Alderley Edge Symphony Orchestra March 2022
Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827): Egmont Overture Op. 84 (1809-1810)
Beethoven was characteristically complex in his views towards Goethe. Although the composer greatly admired the poet’s works, the pair clashed immediately at their only meeting, in Teplitz in 1812. Beethoven was nauseated by Goethe’s reverence for the establishment, writing that he ‘delights in the court atmosphere far more than is becoming to a poet’. Goethe, for his part, was appalled by the ‘absolutely uncontrolled personality’ of Beethoven, who at one point during their meeting had pointedly snubbed the Empress Maria Ludovika while Goethe swept off his hat and bowed.
If Beethoven, the arch-revolutionary, was troubled by Goethe’s respect for the elite, he held far greater respect for the ideas within Goethe’s writing. The 1788 play Egmont described the eponymous Count (1522-68), a Flemish nobleman whose protests against Spanish rule of the Netherlands led to his execution by the ruthless Duke of Alba. In summer 1809, while at the height of his middle or ‘Heroic’ period, Beethoven had taken shelter in his brother’s cellar during the French bombardment of Vienna. Egmont’s themes of resistance to tyranny and hope for mankind chimed loudly, and Beethoven enthusiastically set about writing incidental music for the play.
The Overture seems to echo the Egmont story in miniature. In the introduction, dramatic chords depict the Count in gaol amid Dutch opposition to Spanish rule. Turmoil continues into the tense Allegro, where metrically ambiguous descending phrases in the strings hint at unrest. Sudden brassy chords abruptly bring the music to a halt, and silence ensues: has the Count been beheaded? After a brief woodwind prayer, a triumphant, major-key figure rises through the strings and erupts joyfully into a tutti realisation. The Count may be dead, but his cause lives on.
Sergei Rachmaninov (1873-1943): Piano Concerto No. 3 in D minor, Op. 30 (1909)
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Allegro ma non tanto
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Intermezzo: Adagio
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Finale: Alla breve
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, and 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?’
The third piano concerto was written in Dresden in the summer of 1909 during a rare patch of relative self-assurance. Rachmaninov and his family had left Moscow amid political upheaval in 1906, and the success of his second symphony in 1908 had done a great deal to restore his pride. The new concerto was written at some speed with a plan that it be premiered during the composer’s first tour to America, and with Rachmaninov also billed as soloist for its first performances, he was forced to practise on a silent keyboard mock-up on the Atlantic crossing. The first performances were a mixed success. While Rachmaninov was especially delighted that Gustav Mahler conducted the second performance, critics found the new concerto longer, more complex and more aesthetically ‘difficult’ than the popular second concerto. The New York Herald critic also noted that the solo part was so enormously technically demanding for the soloist as to ‘Bar it from performances by any but pianists of exceptional technical powers’, and many modern pianists have come to view it as an Everest waiting to be conquered.
The concerto is in traditional three-movement form. The first begins in the brooding depths of D minor with a chant-like theme for solo piano. Rachmaninov dispelled suggestions that he had borrowed this from the liturgy, rather that it had simply ‘got written’. This and a second theme, in B-flat major, undergo a complex development as the movement unfolds, passing through several heady climaxes. The first movement cadenza is a curiosity in that Rachmaninov provided two: one shorter and more subtle, and the other on a grander scale.
‘Intermezzo’ is a peculiarly modest description of the slow movement, which is much more than an upbeat to the finale. Roughly following a theme-and-variations form, the music ebbs and flows through turbulence and serenity, led in turn by orchestra and soloist. Three abrupt chords herald the finale, which is a breathless, skittish journey to the finish line. Themes from earlier in the concerto are recapitulated, and occasional glimpses of resolution present themselves in dotted-rhythm figures reminiscent of the second symphony’s joyous finale. It ultimately takes a monumental effort, though, for the music to drag itself to the searing ‘big tune’ which crowns the work, the composer signing the concerto off with his trademark four last notes – Rach-man-in-ov!
Antonín Dvořák (1841-1904): Symphony No. 8 in G major, Op. 88 (1889)
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Prologue (Lento) – Allegro risoluto
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Lento
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Scherzo (Nocturne) – Allegro vivace
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Andante con moto – Maestoso alla marcia (quasi lento) – Allegro Epilogue: Andante sostenuto
Among his orchestral compositions, Dvořák’s eighth symphony is second only to the New World symphony for its popularity. Its instant appeal to audiences and musicians is readily understandable: in a stark departure from the stormy sobriety of the seventh and ground-breaking ninth, it is outwardly an uncommonly genial, bucolic work characterised by almost unwavering good cheer. In writing the eighth, Dvořák recalled that he set out ‘To write a work different from my other symphonies, with individual ideas worked out in a new manner’.
The symphony was written in the late summer of 1889 from Dvořák’s summer retreat, to mark his election to the Bohemian Academy of Science, Literature and Arts. The publication process was less convivial than the music: the publisher Simrock offered a mere 1000 marks for the new symphony, having paid 3000 for the seventh, and wanted to translate the movement titles and even the composer’s name from Czech into German. Dvořák was insulted; he was already troubled by anti-Czech sentiment under the Hapsburgs, having seen his Stabat Mater fall foul to what he viewed as ‘destructive criticism’ the previous year, and in the event, he sold the score to Novello. Beneath the symphony’s benign, pastoral exterior, therefore, some listeners have heard nostalgic laments for the landscapes and repressed cultures of Bohemia.
The symphony’s four movements follow a broadly traditional pattern. Nature and Bohemia never seem far away, with birdsong and folkdances making frequent appearances. The first movement is the most powerful, with fleeting threats of storm clouds and strife making brief appearances amid a torrent of memorable tunes. The summery second movement, by contrast, is only very briefly disrupted by a cloud burst (much like Beethoven’s sixth symphony). The third is a somewhat haunting minor-key waltz filled with nostalgia and longing, flanking a central trio which offers a brief memory of childlike simplicity. The finale is heralded by an apparently martial trumpet fanfare, though as the great Czech conductor Rafael Kubelík explained to his musicians, ‘Gentlemen, in Bohemia the trumpets never call to battle—they always call to the dance!’. After a short and attractive introduction, the movement explodes into life with a thrilling major triad theme, propelled by giddy horn trills and dizzying woodwind solos. Just when the party seems to have burnt itself out, the band strike up once more, and the symphony crashes into an exuberant coda amid a flurry of brass and timpani.