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A note by the conductor I consider myself lucky to have experienced Schubert’s wonderful music from different perspectives: as a member of the audience, at the piano as a child, as an oboist in a symphony orchestra, and now standing on the podium as a conductor. The emotional capacity of Schubert’s writing has allowed for enormous diversity of interpretation. Amazingly flexible, the fabric of Schubert’s music allows the performer to freely navigate through his or her own imagination. In this recording, the St Petersburg Symphony Orchestra and I present two of Schubert’s symphonies in a collaborative creative effort to tap the emotional and philosophical depths of his masterful work.
The ‘Unfinished’ Symphony This symphony surely stands as one of the first works with which we as music-lovers and musicians become acquainted. It is difficult to believe that it was not played until 37 years after Schubert’s death, not to mention that at the time of its writing he was only 25 years old. This is the work of a young composer who is struggling with mortality and his hopes and expectations for life after death. The very opening of the motif in the cellos and double basses immediately reminds us of the inevitability of death. I have chosen a faster tempo than usual because I do not believe that a young composer would succumb to being at peace with the end of life as we know it. The longing oboe and clarinet melody that follows this theme is accompanied by very emotionally unsettling passages in the first and second violins. All this creates a picture of almost Dantean proportions. Such techniques and structures – swirling wind-writing and longing melody – would be used much later by Tchaikovsky in Francesca da Rimini. The second subject, which starts in the cello section and is then taken up by the first violins, could be misinterpreted as merely pleasant and relaxed, but then a sudden bar of rest makes an even greater impact than the huge tutti cord following it. Throughout the development section we realize that the main question of the symphony could not possibly be answered by Schubert or by anybody else. I have asked myself many times if that is the reason why
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the symphony remains unfinished. Many composers (including Schubert himself) have tried to write the last two movements but they have never felt as if they truly belong with the first two. Last movements should bring some sense of resolution or an answer, but what if no answer can found?… If this movement is taken at a much slower tempo, it loses its nerve-wracking edge and just becomes pretty and somewhat peaceful. In my opinion, this interpretation would be possible were it not for the second movement. I have always felt that most conductors take the second movement too fast. To me the key is the pizzicato in the lower strings and the placing of the second beat of the bar, which has to be delayed in order to create a sense of eternal space and time. Schubert is almost telling us that it is ‘not that bad’ to be on the other side of life, on the other side of sorrow and suffering. It seems that knowledge of the afterlife brings some comfort and he is very convincing in making that world sound real. But then the first violins play several lonely unison notes followed by syncopated rhythms which accompany extremely sorrowful long phrases on the solo clarinet and oboe. This gives us a chilling perspective: we all hope that there is no need to fear death as the soul will live on eternally, but we can never be sure. The will of the composer to believe in eternity makes him repeat the cycle of portraying the afterlife and questioning it twice until the pizzicato in the lower strings returns, this time to say farewell in the slower and increasingly transparent coda. The final chord leaves us completely stunned and I hope you will feel that the end of this requiem-like symphony will lend some clarity to all the uncertainty that has come before it…
The ‘Great’ Symphony In spite of the title of this symphony, its historical and musical significance is often underestimated. With this monumental work, the young Schubert paved a new direction for composers and performers. For example, I think Dvorˇák’s melodic sequences are inspired by the way Schubert ripples melody upon melody at the audience. In both composers’ music, we hear a delicate lyricism and sweet coherence of writing style. Furthermore, if we listen closely to the opening of the ‘Great’ Symphony, we hear echoes of what would become Brahms’s orchestration. The way Schubert uses the winds as human operatic voices is similar to Brahms.
