Stockport Symphony Orchestra  March 2019: Stockport International Young Musicians' Competition Final

 

Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky (1840-1893): Piano Concerto No. 1 in B-flat minor, Op. 23 (1874-75; revised 1879 and 1888)

 

1. Allegro non troppo e molto maestoso – Allegro con spirito

2. Andantino semplice – Prestissimo – Tempo I

3. Allegro con fuoco – Molto meno mosso – Allegro vivo

 

In a cold classroom of the Moscow Conservatory on Christmas Eve 1874, the hypersensitive, insecure young Tchaikovsky nervously played his new piano concerto to the eminent pianist Nikolai Rubinstein, the concerto's intended dedicatee and soloist. Writing later to his confidante Nadezhda von Meck, Tchaikovsky recalled the horror of his experience:

 

“I played the first movement. Not a single word, not a single remark! If you knew how stupid and intolerable is the situation of a man who cooks and sets before a friend a meal, which he proceeds to eat in silence!... Then a torrent poured from [Rubinstein's] mouth... my concerto was worthless and unplayable...bad, vulgar...only two or three pages were worth preserving; the rest must be thrown away...I was not only astounded but outraged by the whole scene. I am no longer a boy trying his hand at composition, and I no longer need lessons from anyone...”

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Though at first Tchaikovsky vowed to make none of the changes recommended by Rubinstein, he soon relented and made major revisions. Among the biggest was to obliterate the name of the original dedicatee and instead send the score to Hans von Bülow, who was far more welcoming of it. Von Bülow premiered the concerto on tour in Boston, where it achieved such success that he played it in 139 of his 172 programmes that season. Although one of Rubinstein's chief complaints about the work persists to this day – that it is close to unplayably difficult – he and Tchaikovsky resolved their differences and went on to enjoy a successful partnership as composer and conductor.

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The biggest enigma of the concerto is its opening theme, that famously stirring D-flat major melody above ringing piano chords which transpires to be little more than a fleeting introduction to the piece. This memorable theme appears twice, but then never again, in what seems a startlingly rash throwing away of a big tune. Some have suggested that small details of this introductory passage reappear in the rest of the concerto, tying it neatly together, but these connections are so microscopically subtle as to stretch credulity. The music instead plunges into a brisk minor key dance in an elaboration on a folktune Tchaikovsky heard sung by blind beggars near Kiev. This is batted between soloist and woodwinds before the clarinet introduces a more introspectively tuneful theme, and the strings an optimistically rising theme. Each idea is worked out in the stormy development before the movement eventually finds an uneasily restless coda which seems to offer compromise rather than any convincing resolution.

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The slow movement is a reconciliatory lullaby, first played by a flute and then by the pianist, before being passed around the orchestra with the soloist adding decorative effects to the moonlit scene. A skittishly quick central passage sees the piano play a secondary (but virtuosically challenging) role to the strings, but it is the lullaby which has the last word. A timpani thunderbolt announces the finale, which contrasts another Ukrainian folktune against a soaring violin melody. The former rollicks along boisterously, bouncing between orchestra and soloist, before momentum starts to build inexorably towards a last, noble statement of the violin theme. The coda breathlessly remembers the Ukrainian theme in a flurry of exuberance.

 

Previous Stockport performances: Alexandra Dariescu (2015), Ian Buckle (2008, 2000), Martin Roscoe (1993), Evadne Hinge (1985) and Peter Donohoe (1981) 

 

Béla Bartók (1881-1945) – Viola Concerto (1945)

 

1. Moderato –

2. Adagio religioso – Allegretto –

3. Allegro vivace

 

Bartók's concerto for viola sits in the mysterious category of works left unfinished at their creator's death. Some such works, notably the final symphonies of Elgar or Mahler, have come into popular performance in versions edited and completed by musicologists. Others, like Bruckner's ninth, have seen so many new editions hailed by enthusiastic publishers as the authoritative edition that it is only the incomplete original which is regularly played. When Bartók died of acute leukaemia in New York in 1945, he left sketches for both the Viola Concerto and a third piano concerto incomplete by his deathbed.

