WHAT YOU ARE ABOUT TO HEAR

Rossini (1792-1868)

Overture, The Barber of Seville (1816)

Bottesini (1821-1889)

Fantasia ‘Lucia di Lammermoor’ for Double Bass and Orchestra (Date unknown)

Operatic exuberance, flamboyant fun and – yes – plenty of summer sunshine are all present and correct in tonight’s all-Italian concert – with no apologies, either, for some Mediterranean high spirits from two of the Scottish Chamber Orchestra’s Principals. Okay, our final piece might actually have come from the pen of a German composer, but he was so immersed in Italy’s bright colours and vigorous lifestyle that he surely counts as temporarily Italian too.

Rossini (1792-1868)

Introduction, Theme and Variations for Clarinet and Orchestra (1819)

Bottesini (1821-1889)

Gran Duo for Clarinet, Double Bass and Orchestra (Date unknown)

Mendelssohn (1809–1847)

Symphony No 4, ‘Italian’ (1833)

Allegro vivace

Andante con moto

Con moto moderato

Finale: Saltarello (Presto)

We begin, however, with a composer who’s Italian through and through. For many listeners, the Overture to Gioachino Rossini’s 1816 opera The Barber of Seville is the epitome of effervescent Italian wit, summing up to a tee the scheming hairdresser running rings around local bigwigs at the centre of the composer’s comic romp. This music, however, was not even written for The Barber of Seville at all. Rossini had originally composed the Overture for his 1813 opera Aureliano in Palmira, and then reused it in his 1815 Elisabetta, regina d'Inghilterra. His rather shameless re-recycling for The Barber of Seville marked his third use of the material – but there was a reason.

In fact, Rossini had simply run out of time. Remarkably, he dashed off The Barber of Seville in less than three weeks – not that you’d ever suspect from the opera’s wealth of wit and melody. But that was hardly unusual. Rossini was a notoriously fast worker: he’d maintain the pace of producing at least two operas a season for 19 years. He’d originally planned something Spanish-sounding for The Barber of Seville’s Overture, to match the opera’s Iberian setting, but left things too late to put it together. In the end, recycling older material was his only option.

The irony, of course, is how indelibly we associate the Overture’s bubbling comedy and good humour with the opera itself –despite the fact that it contains precisely no themes or melodies that we’d encounter later in the work. And for eagle-eared listeners at the opera’s first performance – on 20 February 1816 at Rome’s Teatro Argentina – that redeployment of existing music was perhaps just one reason behind the show’s fiasco of a premiere.

For a start, rival composer Giovanni Paisiello – who’d already scored a hit with his own operatic version of Beaumarchais’ 1775 comedy – turned up with some cronies to disrupt this new version by the upstart Rossini before it gained a foothold in audiences’ affections. Paisiello and his mates caused mayhem, allegedly releasing a stray cat to prowl around the stage, and the poorly rehearsed cast hardly helped by tripping over scenery, falling through trapdoors and missing their cues. Appalled, Rossini left early, and stayed away for the following night too. When a mob of torch-wielding locals approached his residence after the second performance, he feared the worst. In fact, they were there to proclaim and celebrate his genius, and Rossini’s Barber soon found a permanent place in the repertoire. Its music became so well known and widely loved, in fact, that it later inspired affectionate parodies from the likes of Woody Woodpecker, Bugs Bunny and Tom and Jerry, each in their own individual animated take.

Launching with some attention-grabbing loud chords, Rossini’s Overture seems barely able to contain its excitement in its restrained opening section. The loud chords return to kick off the Overture’s faster section, contrasting a nimble but

Giovanni Bottesini

melancholy violin tune against a wittier, far more mischievous oboe melody. After a couple of Rossini’s trademark swelling crescendos, the tempo surges forward even faster before the Overture’s exuberant conclusion.

Born about three decades after his compatriot Rossini, Giovanni Bottesini was another successful and muchadmired man of the opera. His first opera, Cristoforo Colombo, received its premiere to great acclaim in Havana, Cuba, in 1847, and he maintained a particularly close friendship with Giuseppe Verdi, who asked him to conduct the premiere performances of his own Aida, in Cairo in 1871.

But opera isn’t what Bottesini is primarily remembered for today (even if it nonetheless finds its way into tonight’s next piece). Instead, he’s remembered as a rare but breathtaking virtuoso on the double bass, and also as one of the figures who established the bass as a legitimate, respectable solo instrument in its own right, capable of enormous expression and lyricism. Not bad for someone who’d only taken it up in order to get a scholarship into the Milan Conservatoire (he’d started off as a singer and violinist). The young Bottesini immediately took to the instrument, however, giving his first public concert in 1839 as an 18-year-old, and embarking on a concert tour of Italy the following year.

But if we jump ahead to his later life, and his parallel career in opera, Bottesini developed a reputation for bringing his bass along to performances he was conducting, and using it to serenade opera-goers during the intervals with musical fantasies based on the tunes they’d just heard. His exuberant, extrovert Lucia di Lammermoor Fantasia reputedly began life as one of those spontaneous interval entertainments, inserted into

Gaetano Donizetti’s 1835 opera. (Which brings us far closer to home: the opera is based on Sir Walter Scott’s tragic novel The Bride of Lammermoor, which tells of a woman trapped between feuding familites in the Lammermuir Hills, southeast of Edinburgh, in the 17th century.)

