Stockport Symphony Orchestra 23 February 2019
Johannes Brahms (1833-1897) – Hungarian Dance No. 5 in G minor (1869)
As a young boy, Brahms was frequently exposed to the readily hummable folk tunes of Hungarian travellers as they passed through Hamburg on the way to America, escaping revolution and the overthrow of the Hapsburgs. For many years, he would entertain friends privately with a selection of 'Hungarian Dances', as he described them, but only came to publish them some years later. They were originally scored for piano duet, a popular and reproducible format in an era before recordings were available, and later worked out for orchestra. The concept of orchestrating music intended for a handful of street musicians in a cafe must have raised eyebrows among Hungarians, as would the 'composer's' boldness in profiting handsomely from the music. Almost none of the dances are entirely original compositions, with most being traceable to folk or cafe music, so one might well question Brahms' integrity in appropriating and achieving rapid financial success from the music of refugees. The fifth dance of the twenty-one is unmistakeably based upon the czardas Bártfai emlék by the Hungarian composer Béla Kéler, as a quick YouTube search will confirm. However dubious the context seems through a 21st century lens, though, this is infectiously danceable music of enormous spirit and energy.
Erich Korngold (1897-1957) – Violin Concerto in D major, Op. 35 (1945)
1. Moderato nobile
2. Romanze
3. Allegro assai vivace
Perhaps thanks to his status as son of the editor of the Neue Freie Presse in Vienna, Erich Korngold enjoyed great success in his composing career even as a boy. Born in Brno and later mentored by no less than Gustav Mahler, the young Korngold developed a musical voice which looked firmly over his shoulder. His writing vividly echoes the sounds of Mahler and Strauss in fin-de-siècle Vienna, but with the lightness necessitated by the film studio. Although his early output largely revolved around opera, he came to see film music as the natural successor to the genre, and today is more readily associated with music for the screen. Escaping dark political developments in Europe, he first wrote for Hollywood in 1934, and signed an exclusive contract with Warner Bros the following year, going on to win Oscars for his scores to Anthony Adverse (1936) and Robin Hood (1938).
This success came at the price of his credentials in 'serious music', however, and by the end of the war, Korngold was ready to put the financial rewards of film music to one side. In writing his Violin Concerto he borrowed significantly from his own film scores (an intriguing mirror image of the likes of John Williams, who borrows heavily from the classical repertoire) and dedicated the finished product to Mahler's widow, Alma. The New York Times may have sneered at the 'Hollywood Concerto', but it has found an established place in the repertoire and remains popular today.
The concerto bears the unmistakeable technicolour sounds and swashbuckling themes of the world of film music. Unusually, the soloist is the first to speak, in a rapidly rising theme taken from the film Another Dawn (1937). There is more than a hint of Star Trek in its beguiling melodic line and adventurous aspirations. The movement's second theme is the love theme from the 1939 history-drama Juarez. Both themes are stripped back and reimagined rather than merely being pasted into the concerto, frequently keeping the soloist occupied in the violin's more stratospheric ranges, and the intensity steadily blooms into an agitated cadenza. The movement ends in a frenzy of dazzling violin virtuosity.
The slow movement takes inspiration for its main theme from the successful score to Anthony Adverse, and turns immediately away from the unsettled turbulence of the first. Above a luscious carpet of strings and colourful 4-mallet chords for vibraphone (a relatively new instrument in the 1940s), the soloist plays a theme of deeply affecting beauty. It is difficult not to imagine a film scene accompanying such showily eloquent music, but the finale is even more graphic in its rambunctious capers and derring-do. The folksy theme and variations, based on music for The Prince and the Pauper (1937), form an ever more virtuosic game of cat-and-mouse between orchestra and soloist, before the music romps to a thrilling conclusion.
Sergei Rachmaninov (1873-1943) – Symphony No. 2 in E minor, Op. 27 (1906-08)
1. Largo – Allergro moderato
2. Allergo molto
3. Adagio
4. Allegro vivace
When Igor Stravinsky found Sergei Rachmaninov as his neighbour in Beverley Hills, his assessment of his compatriot was as a ‘Six-and-a-half foot scowl’. Rachmaninov's dangerous tendencies towards anxiety and crippling self-doubt are usually traced to the calamitous premiere of his first symphony, at which he was found hiding in a stairwell with his hands over his ears during the performance, conducted by an inebriated Glazunov. César Cui described the symphony as the musical equivalent of the seven plagues of Egypt, and Rachmaninov was widely ridiculed. He wrote nothing for the next three years, languishing in a black hole of depression and creative drought from which not even Leo Tolstoy could jump start him. It was only when the Parisian neurologist, Freud scholar and amateur violist Dr Nicolai Dahl took over his medical care that things began to improve. Under Dahl’s pioneering hypnosis treatment, Rachmaninov discovered a new creative voice and wrote his much-loved second piano concerto in his doctor’s honour.
The symphonic demons remained unbanished, though, and it was several years before the second symphony would be conceived. It was begun in Dresden in 1906 while lying low from the demands of a busy performing schedule in Russia, though the compositional process remained a tortuous one. Even after completion of the score, two years of obsessive revisions followed. Although the 1908 premiere in St Petersburg was a triumph, and despite it winning the Glinka prize of 1000 Rubles later the same year, Rachmaninov remained an anachronism, much like Korngold: an unfashionable throwback clinging to the decadence of the Romantic age, whose sentimental lyricism sounded naïvely quaint in comparison to Stravinsky's riot-inducing Rite of Sping of 1913. It became trendy to disparage Rachmaninov's music and prune it in concert so aggressively as to relieve it of any sense of structure. The composer's self-doubts persisted, and he reflected that in pursuing composition, conducting and piano playing, “I have chased three hares; can I be certain that I have captured one?”. While the success of the second symphony was adequate to convince the great Russian to stick with his favoured hare – composition – and write such masterpieces as The Isle of the Dead and the third Piano Concerto, he would not write another symphony until 1935.
The symphony is written in the rich colours and large scale of the late Romantic period, broadly following a programme of darkness to light over the course of an hour. The first movement's slow introduction is immediately bleak in its foreboding cello and bass statement and sighing theme for winds. The main body of the movement eventually gets under way with a restless, rising and falling violin melody. A brighter second theme follows, though there is little warmth to be found in the watery sunshine, and hints of the tragedy of the slow movement suggest that this diversion into the major key is wishful at best. The darkness becomes more pervasive in the development passage, until the storm burns itself out with cymbals and heavy brass. Another appearance for the optimistic second theme is even less convincing in the aftermath of this.
The Scherzo is a dashing exploration of the fate-ridden Dies Irae chant which had earlier been incorporated into the first symphony and second piano concerto. Again, a more lyrical theme offers a brief glimpse of redemption, but it is short-lived. At the centre of the movement, an agitated fugal passage skittishly flits past with the air of a toy soldier procession, but by the start of the famous Adagio, Rachmaninov's demons are in full view, and in need of something special to banish them. The longed-for redemption comes in the form of a soft, wandering theme for solo clarinet, extraordinarily expressive even by the composer's own standards in 'big tunes'. After much soul searching, and with a monumental sense of struggle, the music eventually works its way into an impassioned climax.
The finale seeks to affirm the consolation found in the slow movement, and bursts into life with a boystrous swagger. The dancing exuberance never establishes itself with any credible stability, though, attested by the wan smile of a more lyrical string theme and further restless searching. Eventually, a more resolute mood emerges, at first softly in the trombones amid the tumult of the dance, and ultimately in a golden peroration for full brass. The first symphony, that dark stairwell and ensuing years of psychological vulnerability seem forgotten, at least for a while.