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Schubert’s gift to the performer of interpretive freedom places enormous responsibility on player and conductor alike. We have obligations to the music, but also to our own vision. The tempi in this recording were chosen after careful and intense consideration. My goal was to grant the music flexibility without losing sight of the grand structure of the work. In this respect, arcs of rhythmic relationships are extended not only between sections, but also inside bars, within intervals of movements, and between movements themselves. Looking at the final movement of the symphony, I think the Allegro vivace indication coupled with the sheer energy of the writing justifies quite a fast tempo. Indeed, Schubert has granted us plenty of ammunition for rhythmic and melodic brilliance. As a contrast, we can then take the third-movement Scherzo a little slower. Although the tempo indication of the third movement is also Allegro vivace, its playful folk-dance qualities require a different, more measured approach. The second movement, Andante con moto, is a slow march – in my opinion the most beautiful march ever written. With help from the constant dotted rhythms and grace notes, a stately grace and mindful eloquence will emerge if this movement is taken at exactly the right tempo. I’m discussing the movements in reverse order because I believe that the expressiveness of the music needs a retrospective framework. Even though we are listening from start to finish, I believe that the music’s impact on what precedes it and what follows it is equally important. In any case, although Schubert’s brilliance begins with the opening notes of the first movement, his masterful craftwork can only be carried through to the end if the structure of the work as a whole is kept in mind. Finally, I must admit that Brahms – in my view the best interpreter of the traditions established by Franz Schubert – inspired me to approach this work. C Vladimir Lande, 2011
Schubert: Symphonies 8 & 9 In September or October of 1822 Franz Schubert began to write an ambitious and unusual Symphony in the key of B minor (a tonality virtually unused for symphonies throughout the Classical period because it was a very difficult one for the valveless horns and trumpets then in use). He completed two movements, sketched but did not complete a third, and then – as far as is known
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– abandoned the work, even though he would live for another six years. The following year, 1823, he received an honorary diploma from the Graz Music Society, and in return Schubert dedicated the unfinished symphony to the Society and gave the score to his friend Anselm Hüttenbrenner, acting as the Society’s representative. Nevertheless Hüttenbrenner did not transmit the score to the Society, nor did he make any attempt to have the work performed. Perhaps he expected Schubert to complete it, but even after the composer’s death he held on to the score and only revealed it in 1865, when he was 76. The conductor Johann von Herbeck, who had heard of the score’s existence, persuaded Hüttenbrenner to release it, and gave the first performance of the two completed movements at a concert in Vienna on 17 December 1865, adding the last movement of Schubert’s Symphony No.3 as a finale. The work was published two years later, in 1867, and ever since the two complete movements have been known to concert audiences as Schubert’s ‘Unfinished’ Symphony. There is no doubt that Schubert did not regard these two movements as a complete work; he had drafted and begun orchestrating a scherzo, and several Schubert scholars have suspected that the big B minor entr’acte from his incidental music to Rosamunde may originally have been sketched as the finale of the symphony. (There is no direct evidence for this, but the entr’acte’s elaborate form, identical orchestration and unusual key may be significant pointers.) Whatever the truth of this, the fact remains that the two-movement ‘Unfinished’ has firmly established itself as one of the iconic works of the symphonic repertory and as one of Schubert’s most highly personal achievements. Within the constraints of symphonic form, handled with great power, he created in the B minor Symphony a work that blends a highly lyrical, song-like impulse with the requirements of sonata-form drama and dynamism. The work is exceptionally ample in its proportions, and the steady tempo of the first movement – very unlike any Classical Allegro – is closer to the slightly slower one of the second than many opening symphony movements, creating an unusual unity of feeling that would likely have been disturbed by the lively but never completed scherzo movement. The soft, sombre bass theme that opens the first movement (itself an unprecedented way to start a symphony), answered at once by the intense lyric pathos of the ensuing melody for oboe and clarinet, at once creates an atmosphere very far from the Classical norm and prophetic, instead, of the Romantic composers of half a century later. The accompanimental pattern to the woodwind melody, occurring before the melody itself, is important in its own right, as is the syncopated
