Beethoven’s Second Symphony

Umberto Clerici
Conductor

After a career spanning more than 20 years as a gifted cello soloist and orchestral musician, Umberto Clerici has consolidated his diverse artist achievements to rapid acclaim as a conductor. Umberto is now the Chief Conductor of the Queensland Symphony Orchestra.

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 throughout the world he took up the position of Principal Cello of the Sydney Symphony Orchestra (2014-2021).

It was in Sydney in 2018 that Umberto made his conducting debut with the Sydney Symphony Orchestra at the Sydney Opera House. Following a swift trajectory of prestigious conducting engagements, Umberto is now in high demand with the major symphony orchestras throughout Australia and New Zealand. Umberto's other 2023 conducting engagements include returns to Sydney, Melbourne and West Australian Symphony Orchestras and his debut with the Tasmanian Symphony and Dunedin Symphony Orchestras. Earlier this season Umberto his debut in opera conducting Verdi’s Macbeth with Opera Queensland.

Liz Chee
Oboe

Liz Chee was born in Sydney where she attended the Conservatorium High School. She then studied at the Sydney Conservatorium of Music, where she obtained a Bachelor of Music (Performance) in 2004, studying with Alexandre Oguey (Sydney Symphony Orchestra), Rixon Thomas (Royal Danish Orchestra) and the late Josef Hanic.

After completing her university studies, Liz participated in the Lady Barbirolli oboe competition and masterclasses on the Isle of Man, and completed her studies with David Walter, a teacher at the Paris Conservatoire.

Liz has held contract oboe and cor anglais positions with most of the Australian and New Zealand orchestras, as well as the Malaysian Philharmonic Orchestra.

Liz started performing with WASO in 2011 as a contract player (cor anglais), before becoming a permanent member of the orchestra in 2014 in the position of Associate Principal Oboe. Since 2016, Liz has been Acting Principal Oboe. Liz has performed as soloist with WASO in 2021, playing the Albinoni Oboe Concerto, and in 2022, playing Haydn’s Sinfonia concertante alongside three WASO colleagues.

Liz has performed nationally with The Chambermaids quintet for Musica Viva’s education programs.

Liz's Chair is supported by Ruth Thorn and Michael & Helen Tuite through the Duet program.

Franz Schubert
(1797-1828)

Rosamunde: Overture, D.644

In 1823 Schubert was commissioned to write incidental music to the romantic play Rosamunde, Princess of Cyprus. He supplied interludes and ballet music – which survive among Schubert’s most popular orchestral works – but he wrote no overture. On the night (on both nights – the play flopped with only two performances) the overture to his opera Alfonso and Estrella was performed, and this was subsequently published with the rest of the Rosamunde music. Curiously, different music yet again has come down to us as the ‘Rosamunde Overture’.

Nowadays, almost without exception, when we hear the ‘Rosamunde Overture’ we are listening to the music composed to precede the melodrama Die Zauberharfe (or The Magic Harp) in 1820. This overture is without doubt Schubert’s best-known short orchestral piece.

The obvious tunefulness and life of this music has tended to obscure some fascinating aspects of the piece. One is that the striking changes of harmony in the rather grand introduction were taken from one of Schubert’s own ‘Overtures in the Italian Style’, and also used in the Symphony No.6 in C, where Schubert is clearly influenced by Rossini, whose music was just then beginning to take Vienna by storm. So in the Rosamunde Overture a Viennese composer takes on some Italian dialect! Such is Schubert’s own strength of creative personality that the result, far from sounding imitative, is something fresh and new. This fine music could be paralleled with Weber’s overtures to operas on romantic subjects (Der Freischütz, and Oberon, for example) but Schubert, like Rossini, remains more the classicist, the disciple of Haydn and Mozart.

- Yvonne Frindle

Composition Year:
1823.

Most Recent WASO Performance:
18-19 August 2000.
Sebastian Lang-Lessing, conductor.

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

Judith Weir
(b.1954)

Oboe Concerto

Having played the oboe myself as a young person, the composition of an Oboe Concerto had an almost autobiographical significance for me. It was also a memory exercise, as I recalled in detail some of the music I had learned so carefully during those years. One important work, the Strauss Concerto, was helpful with my choice of accompanying instruments; just a wind octet plus strings.

My Concerto is in two movements. The first begins with the oboe more or less solo, flying lyrically through the open air, though soon in dialogue with the strings. The orchestral winds enter unobtrusively, one by one until gradually approaching the first of two major tuttis. After the second of these (which contrasts strong orchestral sentences with almost brutal oboe attacks) the music winds down, again lyrically, and with the oboe nearly always in the foreground.

