Programme Notes | 06/10/11

The London Chamber Orchestra
Christopher Warren-Green | Lucas & Arthur Jussen

Mozart Concerto in E flat for two pianos K365
Poulenc Concerto for two pianos in D minor
Haydn Symphony No. 104 in D, 'London'

Concerto in E flat for two pianos K365
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756-1791)

Allegro
Andante
Rondeau: Allegro

How could so warm and often gentle a piece of music-making have got Mozart into trouble? He worked no mischief or Masonic gamesmanship into this unusual concerto – but then, he tended to take the actual process of composition intensely seriously, and leave the fun for the rest of his life – but it’s precisely the comfortable, humanist glow of instrumental colour that appears to have annoyed his employer Count Hieronymus von Colloredo, the last Prince-Bishop of Salzburg, to whom Mozart was contracted to supply a steady stream of church music. Colloredo didn’t take exception to this concerto in particular, but the supply of Masses and motets had been drying up for some years while Mozart was increasingly diverting his energies to more bountiful and secular (and personally stimulating) streams of income such as concert-touring and indeed concert music.

Dating from early 1779, the concerto is the last such he composed before finally being given the boot by Colloredo and moving to Vienna, where he would find life more exciting but scarcely easier even for a genius of his many and acknowledged talents. He probably wrote it with himself and his sister Nannerl in mind, and then added parts for clarinets, trumpets and timpani, when he came to play the concerto in Vienna in 1781 and 1782 with a student, Josepha Barbara Auernhammer.

The 22-year-old Auernhammer was, according to her 25-year-old teacher, fat, sweaty and ‘a fright, though she plays enchantingly’ – and here’s a guide to all pianists who face his music – ‘but in cantabile playing she does not have the real delicate singing style. She clips everything.’ So, no typewriters allowed, then or now. It should be said that although Josepha fell in love with Mozart during their daily lessons, and indeed ‘put out’ to his considerable distate, she appears to have been admirably self-possessed, confessing to him that ‘I am no beauty – au contraire, I am ugly. I have no desire to marry some [rich] chancery official and I have no chance of getting anyone else. So I prefer to remain as I am and live by my talent.’ She did get someone else, 15 years later, one Bösenhönig, and did indeed make a career as a performer, composer and teacher.

Cantabile style is all the more to be prized when two or more pianos are gathered together; Mozart placed great store by quiet hands and good damping on the hammers. His writing for the two solo parts weaves one around the other and only rarely brings them together. The conversation is conducted here between two kindred spirits – brother and sister to each other, you might say, if you enjoyed (as Wolfgang and Nannerl did) a sibling relationship without fractiousness. The keynote is warmth, only embraced the more tenderly after clouds pass over the development episode of the opening Allegro and the central section of the slow movement, before being entirely banished from the frisky finale.

© Peter Quantrill

Concerto D minor for Two Pianos
Francis Jean Marcel Poulenc (1899 - 1963)

I Allegro ma no troppo
II Larghetto
III Allegro molto

In a story that says much about the conflicting forces of twentieth century culture, Maurice Ravel refused George Gershwin’s request for lessons when he learned how much Gershwin earned from his music already, arguing that perhaps it should be Gershwin giving the lessons. 

Francis Poulenc took lessons from neither Ravel nor Gershwin, yet both can be heard in his own music  – as can the music of Stravinsky, Mozart, Bach, Chabrier (about whom Poulenc wrote a book), Satie and Falla (the last two of whom Poulenc met as a young man) and many other seemingly irreconcilable ingredients.  And Poulenc’s musical imagination wasn’t just sparked by the Western classical tradition either: Poulenc also brings to the serious concert hall the music of the jazz hall and the cinema – not just the art films of the self-consciously modernist, but the music of slap-stick comedy and car chases.  Poulenc he also brings in influences from East Asia.  So much of his music is a tissue of influences that some have worried there is little room left for his own.