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rhythm that accompanies the second subject, a melody sublime in its elegant sadness even though pitched in the relative warmth of G major. The sombre bass theme becomes the focus for a development section of utmost intensity, whose dynamic force provides the element of contrast that the main subjects have avoided, after which the recapitulation begins with the lyric woodwind theme and the second subject reappears in D major. The decline from there to the B minor of the coda is a profoundly pathetic event. The Andante con moto second movement, in E major, is likewise in a broad sonata form with two principal themes, the first heard mostly in the strings, the second a long C sharp minor melody for solo clarinet. Here the dynamic contrasts are established by the orchestral outbursts between the themes, though the development itself is a comparatively gentle, ruminative affair. The coda, based on the first subject, touches the realms of the sublime in its sense of mysterious calm. The fragment of Schubert’s scherzo shows he would have returned at once to the darker territory of B minor: but it remains a possibility that he felt the two completed movements, if not an entity in themselves, could only be followed by something anti-climactic, and had decided to leave them as they were. When Schubert died, none of his symphonies had been published, and the chronology and numbering of the late ones (even in some cases their existence) was long a matter for dispute and speculation. The so-called ‘Great’ C major Symphony – rightly regarded as his supreme achievement in the genre – was first published in 1839, posthumously of course, as ‘No.7’: at that time it was the only symphony that was certainly known to be extant and to have been written after Schubert’s first six, more modest symphonies, composed between 1813 and 1818. It became known as the ‘Great’ C major to distinguish it from the smaller Symphony No.6 of 1817–18, which is also in that key. It was only later realized that this supposed ‘No.7’ had been preceded by two other symphonies, each incomplete in a different way and each of importance. These were an E major symphony, fully extant in draft score but largely unorchestrated, and the great B minor Symphony we call the ‘Unfinished’. These were eventually accepted (though not universally, or even to this day) as Schubert’s actual symphonies Nos. 7 and 8, and the ‘Great’ C major was re-numbered as No.9. For a long time, also, it was believed to be a work of Schubert’s last year, 1828, a contemporary of the C major String Quintet and the last piano sonatas. It was true that, in the last months of his life, he did start drafting a symphony – but this was actually the work in D major that has been realized for performance by Brian Newbould as ‘Symphony No.10’. In fact, we now know that the
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‘Great’ C major was largely composed in sketch in the summer of 1825: that, indeed, it was the work to which Schubert was referring in a letter of earlier that year when he said he was preparing himself to write ‘a grand symphony’. By the spring or summer of 1826 it was completely scored, and in October Schubert sent it to the Vienna Philharmonic Society with a dedication, hoping they would pay for a performance. In response they made him a small payment, arranged for the copying of the orchestral parts. At some point in the latter half of 1827 the work was actually given a play-through (the exact date and the conductor are unknown) – though the Philharmonic Society decided it was too long and difficult for a public performance. For that it had to wait for the young Robert Schumann, who discovered the score in Vienna and brought it to the attention of Mendelssohn, who conducted the first complete public premiere (the finale had by then been played in Vienna, on its own) at the Leipzig Gewandhaus on 21 March 1839, more than ten years after Schubert’s death. Schumann hailed the event with an ecstatic article in which he hailed the symphony for its ‘heavenly length’. Even after this players in Vienna, Paris and London rejected the work for performance as too long and difficult, and it only slowly made its way into the repertoire of which it is now one of the acknowledged summits. The Symphony begins boldly with an unaccompanied horn-call: a deeply Romantic image (Bruckner clearly remembered it in the opening of his ‘Romantic’ Symphony) that hints at once at the sheer scale of the work that is to follow and also at some elements that are basic to its identity: notably the dotted rhythm of the second bar. Muscular, energetic dotted rhythms infuse the entire work, helping to establish unity between themes and movements at the deepest level. They also help create the palpable sense of physical movement that is part of the symphony’s special character – the fact that so many of its themes suggest walking, tramping, marching and otherwise traversing a wide harmonic landscape. It is music that paints a broad vista and breathes the open air. It is also among the most ebullient, confident, unclouded and above all public music that Schubert ever wrote. The processional introduction unfolds across the orchestra, accumulating a counterpoint in triplet rhythm, before it accelerates into the main Allegro, led off by the strings with a vigorous dotted-rhythm figure that is answered by triplets in the woodwind: a rhythmic contrast that operates throughout the work. Contrasts of colour, as here, are of ongoing importance also. Very soon a more ambling second subject trots in on the woodwind in a somewhat surprising E minor,
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though it soon moves to the orthodox dominant (G major). Schubert begins to develop his themes almost at once, though we are still formally in the exposition section of the movement: a solemn trombone theme appears, based on the second bar of the introductory horn-call. The actual development section is short, but ventures into the remote key of A flat: a typically Schubertian side-swerve, here carried out on a large scale. The recapitulation (beginning not with the Introduction, but with the Allegro) continues to develop the main themes, then spills over into a long, excited coda dominated by the dotted rhythms and concluding with a majestic apotheosis of the introduction’s horn theme on brass and strings. In the Andante, Schubert must have had the march-like slow movements of Beethoven’s Third and Seventh Symphonies in mind, but he produces a movement of his own that is quintessentially Schubertian in character. A steady tramping figure in the