Bottesini’s Fantasia is unashamedly entertaining for its listeners, and unapologetically taxing for its soloist. The composer first plunges us headlong into the storm that opens Act III of Donzetti’s opera, before allowing the bass to sing in decorated versions of some of the opera’s arias, and transforming some of its storytelling recitatives into showy solo cadenzas. Listen out, too, for Bottesini’s extensive use of harmonics, high-pitched, glassy sounds produced by lightly touching the instrument’s strings while bowing, rather than firmly holding them down.

If Bottesini was a mature conductor, composer and bass virtuoso when he came up with his Lucia di Lammermoor Fantasia, Rossini was barely an adult when he created tonight’s next piece. That said, however, the 18-year-old already had his first opera – Demetrio e Polibio – under his belt, and had been studying at the Bologna Conservatoire since 1806, when he was just 14.

There’s something undeniably operatic, too, about the music of his youthful Introduction, Theme and Variations, which he intended to perform with his fellow Bologna students as part of their end-ofyear exams. It’s far more than just a skilled learner’s compositional exercise, however –and it’s an indication of the young Bologna players’ musical abilities that they could attempt a piece of such lavish technical demands.

After some resonant chords summon our attention, Rossini begins with a slow, somewhat solemn introduction, which nonetheless shows off the clarinet’s voicelike abilities in a noble but extravagantly decorated melodic line. A solo cadenza leads into the piece’s main theme, which has more than a hint of the opera house to it (Rossini would go on to transform it into an aria in his 1819 opera La donna del lago). The composer elaborates on the theme in five contrasting variations, themselves separated by frothy orchestral interludes – and following one last Rhapsody in Blue-like swoop from the bottom to the top of the clarinet’s range, the piece dashes towards its lively conclusion.

Clarinet and double bass sharing the stage as joint soloists is hardly an everyday occurrence (though the unusual combination serves neatly to bring together tonight’s two SCO Principals). It’s frustrating, therefore, that we know so little about the background to Bottesini’s Gran duo for those two instruments. Bottesini’s father was a clarinettist, so the composer undoubtedly knew the instrument well – and may well have written the piece for himself and his dad to play together. There’s a certain chamberlike intimacy to the music that might seem to support that argument, too, not that Bottesini reduces any of the technical demands he makes on both his players, even if he ensures they shine equally brightly in their own individual ways.

A showy orchestral introduction leads to lyrical pronouncements from both soloists, each of whom seems about to launch into a big tune, only for it never to quite materialise. They come together, however, in an elegant, slow-moving melody, decorating each other’s themes tastefully. A similarly portentous orchestral introduction leads into the second movement, ushering in the clarinet’s perky but serious, minor-key melody, soon answered more lyrically by the bass. But Bottesini quickly moves us into far more comical music as the two soloists join forces in a tripping tune, pushing the piece to its sunny ending.

We bring tonight’s concert to a sparkling conclusion with the young Felix Mendelssohn, as a gap-year traveller in his early 20s. It was more like three gap years, in fact, off and on between 1829 and 1831. And it’s probably fairer to describe his travels as excursions in the tradition of a Grand Tour, in which a wealthy young man completed his education by ticking off the cultural highlights of Europe. Mendelssohn began – unconventionally – with a threeweek visit to Scotland in 1829, which inspired both his Hebrides Overture and his ‘Scottish’ Symphony. But, encouraged by both writer Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (who he counted as a friend) and his composition teacher Carl Friedrich Zelter, he set off for the more traditional destination of Italy in October 1830. He spent ten months in the country, making his way from Venice to Naples via Bologna, Florence and Rome, then back home again through Genoa and Milan.

If his Scottish trip had been about brooding landscapes, swirling mists and blood-soaked history, his Italian trip, as he wrote home to his parents, was about light, sunshine and happiness: ‘This is Italy! And now has begun what I have always thought to be the supreme joy in life. And I am loving it.’

He devoted time during his travels to planning what he called ‘the jolliest piece I have ever done’ in a letter to his sister Fanny, completing his ‘Italian’ Symphony back home in Berlin on 13 March 1833. It was an immediate success at its premiere in London two months later. (Its designation as No 4, incidentally, is misleading: Mendelssohn wrote and premiered the piece several years before his Second and Third Symphonies. It’s only numbered as his Fourth because it was published after those later works.)

Mendelssohn described the Symphony as ‘blue sky in A major’, and it’s a bright optimism that’s encapsulated in the first movement’s bounding opening theme, though the movement’s central development section brings in somewhat darker, more impish material. The slow second movement was inspired by religious processions that Mendelssohn witnessed in Rome: it contrasts a noble melody in the woodwind and violas with a plodding bassline, slipping away at its conclusion as if the procession has moved into the distance.

Following an elegant third-movement minuet (complete with distant horn calls in its gently martial trio section), Mendelssohn closes with a finale that blends two breathless Italian dances: the Roman saltarello (which gives the movement its name) and the Neapolitan tarantella. The ‘Italian’ is one of very few symphonies that begins in the bright positivity of the major and ends in the more serious minor (often the journey is the other way round: just think of Beethoven’s Fifth). The finale’s whirling energy, however, alongside a melancholy memory of the Symphony’s opening melody just before the end, ensures a propulsive, somewhat delirious conclusion.

© David Kettle