WHAT YOU ARE ABOUT TO HEAR

Mozart (1756-1791)

Overture, Die Zauberflöte (The Magic Flute), K620 (1791)

Schubert (1797-1828)

Symphony No 8 ‘Unfinished’, D759 (1822)

Allegro moderato

Andante con moto

MacMillan (b.1959)

Eleven (UK Premiere) (2022)

Mozart (1756-1791)

Piano Concerto No 22 in E-flat, K482 (1785)

Allegro Andante

Allegro

Can we really call a two-movement bleeding chunk of a larger piece a ‘symphony’? Probably about as much as we can call a brief, punchy curtainraiser conceived for the opera house a legitimate concert work. There’s plenty we take as read about classical music. But as at least two of the pieces in tonight’s concert demonstrate, there’s probably quite a lot that shouldn’t slip by unquestioned, certainly in terms of how background and context have defined the musical sounds we hear.

In truth, opera overtures have been performed in concerts for centuries. There’s always been a nagging question, however, about whether they really belong. Even some of today’s conductors feel less than comfortable about severing a dramatic opener from the theatrical work it launches.

They might feel rather differently, however, in the case of the strange, symbolic, almost ritualistic drama of Mozart’s The Magic Flute . The opera (more correctly a Singspiel, virtually the equivalent of a modern-day musical) is as much a representation of Enlightenment values of knowledge, resilience and self-fulfillment as it is a fairy tale about a mysterious bird-man and a dragon-fleeing hero rescuing a damsel in distress.

It was Mozart’s last great completed work, and an unexpected success when unveiled at Vienna’s Theater auf der Wieden on 30 September 1791, just a couple of months before the composer’s death. Mozart’s fortunes had been sliding downhill rather dramatically as notoriously fickle Viennese music lovers shifted their attention to the latest musical fashions. The Magic Flute, however, provided Mozart with the greatest operatic hit of his career, and may well have launched a period of new creativity and innovation – had he lived longer.

And just as The Magic Flute ’s fantastical storyline was designed to convey Enlightenment ideals, so its Overture serves to introduce those ideas in music that’s at once grand and playful. Mozart and his librettist Emanuel Schikaneder were both active Freemasons, and Masonic symbolism is embedded deep within both the opera’s plot and its music. The number three has a mystical significance in Masonic tradition, and it’s with three confident, sonorous chords that Mozart launches his Overture, in the three-flat key signature of E flat major.

Mozart’s fortunes had beenslidingdownhill ratherdramaticallyas notoriouslyfickleViennese music lovers shifted their attention to the latest musical fashions.

After this somewhat reverential slow introduction, however, Mozart launches the main body of the Overture with a scampering theme that’s quickly passed from instrument to instrument in an increasingly rich and complex texture. There’s symbolism here, too, since every musician makes a crucial (even, perhaps, equal) contribution to the overall music, or maybe simply knows their place in the bigger picture. Mozart’s towering harmonies return about halfway through, but the Overture bustles to a busy close with the faster music, while rather magically never losing its sense of ceremonial grandeur.

If the musical symbolism of Mozart’s operatic Overture makes it a particularly fitting work for the concert hall, Franz Schubert’s two-movement Symphony established its place through the strength of its music alone.

Schubert’s ‘Unfinished’ was, however, always intended to end up as a conventional, four-movement Symphony. Alongside its completed first and second movements, a reduced version of a projected third movement exists, though there’s nothing at all to indicate what the composer had in mind for a finale. Scholars and performers have put forward various competing completions down the centuries, but none has stuck. That’s perhaps because Schubert’s two existing movements exhibit a strange kind of balance and unity on their own, as if they’re two sides of the same coin.

It’s not even clear why Schubert left the Symphony unfinished – although it’s hardly the only one he failed to complete. He began 13 symphonies in total, but only finished seven of them, leading to all manner of inconsistencies as to numberings (you might find the ‘Unfinished’ referred to as No 7, No 8 or even No 9, depending on how editors viewed the other symphonies –complete, sketched or partially completed – before and after it).

Various theories have been put forward as to why Schubert seemed to stop after just two movements. Perhaps it was for reasons of health: he began to feel the first serious effects of the syphilis that would kill him six years later around the same time he began work on the Symphony, in the autumn of 1822. And there’s little doubt that the sense of turmoil and despair that Schubert evokes in his opening movement feel rooted in genuine personal experience. Or perhaps he was overawed by the remarkable achievements of Beethoven. Schubert would have no doubt heard the premieres of the elder composer’s Seventh and Eighth Symphonies in Vienna just a few years earlier, and he clearly took those bold, pioneering creations as models for his new work.

