Mozart’s Odyssey
MORNING SYMPHONY SERIES
Thursday 3 October 2024, 11am
Perth Concert Hall
West Australian Symphony Orchestra respectfully acknowledges the Traditional Custodians and Elders of Country throughout Western Australia, and the Whadjuk Noongar people on whose lands we work and share music.
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Mozart’s Odyssey
Wolfgang Amadeus MOZART Idomeneo: Ballet Music – Chaconne & Pas seul
(14 mins)
Wolfgang Amadeus MOZART The Magic Flute: Overture (6 mins)
Wolfgang Amadeus MOZART Symphony No.39 (25 mins)
Adagio – Allegro
Andante con moto
Menuetto (Allegretto) – Trio – Menuetto
Allegro
Fabien Gabel conductor
Wesfarmers Arts Pre-concert Talk
Find out more about the music in the concert with this week’s speaker, Ashley Smith. The Pre-concert Talk will take place at 9.40am in the Main Auditorium.
WASO On Stage
About the Artists
Fabien Gabel
Conductor
Fabien Gabel is the newly appointed Music Director Designate of the Tonkünstler-Orchester Niederösterreich, a position which begins with the 2025/2026 season. Elsewhere, he has established an international career of the highest calibre, appearing with orchestras such as London Philharmonic Orchestra, Orchestre National De France, NDR Elbphilharmonie Orchester, Oslo Philharmonic, Royal Stockholm Philharmonic Orchestra, Chicago Symphony, Seoul Philharmonic and Melbourne Symphony Orchestra. Praised for his dynamic style and sensitive approach to the score, he is best known for his eclectic choice of repertoire, ranging from core symphonic works to new music to championing lesser-known composers of the 19th and the 20th century.
Gabel returns as a guest in 2023/2024 to such orchestras as City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra, Malmö Symphony Orchestra, Stavanger Symphony Orchestra, Cleveland Orchestra, Minnesota Orchestra, NDR Radiophilharmonie Hannover, Orquesta Sinfónica de Galicia and Orchestre Philharmonique de Monte Carlo. In Paris, he continues his work on a large-scale project to record a new score for Abel Gance’s epic film ‘Napoleon’ with the Orchestre National de France and Orchestre Philharmonique de Radio France, in a production which will appear in cinemas, for online streaming and in live performances.
Fabien Gabel performs with soloists such as Yefim Bronfman, Emmanuel Ax, Bertrand Chamayou, Seong-Jin Cho, Jean-Yves Thibaudet, Gidon Kremer, Augustin Hadelich, Simone Lamsma, Daniel Lozakovich, Christian Tetzlaff, Gautier Capuçon, Daniel Mueller-Schott, Johannes Moser, Håkan Hardenberger, Emmanuel Pahud, and with singers such as Measha Brueggergosman, Natalie Dessay, Petra Lang, Jennifer Larmore, Marie-Nicole Lemieux, Danielle de Niese and Michael Schade.
Having attracted international attention in 2004 as the winner of the Donatella Flick conducting competition, Fabien Gabel was Assistant Conductor of the London Symphony Orchestra 2004-2006. He was music director of Orchestre symphonique de Québec 2012-2021 and Orchestre Français des Jeunes 2017-2021.
Born in Paris to a family of accomplished musicians, Fabien Gabel began playing the trumpet at the age of six and honed his skills at the Conservatoire National Supérieur de Musique de Paris and at the Hochschule für Musik Karlsruhe. He played with various Parisian orchestras under prominent conductors such as Pierre Boulez, Sir Colin Davis, Riccardo Muti, Seiji Ozawa, Simon Rattle and Bernard Haitink before embarking on his conducting career. Fabien Gabel was named ‘Chevaliers des Arts et des Lettres’ by the French government in January 2020.
