City Recital Hall Angel Place -...

2011 SEASON

City Recital Hall Angel Place

Mozart in the City PROGRAM CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION

Is that a Serenade?Labelling Mozartpage 4

Artist biographiespage 8

Thursday 3 February | 7pm

Mozart Revisitedpage 13

Thursday 14 April | 7pm

Mozart & Haydnpage 19

Thursday 23 June | 7pm

Mozart After Darkpage 25

Thursday 1 September | 7pm

Mozart & Brahmspage 31

This program book for Mozart in the City contains articles and information for all four concerts in the 2011 series. Copies will be available at every performance, but we invite you to keep your program and bring it with you to each concert.

MYSTERY MOMENTS

Each Mozart in the City concert ends with a Mystery Moment – one delightful musical jewel to send you into the evening with a smile. We’d like to let the mystery linger after the concert, but we don’t want to keep you in unnecessary suspense, so we’ll be revealing the name of the piece on the Friday after each concert.

To fi nd out the identity of the Mystery Moment, you can:

Check our Twitter feed: twitter.com/sydsymph

Visit our Facebook page: facebook.com/sydneysymphony

4 | Sydney Symphony

INTRODUCTION

Is that a Serenade? Labelling Mozart

If you are a plant lover you visit botanical gardens. Perhaps you recognise a plant, or fi nd one beautiful, but don’t know what it is called. You want to know, so you can tell people about it, or get one for yourself to enjoy. Botanical gardens – and that’s one reason you go there – label the plants for you, giving them names, and classifying them.

This year’s Mozart in the City series off ers, in each concert, a serenade. You’ll know which work it is, from its label – ‘Serenade’. Neat. Too neat. Consider this: your historian of music, with a passion for correctness, will suggest that the symphony in the fi rst concert might have been taken from ‘the Finalmusik for 1779’. The serenade in the second concert was referred to by Mozart himself as a ‘Nachtmusik’. That German term means the same, pretty much, as the ‘Nocturnal’ part of the Serenata notturna by Mozart in the third concert, which does at least have ‘Serenade’ as the other part of its title. In fact, the only piece in the series where the title Serenade is quite unequivocal is by Brahms.

Posthumous portrait of Mozart by Barbara Krafft (1819)

5 | Sydney Symphony

By 1860, when Brahms titled the piece, he knew how it should be labelled. By then, most of the pieces by Mozart that were among his models were labelled ‘Serenade’. It’s time to meet Ludwig Köchel, the man who put labels on Mozart’s works. Köchel was a botanist by profession. He was also a musical amateur with a deep love for Mozart’s music. Around 1850 he decided to compile a catalogue of all of Mozart’s output, arranging the works in chronological order. This had never been done before. It was no accident that it was attempted by a botanist – botany had a centuries-old tradition of classifying and labelling. So this is where the K. numbers come from – strictly speaking K.V. numbers, standing for Köchel Verzeichnis (catalogue). As well as establishing the chronology, Köchel had to do a lot of classifying. Only 144 of Mozart’s more than 600 works had been published in his lifetime. Where the labelling became crucial was in the second part of Köchel’s project. He persuaded the publishers Breitkopf & Härtel to use his catalogue as the basis for a defi nitive edition of Mozart’s music. In 1875 the publisher committed to this, and sought subscribers. Köchel died in 1877, but in preparation he had arranged Mozart’s works into 24 categories, which were used by Breitkopf & Härtel for their edition.

Classifying symphonies, concertos, quartets…no problem. But what to do with the ‘miscellaneous’ orchestral works, which had been given a great variety of names when they were new? Köchel created a sub-category: ‘Kassations, Serenades and Divertimenti for Orchestra’. It contained 31 items, out of which 10 were shoehorned into the label ‘Serenade’ and 17 into the label ‘Divertimento’. Thus was rationalised and simplifi ed the almost bewildering variety of names given to the occasional and entertainment music Mozart composed, mostly before he left Salzburg. And the labels stuck.

Ironically, it is the work by Brahms in this concert series that best fi ts Köchel’s Serenade label – a multi-movement orchestral work with two minuets. The work Mozart referred to as a Nachtmusik, and which we call a Serenade, K.375, also has two minuets, but Köchel and Breitkopf put it in the orchestral grab-bag, even though it’s for wind instruments only.

The problem – if problem it be – is that the 19th-century urge for classifi cation used the criterion of form. Labels like sonata, symphony, concerto, string quartet would tell you much: how many movements, the internal organisation of the movements; the instrumentation, to a degree. Some of

Ludwig Ritter von Köchel A musical botanist

6 | Sydney Symphony

Silhouette depicting a wind band in the establishment of the Prince of Oettinger-Wallenstein (1791).Such a band would have been called a Harmonie.

the titles for works in use in the 18th century fi tted neatly into this approach. But others gave an indication of the time, setting, or occasion, rather than form.

As Mozart lovers will know, the most famous of his works called Serenade is actually ‘A Little Night Music’. It’s for strings – probably just fi ve players. K.375, in the second concert of this series, is also a ‘Nachtmusik’, for wind instruments. It’s possible that the term ‘Cassation’ (sometimes Kassation) is based on an Italianisation of ‘Gasse’ – laneway or alley music. A ‘Finalmusik’, in Salzburg, was music for the festivities at the end of the academic year, and what has been labelled the ‘Posthorn’ Serenade, from which the symphony in our fi rst concert was extracted, was actually a Finalmusik composed by Mozart in 1779.

In a Mozart series, taking so much music from the 18th century, the labelling may often seem a little arbitrary. There are two pieces in these concerts Mozart called ‘concertos’. One is for violin and piano, the other for fl ute and harp. In the case of the latter, if Mozart’s commission had been from a Paris concert promoter rather than a private individual, Mozart might have called it ‘Sinfonia concertante’, to be à la mode, given the Parisian fashion for this label. He did that with the piece he wrote for wind players from Mannheim to play in Paris.

7 | Sydney Symphony

Obviously the label ‘concerto’ covers a multitude of diverse works. Ferdinand Schubert labelled the piece his brother wrote for him ‘concerto’, but since it has only one movement, and no cadenza for its violin soloist, classifi ers in the Köchel mode have labelled it ‘Concert piece’, or even, for its form, ‘Adagio and Rondo’. As for ‘symphony’: it would have been provocative of the 18-year-old Benjamin Britten to have titled his Opus 1 ‘Chamber Symphony’ – too obvious a pointer to his inspiration from a piece of that name by Arnold Schoenberg, a composer regarded by Britten’s professors as a dangerous, bad infl uence. So Britten called his chamber symphony ‘Sinfonietta’, a little symphony. Perhaps labels really do matter.

You probably bought your ticket for this concert after consulting the labels – the big one that said ‘Mozart’, and those on each of the pieces in the program. You can’t hear a label; it’s merely a cue to what you will hear. But none of us can help being a bit of a musical botanist. We want to know, not only what it is, but what it’s called.

DAVID GARRETT ©2011

“Serenades for Mozart in front of the Villa Betramka in Prague” (K. Müller’s illustration for Louis Fürnberg’s 1947 novella Amade and Casanova). Mozart himself was once serenaded in this fashion, and with his own music (K375).

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ABOUT THE ARTISTS

Michael Dauth violin-director Michael Dauth began violin studies under the direction of his father, later studying with Franz Josef Maier and the Amadeus Quartet in Cologne, and with Yfrah Neaman at the Guildhall School in London. Soon after, he became Concertmaster of Hanover’s North German Radio Orchestra and auditioned for the Berlin Philharmonic, where he was invited to lead the Berlin Philharmonic Octet, Berlin Piano Trio and Chamber Virtuosi. In 1988 he moved to Australia, became Concertmaster of the Melbourne Symphony, and was a founding member, Special Concertmaster and Artistic Director of the Orchestra Ensemble Kanazawa, Japan, a position he holds today.

Michael Dauth has appeared as a soloist with major orchestras in Japan, Australia, New Zealand and Europe, and at all the major festivals including Salzburg, Lucerne, Berlin and Tokyo. Last year his performances with the Sydney Symphony included Mozart’s Sinfonia concertante for violin and viola, with Roger Benedict. His recordings include the Beethoven, Tchaikovsky and Mendelssohn violin concertos, the premiere recording of Takemitsu’s Nostalghia, and the Mozart and Brahms clarinet quintets with his Japan-based Sunrise String Quartet and Wenzel Fuchs. His recordings with Orchestra Ensemble Kanazawa include Eight Seasons, a recording of Piazzolla and Vivaldi.

In 2003 he received the Governor-General’s Centenary medal for service to Australian society and the advancement of music.

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CONCERTMASTER

Dene Olding violin-director Dene Olding is one of Australia’s most outstanding instrumentalists and has achieved a distinguished career in many aspects of musical life.

As a soloist, he appears regularly with the Australian symphony orchestras and has given the Australian premieres of Lutoslawski’s Chain 2, Carter’s Violin Concerto, and the Glass Violin Concerto, as well as concertos by Ross Edwards and Bozidar Kos, and Richard Mills’ Double Concerto, written for him and his wife, violist Irina Morozova.

