Laurence Jackson Plays Mozart

Laurence Jackson
Director/Violin

Laurence Jackson is WASO’s Concertmaster.

After attending Chethams School of Music, Laurence Jackson gained a scholarship to the Royal Academy of Music in 1984. Studying with Emanuel Hurwitz, Maurice Hasson, and Anne- Sophie Mutter, he was a prize-winner at the 1985 Yehudi Menuhin ‘Concours de Paris’ Competition and won 3rd Prize at the 1st Sarasate Violin Competition in Pamplona, Spain.

In November 1990, Laurence received 1st Prize at the 17th International Violin Competition 'Dr Luis Sigall' held in Vina del Mar, Chile and subsequently, he gave concerto and recital performances throughout Chile as well as a recital tour of Argentina.

Since making his Royal Festival Hall debut in 1990, Laurence has forged a highly successful career as a soloist, chamber musician, and concertmaster, appearing with the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra, as well as directing the Guildhall Strings, Calgary Festival Orchestra, and the Birmingham Contemporary Music Group. He is regularly invited to guest-lead orchestras in both the UK and abroad, including the London Philharmonic, Philharmonia, Royal Scottish National Orchestra, BBC Philharmonic, Trondheim Symphony Orchestra, and Bergen Philharmonic. Guest-leading in the 2014/15 season included the West Australian Symphony Orchestra and the San Francisco Ballet.

In 2006, he accepted the position of Concertmaster of the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra (CBSO), with whom he has appeared as soloist in the Dvořák, Bruch, Brahms' Double, and Nielsen concertos, as well as several performances of Vaughan- Williams' The Lark Ascending. Laurence has also directed the CBSO strings on several occasions, including directing performances of Mozart's Sinfonia Concertante and Mozart's Violin Concerto No.3. In June 2009, he recorded live the solo violin part in Ein Heldenleben by Richard Strauss with the CBSO and Andris Nelsons for Orfeo to much critical acclaim.

Between 1994 and 2006, Laurence was leader of the Maggini Quartet, with whom he regularly toured throughout the USA, Canada, and Europe to much critical acclaim. Worldwide sales of their recordings for their Naxos English Music series have exceeded 100,000 discs.

With the Magginis, Laurence recorded some 23 discs and most notably won the Gramophone Chamber Music Award of 2001, the 2002 Cannes Classical Award, the Diapason d’Or of the Year in France, and CHOC award for Le Monde de la Musique (Elgar quartet and piano quintet with Peter Donohoe). They were also nominated for Grammy Awards in both 2004 and 2005, and the Classical Brit Awards Ensemble/Orchestral Album 2002. Their collaboration with Sir Peter Maxwell Davies, performing and recording his ten ‘Naxos Quartets’ over a five-year period, was a hugely exciting and unique project and the works were premiered at the Wigmore Hall, as well as the Cheltenham Festival, Oslo Chamber Music Festival, and the Purcell Room.

As well as his numerous award-winning recordings with the Maggini Quartet, he has recorded the John Jeffreys Violin Concerto (Meridian) and the Frank Martin Violin Sonata (ASV) with Iain Burnside (piano). Laurence, with the pianist Ashley Wass, has recorded two discs for Naxos of the complete repertoire for violin and piano by Sir Arnold Bax and both discs have received wide critical acclaim throughout the musical press.

Laurence is an Honorary Fellow of both Brunel University, London and Canterbury Christ Church University, and he was awarded a fellowship of the Royal Academy of Music in 2013.

Laurence plays a violin made by J. B. Vuillaume, circa 1850.

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
(1756–1791)

Violin Concerto No.4 in D, K218

Allegro
Andante cantabile
Rondeau (Andante grazioso – Allegro ma non troppo, alternating)

Mozart’s father once suggested to him that the best way to introduce himself in a place where he wasn’t known was to play a violin concerto. It is easy to take for granted how masterly Mozart’s violin concertos are, because they are not as great as the best of his piano concertos. We think of Mozart as a pianist, and the most that many people know about his violin playing comes from letters written to him by his father Leopold, one of the leading violin teachers of the time, exhorting him not to give up practising, and claiming that he could be, if he worked at it, the finest violinist in Europe.

