of Weber’s special instruments) and the finale has a piquancy that never degenerates into mere fluency.

© Conrad Wilson