Haydn's Cello Concerto

Elena Schwarz
Conductor

Elena Schwarz is forging a reputation for her insightful interpretations and musical vision and is in demand in Europe, the USA and Australasia. Guest conducting engagements include orchestras such as the Deutsches Symphonie-Orchester Berlin, Helsinki Philharmonic, WDR Sinfonieorchester, Los Angeles Philharmonic, BBC Philharmonic, Norwegian Radio and the Lucerne Symphony Orchestra whilst forthcoming highlights bring her to the Philharmonia Orchestra, City of Birmingham Symphony, Bremen Philharmoniker and the Duisburger Philharmoniker at the Ruhr Triennale.

Widely admired for her advocacy of new music, Elena Schwarz works regularly with specialist contemporary ensembles such as Ensemble Modern, Ensemble InterContemporain, MusikFabrik and Klangforum Wien.

She was awarded 1st Prize at the Princess Astrid Competition (2014), 2nd Prize at the Jorma Panula Competition (2015) and a Dudamel Fellowship (2018-19).

Li-Wei Qin
Cello

Chinese-Australian cellist Li-Wei Qin appears world-wide as a soloist and chamber musician. Twice a soloist at the BBC Proms, Li-Wei has enjoyed successful artistic collaborations with many of the world’s great orchestras including all the BBC symphony orchestras, the LA, London, Hong Kong, Osaka, China and NDR Hamburg Philharmonic Orchestras, Berlin Radio Symphony and Konzerthaus Orchestra, La Verdi Orchestra Milan, ORF Vienna Radio Orchestra, Prague Symphony, Sydney, Melbourne, Adelaide and Tasmanian Symphony Orchestras and the Munich, Manchester, Zurich and Australian Chamber Orchestras.

Li-Wei’s recordings on Universal Music/Decca include the complete Beethoven Sonatas, Rachmaninov with Albert Tiu, Dvořàk Concerto (Singapore Symphony), Elgar and Walton Concerti (London Philharmonic), and a live performance with Shanghai Symphony, Yu Long conducting, for Sony Classical.

He teaches at the YST Conservatory, Singapore, is guest professor at Shanghai and Central Conservatory of Music, China and visiting professor, Chamber music, at the Royal Northern College of Music. Li-Wei plays a 1780 Joseph Guadagnini cello, generously loaned by Dr and Mrs Wilson Goh.

Image credit: Hans Goh

Igor Stravinsky
(1882-1971)

Pulcinella – Suite

Sinfonia
Serenata
Scherzino – Allegro – Andantino Tarantella
Toccata
Gavotta con due variazioni
Vivo
Menuetto –
Finale

Stravinsky created this suite out of the music he wrote for the ballet Pulcinella, commissioned by Sergei Diaghilev, impresario of the Ballets russes. The ballet was premiered in 1920, with designs by Picasso and choreography by Leonid Massine.

There was a vogue at the time for ballets based on the music of Italian masters: Domenico Scarlatti’s music adapted by Tommasini for the Good-Humoured Ladies, Rossini’s music arranged by Respighi for La Boutique fantasque. Diaghilev however wanted Stravinsky to adapt the music of Pergolesi. At first Stravinsky was lukewarm. He barely knew Pergolesi’s Stabat Mater and opera La serva padrona, but he was entranced once he examined the scores Diaghilev had found in Italian conservatories and the British Museum (most not by Pergolesi, however, but by contemporaries).

He justified his absorption as the sort of love which urges us to possess a woman, but his orchestration of Pergolesi’s music amounts to a complete re-composition. Stravinsky’s 18th century model is obvious, but so too are his own fingerprints: more pronounced rhythms; quirkier orchestration; melodies chopped into asymmetrical phrases. ‘I could not produce a “forgery” of Pergolesi,’ he said, ‘because my motor habits are so different.’

Stravinsky created his ballet out of music by Pergolesi, Gallo and Monza. From the ballet’s 19 numbers he selected 11 for the suite and turned them into eight movements. There were voices in the original, but their parts were redistributed among the instruments. The scoring was deliberately that of an 18th century concerto grosso, complete with ripieno, or solo group (a string quintet), and concertino of 30 instruments. However the duet for double bass and trombone towards the end gives the distance from the 18th century.

G.K.Williams
© Symphony Australia, 2001

First performance:
Pulcinella opened Paris Opera on 15 May, 1920. The Suite was first performed in December 1922 in Boston. Stravinsky revised the score in 1947.

First WASO performance:
May 1974. David Measham, conductor.

Most recent WASO performance:
17-18 October 2003. Federico Cortese, conductor.

