Programme notes

Speedread

A concerto for piano, violin and cello is a rare thing, but somehow even more surprising is that one of the few examples of such a conversational piece should be by Beethoven. And indeed, though written around the same time as the muscular ‘Eroica’ Symphony, it finds the composer in unusually relaxed mood, expansive rather than dramatic, and, in the finale, indulging in a bit of regional colour.

Ludwig van Beethoven

1770–1827

‘Did he who wrote the Ninth write thee?’ This glib William Blake paraphrase by one writer from the first half of the last century is not at all untypical of the way in which Beethoven’s affable Triple Concerto has been dispraised over the years. Yet, despite its relative unpopularity with musicologists suspicious of its apparent lack of typically Beethovenian punch, the work has retained a place in the repertoire, and along with Mozart’s Sinfonia Concertante for violin and viola, and Brahms’s Double Concerto for violin and cello, is one of very few post-Baroque concertos for multiple soloists still to receive anything like regular performance.

It enjoyed a fair number of outings in Beethoven’s day too, despite the appearance of having been carefully tailored to suit the particular talents of its original interpreters. Composed in 1803–04, it was intended for Beethoven’s patron and piano pupil Archduke Rudolph, a good musician but a player of relatively modest ability, and thus it is that the piano-writing, for all its Mahler’s First Symphony is the surging creation of a man in his twenties who is already looking back to the world of his Austro-Bohemian childhood, marvelling at nature and recalling early love affairs. And while, as so often in his music, Mahler shows that life’s heartless ironies are there to be engaged, the work ends in what seems a blazing statement of a young man’s belief in the future.

Triple Concerto in C major for piano, violin and cello, Op. 56

1 Allegro 2 Largo –3 Rondo alla polacca

Anne-Sophie Mutter violin Khatia Buniatishvili piano Pablo Ferrández cello

elegance and good taste, lacks the kind of difficulty found in the solo concertos. The violin and cello parts, on the other hand, were written for top professional virtuosi – the violinist Carl August Siedler and the cellist and composer Anton Kraft, the man for whom Haydn had composed his D major Concerto – and this is reflected in the more technically demanding roles these instruments are given. These were the players at the work’s private premiere in 1804, and further performances followed with various combinations of soloists until the work was finally heard at a public concert for the first time in May 1808. Unfortunately it made a poor impression on that occasion, falling early victim (judging from the report of Beethoven’s friend Anton Schindler) to performers who ‘undertook it too lightly’.

To more modern-day dismissals of the Triple Concerto as ‘weak’ Beethoven, the 20th-century writer Hans Keller once offered the answer that ‘we have perhaps

come to realise that Beethoven’s imperfections are not lack of perfections, but absence of completeness – in view of things to come’. What was to come in this case were the Fourth Piano Concerto and the Violin Concerto, both of whose laid-back spaciousness, and a few other details besides, owe something to the expansive nature of the Triple Concerto.

More importantly, however, the Triple Concerto has glories of its own. The very opening is quietly original, its first theme being announced mysteriously by cellos and basses on their own before becoming the basis of a drawn-out orchestral crescendo. It is with this theme that the soloists eventually enter one by one, but the movement has a wealth of melodic material as well as a few surprises, not the least being the triumphantly loud return to the main theme after the central development section.

The Largo (in A flat major) is lyrical and uncomplicated, its mood of tranquillity set by a sublime opening cello solo, while the way in which it leads directly to the finale places it in the same category as its counterparts in the Violin Concerto and the Fourth Piano Concerto. The finale itself is a boisterous Rondo in the style of a polonaise, a familiar enough style to us now thanks to Chopin, but in Beethoven’s day a dance whose place in orchestral art-music was relatively new. The Polish flavour reaches its height in an ebullient episode about midway through, but the whole movement has a freshness and a vigour that make it a fitting conclusion to this relaxed yet expertly crafted work.

Interval – 20 minutes An announcement will be made five minutes before the end of the interval.

Gustav Mahler

1860–1911

Symphony No. 1 in D

1 Langsam. Schleppend – Immer sehr gemächlich [Slow, held back – Always very leisurely] 2 Kräftig bewegt, doch nicht zu schnell – Trio: Recht gemächlich [Moving strongly, but not too fast – Trio: leisurely] 3 Feierlich und gemessen, ohne zu schleppen – Sehr einfach und schlicht wie eine Volksweise [Solemn and measured, without dragging – Very simple, like a folk melody] 4 Stürmich bewegt – Sehr gesangvoll [Tempestuously – Very melodious]

Mahler once told a friend that his First Symphony was ‘the most spontaneous and daringly composed of my works’, a surprising remark when one considers that it probably took him over four years to write (from 1884 to 1888), and that even then it went through several revisions before reaching its final form. At its premiere in November 1889 in Budapest (where Mahler was at that time conductor of the Royal Opera), it had five movements and went under the title of ‘Symphonic Poem in two parts’; for subsequent performances in Hamburg and Weimar it acquired a title – ‘Titan’, after the novel by the German Romantic writer Jean Paul – and also a written programme; and it was not until its fourth performance, in Berlin in 1896, that it emerged as more or less the four-movement ‘Symphony’ we know today (and will hear tonight), without title or programme, and without the original second movement entitled ‘Blumine’ (‘Flowers’). Clearly his initial feeling that ‘it would be child’s play for performers and listeners’ was somewhat misplaced, and indeed audience reaction to the Symphony in its early years of existence was hostile. That may explain Mahler’s indecision over how to present it but, for all that, this debut by one of the greatest of all symphonists has a bursting energy and freshness to it that can make the blood run faster in the veins.

Mahler’s suppressed programme for the ‘Symphonic Poem’ labelled its two parts as ‘From the Days of Youth’ (movements 1 and 2) and the Dante-esque ‘Commedia humana’ (movements 3 and 4). Certainly there is a nostalgic feel to the first movement; even though Mahler was only in his mid-20s when he began it, it is filled with sounds remembered from his Moravian childhood, particularly in the spaciousness of the opening pages, which present a wide-open sonic landscape peppered by cuckoo cries and bugle calls from distant barracks. ‘The awakening of nature and early dawn’ was how Mahler described it in his programme, a phenomenon he may well have missed in his busy conducting career. Eventually the music coalesces into melody and moves into the main part of the movement, where again there is a sense of looking back as Mahler borrows a theme from ‘Ging heut’ Morgen übers Feld’, one of his Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen (‘Songs of a Wayfarer’) composed around the same time as the Symphony was begun. The initially radiant but ultimately darkening song had recalled a youthful love gone wrong, and was inspired by just such an episode in Mahler’s own life. The symphonic movement, however, ends in optimistic vein.

Composing is like playing with building blocks, where new buildings are created again and again, using the same blocks. Indeed, these blocks have been there, ready to be used, since childhood, the only time that is designed for gathering.

Gustav Mahler to his friend Natalie Bauer-Lechner