The Hallé: Online Concert Programme | Wed 25 Mar 2026

Richard Wagner (1813-1883): Tannhäuser: Overture

Medieval legends on the conflict between sacred and profane love were as potent a source of inspiration to Richard Wagner as the theme of transcendent love, redemption and fulfilment in death. Tannhäuser is based on a combination of tales bringing together the song contest on the Wartburg and a minstrel-knight, Tannhäuser. Seduced by Venus and held captivate in her grotto in the Venusberg, the knight finally calls upon the Virgin Mary and escapes Venus’s clutches. He then pursues a long and bitter quest seeking pardon for his sins, achieving redemption only through the love and faith of Elisabeth, whose dying prayer begs for his forgiveness and salvation.

After the premiere of Tannhäuser in Dresden in 1845, under the composer’s direction, the overture was quickly taken up in the concert hall. Wagner wrote his own programme note – detailing all the ideas contained in the overture – for the famous series of concerts he conducted in Zurich nearly 30 years later.

‘At first the orchestra introduces us to the Pilgrims’ Chorus alone. It approaches, swells and finally passes into the distance. Twilight: dying echoes of the chorus. As night falls, magic visions show themselves. A rosy mist swirls upward, sensuously exultant sounds reach our ears, and the blurred motions of a fearsomely voluptuous dance are revealed.’ At this moment the feverish Allegro of the Overture begins; the harmonies turn chromatic, and we hear the first of many bacchanalian themes associated with the unholy revels in the legendary Venusberg.

An invitation to stage Tannhäuser in Paris in 1861 led to a debacle almost as celebrated as that surrounding Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring in the same city over 40 years later. Revenging themselves on a politically unpopular princess involved with the event, members of the Jockey Club disrupted three performances in 1861 with what one commentator described as ‘aristocratic baying and dog-whistles’.

© Lynne Walker

Johannes Brahms (1833-1897): Violin Concerto

1. Allegro non troppo
2. Adagio
3. Allegro giocoso, ma non troppo vivace – Poco più presto

Joseph Joachim, for whom Brahms wrote his Violin Concerto, was more than just a virtuoso instrumentalist. As a composer, conductor and teacher as well as a uniquely authoritative violinist, Joachim (1831-1907) became one of the most respected and influential figures in German musical life in the second half of the 19th century. Any composer with a violin concerto to promote would hope that Joachim would take an interest in it: if he did, its future, or at least its immediate future, was secure.

One way of appealing to Joachim – a Hungarian who had himself written a Violin Concerto ‘in the Hungarian manner’ in 1861 – was to include a significant Hungarian element in the score. Max Bruch did this in the finale of his Concerto No.1 in G minor, the final 1868 version of which owes much to Joachim’s advice and encouragement. So did Brahms, who had been interested in Hungarian music – or, more accurately, Hungarian Gypsy music – since his boyhood and his collaboration with another Hungarian violinist, Eduard Remenyi, in his early 20s. Although Brahms originally intended that it would be a concerto in four movements, the second and third of which were later replaced by the present Adagio, the Hungarian-dance finale was always there. The composer and the violinist worked on the violin scoring together and when the work was published a few months after its first performance – given in Leipzig on New Year’s Day 1879, with Joachim as soloist and Brahms conducting – it bore a dedication to Joachim. It was also Joachim who devised the first-movement cadenza that most soloists still choose to play today (Brahms having followed the old-fashioned convention of leaving it up to each soloist to supply their own).

Apart from its Hungarian flavour, another thing that must have attracted Joachim to the Brahms Concerto was the distinctive role of the solo violin in relation to that of the orchestra. Brahms casts his soloist not as the conventional virtuoso hero but as a thinker and a poet, who is not just busier than the orchestra but also more inspired. So the work begins with an informal orchestral exposition that is neither complete nor definitive. The solo violin makes its first entry as though to correct the tendency in the orchestra to get carried away and off the point. Gradually the soloist calms the atmosphere and, at the right psychological moment, reintroduces the first subject in a form very much more poetic than its initial statement at the start of the work. So the violinist goes on, reshaping or re-colouring the main themes and, as the finest solo inspiration, contributing a lovely new waltz-like melody to the second subject.

In the Adagio (characteristically dismissed by the self­disparaging composer as ‘feeble’) the soloist occupies a more modest role at first. It is the principal oboe, accompanied only by fellow woodwind and horns, which introduces the lovely main theme. On its first entry the solo violin is content to add its own variant on the melody. But then, following a hint in the main theme, it extends itself in an elaborately expressive improvisation. The soloist’s is the dominant personality throughout the reprise of the first section too.

The finale is motivated almost entirely by the violin. Principally, it leads the Hungarian dance that is presented as the main rondo theme, but it is active everywhere, running energetically uphill in double­stopped octaves in the first episode and, after recalling the main theme, introducing a new song-like melody in the second episode. All but the last of these themes are developed, the soloist participating tirelessly and ever more brilliantly in such virtuoso inspirations as a passage of solo counterpoint, a fanciful series of trills and arpeggios, and a short cadenza (this time written out by Brahms) leading into the extended quick-march coda.