Instrumentation:
two flutes, two oboes, two bassoons, two horns, trumpet, trombone, strings.

Joseph Haydn
(1732-1809)

Cello concerto in C, Hob.VIIb:1

Moderato
Adagio
Allegro molto

Haydn almost certainly wrote his C major Cello Concerto during the first half of the 1760s, in his first few years of service for the Esterhazy princes. In these years the princely court was still established at Eisenstadt in the Austrian Burgenland, south of Vienna: Prince Nikolaus the Magnificent had not yet built his dream castle of Esterhaza in the remote marshlands of Hungary.

Stylistically the concerto is an early work, and Robert Dearling considers that internal evidence probably places it more specifically around 1761 or 1762. If so, this tends to corroborate the belief that Haydn wrote it for Joseph Weigl, who went to Eisenstadt as solo cellist in 1761 and remained with the orchestra until 1769. In that time Weigl and the composer developed a friendship, Haydn becoming godfather to both of Weigl’s sons (the elder of whom, Joseph junior, was himself to achieve fame as an operetta composer).

Besides the concerto, Haydn wrote splendid solos for Weigl in several early symphonies, including the trilogy Le Matin, Le Midi and Le Soir (Nos 6-8). The young composer knew well in these early days that the way to his musicians’ hearts was to give them something to display their skill.

There is any amount of florid display writing for both soloist and orchestra in the ceremoniously striding first movement, with horns injecting a judicious element of pomp into the tuttis. The emphasis here is not on ‘traditional’ first-movement sonata form (a tradition which Haydn was himself to do much to create, but which at this time was still in its formative stages). Rather it is on a sequence of Baroque rondo-style appearances in which the main theme never returns twice in precisely the same guise.

Oboes and horns sit silent throughout the slow movement, a rapt soliloquy for soloist against just the strings of the orchestra. This eloquent Adagio, in three-part ‘aria’ form, is richly redolent of the opera stage.

The tearaway finale generates such electric tension in its driving, impatient rhythm that it sweeps up the soloist in a developing drama which appears to take on a life of its own. No longer is the soloist the raison d’être of the work: the music itself takes over. Here, in Dearling’s view, the earnest young composer sounds his distinctive voice.

Strangely, for a work of such self-assurance and command of style, this concerto lay lost for the best part of two centuries until a set of parts, apparently owned by Weigl himself, came to light in the Prague National Museum in 1961. Its rediscovery has obliged music scholars to reassess Haydn’s stature as a concerto composer. The work was immediately accepted into the repertoire of leading world musicians – Sir Charles Mackerras conducted the first modern performance, Rostropovich has recorded it twice, and Benjamin Britten composed cadenzas for the Rostropovich performances.

This was not just a reflection of the limited number of fine concertos in the cello repertoire but recognition of the new work’s intrinsic merit, particularly in relation to Haydn’s somewhat less interesting, though much later and more famous, Cello Concerto in D (Hob. VIIb:2) of 1783. In respect of the D major concerto, scholars for years had argued that Haydn must have taken advice from his soloist, Anton Kraft, on how to write for the cello. The rediscovered C major concerto demonstrates that such advice was hardly necessary.

Anthony Cane © 1989

Year/date of composition:
1761-65 ca.

First publication:
1963 or before

Most recent WASO performance:
26 July 1997. Tanja Tetzlaff, cello.
Vernon Handley, conductor.

Instrumentation:
Two oboes, two horns and strings.

Holly Harrison
(b.1988)

Holly Harrison is a young Australian composer from Western Sydney. Holly’s music is driven by the nonsense literature of Lewis Carroll, embracing stylistic juxtapositions, the visceral energy of rock, and whimsical humour. She was the Tasmanian Symphony Orchestra’s composer in residence across 2020-2022, and in 2023 is composer in residence for the ASME National Young Composer Project. Her music has been described as “exploding off the page”, full of “riotous energy, eclectic rhythmic complexity” and “inventive, witty and invested with thrilling dynamism and momentum”.

Hi-Vis

Hi-Vis is inspired by night roadworks. For the majority of 2020 (and beyond!), major roadworks took place outside my Western Sydney home from 9pm to 4am each night: flickering lights, continuous drilling, humming, reversing, beeping, and grinding. Yet, amid lockdown times, I found the rhythms of machinery strangely comforting and exciting, and a gentle reminder of the existence of other people!

Hi-Vis is a musical re-imagining of these sights and sounds, but also a celebration of all things hi-vis, musical and otherwise. Think fluorescent, luminescent and neon colours, LED traffic batons, and, of course, workers in hi-vis vests. I began to imagine what road workers might be listening to, and how the contrast between the strobing lights and dark sky conjured up an almost nightclub-like environment. The piece loosely draws on ‘hi-vis’ elements of electronic dance music, brass fanfares, boot-scooting, and disco, all filtered through the constant on-and-off of earmuffs.