A graduate of the Juilliard School, in 1985 he was awarded a Winston Churchill Memorial Trust Fellowship and was a Laureate of the Queen Elisabeth of Belgium International Violin Competition. He rejoined the Sydney Symphony as Co-Concertmaster in 2002, having held the position from 1987 to 1994. Other concertmaster positions have included the Australian Chamber Orchestra and Melbourne Symphony Orchestra. He is also fi rst violinist for the Australia Ensemble and a founding member of the Goldner String Quartet. As a conductor he has made appearances with the Sydney Symphony and Auckland Philharmonia, and as conductor-soloist with chamber orchestras in Australia and America.

His recordings include Brahms, Beethoven and Mozart sonatas, concertos by Martin, Milhaud, Hindemith and Barber, the premiere recording of Edwards’ violin concerto, Maninyas, the complete Beethoven string quartets and a Rachmaninoff disc with Vladimir Ashkenazy.

Dene Olding plays a 1720 Joseph Guarnerius violin.

CONCERTMASTER

9 | Sydney Symphony

Pieter Wispelwey celloPieter Wispelwey belongs to a generation of performers who are equally at ease on modern or period cello. His stylistic awareness, originality and technical mastery has won hearts in repertoire ranging from JS Bach to Alfred Schnittke, Elliott Carter and works composed for him.

He has appeared as soloist with many of the world’s leading orchestras, and highlights among his future concerto projects will include the Hamburg Symphony Orchestra, Munich Chamber Orchestra, Zurich Chamber Orchestra, National Symphony of Ireland, Ensemble Orchestral de Paris, Sao Paulo State Symphony and a tour with the Scottish Ensemble.

Forthcoming recital appearances include duo concerts with fortepianist Kristian Bezuidenhout (Vienna Konzerthaus, London Wigmore Hall, Bruges Concertgebouw), pianist Cédric Tiberghien (Paris Théâtre des Champs-Elysées, Wigmore Hall), and solo recitals at the Louvre Series in Paris and festivals in Amsterdam, Spain, France and Israel.

His discography includes more than 20 recordings, six of which have attracted major international awards. His fi rst concerto engagement with the Sydney Symphony was in 2007 when he played Walton’s Cello Concerto with conductor Jeff rey Tate. This performance was subsequently released on CD.

Pieter Wispelwey plays on a 1760 Giovanni Battista Guadagnini cello and a 1710 Rombouts baroque cello.

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Andrea Lam pianoIn recent years, Australian pianist Andrea Lam has given more than sixty performances with orchestras in Australia, the United States, Japan and Hong Kong, and she has worked with renowned conductors such as Alan Gilbert, Edo de Waart, Michael Christie, Markus Stenz and Christopher Hogwood.

Recent highlights include a recording of Mozart concertos with the Tasmanian Symphony Orchestra, performances with the Queensland, Melbourne and Columbus symphony orchestras, and recitals in Australia and America.

A native of Sydney, Andre a Lam has featured in two national television programs, including Andrea’s Concerto, documenting her life as a young pianist and concluding with her performance of Tchaikovsky’s Piano Concerto No.1 with the QSO.

She has participated in the Yellow Barn festival (Vermont), was a Keyboard winner in the Young Performer’s Awards, winner of the ABC Quest Competition Viewers’ Choice Award, Audience Prize recipient at the 2007 Louisiana Piano Competition, and a winner of the Salon de Virtuosi Career Grant. In 2009 she was a semifi nalist in the Van Cliburn Competition.

Her most recent appearance with the Sydney Symphony was in 2006 when she played Mozart’s Piano Concerto No.15 (K450) with Edo de Waart. This year she also appears with the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra. She currently lives in New York City.

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10 | Sydney Symphony

Emma Sholl fl uteEmma Sholl has been the Associate Principal Flute with the Sydney Symphony since 2003. She began working with the orchestra at the age of 19 and was awarded the position of Second Flute the following year – one of the youngest musicians ever appointed.

Between 2002 and 2003 she received several scholarships, including the Martin Bequest and Dorothy Fraser scholarships, which allowed her to study in Geneva with Jacques Zoon. During this time she was invited to perform in St Petersburg and Moscow as part of the World Orchestra for Peace, conducted by Valery Gergiev.

She has also performed as guest principal fl ute with the Hong Kong Philharmonic, the Adelaide, Tasmanian, Queensland and West Australian symphony orchestras, and the Australian Chamber Orchestra.

Emma Sholl has performed as a soloist with the Adelaide, Tasmanian and Sydney symphony orchestras, in recital for Musica Viva, and plays chamber music as a member of the Sydney Soloists and Sydney Omega Ensemble. She also enjoys teaching at Australian Youth Orchestra programs and the Australian National Academy of Music.

In 2006, she recorded Bach’s Fourth Brandenburg Concerto in an arrangement for keyboard and two fl utes with pianist Angela Hewitt, fl autist Alison Mitchell and the ACO.

ASSOCIATE PRINCIPAL FLUTE, ROBERT & JANE CONSTABLE CHAIR

Louise Johnson harpLouise Johnson studied harp at the Sydney Conservatorium of Music High School, and later at the Cleveland Institute of Music and Salzedo Summer Harp School (USA) with Alice Chalifoux.

At 18, she was appointed Principal Harp of the Queensland Symphony Orchestra. Between 1983 an d 1985 she lived in London, performing with the London Symphony Orchestra under the baton of Claudio Abbado and Richard Hickox, and giving recitals in Wigmore Hall and the Purcell Room.

She has performed with all the major Australian symphony and theatre orchestras, the Australian Chamber Orchestra and the Australia Ensemble. She has also performed with artists such as Cher, Sammy Davis Jr and the Bee Gees, and toured Australia with the Bolshoi and Sadler’s Wells ballet companies. She has also played for the Bolshoi Opera and with Luciano Berio, in a concert of his own works. In 1996 she performed the Ginastera Harp Concerto in Seattle for the World Harp Congress.

She gave her fi rst performance with the Sydney Symphony Orchestra at the age of 14, later joined the orchestra as a permanent member, and was appointed Principal Harp in 1985. She regularly appears as a soloist with the orchestra: in 1990 she performed the Mozart Flute and Harp Concerto with James Galway, and in 2006 Spohr’s Concertante for violin and harp with Michael Dauth.

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PRINCIPAL HARP


Geoffrey LancasterFor more than 30 years, Geoff rey Lancaster has been at the forefront of the historically informed performance practice movement. He has appeared to acclaim with such orchestras as the Leipzig Gewandhausorchester, Rotterdam Philharmonic, Gürzenich Orchester Köln, Royal Stockholm Philharmonic, Tafelmusik, La Cetra Barockorchester Basel and Ensemble 415. He was the fi rst Australian to win a major international keyboard competition, receiving First Prize in the 23rd Festival van Vlaanderen International Mozart Fortepiano Competition, Brugge, and his 47 CDs have won many awards including the ARIA Best Classical Album and Gramophone Best Recording.

Dr Lancaster’s career honours include the Australian Artists Creative Fellowship for his outstanding artistic contribution to the nation, the HC Coombs Creative Arts Fellowship, and elected Fellowships of the Royal Society of Arts and the Australian College of Educators. In 2006 he was named Australian of the Year for the Australian Capital Territory, and was awarded the Order of Australia for service to the arts. In 2007, he was appointed Honorary Professor of the University of Tasmania. Since 2002 his principal appointment has been at the Australian National University School of Music, where he is Professor of Music. His most recent appearance for the Sydney Symphony was 2009 when he gave a fortepiano recital, and he performed Haydn’s Concerto in D in the Mozart series in 2006.

Roger Benedict violaRoger Benedict has worked as a soloist, chamber musician, orchestral player, teacher and conductor. He studied at the Royal Northern College of Music, Manchester (where he was later a professor), and the International Musicians’ Seminar, Prussia Cove. In 1991 he was appointed Principal Viola of the Philharmonia Orchestra, and in 2002 Principal Viola of the Sydney Symphony. He is also Artistic Director of the Sydney Symphony’s Fellowship program, and has performed as guest principal with the Chamber Orchestra of Europe.

As a soloist he has appeared with the Philharmonia Orchestra, Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra, Ulster Orchestra, and Orchestra Ensemble Kanazawa, Japan. He has recorded several concertante works for BBC Radio 3, including Michael Berkeley’s Viola Concerto, of which he gave the premiere, and he is frequently heard on ABC Classic FM. His new recording of music by Koechlin and Jongen, Volupté, is available on Melba Records.

He has performed Strauss’s Don Quixote many times, and with the Sydney Symphony he has performed Mozart’s Sinfonia concertante, Berlioz’s Harold in Italy, Ford’s Unquiet Grave and Vaughan Williams’ Flos campi. His chamber music partners have included such musicians as Lorin Maazel, Simon Rattle, Louis Lortie and Leif Ove Andsnes.

Roger Benedict plays a Carlo Antonio T estore viola made in Milan in 1753.

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PRINCIPAL VIOLA


2011 SEASON

MOZART IN THE CITY

Thursday 3 February | 7pmCity Recital Hall Angel Place

Mozart RevisitedDene Olding violin-directorAndrea Lam piano

WOLFGANG AMADEUS MOZART (1756–1791)Concerto in D for piano and violin, K315freconstructed by Philip Wilby (born 1949)

AllegroAndantino cantabileAllegretto

BENJAMIN BRITTEN (1913–1976)Sinfonietta, Op.1

Poco presto ed agitatoVariations (Andante lento) –Tarantella (Presto vivace)

MOZARTSymphony in D (from the Posthorn Serenade, K320)

Adagio maestoso – Allegro con spiritoAndantinoFinale (Presto)

MOZART MYSTERY MOMENTTo be announced on Friday. See page 3 for details.

