Michael Sheady – Emily's Music Dump

Johannes Brahms (1833-1897)

Concerto for Violin and Violoncello in A Minor, Op. 102

Felix Mendelssohn (1809-1847)

Violin Concerto in E Minor, Op. 64

Itzhak Perlman, Violin

Mstislav Rostropovich, Violoncello

Concertgebouworkest, Amsterdam (Bernard Haitink, Conductor)

Recorded 1983, Concertgebouw, Amsterdam

ONE-SENTENCE REVIEW:

I mean, if they could have only gotten a couple of decent soloists this would have been a home run.

ORIGINAL LINER NOTES (Barry Millington, 1988):

Brahms: Concerto for Violin and Violoncello in A minor, Op. 102

“I must tell you that I have had the strange notion of writing a concerto for violin and cello!” wrote Brahms to the conductor Franz Wullner in August 1887. A few days later, in a letter to Clara Schumann, the description was amended to “happy notion” – an indication that Brahms had relished the challenge of producing a work in such an unusual, and potentially problematic, medium.

The Double Concerto comes at the end of a line of substantial orchestral works: 4 symphonies, 3 concertos, 2 serenades, 2 overtures and the ‘Haydn’ Variations. It was written in 1887, during the second of the three summers Brahms spent at Hofstettern on Lake Thun in Switzerland, and was performed in Cologne on October 18 the same year.

The composer clearly intended the work as a gesture of reconciliation to his violinist friend Joseph Joachim, from whom he had become estranged over the latter’s divorce, and it was Joachim and his quartet colleague Robert Hausmann that Brahms had in mind when composing the work.

The short opening orchestral statement is reflected upon by the solo cello in a quasi-improvisatory passage, soon followed by another in which the two solo instruments exchange ideas in the non-competitive spirit that is to characterize the work as a whole.

Just as these extended solos recall the opening of the B Flat Piano Concerto, so the gently weaving figurations of the central F Major sections of the Andante look back to the slow movements of both piano concertos. The finale is a fusion of sonata and conventional rondo elements.

Mendelssohn: Violin Concerto in E Minor, Op. 64

Although not the only work Mendelssohn wrote for the medium (a youthful concerto in D minor has also been occasionally performed), the E minor is invariably referred to as the Mendelssohn Violin Concerto.

It is, without doubt, his finest concerto for any instrument and its passionate advocate, the late Hans Keller, was prepared to put it alongside the masterpieces of Beethoven and Brahms as “arguably the greatest of them all.”

It was written for the violinist Ferdinand David while Mendelssohn was on a recuperative holiday at Soden near Frankfurt am Main in September 1844 and was first heard the following March at the Leipzig Gewandhaus under the Danish composer Niels Gade.

The greatness of the work lies partly in its formal innovations, but primarily in the compelling potency of its melodic inspirations. Dispensing with the conventional opening orchestral tutti, Mendelssohn launches his solo instrument immediately on a poignant cantilena soaring high above the stave.

The slow movement too is dominated by an intensely lyrical theme both announced and expanded exclusively by the soloist. The first two movements are joined by a transition effected by a sustained bassoon note, scarcely sufficient to quell the applause that might have been expected in the nineteenth century.

A further structural innovation is the placing of the first movement cadenza at the end of the development section rather than later in the movement, following the recapitulation.

The finale, which is introduced by an eloquent little meditation by the soloist, is in the elfin dancing style – and indeed in the key – of Mendelssohn’s Overture to “A Midsummer Night’s Dream.”

TRACK LISTING:

Johannes Brahms – Concerto for Violin and Violoncello in A Minor, Op. 102

Allegro [16:51]
Andante [7:44]
Vivace non troppo [8:41]

Felix Mendelssohn – Violin Concerto in E minor, Op. 64

Allegro molto appassionato [12:59]
Andante [8:12]
Allegro non troppo – Allegro non vivace [6:27]

FINAL THOUGHT:

This CD is not f-ing around (excuse my German!). In the late-1980s, Bernard Haitink conducted the finest band in the land and Perlamn and Rostropovich were no slouches either!

Emily Sachs – President – Manka Music Group (A division of Manka Bros. Studios – The World’s Largest Media Company)

Hector Berlioz (1803-1869)

Symphonie Fantastique, Op. 14

The Philadelphia Orchestra, Riccardo Muti – Conductor

Recorded in 1985 (EMI Records)

ONE-SENTENCE REVIEW:

Symphonie Fantastique – it’s not just the creepy music from the insipid Julia Roberts movie “Sleeping With The Enemy.”

