John Lill plays Beethoven:Themes and variations

19 January 2018: Forum Theatre, Malvern Theatres

• Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart – Overture ‘Don Giovanni’, K527
• Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart – Symphony no41 ‘Jupiter’ in C major, K551
• Ludwig van Beethoven – Piano Concerto no3 in C minor, op37

This evening’s concert features – arguably – two of the greatest composers who ever lived: both with major works composed hastily during periods of significant trial and tribulation. Firstly, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart – here in financial straits, after the failure of his latest opera; and possibly on the verge of depression – three years before his death and his final great outpourings. And then Ludwig van Beethoven, as he began to break free of his great idol’s influence to find his own voice: despite struggling to come to terms with the onset of deafness – especially the concomitant tinnitus.

Don Giovanni had been hailed a palpable hit at its first performance in Prague, in October 1787; but, just over six months later, in Vienna, a revised version met with failure. Facing this setback head-on, Mozart immediately began composing his three final, miraculous, symphonies: managing somehow to complete them in successive summer months.

The last of these – our second work, tonight – even in the light of its two remarkable symphonic companions, K543 and K550 – is utterly astonishing. It simply does not matter whether you consider ‘Jupiter’ the greatest symphony ever written (as I do) – or merely(!) the greatest symphony of one of the “greatest composers who ever lived” – it will always stand as an imposing, sunlit monument to the man and the genre. (Sadly, it seems unlikely that it was ever performed in Mozart’s lifetime.)

It is difficult not to consider Don Giovanni his greatest opera, as well (although his later “great outpouring”, Die Zauberflöte, K620 – certainly more successful in his lifetime; and more frequently performed, today – must also be a contender). The overture is rumoured to have been composed on the day of its first performance (29 October 1787). However, Mozart records the completion of the opera as the day before! Whatever the case, as with the symphony, there are absolutely no audible signs of such alacrity.

Only music from the pen of a composer of Beethoven’s stature could succeed such masterpieces: with a work also premiered in Vienna (in April 1803, alongside his first two symphonies) – however, yet again, to mixed reviews. This time, though, the score had not even been finalized: the composer, as soloist, playing reportedly from “nothing but empty pages [with] a few Egyptian hieroglyphs… scribbled down to serve as clues”!

Messiah:Themes and variations

9 December 2017: Holy Trinity Church, Stratford-upon-Avon

On 9 September 1742, George Frideric Handel wrote a letter to his close friend (and greatest fan), Charles Jennens, enclosing a glowing review – by “no less than the Bishop of Elphim (A Nobleman very learned in musick)” – of the extremely successful first performance of an oratorio in Dublin. This premiere had actually taken place five months earlier, on 13 April 1742: so it seems that Handel was perhaps a little tardy in informing Jennens just “how well Your Messiah was received”.

Yes… – “Your” Messiah. For it was Jennens who not only compiled the text; but also convinced Handel of the merits of such a work in the first place. It seems, as well, that the composer trusted his collaborator’s knowledge of music, and musical forms, well enough to have asked him for feedback on the final article: as later, he would write to Jennens, asking him to “point out these passages in the Messiah which you think require altering”.

Unfortunately, Jennens doesn’t appear to have considered Messiah one of Handel’s greatest hits (an opinion also held by the first London audiences for the work) – as he wrote to his friend Edward Holdsworth that…

I shall show you a collection I gave Handel, called Messiah, which I value highly. He has made a fine entertainment of it, though not near so good as he might and ought to have done. I have with great difficulty made him correct some of the grossest faults in the composition; but he retained his overture obstinately, in which there are some passages far unworthy of Handel, but much more unworthy of the Messiah.

There is no mention in either of my (extremely well-used) scores of Messiah of the librettist’s name; and it would be easy to dismiss – as many have done – its lyrical content as just a collection of random verses from the Bible loosely stitched together. Additionally – especially for those of us who need more than our hands and feet to count the number of performances we have either attended or taken part in – the words have become so utterly familiar, anyway, that we perhaps take little (if any) notice of their meaning – either as individual movements, or overall.

