Tamsin Waley-Cohen plays Mozart:Themes and variations

21 November 2017: Stratford ArtsHouse
22 November 2017: Town Hall, Birmingham

• Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart – Symphony no15 in G major, K124
• Edvard Grieg – Holberg Suite, op40
• Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart – Violin Concerto no4 in D major, K218
• Joseph Haydn – Symphony no22 ‘The Philosopher’ in E-flat major, Hob.I:22

In different ways, all three of today’s composers (and all four of today’s works) can be seen as reflecting on their compositional inheritance – or even looking back at it deliberately, with unfeigned affection – especially in the use of earlier dance-forms. In doing so, they each not only shine a new light on such musical history and tradition, but also breathe fresh energy into its utilization.

Fifteen, when he wrote his Fifteenth Symphony, and only eighteen or nineteen when he wrote his five violin concertos, Mozart’s style, here, is not yet fully mature, of course: and he is therefore still audibly influenced by that of his predecessors and elders – including his father, Leopold; as well as JC Bach and Michael Haydn. Nevertheless, the obvious musical growth demonstrated by this concert’s two compositions is quite astounding. And it is in the later work’s final movement – the Violin Concerto’s explicitly French-style Rondeau (Italian: rondó; ‘round’) – that Mozart’s retrospection takes its most concrete form. (As with its predecessor, K216, though, this movement stops and starts, and veers off in all sorts of ‘modern’ and ‘humorous’ directions!)

Additionally, until supplanted by the Beethovenian scherzo (Italian for ‘jest’ or ‘joke’), the minuet (Italian: minuetto; German: Menuett; French: menuet) was a recognizable, characteristic part of most classical symphonies: and thus features in both of today’s, along with its typical, central trio (so-called because, initially, this was in three-part harmony: as with the minor-key sections of sixteenth-century masses). Originally a rustic French dance, the menuetto (a neologism frequently used by both Mozart and Beethoven) is always in triple time – its epithet deriving from its distinctive dainty step: that is, from the French menu, for ‘small’.

As well as including such a Menuet e Trio, the overall structure of Haydn’s symphony also references the past: its slow-fast-slow-fast sequence of movements being more typical of the Baroque-era (roughly 1600 to 1750) sonata da chiesa (‘church sonata’). Its instrumentation, though, is both unique and groundbreaking.

However, it is in Grieg’s Holberg Suite that we find bygone styles evoked most knowingly – the deliberate call to earlier forms and styles (as with Warlock’s Capriol Suite and Prokofiev’s Classical Symphony) coloured with, and seen from, a more distant remove; as well as treated with a more modern discernment. Proof indeed that looking back is no hindrance to looking – and moving – forward.