30 APRIL-2 MAY 2020
MAXIM EMELYANYCHEV DIRECTS MOZART PIANO CONCERTO NO 20 –––––
2019/2020 PROGRAMME NOTE SCO.ORG.UK
WHAT YOU ARE ABOUT TO HEAR –––––
DEBUSSY (1862–1918) Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune (1894) FARRENC (1804–1875) Symphony No 3 in G minor (1847) Adagio - Allegro Adagio cantabile Scherzo. Vivace
––––– A flute slithers languorously down a few notes of a scale and back up again, in what’s barely even a melody. Oboes and clarinets intone a mysterious, reedy chord, and a quiet flurry of pluckings emanate from a harp. With these apparently aimless, disconnected gestures, Debussy’s Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune emerges hesitantly from silence. And in a mere ten minutes of sensuous sounds, it succeeded in overturning many of music’s existing conventions, and in shining a bright light on fresh sonic possibilities, new musical directions – all with just a caress, a suggestion.
Finale. Allegro
MOZART (1756-1791) Piano Concerto No 20 in D minor, K466 (1785) Allegro Romanze Rondo, Allegro assai
By 1892, when he began composing his Prélude, Debussy had spent two unhappy years in the Italian capital after winning the Prix de Rome in 1884. He’d also immersed himself in Wagner in two trips to Bayreuth, and he’d marvelled at Javanese gamelan at the 1889 Paris Exposition Universelle. He was a composer confident in his radical new ideas about music, which crystallised the following year in his only completed opera, inspired by attending a Paris performance of Maurice Maeterlinck’s play Pelléas et Mélisande. Debussy’s Prélude is in some ways a precursor to his opera – if nothing else, it shares the opera’s repressed sexuality, sumptuousness and suggestion. And suggestion, rather than anything as vulgar as overt storytelling, was the relationship that Debussy also intended between his Prélude and the poem that inspired it, L’après-midi d’un faune by symbolist writer Stéphane Mallarmé, at whose free-thinking Saint-Gervais salon the young Debussy had been a regular visitor. In the poem, a faun, half-man
and half-goat, exhausted from his sexual escapades with two nymphs in the forest, lies in the afternoon heat imagining future conquests while blowing an idle tune on his pipe. It’s the faun’s lazy piping we hear at the Prélude’s opening, but the rest is, as Debussy described it, ‘a succession of scenes through which pass the desires and dreams of the faun in the heat of the afternoon’. Mallarmé was delighted with Debussy’s musical interpretation, inscribing a manuscript of his poem after hearing the Prélude’s first performance: ‘Sylvan spirit, if with your primal breath Your flute sounds well, Hear now the radiance When Debussy plays.’ We remain in France but jump back in time half a century for tonight’s next piece. But you’ll notice an abrupt change in atmosphere. Louise Farrenc’s Third Symphony shatters any lazy notions of music by women composers being soft, gentle,
Claude Debussy
delicate or elusive. Not for nothing has Farrenc been dubbed the female Beethoven.
Hummel and Moscheles for piano, and Reicha for composition. It was as a performer at private Parisian soirées that she met her future husband, the composer and flautist Aristide Farrenc, and he further encouraged her in her musical pursuits, as well as introducing her to the wider musical world of Auber and Halévy, Berlioz and Schumann.
But perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised. So restricted were the possibilities for a woman to achieve success and respect in music in the 19th century, and so formidable were the obstacles to a successful career in the arts, that only women with the strongest character, selfbelief and determination made it through. Farrenc clearly possessed both of those attributes.
encouraged her artistic passions right from the start, arranging for her to study with luminaries of the time, including
She was born in Paris in 1804, into the influential and artistic Dumont family (her forebears had included painters and sculptors to the royal court stretching
With their birth of their daughter Victorine in 1826, Louise decided to end her travelling career as a piano soloist, and to concentrate instead on teaching and composition. She was taken on as a professor of piano at the Paris Conservatoire in 1842, and quickly became one of Europe’s most prestigious
back to the 17th century), and her family
keyboard pedagogues – though she had
Louise Farrenc
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
to tolerate a salary of barely half that of her male colleagues, until she successfully demanded parity.