This concert will be recorded for later broadcast on ABC Classic FM.

Pre-concert talk by David Garrett at 6.15pm in the First Floor Reception Room.Visit sydneysymphony.com/talk-bios for speaker biographies.

Estimated durations: 28 minutes, 15 minutes, 17 minutes, 5 minutes

The concert will conclude at approximately 8.15pm.


BRITTEN SINFONIETTA

Britten composed his three-movement Sinfonietta in just under three weeks. The amazing achievement of a brilliant boy, it was fi rst performed on 31 January 1933 at one of the concerts organised by Britten’s friends Anne Macnaghten and Iris Lemare. Britten himself conducted it with students at the Royal College of Music six weeks later. A BBC broadcast and publication by Boosey and Hawkes in 1934 as Britten’s Opus 1 helped put a new talent on the national map.

The Sinfonietta was originally composed for ten instruments, but the string quintet parts can also be played by string orchestra, as in this concert.

Mozart Revisited

We’re used to hearing Mozart as the youngest composer on a program. In this concert another composer takes the honours. But if you didn’t know, you probably wouldn’t guess that the composer of Britten’s accomplished Opus 1 was just a teenager.

The Mozart pieces, both of them, may be considered ‘bonus’ Mozart. One is an extra Mozart symphony – the result of a serenade ‘revisited’. Its derivation from a larger work may have been done by Mozart himself, but we can’t prove it. The second bonus might be called ‘recovered’ Mozart: a completion of something he himself did not fi nish.

Benjamin Britten was 18 years old when he composed his Sinfonietta. He was studying at the Royal College of Music, but also continuing private studies begun when he was a schoolboy, under the composer Frank Bridge. The compositions he’d submitted for the entry scholarship to the Royal College had made one of the examiners remark that it wasn’t ‘decent’ for an English public schoolboy to be writing such music. Britten was already aware of the music of the Second Viennese School. He had heard Schoenberg’s Pierrot Lunaire on the radio, and requested the score as a school prize. Later he wanted to study in Austria with Alban Berg. Perhaps infl uenced by the director of the Royal College, Britten’s parents vetoed this, on the grounds that Berg was ‘not a good infl uence’.

ABOUT THE MUSIC

Benjamin Britten

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The Sinfonietta shows the infl uence of Schoenberg. Its instrumentation, for a quintet of winds plus a quintet of strings, is similar to that of Schoenberg’s First Chamber Symphony (performed by the Sydney Symphony in 2010), and Britten pays tribute to the Schoenberg work by quoting it, in the rising horn motif at the start. Schoenberg was also Britten’s model for deriving most of the thematic material, in all three movements, from just a few basic ideas. But the music does not sound like Schoenberg.

The second movement has some affi nity with the English ‘pastoral’ school, favoured at the Royal College where Ralph Vaughan Williams was eminent and John Ireland was Britten’s composition teacher. But neither would have composed anything quite like this. Britten calls it ‘Variations’, referring no doubt to the constant reconsideration of the main motives. The fi nale, a tarantella, is a hectic dance. This is the most ‘Brittenish’ movement, thinks composer and Britten biographer David Matthews, who sums up the Sinfonietta as having ‘a cool steely brilliance’.

Mozart was 22 when he began, but did not fi nish, a concerto for violin, piano and orchestra. Like Britten, Mozart was passing through a crucial stage on the way to maturity. Leaving Salzburg in 1777 with his mother, he visited Munich, Augsburg and Mannheim, where he got to know musicians from that city’s outstanding orchestra, and fell in love with Aloysia Weber; then on to Paris, where Mozart’s mother died. In November 1778, back in Mannheim, Mozart wrote to his father in Salzburg: ‘An Académie des Amateurs, like the one in Paris, is about to be started here. Herr Franzl is to lead the violins. So at the moment I am composing a concerto for clavier and violin.’ Mozart never fi nished the concerto, and what has survived is 120 bars of a fi rst movement – about fi ve minutes – partly fully scored for orchestra, partly in draft, from the entry of the soloists on.

All Mozart’s concertos with multiple solo instruments come from around this time. He fi nished the Concerto for fl ute and harp (to be heard later in this series), the Sinfonia concertante for violin and viola, K364 (performed last year) and the Concerto for two pianos, K365 – these two last composed after returning to Salzburg. He also composed a Sinfonia concertante for winds for the Mannheim soloists to perform in Paris, which may survive as K297b, and he began a Sinfonia concertante for violin, viola, and cello in Salzburg.

CONCERTO COMPLETED

Mozart began his concerto for piano and violin with the Mannheim violinist Ignatz Franzl in mind. He greatly admired Franzl’s playing, writing to his father in 1777: ‘You know I am no lover of diffi culties. He plays diffi cult things, but his hearers are not aware that they are diffi cult.’ Mozart praised Franzl’s ‘beautiful round tone’, his staccato (played in a single bowing, up or down), and his double trill.

That trademark staccato turns up in the second movement of a violin sonata Mozart composed in 1778 (K306) and this, together with the surviving fragment of Mozart’s concerto, formed the basis for Philip Wilby’s reconstruction and completion of the concerto, fi rst performed in 1985. Wilby completed Mozart’s fi rst movement, using some music from the sonata as the basis, and orchestrated the second and third movements of the sonata as a concerto.


The concerto for violin and piano may have been abandoned because the opportunity for its performance suddenly disappeared. Only a short time after Mozart told his father he was composing the concerto, Mannheim’s ruler moved to Munich, and took most of the Mannheim orchestra with him. There were to be no concerts of the Mannheim Académie des Amateurs.

What Mozart did write of this concerto is tantalising. Mozart authority Alfred Einstein, after describing the imposing and richly orchestrated opening, exclaims ‘A Sinfonia concertante for Franzl, whom Mozart admired so highly as a violinist, and himself – what a gift to the world this would have been!’

Enter Philip Wilby. This English musician has been a professional violinist, a composer (notably of music for brass) and a university teacher. Wilby has made several ‘reconstructions’ of unfi nished pieces by Mozart (including the 134-bar fragment of the sinfonia concertante for violin, viola and cello). In this instance, he has expanded Mozart’s fragment for piano and violin into a concerto in three movements. Wilby believes that when he dropped the concerto, Mozart re-used his ideas for it as a piano and violin sonata, in the same key: K306 in D major. Wilby fi nds signs in the second and third movements of the sonata of possible transcription from an orchestrally conceived work. The sonata, he concludes ‘is in reality [Mozart’s] double concerto’. Wilby has completed Mozart’s fi rst movement, taking some music from the sonata as the basis, and he has

Composer and ‘musical detective’ Philip Wilby

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scored the second and third movements of the sonata as a concerto.

Wilby’s arguments for the sonata ‘being’ the concerto include the presence in the last movement, of an ‘immensely long’ cadenza, most unexpected in a chamber sonata. The piano and violin sonata K.306 is notably ‘concertante’ in conception – ‘a great concert sonata’, Einstein calls it, and he relates the fi nale to Mozart’s violin concertos. Franzl’s trademark staccato in one bow stroke – not found in the fragment of the concerto fi rst movement – is found several times in the slow movement of the sonata. In this movement, too, Mozart gives each instrument in turn a chance to shine expressively, in the concertante manner.

In the last movement a toy soldier march and a romp in 6/8 time keep interrupting each other, in a double variation form. This is Wilby’s description, and he admits that the hint of a private joke in the big cadenza is less strong when this is heard as part of a concerto rather than a sonata.

The symphony ‘from the Posthorn Serenade’ has its birth lines in order, except that there is no evidence that Mozart himself made the selection – the only copy is not in his hand. But he did extract symphonies from other Salzburg serenades (his Haff ner Serenade, K250, for example), and even made a ‘symphony’ of sorts from the Posthorn Serenade. The movements headed ‘Concertante’ and ‘Rondeau’ were played in Mozart’s concert in Vienna’s Burgtheater on 23 March 1783, billed as ‘Concertant-Simphonie’. Those movements featured solo instruments. But the more common practice was to extract a ‘non-concertante’ symphony, by removing the movements featuring soloists, and one or both of the minuets.

Someone has applied this process to what is almost certainly the Finalmusik, associated with the end of year graduation ceremonies of Salzburg’s Benedictine University, on 3 August 1779. The nickname of that Finalmusik, or serenade, comes from one of the omitted minuets, which contains a post horn solo – a symbol of departure and probably a salute to the graduating students.

Like the concerts Mozart presented in Vienna after departing Salzburg, this Mozart in the City series has a need for symphonies. Whether or not he compiled the ‘Posthorn’ Symphony himself, he might well have said ‘it must certainly be very eff ective’, just as he did about the ‘Haff ner’ Symphony. Mozart revisited.


POSTHORN SYMPHONY

The three movements from the Posthorn Serenade heard in tonight’s concert merit the title ‘symphony’. After 1775, Mozart was making up for the lack of opportunity for symphonic composition in Salzburg by writing in a grand symphonic manner in his orchestral serenades. The fi rst movement of the Posthorn Serenade is one of Mozart’s most ambitious utterances. It features a slow introduction, and exploits the dynamics available from a large orchestra with trumpets and drums by including orchestral build-ups of the kind called ‘Mannheim crescendos’. The Andantino in D minor, coloured by the dark tones of bassoons and horns, provides a sombre contrast – surprising in music written for a celebration – while the fi nale combines entertainment with brilliant orchestral grandeur, and imitative writing sometimes looking forward to the ‘Prague’ Symphony.

