Mendelssohn's Violin Concerto

Anja Bihlmaier
Conductor

Principal Guest Conductor of the BBC Philharmonic since September 2024, Bihlmaier has become a firm favourite at the BBC Proms where she appears annually.

In 2025/26, she conducts for the first time the London Symphony Orchestra, Orchestre Symphonique de Montréal and Orchestre National de Lyon, returning to the Royal Stockholm Philharmonic, Madrid National, Helsinki Philharmonic, Berlin Konzerthausorchester, Hong Kong Philharmonic, and Sydney and Melbourne symphonies.

She continues her residency at the Bonn Beethovenfest conducting the DSO Berlin, with whom she will also open the Berlin Musikfest. Last season she debuted with the Seattle Symphony, NDR Elbphilharmonie Orchestra and Munich Philharmonic, all of whom have reinvited.

Bihlmaier has a wide-ranging repertoire that includes Haydn, Mahler, Strauss, B.A. Zimmermann to Sibelius, Bartók, Dvořák, Shostakovich, Debussy, Britten, Galina Ustvolskaya and Unsuk Chin.

In the past two seasons Bihlmaier conducted new productions at the Berlin Staatsoper (Cassandra) and Glyndebourne Festival (Carmen) – both debuts, and both leading to immediate reinvitations. In Spring 2026 she conducts her first production at the Hamburg Staatsoper (Elektra).

In her early career she held positions at the opera houses of Hanover, Chemnitz and Kassel, and went on to conduct at the Vienna Volksoper and across Scandinavia, notably in Malmo (Midsummer Night’s Dream), Tampere (Fliegender Hollaender) and Oslo (La Traviata).

Bihlmaier was Chief Conductor of the Residentie Orkest (Den Haag) 2021–2025 and Principal Guest of the Lahti Sinfonia 2020–2024, and in the past year both orchestras have released CDs with her conducting – Ravel with Residentie and Yeol Eum Son for Naïve, and Prokofiev with Christian Poltera for BIS.

Bihlmaier studied at the Freiburg Hochschule für Musik with Scott Sandmeier, was subsequently awarded a scholarship at the Salzburg Mozarteum and then went on to study with Dennis Russell Davies and Jorge Rotter. She was accepted into the Deutsche Dirigentenforum and received a scholarship from the Brahmsgesellschaft Baden-Baden.

Benjamin Beilman
Violin

Benjamin Beilman has won international praise for his passionate performances and deep, rich tone, which The New York Times described as “muscular with a glint of violence,” and The Strad as “pure poetry.”

Highlights of Benjamin’s 2025/26 season include his subscription debut with the Berlin Philharmonic, following a successful U.S. tour with the orchestra replacing Hilary Hahn. He also appears with the Minnesota Orchestra (Szymanowski Violin Concerto No.1), Seattle Symphony (Barber), Dresden Philharmonic (Mozart No.5), Antwerp Symphony (Saariaho’s Graal théâtre), Solistes Européens Luxembourg (Beethoven), Nouvel Ensemble Moderne (Berg), and the Nashville Symphony (Britten).

In addition, he curates, stages, and leads two chamber music programs at the Sun Valley Music Festival and continues his recital partnership with pianist Steven Osborne. During the summer, he undertakes a month-long Australasian tour, performing with the Sydney Symphony, Tasmanian Symphony, West Australian Symphony, and Auckland Philharmonia.

Recent seasons have included debuts with the Berlin Philharmonic and Kirill Petrenko on U.S. tour, as well as appearances with the Chicago Symphony, Cincinnati Symphony, Oslo Philharmonic, Antwerp Symphony, Belgian National Orchestra, and Tokyo Metropolitan Symphony. He has performed with major orchestras worldwide, including the Philadelphia Orchestra, San Francisco Symphony, London Philharmonic, Zurich Tonhalle, Frankfurt Radio Symphony, and Sydney Symphony, and has toured Australia extensively in recital with Musica Viva.

A dedicated advocate for contemporary music, Beilman has inspired new works by Frederic Rzewski and Gabriella Smith, premiered Chris Rogerson’s Violin Concerto (The Little Prince), and recorded Thomas Larcher’s concerto for Warner Classics. He joined the faculty of the Curtis Institute of Music in 2022, its youngest ever appointee.

Beilman studied at the Curtis Institute of Music and the Kronberg Academy and is the recipient of numerous honours, including an Avery Fisher Career Grant and a Borletti-Buitoni Trust Fellowship. He plays the “Ysaÿe” Guarneri del Gesù (1740), on loan from the Sasakawa Music Foundation (formerly the Nippon Music Foundation).

Melody Eötvös
(b. 1984)

The Saqqara Bird

Composer’s Note

There’s something undeniably intriguing about events that happened, discoveries that were made, and literature that was written at the turn of the 20th century. Until recently I have been obsessed by just the literature.

In 1898 an expedition took place in Saqqara, Egypt, during which a curious and confounding artefact was discovered. The object I am referring to is a bird-shaped relic made of sycamore wood. Due to a lack of period documentation, the function of the Saqqara Bird is completely unknown. Some hypothesize it is a ceremonial object, while others radically envision it is evidence that the Egyptians were dabbling in the principles of aviation. It has also been posited as a weather vane, an elite child’s toy, some sort of boomerang, and as a featured carving on the masthead of a sacred boat.