Mozart composed all but the first of his five violin concertos, including this one, in a sustained burst in 1775 when he was 19. They have sometimes been regarded as attempts to please his father rather than himself. Yet none of the piano concertos Mozart had written up to this time show the maturity of conception of the last three of these violin concertos, the ones in G (K216), in D (K218), and in A (K219). It was after Mozart left Salzburg for Vienna, which he called ‘the land of the piano’, that his concerto energies flowed exclusively into keyboard works. He wrote no further violin concertos.

Of the countless violin concertos composed in the 18th century, the standard modern ‘symphony concert’ repertoire retains only a few of Vivaldi’s, those of J.S. Bach, and Mozart’s. Mozart’s violin concertos are standard because they are very good music. Listening illustrates this better than words, but part of it is that the musical ideas are so strong, and there are so many of them. Mozart, even at this age, can organise his many ideas concisely and convincingly. Composing opera, his main preoccupation, has already taught him how to make the soloist the protagonist in a drama.

The solo violin parts of these concertos put musical substance and idiomatic writing for the instrument ahead of virtuoso display. This wasn’t because Mozart’s own violin technique was limited. The concertos were possibly intended not for him but for his Salzburg colleague Antonio Brunetti (first violin and soloist in the Court Orchestra). Both men certainly played at least some of them, and Brunetti himself said, ‘Mozart could play anything.’ In some of Mozart’s Serenades, which he did play, the solo violin parts are more brilliant than anything in the concertos. The style of the concertos was a matter of preference – a direct, uncluttered mode of expression in writing for the violin.

Concerto No.4 in D, is similar to its immediate predecessor composed a few weeks earlier, No.3 in G. It is also more brilliant and sonorous, as one might expect from the brighter key. Indeed, it opens with fanfare figures suggesting trumpets and drums, though the orchestra contains neither. The horns and oboes are used more assertively. Mozart has so many ideas that he can afford to throw some away: the theme of the opening tutti, although it is repeated by the soloist, does not appear again, either in development or recapitulation. The soloist’s part is almost continuous, without the interchanges with the orchestra which mark the previous concerto. The most memorable of the many themes is the sinuous one presented by the soloist in the lower register, with its sudden forte. The impression left by this movement is of delightfully unpredictable regrouping of the material, rather than regular sonata form.

The slow movement, in A, has the soloist playing almost throughout. The opening theme is of the kind which used to be called ‘hymn-like’ when the more reposeful of Handel’s opera arias, which this rather resembles, were considered religious melodies. The loveliest passage has the oboe echoing the solo violin over tiptoeing figures from the strings. The finale contains fascinating episodes of a popular cast. The alternation of metres, tempos, and character is so rapid, yet so sure, that the effect is charmingly capricious rather than odd. In a movement appropriately given the French title Rondeau, there is a musette like episode in which a drone bass is produced by the oboe doubling the soloist’s long sustained low note.

© David Garrett

First WASO performance:
22 July 1939. Malcolm Sargent, conductor; Vaughan Hanly, soloist.

Most recent WASO performance:
29-30 July 2022. Vasily Petrenko, conductor; Emily Sun, soloist.

Instrumentation:
two oboes, two horns, strings.

Ludwig van Beethoven
(1770–1827)

arr. Gustav Mahler
(1860–1911)

String Quartet in F minor, Op.95 (1810)
arranged for large string orchestra (1899)

Allegro con brio
Allegretto ma non troppo –
Allegro assai vivace ma serioso
Larghetto espressivo – Allegro agitato

Mahler told a friend that he was ‘ready for a fight’ when he stepped onto the podium to conduct this Beethoven string quartet with the full strings of the Vienna Philharmonic on 15 January 1899. It was one thing to tinker with the orchestration of a Beethoven symphony (something many conductors got away with in those days without raising undue critical ire), another to transgress the sacred intimacy of the Übermeister’s quartets by playing them in a big hall with a correspondingly big band. Predictably, one critic likened Mahler conducting the usually conductorless work to fitting a carriage with a useless fifth wheel! Another lamented Beethoven’s ‘private conversation of four connoisseurs’ being transformed by an orchestral army marching to Mahler’s beat.