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2011 SEASON

MOZART IN THE CITY

Thursday 14 April | 7pmCity Recital Hall Angel Place

Mozart & HaydnPieter Wispelwey cello-director

WOLFGANG AMADEUS MOZART (1756–1791)Serenade in E fl at for wind octet, K375

Allegro maestosoMenuettoAdagioMenuetto IIAllegro

JOSEPH HAYDN (1732–1809)Symphony No.49 in F minor (La passione)

AdagioAllegro di moltoMenuet e TrioFinale (Presto)

HAYDNCello Concerto No.1 in C, Hob.VIIb:1

ModeratoAdagioAllegro molto

MOZART MYSTERY MOMENTTo be announced on Friday. See page 3 for details.






ABOUT THE MUSIC

Mozart & Haydn

This program of ‘Classical’ music shows just how broad and rich such a concert can be. The title composers, Mozart and Haydn, knew and admired one another’s music. But tonight’s works by Haydn were composed long before he got to know Mozart personally. The two greatest composers of the age were to form a personal relationship in Vienna, so it is fi tting in a way that in this concert Mozart is represented by one of the fi rst pieces he composed after moving from Salzburg to Vienna for good. Tonight, the selection of works accentuates the diff erences between Mozart and Haydn, rather than the connections.

A concert with Mozart as player-director would have featured a concerto for his main instrument, the piano. Tonight’s player-director is a cellist, and he saves his solo appearance until last, where Haydn gives him an outstanding opportunity to shine. Haydn, neither a virtuoso himself nor famous as a composer of concertos, nevertheless wrote one of the most eff ective all concertos for cello. (Mozart never attempted a cello concerto. Perhaps he never encountered a soloist who inspired him enough.)

Each concert in this year’s Mozart in the City promises a serenade. Mozart didn’t give that name to the wind octet K375, but he was serenaded by its music. A letter from Mozart in Vienna to his father in Salzburg, tells how he celebrated his name day in 1781: ‘At eleven o’clock I was treated to a Nacht Musick performed by two clarinets, two horns and two bassoons – and that too of my own composition’. The players were in the courtyard, and

WIND SERENADE, K375

This is typical of the serenade genre in having two minuets, and its opening movement begins with a suggestion of the march to which the musicians could be imagined entering. The majestic manner and the rich sonority of the music recall other Mozart works in the key of E fl at major, such as the Sinfonia concertante for violin and viola, K364 (heard in this series last year). The two minuets and their contrasting trios show amazing variety of musical character and textures. In the slow movement (Adagio), ever-shifting patterns, combinations, and rhythms accompany songful themes for each instrument in turn, and sometimes in dialogue. The clarinettist Eric Hoeprich has said he imagines it played in a room lit by candles. The fi nale is notable for its brilliance and energy.

“At eleven o’clock at night I was treated to a serenade performed by two clarinets, two horns and two bassoons – and that too of my own composition – for I wrote it for St Theresa’s Day, for Frau von Hickel’s sister…at whose house it was performed for the fi rst time.… But the chief reason why I composed it was in order to let Herr von Strack, who goes there every day, hear something of my composition; so I wrote it rather carefully. It has won great applause too and on St Theresa’s Night it was performed in three different places; for as soon as they fi nished playing it in one place, they were taken off somewhere else and paid to play it. Well, these musicians asked that the street door might be opened and, placing themselves in the centre of the courtyard, surprised me, just as I was about to undress, in the most pleasant fashion imaginable with the fi rst chord in E fl at.”

MOZART, WRITING ABOUT HIS NAME DAY (31 OCTOBER)


the door to the house was left open, so that Mozart was surprised, just as he was about to undress, to hear the fi rst chord of his own piece. This was probably the original version, for wind sextet, of the ‘Serenade’ K375, which is now known in the version with two oboes added to pairs of clarinets, horns, and bassoons.

Mozart tells his father he composed the music very carefully, because he wanted to impress Herr von Strack, the valet of the Emperor Joseph II. Mozart knew that the Emperor was planning to form his own ‘Harmonie’, or wind ensemble. He’d written this wind sextet for performance at the house of the sister in law of the court painter, knowing that Strack went there every day. Their serenading of Mozart was an extra, impromptu performance by the same players.

When the Emperor formed his Harmonie, early in 1782, it was an octet. In the summer of that year Mozart composed the Serenade in C minor, K388, for this enlarged ensemble, and also added oboe parts to the Nacht Musick in E fl at. As a career move it failed, since the Imperial Harmonie never included any original wind music by Mozart in its library, preferring transcriptions of opera and ballet music, including some by Mozart.

The term Mozart uses for this piece, ‘Nacht Musick’, is interchangeable with the Italian ‘Notturno’, and with ‘Serenade’ – all meaning ‘music to be played at night’. It was sophisticated entertainment music, to be played in the open air, where wind instruments carried best, or at least alluded to that manner of performance.

This 18th-century silhouette by an unknown artist shows Haydn playing the violin with Mozart at the keyboard, while Mozart’s wife Constanze listens.

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After this warm and entertaining music comes a contrast: concert music alluding to a world of sombre emotion. Many things are remarkable about Haydn’s Symphony No.49. All four movements are in the same key, F minor, a key Haydn used for some his most intensely felt music. F minor, in Haydn, is the key for such music, as was G minor in Mozart (String Quintet, Pamina’s despairing aria in The Magic Flute) or C minor in Beethoven (Pathétique Sonata, Fifth Symphony). Haydn compounds this symphony’s unity of mood by beginning all four movements with the same pattern of four notes.

Beginning the symphony with a movement in a slow tempo, was a strategy Haydn had also adopted in his ‘Philosopher’ Symphony, No.22 (Mozart in the City 2009). This followed the form of the by then old-fashioned ‘church sonata’, and it imposes from the start a striking mood of refl ection, a sustained cantilena for the strings, punctuated by outbursts that intensify the tragic feeling. Only for one brief moment does the intensity let up: in the trio of the Minuet. In the fast second movement, the leaping intervals and the driving, lean, sinewy writing are typical of what has been called Haydn’s ‘Storm and

LA PASSIONE

The fi rst documented use of the name ‘La passione’ was in 1790. This symphony circulated widely in 18th-century courts and monasteries, and remained well known throughout Haydn’s life, even many years after he wrote it. The nickname is a mystery: we don’t know if Haydn approved it and there’s no musical or historical evidence that he intended it for Holy Week (‘passione’ referring to the Passion of Christ).

The symphony is striking and unusual in at least two ways: all the movements are in the same, lamenting key (F minor), and it follows the form of the old-fashioned ‘church sonata’, beginning with a slow movement instead of a fast movement. Its powerful, emotional character places it clearly within the group of Haydn’s Sturm und Drang (storm and stress) symphonies.

Engraved portrait of Haydn, published in 1781 .


Stress’ style. The analogy is with the subjectively emotional literature given that name in the 1770s. Haydn anticipated this feeling in works like this symphony, composed in 1768.

The nickname ‘La passione’ refl ects the impression this extraordinary symphony made on its contemporaries. There is no historical or musical evidence, however, that it was composed for Holy Week or that Haydn had in mind the Passion of Christ.

For more than 150 years following Haydn’s death, there was only one Haydn Cello Concerto, the D major piece of 1783. Although its music survived in Haydn’s own writing, there were queries about the authorship, partly because Haydn had not entered a D major Cello Concerto in the Thematic Catalogue of his works. He had entered the beginning of a cello concerto in C, but of that no trace was to be found. In 1961 it was noticed that a set of parts for a cello concerto, in the Prague National Museum, had the same beginning as Haydn’s catalogue entry. This discovery caused great excitement, not just because there are so few cello concertos, especially from the 18th century, but because of the high quality and attractiveness of the music.

The Prague library also contained a concerto in the hand of the same 18th-century copyist, composed by Joseph Weigl, who was a cellist in the Esterházy orchestra from 1761 to 1769. This suggests the Cello Concerto in C was for Weigl, a colleague of Haydn’s who may have expanded his awareness of what the cello can do. Style and form in this concerto display aspects of the Italian baroque concerto – solo passages alternate with ritornello passages in which the main themes ‘return’. But the harmonic structure is closer to Classical ‘sonata form’, in the new style Haydn himself was doing so much to forge. The long phrases give a sense of continuity, especially where, as most often happens, the soloist is leading the discourse.

Haydn here is writing for his soloist and his public, rather than, as in the ‘Passione’ symphony, making a take-it-or-leave-it personal statement. This is true also of the slow movement, in F, elegant and graceful, music not unlike what, in the context of this concert’s pairing, one could imagine the young Mozart writing in one of his pieces of occasional music for Salzburg. Haydn has left the best until last, in the fi nale’s almost non-stop virtuoso fi reworks. This dynamism is like that of the ‘Passione’ symphony, from the same period, but without the storm and stress.


CELLO CONCERTO

Haydn’s Cello Concerto in C was probably written during the early 1760s, for the cellist Joseph Weigl, who played in Haydn’s orchestra at Eisenstadt. The concerto gives a gifted soloist plenty of opportunity for true virtuoso display, not least in what Pieter Wispelwey describes as its ‘fabulous fi nale’. It’s not just an allegro, he points out, but an allegro molto (very fast!) and ‘it has one of the longest semiquaver passages in the repertoire – it’s only six minutes, but it’s a hypnotising movement and very exciting’.

