Program Notes

Violin Concerto in D major brahms

Patrick Campbell Jankowski

When it comes to writing concertos, it helps when a composer either plays the instrument themself, or has a particular collaborator in mind. Mozart’s violin and keyboard concertos are so organic and idiomatic because he played both, and was almost always the best performer of his own music. Beethoven’s piano concertos are naturally brilliant, as the composer himself was a great pianist. But then there’s his violin concerto, which while recognized today as a masterpiece, was written off at first as haphazardly composed, with a thrown-together and rather messy first performance. Only years after his death was it revived by the gifted Joseph Joachim, who played it at the age of 12 with Felix Mendelssohn conducting. Joachim would go on to become among the most important artistic collaborators and friends with Beethoven’s “heir” to German symphonic music: Johannes Brahms. When Brahms decided to write his own concerto for the instrument, he turned to his friend for guidance. The fruits of their collaboration are in the concerto’s balance of symphonic construction and cleverness (from Brahms), with the lyricism of its solo part (surely at least inspired by Joachim). It is a work which appeals to the mind as well as the heart. In the opening movement in particular, the symphony-concerto duality is readily apparent: at over twenty minutes in length and with a substantive and complex development, it is ultimately rounded out by a brilliant cadenza written by Joachim. Following this “thinking person’s” opening, Brahms succumbs a bit more to unapologetic appeals to emotion: in the songful Adagio, with its famous oboe melody to which the violin beautifully replies, and in the buoyant finale, in which we find Brahms at his most lighthearted and humorous.

Symphony No. 7 in E major bruckner

Paul Hawkshaw

“Since Beethoven, nothing even close has been written!” The great 19th-century conductor Arthur Nikisch made this remark to Anton Bruckner’s friend Joseph Schalk, before he conducted the first performance of the composer’s Seventh Symphony in Leipzig on December 30, 1884. The next year, Bruckner wrote to Nikisch that fellow conductor Hermann Levi had described the piece as “the most significant symphonic work since Beethoven’s death.” Levi had conducted a performance in Munich on March 10, 1885. The Nikisch and Levi performances of the Seventh brought Bruckner international recognition as a composer for the first time.

Given the work’s popularity to the present day, it is astonishing what little we know about readings of the work we are used to hearing. Bruckner’s autograph score was subject to numerous changes in tempo, performance markings and orchestration between its initial completion in September 1883 and the spring of 1885 when it served as the engraver’s copy for the first edition. Many of these alterations are in the hand of Joseph Schalk’s brother, Franz, who helped the composer prepare the score for printing. Some were endorsed by Bruckner; others were added without authorization