Mendelssohn's Scottish Symphony

Umberto Clerici
Conductor

With a career spanning more than 20 years as a gifted cello soloist, orchestral musician, and now conductor, Umberto Clerici has gained a reputation as an artist of diverse and multifaceted talents.

Umberto began his career as a virtuoso cellist making his solo debut at the age of 17 performing Haydn’s D Major cello concerto in Japan. After years of performing on the stages of the world’s most prestigious concert halls, Umberto took up the position as Principal Cellist of the Royal Opera House in Turin and in 2014, he was appointed as the Principal Cello of the Sydney Symphony Orchestra, a position he held until 2021.

It was in Sydney in 2018 that Umberto made his conducting debut with the Sydney Symphony Orchestra at the Sydney Opera House. Umberto is now in high demand with the major symphony orchestras throughout Australia and New Zealand.

Future conducting highlights in Australia include returns to the podiums the Sydney Symphony, Queensland Symphony and Melbourne Symphony Orchestras. Umberto also looks forward to his debuts with the West Australian Symphony, Adelaide Symphony, Dunedin and New Zealand Symphony Orchestras.

Image credit: Jay Patel

Ashley Smith
Clarinet

Described as ‘Incandescent... a masterly display of skill and insight... as an apologist for contemporary music-making, you would search hard to find this young clarinettist’s equal’ (The Age), clarinettist Ashley William Smith appears internationally as a soloist, chamber musician and director. He has been recognised by a Music Council of Australia Freedman Fellowship, an ABC Symphony International Young Performer Award, a Churchill Fellowship, and an APRA Performance of the Year (Skipworth Clarinet Concerto with the West Australian Symphony Orchestra). Notable engagements include performances for the Chamber Music Society of the Lincoln Centre, Chamber Music Northwest, the Kennedy Centre and the Beijing Modern Music Festival. Ashley is a Senior Lecturer and Chair of Woodwind and Contemporary Performance at the University of Western Australia Conservatorium of Music. A graduate of Yale University, the University of Western Australia, and a Fellow of the Australian National Academy of Music, Ashley was awarded the highest honours as the most outstanding performance graduate of each institution. In 2020 he was awarded a Doctor of Musical Arts from UWA.

Hector Berlioz (1809-1869)

Béatrice et Bénédict: Overture

Berlioz ended his composing career in 1860- 2 with a comedy, Béatrice et Bénédict – an Indian summer, following his epic opera The Trojans. The Overture fits Berlioz’s description of the opera: ‘a caprice written with the point of a needle, and demanding excessive delicacy of execution’. Berlioz commented wryly on the critics’ response: ‘They have discovered that I have melody, that I can be gay and even comic.’

Berlioz was obsessed with Shakespeare. Well-known is his infatuation with the actress Harriet Smithson, who came to Paris in a touring Shakespeare company, and whom he married. Berlioz’s Shakespeare-inspired music includes Roméo et Juliette and the King Lear Overture. He had been contemplating a Romeo and Juliet opera, or an Antony and Cleopatra when the commission for a new opera came from Edouard Bénazet, to inaugurate the new theatre he was building at the fashionable spa in Baden-Baden.

Berlioz chose to base the opera on his adaptation of a Shakespeare comedy – light relief after his struggles getting The Trojans finished and performed. He had been toying with the idea of setting Shakespeare’s Much Ado about Nothing since as early as 1833, when he made a few preliminary sketches. His life since then had made Shakespeare’s play even more meaningful. A tragi-comedy, originally called Benedick and Beatrix, the play celebrates a marriage between two high-spirited young people. Beatrice and Benedict achieve a true partnership in spite of themselves, love triumphing in the end over independent-mindedness, cynicism, and raillery. Berlioz saw the irony of his choice of subject – his own marriages, with Harriet Smithson and Marie Récio, brought him much unhappiness.

The opera, premiered in 1862, was a success, but the overture remains its best-known music. Composed last, it is a brilliant précis, a weaving-together, or patchwork, of melodies from the opera (at least seven of them); a quicksilver scherzo, with episodes of soft emotion. ‘Racing, headlong, yet ironically poised, brilliant but touched with warmth of heart and a delicate spirit of fantasy’ is Berlioz biographer David Cairns’ summary of the overture, and he comments with wonder that it was the creation of a man in pain and longing for death. Though Berlioz lived seven more years, Béatrice et Bénédict was his last major composition. The overture quotes at the beginning the duet Béatrice and Bénédict sing about the love that has broken down their defences: ‘a flame, a will o’ the wisp, coming from no one knows where, gleaming and vanishing to distract our souls’.

