Stockport Symphony Orchestra March 2022: 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)
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Allegro non troppo e molto maestoso – Allegro con spirito
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Andantino semplice – Prestissimo – Tempo I
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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...”
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.
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 Kyiv. 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.
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.
Antonín Dvořák (1841-1904): Cello Concerto in B minor, Op. 104 (1894-95)
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Allegro
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Adagio, ma non troppo
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Finale: Allegro moderato — Andante — Allegro vivo
Dvořák was a relatively late developer as a composer. His early musical career was spent as a piano teacher and principal violist in the dance orchestra which went on to become the National Theatre Orchestra of Prague, in which he played under the likes of Smetana and Wagner. The dawn of his compositional success came when, as an impoverished music teacher from the Bohemian provinces, he submitted a portfolio of some fifteen works for the Austrian State Prize for composition. The jury, among them Brahms and the stern critic Eduard Hanslick, was impressed, Brahms so ‘visibly overcome’ that he recommended Dvořák to his own publisher Simrock, affording the younger composer the financial security to focus on composition alone.
For such a consummate symphonic writer, it is a little surprising that Dvořák only wrote three and a half concertos in addition to his 9 symphonies, 5 tone poems, the opera Rusalka and a large amount of chamber and choral work. Of these concertos, those for piano and violin are infrequently heard, and early sketches for a youthful first cello concerto in A major were wholly disowned and abandoned. What we therefore describe as the Dvořák cello concerto, in the definite article, is in fact technically his second, and is one of the greatest of all works for the instrument. This in itself is remarkable, as some years earlier Dvořák had opined that although the cello was adequate for orchestral and chamber use, it was not a suitable vessel for a concerto, its top range too nasal (or squeaky, or whiny, depending on translation) and its lower register too grumbly.
After putting aside the early A major cello concerto, Dvořák’s friend, the cellist Hanuš Wihan, had repeatedly requested a new concerto for the instrument. The spark came when, while director of the National Conservatory of Music in New York, he attended the premiere of a new cello concerto by his teaching colleague, Victor Herbert. Herbert was principal cellist in the Metropolitan Opera orchestra, and had also led the section at the premiere of the New World symphony in 1893, and so held some influence in inspiring Dvořák to write for the instrument. Work on the new concerto began in November 1894 and was complete by the following February. Dvořák relied heavily on Wihan for technical advice in writing for the cello, though Dvořák was aghast at his friend’s suggestion of finishing the piece with a big, virtuosic cadenza, so much so that Wihan was dropped as soloist for the concerto’s premiere, and in selling the score to Simrock, he stipulated that it was not to be tampered with in any, least of all by Wihan.
The pair ultimately reconciled, and the concerto was an immediate success. Brahms quipped that if he had only known that such a piece was possible, he would have written it long ago. Dvořák might have thought his work on the concerto was finished, but he made key revisions later in 1895. Some three decades previously, he had harboured affections for his piano student, Josefina Kaunitzová. Josefina did not return his feelings, though the pair remained friends after Dvořák married her elder sister, Anna. When word reached the composer in America that Josefina was gravely unwell with a heart condition, he reworked the second movement of his cello concerto to quote heavily from the first of his Four Songs, Opus 82, entitled Kez duch muj san (‘Leave me alone’), of which Josefina was especially fond. A month after Dvořák returned home later in the year, Josefina died, prompting further revisions to the score with a further, wistful quotation from the song in the concerto’s penultimate paragraph.
The work is written in classical three-movement form, though is not without its surprises. The first movement begins with a low, brooding theme for woodwinds, followed shortly by an astonishingly songful major-key theme for solo horn, which the great musicologist Sir Donald Tovey calls ‘one of the most beautiful passages ever written’. Dvořák knew a good tune when he wrote one, and so it is this second theme, rather than the conventional first, which is recapitulated joyfully by the whole orchestra after being developed by the soloist.
The woodwinds also open the slow movement, now with a tranquil, meditative theme which is echoed soon after by the soloist. Stormclouds gather, though, amid a sudden moment of tutti orchestral strife, heralding the central section which quotes elegantly from Kez duch muj san (in itself well worth listening to). The finale snaps abruptly out of the reverie into a brisk march-like figure. The movement steadily gains momentum, flying through a heady duet for solo violin and cello. Just when we seem to be reaching the kind of triumphant, firework-laden conclusion which Wihan had impertinently suggested, Dvořák instead presents an elongated coda which returns to the mesmeric stillness of the slow movement. Josefina, now dead, is acknowledged once more with a refrain of her favourite song, and though the last page of the concerto finishes with a flourish, it is this elegiac sigh which leaves the deepest impression.
Frederick Delius (1862-1934): Two Pieces for Small Orchestra (1911-12)
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On hearing the first cuckoo in spring
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Summer night on the river
Born as Fritz Delius to German parents in Bradford, the popular view of Frederick Delius as a composer of ‘English’ music is not a strong one. After formative years managing an orange plantation in Florida before studying in Leipzig (surrounded by the likes of Mahler, Brahms and Tchaikovsky) and Paris, his mature sound has more in common with Wagner than Elgar. Nonetheless, though they differed in their style and approach, Elgar and Delius became friends in later life, Elgar describing the other as a ‘a poet and a visionary’.
The Two Pieces for Small Orchestra were composed at the crest of a rapid ascendancy in Leipzig following the considerable success of his Mass of Life, a vast work for soloists, double choir and large orchestra based on Nietzsche’s Also Sprach Zarathustra. Richard Strauss had written his own tone poem of the same title some years previously, and both men considered the other’s to be inferior. The Two Pieces were composed amid a flurry of writing, and were premiered by Arthur Nikisch and the Gewandhaus Orchestra. The pieces are a world away from the Mass of Life, scored simply for strings, double winds and horns. Delius’ own assessment of the pair to his wife has remained true: ‘The public seemed to like the first piece best, although I like the second one best’.
The first cuckoo has enjoyed enduring popularity, particularly in this country. At its heart, though, is a quotation from a Norwegian folktune, In Ola Valley, which Edvard Grieg had also arranged long before Percy Grainger forwarded the tune to Delius. Much of the piece’s success is thanks to Sir Thomas Beecham, with whom Delius had enjoyed a mountain walking holiday in Norway in 1909. Summer night on the river is less immediately appealing to those seeking nostalgia for some bucolic English paradise. Its colour palette and chromaticism owe much to Debussy, and it is the French river Loing, near Delius’ house in Grez-sur-Loing, which is most likely the inspiration for the music, rather than the kinds of English landscapes which inspired Vaughan Williams.