And, it seems, he may have intended to complete the Symphony after taking a break from working on it. In 1823, he received an honorary diploma from the Graz Music Society, an honour he felt obliged to recognise by dedicating a new symphony to the organisation. His friend Joseph Hüttenbrenner was a member, and Schubert sent him the two symphonic movements he’d written in 1822 to be getting on with – then did nothing more. Hüttenbrenner later passed the score on to his brother Anselm for safekeeping, and it remained in Anselm’s possession until 1865, almost four decades after Schubert’s death. The conductor Johann von Herbeck had been tipped off about the existence of a mysterious, incomplete Schubert symphony, and visited Anselm to find out more. Flattered by the suggestion that Herbeck might include a work of his own in a prospective future concert, Anselm Hüttenbrenner miraculously remembered the music by Schubert he’d hidden away in 1823, and Herbeck duly gave the ‘Unfinished’ Symphony its premiere on 17 December 1865 in Vienna (with a finale tacked on from Schubert’s teenage Symphony No. 3). It went down a storm.

It might well have been that delay in performance, coupled with changing musical tastes, that ensured Schubert’s ‘Unfinished’ its success. From the hushed murmurings of its sombre opening on cellos and basses, and its melancholy oboe melody, it feels like music ahead of its time, but very much in tune with the high emotions and drama of the Romantic movement that was in full flight by the mid-19th century. A single held note from the horns acts as a pivot into the brighter music of the opening movement’s second main theme, a graceful cello melody, but the new-found contentment suddenly comes to a halt, interrupted by anguished chords from across the orchestra. After a turbulent central development section, the two earlier themes return to propel the movement to its stormy, unremittingly dark close.

In many ways, Schubert’s second movement is the lighter, brighter twin of the heavier, darker first, in the same three-time, and even passing by at a similar speed. And though it’s tempting to see its dancing, lyrical melodies as the mirror images of the first movement’s melancholy, brooding themes, in many ways it’s just as turbulent and unpredictable. Its calm, floating tunes are often interrupted by violence, so that its conclusion, though reassuringly calm, also feels somewhat provisional.

It was the SCO and conductor Maxim Emelyanychev who gave tonight’s next piece its world premiere in Antwerp last year, and who now give Sir James MacMillan’s Eleven its first UK performances. The composer writes about his new work:

"There have been various pieces of music inspired by sport over the decades, and by football (soccer) in particular. This short concert overture is another one, and is particularly inspired by the local teams in East Ayrshire in Scotland where I grew up. In fact the work is dedicated to the supporters of five teams in the area.

Eleven is the number of players in a team and is the number which shapes a lot of the musical choices here: themes made up of eleven notes, chords consisting of eleven pitches, durations of eleven units and so on. The piece begins with the sound of a referee’s whistle before two eleven-note themes are thrown around between wind and strings, as if they are two opposing teams. Gradually melodies which have been appropriated as archetypal football chants start to appear, always underpinned by a restless physical energy.

One of these (which has its origin in ‘Auld Lang Syne’) eventually establishes itself as a slowmoving chorale over which the violins swirl around and up and down. The central section becomes an energetic moto perpetuo before the whole orchestra blares out eleven violent repeated chords.

The referee’s whistle heralds a brief recapitulation of the opening duel between the sections of the orchestra before the music eventually settles to a calm codetta, marked 'serene and warm'."

We return to Mozart for tonight’s concluding piece, and there’s no question that his Piano Concerto No 22 was firmly intended for concert performance – and, in fact, for himself to perform as soloist. Mozart did so on 23 December 1785 in Vienna’s Burgtheater (having completed the Concerto barely a week earlier), with an orchestra conducted by Antonio Salieri, and in the presence of none other than Emperor Joseph II.

Six years earlier than tonight’s opening Overture, Mozart was at the height of his popularity in the Austrian capital – or almost. He’d yet to unveil his opera The Marriage of Figaro, which he would do to huge acclaim in May 1786. But while opera might have brought Mozart fame and prestige, it was the humbler piano concerto that first established his reputation – and, crucially, provided his day-to-day income. As a result, he wrote no fewer than 17 piano concertos for himself to perform for enthusiastic Viennese audiences. Irish tenor Michael Kenny, who’d go on to sing in the first production of The Marriage of Figaro, summed up Mozart’s playing at the time: ‘His feeling, the rapidity of his fingers, the great execution and strength of his left hand particularly, and the apparent inspiration of his modulations, astounded me.’

No 22, however, stands apart from many of Mozart’s keyboard concertos in terms of the freedom with which the composer uses his musical material, and also in his use of his orchestra. It’s the first concerto in which Mozart replaces the customary orchestral oboes with clarinets, lending the piece a distinctively warm, mellow sound. A drumrolllike, military-style idea kicks off his opening movement, followed by a more lyrical melody on the violins. When the piano finally enters, however, it’s with entirely new material all of its own. In his central development section, Mozart pushes his pianist (or himself) hard, with virtuoso figurations that make flying visits to several distant keys, though when the military-style theme marks the return of the opening material, the pianist feels free to add their own distinctive contributions.

Listeners begged for an encore of Mozart’s deeply melancholy second movement at the Concerto’s first performance, and it’s a particularly moving creation, its dragging melody low in the violins’ range closely followed by what feels like an improvised response from the pianist. Mozart plays a few tricks on listeners in his bright and breezy finale, however, swerving unexpectedly away from his perky main theme to more mysterious, dreamier music, before a smiling, sunny conclusion.