Stockport Symphony Orchestra January 2022
Edward Elgar (1857-1934) – Violin Concerto in B minor, Opus 61 (1909-1910)
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Allegro
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Andante
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Allegro Molto
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The image of Edward Elgar as the moustachioed arch-Imperialist rabble-rouser, father of the Pomp and Circumstance marches, is one of music’s most inaccurate caricatures. Born outside Worcester to a church organist father and farm-raised mother, he never outgrew his fears that, culturally as a Catholic among Protestants and musically as a Romantic among modernists, he was an outsider. His early career saw him supporting his violin and piano tuition income through manning his father’s shop and conducting the band of Worcester and County Lunatic Asylum. He performed Dvořák's Symphony No. 6 with the composer conducting, and was also a keen bassoonist. Composition remained his keenest ambition, however, and his real first success was not until The Dream of Gerontius in 1900. The decade which followed was a happy time; Gerontius became a choral staple, a knighthood and honorary doctorates followed, and the first symphony, The Kingdom and The Apostles were premiered.
Amid the heady successes of the decade, Elgar met the Viennese violin virtuoso Fritz Kreisler in Leeds in 1904. Kreisler was immediately taken with Elgar’s music, and was later quoted in the Hereford Times as opining that ‘If you want to know whom I consider to be the greatest living composer, I say without hesitation Elgar… I place him on an equal footing with my idols, Beethoven and Brahms. He is of the same aristocratic family… I wish Elgar would write something for the violin.’ Clearly Kreisler may have been generous in talking to a Hereford newspaper about their local superstar, but he repeated the request to Elgar for a Violin Concerto in 1907. Elgar had started and then destroyed an early violin concerto attempt in 1890, and though smaller works such as the Salut d’Amour (1888) had been popular, he still had large-scale ambitions for the instrument.
When the Royal Philharmonic Society formally commissioned the concerto in 1909, he set to work on it with enthusiasm. Despite his own considerable skills as a violinist, he took technical advice from Kreisler and also Billy Reed, the newly appointed concertmaster of the London Symphony Orchestra, in view of the unprecedented difficulty of the solo part. By May 1909, he recorded in his diary that ‘I have the Concerto well in hand… and it’s good! Awfully emotional! Too emotional, but I love it’. In June he recoded that ‘I have made the end serious & grand’, though Elgarian self-doubt was not far behind: a week later he decided that ‘I am appalled at the last movement’. Happily, the premiere in November 1910 was a triumph. With Elgar conducting the LSO and Kreisler at the violin, he was summoned back to the rostrum for as many as fifteen bows after the concerto. The violin concerto was to be the last of his immediately successful works, surpassing even the Cello Concerto and second symphony. He would later be deeply affected by World War I, his wife Alice’s ill-health, and his public perception as an anachronism.
The dedications at the top of the score are three-fold; first, to Fritz Kreisler, and lastly to the sixteen-year-old Yehudi Menuhin, whose dedication was added after recording the concerto with Elgar and the LSO in 1932. The other inscription is the most puzzling: written in Spanish above the music are the words ‘Aquí está encerrada el alma de…..’, taken from Gil Blas by the French novelist Alain-René Lesage. Elgar recorded his own translation of this as ‘Here, or more emphatically In here is enshrined or (simply) enclosed—buried is perhaps too definite—the soul of ?’. The identity of ‘?’ is an Elgarian mystery on a par with the Enigma Variations. The choice of five dots, rather than three, is telling, and the most popular theory is that the mystery dedicatee is Alice Stuart-Wortley, a long-term friend with her husband of Edward and his wife Alice. To distinguish the two Alices, he referred to Alice Stuart-Wortley as ‘Windflower’ and referred to the violin concerto as ‘our concerto’ in letters to her. Other theories are also available; the musicologist and Elgar biographer Jerrold Northrop Moore suggests that the inscription alludes to two identities in each movement: Alice Stuart-Wortley and his old love Helen Weaver in the first, Elgar’s wife and mother in the second; and Billy Reed and August Jaeger (also seen as Nimrod in the Enigma Variations) in the third.