Poulenc’s eclectic range of reference was perhaps seeded in his personal biography.  The son of a successful and very wealthy industrialist father and an amateur pianist mother, Poulenc lived through the darkest years of the twentieth century, but was very much a darling of the best Parisian social circles.  His early music reflects both the exuberance of the jazz age that followed the First World War, and his membership of Les Six, an informal group of Montparnasse-based composers in playful reaction against both the seemingly all-pervasive influence of Wagner and against impressionism.  Yet his later music reflects his increasing interest in the Catholic church which was serious enough for him to go on pilgrimage. 

Poulenc’s concerto for two pianos was commissioned by Princess ‘Winnie’ de Polignac, American Singer sewing machine heiress and socialite, in unconventional marriage with a French aristocrat and amateur composer.  It was first performed in 1932, the darkest year of the Great Depression and the year before Hitler took power in Germany, and the opening of the first movement is thus perhaps unsurprisingly serious and nervous.  But suggestions of serious sonata form give way to a simpler structure and lighter tones and influences.  The movement concludes with pages that sum up the work as a whole: suddenly sombre strains from the cellos are pulled up short by flippant clacks from the percussion section which in turn introduce the serene sound of the Bali gamelan.  Which matters more, the beauty or the humour, the seriousness or the irreverence?  Is this synthesis or potpourri?

In the slow second movement, as Poulenc himself confessed, "I permitted myself, for the first theme, to return to Mozart, because I have a fondness for the melodic line and I prefer Mozart to all other musicians."  But the movement’s central section soon takes a turn for the richly romantic.  The second movement, like the first, stops rather than concludes, and the third movement takes us back to the nervous, manic, energy of the first movement, but the brass and woodwind, which often with the help of the soloists push the strings into the background, remind us comfortingly of the world of jazz band and cinema. 

When the third movement also stops suddenly the listener is left with the first movement’s questions still unanswered.  Some listeners have always argued that Poulenc is just having a bit of fun with his audiences; others hear in Poulenc’s attempt to have his cake and eat it (perhaps seasoned with potpourri) one of the more successful artistic attempts to catch the complexities of the twentieth century and the cultural and historical forces that fed it.

© Rupert Merson

Symphony No.104 in D, ‘London’
Joseph Haydn (1732-1809)

I Adagio – Allegro
II Andante
III Menuetto: Allegro – Trio
IV Finale: Allegro spiritoso

Only five years before the public triumph of this, last symphony of Haydn’s, its composer had still been living as a musical artisan in the back end of the Austro-Hungarian empire. His music had travelled Europe; Haydn had stayed where he was. All that changed on the death in September 1790 of his patron, Prince Nikolaus of Esterhazy. Haydn was pensioned off and the impresario Johann Salomon sensed an opening that would in time seal his own place in history. Within three months Haydn was lured to London, where he became toast of the town. On his first visit he wrote six ‘London’ symphonies; when he returned three years later he produced another six, all of them acclaimed and handsomely rewarded. This last of them brings down the curtain on the first and for some the greatest symphonic career of them all.

The first movement shows just how Haydn could go to the well so often and never come back empty. Its slow introduction has a broad and military aspect to it that Haydn noted the English loved so well; but it is not without an operatic degree of tension. The main allegro makes do with one theme where those who came after him used two as a minimum. Yet there is no lack of contrast. The central development section builds to a crisis point by focusing on the four repeated notes at the start of the main theme.

The slow movement’s main theme is placid enough, but its pairs of descending notes are not so far from the pathos of Mozart’s late G minor symphony. The admiration Haydn felt for his young friend, by now dead for four years, can also be heard in the wind writing and the subsequent dramatic interruption. This ‘interruption’ ceases just as abruptly as it started, and the rest of the movement moves between the two expressive worlds.

The bizarre accents and sudden cliff-hangers of the menuet and the graceful counterpoint of the trio make play with the same contrast, and the stage would seem to be set for a grand finale. Yet nothing is more characteristic of Haydn than his subversion of expectation and convention. What he gives us instead is a joyous dash to the finish with the common touch: a drone in the bass and a tune taken from a Croatian folksong. Audiences of the time thought they could hear London street-cries, which must have pleased Haydn no end. Times have changed. It’s even harder for a composer to make a living composing serious music for London audiences than it is to hear a fish-seller shout ‘Live Cod’ on a street corner.

© Peter Quantrill