WHAT YOU ARE ABOUT TO HEAR

Boccherini (1743-1805)

Cello Concerto in G, G480 (C 1770)

Allegro Adagio Allegro

Boccherini (1743-1805)

Quintet in C, Op 30 No 6 ‘Musica

Notturna delle Strade di Madrid’ (1780) arr. for strings

Ave Maria della Parrocchia

Ave Maria del Quartiere

Minuetto dei Ciechi

Il Rosario

Pasecalle – Los Manolos

Il tamburo dei Soldati

La Ritirata

Mozart (1756-1791)

Fantasie in F minor for Mechanical Organ, K608 (1791)

Allegro – Andante – Allegro

Mendelssohn (1809–1847)

String Symphony No 10 in B minor (1823)

Adagio – Allegro – più presto

Mozart (1756-1791)

Serenade in G, K525

‘Eine kleine Nachtmusik’ (1787)

Allegro

Romanze: Andante

Menuetto: Allegretto

Finale: Allegro

From a musical depiction of the Spanish capital’s nightlife to a passionate lament originally conceived for mechanical pipes and pistons – all by way of a ten-minute symphony by a 14-year-old. There are plenty of discoveries to be made in today’s rich and unusual programme – as well, of course, as the most famous of all Mozart’s serenades.

We begin, however, with something slightly more conventional. That said, Luigi Boccherini is hardly a composer whose name crops up regularly on concert programmes. Which is a shame, because he’s a fascinating musical figure, and an important one, too.

Boccherini was born in Tuscany in 1743 into a thoroughly musical and artistic family: his father was a cellist and double bassist, his elder brother Giovanni would go on to make waves as a dancer, choreographer and librettist, and his two sisters Anna Matilde and Riccarda would become a ballet dancer and an opera singer respectively. Young Luigi was hardly without talent himself. He began his serious musical studies in Rome aged just 13, and his achievements were so conspicuous that as a 15-year-old he was summoned to perform with his father in Vienna, where they took up positions in the orchestra of the Burgtheater.

Luigi quickly nurtured an international reputation as a cellist and a composer, and spent much of his later life in Spain, where he received patronage from the Infante Don Luis Antonio, younger brother of King Charles III, among numerous other patrons. (He ended up needing those other supporters: Boccherini later fell foul of the

King when he refused to change a passage in a trio he’d written, which the monarch didn’t particularly care for. The musician was immediately dismissed.)

You can perhaps understand Boccherini’s reluctance to tamper with his music: his creations are full of exquisite craftsmanship, building on the influential musical trends set down by Joseph Haydn but injecting them with a distinctive sense of charm and optimism. Boccherini was extraordinarily prolific, too, creating more than a hundred string quintets (we’ll hear one of them later), dozens of string quartets and guitar quintets, as well as 30 symphonies and no fewer than 12 concertos for his own instrument, the cello.

The Cello Concerto in G that opens tonight’s programme was first published in Paris in 1770, and probably dates from Boccherini’s years working for the Infante Don Luis Antonio, though the composer is believed to have given its premiere in the French capital rather than in Spain. And despite its abundant elegance and refinement, it’s also music of surprisingly stark and extreme contrasts. The cello soloist duets sweetly with one of the orchestral violins in the smiling first movement, and later gets an airborne, bassline-less accompaniment from just violins, running through passages that you’d be forgiven for mistaking for Vivaldi’s Four Seasons. A similar floating, bassline-free texture marks out the slower second movement, though the music here takes us to another world entirely: one of profound emotions and deep sorrow. Boccherini ends his Concerto, however, with a playful, dancing finale that showcases his soloist’s virtuosity.

The Infante Don Luis Antonio was quite a character. Though he’d been set on a path towards an ecclesiastical life (he was named Archbishop of Toledo and Primate of Spain at the eyebrow-raising age of eight), he later abandoned his religious titles and the celibacy that went with them, got involved in a sex scandal, was forced to marry, and was then exiled from Madrid to Arenas de San Pedro, west of the capital.

Boccherini went with him, and it was there, around 1780, that the composer wrote the String Quintet that we’ll hear next in tonight’s programme. He himself gave the piece its unusual title – literally ‘Night Music from the Streets of Madrid’ – to indicate his musical evocation of the evening sounds from the Spanish capital, from merry revellers to military tattoos. It’s hard, though, not to detect a certain wistful nostalgia in Boccherini’s vivid evocations. This was, after all, the hustle and bustle of a lively international city, from which his patron was now barred.

The Quintet is a deeply unconventional piece that obeys few rules of classical design, devoting itself instead to a series of sound portraits of Madrid as night falls. Boccherini admitted as much on his own manuscript, writing rather apologetically: ‘Everything that does not comply with the rules of composition may be forgiven for the sake of portraying the scene with veracity.’ Indeed, so specific are Boccherini’s musical descriptions that he forbade publication of the Quintet until after his death, explaining: ‘The piece is absolutely useless, even ridiculous, outside Spain, because the audience cannot hope to understand its significance, nor the performers to play it as it should be played.’ You may beg to differ. And even in Boccherini’s lifetime, the piece became so popular within Spain that he made arrangements for piano quintet and also string quartet plus guitar.