First performance:
11 March 2022, Hobart.
Eivind Aadland, conductor.

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

Image credit: Steve Broadbent

Dmitri Shostakovich
(1906-1975)

Symphony No.9 in E flat major, Op.70

Allegro
Moderato
Presto –
Largo –
Allegretto

What was Shostakovich thinking? He of all people knew that discretion can be the better part of valour. Despite its popular success, his opera Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk had been savaged – possibly by Stalin himself – in the pages of the Party newspaper, Pravda, and the composer knew that denunciation often preceded ‘disappearance’. At the height of the Great Terror of the late 1930s, therefore, Shostakovich prudently held back his inevitably controversial Fourth Symphony and produced the Fifth which, with its ostensibly positive outlook, returned him to precarious favour for the time being.

Shostakovich might have been daunted by the prospect of writing a Ninth Symphony. Not only was there the precedent of Beethoven’s hybrid masterpiece, but Bruckner, for instance, had gone to his eternal reward before completing his Ninth, and this in turn had led Mahler – according to his
wife, anyway – to such an excess of superstition that he refused to give Das Lied von der Erde a number in his symphonic sequence. A Ninth is an enormous challenge; for Shostakovich this was compounded by other circumstances. Two years earlier his Eighth Symphony had been criticised publicly by Prokofiev at an assembly of the Composers’ Union. More importantly, the Ninth Symphony dates from 1945 and was expected to celebrate the Red Army’s victory over Fascism – indeed, Stalin is said to have ‘suggested’ that Shostakovich use Beethoven’s Ninth as the model for a massive, optimistic choral symphony.

Shostakovich started work on such a piece in 1944, by which time the Soviet armies had begun to force the German retreat. His efforts proved fruitless, however, and he set it aside until August 1945, finishing the piece in a few short weeks. It was, however, as unlike Beethoven’s Ninth as it was possible for Shostakovich to write. Lasting little over half an hour, and without a chorister in sight, it is almost defiantly simple in its design. The first movement begins with the kind of Rossinian melody in which Shostakovich specialised, its seemingly cheerful diatonic character tweaked every so often by an unexpected change of key, or a barely perceptible change of metre. We hear both of these devices in the first few seconds of the piece: in the violins’ first theme, and after the short answer from the solo flute. The movement as a whole is characterised by this apparent levity, which is enhanced by elements like the cartoonish piccolo solo, the fondness for circus-like music, the self-parody of the movement’s final bars and comically abrupt ending.

The second movement is curiously understated, its waltz tempo thrown slightly out of registration by seemingly random 4/4 bars, its texture often ‘hollow’ with a solo line (again, frequently given out by a wind instrument) some octaves above the bass. Even moments of
fuller scoring are somehow unfulfilling, often trailing off suddenly, as does the movement itself with a deflating sequence in the winds, and a desiccated texture barely able to support the solo piccolo.

The final three movements are played without a break, beginning with a deftly energetic scherzo introduced, characteristically, by a solo wind – the clarinet. The fourth movement essentially is a strange little recitative for solo bassoon, introduced by self-consciously ceremonial trombones and punctuated by listless chords colored by the cold sound of a cymbal hit with a timpani stick. The solo bassoon’s recitative becomes by degrees the theme of the final movement, which has all the energy that the preceding section lacked. Once again the manner of the movement is apparently light-hearted, even glib, with strong resonances of comic opera in its seemingly simple melodies and shamelessly gauche scoring. Once again though, and as if it were in the middle of a rally between strings and winds, a simple V-I cadence summarily brings the game to an end.

This was not the piece that Stalin, nor anyone else, was expecting – but it is a measure of Shostakovich’s ambiguity that its tone can be interpreted as the ‘sheer joy of making self-sufficient music’ or as a bitterly ironic response to the world left behind by the second world war. Theodor Adorno believed that poetry was no longer possible after Auschwitz; Shostakovich, writing in the aftermath of the horrors in Eastern Europe and as the bombs fell on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, clearly felt that there was little to glorify.

Gordon Kerry
Symphony Australia © 2001

First performance:
3 November 1945, Leningrad. Yevgeny Mravinsky, conductor.

Most recent WASO performance:
14 September 1974.
Carlo Bagnoli, conductor.

Instrumentation:
piccolo, two flutes, two oboes, two clarinets, two bassoons, four horns, two trumpets, three trombones, tuba, timpani, three percussion and strings.