Alderley Edge Orchestra February 2017
Felix Mendelssohn (1809-1847) – Meeresstille und glückliche Fahrt (Calm Sea and Prosperous Voyage), Op. 27 (1828)
The two popular Goethe poems which inspired both this concert overture by Mendelssohn and Beethoven’s cantata of 1822 by no means describe synonymous maritime circumstances. The perils of becalmed waters in the pre-steam age are in sharp antithesis to the jubilation of the ship’s arrival in port in the two poems respectively. Goethe and the young Mendelssohn first met when they were aged 72 and 12 respectively, walking in Goethe’s Weimar garden and dining at his house before Mendelssohn improvised at the piano, prompting the great poet to hail his young friend as a new Mozart. Seven years later, the precocious 19-year-old Mendelssohn set about composing a programmatic overture to honour Goethe. After the angst of the opening minutes, a bustling and ultimately triumphant allegro carries the work to within sight of land, heralded by the trumpet section.
Meerstille
Tiefe Stille herrscht im Wasser,
ohne Regung ruht das Meer,
und bekümmert sieht der Schiffer
glatte Fläche ringsumher.
Keine Luft von keiner Seite!
Todesstille fürchterlich!
In der ungeheuren Weite
reget keine Welle sich.
Calm Sea
Calm and silence rule the water,
motionless the ocean lies,
and the sailor’s anxious gaze
finds glassy flatness far and wide.
Not a breath of air is stirring!
Fearful, deathless stillness reigns!
On the infinite expanse
not a single wavelet moves.
Glückliche Fahrt
Die Nebel zerreißen,
der Himmel ist helle,
und Aeolus löset
das ängstliche Band.
Es säuseln die Winde,
es rührt sich der Schiffer.
Geschwinde! Geschwinde!
Es teilt sich die Welle,
es naht sich die Ferne,
schon seh’ ich das Land!
Prosperous Voyage
The mists are rent,
the heavens shine,
and Aeolus loosens
restraining ties.
The winds now are whistling,
the sailor bestirs himself.
How swiftly; how swiftly
the waves part before us,
the distance draws near;
and now I see land!
Frédéric Chopin (1810-1849) – Piano Concerto No. 2 in F minor, Op. 21 (1829)
1. Maestoso
2. Larghetto
3. Allegro vivace
Chopin and Mendelssohn’s lives followed similar time spans, and the Polish pianist composed his two piano concertos just after Mendelssohn’s Calm Sea. Tonight’s concerto, actually written first but published second, came from his celebrated youth in the relative cultural wilderness of Warsaw before he settled in Paris, by then hyper-sensitive and delicate, and separated from his homeland by war between Russia and Poland. In contrast to the concerti of Beethoven and Mozart, Chopin eschews any real dialogue or friction between soloist and orchestra, holding the spotlight far more intently on the soloist. This, at least for the concerto’s first performances, would have been the composer himself.
Formed in classical three-movement structure, the concerto opens with a grave Maestoso which evolves into a lengthy pianistic discourse of variously poetic and virtuosic disposition. Curiously, the première of the work then featured a divertimento before the second movement in the form of an improvisation for solo horn. The slow movement Larghetto is airy and meditative, seldom requiring more input from the orchestra than a few accompanying sighs. The Allegro vivace finale, a piquant mazurka, is the most harmonically simple of the concerto. It shies away from any overblown climax, but dances its way into a delightfully sparkling close.
Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov (1844-1908) – Scheherazade (1888)
1. The sea and Sinbad's ship
2. The Kalendar Prince
3. The young Prince and Princess
4. Festival at Baghdad
Much of Rimsky-Korsakov’s reputation as the master orchestrator of his age rests on the success of his symphonic tone poem Scheherazade. His ability to create an utterly compelling sound world unique to each scene he wishes to portray easily rivals the skills of Wagner and Richard Strauss, the latter a man who famously claimed to be able to depict a dinner fork in music. The young boy Rimsky-Korsakov was obsessed with visions of The Orient, in its broadest possible sense, having left his home town only a couple of times by the age of twelve and pored over letters from his elder brother in the Navy. Aged 30, he travelled with his wife and young son to Southern Crimea, where he became obsessed, as he wrote in his memoirs, with “the coffee houses, the shouts of its vendors, the chanting of the muezzins on the minarets, the services in the mosques, and the oriental music”. He returned on a subsequent trip, finally making it across the sea to Constantinople.
When Borodin died unexpectedly in 1887, the bereft Rimsky-Korsakov set about completing his dear friend’s unfinished opera Prince Igor, a work laced with Oriental influence in its Polovtsian chiefs and Turkish invaders. It was while working on Igor that he conceived his own Oriental masterpiece, inspired by the stories of the One Thousand and One Arabian Nights. He headed the manuscript score thus:
“The Sultan Shahriar, convinced of the duplicity and infidelity of all women, vowed to slay each of his wives after the first night. The Sultana Scheherazade, however, saved her life by the expedient recounting to the Sultan of a succession of tales over a period of one thousand and one nights. Overcome by curiosity, the monarch postponed the execution of his wife from day to day, and ended by renouncing his sanguinary resolution altogether.”
The composer was indecisive in his use of programmatic titles for the work’s four movements. He claimed to have originally intended the work to offer a general flavour of the exotic and otherworldly, before adding descriptive headings to each movement. These descriptions conjure abstract scenes from the Arabian Nights rather than recounting specific stories, and were subsequently erased for the score’s second edition, when Rimsky reverted to the idea of a general and non-specific exploration of the Orient. It is left to the modern listener to choose between his own interpretations of the 47-minute work or to follow the younger composer’s suggested guide, which is detailed below.
The work is framed in a symphonic four-movement form, with a central scherzo and slow movement before a dashing finale. It opens with the stern theme of the Sultan in a brutal, almost vulgar, heading. The solo violinist, playing the role of Scheherazade, and on whom enormous demands are placed throughout the piece, then beguilingly beckons the listener into the spacious opening movement, titled The sea and Sinbad’s ship. The six-in-a-bar pulse, rocking above an oscillating cello figure, swells into an agitated tutti before a more settled sunset appears. Scheherazade also introduces the second movement, The Kalendar Prince, a rhapsodic set of variations featuring prominent and virtuosic solos for all wind principals, and in particular the bassoon. The slow movement, The Young Prince and the Princess, is altogether more soft-centered and romantic, apart from a brief toy soldier interlude which interrupts proceedings.
The finale was originally headed more specifically as Festival at Baghdad – The sea – The ship breaks against a cliff surmounted by a bronze horseman. It sees the furious Sultan sweep back into the room before Scheherazade spins her final tale, a rollicking fantasy of epic scope which ultimately saves her life.
© Rohan Shotton 2019. Programme notes may not be reproduced or edited without permission. Please contact me if you would like to use these notes.