2010 Program note: Concert with Leif Ove Andsnes & DNK

Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach (1714­­–1788):

Symfoni i e-moll | Symphony in E minor, H 653/Wq 178

Allegro assai

Andante moderato

Allegro

Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach composed nine of his nineteen symphonies during the almost thirty years that he spent as the harpsichordist to the court of Frederick the Great in Berlin. He composed the remaining ten after 1768, when he took over from his godfather Georg Philipp Telemann as Kapellmeister in Hamburg, where his responsibility was primarily for church music. His collections from 1773–76 of six and four symphonies respectively, all strongly influenced by two aesthetic schools – Empfindsamkeit (sensitivity) and Sturm und Drang (a literary movement, often translated as Storm and Stress), displayed remarkable wit and bold invention.

However, in his early symphonies (this evening’s was composed in 1756), he does not represent ‘early classicism’, since he never adopted his younger brother Johann Christian’s ‘galant’ style that was to influence Mozart. He based his style on the premiss that the time of the Italian operatic sinfonia was over, and that for a symphony to please an audience it had to be bold and catchy in its first movement, lyrical/meditative in the second, and cheerful or innocent in the final movement.

The English music historian Charles Burney, who travelled throughout Europe reporting on the current state of music, wrote that the composer Johann Hasse had recommended CPE Bach’s symphony in E minor as the best he had ever heard. It was originally written for a string orchestra, but Bach’s later ‘reinforcement’ with wind instruments endowed the work with new qualities.

Bent Sørensen (1958)

Piano Concerto No 2

La Mattina

Lento lugubre – Luminoso, quasi allegro – Lento misterioso – Andante – Presto

In October 2009 Leif Ove Andsnes and the Norwegian Chamber Orchestra gave the first performance of the Danish composer Bent Sørensen’s second Piano Concerto, entitled ‘La Mattina’ (Morning), at the Norwegian Opera in Bjørvika, Oslo. It was commissioned by the Norwegian Chamber Orchestra, and written for and dedicated to Leif Ove Andsnes. The composer says that the dark opening of the solo was inspired by hearing Leif Ove Andsnes play an arrangement of Bach by Ferruccio Busoni.

The concerto has five movements played without pause, but it may also be divided into three, four or six sections. Motifs and textures reappear in new guises, and according to the composer, the dark opening – ‘with eyes closed and the slightest hint of a Bach chorale’ ends in a frantic rondoesque movement – with eyes wide open.’

In her review of the premiere, Ida Habbestad wrote in Dagsavisen that ‘longing and aetheriality are once again central features of the composer’s music. The soloist is the supporting structure, though not with clear thematic presentations as tradition might lead us to expect. Rather the material is reminiscent of fragments of the past against a light, sustained backdrop of sound in the strings, played so quietly that it is barely audible. However, the light eventually breaks through.’

Leoš Janáček (1854–1928)

String Quartet No 1

The Kreutzer Sonata

(arranged for string orchestra by Terje Tønnesen)

Adagio – Con moto

Con moto

Con moto – Vivace – Andante – Tempo I

Con moto

Leo Tolstoy (1828–1910) claimed in his novella The Kreutzer Sonata (the title comes from Beethoven’s Sonata for Violin and Piano of the same name) that music has a negative influence on human morality, and that it is one of the strongest driving forces behind infidelity. The Czech composer Leoš Janáček took the diametrically opposite view. According to his fellow musician, Josef Suk, violinist and composer, who was involved in the first performance in October 1924 of his first String Quartet, the work is a moral protest against men’s despotic attitude towards women. Here music has the role of ‘the voice of the conscience of humanity’ (Jaroslav Vogel).

Janáček was following in the footsteps of another Czech composer, Bedrich Smetana, when he started using programme ideas in chamber music pieces – the very epitome of absolute music. He also consistently ignored the formal rules applied by convention to the string quartet. Short, highly emotional motifs are not developed, but are subjected to a technique of metamorphosis that gives the impression of transient yet essential arrangement of sharp detail.

Tolstoy’s novella had occupied Janáček for a long time. In the autumn of 1908 he wrote a piano trio inspired by the story, and six months later he revised it for a concert in Brno in connection with Tolstoy celebrations that year. The trio was performed, but it has since been lost, and Janáček never mentioned how much of the material found its way into the string quartet fourteen years later.

It would be futile to search for Tolstoy’s story – bar for bar – in the music, just as it would be inappropriate to analyse it as absolute music. The musical annotations relate just as accurately what is happening: angry – sharp – anxious – as if in tears. In several sections ‘the instruments seem frustrated by the limits on their ability to communicate, like partners in a wasted marriage’ (Paul Griffiths).

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756–1791)

Piano Concerto No 24 in C minor

KV 491

Allegro

Larghetto

Allegretto

It seems that in the 1780s Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart ‘discovered’ the key of C minor. Between 1781 and 1786 he wrote several remarkable compositions in this dramatic key – the Wind Serenade KV 388, the Fugue for Two Pianos KV 426, the unfinished Mass KV 427, a Piano Sonata KV 457, the Piano Fantasia KV 475, the Masonic Funeral Music KV 477 and the Piano Concerto No 24 KV 491.

He composed the concerto while his work on The Marriage of Figaro was at its most intense. It has no happy ending, concluding in the same key as the beginning. The opening theme contains all twelve notes of the chromatic scale – ‘a restless traversal of the known world in not quite a quarter of a minute’ (Michael Steinberg). In the recapitulation the apparently divergent elements of the movement are combined for the first time. The melody that starts the slow movement is (or at least appears) simple, and after two contrasting episodes in the wind instruments the coda makes a convincing conclusion. The final movement consists of variations on a sombre march motif.

The Danish composer Carl Nielsen commented upon the inexplicable Mozartian melancholy that appears in this piano concerto: ‘He points not at his wounds; he has no pity for himself; but opens the way to his innermost being with a soulful smile that says everything.’

Text: Hans H Rowe
English version: Roger Martin