The 20th-century premiere of Haydn’s Cello Concerto took place in the city where it was discovered, as part of the Prague Spring Festival on 19 May 1962. The soloist was Miloš Sádlo and the Prague Radio Symphony Orchestra was c onducted by Charles Mackerras.


MORE MUSIC

MOZART RECONSTRUCTED

Violinist Daniel Hope and pianist Sebastian Knauer have recorded Philip Wilby’s reconstruction of K315f with the Camerata Salzburg and Roger Norrington. Also on the disc is Mozart’s Piano Concerto No.16 in D, K451 and his Violin Sonata in G, K379.WARNER CLASSICS 61944

To hear the Violin Sonata in D, K306, which Wilby took as a guide in his reconstruction of the concerto, try the recording of four Mozart sonatas by Duo Amadè (Catherine Mackintosh and Geoffrey Govier playing on period instruments).CHANDOS 764

Glen Wilson (fortepiano) and Jean-Jacques Kantorow (violin) perform just Mozart’s notes from the surviving fragment accompanied by the Netherlands Chamber Orchestra and Leopold Hager.DENON 33C37-7505

BRITTEN SINFONIETTA

Britten’s Opus 1 is included on the disc Our Hunting Fathers, in a performance by the Britten Sinfonia and Daniel Harding. Tenor Ian Bostridge joins them for the title work and other songs. Also available on iTunes.EMI CLASSICS 56534

POSTHORN SERENADE

It’s worth listening to all of Mozart’s ‘Posthorn’ Serenade, K320, in order to hear the minuet with the posthorn solo that gave the music its nickname, as well as the delightful concertante movements that Mozart himself felt worthy of separate performance. It’s included in a disc with the Serenata notturna (K239) and Eine kleine Nachtmusik (K525), with performances by the Mannheim

Chamber Orchestra and Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra and conductors Florian Heyerick and Sir Colin Davis.BRILLIANT CLASSICS 93292

Roger Norrington and the Stuttgart Radio Symphony Orchestra have recorded the three-movement symphony from the serenade and placed it alongside an early Mozart symphony (No.8) and one of his last (No.40).HÄNSSLER CLASSIC 93213

WIND SERENADE K375

The recording by Erich Hoeprich’s period wind ensemble Nachtmusique of Mozart’s Serenade for winds, K375, is coupled with a Harmonie (or windband) arrangement of music from The Magic Flute. Opera arrangements such as these were favoured by the Emperor; Mozart’s original wind serenades didn’t get a look in.GLOSSA 80601

HAYDN ‘PASSIONE’

Haydn’s Symphony No.49 (La passione) is included in a 2-disc collection of his ‘Sturm und Drang’ symphonies, recorded by Adám Fischer and the Austro-Hungarian Haydn Orchestra. Also in the set: the ‘Trauer’ (Mourning) Symphony No.44.NIMBUS 7072

HAYDN CELLO CONCERTOS

Pieter Wispelwey has recorded Haydn’s cello concertos No.1 in C and No.2 in D with Florilegium, directed by fortepianist Neal Peres Da Costa. The most recent release fi lls out the disc with Salomon’s chamber arrangement for Haydn’s Symphony No.104 (London).CHANNEL CLASSICS 6007

Selected Discography: Concerts 1 & 2

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2011 SEASON

MOZART IN THE CITY

Thursday 23 June | 7pmCity Recital Hall Angel Place

Mozart After Dark Michael Dauth violin-directorEmma Sholl fl uteLouise Johnson harp

FRANZ SCHUBERT (1797–1828)Konzertstück in D for violin and orchestra, D345Adagio – Allegro

WOLFGANG AMADEUS MOZART (1756–1791)Concerto in C for fl ute and harp, K299

AllegroAndantinoRondo (Allegro)

MOZARTSerenata notturna – Serenade in D, K239

March (Maestoso)MenuettoRondo (Allegretto)

MOZART MYSTERY MOMENT

To be announced on Friday. See page 3 for details.






ABOUT THE MUSIC

Mozart After Dark

It is indeed ‘after dark’, and there will be Mozart. The title conjures up an image of Mozart’s music as background in a nightclub – more likely in Paris, where Mozart composed the fl ute and harp concerto, than in provincial and clerical Salzburg. But it is from Salzburg that the concert gets its night-time title, from Mozart himself, and his ‘Serenata notturna’.

This ‘nocturnal serenade’ is one of the most individual of the pieces Mozart turned out for social occasions. It is basically a concerto grosso – a concerto with a group as ‘soloists’ – but with some unusual, and amusing, features.

Much has been made by scholars of the composition of the concertino (soloists) group – two violins, viola and double bass. This, it is suggested, implies the conventions of outdoor performance – where the players would arrive and depart playing on the march. A cello cannot readily be played on the move, whereas the double bass can be strapped to the player, and so can the kettledrums. Indeed, this serenade begins with a march. On the other hand, Mozart’s autograph score bears the date January 1776, and it is unlikely that the music was played outdoors in winter.

Perhaps the best way to understand this work is that Mozart was using the conventions of outdoor music, with their suggestion of an al fresco style, as a substitute for the outdoors itself (Notturno may have been the special Salzburg name for such music). The prominence given to the timpani is particularly noteworthy: the drums’ presence in the ripieno (large group) balances the double bass in the concertino. Mozart makes the most of the eff ects of colour available from this combination of instruments.

Einstein suggests that the episodes in the Rondo fi nale, contrasting so strikingly with the music surrounding them, are allusions to tunes known to the fi rst audience which signifi ed something special and amusing. The audience at the hypothetical Salzburg nightclub seem to have been sophisticated – if not socially, at least musically!

Salzburg, Mozart came to feel, was hard, often ungrateful work. Paris, city of lights, seemed to promise more – at fi rst. Mozart, beginning his extended stay in Paris in 1778, reported dutifully to his father in Salzburg on the calls he had paid on potential patrons. He had some success. The fl ute and harp concerto was ordered by a fl ute-playing French aristocrat, and in the fi rst fl ush of a freelancer’s enthusiasm, Mozart wrote to his father: ‘the Duc de Guines, whose daughter is my composition scholar, plays the fl ute

SERENATA NOTTURNA

Mozart’s ‘nocturnal serenade’ departs from convention in several ways: it would have been performed indoors, rather than out, and Mozart adopts an formation of instruments unlike any other: two groups of strings (quartet and orchestra) with timpani or kettledrums. Instead of many shorter movements, there are just three. The fi rst is a march, restricted to simple fundamental harmonic structure because the timpani can provide only two notes. Mozart’s originality emerges in the unexpected sonority of plucked strings against the drums. The minuet is a rather grand one, and in the middle Mozart writes a trio for his ‘serenade quartet’. The concluding Rondeau offers especially imaginative episodes – at one point a poignant adagio leads to a sprightly contredanse. Its most striking feature, however, is its principal theme, which ends each time with a rhetorical pause. Could it be an invitation to improvise? Perhaps.

THE SERENADE QUARTET

A regular string quartet comprises two violins, viola and cello. But in Salzburg, so the theory goes, the ‘serenade quartet’ consisted of two violins, viola and double bass: serenade music was usually outdoor music and, unlike a double bass, a cello can’t be played standing up. The evidence for this formation rests largely on Mozart’s Serenata notturna, which was completed in winter and almost certainly played indoors, but still nods its head to the summer serenade tradition.


FLUTE AND HARP CONCERTO

There was a craze in Paris in the 1770s and 1780s for the symphonie concertante, a type of orchestral work featuring several soloists. Mozart’s fl ute and harp concerto of 1778 is such a work in everything but name, and it makes a pair with the Sinfonia concertante he composed for wind soloists from the Mannheim orchestra, who intended to play it in Paris (this may or not be what survives as K297b). The Flute and Harp Concerto was composed for one of Mozart’s composition students in Paris, a young aristocratic girl who played the harp, and her fl ute-playing father, the Duc de Guines.

incomparably, and she the harp magnifi que’. Over the fi ve months between receiving the commission and completing the concerto, Mozart had apparently reassessed the skill of his intended performers – judging by the ‘easy’ key of C major and other aspects of the music. Worse, after four months the father still hadn’t paid Mozart for his daughter’s composition lessons, and Mozart was bored with teaching her, despairing of her ever having an idea.

The fl ute in the 18th century was the aristocratic amateur’s instrument par excellence. Adrien-Louis Bonnières de Souastre, Comte [not Duke] de Guines, in England as French envoy, had apparently acquired an English fl ute with six keys, able to play the notes D fl at and C at the bottom of its range. These notes appear, sparingly, in the concerto for fl ute and harp, but nowhere else in Mozart’s writing for fl ute.

The whole concerto is proof of Mozart’s ability to tailor his writing, both technically and aesthetically, to the practicalities of instruments, players and their expected audience. ‘I can adopt and imitate pretty well any sort or style of composition’ was Mozart’s boast, in a letter of February 1778.

“The Concert” ascribed to Jean-Honoré Fragonard. This painting from 1780 depicts the aristocratic world of Mozart’s harp-playing student and her father.

