Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra Programme Notes Online

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1 Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra Programme Notes Online Classic FM Series Fingal s Cave Thursday 26 October pm Friday 27 October pm FELIX MENDELSSOHN ( ) Overture The Hebrides (Fingal s Cave), Op.26 Young gentlemen of the 18th century travelled to Italy to absorb the beauties of classical Rome. But the age of Beethoven and Goethe had stronger tastes. And so, on 7 August 1829, we find the 20-year-old Felix Mendelssohn urging his reluctant friend Karl Klingemann onto the paddle-steamer that was to take them on a sightseeing trip to the Hebridean island of Staffa, and its great basalt sea-cave. Klingemann was right to worry; he was seasick. But if Mendelssohn suffered too, he certainly didn't mention it in his letters home: In order to make you understand how extraordinarily the Hebrides affected me, the following came into my head there. There follows, hastily scribbled but otherwise exactly as we hear it tonight, the opening of the Hebrides overture. He left it at that you will excuse a short note, as the best I have to tell you is described exactly in the above music. So there s little to add, except that Mendelssohn completed his Hebrides overture in Rome the following year an instant classic. Disappointingly, Mendelssohn was so taken with the Hebrides that he left us no musical souvenir of his visits to Liverpool and Flintshire some three weeks later. But any regrets are swept away when the six-note opening motif begins its wave-like swell,

2 and the soaring cello melody opens out its great vistas; the most atmospheric and original musical seascape ever painted. Gerald Larner 2017 JEAN SIBELIUS ( ) Violin Concerto in D minor, Op.7 Allegro moderato / Moderately fast Adagio di molto / Very slow Allegro, ma non tanto / Fast, but not too fast Dreamt I was twelve years old and a virtuoso. So Sibelius noted, wistfully, in his diary in To those of us who aren t geniuses, it may be hard to understand how a man with five magnificent symphonies, a growingly popular violin concerto and a sequence of superbly imaginative tone poems to his credit should feel in any way an artistic failure. But as that poignant little diary entry shows, Sibelius at fifty could still smart inwardly at the thought of what might have been. For there had been a time when a career as a violin virtuoso had been a real possibility. Sibelius s violin teacher at the Helsinki University, Mitrofan Vasiliev, had pronounced him a genius. Others were more cautious, but on the whole encouraging. But something seems to have gone wrong with Sibelius s confidence, and his technique suffered. Eventually came the moment of decision. He thought of renouncing music altogether - and living the life of an idiot, for which I m well qualified. But while he was able to give up the violin, the urge to compose was too strong. Sibelius bowed to what he believed to be the ruling of Fate he was to be a composer, not a violinist - but not without lasting regret. Then, at the turn of the century, Sibelius met the man who was to become one of his closest and most influential friends, Axel Carpelan. Carpelan was bursting with ideas: Sibelius should go

3 to Italy for inspiration, he should write another symphony, music for Shakespeare s plays, a violin concerto... Sibelius did all these things; but one can imagine how mixed his feelings must have been when he came to tackle the Concerto project. It may be significant, but the time immediately before and during Sibelius s work on the Violin Concerto was marked by one of his worst periods of alcoholism. His heroically patient wife Aino frequently went out to search Helsinki s fashionable clubs, bars and restaurants for him, hoping against hope that he might just sober up enough to complete the work. The slow movement of the Concerto was apparently sketched out during a colossal threeday hangover. Sibelius s brother, Christian (a clinical psychiatrist), begged him to stop. But Sibelius replied that he was just too weak. When I am standing in front of a grand orchestra and have drunk a half-bottle of champagne, then I conduct like a young god. Otherwise I am nervous and tremble, feel unsure of myself, and then everything is lost. The same is true of my visits to the bank manager. Given all this, it is surprising how little evidence there is of weakness either intellectually or spiritually in the Violin Concerto. True, we are hearing a revised version, made the year after the work s premiere, in which the original score was cut and the violin part somewhat simplified. And yet nowhere is this the kind of music one would describe as self-indulgent or looselimbed. The violin writing is masterly - an indication of how thoroughly Sibelius understood his instrument. Some of it is ferociously difficult even in the simplified revised version but on the whole it presents the kind of challenges that excite rather than intimidate virtuosos. Still, there are moments which can bring the most expert player out in a cold sweat and they re not always the passages that sound the most difficult to the audience. After the first big climax in the slow movement, there s a sudden hush from the orchestra, while the soloist, still forte, plays two rhythms simultaneously: a syncopated high figure accompanied by crotchet triplets. It s hard enough on a keyboard,

