Alderley Edge Symphony Orchestra 7 March 2020
Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky (1840 – 1893): Sleeping Beauty Suite, Opus 66a (1889)
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Introduction
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Adagio
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Pas de caractère
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Panorama
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Waltz
When Tchaikovsky was first approached for a new ballet in 1888 by the director of St Petersburg’s Imperial Theatres, the proposed story was Fouqué's Undine. Having endured disappointing responses to his Swan Lake (1877) and the fifth symphony (1888), the composer was in a fragile mindset. The storyline for the new ballet was soon switched to Charles Perrault’s La Belle au Bois Dormant, in the Brothers Grimm version. A healthy sprinkling of other Perrault characters from Mother Goose (1697) also appear in the ballet, including Puss in Boots, Little Red Riding Hood and Bluebeard. After working on the score with enormous enthusiasm and energy, Tchaikovsky was, for once, able to appreciate and take pride in his own work. The Tsar, present at the 1890 première in St Petersburg, damned it with the faint praise of “Very nice”, but public and critical reception soon established it as a much-loved favourite.
The idea of a concert suite of big numbers from the four-hour ballet occurred to Tchaikovsky himself shortly after its early success, though he could never quite decide on his preferred excerpts. The commonly performed suite was therefore arranged posthumously. We can at least be confident that the composer would not have grievances with such a ‘highlights package’ arrangement: he was clear that the ballet was more about its music than the story, noting that ‘Going to the Ballet for the plot is like going to the opera for the recitatives’.
The suite consists of five readily recognisable extracts from the ballet. The Introduction portrays the evil fairy Carabosse, who has cursed the infant Princess Aurora, and the benevolent Lilac Fairy, who softens the fatal curse into a century-long sleep. In the famous Rose Adagio, four princely suitors charm the Princess. The Pas de caractère depicts the Puss in Boots and White Cat, when they attend the royal wedding of Act 3. In the Panorama, the Lilac Fairy leads Prince Désiré through the forest to the somnolent Aurora, and the Waltz is taken from the birthday celebrations of Act 1.
Ludwig van Beethoven (1770 – 1827) - Piano Concerto No. 3 in C minor, Opus 37 (1800)
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Allegro con brio
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Largo
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Rondo. Allegro
Ludwig van Beethoven’s music remains some of the most influential art in any genre through history. In his 56 years, his greatest achievement was to raise the arts from a polite entertainment for the ruling classes to a universal endeavour relevant to all of humanity. The turning point in his career, when he grew from a merely excellent composer to perhaps the greatest ever, was his ‘Heligenstadt Testament’, in which he resolved to live on and continue writing for the sake of his art despite his encroaching deafness. This marked the end of his early period, and the beginning of his middle, or ‘heroic’ period, a phase which dragged music irretrievably into the Romantic Period. The third piano concerto sits at the very end of the early period, on the cusp of that great strophe between the classical worlds of Haydn and Mozart and the future.
C minor seems to have held a special place in Beethoven’s mind for the turbulent and the tragic, deploying it to devastating effect in the Eroica symphony’s slow movement, and also in the Pathétique sonata. Although he had gone to Vienna in 1792 to study with Haydn, his lessons with the grandmaster of the symphony were few and relatively fruitless. He was far more inspired by Mozart, lying in an unmarked grave, whose C minor Piano Concerto No. 24 seems to have been a clear inspiration for Beethoven’s concerto in the same key. On hearing the refrain of that Mozart concerto, he exclaimed to his friend Kramer that he would “Never be able to do anything like that!”, though he proved himself wrong in his own C minor concerto.
After completing the new concerto around 1800, the work lay unperformed until a benefit concert in 1803, when it was debuted alongside the second symphony and the oratorio Christ on the Mount of Olives. It is scored for an orchestra of classical proportions, though is the first known piano work to make use of the newly expanded piano keyboard, which until recently had been limited to five octaves. Despite its long incubation, wilfully or otherwise, Beethoven had neglected to write out most of the piano part, which he himself performed at the première. His page turner was most alarmed, recalling that ‘I saw almost nothing but empty pages; at the most, on one page or another a few Egyptian hieroglyphs wholly unintelligible to me’.
The first movement immediately sets out its main theme, in a hushed, terse setting for strings. The opening line ends in a knocking figure, which reappears frequently throughout the movement, and is softly echoed at its close by the timpani. There is a more lyrical second theme, in the relative major key, but as the movement pans out, it is clear that this is a fleeting reprieve from the irascible language of C minor.
