The Program
WOLFGANG AMADEUS MOZART
Adagio in E Major, K. 261
Mozart wrote all five of his violin concertos as a teenager in his
native Salzburg between 1773 and 1775. The Adagio in E Major, K.
261, though performed today as a stand-alone piece, was written in
1776 as a replacement slow movement for the Violin Concerto No. 5,
whose original slow movement is also an adagio in E major. The
impetus for K. 261 was almost certainly the arrival of the famous
Italian violinist Antonio Brunetti, who succeeded Mozart as
concertmaster of the Salzburg court orchestra and who supposedly
found Mozart's original slow movement to be "too serious."
(Mozart's other two single movements for violin and orchestra—the
Rondo in B-flat Major, K. 269, and the Rondo in C Major, K.
373—were also written for Brunetti as replacement concerto
movements, likely for Mozart's Violin Concerto No. 1 and a concerto
by a now unknown composer, respectively.) This replacement Adagio
must surely have been straightforward and untroubled enough for
Brunetti: Its breathy, songlike nature provides the soloist with a
vehicle to display his most ravishingly lyrical playing.
—Jay Goodwin
FELIX MENDELSSOHN
Violin Concerto in E Minor, Op. 64
In the long, astounding history of musical child prodigies,
Mendelssohn towers above the vast majority and has few, if any,
equals; a strong argument can be made that Mendelssohn's early
accomplishments surpass even Mozart's. So although he was just 36
years old when his Violin Concerto received its premiere in 1845,
Mendelssohn was already tremendously accomplished and firmly
established as one of the world's finest composers, conductors, and
pianists. (Indeed, this concerto would sadly turn out to be his
last large orchestral work; he died two years later.) Among the
many advantages and privileges he enjoyed from his exalted status
was a captive and superlative ensemble with which to rehearse,
refine, and perform his new works—the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra,
which he took over as conductor and manager in 1835. One of his
first acts as leader of the Gewandhaus was to appoint his friend
Ferdinand David concertmaster, a favor David repaid handsomely
through years of correspondence and collaboration with Mendelssohn
on this concerto, for which David offered much valuable advice
about the technical abilities and limits of the violin, as well as
a few important revisions.
Along with recognition as one of the all-time great prodigies,
Mendelssohn also shares something less desirable with Mozart: a
history of receiving misguided, unfair criticism for writing music
that is "too perfect," so smooth and flawless in its craftsmanship
that it lacks the heart and soul only imbued in a work by the
struggles of its creator. Mozart's music has, for the most part,
finally shrugged off that ridiculous label and is regarded with an
appropriate amount of delight and awe from the modern listener.
Mendelssohn has not been so lucky, and his music is still woefully
underperformed in proportion to its merit. The Violin Concerto, a
work that happily receives due admiration, exemplifies
Mendelssohn's particular brand of magic and proves such complaints
unfounded.
Admittedly, the technical proficiency on display here is
prodigious. Across its approximately 28-minute length, the E-Minor
Concerto is absolutely seamless, an effect Mendelssohn achieves not
only by connecting all three movements so they run together without
pause, but also by weaving together the various sections within
each movement through a series of ingenious yet understated
compositional devices. Take, as just a few representative examples,
the lack of a long orchestral introduction before the entrance of
the soloist; the placement of the cadenza in the middle rather than
at the end of the first movement; and the integrated rather than
flashy and distracting nature of that cadenza, as well as how its
tail end continues beneath and melds with the re-entry of the
orchestra, avoiding what in so many other composers' concertos
becomes a prosaic, clunky moment of linkage. These wonderful
moments of compositional skill are fascinating, but it is a mistake
to focus on them. More important is the infectious energy, a
procession of achingly beautiful melodies, and a range of genuine
emotion that Mendelssohn places within this exquisite framework.
From the ardent passion of the first movement, through the
touchingly melancholic Andante, to the fleet-footed exuberance of
the finale, the concerto hums with life. Anyone who can't hear the
beating heart of this music through its technical flourishes simply
isn't listening.