Beethoven was indulging his own contrarian streak in composing this odd little work, which he described as ‘serioso’, and ‘never to be performed in public’. Its curtly economical first movement has none of the exhilarating note-spinning of his earlier public ‘Razumovsky’ quartets, and Beethoven’s originally private ‘brio’ can verge on something more aggressive, almost violent, as amplified by Mahler’s strings.

Imagining himself out of public earshot, Beethoven seems to lose patience with well-mannered harmony, abandoning it again and again for unequivocal unisons, a strong gesture in 1810, inexorable as redelivered in 1899 by Mahler’s large and disciplined string band.

There follows a ’fast’ slow movement, speed lending it an emotional detachment, traditional slow-movement pathos and passion foreign to music that is so cool and impassive. The amorphous harmonies almost suggest the tone of an organ, and the seamless polyphony of antique church music in the fugal middle section.

Beethoven’s next economy is to do away with a break before what might have been called a scherzo, were it not for his qualification ‘but seriously’. Whereas it is marked by rhythmic crispness, the contrasting middle section is almost clumsy. Reminiscences of Haydn’s bagpipe and squeeze-box episodes seem to be behind this strange and effective interlude, that must have appealed to Mahler’s own delight in folkloric evocations.

A few bars marked Larghetto espressivo lead into the incessant turmoil of the finale. Rondo format, usually one of the looser forms capable of prolonging itself indefinitely, is turned into a means of condensation, by over-dramatising the characteristic frequent returns of the theme. The coda winds down to a whisper, and onto two apparently terminal chords. But no; Beethoven snaps out of his ‘serioso’ mood, so that Mahler can whip his massed strings up to a second, perversely positive ending.

Graeme Skinner © 2010

Antonín Dvořák
(1841–1904)

Notturno in B, B.47 (Op.40)

Dvořák’s Grosse Fuge, this remarkable slow movement has been called – because, like Beethoven with his Great Fugue, the composer couldn’t find a place for it and was ultimately obliged to let it stand alone.

Dvořák’s Siegfried Idyll it might also be called – because it is idyllic, just for the strings, like Wagner’s work unique among his compositions. And it does betray the unmistakable influence of Wagner.

The young Dvořák was far from alone in being swept up in the general 19thcentury enthusiasm for Wagner and the ‘music of the future’. In 1863, aged 21 and not long a member of the Provisional (Czech) Theatre orchestra in Prague, Dvořák experienced the thrill of playing viola in a concert of Wagner’s compositions under the baton of the master himself. He had also played under Liszt in 1858.

Dvořák’s often naive attempts to emulate Wagner are apparent in his compositions throughout the 1860s – the operas Alfred (of the burnt cakes) and The King and the Charcoal-burner, the early symphonies (Nos. 2 to 4), and three string quartets (Nos. 2 to 4).

The String Quartet in E minor (No.4, B.19), completed in 1870, is an extended, highly Romantic work in which Dvořák’s cataloguer, Jarmil Burghauser, finds clear harmonic echoes of Tristan. It was from this quartet, later disowned, unpublished (though it has survived and been performed in modern times), that Dvořák thought the second movement, Andante religioso, worth salvaging. It was to become – much more concisely – the basis of the present Nocturne. In the meantime, he had used it in the String Quintet with double bass (B.49, 1875), only to withdraw it as superfluous. When he eventually turned it into an independent piece for string orchestra and published it as Nokturno (1883), he also made a version for violin and piano (B.48).

In the meantime, too, the realisation had struck Dvořák that Wagnerism was not his natural bent. Turning to a naturally melodious, more Czech, style, he made a new version of The King and the Charcoal-burner – not just a revision but a completely new opera. With this, despite an irredeemable libretto, and his first Czech cantata, Heirs of the White Mountain, Dvořák began to win performances.