© Rupert Avis

Béla Bartók (1881-1945): Concerto for Orchestra

1. lntroduzione: Andante non troppo – Allegro vivace
2. Giuoco delle coppie: Allegretto scherzando
3. Elegia: Andante non troppo
4. Intermezzo interrotto: Allegretto
5. Finale: Pesante – Presto – Un poco meno mosso – Presto

In the spring of 1943 Bartók was in hospital in New York, seriously ill and seriously impoverished. He had written nothing new since he had arrived in the United States, more or less as a refugee, in 1940 and he was convinced he never would: ‘Under no circumstances will I ever write any new work,’ he had told his wife. Then the conductor Serge Koussevitzky came to see him with a commission for a new score for the Boston Symphony Orchestra and a cheque for $500 from the Koussevitzky Foundation as a first half-payment. Within a few months Bartók was out of hospital, convalescing at Saranac Lake and writing his Concerto for Orchestra.

The programme note Bartók wrote for the first performance of the Concerto for Orchestra in Boston on 1 December 1944 is a touching indication of how closely the gradual improvement in his health was linked with the progress of the composition: ‘The general mood of the work represents – apart from the jesting second movement – a gradual transition from the sternness of the first movement and the lugubrious death song of the third, to the life-assertion of the last one.’ The second movement stands apart from that emotional progression only because of Bartók’s natural inclination to construct in ‘arch’ form – in this case, a central slow movement with a scherzo on each side of it and matching quick movements at the beginning and the end.

Bartók also described the work as symphony-like with two movements, the first and the fifth, ‘written in a more or less regular sonata form’. Before the main Allegro vivace section of the first movement, however, there is an Andante introduction that is not only highly atmospheric but also structurally crucial to the whole work, above all in its presentation of the rising and falling fourths and seconds in the cellos and basses and the four-note motif with the semitone inflection first heard on a solo flute and later on trumpets. It is from the first of those motifs that, after an accelerando, the opening theme of the Allegro vivace emerges on violins in F minor. This, with a vigorous variant for trombone, is Bartók’s equivalent of a first subject. The second subject, based on the four-note motif from the lntroduzione, is a tranquil oboe melody in B minor. The main themes pass through various developments, including a tranquillo version of the first theme on clarinets and a splendid brass fugato on the trombone variant. But, because of the composer’s natural tendency towards arch form rather than regular sonata form, the second subject is recapitulated before the first, with the result that the beginning of the movement is reflected in the end.

Bartók explained the title of the Concerto for Orchestra by referring to its ‘tendency to treat the single orchestral instruments in a concertante or soloist manner … especially in the second movement, in which the pairs of instruments appear consecutively with brilliant passages’. So in this Giuoco delle coppie (Game of Couples) the bassoons appear first in sixths, then the oboes in thirds, the clarinets in sevenths, the flutes in fifths and the muted trumpets in satirical sevenths, each pair of instruments with its own tune. There is a brief middle section, in the form of a chorale for two different brass quintets, followed by a very much elaborated version of the first section.

The Elegia begins with the theme that opened the work. Pools of tears (or so it seems by analogy with a similar passage in Bartók’s opera Duke Bluebeard’s Castle) are reflected in harp glissandos and woodwind arpeggios. High above them is a plangent oboe melody later elaborated by the piccolo. The second main theme, passionately uttered by violins and clarinets with fierce trumpet interjections, is obviously derived from the four-note motif of the lntroduzione. As in the first movement, the material is developed and the form is arched by recapitulating the second theme first. But the end of the movement is by no means as desolate as the beginning.

It is an indication of how cheerful Bartók must have been feeling by the time he got to the Intermezzo interrotto (Interrupted Intermezzo) that he was able to risk a satirical stab at Shostakovich, who, as he knew, was Koussevitzky’s idol among contemporary composers. The first part of the Intermezzo is a kind of serenade to Hungary, based on two main themes: one a charming, rhythmically intriguing folk dance introduced by oboe; the other a rhapsodic melody on violas that is actually derived from an operetta melody, ‘Hungary, you are beautiful and splendid’, by Zsigmond Vincze (1874-1935). It is rudely ‘interrupted’, however, by a parodied version of a significant theme from Shostakovich’s recently premiered and much-publicised ‘Leningrad’ Symphony, which is duly greeted with derision from the brass and peals of laughter from the woodwind. (Incidentally, any intended resemblance between this theme and a popular number from Lehár’s The Merry Widow was firmly denied by the composer, according to his pupil and friend, the conductor Antal Doráti.) The serenade is resumed and the Intermezzo ends with a flute cadenza as sensitive as the interruption was rowdy.

The pesante (heavy) horn call at the beginning of the Finale is immediately brushed aside by the presto (quick) activity of the strings but not forgotten. When the moto perpetuo energy can be sustained no longer, the horn theme returns, first on second bassoon, then in a fugato, and then in a romantic transformation on the flute. Later, when the presto activity begins again, an inverted variant is superimposed by a trumpet over the restless semiquavers in the strings. In this racier form it becomes the subject of a marvellously inventive, contrapuntal central episode and – after an even quicker presto, beginning with whispers on the bridge of the string instruments and gradually reaching a fortissimo climax – it makes a final and expansively triumphant appearance in the coda.

© Gerald Larner