strings introduces the principal theme on oboe – a brave little A minor tune whose progress generates a curious pathos. A graceful string melody is in perfect contrast. A solo horn links back to the oboe tune (Brahms remembered this passage in his Second Symphony), and the tune itself gains a little trumpet fanfare for a companion. This grows to a climax, releasing some of the accumulated tension, and a cello leads back to a reprise of the mellifluous contrasting theme, which is now richly elaborated until the oboe tune has the last word. The big Scherzo is an invigorating study in 3/4 rhythms, with a busy, assertive first subject answered by a graceful tune in waltz-time. The central Trio surges majestically, like the mighty Danube, across the bar-lines that the scherzo had stressed, and stresses again in its reprise. The finale then begins with a peremptory call to action that immediately contrasts dotted-notes and triplets, and launches into a dynamic movement of irresistible rhythmic drive. The first subject has the character of an obstreperous military march, while the second subject, introduced by the woodwind, is one of those ideas that seem to distil a cosmic energy into the proportions of classical motion. Its initial figure of four tolling repeated notes (taken up from a trumpet figure in the first subject) sets up an impression of a huge, striding rhythm underlying everything, upon which all the surface activity of motifs and figurations (with ominipresent, elated triplets) is dancing. The four-note figure becomes an element in its own right, precipitating explorations of new keys and becoming the foundation for the building-up of climaxes. As in the first movement, the arrival of the development is signalled by a harmonic detour, here
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into E flat. There is also a third theme, again in the woodwind: more lyrical, with a curious halfreminiscence of the ‘Ode to Joy’ theme in Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. (Schubert had heard its premiere in 1824 and it must have been given him powerful impetus to proceed with his own ‘grand symphony’.) In the recapitulation the dotted rhythms take over the role of accompaniment from the triplets; but the two rhythms are again associated, along with the pounding four-note figure and the military fanfares, in the huge coda that forms the full-hearted and triumphant climax to this magnificent work. C Malcolm MacDonald, 2011
Conductor Vladimir Lande is the Principal Guest Conductor of the St Petersburg Symphony Orchestra. He is also guest conductor of the National Gallery Orchestra in Washington D.C. and Music Director of the COSMIC Symphony Orchestra, the Washington Soloists Chamber Orchestra in Washington D.C. and Johns Hopkins University Chamber Orchestra. He regularly appears as a conductor with the famous Donetsk Ballet Company in Europe and the United States. In summer 2004, Maestro Lande was invited to conduct the opening concert of the internationally renowned White Nights Festival including a performance in the Grand Philharmonic Hall in St Petersburg. He made his conducting debut with the Baltimore Opera Orchestra in 2006, the Tulsa Symphony Orchestra (Oklahoma) in 2008, and the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra in December 2010. In September 2008, Vladimir Lande led the National Gallery Chamber Orchestra in an American-wide tour. His subsequent conducting appearances with the National Gallery Orchestra included concerts on 18 April and 31 May 2009. In autumn 2009, Vladimir Lande made his debut as the Music Director and Conductor of the Contemporary American Music Festival in Washington D.C. He led the St Petersburg Symphony Orchestra through their summer 2009 and 2010 seasons, following earlier concerts and a CD recording in December 2008. He recorded six more CDs (two of them for Naxos) with the orchestra in June and July 2010. These recordings include several contemporary American pieces, Tchaikovsky’s Symphony No.5 and music by Shostakovich. His engagements for the 2010–11 season include performances with the Donetsk Ballet Company in the United States. He will also return to record and conduct performances with the St Petersburg
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Symphony Orchestra. Recent CDs with the St Petersburg Symphony were released by the labels Arabesque (contemporary American music, 2007), Kleos (featuring renowned saxophonist Gary Louie as a soloist, 2008) and Marquis (Respighi and Castelnuovo-Tedesco, 2009) to great critical acclaim. In autumn 2010, Vladimir Lande recorded a large cycle of instrumental concertos with the St Petersburg Symphony and world-renowned soloist Eugene Ugorski. In October 2011 he will lead the St Petersburg Symphony on their tour of the United States (including a performance at Alice Tully Hall), Mexico (including the Cervantino Festival) and South America (including the Teatro Colón in Buenos Aires). He is scheduled to release five more CDs with the St Petersburg Symphony in winter 2012. Recent tours have taken Maestro Lande to New Zealand, Australia, the United Kingdom (including a performance at the Church of St-Martin-in-the-Fields in London), Italy, Russia, and most of the United States. In addition to his busy conducting schedule, he is an oboist and has maintained a successful career as a soloist and chamber musician. He is a member of the renowned Poulenc Trio.
Recording: 22–23, 25–27 October 2010, Melodiya Studios, St Petersburg, Russia Produced by Dirk Fischer Balance Engineer & Editing: Dirk Fischer Recording engineer: Alexey Barashkin on behalf of Petersburg Recording Studio Cover image – Franz Stober (1760–1834): Funeral of Ludwig van Beethoven (1770–1827) in Vienna, 29 March 1827 (watercolour on paper) Photo: Beethoven-Haus Bonn, Germany/Giraudon/The Bridgeman Art Library P & C 2011 Brilliant Classics
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