WHAT YOU ARE ABOUT TO HEAR

Britten (1913–1976)

Simple Symphony, Op 4 (1933/34)

Boisterous Bourrée

Playful Pizzicato

Sentimental Sarabande

Frolicsome Finale

Shostakovich (1906-1975)

Cello Concerto No 2 in G Minor, Op 126 (1966)

Largo

Allegretto

Allegretto

Beethoven (1770-1827)

Symphony No 5 in C minor, Op 67 (1804–1808)

Allegro con brio

Andante con moto

Scherzo: Allegro

Allegro – Presto

You could just about make a case that there are three symphonies in tonight’s programme, even if they’re very different in nature and style. Britten’s is a celebration of childhood innocence, brief, dashing and energetic. Shostakovich thought his Second Cello Concerto felt more like a symphony with a solo cellist (and its ambitions and profundity would undoubtedly merit that description). As for Beethoven – well, he created what’s surely become music history’s most iconic example of the form, a Symphony that would set the agenda for countless later works.

It was at the age of just 20 that Benjamin Britten composed his Simple Symphony in 1933-4, during his final year as a student at London’s Royal College of Music. But he based the Symphony on snippets of piano pieces and songs that he’d composed many years before, between the ages of nine and 12. And he’s proudly explicit about those earlier pieces in the Symphony’s score, marking the themes clearly and indicating which childhood works they came from.

Indeed, Britten was preoccupied by ideas of childhood innocence and adult experience throughout his composing career, from the death of the eponymous anti-hero’s boy apprentice in Peter Grimes through to the forbidden lust of his final opera, Death in Venice. Written by a composer barely out of his teens looking back to his own childhood, however, the Simple Symphony falls firmly into Britten’s innocent side, though he nonetheless provides sophisticated and often humorous settings for those youthful melodies in the Symphony’s four brief movements.

The opening ‘Boisterous Bourrée’ is a vigorous Baroque dance whose main theme is shared between pairs of instruments – second violins and cellos, then violas and first violins – before a more graceful second theme enters over a gently lapping accompaniment. The ‘Playful Pizzicato’ is the Symphony’s scherzo, deftly scored and full of bewitching sonic variety despite restricting itself to plucked strings throughout. Its folksy central section bears an uncanny resemblance to a piece called ‘Barwick Green’, written in 1924 by Arthur Wood – and far better known as the theme tune to The Archers.

The slow and intense ‘Sentimental Sarabande’ is the Symphony’s longest movement, in which Britten injects another Baroque dance form with the pathos of an English folk song – perhaps gazing back in time further than the Baroque to the Elizabethan English music of Dowland and others that he so loved. He brings the Symphony to a rousing, rhythmic conclusion in his ‘Frolicsome Finale’, which seems to stick doggedly to the downcast minor before swerving into the major mode for its sparkling conclusion.

Though it was written more than three decades later, there are clear connections between tonight’s next piece – Shostakovich’s Cello Concerto No 2 – and the youthful offering from Britten that we’ve just heard.

For a start, despite being separated by geographical distance and often insurmountable political barriers, Britten and Shostakovich were firm friends and mutual admirers. Their friendship had been nurtured by another man: the visionary Russian cellist Mstislav Rostropovich. Britten wrote his 1963 Cello Symphony for Rostropovich, who premiered it the following year in Moscow. Shostakovich wrote both of his cello concertos for the great cellist, and –perhaps partly inspired by Britten’s earlier work – even considered calling the Second Concerto a symphony with a solo cello part. Not without reason: the Concerto charts a troubled journey through darkness and light that feels more akin to symphonic profundity than the virtuoso flamboyance of some concertos.

Shostakovich and Rostropovich had first met in 1943, when the cellist was a student in Shostakovich’s orchestration class at the Moscow Conservatoire. The older man was immediately struck by his pupil, later remembering ‘the intense, restless mind and the high spirituality that he brings to his mastery’. By the time he came to write his Second Cello Concerto two decades later, however, Shostakovich had been through several cycles of official Soviet censure and denunciation for his daringly forward-looking, rule-breaking music, followed by supposedly humble apologies, and gradual rehabilitation. His health was increasingly fragile – he had one heart attack just before beginning work on the Concerto, and another just a month after finishing the piece. It would be Shostakovich’s penultimate concerto, and he’d die just nine years after its premiere, which took place at a celebratory official 60th birthday concert in Moscow on 25 September 1966.

That state celebration of his anniversary, offering official recognition for Shostakovich’s reputation and achievements, may have encouraged the composer to feel a greater sense of calm and security. The terrors of Stalin’s regime had indeed begun to ease slightly when Nikita Khrushchev became Soviet leader in 1953 (though Leonid Brezhnev would re-tighten restrictions when he took power in 1964). That possible calm and security may lie behind the Concerto’s somewhat more modest, focused, understated musical style – the so-called ‘late style’ that also characterises Shostakovich’s final symphonies and string quartets. It’s equally possible, however, that what we might hear as somewhat calm detachment is actually closer to quiet desperation at the inescapable cycles of repression that the composer had endured for decades.