The second movement could be compared with a passacaglia structure; an orchestral grid that repeats multiple times, but always in transformed scoring, for strings and (later on) bassoons only, with ornamentation by the oboe soloist. Some of the baroque and early classical concertos I used to play (for instance that by Cimarosa) were influential on the melancholy but also dance-like feel of this music.

Finally the winds re-enter with a short sequence of scherzo-like noises, before an extended, up-tempo coda brings the music to its conclusion with, once more, the oboe fluently in the foreground.

My Oboe Concerto was written for Celia Craig, who gave the first performance in Adelaide in October 2018 with the Adelaide Symphony Orchestra (conducted by Douglas Boyd). This orchestra was one of the co-commissioners, along with West Australian Symphony Orchestra and the Tasmanian Symphony Orchestra. The UK premiere of the work was given by Celia Craig with BBC NOW in September 2019.

- © 2019 Judith Weir
Reprinted with permission from Wise Music Group.

First performance:
13 October 2018, Adelaide. Douglas Boyd, conductor.

Instrumentation:
two each of flutes, clarinets and bassoons; two horns and strings.

Ludwig van Beethoven
(1770-1827)

Symphony No.2 in D, Op.36

Adagio molto–Allegro con brio
Larghetto
Scherzo (Allegro) and Trio
Allegro molto

Composed in 1802 and premiered three years almost to the day after Beethoven’s first symphony, the Symphony No.2 proved uncomfortable listening for those who heard its first performance on 5 April 1803. Critics fondly recalled the ‘unaffected ease’ of the First Symphony, compared with which the Second, ‘striving [to be] new and striking’, succeeded only in being ‘bizarre, harsh and undisciplined’. To one imaginative critic, the abrupt, quivering figures of the finale seemed no less than a monster, ‘a wounded, tail-lashing serpent, dealing wild and furious blows as it stiffens in its death agony…’

To a modern listener, the movement merely proclaims the composer’s youthful vigour.

Beethoven was by now expanding symphonic form significantly. On one hand there is a vast slow introduction – by turns imposing, solemn and lyrical – which reaches a powerful climax in D minor (presaging the Ninth Symphony) before a mood of hushed expectancy gives way to an irresistible ‘boil-over’ directly into the Allegro. On the other hand, the outer movements culminate in bigger and grander codas than ever before. And, perhaps most significantly, we see unprecedented weight and emphasis on the last movement – the finale no longer just a high-spirited wrap-up but now beginning to bear a greater burden of symphonic argument.

If the first-movement Allegro pursues a course of unprecedented brilliance and energy, it nevertheless remains essentially ‘normal’ until the coda, where, as Donald Francis Tovey has suggested, Beethoven’s orchestra rises to an intense climax assuming the grandeur of a great chorus.

To follow such exhilaration comes a Larghetto movement described by Tovey as ‘one of the most luxurious slow movements in the world’, and by Robert Simpson as ‘an outstanding marvel of beauty and grace’. Even with no indication of the normal sonata-form repeats, this leisurely movement is unusually substantial, causing Beethoven in a later arrangement for piano trio to indicate a marginally livelier tempo, Larghetto quasi andante.

The third movement is the first in a Beethoven symphony to bear the supposedly characteristic designation Scherzo, and is, in fact, the first of only two such movements in all Beethoven’s symphonies. It reveals the composer in boisterous good humour, as he contrives to make music out of a variety of staccato three-note figures with impulsive chordal interjections, yet managing to sound joyful, as if he were out in the countryside free of all worldly cares.

Similar sharp dynamic contrasts characterise the finale – the movement which, more than any other, marks the composer’s advance in the three years since the First Symphony. Like the Larghetto, this is a sonata movement without repeats, displaying great brilliance and good humour, and posing a problem of dissonant harmony which finds resolution in a massive coda more than half as long again as the main body of the movement. It is in the coda that Beethoven opens the magic casements briefly, poised on a knife-edge of hushed expectancy, to reveal a blissful glimpse of future glories in store. But it cannot last. Beethoven at age 32 can only round it off and bring us conventionally down to earth.

Beethoven completed the Second Symphony in the seclusion of rural Heiligenstadt, outside Vienna, where he was under doctor’s orders to rest and try to restore his failing hearing. It was there that he realised his ailment was progressive and incurable, there that he was driven to pen his despairing, valedictory Heiligenstadt Testament. Yet at the same time he was able to compose a symphony of mingled exhilaration and bliss – a salutary reminder that he, unlike the Romantics, is to be interpreted by heart-on-sleeve analysis at one’s peril.

Anthony Cane © 1998/2011

First Performance:
5 April 1803, Vienna. Composer conducting.

Most recent WASO performance:
24 August 2014. Asher Fisch, conductor.

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