SCHUBERT & TCHAIKOVSKY Thursday 10 December 2020, Perth Concert Hall –––––
PROGRAMME NOTE
SCO.ORG.UK
Season 2020/21
SCHUBERT & TCHAIKOVSKY Thursday 10 December 2020, 7.30pm Perth Concert Hall
Schubert Symphony No 5 Tchaikovsky Variations on a Rococo Theme Schubert Entr’acte No 3 from Rosamunde Maxim Emelyanychev Conductor Philip Higham Cello
Our Musicians
YOUR ORCHESTRA FIRST VIOLIN Stephanie Gonley Leader Ruth Crouch Kana Kawashima Aisling O’Dea Siún Milne Fiona Alexander SECOND VIOLIN Gordon Bragg Sarah Bevan Baker Amira Bedrush-McDonald Stewart Webster Niamh Lyons Gongbo Jiang VIOLA Felix Tanner Jessica Beeston Brian Schiele Steve King
FLUTE Brontë Hudnot Lee Holland OBOE Robin Williams Julian Scott CLARINET Maximiliano Martín William Stafford BASSOON Cerys Ambrose Evans Alison Green HORN Patrick Broderick Jamie Shield
CELLO Su-a Lee Donald Gillan Eric de Wit BASS Nikita Naumov Adrian Bornet
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WHAT YOU ARE ABOUT TO HEAR Schubert (1797-1828) Symphony No 5 (1816) Allegro Andante con moto Menuetto. Allegro molto Allegro vivace
Tchaikovsky (1840-1893) Variations on a Rococo Theme (1877) Moderato assai quasi Andante – Thema: Moderato semplice Var. I: Tempo della Thema Var. II: Tempo della Thema Var. III: Andante Var. IV: Allegro vivo Var. V: Andante grazioso Var. VI: Andante Var. VII: Andante sostenuto Var. VIII e Coda: Allegro moderato con anima
Schubert (1797-1828) Entr’acte No 3 from Rosamunde (1823) Entr’acte nach dem 3. Aufzug (Andantino in B-flat major)
––––– Franz Schubert turned 19 in January 1816. By the end of that year, he’d completed around 200 new works – including both his Fourth and Fifth symphonies, written within just a few months of each other. (It wasn’t an unusual year, either: over the previous 12 months, he’d written about 150 songs, many of which remain classics of the repertoire today.) And if the Fourth Symphony, the ‘Tragic’, shows the young composer grappling with the revolutionary symphonic innovations forged by Beethoven, in his Fifth, Schubert shrinks his orchestra to an almost miniature size and mines all the joy and wonder that he’d omitted from that earlier Symphony, creating instead an overt homage to that other towering figure of recent years in Vienna: Mozart. Though Mozart had been dead for a quarter of a century by the time Schubert was writing his Fifth Symphony, the earlier composer’s music was more highly regarded than ever – and more popular, certainly, than that of Beethoven, who at that point was eight symphonies through his nine-strong cycle, and seen as dangerously, unpredictably innovative. Schubert was fascinated by Beethoven, but devoted to Mozart. In October 1816, the same month he completed his Fifth Symphony, he gushed in his diary: “As though from afar, the magic notes of Mozart’s music still gently haunt me. So these fair impressions, which neither time nor circumstance can efface, linger in the soul and lighten our existence. They show us in the darkness of this life a light, clear and lovely, for which we may constantly hope. O Mozart, immortal Mozart, how many, how endlessly many such beneficent
And if the Symphony is sometimes dismissed as ‘light’ music when compared with the darker, more ambitious Fourth – well, that can only be a compliment. Franz Peter Schubert
intimations of a better life have you imprinted on our souls.” Schubert’s Fifth Symphony would no doubt have received its first performances from the amateur orchestra that met in the apartment of Vienna violinist Otto Hatwig, in which the young composer played viola. But it had to wait until 13 years after Schubert’s death for its public premiere, in 1841 at Vienna’s Josefstadt Theatre. And if the Symphony is sometimes dismissed as ‘light’ music when compared with the darker, more ambitious Fourth – well, that can only be a compliment. Light it certainly is, in its apparently effortless invention, its endless charm and grace, and its delicate, translucent scoring. Schubert opens his first movement with a miniature ‘curtain-raiser’ for the
woodwind, which the first violins can’t help but interrupt with their jaunty main theme. There’s an undoubted Mozartian feeling to the movement’s clarity and balance, but also a harmonic richness that makes it distinctively Schubertian. Light and shadow seem constantly to shift in the gently tripping second movement, officially the slow movement but not terribly slow at all. The third movement, a minor-key minuet, provides the Symphony’s stormiest, most dramatic music, despite its lighter, more bucolic central trio in the contrasting major. And Schubert offers plenty of mischievous harmonic surprises in his bouncy, scampering fourth movement, a masterclass in transparent orchestration. Tchaikovsky, too, held a lifelong love of Mozart, even referring to him at one
Tchaikovsky’s thinking is clear in the Rococo Variations’ unassuming, elegant opening theme, though whether he sticks closely to unaffected purity as he transforms that theme across eight increasingly elaborate variations is another question entirely. Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky
stage as 'the Christ of music'. It’s all the more appropriate, then, that his Mozart-
carefree feeling of well-being’, a certain pure, unaffected style that had emerged
inspired Variations on a Rococo Theme is a Christmas-timed (if not Christmasthemed) work, completed in December 1876, even if it didn’t receive its premiere until the following November.