Despite its focus and concision, however, the Second Cello Concerto remains a deeply powerful piece, and one that – as with so much music by Shostakovich – seems to raise more questions than it answers. Shostakovich’s opening movement begins in darkness and solitude, with the cello soloist mulling over a few notes low in its register. The music increases in energy and rises higher through the orchestra, even allowing in a sudden burst of light with its second main theme from the distinctive combination of xylophone, harp and woodwind. But a bass drum thumps its way through the cellist’s solo cadenza – perhaps a ringmaster cracking their whip, or an encouraging supporter (it’s impossible to tell which) –and the movement ends enigmatically and inconclusively.

Shostakovich’s devilish scherzo of a second movement is based around a street song, ‘Bagels! Buy my bagels!’, from Odessa, where he wrote the Concerto while convalescing after his cardiac problems. The song tune is first heard against rousing oom-pah accompaniment from the woodwind, but later takes on a far more grotesque, almost surreal sense, as if things are not quite right – and as in the first movement, drums (this time timpani) make aggressive contributions to the sinister atmosphere. Horn fanfares and a rattling drumroll lead directly into

Shostakovich’s finale, though they’re quickly taken over by the cello soloist and tambourine in what sounds like a weaker, cut-price alternative. This time it’s the snare drum that makes its mark on the soloist’s showy cadenza, but after what’s unmistakably a send-up of the climax of Mahler’s First Symphony, the soloist makes a rapid return to solitude, with just the quiet pattering of distant percussion for company.

There’s surely no more famous opening to a piece of music than the four powerful unison notes that launch Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony (followed quickly, of course, by four more). When asked what they meant, Beethoven apparently (and famously) replied: ‘Thus Fate knocks at the door!’ That’s according to his secretary and biographer Anton Schindler, at least. And frankly, we probably shouldn’t take Schindler’s account too seriously. He was almost certainly out to enhance his own reputation by painting his relationship with the revered composer as closer and more serious than it really was.

Nonetheless, the idea of a destructive ‘fate’ intruding on Beethoven’s life and work isn’t so far-fetched, nor is the idea that Beethoven himself might have seen things in those terms. When he completed the Fifth Symphony in 1808, having worked on it for the previous four years, he’d been suffering from tinnitus and hearing loss for a decade, a condition that would only worsen. Six years earlier, the composer famously wrote an (unsent) letter to his two brothers, which we now call his Heiligenstadt Testament, in which he admitted to having contemplated suicide, finally resolving to live for the sake of his pioneering art.

His steadily increasing deafness also forced Beethoven to move away from the activities as a pianist for which he was best known in Vienna, encouraging him to develop his parallel reputation as a composer. Indeed, it was in the same, notorious concert in which his Fifth Symphony was premiered – on 22 December 1808, in an ill-conceived, icy-cold mega-event that also featured the premiere of his ‘Pastoral’ Symphony, his Choral Fantasy, the concert aria ‘Ah! perfido’, some piano improvisations and two movements from his Mass in C – that Beethoven gave his final performance as a soloist with an orchestra, in his own Piano Concerto No 4.

Another factor to add to this already complex mix of ideas behind the Fifth Symphony is the French Revolution, whose guiding tenets of liberty, equality and fraternity chimed harmoniously with Beethoven’s own political beliefs. It’s been suggested – by eminent UK conductor Sir John Eliot Gardiner and others – that the four famous notes of the Symphony’s opening are derived from the revolutionary Hymne du Panthéon by Luigi Cherubini, written in 1794.

What’s truly revolutionary, however, is what Beethoven does with those four opening notes. They go on to permeate every aspect of the Symphony’s first movement, sometimes plainly for all to hear, sometimes more submerged within the texture or structure, bringing a striking sense of unity and purpose to the music – perhaps representing inescapable fate, as Schindler suggested, or perhaps simply indicating meticulous craftsmanship. They even serve to herald the arrival of the movement’s far gentler, more lyrical second main theme, first heard flowing in the violins.

The slower second movement is a set of variations on two contrasting themes – the first a sweet, gentle melody for violas and cellos, the second a more assertive, militarystyle march. If the third movement is truly a Scherzo, it’s a dark, march-like one, though it also summons back the Symphony’s four opening notes in its strident main melody. Through a dramatic crescendo propelled forward by relentless timpani beats, Beethoven drives the listener from the sinister Scherzo straight into his finale, which erupts with a sense of blazing light and optimism. Schindler also speculated that the Symphony represented the story of a hero and his ultimately victorious battles against fate. Hearing the joy and triumph in Beethoven’s final movement, it’s an interpretation that it’s hard to disagree with – and one that went on to inspire countless later composers, from Mahler to Richard Strauss, even Shostakovich.

© David Kettle

TCHAIKOVSKY’S FIFTH

4-5 May, 7.30pm

Edinburgh | Glasgow

BRAHMS REQUIEM

11-12 May, 7.30pm

Edinburgh | Glasgow

4 Royal Terrace, Edinburgh EH7 5AB +44 (0)131 557 6800 sco.org.uk