CARNEGIE HALL PRESENTS
Mahler Chamber Orchestra

Stern Auditorium / Perelman Stage
Friday, October 5th, 2007 at 8:00 PM

Mahler Chamber Orchestra
Pierre-Laurent Aimard, Conductor and Pianist

MOZART Piano Concerto No. 13 in C Major, K. 415
HAYDN Symphony No. 102
BEETHOVEN Piano Concerto No. 2

Encore:
BEETHOVEN Rondo for Piano and Orchestra in B-flat Major, WoO 6

Sponsored by Smith Barney

Program Notes:

The Concert At a Glance

The symphony and the piano concerto may well be regarded as the two most central, and certainly two of the most popular, genres of concert music in the Classical period. Our program this evening couples piano concertos by Mozart and Beethoven that exemplify the form in contrasting stages of evolution—Mozart’s demonstrating some of the first mature fruits of experience, Beethoven’s more the expression of a youthful genius exploring new territory and testing its own range—with one of the supreme symphonies of a composer, Haydn, who turned a formerly minor genre into the one that has dominated musical life ever since.

Notes on the Program
By Bernard Jacobson

WOLFGANG AMADEUS MOZART Piano Concerto No. 13 in C Major, K. 415
Born January 27, 1756, in Salzburg, Austria; died December 5, 1791, in Vienna.

Composed in 1782–83, the C-Major Concerto, K. 415, was first performed by the composer in Vienna on March 23 of the latter year; it received its Carnegie Hall premiere on October 24, 1946, with Wanda Landowska, piano, and the New York Philharmonic conducted by Artur Rodzinski.

Scoring: solo piano; 2 oboes, 2 bassoons, 2 horns, 2 trumpets, timpani, and strings.

The sequence of Mozart’s fully original piano concertos began in 1773, and its first phase culminated, in 1777, in the great E-flat-Major Concerto, K. 271. This was followed, aside from the composition of the Concerto for Two Pianos in 1779, by a five-year gap. It was in the autumn of 1782 and the following months that the three works listed in Köchel’s catalog as Nos. 413, 414, and 415 were written, prefacing the monumental series of 14 masterpieces that were to complete Mozart’s piano-concerto oeuvre during the next nine years.

These three works, the composer wrote to his father,

are a happy medium between what is too easy and what is too difficult; they are very brilliant, pleasing to the ear, and natural, without being vapid. There are passages here and there from which only the connoisseurs can derive satisfaction; but these passages are written in such a way that the less learned cannot fail to be pleased, though without knowing why.

Of these three, K. 414 is by far the best-known, thanks no doubt to a lyrical warmth and grace typical of Mozart’s works in the key of A Major; witness in particular the later piano concerto in that key, K 488, and the concerto and quintet for clarinet. In its breezier, more extrovert manner, however, the C-Major Concerto, K. 415, in which Mr. Aimard will play Mozart’s own cadenzas, is a scarcely less attractive work. The first movement, based on an etherealized march rhythm that was to dominate several of the concertos of 1784 (but that, curiously, Mozart never used in his symphonies), features a great deal of virtuoso writing for the piano. Solo instrument and orchestra make much play with a Baroque-sounding figure that Beethoven also would exploit in his Consecration of the House overture, and another theme that points to the future is the graceful subordinate subject, prophetic of a corresponding passage in Mozart’s later C-Major Concerto, K. 503 An interesting structural touch in this movement is the way the theme used to introduce the soloist is retained at the start of the recapitulation.

In his searching study, Mozart’s Piano Concertos, C. M. Girdlestone had some fairly negative things to say about this Allegro and the placidly flowing Andante that follows it, but of the “rondeau” (Mozart’s spelling) he observes, “By its construction and the ingenious use it makes of its material, it ranks among Mozart’s most original finales,” and Olivier Messiaen too places it “among the summits of Mozart’s work.” Closer in spirit and method to the violin concertos of three years earlier, the movement is twice arrested in its carefree course for an intensely expressive Adagio; and as in those concertos, it brings the work to a surprising pianissimo conclusion, which Girdlestone likens to “the hum of the countryside at the end of a beautiful day.”


JOSEPH HAYDN Symphony No. 102 in B-flat Major, Hob. I:102
Born March 31, 1732, in Rohrau, Lower Austria; died May 31, 1809, in Vienna.

Composed in 1794, the Symphony No. 102 was first performed at the King’s Theatre in London on February 2, 1795, under the composer’s direction; it received its Carnegie Hall premiere on December 27, 1923, with the New York Philharmonic conducted by Henry Hadley.

Scoring: 2 flutes, 2 oboes, 2 bassoons, 2 horns, 2 trumpets, timpani, and strings.

For Haydn, as for Beethoven in the throes of his last illness, England was in truth a very special place. It was London that set the seal on his international reputation. His first visit there, in 1791–92, was enormously productive both of financial gain and of critical and public acclaim. It was in February 1794 that Haydn arrived for the second time in England, bringing with him one complete new symphony and parts of two others. They drew extraordinarily ecstatic reviews in the London press. But wonderful as the symphonies of 1794 are, they are surpassed by the three that Haydn premiered in the following year.

Phrases like “Father of the Symphony” have done the composer more harm than good. It is perfectly true that he made the largest contribution to the early development of a form first used by a number of other composers who are now of little more than historical interest. But his very role in this development has tended to make people regard Haydn’s own symphonies too much as historical documents—fine achievements “for their time,” but really a bit primitive and rudimentary, and not to be mentioned in the same breath as the symphonies of Beethoven.

