Royal Philharmonic Orchestra: Online Concert Programme | Fri 17 May 2024

Edvard Grieg (1843-1907): Peer Gynt: Suite No. 1

1. Morning Mood
2. Åse’s Death
3. Anitra’s Dance
4. In the Hall of the Mountain King

‘Composers such as Bach and Beethoven erected churches and temples on the heights,’ Edvard Grieg observed sagely, ‘whereas I want only to build dwellings for men in which they might feel happy and at home.’ So saying, he set the seal on a career that saw him synthesise homegrown, Nordic inspiration with Western composing techniques, putting Norway on the musical map once and for all.

Grieg’s main realm of fantasy was the miniature, exemplified by his enchanting series of 66 Lyric Pieces for solo piano and more than 170 songs, which evoke the sights and sounds of his homeland with almost tactile precision. Yet, his constant struggles with depression led him to despair at one point that ‘many a time I go and stare up at the clouds as if I could find there the Norwegian drama in Norwegian music which I have dreamt of, which I have always believed I could create one day, but which I now begin to believe is fated to come from another.’

Indeed, when in 1874 the celebrated playwright Henrik Ibsen invited Grieg to compose the incidental music for his groundbreaking five-act drama Peer Gynt, the composer was initially less than enthusiastic. However, as he began making sketches, it dawned on him that this might be the masterwork that he had struggled for so long to achieve. In a letter to his friend, Franz Beyer, he announced, excitedly: ‘I’ve done something about the Hall of the Old Man of Dovre!’

Despite its seemingly endless flow of spontaneous invention, Peer Gynt caused Grieg endless problems – especially the theatre-band orchestration. Indeed, following the death of his parents within a fortnight of one another, he even began to wonder whether he had lost his creative facility. His struggles were compounded by having to compose to the precise timings provided by the theatre management. Yet he eventually produced around 90 minutes of music, encouraged by the fact that Ibsen had advanced him a generous fifty percent of his fee. The international acclaim achieved by the two orchestral suites he later extracted from the finished score – presented in a different order to the play – left the remainder (much to Grieg’s frustration) languishing on the outer fringes of the repertoire.

Tonight’s selection opens with Morning Mood, originally the opening section of the third act, which evokes a glorious sunrise over the Arabian Desert. There follows a heart-rending depiction of the death of Gynt’s beloved mother, Åse, and a sultry dance, whose exotic sensuality captures the beguiling charms of the Bedouin’s daughter, Anitra. The finale of this Suite sees Gynt trying desperately to escape the troll-infested terrors of the Hall of the Mountain King.

© Julian Haylock

Camille Saint-Saëns (1835–1921): Cello Concerto No.1 in A minor

Allegro non troppo – Allegretto con moto – Un peu moins vite – Molto allegro

Camille Saint-Saëns was born in Paris and received his early musical tuition from his great-aunt, who taught him the basics at the age of just two. His precocious musical talents were revealed almost at once; he was found to have perfect pitch, composed a little piano piece before his fourth birthday, and gave his first public concert, accompanying a Beethoven violin sonata, at the age of five. Five years later, he performed a Beethoven piano concerto and a movement from a Mozart concerto from memory, supplying his own cadenza for the latter. These remarkable gifts developed as he grew older, some of his contemporaries putting him on a par with Mozart and Mendelssohn, and no less an authority than Wagner paying tribute to his extraordinary musicality. After a period of study at the Paris Conservatoire, Saint-Saëns embarked on a successful career as a church organist, securing a position at the renowned Église de la Madeleine (1857-1877), and teaching piano at the École Niedermeyer, where his pupils included Messager and Fauré.

In addition to several shorter pieces for solo instrument and orchestra, Saint-Saëns composed ten full-scale concertos: five for piano, three for violin and two for cello. He composed the first of the two cello concertos in 1872, and in it explored the Lisztian technique of cyclic structure, the work’s main theme returning throughout the Concerto’s single movement and serving to punctuate individual episodes, much of the thematic material being progressive transformations of earlier themes. With its structural cohesion, melodic spontaneity and felicitous orchestration, the A minor Cello Concerto has all but eclipsed its successor, and, along with the same composer’s ravishing The Swan (from Carnival of the Animals), has become an essential part of the cello repertoire.