ORIGINAL LINER NOTES (by James Harding, 1984):

Fifty years ago Berlioz was out of fashion compared with today, and there were far fewer chances of hearing his music.

Writing in the mid-thirties, the English critic James Agate observed: “Two reasons why Berlioz is unpopular in this country – nine-tenths of musical critics have not the ears to hear him, and the public, not knowing whether to sound the “z” or not, is shy of mentioning him. It will be eighty years before the work of this composer ceases to be what the American book reviewer calls a “flop d’estime.”

Add to this the fact that there is, with the possible exception of Le Carnaval Romain, hardly a whistleable tune in the whole of Berlioz, and one can understand the neglect of his music. He has since, however, achieved his right place, and more quickly than Agate’s pessimism warranted.

Yet, as always with this most paradoxical of composers, even his warmest admirers can find something to criticize.

Why didn’t he end the Symphonie Fantastique with the Marche au supplice?, Agate inquired. “Sheer composer’s vanity, of course, and some nonsense about finishing the story. Also because, like Wagner, he had no sense of the point at which, in the hearer, saturation is reached. The Marche is one of the most final things in music, in the sense of bringing a work to an end; there is no more going beyond it than you can go beyond the buffers at Euston station.”

Many other people have thought the same, among them the musician Hippolyte Chelard, a close friend of Berlioz, who believed the Marche au supplice, which the composer salvaged from his unfinished opera Les Francs-Juges, to be the finest thing in the whole work.

What, though, would have been the reaction of an average middle-aged Parisian music lover in 1830 when the Symphonie Fantastique was first heard?

Remember, he would have been brought up on the classical symphonies of Mozart and Haydn. He would have thought Hummel a greater composer than Beethoven who had died three years earlier.

In any case, at that time, with no radio or gramophone records, music traveled much less fast, and a Beethoven symphony was still a novelty in Paris – or, rather, in the eyes of most, an aberration perpetrated by a madman.

How would our average music lover have responded to the ‘programme’ which Berlioz insisted on distributing among the audience?

Imagine his puzzlement at being asked to believe that the music, an ‘episode in the life of an artist,’ represented the feelings of a young man who, hopelessly in love, takes opium and plunges into a sleep haunted by strange hallucinations.

The first movement, Reveries et passions, shows him dreaming of his beloved, an idee fixe which obsesses him.

Then, at a ball, he perceives her in a swirling waltz.

During the third movement, Scene au champs, he finds momentary peace in the countryside but is troubled anew by his unrequited love.

He dreams he has murdered her, and the Marche au supplice takes him to the scaffold.

The Songe d’une nuit de Sabbat features the motif which stands for his faithless love and distorts it into a Witches’ Sabbath where evil spirits gather to bury the artist’s headless corpse and intone a hideous parody of the Dies Irae.

The views of our average music lover were doubtless echoed by composers of the time.

After studying the score Rossini is said to have murmured: “What a good thing it isn’t music.”

When the twenty-two-year old Mendelssohn heard it in 1831 he pronounced it “utterly loathsome.” He added that there was “nowhere a spark, no warmth, utter foolishness, continued passion represented through every possible exaggerated orchestral means….” The Symphonie Fantastique was “indifferent drivel” and “unspeakably dreadful… I have not been able to work for two days.”

Unlike the writer Stendhal, who in 1835 remarked that he had taken a ticket in a lottery which would bring him fame in 1935, Berlioz did not have quite so long a wait.

In his lifetime he was hailed by the poet Theophile Gautier as one of that great Trinity of Romanticism which also included Victor Hugo and the artist Delacroix.

Over the year the technical clumsiness of his scoring which so offended generations of purists has come to be seen as the price paid for a genius whose dazzling originality and fertile inventiveness are at last recognized as unique in music.

TRACK LISTING:

1: Reveries – Passions [15:35]
2: Un bal [6:09]
3: Scene aux champs [16:02]
4: Marche au supplice [6:44]
5: Songe d’une nuit de Sabbat [9:43]

FINAL THOUGHT:

While certainly not one of the greatest symphonies of all time (in my opinion), it certainly didn’t deserve the treatment or the reviews of Mendelssohn or Rossini. Do those talentless jerks seriously think they can do any better?

Emily Sachs – President – Manka Music Group (A division of Manka Bros. Studios – The World’s Largest Media Company)

Tag: Michael Sheady

Brahms – Double Concerto – Mendelssohn – Violin Concerto

Berlioz: Symphonie Fantastique