The Quilter Cheviot Benedetti Concert
BENEDETTI PLAYS BRUCH Thursday 24 September, Perth Concert Hall –––––
PROGRAMME NOTE
SCO.ORG.UK
Season 2020/21
BENEDETTI PLAYS BRUCH The Quilter Cheviot Benedetti Concert
Thursday 24 September 2020, 7.30pm Perth Concert Hall BRUCH Violin Concerto No 1 in G minor Maxim Emelyanychev Conductor Nicola Benedetti Violin
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 Stewart Webster Amira Bedrush-McDonald Niamh Lyons Carole Howat VIOLA Felix Tanner Brian Schiele Steve King Kathryn Jourdan CELLO Philip Higham Su-a Lee Donald Gillan Eric de Wit BASS Nikita Naumov Adrian Bornet
The Orchestra list was correct at the time of going to print.
FLUTE André Cebrián Lee Holland PICCOLO Lee Holland OBOE Robin Williams Amy Turner CLARINET Maximiliano Martín William Stafford BASSOON Paul Boyes Alison Green HORN Patrick Broderick Harry Johnstone Jamie Shield Rachel Brady TRUMPET Peter Franks Shaun Harrold TIMPANI Louise Goodwin
The Scottish Chamber Orchestra is a charity registered in Scotland No. SC015039. Company registration No. SC075079.
WHAT YOU ARE ABOUT TO HEAR Bruch (1838-1920) Violin Concerto No 1 in G minor, Op 26 (1866) Vorspiel: Allegro moderato Adagio Finale: Allegro energico
––––– Bruch’s First Violin Concerto came top in Classic FM’s Hall of Fame for the five years from 1996 to 2000: for that period, it was considered (by listeners to that radio station, at least) the most popular piece of classical music in the world. It might have slid down the list slightly since then – it currently resides around No. 24 – but by any measure, it’s an astonishingly well-loved piece of music. Furthermore, it’s admired by classical aficionados and novices alike: it’s worth remembering that much of its enduring popularity comes courtesy of professional violinists, who have enjoyed performing the Concerto enough to keep it in the public eye (or ear). In fact, it’s been that way ever since the final version of the Concerto was premiered in 1868, following its lengthy and somewhat troublesome gestation. Bruch began sketches for a violin concerto as far back as 1857, when he was just 19 – by which time he’d already been composing for several years. He’d written his first chamber music by the age of 11, completed a symphony at 14, and would write his first opera when he was just 20. He followed a noble tradition. His teachers – Ferdinand Hiller and Carl Reinecke – immersed the young Bruch in the somewhat straitlaced musical world of Mendelssohn, Schumann and Brahms, making sure to steer him away from the more radical influences of Wagner and Liszt. But despite being an established composer by the time he wrote his First Violin Concerto, it nonetheless caused Bruch quite a lot of anguish. He began work in earnest in the summer of 1864,
Bringing together all three men’s suggestions, Bruch was finally satisfied with the results. Better still, Joachim was hooked, too: it was he who gave the premiere of the revised version – the work we know today – in 1868 in Bremen
Max Bruch
but 18 months later was clearly struggling with the work, writing to his former teacher Hiller: ‘My violin concerto is
Joachim had been responsible virtually single-handedly for popularising and establishing in the repertoire the
progressing slowly – I do not feel sure of my feet on this terrain. Do you think that it is very audacious to write a violin concerto?’ Perhaps his concerns grew from a sense of responsibility to the instrument for which he felt a particular fondness. Despite being a pianist, he felt the violin could ‘sing a melody better than a piano, and melody is the soul of music’.
concertos of Mendelssohn, Beethoven and Brahms (whose Concerto he’d as good as co-written with the composer). It would do no harm, surely, to involve as eminent a figure as Joachim in the creation of a new concerto – and the violinist duly sent back lists of possible improvements to Bruch, who then also asked conductor Hermann Levi and composer/violinist Ferdinand David (who’d premiered Mendelssohn’s E minor Concerto two decades earlier) for their own input.
Bruch himself conducted the Concerto’s very first performance, in Koblenz on 24 April 1866, with Otto von Königslow as soloist, and promptly withdrew the work afterwards. Feeling he needed another person’s perspective, he took the canny decision to send the score to the great violinist, conductor and composer Joseph Joachim for his comments.
Bringing together all three men’s suggestions, Bruch was finally satisfied with the results. Better still, Joachim was hooked, too: it was he who gave the premiere of the revised version – the work we know today – in 1868 in
Bremen. Indeed, Bruch’s First Concerto remained one of Joachim’s favourites: at celebrations to mark his 75th birthday, he famously declaimed: ‘The Germans have four violin concertos. The greatest, the most uncompromising, is Beethoven’s. The one by Brahms vies with it in seriousness. The richest, the most seductive was written by Max Bruch. But the most inward, the heart’s jewel, is Mendelssohn’s.’ Rich and seductive Bruch’s Concerto undeniably is. And once let loose on the world, it became an astonishing international success, quickly taken up by violinists right across Europe and America. (At its London premiere, the critic of The Times described it as ‘full of pretension, but almost destitute of interest’, though history has taken a somewhat different view.) So successful was the work, in fact, that it came to overshadow virtually everything else that Bruch wrote – not least his two subsequent violin concertos. Bruch himself came to resent his First Concerto’s overwhelming popularity. Part of his dislike, surely, came from financial frustration: he’d sold the copyright of what would become his greatest hit to Hamburg music publisher August Cranz for a pittance, and therefore made hardly any money from it himself. Nevertheless, Bruch’s First Concerto remains a gloriously warm, expressive work, and at about 25 minutes, a relatively brief one, too. Indeed, its modest duration meant it fitted perfectly onto a single side of an LP record, making it the perfect choice for record company executives from the 1950s (often coupled with the Mendelssohn
The Concerto achieves a miraculous balance of melodic simplicity and sparkling virtuosity – despite the abundant melodic rewards it offers, it’s devilishly difficult for its soloist to play
E minor Concerto, a tradition that continues today). A wealth of early recordings can only have added to the piece’s popularity. Indeed, the Concerto achieves a miraculous balance of melodic simplicity and sparkling virtuosity – despite the abundant melodic rewards it offers, it’s devilishly difficult for its soloist to play. One of Bruch’s nagging concerns was whether the work truly rated as a Concerto at all, a question exemplified in the work’s unconventional structure. His opening movement, called ‘Vorspiel’ (‘Prelude’), serves as an extended upbeat to the glories of Bruch’s prayerful, rapturous slow movement, which contains some of the most exquisitely beautiful writing in the whole violin repertoire. Bruch rounds things off with a propulsive, gypsy-style romp. And indeed, if we’re looking for any more reasons behind the Concerto’s remarkable popularity, its unusual but highly effective melding of heart-onsleeve passion, quirkiness and melodic immediacy should come high on the list. © David Kettle