around the time of Haydn and Mozart, and which had deteriorated due to the excesses of certain later composers. Tchaikovsky’s thinking is clear in the Rococo Variations’ unassuming, elegant opening theme, though whether he sticks closely to unaffected purity as he transforms that theme across eight increasingly elaborate variations is another question entirely.
Tchaikovsky wrote it while coming to the end of his decade of teaching at the Moscow Conservatoire, where he’d begun to resent the time that teaching sapped from his composition. He’d made some close friends at the institution, however, including German cello professor Wilhelm Fitzenhagen, for whom he wrote the Rococo Variations. In a letter to Fitzenhagen, Tchaikovsky explained his thinking behind the piece:
No cellist himself, and self-effacing to the point of diffidence, Tchaikovsky acquiesced to a number of changes that Fitzenhagen suggested for the cello line before the work’s premiere. Following that first performance, Fitzenhagen went further, adding new endings here and
the word ‘rococo’ he felt, meant simply ‘a
there, shuffling the order of Tchaikovsky’s
variations, and even dropping one of them entirely. Tchaikovsky seemed not to know what to do, finally giving up resistance and
movement in which the cellist transforms the original theme into a passionate love song. A second cadenza links to the
accepting the cellist’s wholesale rewrite in a letter to his publishers, saying: “The devil take it – let it stand!”
eighth variation, and the work ends in joyful brilliance, the soloist pushed to ever greater heights of viruosity.
For better or worse, that seven-variation incarnation of the Rococo Variations remained the version known to concert audiences until the composer’s original came to light half a century later, and was given its first modern performance by Soviet cellist Daniil Shafran in 1941. And it’s this earlier version, discovered later and embodying Tchaikovsky’s original thoughts – and with eight, rather than seven, variations – that Philip Higham performs today.
We return to Schubert for today’s final piece, this time with no direct Mozartian connections. And despite his mastery of songs, chamber music and – as we saw earlier – orchestral music, he never quite achieved the same success in the field he really strived for: as a composer for the stage, whether in opera or incidental music for a play. Rosamunde is a case in point. Schubert wrote about an hour’s worth of music for Helmina von Chézy’s play Rosamunde, Princess of Cyprus, which opened at Vienna’s Theater an der Wein in December 1823, and lasted for a grand total of two performances. With a convoluted storyline involving a cursed princess, poisoned letters, shipwrecks, ghosts and forced marriage,
Following a brief orchestral introduction, Tchaikovsky ushers in his refined theme on the solo cello, signed off by a distinctive woodwind tailpiece that goes through its own transformations as the piece progresses. Both the first and second variations present ornamented versions of the theme – the first as scurrying triplets, the second in more outspoken runs and flashy passagework. The piece’s first solo cadenza leads into the slow, sad third variation, where the cello sings a minor-mode version of its opening theme, with woodwind decorations and hushed pizzicatos from the strings. The fourth variation is a dashing Russian dance that breaks the mood entirely, and the fifth begins gracefully, although the cellist soon gives in to virtuoso figurations as though he can’t hold them back. The orchestral flute plays the theme in the sixth variation, with decorations from the cello, and the
perhaps its short run is understandable. Nonetheless, it also represented one of Schubert’s many frustrations as a theatre composer.
seventh is a full-blown Romantic slow
© David Kettle
Among the choruses, ballet sequences and songs that he composed for the play are short interludes to be performed between its acts. And ironically, this brief entr’acte has become one of the composer’s bestloved orchestral works, undoubtedly because of its beautifully simple melody. Schubert can’t have been unaware of the tune’s immediate appeal, going on to reuse it in his second set of piano Impromptus, and also in the slow movement of his A minor String Quartet, D804.
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