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About the Music
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
(1756-1791)
Idomeneo – Ballet Music, K367: Chaconne et Pas seul (de M. Le Grand)
We do not think of Mozart as a composer of dance music, even though he composed at least eight hours worth of it, mostly commissioned for balls during his later years in Vienna. And although ballet played an important part in 18th-century opera, the operas of Mozart’s Vienna years, which we know best, contain surprisingly little or no dance. But Mozart loved dancing, and hoped through his friendship with the great ballet master and theoretician Jean Georges Noverre to obtain a commission for a big opera in the French style; that is to say, the style of Rameau as modified by Gluck, with a large element of dance-spectacle.
Although this hope, like most of Mozart’s ambitions in Paris in 1778, ended in disappointment, he did after all get the opportunity two years later to write
an operatic ballet in the French style. That was in his Idomeneo, re di Creta (Idomeneus, King of Crete), an opera seria composed for the Munich court in the last months of 1780, and premiered on 29 January 1781. The score of the ballet music gives the names of the dancers (several of them French, including the ballet master, M. Le Grand). This ballet is almost always omitted in modern revivals of the opera, not least because it would prolong the evening to Wagnerian lengths!
Idomeneo is a tragic opera, with a plot reminiscent of the story of Jeptha in the Bible. During a shipwreck, King Idomeneo vows to Neptune, if he and his companions are saved, to sacrifice to the god the first human he encounters. This is his son, Idamante, but the tragic outcome is finally averted when Neptune intervenes, speaking through his statue, and releasing Idomeneo from his vow. The opera ends in general rejoicing.
As Mozart explained in a letter to his father, since the ballet was not an added-on spectacle but only an ‘appropriate divertissement’ in the opera itself, he had the honour of composing its music as well. This break with convention meant that Mozart was ‘up to the eyes in work’, but he was glad of it ‘for now all the music will be by the same composer’. Mozart was excited, too, to be writing for the admirable orchestra of the Elector’s new opera house in Munich – the musicians had recently transferred from the Mannheim orchestra, regarded as the best of its time.
The Chaconne is joined with the Pas seul de M. Le Grand to form a single mighty movement, perhaps the longest in all Mozart’s instrumental music. The chaconne of French baroque opera was a dance for the full company, with elaborate orchestral music in triple meter. In form, it was a rondeau, with a refrain and several couplets or episodes. In Lully and Rameau such pieces often formed the conclusion of the evening’s staged entertainment. Although Idomeneo is a tragic opera, like most 18th-century tragedies it has the mandatory lieto fine (happy ending). The Chaconne and Pas seul were probably a danced celebration of the triumph of love which ends the opera, and Mozart’s music ends in such a way as to suggest a magnificent conclusion.
The Idomeneo chaconne is not quite like anything else in Mozart’s music: its extraordinary scale allows the composer not only a richness of scoring, but also contrasts of tempo and texture. Although Gluck’s music may have been a model, and the theme of this Chaconne occurs in that composer’s Iphigénie en Aulide, Mozart’s music recalls at least as much the more inventive Rameau, using the formal gestures and dotted rhythms of the French overture. The new techniques of the Mannheim orchestra are also heard, notably in the crescendos built up with repeated figures. The music has a galant charm, too, reminding us that the young Mozart was deftly poised between Italian and German idioms, and could, on occasion, add a French ingredient to the recipe.
© David Garrett, 1999
First performance (Revised version):
29 January 1781 (Idomeneo), Munich. Christian Cannabich, conductor.
First WASO performance:
30 June 1990. Muhai Tang, conductor.
Most recent WASO performance:
6-7 May 2016. Laurence Jackson, director.
Instrumentation:
two each of flutes, oboes, bassoons; horns, trumpets; timpani and strings.
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About the Music
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
(1756-1791)
Symphony No.39 in E flat, K543
Adagio – Allegro
Andante con moto
Menuetto (Allegretto) – Trio – Menuetto Allegro
After relocating from Salzburg to Vienna in 1781, the piano concerto became Mozart’s preferred orchestral vehicle, better for charming fickle metropolitan audiences than the more esoteric symphony. New symphonies were not entirely absent from his Vienna concerts, but all of them from these years were out-of-town commissions: No.35 for the Haffner family in Salzburg in 1782; No.36 and the so-called No.37 (most of it actually by Michael Haydn) for a concert in Linz in 1783; and No.38 for Prague in 1787.