The slow movement shows hints of the Romantic period, lying just around the corner. Opening in the disarmingly remote key of E major, its fresh, wandering melody is handled with exquisite delicacy by the soloist. The warm atmosphere is again cruelly dispelled, though, as the movement’s last note, a bright G-sharp, abruptly changes its spots into a dark A-flat, heralding a grim return to C minor for the finale. The last movement’s agitated main theme reappears with unforgiving regularity between brief glimpses of Oom-Pah jollity. Breeze and bluster seem to jostle for the prominence, though it is not until the concerto’s last minute that a suddenly whimsical coda appears. Is this a convincing resolution or a contrived deus ex machina throwaway? Beethoven’s genius is that it can be either.
Modest Mussorgsky (1839 – 1881), arr. Maurice Ravel (1875 – 1937) – Pictures at an Exhibition (1874, orchestrated by Ravel 1922)
Promenade
1. Gnomus
Promenade
2. Il vecchio castello (The old castle)
Promenade
3. Tuileries (Children's quarrel after games)
4. Bydło (Cattle)
Promenade
5. Ballet of the unhatched chicks
6. "Samuel" Goldenberg and "Schmuÿle"
Promenade
7. Limoges. The market (The great news)
8. Catacombs (Roman tomb) – Con mortuis in lingua mortua (With the dead in a dead language)
9. The hut on hen’s legs (Baba Yaga)
10. The Great Gate of Kiev
When the artist and architect Viktor Hartmann suddenly died at the age of 39, his great friend Mussorgsky was deeply affected. The critic Vladimir Stassov arranged an exhibition of some 400 of the late artist’s works soon after, whereupon Mussorgsky conceived the idea of Pictures at an Exhibition as a grand memorial to his friend. In it, he depicts himself ‘Roving through the exhibition, now leisurely, now briskly, in order to come closer to a picture that had attracted his attention, and at times sadly thinking of his departed friend’.
Mussorgsky was vehemently opposed to classical symphonic form, which he saw as an outdated anachronism: writing ‘I am not against symphonies, just symphonists, incorrigible conservatives’. His suite was a novel concept, and among the most literally pictorial music composed to date. Originally written as a daringly virtuosic piano solo, it remained unperformed at the composer’s death from alcoholism. His friend and colleague in the ‘Mighty handful’, Rimsky-Korsakov, edited the suite posthumously, and numerous composers subsequently expanded it for large orchestras. Although strong arrangements exist by Henry Wood and Leopold Stokowski, Maurice Ravel’s brilliantly colourful setting remains the most popular.
The suite is punctuated by a recurring ‘Promenade’ theme, heard initially on solo trumpet, and depicting the 21-stone the composer hulking between galleries. In Gnomus, we see a gnome-shaped nutcracker Christmas tree decoration, complete with vivid nut-cracking near its end. The Old Castle, with its evocatively scored solo for alto saxophone, portrays a French troubadour fruitlessly serenading his beloved outside an old French castle. Tuileries paints a horde of Parisian children and their nurses squabbling and chattering animatedly. Bydło vividly portrays a lumbering, oxen-drawn cart approaching and then disappearing into the distance.
The Unhatched Chicks were inspired by Hartmann’s costumes for a ballet, featuring children dressed as canaries. Goldenberg and Schmuÿle were two contrasting Jewish characters, the former wealthy and imposing, the latter pitiful and whining. In Limoges (where Hartmann painted over 150 watercolours), a noisy market is observed, with great flurries of frenzied but ultimately trivial activity taking place. In the margin of the score, Mussorgsky wrote ‘Great news! M. de Puissangeout has just recovered his cow… Mme de Remboursac has just acquired a beautiful new set of teeth, while M. de Pantaleon’s nose, which is in his way, is as much as ever the colour of a peony’.
Catacombs portrays Hartmann examining subterranean Paris with a lamp amid piles of skulls, and the ensuing Con mortuis in lingua mortua is a bleak, mournful adaptation of the Promenade, perhaps representing the composer remembering his late friend. The frenzied Baba-Yaga illustrates the mythical child-eating witch and her hut on hen’s legs as it scampers after her victims. Just as the chase reaches a climax, the magnificent Great Gate comes into view, derived from architectural sketches for a grand, ceremonial new city gate. Though the actual gate was abandoned due to lack of municipal funds, it survives in Mussorgsky’s majestic finale.