Boccherini opens with church bells tolling an Ave Maria, summoned by resonant pizzicatos from four of the string players. The first violin proceeds to beat out a soldier’s drum rhythm on a single note, before a dance for blind street beggars, for which the composer instructs his cellists to strum their instruments like guitars. Boccherini next moves to ‘The Rosary’, a prayerful duet for violin and cello complete with church bell-like pizzicatos, which is twice interrupted by vigorous, fanfare-like intrusions. Loudmouth street singers off for a big night out next enter the scene, accompanied by more strumming guitars, before the return of the soldier’s drum we heard earlier. Boccherini closes with the military retreat: the night watch announces Madrid’s midnight curfew with a stomping, ceremonial march, complete with more drum sounds from the quintet’s two cellists.

In March 1791 – about a decade after Boccherini conjured his musical portrait of night-time Madrid, and just a few months before his own death – Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart was asked to write a rather unusual piece of music. ‘It is a kind of composition that I detest,’ he wrote with typically brutal honesty to his sister Constanze. ‘I have unfortunately not been able to finish it. I compose a bit of it every day – but I have to break off now and then, as I get bored. And indeed I would give the whole thing up, if I had not such an important reason to go on with it. But I still hope that I shall be able to force myself gradually to finish it.’

A lot of Mozart’s displeasure came from the unconventional instrument for which he was writing: a mechanical organ. These contraptions were among the world’s most intricate pieces of machinery at the end of the 18th century, clockwork devices that worked as a cross between a timepiece and a pipe organ, employing a rotating barrel with pins to send air puffing into organ pipes at precise moments. As a means of supplying music on demand, they were almost the 18th-century equivalent of an Alexa smart speaker: they might sit unobtrusively on a table, but they might also take up the entire wall of a room. Austrian military hero Count Joseph Deym was mad about them, so much so that he even opened a gallery in Vienna to show off his collection – alongside his parallel collection of waxworks.

It was a waxwork of fellow Austrian military hero Field Marshal Ernst Gideon, Baron von Laudon – commander-in-chief of the entire Austrian armed forces when he died in Moravia in 1790 – that Deym decreed would be shown in a glass coffin, accompanied by music for mechanical organ specifically composed by Mozart. Deym announced ‘performances’ in the city’s newspapers, inviting interested listeners to attend.

And despite his reservations, what Mozart composed for this rather macabre spectacle stands as one of his final masterpieces, an appropriately fantastical piece of music for its rather theatrical intended use. The piece remained untitled until it was transformed into a piano duet in the 19th century under the name ‘Fantasie’, and since then it’s been arranged for flutes and string quartet, as well as the orchestral reimagining you hear tonight.

It’s a turbulent piece from its very opening, with military-style dotted rhythms and no shortage of anguished dissonances. It quickly moves into a more measured fugue, however, with intertwining melodic lines, before the return of the stormy opening music leads to a far gentler section with a floating melody that becomes increasingly heavily decorated as it progresses. After a version of a showy, concerto-style cadenza, the opening music returns – now brighter and more optimistic – before the piece’s sonorous, surprisingly stormy conclusion.

Earlier in his life, of course, Mozart was a remarkable child prodigy. Though lesser known for his youthful activities, Felix Mendelssohn was an equally early musical developer about half a century later. Mendelssohn’s earliest compositions date from 1820, when he was just 11 (they include – deep breath – a violin sonata, a piano trio, several songs, three piano sonatas, choral works and even an opera). Tonight’s next piece is one of twelve String Symphonies that Mendelssohn composed between the ages of 12 and 14. At that time, he was a pupil of Carl Zelter, and these String Symphonies inevitably display the influence of Zelter’s rather conservative teaching, not least in their backward glances to the music of CPE Bach.

But they’re no mere childhood exercises. The String Symphony No 10, completed in May 1823 when Mendessohn was 14, is a single-movement work (it’s been suggested it may originally have been joined by two complementary movements, though they’ve never been unearthed) of enormous confidence and sophistication, whose solemn, Haydn-inspired introduction is followed by a dashing faster section that’s Mendelssohn through and through.

We end tonight’s concert back with Mozart. And, alongside Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, with probably the only other piece in the classical repertoire that’s immediately recognisible from just its opening notes.

Which is ironic, because despite the familiarity of the music of Mozart’s Eine kleine Nachtmusik – strictly speaking, his Serenade No 13 for strings – we know very little else about it. Mozart entered it in his catalogue on 10 August 1787 (as ‘Eine kleine Nacht-Musik’ – he himself was responsible for the informal name by which we all know it), which dates it to around the same time he was writing his opera Don Giovanni. Indeed, it might not be too far-fetched to see the Serenade as a lighthearted, carefree counterpart to the composer’s darkest, most troubled and troubling stage work. But a serenade would usually have been written for a particular occasion: in this case, we don’t know what. It’s not inconceivable that Mozart wrote it simply for private playing with his friends – which would also make sense of his manuscript specifying ‘two violins, viola, cello and bass’ rather than the larger string orchestra that usually plays the piece today.

Nonetheless, it’s one of Mozart’s blithest, brightest creations, explicitly intended to be immediate, accessible and lighthearted, though no less expertly crafted for that. The composer originally wrote five movements, but an additional minuet intended to be heard between the first and second movements has been lost.

The piece’s bracing opening theme – in fact, just a run up and down the notes of two crucial chords in the work’s home key of G major – serves as a unison call-to-attention, and it’s quickly followed by a more lyrical, tripping second theme, a brief central development section, and a return to the bright opening music. Mozart’s second movement is a gently lyrical Romance, with perhaps a hint of poignancy amid its poise and elegance. After the very brief minuet and trio of his third movement, Mozart rounds things off with an irrepressibly energetic finale, whose closing notes might just take us right back to the Serenade’s unforgettable opening.

© David Kettle