The concerto is in the three-movement, ‘fast-slow-fast’ form of the great violin concertos of Beethoven, Brahms and Tchaikovsky, though at around fifty minutes in length, is on a much grander scale. The first is in an elongated sonata form, with as many as six themes presented in the orchestral exposition. A couple of these are marked ‘Windflower’, and are repeated triumphantly later in the movement. The soloist’s entry is a haunting rather than heroic entry, a complexity which is borne out through the rest of the concerto. The second movement, in the distant key of B-flat, is inward-looking and altogether gentler, and makes several quotations of Wagner’s famous ‘Tristan’ chord, that which symbolises tragic or doomed love in Tristan und Isolde. The great musicologist Michael Kennedy calls the slow movement ‘A display of sustained and noble eloquence’. The finale is more vigorous, requiring huge stamina from the soloist to see it to its last page. The concerto’s only cadenza is unusual; rather than being a display of soloistic heroics heralded by an orchestra flourish, the cadenza instead reflects and elaborates on earlier themes from the concerto (including the ‘Windflower’ theme, above a hushed string pizzicato-tremelo, achieved by brushing the soft pulp of the finger against the string.
Sergei Rachmaninov (1873-1943) – Symphony No. 3 in A minor, Opus 44 (1935-36)
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Lento – Allegro moderato – Allegro
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Adagio ma non troppo – Allegro vivace
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Allegro – Allegro vivace – Allegro (Tempo primo) – Allegretto – 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, culminating in his much-loved second piano concerto. The reprieve was brief, though; it became trendy to disparage Rachmaninov's decadent music and prune it aggressively in concert. 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 period between 1918 and his death was relatively fallow for composition thanks to the demands of an exhausting touring schedule. Only six major works were written in this time: the Piano Concerto No. 4, Three Russian Songs, the Paganini and Corelli variations, the Symphony No. 3, and the Symphonic Dances.
The weight of his personal history with the symphony as a genre must have weighed heavily on Rachmaninov’s mind as he sat down in his new villa by Lake Lucerne to write the third symphony in summer 1935. Such was this weight when publishing his symphonic choral work The Bells in 1913 that he eschewed the term ‘symphony’ altogether. He also remained troubled by his partially self-imposed exile from Russia. After leaving amid post-revolution turmoil in 1917, his comments about the Soviet regime led to a ban of his music in Russia. In a 1930 London interview, he lamented ‘There is a burden heavier to me than any other; it is that I have no country… The whole world is open to me and success awaits me everywhere. Only one place is closed to me, and that is my own country, Russia.’
After completing the new symphony in early 1936, its premiere in Philadelphia met with a mixed reception. The public had perhaps come expecting to take guilty pleasure from the sort of old-fashioned romantic symphony for which they also derided him. As Rachmaninov wryly recalled, ‘When my first symphony was first played, they said it was so-so. Then when my second was played they said the first was good, but that the second was so-so. Now that my third has been played—just this fall—they say that my first and second are good but that my—oh, well, you see how it is.’
The symphony is in three movements, with the second fulfilling the role of both slow movement and scherzo. Like Rachmaninov’s earlier works, it is written for a large orchestra and makes use of recurring motto themes (making it a ‘cyclic’ work) and the Dies Irae chant, though is significantly more concise than the sprawling second symphony and The Bells. The third symphony is cut instead from the same cloth as the composer’s very last work, the Symphonic Dances, and perhaps Sibelius’s seventh and final symphony (1924), which is a similarly concise, cyclic work in comparison with his grander earlier symphonies.
The prayer-motto pervades the whole symphony. It opens the first movement in a hushed utterance given by clarinet, stopped horns and cello, before the whole orchestra flexes its muscles. A more lyrical second theme recalls the ‘big tunes’ of the composer’s earlier years. The music is developed with increasing rhythmic energy, before closing quietly wish a hushed reaffirmation of the motto. The inner movement begins with a plaintive horn melody accompanied by harp chords, followed by a theme for solo violin. The Allegro Vivace section of the movement, acting as the symphony’s scherzo, arrives quite suddenly, though it is the slower theme which has the last word. The finale recapitulates themes from the first movement, and with ever increasing brilliance of orchestration, dances thunderously to a rowdy conclusion.