4 with two hands; with just one bow, four fingers and four strings it s very nearly impossible. The idea of mastery extends to every dimension of the Violin Concerto. Construction is taut, emotions are powerful but not uncontrolled, the long lyrical paragraphs (like the floating, soaring violin line at the very beginning) are always beautifully shaped they never sprawl. There are moments, such as the impassioned second theme of the first movement, or virtually the whole of the central Adagio di molto, where the mood is achingly nostalgic, even pained. But the hand of Sibelius the great symphonist, the master of organic logic, is always in evidence. And after the emotionally probing first and second movements comes an energetic, resolute finale, with a theme the musician and writer Donald Tovey whimsically dubbed a polonaise for polar bears. The stern, stormy but unambiguously major-key ending suggests inner darkness confronted and defied the composer very much the captain of his soul. In terms of Sibelius s own life at the time, this may have been wish-fulfilment; but as art it s resoundingly convincing. Stephen Johnson 2017 JOHANNES BRAHMS ( ) Symphony No.4 in E minor, Op.98 Allegro non troppo / Fast, but not too fast Andante moderato / At a moderate walking pace Allegro giocoso / Fast, playful Allegro energico e passionato / Fast, with energy and passion The last, and by common consent the greatest, of Brahms four symphonies was born of his love for what today we would call early music. Over the years he developed a keen interest not just in the language of the Viennese classics that were his immediate heritage Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven and Schubert. His concerns went back further, to baroque composers such as Bach, Handel,

5 Schütz and Gabrieli, and Renaissance figures including Palestrina and Lassus. It may even be that he felt more at ease with the remoter past, conscious as he was of being dogged by Beethoven s footsteps (as he put it), and a sense of obligation to uphold the Viennese tradition, an obligation that was partly selfimposed and partly the result of his colleagues expectations. What he achieved in the Fourth Symphony was a remarkable blend of late 19th-century romantic expression, Viennese classical symphonic thinking, and techniques derived from his study of earlier music. He composed the symphony between 1884 and Even musicians who had been his staunchest supporters were puzzled by their first encounter with the work, a number of them finding it unapproachably austere. Hearing Brahms and his friend the composer and pianist Ignaz Brüll play through a version for two pianos, the critic Eduard Hanslick commented after the first movement: All through I felt as though I was being thrashed by two terribly clever men. The writer Max Kalbeck, whose fourvolume biography of the composer was published between 1904 and 1914, advised Brahms to discard the third movement and publish the finale as a separate piece, replacing them with two new movements. Brahms stood by what he had written, and it was not long before the symphony s qualities began to be recognised. First movement The first movement sets out with a quietly insistent sense of purpose. The opening theme, with its pairs of notes alternately falling and rising, sets up a pattern of intervals that subtly underpins all four movements. The music takes on a more strenuous quality with a new fanfare-like motif in the woodwind. This both heralds an expansive lyrical theme for the cellos, and gives rise to another new idea, on woodwind and horns and punctuated by a mysterious rising and falling figure for the strings. Steadily, almost imperceptibly, the music gathers momentum until, by the end, it has become one of Brahms most stormily passionate symphonic movements.

6 Second movement The tension between these two expressive poles the lyrical and the turbulent continues through the rest of the symphony. The slow movement opens with a quietly mysterious horn-call, joined by woodwind. Throughout, there is a pull between an impersonal aloofness and the symphony s most most warmly expressive music, but always with the steady tread of the opening underpinning everything. Third movement The Fourth is the only one of Brahms symphonies to include a quick scherzo, where the first three all have a moderately-paced intermezzo. It was the last of the movements to be written, no doubt because Brahms needed to complete the finale before he could assess what kind of piece should precede it. Its fierce energy appears to release the tensions built up during the first two movements, but also paves the way for the defiant, stoical vigour of the finale. In one of his rare departures from the Beethoven- Schubert orchestra, Brahms adds piccolo, contrabassoon and triangle to the scoring, giving both a depth and a brightness to the sound that underlines the movement s ambiguous function. Fourth movement The finale is the culmination not just of the symphony but of Brahms engagement with the music of the distant past. He does something no other composer of the time would have dreamed of doing, taking the baroque form of the passacaglia a set of continuous variations over a repeating short phrase and using it to build a movement that successfully brings the musical processes of the symphony to a head. He took his theme from the final chorus of Bach s Cantata No.150, Nach dir, Herr, verlanget mich (I long for you, Lord), expanding its last bar into four by stretching the rhythm and adding a chromatic extra note. We hear it first as the upper part of the opening wind and brass phrase. In the 30 variations that follow, Brahms varies its position in the texture, sometimes in the bass, sometimes in an inner part,

7 sometimes little more than a background presence. The variations are grouped into three main sections, with Brahms at pains to emphasise coherence and continuity from one variation to the next, rather than contrast. The first eleven variations are quick. The ninth is the climax of this section, after which the music winds down until, in variation 12 we reach the plaintive flute solo that begins the quiet central episode. Three more slow variations follow, but with variation 16 the music suddenly regains its energy, recalling the opening of the movement to launch a final section of accumulating force and density. As the sequence of variations comes to an end the tempo increases further, and the music drives headlong towards the grim elation of its final bars. Mike Wheeler 2017