But no matter: Farrenc’s Third doesn’t need to compete with Beethoven for respect – though it shares with the
Her Third Symphony is a case in point. It received its premiere in 1849 at the Paris Conservatoire, by the Société des Concerts du Conservatoire under conductor Narcisse Girard, who had been reluctant to programme her music – and probably tried to rob Farrenc’s new work of the admiration it deserved by programming it alongside Beethoven’s Fifth, then (as now) a much-
German composer’s later works a remarkable clarity of thought and directness of utterance, as well as an astonishing concentration of expressive power. Following a sinuous slow introduction, the first movement builds into a swaggering, turbulent Allegro with a dense, compelling argument. It’s followed by a lyrical slow movement that offsets its delicacy with passages of surprising power, and then a scurrying, quicksilver scherzo of a third movement, which wears its indebtedness to Mendelssohn as a badge of honour. Mendelssohn returns, alongside Schumann, as godfathers hovering above Farrenc’s restless, dramatic finale, though its textural inventiveness is all her
loved and much-admired musical warhorse.
own.
Ironically, part of Farrenc’s fame and success as a composer came from the fact that she was a woman, and thus attracted large audiences curious to hear her music, listeners who could scarcely believe that these powerful, passionate works had been written by a female musician.
WITH ITS SOMBRE MOOD AND ITS UNUSUAL MINOR KEY (THE SAME KEY AS DON GIOVANNI, THE REQUIEM AND THE QUEEN OF THE NIGHT’S FAMOUS ARIA – D MINOR WAS CLEARLY A PORTENTOUS TONALITY FOR MOZART), THE PIANO CONCERTO NO 20 SETS OUT TO BREAK NEW GROUND, TO CHALLENGE AND PROVOKE. –––––
The drama continues in Mozart’s Piano Concerto No 20, famously one of his most powerful and personal keyboard concertos, one whose turbulence and overt emotion seem to look directly ahead towards Beethoven. Indeed, Beethoven himself was particularly fond of the work, performing it on several occasions and writing his own cadenzas for it. You could be forgiven for arguing he doffed his cap to it in his own Third Piano Concerto. Mozart wrote his Piano Concerto No 20 during the height of his popularity in Vienna, when the city’s public seemed to adore anything he placed before them, especially if it showcased the great pianist/composer’s prodigious keyboard abilities. He wrote no fewer than 12 twelve piano concertos in Vienna between 1784 and 1786 (Nos 14 to 25), but No 20 stands out from the others. It wouldn’t be unfair to say that – despite their immaculate craftsmanship, their unbridled joy, their thoughtfulness and vigour – in those other concertos Mozart was essentially trying to give the Viennese what they wanted. With its sombre mood and its unusual minor key (the same key as Don Giovanni, the Requiem and the Queen of the Night’s famous aria – D minor was clearly a portentous tonality for Mozart), the Piano Concerto No 20 sets out to break new ground, to challenge and provoke.
The tension is there right from the hushed opening of its first movement, with syncopated upper strings and ominous growls from cellos and basses, before the music bursts explosively into life. Surprising, sudden changes in dynamics are a feature of the whole movement, in fact, as are subtle thematic transformations, so that the returns of significant melodies, while always recognisible, are often not precisely the same. Mozart’s second movement opens with the piano soloist alone, and its elegant, song-like theme more than earns the movement its ‘Romance’ title. More surprising, though, is the movement’s sudden sideways swerve into a minor key for fiery, virtuosic keyboard writing and stabbing interjections from the strings: it’s as if the first movement’s tensions have briefly returned. The fraught drama continues in the closing movement, though it sweeps into a brilliant D major straight after the soloist’s cadenza, an ending that scholar Alfred Einstein memorably described as ‘a coda of enchanting sweetness, which represents at the same time an affecting ray of light, a return to the social atmosphere of earlier works, the courtly gesture of a grand seigneur who wishes to leave his guests with a friendly impression.’ ©David Kettle
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