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The unison opening for all the instruments was a favourite of the French, though, as Mozart said when he imitated it in his ‘Paris’ symphony, he couldn’t see what all the fuss was about: ‘they all begin together, just as they do elsewhere’. As in most concertos with multiple soloists, the music is broadly laid out so as to give space for each instrument to display itself in turn. Later the music is fl ecked with chromatic notes for colour, especially from the fl ute, but Mozart is careful not to modify too far the neutrality of C major – lest the music be thought diffi cult and demanding. The harp was a novelty instrument, especially for aristocratic ladies, as an alternative to the piano. Mozart wrote his only music for harp as if it were for a keyboard instrument (perhaps his pupil couldn’t show him what else it could do).

In the Andantino Mozart transcends his self-imposed brief. Einstein compares it with the rococo paintings of Boucher: ‘decorative and sensuous but not lacking in deeper emotions’. The Rondeau, its theme a gavotte, is the most explicitly French movement. This is a truly luxuriant movement, constantly sprouting new melodic ideas.

The young Schubert, c.1816

CADENZAS

Mozart had to write out the cadenzas for his aristocratic soloists, but these are lost. The cadenzas most frequently adopted by modern performers are those by German composer Carl Reinecke (1824–1910), a noted interpreter of Mozart’s piano concertos, who supplied cadenzas for all three movements (allowing the harp its trademark glissandos). Reinecke takes both the fl ute and the harp beyond the compass possible on instruments Mozart knew, and his cadenzas are frankly romantic in heightening the expression and enriching the harmony of Mozart’s material. They remind us that ours was not the fi rst era to fi nd Mozart’s music beautiful. (At the time of publication our soloists had yet to decide on their cadenzas.)


SCHUBERT’S KONZERTSTÜCK

The title given to Schubert’s Konzertstück or ‘Concert piece’ comes from the classifying and labelling concern of systematic musicology. On the only surviving score, which is not in Schubert’s hand, it is called ‘Concerto pour Violino’, but – even apart from the confusion of languages – it isn’t really a concerto. There’s only one movement, which takes the form of a rondo, with its recurring main theme, prefaced by a slow introduction (Adagio). Germans called such pieces for solo and orchestra ‘Konzertstück’.

Count Hieronymus von Colloredo was the Prince-Archbishop of Salzburg from 1771 to 1803. Both Mozart and his father Leopold were employed at the Archbishop’s court.

The most homespun music in this concert, where sophistication hardly comes to mind, is the ‘Concert piece’ by Schubert. Along with the Adagio and Rondo for violin and string orchestra (D438) and the Adagio and Rondo ‘concertante’ for piano and string trio (D487), this is the closest Schubert came to writing a concerto.

Unlike Mozart, even unlike Haydn, Schubert’s musical life only occasionally intersected with the public concert world, the sphere of the virtuoso. His works with instrumental soloists were by and large for domestic, or at most semi-public, music making. The ‘concerto’ for violin was probably written, in 1816, for Schubert’s violinist older brother Ferdinand, who after Schubert’s death, consigned it to the publisher Diabelli, as ‘Concerto in D, with orchestral accompaniment’ – it was not published.

The absence of a cadenza suggests a lack of concern for virtuoso display, but violinists report that the solo part is demanding in its own way. The Adagio introduction makes simple but expressive use of the trumpets, oboes and drums, framing solo music, then, with no breaks, comes the Rondo, whose characterful main theme is presented by the soloist; there are alternating episodes in G and in D minor. The forms and spirit of Mozart’s entertainment music are not far away, but some of the distinctive voice of Schubert, then a 20-year-old assistant schoolteacher, can be heard.



2011 SEASON

MOZART IN THE CITY

Thursday 1 September | 7pmCity Recital Hall Angel Place

Mozart & BrahmsRoger Benedict viola-directorGeoffrey Lancaster piano-director

JOHANNES BRAHMS (1833–1897)Serenade No.2 in A, Op.16

Allegro moderatoScherzo (Vivace)Adagio non troppoQuasi MenuettoRondo (Allegro)

Directed by Roger Benedict

WOLFGANG AMADEUS MOZART (1756–1791)Piano Concerto No.25 in C, K503

Allegro maestosoAndante[Allegretto]

Directed by Geoffrey Lancaster

MOZART MYSTERY MOMENT

To be announced on Friday. See page 3 for details.


Pre-concert talk by David Garrett at 6.15pm in the First Floor Reception Room.Visit sydneysymphony.com/talk-bios or speaker biographies.

Estimated durations: 29 minutes, 30 minutes, 5 minutes.



ABOUT THE MUSIC

Mozart and Brahms

Brahms would have been pleased that Mozart’s music was played in the same concert as his – pleased, and perhaps fearful too, just a little. In 1878, Brahms wrote, endorsing his friend Clara Schumann’s plan to play a Mozart concerto: ‘people in general do not understand or respect the best things, such as the Mozart concerto…if only people knew that what they get from us in drops they might drink in bucketfuls from these sources!’

Brahms composed his two serenades for orchestra after spending time getting to know the divertimentos and serenades of Mozart and Haydn. He was 24 years old when he was engaged in 1857 by the Court of Detmold as piano teacher and choirmaster. There he enjoyed long walks in the neighbouring Teutoburg forest, and conducted his choir of young ladies while sitting in the branches of a tree!

BRAHMS SERENADE

The most distinguishing feature of Brahms’ Serenade in A is the absence of violins. In this music the violas have the top line in the strings. There’s a precedent in the opera Uthal by the French composer of the revolutionary era, Méhul, but Brahms’s motivation was surely to put the wind instruments in higher relief.

The Serenade’s fi rst movement is launched by clarinet and bassoon singing a hymn-like theme over plucked strings and shows Brahms’ inclination to write long paragraphs. His learning and his love of Bach is apparent in the slow movement (Adagio non troppo), which begins over an eight-times repeated ground bass, whose theme, after the horn has asserted itself in a remote key, becomes the subject for a fugue. Clara Schumann exclaimed of this movement that there was something religious about it – ‘it could be an Eleison’. Before the playful fi nale comes a movement that may linger in the memory. The heart of this ‘quasi menuetto’ is the most Romantic thing in this serenade, a mysterious forest of leaves rustling and birds calling – perhaps the Elf Queen will appear?

Brahms in the 1880s


Brahms’s own serenades adopt the same multi-movement and relaxed forms as the serenades of Mozart. For Brahms they were preparation for symphonic writing, also delaying the day when he would have to venture on a symphony. He changed his mind several times about the scoring of the fi rst serenade, which went from music for nine players to a full orchestral piece, but the second Serenade came out right fi rst time. Premiered under Brahms’s direction in Hamburg on 10 February 1860, it is one of Brahms’ most mellow and pleasant works, and he remained very fond of it, though insisting that its subtleties required careful preparation by the performers.

Even Beethoven, so much more self-confi dent than Brahms, could admit to being intimidated by Mozart. Attending a rehearsal of the Mozart piano concerto K491, Beethoven exclaimed to a colleague, after one especially marvellous passage ‘You and I, my dear Cramer, will never have an idea like this’. And Beethoven’s own piano concertos reveal the infl uence of the mighty C major Concerto heard in this concert. The much-repeated rhythmic fi gure of three short notes, one long surely suggested the same, almost obsessive, idea in the fi rst movement of Beethoven’s fourth piano concerto.

This Mozart concerto, his longest, and in many ways most magnifi cent piano concerto, admired by musicians and loved by pianists, has never achieved the same popularity as some other Mozart piano concertos. Charles Rosen, in The Classical Style, suggests this is because of the rather neutral character of the musical material. The orchestral opening, for example, is built up by blocks forming a descending then ascending arpeggio. A march, built up by repeating the rhythm just mentioned, begins in the minor key – alternation of major and minor will mark this concerto.

A transition, including a fanfare briefl y suggesting Handel’s Hallelujah Chorus, leads to the piano entry, called in by a ‘sighing’ trill from the violins, an invitation repeated and answered twice, until the piano eventually continues on its own, with more and more virtuosity The piano soloist a wide range of dynamics. Brilliant octave passages and runs in both hands match, but never overcome, the accompaniment. The massive chords from the piano (answered and answering the orchestra) anticipate Beethoven’s in the fi rst movement of his Fourth Concerto.

The development is almost entirely taken up with the march theme. Mozart moves it through keys and between major and minor, varying the colour constantly. At the climax the music is in eight real parts, the most polyphonic

In February 1861 Brahms wrote to Clara Schumann, who was in Detmold playing Mozart piano concertos: ‘I was delighted with your two dear letters, best beloved Clara, and your raptures about the Mozart concertos…It is impossible to experience a greater joy than to hear these concertos come to life. Merely to read through them is not enough. They seem to spring from a veritable fountain of youth. Unfortunately, however, one really enjoys them best alone. The very public which is always pointing to Mozart and making fun of modern tawdriness really only enjoys the latter and gets no pleasure whatsoever from the former…’


passage ever written in a concerto up to then, and rarely matched since.

This concerto of Mozart’s is grander even than any of the symphonies – the nearest comparisons are with the fi nale of the ‘Jupiter’ Symphony, No.41, also in C major, the Prague Symphony (No.38, K504), composed at the same time, and the String Quintets in C, K515 and G minor, K516. It has been described as an ‘Olympian’ work, yet it has no stiff ness in its formality, and there is no triviality in its expression of classical poise.