It cannot be too strongly emphasized that this is a radically mistaken view. At least 20—perhaps even a good many more—of Haydn’s symphonies are supremely great music, unqualified by any irrelevancies of time or place.

Yes, many Haydn symphonies, especially the late ones, open with a slow introduction, which fact might be regarded as evidence of uniformity. But the import of these introductions differs vastly from work to work: now architectural, now dramatic; boldly assertive in one symphony, gently insinuating in another. In the symphony we hear this evening, “architectural” and “gently insinuating” are the most appropriate descriptions. The string figure that follows an initial bare unison for the full orchestra is indeed gentle, but it serves an architectural purpose, for, speeded-up, it provides an important thematic element toward the end of the exposition. And while in some regards the work sits squarely in the tradition that Haydn himself had done so much to create, it is indeed to Beethoven–especially, perhaps, his Second Symphony–that the main Vivace of the opening movement points forward, with its intense rhythmic drive, and the volcanic drum crescendo that ushers in the recapitulation.

For many commentators, this wonderful movement establishes the claim of No. 102 to be regarded as the very greatest of all Haydn’s symphonies. It is all the more astonishing that the movements that follow in no represent a falling-off from such quality. The F-Major Adagio, adorned with an eloquent cello solo, is essentially identical, though a semitone lower in pitch, to the slow movement of the F-sharp-Minor Piano Trio composed around the same time–it is not know which version came first—though the one we hear in the symphony adds an instrumentally varied repeat of the exposition. An energetic minuet follows, its trio section notable for the rhythmic ingenuity of its little two-note cadence figure on the first flute (moving from weak measure to strong the first time around, from strong to weak on its repetition); and the finale, which was encored at the first performance, is one of Haydn’s most entertaining sonata-rondos, diversified by moments of drama that recall the mood of the first movement, and held up near the end by a witty deceleration that again prefigures Beethoven.


LUDWIG VAN BEETHOVEN Piano Concerto No. 2 in B-flat Major, Op. 19
Born probably December 16, 1770, in Bonn; died March 26, 1827, in Vienna.

Composed around 1793, the Second Piano Concerto (actually the first of Beethoven’s published piano concertos in order of composition) is believed to have been first performed in Vienna on March 29, 1795, with the composer as soloist. The work was revised over the next three years, and the new version was played in Prague and Vienna in 1798; it received its Carnegie Hall premiere on February 20, 1920, with Alfred Cortot, piano, and the New York Symphony Orchestra conducted by Walter Damrosch.

Scoring: solo piano, flute, 2 oboes, 2 bassoons, 2 horns, and strings.

“Mastery” is not an absolute. For all its expressive depth, dramatic intensity, and sheer musical craft, the mastery we find in a movement like the Allegro con brio of the B-flat-Major Concerto is not the mastery of the true classical concerto style, where every flight of rhetoric contributes to the establishment of the soloist’s leadership, but rather a purely symphonic aptitude. It takes account of the demanding interplay of keys and themes in general, rather than of the very specific interplay of solo and tutti.

It was Mozart that had brought the subtle and demanding medium of the keyboard concerto, pioneered by his Baroque and early-Classical predecessors, to its peak of formal perfection. Not until he wrote his Third Piano Concerto, the C-Minor, around 1800 did Beethoven really begin to take the full measure of the genre’s problems and potential. Up to that point, under the pressure of his youthful inspiration, Beethoven wrote concerto first movements that sound like the first movements of symphonies; he allows too much to happen, and too much purposeful modulation in particular, in the opening orchestral ritornellos, or first expositions, so that the entry of the solo instrument, when it comes, answers to no overarching logic, but instead has the droll effect of an epigram.

It is in other regards that this first movement most authoritatively demonstrates the powers of a new master. Notice in particular how the movement’s basic motif returns over the piano’s figurations, pianissimo again and then crescendo, to usher in the recapitulation; and how at this juncture a little connecting figure for the winds is added to dramatize the sense of a new beginning. (Beethoven’s own cadenza will be played by Mr. Aimard on this occasion.)

Other quintessential Beethovenisms you will find in the work include the piano’s rhythmic game at the end of the first movement’s solo exposition, which is the kind of game the composer went on to play also in later works like the E-Minor Sonata, Op. 90; the emotional richness (matched in some of the early string-quartet slow movements) of the central Adagio, a movement that demands “gran espressione” throughout even though the instruction is made explicit only at the piano solo near the end; and the recitative style of that solo, a “speaking” manner that was to stay with Beethoven to the very last.

The bluff cross-accents of the final rondo are prophetic of the vaster but related finale of the Fifth Piano Concerto, and a rhythmic transformation of the main theme anticipates a similar effect in the rondo of the Fourth Concerto. Then, just before the orchestra brings the work to a peremptory close, we hear a little phrase on the piano that will be echoed, more than a decade later and in an utterly different mood (though in the same key), by dolce muted violins in the slow movement of the Pastoral Symphony. This is an apt last thrust for a concerto that, though far from ambitious in size and scope, offers frequent hints of its composer’s future greatness.

Copyright © 2007 by The Carnegie Hall Corporation

Bernard Jacobson writes frequently about classical music and is the author of
A Polish Renaissance, part of the 20th-Century Composers series published
by Phaidon Press.