David Garrett © 2011

First performance:
9 August 1862. Composer conducting.

Most recent WASO performance:
5 December 1992. Ron Spigelman, conductor

Instrumentation:
two each of flutes (one doubling piccolo), oboes, clarinets and bassoons; four horns, two trumpets and one cornet, three trombones; timpani and strings.

Carl Maria von Weber (1786-1826)

Clarinet Concerto No.1 in F minor, Op.73

Allegro
Adagio ma non troppo
Rondo (Allegretto)

Much of the clarinet repertoire owes its existence to exceptional collaborations between composers and virtuoso players. Carl Stamitz wrote for Joseph Beer, Mozart for Anton Stadler, Spohr for Simon Hermstedt and Brahms for Richard Mühlfeld.

For Carl Maria von Weber, the clarinettist was Heinrich Baermann who, following a spell in the Prussian Guards regiment band, abandoned his military career and found his way to Munich, the Bavarian capital, where he obtained the position of principal clarinet in the court orchestra of King Maximilian I.

It was here, in 1811, that Weber encountered Baermann for the second time. (The pair had met in Darmstadt – Baermann on tour, Weber on the run after dodgy financial dealings had resulted in his expulsion from Stuttgart.) The composer was shortly to embark on a concert tour of his own, and invited Baermann to perform at his farewell concert. The evening was a success, and helped cement their friendship.

The two musicians continued working together in Munich, where the enterprising Weber was arranging a royal audience for his music. Knowing Baermann’s outstanding ability as a player and his position with the court orchestra, Weber composed the Concertino for clarinet and orchestra in E flat, Op.26, which received its premiere in the presence of the King on 5 April. Such was the royal approbation on this occasion that Weber was soon commissioned to write two full-scale concertos for Baermann.

Of the two clarinet concertos (No.1 in F minor, Op.73 and No.2 in E flat, Op.74), it is the first that is most often performed today, and was reputedly Baermann’s personal favourite. Weber completed it in May 1811 and Baermann gave the first performance on 13 June, at a concert given by Friedrich Kauffmann, the Dresden piano maker. The concertos were not published, however, until 1822, when Weber’s reputation (enhanced by the success of Der Freischütz) was sufficient to boost confidence in the then youngest of wind instruments. On the other hand, it was Baermann’s artistry earlier on that helped to convince the musical public of Weber’s worth. The composer himself praised Baermann’s ‘complete evenness of tone from top to bottom and divinely tasteful phrasing’. The former was something of a novelty for, while most other clarinettists were playing five- or six-key instruments, Baermann had the Berlin firm Griesling & Scholt make him a ten-key boxwood clarinet.

This innovation not only facilitated Baermann’s naturally agile technical command, but resulted in the fluent delivery of notes throughout the range that Weber had noted. In response, Weber’s clarinet writing placed the instrument at the very edge of virtuosity, and presents formidable challenges even today. At the same time, the Concerto in F minor shows Weber as one of the first musicians of the Romantic period to perceive and liberate the dramatic potential of the clarinet as a solo instrument.

The orchestral introduction of the Allegro establishes the sombre yet lyrical mood that pervades much of this operatic first movement. The soloist’s initial entry, in the upper register, is marked con duolo (with grief), and is typical of the minorkey pathos by a composer with such a gift for dramatic writing.

Throughout the movement, Weber uses the clarinet’s entire range, but is particularly effective in his handling of the natural cantabile qualities of the upper register. Opportunities for clarinet bravura increase as the movement progresses. In fact, most performances include a virtuoso interpolation just before the cadenza by Baermann himself.

In the Adagio ma non troppo Weber combines the clarinet with other wind instruments, exploiting the instrument’s enormous potential for timbral versatility. An instant of exceptional elegance occurs with his use of chorale-like horns to accompany the clarinet after the virtuosic minore episode. Within the solo part, Weber contrasts the poignancy of the upper register, used in the outer sections, with fiery ascents from chalumeau to altissimo register in the animated middle section.

The work concludes with an ebullient Rondo in the tonic major. The rondo theme, heard four times in all, has the manner of a capricious jaunt. Yet, embedded in the abundance of wit and bravura, there is a moment of bittersweet anguish, providing a link not only with material from the earlier movements, but with Weber’s natural inclination to operatic lyricism.

Ingrid Pearson © 1997

First performance:
13 June 1811, Heinrich Baermann soloist.

First WASO performance:
12 December 1949. Rudolf Pakarek, conductor.