I would argue, though, that Jennens’ knowledge of scripture; his grasp of dramatic literature (he was the first person to produce scholarly editions of individual Shakespeare plays), and of dramatic music; all come together to produce a cohesive, intelligent, and, in many ways, a quite startling narrative. We have to remember that nothing like this had been produced before (excepting Jennens’ own text for Handel’s Saul, in 1739); and that the first edition of Alexander Cruden’s Complete Concordance To the Old and New Testaments had only just been published (in 1736). But, even then, it has to be acknowledged that Jennens must have known the 1611 King James Version of the Bible – and the versions of the psalms as printed in The Book of Common Prayer of 1662 – inside-out. Indeed, musicologist Watkins Shaw – in The story of Handel's ‘Messiah’ – asserts that the libretto “amounts to little short of a work of genius”. As a writer, I have to agree!

The storyline that Jennens weaves can be seen in more than one light, too – hence its effectiveness. As religious propaganda, it reflects his own feelings concerning religion and society. In structure, it follows the liturgical year: Part I corresponding with Advent and Christmas; Part II with Lent, Easter, the Ascension, and Pentecost; and Part III with the year’s end (as well as ‘The End of Days’). Of course, its main thrust is the rehearsal of the life of Jesus: from Isaiah’s prophecies of a longed-for saviour – of his birth and death – to their fulfilment (in effect, from the First Coming to the Second). However, despite its title, this “life” is only ever really implied – apart from the appearance of the angels to the shepherds (in movements 13 to 17), events are written well and truly between the work’s lines.

As you listen to Handel’s glorious music, tonight, please, therefore, pay attention to those wonderful words, as well as – perhaps more than you would normally – to their meaning, their significance and power. And remember that, to all intents and purposes, without Jennens, there would be no music to hear. Without Charles Jennens, there would be no Messiah.

New York comes to Stratford:Themes and variations

5 December 2017: Stratford ArtsHouse

• Aaron Copland – Music for Movies
• Pedro H da Silva – Portuguese Guitar Concerto [world premiere]
• Lucía Caruso – ‘Clouds’, for piano and orchestra
• Aaron Copland – Music for the Theatre

Both George Gershwin and Aaron Copland were born in Brooklyn, New York: Gershwin in September 1898; Copland in November 1900. Having both played the piano from an early age, both went on to study composition with Rubin Goldmark – who had once been a pupil of Antonín Dvořák. However, whilst Gershwin remained in America (producing, among other things, a string of successful musicals), in 1920 Copland moved to France, to study with Nadia Boulanger. While there, he was introduced to many European composers – including Igor Stravinsky – and began to realize that, whereas he could easily identify music as, say, ‘French’, or ‘Russian’, there was no immediately recognizable ‘American’ style.

He therefore set out to deliberately create such a language (and “purge” his music of its European influences). Thus, when he returned to the US in 1924 (the year of Rhapsody in Blue), he looked to jazz as a key ingredient. It certainly permeates (if not dominates) this concert’s Music for the Theatre (strangely, Copland preferred the British spelling) – and is the first piece to sound so obviously ‘by Copland’ (as we now know him). “I was anxious to write a work that would immediately be recognized as American in character,” he later recollected. While no particular dramatic device was involved, Copland said that he chose the title because “the music seemed to suggest a certain theatrical atmosphere”. Labelled a “suite in five parts for small orchestra” (not to mention an expansive percussion section!), it received its first performance by the Boston Symphony Orchestra on 20 November 1925.

But there is a great deal more to Copland’s music than ‘all that jazz’. Indeed, that genre’s influence dissipated soon afterwards; and other constituents – especially those derived from American ‘folk’ and ‘popular’ music – started to come to the fore. These can clearly be heard in later masterpieces such as Rodeo, Billy the Kid, and Appalachian Spring – music which is readily identifiable as both Copland’s, and, therefore, as ‘American’.

Although Stateside ‘classical’ music has also moved on – think of John Adams or Milton Babbitt – it could be suggested that Copland was, perhaps, too successful in propagating his national idiom. Nearly a century later, and so many film scores still owe him their existence. Thankfully, his own Music for Movies – which opens this concert – stands head and shoulders above those who try to mimic his matchless style.

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.