—Jay Goodwin
ARNOLD SCHOENBERG
Violin Concerto, Op. 36
The fact that so many great composers died tragically young makes
it all the more interesting to study the stylistic evolution of the
music by those lucky enough to live long lives. Schoenberg is one
of the most fascinating of all. He lived to be 76, and his lifespan
encompassed arguably music history's most turbulent years. When
Schoenberg was born, Wagner was still hard at work trying to build
his custom-designed theater in Bayreuth, and Brahms had yet to
complete his First Symphony. By the time he was in his mid-20s,
those great masters of Romanticism were dead, replaced at the heart
of Austro-German music by Mahler (who became a great supporter and
patron of Schoenberg) and Richard Strauss, both of whom further
stretched but didn't fully break away from established forms and
methods of tonality and musical expression. During his early years,
up through most of the first decade of the 20th century, Schoenberg
largely wrote music—such as Verklärte Nacht and
Gurrelieder—that, though distinctive and highly
accomplished, was much in the same mold as those great
late-Romantics.
It was in the 1910s that Schoenberg made the revolutionary musical
leap for which he is most remembered, advocating for and writing
music that completely abandoned the traditional harmonic system and
allowed all 12 standard tones to be used freely at any time and
with equal importance. He called it the "emancipation of
dissonance," and the concept, in its many variations and guises,
has been at the heart of musical discussion and a matter of endless
debate ever since. It is important to remember, however, that
although Schoenberg was the first of the atonal composers, he was
never the most extreme or the most pedantic. His music is not cold
or lifeless, and it always shows traces of Schoenberg's Romantic
roots. He left old methods behind not as an academic exercise, but
because he believed it was necessary in order for musical
expression to keep pace and retain its relevancy in the modern
world. He also didn't forsake his earlier work after venturing into
atonality. "For the present, it matters more to me if people
understand my older works," Schoenberg wrote in 1923. "They are the
natural forerunners of my later works, and only those who
understand and comprehend these will be able to gain an
understanding of the later works that goes beyond a fashionable
bare minimum. I do not attach so much importance to being a musical
bogey-man as to being a natural continuer of properly understood
good old tradition!"
Like all artists in the first half of the 20th century,
Schoenberg's life and work were profoundly affected by the World
Wars. He served briefly in Austria's army reserve during World War
I, and though his physical frailty kept him off the front lines,
the disruption of his life and the country's cultural activities
meant that his musical output slowed to a trickle during the war
years. The 1920s were productive, but when trouble began brewing in
the early 1930s, Schoenberg joined the flood of artists leaving
Austria and Germany to escape the Nazis. He emigrated to the United
States in 1933, eventually settling in Los Angeles, where he would
spend the rest of his life.
The Violin Concerto was completed in 1936, and was one of the first
major works Schoenberg wrote in America, as well as one of his
first 12-tone works following a few years spent revisiting tonal
methods. For performers, it has a well-earned fearsome reputation.
Schoenberg recognized what he was asking of the soloist: "[It] is
extremely difficult, just as much for the head as for the hands. I
am delighted to add another 'unplayable' work to the repertoire. I
want the concerto to be difficult and I want the little finger to
become longer. I can wait." He didn't have to wait long. The
concerto received its premiere in 1940 with The Philadelphia
Orchestra and Louis Krasner—who also premiered Berg's Violin
Concerto—as soloist.
The Violin Concerto is in three movements with the traditional
fast-slow-fast tempo structure. Despite its foundation on a single
tone row and extensive use of 12-tone techniques, the music is
thoroughly enjoyable without any technical knowledge of its
construction. According to conductor and musicologist Robert
Craft—a specialist known for his expertise in the music of
Stravinsky, Schoenberg, and the other composers of the Second
Viennese School—the Violin Concerto "should be approached as
essentially a work of melodic development and variation. Its
phrase-lengths and shapes, tempo contrasts, rhythmic figurations,
repetition, metric variation (2/2, 3/4, 2/2), melodic
structure-even, to some extent, the treatment of the orchestra-are
extensions of the language of Brahms." The sonorities, especially,
are a source of continual interest, ranging from spare to lush and
hazy to intensely focused; moments of grating dissonance are
purposeful and infrequent. And for all its devilish difficulty for
the soloist, the piece does not give the impression of being solely
focused on pushing the limits of the instrument. For all these
reasons, the Violin Concerto is one of the finest encapsulations of
Schoenberg's personal brand of atonal composition—expressive and
wide-ranging, informed and inspired by the long Austro-German
musical tradition, and infused below the surface with lyricism—and,
perhaps for that reason, was the composer's own favorite of his
orchestral works.
—Jay Goodwin