Alderley Edge Orchestra November 2016

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Franz Schubert (1797-1828) –Fierrebras Overture, D796 (1823)

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The opera Fierrebras was written to a commission from the Theater Kärntnertor in an effort to increase the prevalence of German opera in early 19th century performance schedules. In addition to Schubert’s three act, Charlemagne-era work, Carl Maria von Weber wrote Euryanthe to the same purpose. Schubert’s opera suffers from a rather uninspired libretto by the inexperienced theatre director, Joseph Kupelwieser, and is now seldom performed. The composer himself did not live to hear it performed, or indeed to be paid for it, as its premiere was postponed following the failure of Euryanthe and resignation of Kupelweiser in the shadows of the unfailingly popular works of Rossini.

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The opera describes the eponymous Moorish knight’s efforts to win his place among the Emperor’s paladins. The overture is a dramatic and powerful introduction to the story, and despite being scored for a relatively large orchestra, carries obvious shades of Rossini in its elegance and lightness of touch. It remains a relative obscurity of the repertoire, however, with only the Alderley Edge Orchestra and Vienna Philharmonic programming it this season.

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Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827) – Violin Concerto in D Major, Op. 61 (1806)

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1. Allegro ma non troppo

2. Larghetto

3. Rondo. Allegro

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Beethoven wrote his only complete violin concerto for Franz Clement, the young concertmaster of the Theater an der Wien, twelve years after the great composer had signed the thirteen-year-old’s autograph book on holiday. Carl Czerny noted that the concerto was prepared in a hurried couple of days before its premiere, which was met with an indifferent critical response until later championed by Josef Joachim and Felix Mendelssohn in the 1840s. Clement, by all accounts, did a reasonable job of sight-reading the score before going on to play a composition of his own with the violin held upside down.

 

The concerto is a product of the middle period of Beethoven’s creative timeline, which began following his recognition and bitter acceptance of encroaching deafness, and gave us symphonies 3-8 and piano concertos 3-5. Like many other works of this phase of Beethoven’s life, the opening movement is relatively vast in structure and dramatic weight, before a more subtle slow movement and an ebullient finale.

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The concerto opens, strangely, with a timpani solo of five strokes on a D, a motif which pervades the first movement. A dolce melody follows for oboes and bassoons, followed by a sweepingly grand theme for the whole orchestra. The soloist enters with a modest, rising figure out of the fading orchestral tutti, before leading the music through a series of variations on the early themes in a great range of styles and moods. In contrast to the vast first movement, the slow movement is far less substantial, although there is a great deal of very elegant, lyrical writing to be found in the movement’s theme and variations. The finale is a rondo based around a strikingly simple and unashamedly rustic broken chord theme. This is treated with increasingly exhilarating turns of violin virtuosity, making particularly high demands on the instrument’s upper registers.

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Jean Sibelius (1865-1957) – Symphony No. 2 in D Major, Op. 43 (1902)

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1. Allegretto moderato

2. Tempo andante, ma rubato

3. Vivacissimo

4. Allegro moderato​

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Although Sibelius is commonly considered one of the great nationalist composers, the truth is of course rather more subtle. While some elements of Finnish folklore can be found in his music, he had no real congenital affinity for the nation’s landscapes or culture, having been raised in a Swedish-speaking household, and the Symphony No. 2 – by far the most popular of his seven – was the product of a trip to Italy in 1900-01 rather than some imaginary period of ardent nationalism.

 

The trip south came about after Sibelius received a mysteriously anonymised letter from Baron Axel Carpelan, a penniless but well connected violinist with whom Sibelius would later become close friends. This was his second such letter (the first had proposed the composition of Finlandia) in which the Baron noted that “You have been sitting at home for quite a while, Mr Sibelius; it is high time for you to travel. You will spend the late autumn and the winter in Italy, a country where one learns cantabile, balance and harmony, plasticity and symmetry of lines, a country where everything is beautiful – even the ugly”. Italy, of course, had long been an inspiration to composers from the North, with Mendelssohn, Berlioz, Tchaikovsky, Richard Strauss and Goethe among the many to have enjoyed productive tours of the country. Hiring a villa in the mountains near Rapallo, he wrote of the moment at noon when there is a“kind of muteness, as if nature itself is breathlessly listening to the stealthy footsteps of something supernatural, and at that very moment one feels a greater need for company than ever.”It was here that the sketches for the second movement, the emotional heard of the symphony, emerged.

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The symphony is unconventional, though in the context of contemporaries such as Mahler, far from over-indulgent. The late Sir Colin Davis, in the notes alongside his famous recording of the work with the LSO, elegantly wrote

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Grand in itself alone, but in that breach,
Through which the homeless voice of waters rose
That dark deep thoroughfare, had Nature lodged
The Soul, the Imagination of the whole

 

The restless dialogue between bucolic sunshine and striving, passionately yearning themes runs from the first minutes of the symphony until the very last, when the most triumphant of conclusions finally emerges in the major key after a crescendo of Mahlerian proportions. Here, at last, angst and despair are transformed through monumental effort into triumph.

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© Rohan Shotton 2019. Programme notes may not be reproduced or edited without permission. Please contact me if you would like to use these notes.