Programme Notes | 21/10/11
Cadogan Hall | 21 October 2011
The London Chamber Orchestra
Christopher Warren-Green | Akiko Ono
Finzi Romance
Mendelssohn Violin Concerto
Beethoven Symphony No. 4
Romance for String Orchestra, Op. 11
Gerald Raphael Finzi (1901-1956)
In a preface to a catalogue of his works, Gerard Finzi wrote in 1941, ‘The essence of art is order, completion and fulfillment. Something is created out of nothing, order out of chaos; and as we succeed in shaping our intractable material into coherence and form, a relief comes to mind (akin to the relief experienced at the remembrance of some forgotten thing) as a new accretion is added to that projection of oneself... It must be clear, particularly in the case of a slow worker, that only a long life can see the rounding-off and completion of this projection. Consequently, those few works of mine fit for publication can only be regarded as fragments of a building.’
Alas, a long life was not to be Gerard Finzi’s lot, and although he didn’t know this when he wrote these words, he suspected as much when, suffering from Hodgkin’s Disease, he finally published his Romance in 1951. This short piece had been written back in 1928, but his music even then was suffused with a sense of melancholy which can be traced back to losing his father, three of his brothers and his first music teacher when he was still very young. The piece also catches the flavour of the English countryside which Finzi much loved. In the words of Thomas Traherne, which Finzi set to music: ‘The green trees, when I saw them first, transported and ravished me, their sweetness and unusual beauty made my heart to leap, and almost mad with ecstasy, they were such strange and wonderful things.’
© Rupert Merson
Violin Concerto in E minor, Op. 64
(Jakob Ludwig) Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy (1809-1847)
I Allegro molto appassionato –
II Andante
III Allegretto non troppo – Allegro molto vivace
Mendelssohn’s prodigious talent as a youth, combined with the vernal freshness of his most famous music, can conspire to suggest that music simply flowed from him, barely impeded by pen and paper. The Violin Concerto however, took a full six years to write and was completed only three years before his death. It is fully the work of a man who had been composing for 30 years, its every bar submitted to revision and reconsideration. Mendelssohn had known its dedicatee and first performer, Ferdinand David, as a friend since boyhood days, and David was present at the composer’s deathbed.
This was David’s concerto from the outset, when Mendelssohn first mooted the idea to him in 1838. Their many letters document the progress of the concerto, with the violinist giving all kinds of technical advice and the composer politely heeding him while moulding it according to his own lights. Such care must be one reason why the concerto is as popular with violinists as it is with listeners, for it is full of bravura writing that is gratifying but not absurdly difficult to master and impressive to hear, but also musically strong, without virtuoso filler.
Composers, too, have been nourished by it. Sibelius and Tchaikovsky evidently took note of the extraordinary opening. In place of a grand orchestral statement, the soloist enters with the main theme over a quiet string background, as if the music had always been there. They also followed Mendelssohn’s lead in writing the cadenza into the body of the first movement; no soloist’s impromptu musings could rival the Bachian simplicity of the cadenza itself, or the stroke of genius to let the main theme slide back in before it is finished – a moment Ravel especially prized.
All three movements are linked together. Mendelssohn sought to discourage both the flashy approach to performing concertos, as though they were vehicles for the soloist’s ego, and the applause between movements that often resulted. Thus at the end of the first movement, a bassoon note is held over, the texture expands again, and over a gently pulsing string pedal the violin enters with the main theme. This is a song without words after the manner of his popular piano pieces, in a three-part form. Typical of the orchestral detail is the crisis point of the agitated middle section: underneath the soloist’s double-stopping and its dissonant accompaniment is a quite separate line of musical dialogue on pizzicato strings and horns that carries its own expressive charge.
A recitative for the soloist is derived from the stormy centre of the slow movement, brings a reminder of the first movement, and finally anticipates a central motif of the last: the concerto, digested. A brass fanfare then sets the mood of the exuberant finale, which proceeds in Mendelssohn’s subtle and unstoppable scherzo style, perfected in the Octet and music for A Midsummer Night’s Dream from three decades earlier.
Symphony No. 4 in B flat major, Op. 60
Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827)
I Adagio – Allegro vivace
II Adagio
III Menuetto: Vivace – Trio
IV Allegro ma non troppo
Beethoven was hard at work on what we now know as the Fifth Symphony when a friend of his patron, Prince Lichnowsky, heard the Second and asked him for another. With 500 florins to encourage him, Beethoven changed tack – though not entirely, for fragments of the Fifth’s DNA appear in the Fourth as they do the Sixth, which Beethoven then wrote while completing the Fifth. The descending thirds of the opening seem to grope towards a key centre as the opening of the First Symphony did, but their shape (in abstract) is identical to the opening of the Fifth.
And just as he is the first great composer to liberate the basses from their literally supporting role in a musical argument, in both the Fourth and the Fifth he reimagines the drums as an agent of change rather than reinforcement. In the gloom of the Fifth’s scherzo they find the C major which irresistibly propels us towards the finale; in the first movement of the Fourth, it is a lone but confident assertion of B flat that leads the development away from distant harmonic peregrinations and back to the home key. Then remember that the drum-led Violin Concerto was the next orchestral work after the Fourth.
But ask bassoonists about the Fourth and they too may wryly claim it as ‘their’ symphony too. When the bassoon articulates the little rocking figure that grounds the Adagio (and animates its contrasting passages when played upside-down), it prompts a clarinet reply, merely a descending, four-note scale, elevated by its colouring and context into a wonder of suspended beauty at the heart of a long and soulful movement. But it’s the finale where the bassoonist really earns his fee, especially when taken anywhere near Beethoven’s precipitate metronome mark.
Still others have claimed it as Beethoven’s ‘Upbeat’ symphony – in both senses of the word. To deal with its strictly musical sense first, the long, indeterminate wind chord proves to be one outsize upbeat to a whole series of them, culminating in grand chords that themselves function as launch-pads to spring into the main allegro. The sense of continuity and of becoming in the Fourth is very strong, which is why its points of arrival – the timpani roll mentioned earlier, the scherzo’s mysteriously emphatic close, the finale’s race to the finish line – are so devastatingly effective. The upward rush at the start of the Scherzo is really an involved upbeat to the chains of dialogue between string and wind choirs, and Beethoven’s trick of halting the momentum of the finale is even more elaborately staged than in the First and Second symphonies. It’s an old joke of Haydn’s, told with a new vigour that entirely belies the old reputation of the Fourth as necessarily more graceful or feminine than the heroic statements of the Third and Fifth.
© Peter Quantrill