Most recent WASO performance:
13 October 2012. Michael Collins soloist, OttoTausk conductor.

Instrumentation:
two each of flutes, oboes and bassoons; three horns, two trumpets; timpani and strings.

Felix Mendelssohn (1809 – 1847)

Symphony No.3 in A minor, Op.56 Scottish

Andante con moto – Allegro un poco agitato – Andante con moto –
Vivace non troppo –
Adagio – Allegro vivacissimo – Allegro, maestoso assai

Like the Piano Concerto No.1, the Italian Symphony and the Hebrides Overture, this work dates from the period of what we may call Mendelssohn’s ‘Grand Tour’ – a period of roughly four years during which the composer, entering his 20s, toured the British Isles and Europe.

Sometime in the summer of 1828, Mendelssohn’s parents decided that their young man needed to travel to broaden his mind. Unlike so many 19th-century composers, Mendelssohn was born into middle-class comfort. His home was a cultural hub, and it could be asked how much more broadening was needed by someone whose family home buzzed with the company of people such as the scientist Alexander von Humboldt, the philosopher Hegel, the actor Eduard Devrient, and music critic and theorist Adolph Bernhard Marx, among others. In any case Felix left Berlin on 10 April 1829, bound for England, Scotland and Wales. There in the British Isles, he was enthusiastically received as a concert and salon pianist, but he also spent time touring and observing, soaking up the sights and sounds of fascinating new environments.

In the summer of 1829 Mendelssohn set off for Scotland. Taken by the wild atmosphere of the country, he set sail for the Hebrides, where he visited Fingal’s Cave and made a sketch for what later became the Hebrides Overture. The Third Symphony can also be traced to a sightseeing visit, this time to Holyrood House, Edinburgh, about which Mendelssohn wrote:

The chapel beside it has now lost its roof. It is overgrown with grass and ivy, and at the altar Mary was crowned Queen of Scotland. Everything is ruined, decayed and open to the sky. I believe I have found there the beginning of my Scottish Symphony.

It is probably in terms of overall mood that the Scottish Symphony most noticeably reveals its original impetus. One can perhaps glimpse, through the overall sombreness, the Scottish landscape ‘looking so stern and robust, half-wrapped in haze of smoke or fog’, but this work is not as pictorial as the Hebrides Overture. The portrait is somewhat muted.

Although many of Mendelssohn’s works during the period bore the sign of literary or pictorial inspiration, his aesthetic probably owes more to the philosophy of a family friend, Hegel, who was to say in Vorlesung über die Aesthetick (Lecture on Aesthetics, Berlin, 1836) that the composer ‘should devote equal attention to two
aspects – musical structure, and the expression of an admittedly indeterminate content’. It is probably towards the creation of a piece which is satisfying on purely musical terms that the composer directed his energy in this instance. The symphony is composed in the standard symphonic four-movement plan, but structurally, Mendelssohn was trying to break new ground, not only linking the four movements, but relating them through some cross-referencing of themes.

The first movement rarely leaves the minor mode, even for the lyrical second subject. The second movement is an example of the fleet-footed scherzando style which we have typically come to associate with the composer of the Octet and A Midsummer Night’s Dream. The finale provides an affirmative conclusion but
also binds the work together thematically. Here we may recognise the music of the opening – purged of its brooding, but retaining its regal quality.

How Scottish is the work? Certainly there are no bagpipe competitions, though Mendelssohn wrote home about one:

[the bagpipers] with long red beards, tartan plaids, bonnets and feathers, naked knees, and their bagpipes in their hands… passing along the half-ruined grey castle on the meadow, where Mary Stuart lived in splendour and saw Rizzio murdered…

And there is no folksong quotation, which would have been the easiest way to make a Scottish association. The nearest Mendelssohn actually comes to folk-like sources is in the scherzo, where the main melody could be thought to possess a ‘folkish’ pentatonicism. Even so perceptive a critic as Schumann, hearing this symphony and thinking it was the Italian, was moved to remark on how appropriately it portrayed its subject! It was, he said, ‘so beautiful as to compensate a listener who had never been in Italy’ – which should console those listeners who simply wish to enjoy the superbly well-written music.

G.K. Williams
Symphony Australia © 1999

First performance:
3 March 1841, Leipzig. Composer conducting.

Most recent WASO performance:
9-10 August 2013. Paul Daniel, conductor.

Instrumentation:
two each of flutes, oboes, clarinets and bassoons; four horns, two trumpets; timpani and strings.