Having completed this concerto, Mozart seemed to lose interest in the concerto genre, returning to it for one, very diff erent piano concerto two years later, the ‘Coronation’ Concerto K537, then in 1791 for two concertos of an intimate rather than public character: one for piano (K595), and one for clarinet (K622). The C major Piano Concerto of 1786 thus brings to a splendid close the amazing series of works for this medium composed in quick succession in 1784–86, refl ecting the years of Mozart’s success with the Vienna public as a keyboard performer.

The slow movement, in F major, has the same breadth of conception as the fi rst. This movement is songful, but with great contrast of rhythms, and built up from short fragments. It requires breadth in performance, despite its Andante marking. The piano writing was designed to maintain the sweep of the phrases on an instrument with less sustaining ability than its modern descendants.

From a page in Mozart’s thematic catalogue, showing the opening bars of his Piano Concerto in C (K503, dated 4 December) and his Symphony in D (K504, dated 6 December).

PIANO CONCERTO K503

This piano concerto, like the ‘Prague’ Symphony (No.38, K504), was probably intended for Mozart’s Advent concert series in Vienna, where he gave he gave the fi rst performance on 5 December 1786. He entered the concerto in his thematic catalogue the previous day, but he’d begun writing it in winter 1784–85. The surviving sketches for the fi rst movement dispel two misconceptions about Mozart’s composing: that he composed everything at a single stretch and that he composed whole pieces in his head before writing anything down. The thoroughness of his approach to this concerto befi ts one of the greatest works of his life


The last movement has the same scope as the initial allegro. Towards the end Mozart seems to lose interest, and recapitulates his material with showy virtuosity rather than his usual fascinating changes. Even Homer nods occasionally – Mozart can be excused, since he has just given us the wonderful second episode of the Rondo, where canonic imitation expresses passionate feeling, the winds overlap, while the piano knits the whole passage together with triplets. The refrain of this movement is from the ballet music in Mozart’s opera Idomeneo, a Gavotte about which Erik Smith has observed ‘the ancien régime seems to dance out to its nostalgic strains’. Mozart recalled this music, from the great masterpiece of his early manhood when he composed the king of his piano concertos, one of the old order’s supreme musical achievements!


This portrait of Mozart was begun by his brother-in-law Joseph Lange in 1789. It was intended to show him seated at the piano.


GLOSSARY

6/8 TIME – a musical metre in which six quick notes are grouped in two lots of three: 1-2-3 4-5-6 for a distinctive galloping eff ect.

ARPEGGIO – a musical gesture in which the notes of a chord are ‘spread’, or played one after the other instead of simultaneously.

CADENZA – a virtuoso passage for a soloist.

CANONIC IMITATION – a polyphonic technique in which a melody is presented by one ‘voice’ and then repeated by one or more other voices, each entering before the previous voice has fi nished, e.g. children’s singing rounds.

CANTILENA – a song-like melody

CASSATION – another term for a serenade.

CHROMATIC NOTES – ‘foreign’ notes or harmonies that do not belong to the prevailing key of the music. An expressive device since the 16th century, the rich eff ect is most strongly associated with the Romantic style of the 19th century.

CHURCH SONATA – a baroque instrumental work, normally in four movements and characteristically beginning with a slow movement.

CONCERTANTE – description for any type of music, such as the concerto, in which one or more solo instrumentalists are featured against a full ensemble.

CONCERTO – a work for solo instrument, or a group of soloists, and orchestra, including extended virtuoso passages for the soloist to play alone.

CONCERTO GROSSO – a baroque concerto genre, featuring a group of solo instruments (CONCERTINO) in concert and in contrast with a larger ensemble (RIPIENO).

DIVERTIMENTO – literally a ‘diversion’, in the 18th century this was used interchangeably with serenade.

DOUBLE VARIATION – a version of the theme and variation form in which two alternating themes are varied.

FINALMUSIK – a serenade composed for a

graduation celebration

GAVOTTE – a French dance with a two-note upbeat, which results in the phrases beginning and ending in the middle of a bar. It had a regular rhythm and a strong sense of balance.

HARMONIE – in Austria, southern Germany and Bohemia, Harmonie referred to a band of wind instruments, typically comprising pairs of oboes, clarinets, bassoons and horns, often with a double bass or contrabassoon as well.

MAJOR AND MINOR KEYS – in Western music there are two main categories of scale or key, major and minor. Aurally, a major scale will sound ‘brighter’ or more cheerful (e.g. ‘Happy Birthday’), while a minor scale will sound sombre or mournful (e.g. a funeral march).

MANNHEIM CRESCENDO –18th-century Mannheim was famous for the virtuosity of its orchestra and for its infl uential symphonic style. Signature eff ects included both sudden and gradual changes of volume (e.g. the so-called Mannheim ‘steamroller’ or Mannheim crescendo), and gestures exploiting the full register of the orchestra from low to high (e.g. the Mannheim rocket.

MINUET – a French court dance from the Baroque period, in moderately fast triple time. In concert music the minuet included a contrasting central section known as a TRIO.

NACHTMUSIK – German for ‘night music’; another term for a serenade.

NOTTURNO – Italian for ‘night’; in music this is yet another term for a serenade.

OCTAVE PASSAGES – a technique in piano writing where the melody is doubled (played simultaneously) in diff erent octaves or registers. This gives increased power and emphasis to the melodic line.

POLYPHONIC – a musical texture in which the parts or voices move independently, with their own melodic shapes and rhythms, and ‘vertical’ harmonies are created almost incidentally through the coming together of the diff erent ‘horizontal’ lines. See canonic imitation.


RITORNELLO – literally ‘a little return’, in a baroque concerto this is a recurring section of music which alternates with solo passages.

RONDEAU – the French spelling for the word ‘RONDO’: a musical form in which a main idea (refrain) alternates with a series of musical episodes, much like verse and chorus.

SCALE – a stepwise sequence of notes. The words ‘doh re mi fa soh la ti doh’, as sung in ‘Doh, a deer’, outline an ascending major scale.

SECOND VIENNESE SCHOOL – a collective reference for Arnold Schoenberg and his students Alban Berg and Anton von Webern, and the atonal style they championed in the fi rst part of the 20th century.

SERENADE – the Classical serenade was a multi-movement work intended for outdoor performance in the evening or as incidental entertainment for functions. Brahms’s orchestral serenades followed in the tradition of Mozart’s, but he would have assumed a concert audience – and attentive listeners!

SINFONIA CONCERTANTE – a concerto for more than one solo instrument, the classical counterpart of the Baroque concerto grosso, and especially popular in late 18th-century France.

SONATA – ‘sonata’ can refer to both a musical genre and a musical form. The classical sonata is a three- or four-movement work for solo instrument in which the fi rst movement, and sometimes the last movement, is in sonata form. The term ‘SONATA FORM’ was conceived in the 19th century to describe the harmonically based structure most classical composers had adopted for the fi rst movements of their sonatas, string quartets and symphonies. It involves the EXPOSITION, or presentation of themes and subjects: the fi rst in the tonic or home key, the second in a contrasting key. The tension between the two keys is intensifi ed in the DEVELOPMENT, where the themes are manipulated and varied as the music moves further and further away from the ultimate goal of the home key. Tension is resolved in

the RECAPITULATION, where both subjects are restated in the tonic. Sometimes a CODA (‘tail’) is added to enhance the sense of fi nality.

TARANTELLA – an Italian folk dance from Taranto, characterised by driving, even frenzied, rhythms.

In much of the classical repertoire, movement titles are taken from the Italian words that indicate the tempo and mood. A selection of terms from this program is included here.

Adagio – slow Adagio maestoso – slow, majesticallyAdagio non troppo – slow, not too muchAllegretto – lively, not as fast as allegroAllegro – fast Allegro con spirito – fast, with spiritAllegro (di) molto – very fastAllegro moderato – moderately fastAndante – an easy walking paceAndante lento – at a walking pace, broadlyAndantino – a diminutive of andante, this term can be interpreted as either a little slower than andante or, as is more common nowadays, a little fasterAndantino cantabile – at an easy walking pace and in a singing styleMaestoso – majestically Menuetto – from minuet, a French court dance from the Baroque period. Adopted in the 18th century as a tempo direction, it suggests a dance-like movement in a moderately fast triple time.Moderato – moderately Poco presto ed agitato – somewhat as fast as possible(!) and agitatedPresto – as fast as possiblePresto vivace – …livelyQuasi Menuetto – in the style and tempo of a minuetVivace – lively

This glossary is intended only as a quick and easy guide, not as a set of comprehensive and absolute defi nitions. Most of these terms have many subtle shades of meaning which cannot be included for reasons of space.