In May 1788, the imperial theatre in Vienna unveiled for hometown audiences his latest opera, Don Giovanni, premiered in Prague the previous October. The tepid reception it received perhaps explains why Mozart devoted much of the sultry Viennese summer that year to composing three new symphonies, Nos 39-41, works that, like their immediate predecessors, were unlikely to appeal greatly to the Viennese.
By then, Austria was at war with Ottoman Turkey. Accordingly, most of his patrons were also feeling the economic pinch, and Mozart’s plans to give another concert series, at which the new symphonies might have been performed, came to nothing. However, it may well have been with one eye to possible publication and performances in England, France and Germany that he completed the trilogy in quick succession between June and August.
In doing this, Mozart was probably emulating Joseph Haydn. In December 1787, the Vienna firm Artaria published Haydn’s new set of six ‘Paris’ Symphonies, issued in two sets of three. The first set contained symphonies in C major (No.82), G minor (No.83) and E flat (No.84). Given the rarity of G minor symphonies, it can hardly be mere coincidence that Mozart chose exactly the same three keys for his new trilogy. Clearly, if Haydn could publish symphonies, presumably with hope of financial return, Mozart too, then saddled with debts, might as well try. He had, after all, successfully undertaken a similar copycat project a few years earlier when, following on from Artaria’s 1782 first edition of Haydn’s Op.33 string quartets, he composed a set of his own (since referred to, fittingly, as Mozart’s ‘Haydn’ quartets).
Another small token of Haydn’s legacy can be found in Mozart’s first new symphony in E flat. Like Haydn’s E flat symphony, it begins with a grand introduction. The bold timpani rolls and brass signals of this Adagio have been likened to a ‘clearing of the throat’, designed to call a noisy audience to attention lest they miss the much quieter music with which the main Allegro, surprisingly, begins. There is a continuing interplay between the noisy full band, topped with trumpets and drums, and more delicate combinations of strings and winds. The mellow effect of flute and clarinets at these points is even more marked due to the noticeable absence of oboes, Mozart’s only late symphony to do without this usually essential instrumental colour.
As in many of Haydn’s symphonies, and several of Mozart’s own earlier works, the slower second movement begins with an almost self-contained piece for the string section alone. When the woodwinds enter (no trumpets and drums in this movement), the mood changes and the music temporarily becomes more driven. In the Menuetto, the vaulting melody and pulsing accompaniment verge on the athletic.
Haydn’s new ‘Paris’ symphonies must have reminded Mozart of his own visit to the French capital ten years earlier, for, as the opening gambit of the fourth movement, he revives a joke he had played on the first audience of his own ‘Paris’ Symphony (No.31). As he explained on that occasion in a letter to his father:
“Because I discovered that all the finales here in Paris begin with all the instruments playing together, usually in unison, I started mine with the first and second violins only, piano for the first 8 bars – then immediately forte. The audience, as I expected, said Shh! at the piano, and when the forte came immediately started applauding.”
Later, the various returns to the opening violin texture remain an effective way of marking turning points in the movement’s structure, brilliant for its obsessive concentration on its opening snatch of melody, that can’t be shaken despite the wide-ranging modulations to distant keys. Even then the precise contours of its final cadence come (like its beginning) as something of a surprise!
Adapted from a note by Graeme Skinner © 2013
Year/date of composition:
26 June 1788. Vienna.
First WASO performance:
30 July 1938. George Szell, conductor.
Most recent WASO performance:
31 August – 1 September 2018.
Leo Hussain, conductor.
Instrumentation:
flute, two each of clarinets, bassoons; horns, trumpets; timpani and strings.