 

The concerto had been commissioned by the celebrated Glaswegian violist William Primrose the previous year. Though initially skeptical of his own abilities to write for the instrument, Bartók set to work enthusiastically in the Autumn from his house near Lake Saranac. His health deteriorated rapidly, though. While he managed to complete almost all of the third piano concerto, the viola concerto was left in sketch form. In his last days, the composer discussed these sketches with his friend and student Tibor Serly. The pair had first met when Serly was a viola student at the Budapest Academy of Music, and must have been a welcome friendly face when Bartók fled Hungary in 1940. Serly's task in completing the concerto was a difficult one. The sketches were fragmented and untidy, and with almost no hint as to the intended instrumentation, meaning that a significant amount of the 'completed' concerto was actually his own work. Several other performing editions have been prepared, including that by the composer's son, Peter, and the musicologist Nelson Dellamaggiore. Lively debate rages as to the relative merits of the various editions; Dellamaggiore's, which we hear tonight, is on the whole more faithful to Bartók's original viola part, and more fully scored for the rest of the orchestra.

 

The concerto's three movements run together into an unbroken whole, the first beginning with an airy statement of a wandering theme accompanied by pizzicato low strings and timpani. The viola elaborates on the initial ideas, ornamented with flashes of woodwind colour, developing them in a structure not far off the old classical forms of Mozart and Beethoven. Hints of warmth emerge as the viola transiently accompanies the string section and wind soloists. A passage for mostly unaccompanied soloist gives way to the shorter and more lyrical slow movement. Here, an attractively reverential theme is delicately stated either side of an agitated central passage. In the brief finale, folk dances are thrown around the stage, passed between soloist and orchestra with fierce energy. A drone-like accompaniment appears frequently, hinting at quaintly bucolic bagpipes, and amid a brief flurry of activity, the movement ends abruptly, perhaps betraying the incompleteness of the concerto at its creator's death.

 

 Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756-1791) – Oboe Concerto K. 314 (1777)

 

1. Allegro aperto

2. Adagio ma non troppo

3. Rondo: allegretto

 

When the young Italian oboist Giuseppe Ferlendis joined the Archbishop's orchestra in Salzburg in 1777, he was instantly befriended by the twenty one year old Mozart. Weeks later, Wolfgang wrote an oboe concerto for his new friend. Later the same year, Mozart began a lengthy tour with his mother, and the new concerto found particular success in Mannheim. Here, the local oboist Friedrich Ramm immediately made the work his party piece, giving Mozart cause to write snippily about it rapidly becoming a Cheval de betaille.

 

Mozart returned home to Salzburg two years later without his mother, following her death in Paris, and without a job. From that point, there is barely any record of the oboe concerto, and for the next 137 years, it seems to have disappeared. Then in 1920, a Salzburg archivist unexpectedly came across a set of orchestral parts for a piece which seemed almost identical to the popular piece known as Mozart's Flute Concerto No. 2. The mystery unravelled: in dire need of quick cash, Mozart had rehashed his oboe concerto into a flute concerto after a commission for the latter from Ferdinand de Jean, a surgeon and amateur flautist with Dutch East India Company, in the late 1770s.

 

The Allegro aperto marking of the first movement reflects its open, bold outlook, strikingly aria-like in its melodies and messa di voce figures (a sustained high notes above string theme). The slow movement is similarly songful, though in an introverted manner which is entirely the opposite of the muscular vigour of the first movement. Though the oboe is rarely far from the limelight, there is an attractive dialogue between strings and soloist near the end of the movement, followed by an extended cadenza for the latter. The finale is even more operatic than the preceding two movements, so much so that Mozart later recycled it into an aria ('Welche Wonne, welche Lust') in his opera The Abduction from the Seraglio, in which Blonde sings triumphantly of her imminent rescue from Selim's harem. It is music of striking simplicity, its refrain returning to a chuckling motif with an optimistically rising scale.

 

Previous Stockport performances: Simon Beesley (2001)

 

Alexander Borodin (1833-1887) – Prince Igor: Overture (1887)

 

Like Bartók's concerto for viola, Borodin's large-scale opera Prince Igor was left unfinished when he died, with his friends Glazunov and Rimsky-Korsakov completing it for first performance in 1890. Based on the Ancient Russian folklore epic The Lay of Igor's Host, Borodin spent his last 18 years working on this magnum opus, with compositional aspirations frequently dashed by duties in his role as chemist in the Medical-Surgical Academy of St Petersburg. It remains best known for its Overture and the Polovtsian Dances. The Overture was among the very last music he composed, though how much of it is his own work is a matter of robust debate: having only played it on the piano to his friends rather than committed it to paper, the young Glazunov claimed to have reproduced it purely from memory.

 

The Overture begins with a solemn introduction, disturbed by horn and trumpet calls ricocheting around the stage. A swashbuckling Allegro follows, with prominent clarinet solos evoking the famous Polovtsian Dances. A lusciously soaring violin theme makes a brief appearance, before all three combine to drive the music to an excitable conclusion.