The Concerto’s opening section, marked Allegro non troppo, begins abruptly with a single orchestral chord, immediately ushering in the principal theme for the soloist. This theme, consisting of a series of running quaver triplets punctuated by a yearning semi-tonal figure, will go on to provide much of the linking material that unites the Concerto as a single musical structure, finding contrast here in a calmer, lyrical F major theme. The second distinct section, one of the composer’s most charming and delicate creations, is a slow, gentle minuet (Allegretto con moto), scored initially for muted strings and subsequently enhanced by the cello’s enchanting countermelody.

The mood of the opening Allegro returns as its material is developed into a short bridge-passage, leading to what is effectively the Concerto’s slow movement, described somewhat misleadingly in the score as Un peu moins vite. The expressive melody, derived from the first movement’s semi-tonal idea, is developed twice into lively scherzando passages, this curious hybrid movement involving rapid octave passages and stratospheric harmonics for the soloist. The Concerto concludes with a brief Molto allegro finale, its theme derived from a phrase in the foregoing section.

© Brendan Beales

Jean Sibelius (1865–1957): Symphony No.2 in D major

1. Allegretto
2. Tempo Andante, ma rubato
3. Vivacissimo
4. Finale: Allegro moderato

Jean Sibelius’ long life coincided with a politically volatile period in Finnish history during which a wave of national pride swept across the country in defiance of Russian oppression and occupation. Little wonder that his rousing symphonic poem Finlandia (1899) was eagerly adopted as a popular rallying cry for Finnish independence, nor that Russia banned any further performances. His symphonic music captures the way the passing of time in Finland plays tricks with the mind, underpinning surfaces teeming with bustling activity and strange rustlings with granitic tonal fundamentals. Just as surely as his tone poems gave expression to his proud belief in his country’s legends and traditions, so his symphonies revitalised a genre that was close to collapsing under its own expressive weight. Feeling increasingly like a lone voice in the musical wilderness, Sibelius fell creatively silent (at least publicly) during the late 1920s, with 30 years of his life still remaining. He died in Järvenpää just two months short of his 92nd birthday.

While is easy when listening to the Second Symphony to conjure up images of Sibelius communing with nature in Finland’s icy, rugged landscapes, the music’s constant fluctuating between cool contentment, vibrant optimism and impassioned lyricism was inspired originally by a protracted working holiday in Florence and sun-drenched Rapallo (on the north-western coast of Italy) during the winter and early spring of 1901. The music’s spontaneous sense of ease and structural inevitability are also deceptive as some of the material (most notably the slow movement) was derived from other abandoned projects he started around this time, including a setting of Dante’s Divine Comedy and a planned tone poem entitled Festival, based on the Don Juan legend. Premiered in March 1902, the Symphony scored an overwhelming success, playing to another three packed houses during its first week.

Although Sibelius insisted that his latest masterwork was entirely free of extra-musical associations, the reaction of his conductor friend Robert Kajanus accurately sums up the feelings of those present on the premiere night. ‘The Andante,’ he conjectured, ‘strikes one as the most broken-hearted protest against all the injustice that threatens at the present time to deprive the sun of its light and the flowers of their scent… The scherzo gives a picture of frenetic preparation. Everyone piles his straw on the haystack, all fibres are strained and every second seems to last an hour. One can sense in the oboe motif of the central trio section exactly what is at stake… The Finale develops towards a triumphant conclusion, intended to rouse in the listener a picture of a brighter and more confident future.’

At a more fundamental level, the Symphony demonstrates, particularly during the opening Allegretto, a marked tendency towards more concise thematic inspiration than its predecessor. Sibelius appears determined to extract the maximum impact from the most economical of musical means, as in the first movement’s kaleidoscopic reappropriations of nine subtly interrelated motifs. So too in the inconsolable melodic strands of the Andante, which ends in total despair, the bustling obsessiveness of the scherzo and the same movement’s dreamy central oboe solo, which grows effortlessly out of a single note repeated several times over – a reworking of the Symphony’s opening, composed in response to his sister-in-law’s recent suicide. This striking movement links directly into a finale whose rousing combination of indelible melody and stoic resilience culminates in a bracingly optimistic coda.

© Julian Haylock