A hint of plainchant in the solemn introduction to the Notturno, by unison cellos and basses, does not explain the religioso marking on Dvořák’s original quartet movement. The introduction is, in fact, new in the orchestral version. The original melody appears at the fourth bar, over a continuous low pedal note in the cellos, as fragment piled upon fragment inexorably builds an imposing musical and emotional structure – one which is extraordinary and unique in all of Dvořák’s music. Suddenly, however, the music breaks free from the hypnotic pedal note, gaining brightness and mobility through a reduction in note values and lively pizzicato support from the basses. As he turns from his youthful vision, Dvořák becomes at once more conventional; also, the more open-hearted Czech musician we know and love.

At the end, the music reverts to slower motion, molto tranquillo, and expires, after a few uncertain pizzicato notes, on a single bowed chord, pianissimo.

Anthony Cane © 1995

Year of composition:
1875 (January-March).

Most recent WASO performance:
2 March 2018. Laurence Jackson, director.

Instrumentation:
Strings only.

Joseph Haydn
(1732–1809)

Symphony No.102 in B flat

Largo—Vivace
Adagio
Menuet e Trio (Allegro)
Finale (Presto)

It was with an imposing, newly composed Symphony in B flat that Haydn launched what would be his last season as a symphonic composer. It was February 1795. Worsening hostilities with France had forced a merger of concert activities in London. For the fourth, and final, season of his glorious Indian summer in England, the so-called “Father of the Symphony” found himself with a bigger orchestra (more than 60 players) and a new concert room, capacity 800, in the King’s Theatre, Haymarket.

It was there, during an encore of the new Symphony’s finale, that a chandelier crashed into space vacated by listeners pressing forward to better see Haydn directing from the keyboard. Cries of “Miracle!” confirmed that no-one was injured. But posterity mistakenly pinned the nickname Miracle to the earlier Symphony No.96. Thus, one of Haydn’s towering masterpieces, the third last of his 104 numbered symphonies, lacks the familiarity of a handy sobriquet.

Like all but one of the 12 “London” symphonies (Nos. 93–104) which culminate Haydn’s symphonic career, No.102 begins with a slow introduction. A vignette of grave beauty, it evoked for the late, great Haydn scholar H.C. Robbins Landon a sense of “cosmic loneliness” in its extraordinary impression of space.

Yet, from the very melody of the introduction, its first five notes transformed and accelerated, Haydn creates an electrifying main theme for one of his tautest, most concentrated – indeed, one of his loudest – movements. Ushered in by an elegant solo flute, the Vivace theme bursts forth irresistibly on full orchestra. The score abounds with abrupt sforzato markings and sustained loud passages, but the impression is of contrast, not sheer force. Even the solo flute briefly (bravely!) takes up the Vivace theme. From a development section of unprecedented concentration, a thrilling timpani crescendo precipitates a recapitulation which is less an orthodox restatement of the original material than a grand coda to end the movement.

The slow movement examines rhapsodically a single heartfelt theme which Haydn also used in a piano trio for a dear friend and pupil, the widow Rebecca Schroeter. Unusually for Haydn, romantic crescendos and diminuendos underline an emotional ambivalence already apparent in the instrumentation—a dark-hued solo cello, muffled drums, and muted trumpets seeming to snarl as the movement dies away, pianissimo.

The fast “symphonic” minuet is ebullient, scherzo-like, with a heavy peasant tread. A solo oboe and bassoon in tandem sound strangely solemn in the central trio section.

In the finale, however, Haydn plays ducks and drakes with a perky “rat-a-tat” motif which keeps leading off the main theme, then keeps getting picked off by itself as a plaything and ultimately brushed off. At the very last moment, various groups in virtual slow motion repeatedly try to make something of it but fall back before an impatient orchestra. Just the timpani recall the “rat-a-tat” rhythm at the end. This is a movement of high comedy. It ends one of Haydn’s most learned and serious symphonies. Who else but he would dare?

Anthony Cane ©2010

First performance:
2 February 1795, London. Composer conducting.

Most Recent WASO Performance:
16-17 September 1988. Varujan Kojian, conductor.

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