Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra: Online Concert Programme | Thu 5 Nov 2026

Sergei Prokofiev (1891-1953): Symphony No. 1 ‘Classical’

1. Allegro
2. Larghetto
3. Gavotta: non troppo allegro
4. Finale: Molto vivace

Prokofiev composed his Symphony No. 1, his op.25, between 1916 and 1917, during the period leading up to the October Revolution. He gave the work the subtitle ‘Classical’, indicating that he had conceived it as ‘the kind of symphony Haydn might have written had he been alive today’. Scored for the familiar Classical period orchestra of double woodwinds (flutes, oboes, clarinets and bassoons), plus horns, trumpets, timpani and strings, the characteristics of the music certainly recall those of the 18th century, while the formal proportions, too, have a keen awareness of the Classical style.

If this is undoubtedly a neo-classical composition, it is by no means a pastiche, since the inventive melodies and capricious rhythmic leaps remain typical of Prokofiev, whose own personality remains present throughout. His achievement, then, is to pour brand new wine into old bottles, and his direct and skilful development of his basic material is always the work of a true master. From the time of its first performance in April 1918, in Petrograd, with the composer conducting, the Classical Symphony has rightly maintained a position at the centre of the orchestral repertory.

The first violins introduce both the principal subjects of the opening Allegro movement. The first of the themes is impetuous in character, as well as particularly positive in generating a real sense of momentum as the result of its rhythmic and harmonic vitality. The scoring of the second theme, with an increasingly prominent focus given to the woodwinds, concentrates attention on Prokofiev’s characteristic octave leaps and his endlessly imaginative capriciousness.

The Larghetto is dominated by a piquant melody, whose lyrical violin line is presented against a subtly varied accompaniment, and this approach is typical of Prokofiev’s distinctive musical personality.  At the centre of the movement there occurs a running rhythmic sequence, given to bassoons and pizzicato strings. After this contrast, the return of the lyrical music sounds more affecting than ever.

The brief Gavotte, which is less than two minutes long, is a brilliant fusion of the old and the new, with Prokofiev’s dissonances enhancing the nature of the eighteenth-century dance. For its central trio there is a musette, whose theme is played by the clarinets and flutes above a pedal held by the lower strings. The finale is a wonderfully exuberant movement, in which the subtle relationships between strings and woodwinds are at their most effective. For the music finds the true spirit of the Classical style, as the infectious vitality is maintained throughout.

© Terry Barfoot

Robert Schumann (1810-1856): Piano Concerto

1. Allegro affetuoso
2. Intermezzo. Andante grazioso
3. Allegro vivace

In 1841, the year after he was finally granted legal permission to marry the virtuoso pianist and composer Clara Wieck, Robert Schumann was full of energy for musical experiments. Above all, he concerned himself with large-scale projects: a symphony, an overture, and a ‘phantasie’ for piano and orchestra, all sketched in the late spring and early summer. But all three of these pieces changed shape quite dramatically before reaching their final forms.

The symphony had to wait longest of all, its initial performance in 1841 as Schumann’s second such work leading to an intensive reworking that ultimately resulted in it becoming the Fourth Symphony by 1853. The Overture was joined by a Scherzo and Finale as a kind of hybrid multi-movement orchestral piece. And the single-movement Phantasie, or ‘Concert-Allegro’, which he had been thinking about for some years, was eventually expanded and refined into his one and only Piano Concerto, op. 54, completed in 1845. Clara Schumann, of course, was the soloist for its premiere in Dresden that December, and it was conducted by the Schumanns’ friend and fellow pianist and composer Ferdinand Hiller, to whom Robert dedicated the piece.

It’s a telling indication of the exclusionary nature of so much music history writing that only recently have commentators begun to acknowledge one of Schumann’s most important models in shaping this work: the Piano Concerto of Clara Wieck, composed some years earlier. (She began it when she was 13, and Robert had advised her on certain aspects of its orchestration ahead of its premiere in 1835.) Both Concertos are in A minor; both have three movements which are to be played continuously, without a break between each; and the way in which soloist and orchestra interact in Robert’s opening Allegro is also heavily modelled on Clara’s example. The brusque opening gesture from the piano is met by a melancholy melody from the winds that the soloist then takes up in turn; and the music swings between brooding figuration and sweetly lyrical, almost chamber-like writing, as if folding the moods of two different movements into one. This allows Schumann to write a slower central ‘Intermezzo’ which trips and skips across the keyboard and later features spotlit section solos for string and wind players. The finale adds a dash of the heroic to the energy of its predecessor, all dance and swagger with several hat-tips to Beethoven and J.S. Bach along the way. After so much minor-key music, it’s a delightfully sunny and optimistic way to round off the show.

© Katy Hamilton

Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827): Symphony No. 2

1. Adagio molto – Allegro con brio
2. Larghetto
3. Scherzo: Allegro – Trio
4. Allegro molto

Shortly after the premiere of his First Symphony, Beethoven wrote to his childhood friend Franz Wegeler, opening up in considerable detail about his emerging deafness and the understandable stress this was starting to cause him. Within a year he had come to realise that it would be incurable and he poured out his despair in the famous Heiligenstadt Testament, a suicidal letter that he wrote, but never actually sent, to his brothers. As devastating a time as this was, it is nevertheless typical that none of this emotional turmoil makes its way into the symphony he was writing at the time. The concept of composer as egotist might have been created around Beethoven’s persona, but his music is never about himself, and he would have seen no contradiction in such a distressing and uncertain period of his life fostering as smiling a work as the Second Symphony.

From a structural point of view, the Second Symphony, composed between 1801 and 1802, is a big step forward from its predecessor. The introduction to the first movement is three times longer than its previous equivalent and the coda to the finale represents a third of the movement as a whole. By turning what previously could be considered bookends into significant sections in their own right, Beethoven strikingly expanded the potential of the symphonic form as a whole.

But it is not just the structure that is new. The tone of voice has changed as well. Haydn and Mozart’s symphonies often sound like they were written for the aristocratic society that paid for them, a cultural aesthetic continued by Beethoven in his First Symphony. But though Beethoven’s commissions were derived from similar sources, the music of his Second Symphony is more obviously intended for everyman. Even the title of Scherzo, or joke, that he invented here for the traditional third movement minuet shows that he did not want his music to sound confined to a courtly environment. Beethoven always riled against class distinctions and his music is clearly seeking to engage a more egalitarian audience.

Not that the music is political in a specific sense. There is a calm bonhomie to the first movement, genuine fun in the scherzo, a finale that threatens to burst its Germanic banks with an outpouring of joie de vivre, and a second movement whose intimate calmness brings to mind Beethoven’s exact contemporary, William Wordsworth, whose definition of poetry as ‘emotion recollected in tranquillity’ is an equally valid description here.

If Beethoven had only written two symphonies, much would have been written about how different they are to each other, and what an advance the Second is on the First. His Third Symphony is indeed revolutionary, but its originality would not have been possible without the loosening of the foundations that Beethoven started in his Second. He has established a base camp, one from which his more dramatic mountain assents can confidently begin.

© Mark Wigglesworth