MORE MUSIC

SCHUBERT CONCERT PIECE

Gidon Kremer has recorded Schubert’s Konzertstück, D345 with the Chamber Orchestra of Europe for a 4-disc collection, Schubert Violin Works. Also included is music for violin and piano, the Polonaise for violin and orchestra and Rondo for violin and strings, as well as the Octet for clarinet, horn, bassoon and strings, D803.DEUTSCHE GRAMMOPHON 469 8372

FLUTE & HARP CONCERTO

Emmanuel Pahud (fl ute) and Marie-Pierre Langlamet (harp) recorded Mozart’s Flute and Harp Concerto with Claudio Abbado and the Berlin Philharmonic for a disc that also includes the two Mozart fl ute concertos.EMI CLASSICS 65973

Or if you’re curious to hear more of the harp’s concerto repertoire, try the recording by Nicanor Zabaleta with fl autist Karlheinz Zoeller and the Berlin Philharmonic conducted by Ernst Maerzendorfer. This disc includes the harp concerto by Reinecke (who composed the cadenzas most commonly adopted for the Mozart concerto) and Rodrigo’s Concierto serenata.DEUTSCHE GRAMMOPHON 463 6482

SERENATA NOTTURNA

In addition to the Brilliant Classics release mentioned on page 24, the Serenata notturna can also be found on Jordi Savall’s period-instrument recording with Le Concert des Nations. The ‘Night Music’ theme of the disc is continued with Eine kleine Nachtmusik in a most

un-Muzak-like interpretation and the Notturno for four orchestras (K286). To end: Mozart’s ‘Musical Joke’, K522.ALIA VOX 9846

BRAHMS SERENADES

Hear both of Brahms Serenades on the praised 1981 recording by Kurt Masur and the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra, more recently re-issued in the hybrid SACD format (playable on all CD players).PENTATONE 518 6188

MOZART PIANO CONCERTOS

One of the fi nest recordings of Mozart’s Piano Concerto K503 is by Stephen Bishop Kovacevich with the London Symphony Orchestra and Colin Davis. It’s currently available available in Decca’s 5-CD Ultimate Piano Concertos collection and separately on iTunes.DECCA 4780108

One enticing collection of great Mozart piano concertos (Nos. 20, 21, 25 and 27) features Friedrich Gulda with the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by Claudio Abbado.DEUTSCHE GRAMMOPHON 453 0792

To hear the concerto on fortepiano, turn to the comprehensive 9-CD set of Mozart Piano Concertos with Malcolm Bilson and the English Baroque Soloists conducted by John Eliot Gardiner. (K503 can be purchased alone via iTunes or the Deutsche Grammophon website.)ARCHIV (DEUTSCHE GRAMMOPHON) 463 1112

Selected Discography: Concerts 3 & 4

Sydney Symphony Online

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BEHIND THE SCENES

Sydney Symphony Board

CHAIRMANJohn C Conde AOTerrey Arcus AMEwen CrouchRoss GrantJennifer HoyRory JeffesAndrew KaldorIrene LeeDavid LivingstoneGoetz RichterDavid Smithers AMGabrielle Trainor

Sydney Symphony Regional Touring Committee

Ian Macdonald

Dr Richard Sheldrake Director-General, NSW Department of Industry and Investment

Colin Bloomfi eld Illawarra Coal BHPBilliton

Stephen David Caroona Project, BHPBilliton

Jim Davis Regional Express Airlines

Peter Freyberg Xstrata

Tony McPaul Cadia Valley Operations

Terry Charlton Snowy Hydro

Paul Mitchell Telstra

Grant Cochrane The Land

Geoff AinsworthAndrew Andersons AOMichael Baume AO*Christine BishopIta Buttrose AO OBEPeter CudlippJohn Curtis AMGreg Daniel AMJohn Della BoscaAlan FangErin FlahertyDr Stephen FreibergDonald Hazelwood AO OBE*Dr Michael Joel AMSimon Johnson

Yvonne Kenny AMGary LinnaneAmanda LoveHelen Lynch AMIan Macdonald*Joan MacKenzieDavid MaloneyDavid Malouf AOJulie Manfredi-HughesDeborah MarrThe Hon. Justice Jane Mathews AO*Danny MayWendy McCarthy AOJane Morschel

Greg ParamorDr Timothy Pascoe AMProf. Ron Penny AOJerome RowleyPaul SalteriSandra SalteriJuliana SchaefferLeo Schofi eld AMFred Stein OAMIvan UngarJohn van Ogtrop*Peter Weiss AMAnthony Whelan MBERosemary White

Sydney Symphony Council

* Regional Touring Committee member


MUSICIANS

Vladimir AshkenazyPrincipal Conductor and Artistic Advisor

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Michael DauthConcertmaster

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Dene OldingConcertmaster

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Performing in these concerts…

FIRST VIOLINS Michael Dauth 3Concertmaster

Dene Olding 1Concertmaster

Kirsten Williams 1Associate Concertmaster

Sun Yi 2 3Associate Concertmaster

Fiona Ziegler 2Assistant Concertmaster

Julie Batty 3 4Jennifer Booth 4Marianne Broadfoot 1 3 4Brielle Clapson 4Sophie Cole 2 3Amber Davis 4

Georges Lentz 1 2 3Nicola Lewis 3

Nicole Masters 1Alexandra Mitchell 2

Léone Ziegler 1Emily Qin# 2

SECOND VIOLINS Kirsty Hilton 1 4Principal

Marina Marsden 2 3Principal

Maria Durek 4Emma Hayes 4Shuti Huang 1 4Stan W Kornel 3 4Benjamin Li 2 4Emily Long 2 3Philippa Paige 2 3

Maja Verunica 1 2

Alexandra D’Elia# 1 3

Katherine Lukey# 1 2

Belinda Jezek* 1Emily Qin# 3

VIOLASRoger Benedict 3 4Principal

Tobias Breider 1 4Principal

Robyn Brookfi eld 2Sandro Costantino 3 4Jane Hazelwood 2 4

Stuart Johnson 1 4Justine Marsden 2Felicity Tsai 2 3 4

Leonid Volovelsky 1Rosemary Curtin* 1

David Wicks* 3

CELLOSCatherine Hewgill 2 4Principal

Julian Smiles* 1Principal

Leah Lynn 2 4Assistant Principal

Kristy Conrau 2Fenella Gill 1Timothy Nankervis 3 4Elizabeth Neville 2 3 4

Adrian Wallis 1David Wickham 3 4Rowena Crouch* 3

Rachael Tobin* 1

DOUBLE BASSESKees Boersma 2Principal

Alex Henery 1 2 3 4Principal

David Campbell 1 4Richard Lynn 3

FLUTES Jane Webb 4Principal

Emma Sholl 1Associate Principal

Carolyn Harris 1 4Rosamund Plummer 4Principal Piccolo

OBOESDiana Doherty 1 2 4Principal

Shefali Pryor 3Associate Principal

David Papp 1 2 3 4

CLARINETSLawrence Dobell 2Principal

Francesco Celata 1 4Associate Principal

Christopher Tingay 2 4

BASSOONSMatthew Wilkie 4Principal

Roger Brooke 1 2Associate Principal

Fiona McNamara 2 4

Noriko Shimada 1Principal Contrabassoon

HORNSRobert Johnson 1 3 4Principal

Ben Jacks 2Principal

Lee Bracegirdle 1Euan Harvey 2Marnie Sebire 4

TRUMPETSDaniel Mendelow 1 4Principal

Paul Goodchild 1 3Associate Principal

John Foster 1 4Anthony Heinrichs 3

TIMPANIRichard Miller 1 3 Principal

Mark Robinson 4Assistant Principal

* = Guest Musician # = Contract Musician

Numerals in superscript indicate the concerts in which the musician is appearing.

1 – 3 February2 – 14 April3 – 23 June4 – 1 September

Orchestra lists are correct at time of publication (February 2011); changes of personnel may occur closer to the performance date.

To see photographs of the full roster of permanent musicians and fi nd out more about the orchestra, visit our website: www.sydneysymphony.com/SSO_musicians If you don’t have access to the internet, ask one of our customer service representatives for a copy of our Musicians fl yer.


THE SYDNEY SYMPHONYVladimir Ashkenazy PRINCIPAL CONDUCTOR AND ARTISTIC ADVISOR PATRON Her Excellency Professor Marie Bashir AC CVO

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Founded in 1932 by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, the Sydney Symphony has evolved into one of the world’s fi nest orchestras as Sydney has become one of the world’s great cities.

Resident at the iconic Sydney Opera House, where it gives more than 100 performances each year, the Sydney Symphony also performs in venues throughout Sydney and regional New South Wales. International tours to Europe, Asia and the USA have earned the orchestra worldwide recognition for artistic excellence, most recently in a tour of European summer festivals, including the BBC Proms and the Edinburgh Festival.

The Sydney Symphony’s fi rst Chief Conductor was Sir Eugene Goossens, appointed in 1947; he was followed by Nicolai Malko, Dean Dixon, Moshe Atzmon, Willem van Otterloo, Louis Frémaux, Sir Charles Mackerras, Zdenek Mácal, Stuart Challender, Edo de Waart and, most recently, Gianluigi Gelmetti. The orchestra’s history also boasts collaborations with legendary fi gures such as George Szell, Sir Thomas Beecham, Otto Klemperer and Igor Stravinsky.

The Sydney Symphony’s award-winning education program is central to its commitment to the future of live symphonic music, developing audiences and engaging the participation of young people. The Sydney Symphony promotes the work of Australian composers through performances, recordings and its commissioning program. Recent premieres have included major works by Ross Edwards, Liza Lim, Lee Bracegirdle and Georges Lentz, and the orchestra’s recording of works by Brett Dean was released on both the BIS and Sydney Symphony Live labels.

Other releases on the Sydney Symphony Live label, established in 2006, include performances with Alexander Lazarev, Gianluigi Gelmetti, Sir Charles Mackerras and Vladimir Ashkenazy. Currently the orchestra is recording the complete Mahler symphonies. The Sydney Symphony has also released recordings with Ashkenazy of Rachmaninoff and Elgar orchestral works on the Exton/Triton labels, and numerous recordings on the ABC Classics label.

This is the third year of Ashkenazy’s tenure as Principal Conductor and Artistic Advisor.


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