This orchestral work places the Saqqara Bird at the intersection of all these theories in an imagined tapestry of the mechanical, the living, and the ancient becoming new again. By focusing on the ‘engineered’ side of this wooden carving as inspiration, I was able to invest a great deal more rhythmic and harmonic stability than usual into my music. A wonderful side effect of maintaining a clearly defined beat is that varied repetition more easily gives way to new, yet familiar, melodic ideas.

So, while this piece is a more lyrical and thematically organised work which relies on motivic transformation to propel forward, I will say that it still aims to capture something imaginative and fictional in its Pinocchiolike metamorphosis.

Melody Eötvös © 2016

First performance:
5 August 2016, Hobart, Tasmania. Marko Letonja conducting.

First WASO performance:
This is the first performance by WASO.

Instrumentation:
piccolo, flute, oboe, cor anglais, clarinet, bass clarinet and two bassoons; four horns, two trumpets, two trombones and tuba; timpani, percussion and strings.

Felix Mendelssohn
(1809–1847)

Violin Concerto in E minor, Op.64

Allegro molto appassionato –
Andante –
Allegro non troppo – Allegro molto vivace

In 1826 two precociously gifted teenage boys met in Berlin: Felix Mendelssohn and Ferdinand David. By then Mendelssohn had already composed 13 string sinfonias and five concertos, which were premiered at a series of Sunday concerts at the Mendelssohn family home. Felix, his sister Fanny and members of the Court Orchestra performed a range of music, but a great deal of the young composer’s work. Among the five early concertos was one for violin and strings in D minor, written when Felix was 13 for his teacher Eduard Rietz.

The other boy, 16-year-old violinist Ferdinand David, played in the orchestra of Berlin’s Königstadt theatre. Between 1826 and 1829 David worked in Berlin, and frequently played chamber music with Mendelssohn, Rietz and others. Mendelssohn and David would remain friends until Mendelssohn’s early death in 1847, and David would be involved in editing his friend’s work for posthumous publication.

In 1836 David accepted Mendelssohn’s invitation to move to Leipzig and become leader of the Gewandhaus Orchestra. There he also performed frequently with Mendelssohn in chamber concerts, and when the Leipzig Conservatorium opened in 1843, David established its violin department, with 14-year-old Joseph Joachim among his first pupils. (With David, Mendelssohn and Schumann on staff, it must have been quite an institution.) In 1838 Mendelssohn remarked in a letter to David:

I would like to compose a violin concerto for next winter. One in E minor keeps running through my head, and the opening gives me no peace.

Assuming that it is the same opening that Mendelssohn eventually got down on paper, we can understand how the composer might have felt he was onto something. Despite Mendelssohn’s reverence for the past (Berlioz sniffed that he was ‘a little too fond of the dead’), this work is by no means neoclassical in form or manner. The opening, with its flowing arpeggios and distant, Beethovenian drum-taps, launches without introduction or exposition into a beautiful, Romantic melody for the soloist that starts high and gently ascends further into the stratosphere; the contrasting second subject group shows Mendelssohn’s exquisite ear, as he exploits unusual warm voicing in the wind section (flutes below the clarinets, for instance) as it accompanies the solo violin.

But for various reasons Mendelssohn was unable to complete the work that winter or the next, despite David’s constant reminders. The sheer amount of work Mendelssohn had at this time didn’t help.

As well as duties with the Gewandhaus, he directed six music festivals in Germany and England, and devoted himself to reviving historical music from Bach to Schubert that had sunk into desuetude.

In 1841 he was appointed Kapellmeister by King Friedrich Wilhelm IV of Prussia, so divided his time between Leipzig and Berlin until moving back to the latter city in 1843. There, with the establishment of the new Cathedral choir, and with various composing and conducting engagements in Germany and abroad Mendelssohn continued his hectic pace until the summer of 1844, when he took a vacation. Finally, after nearly a decade, he was able to return to the Violin Concerto which he completed in September of that year. David performed it under the baton of Niels Gade (Mendelssohn was ill) in March 1845. Joachim played it soon after, and the rest is history.

Mendelssohn was averse to virtuosity for its own sake, likening such effects to ‘juggler’s tricks’. Part of his diffidence may have been a response to the challenge of writing a genuine concerto that was not emptily showy. He was no doubt helped byDavid’s technical artistry and personality, and there seems little doubt that David wrote the first movement’s cadenza. But it was Mendelssohn’s genius to place the cadenza before the recapitulation, thus making it part of the dramatic structure of sonata form, rather than an ‘add-on’, as in many other concertos.

A long bassoon note at the end of the first movement briefly holds the music in suspense before it moves, without a break, into a classically Mendelssohnian song. The slow movement is in simple ABA form, with a contrasting central section. It too passes into the finale without a pause; here the music has all the lightness and grace of the great Mendelssohn scherzos.

Gordon Kerry © 2009

First Performance:
13 March 1845, Leipzig. Niels Gade, conductor; Ferdinand David, soloist.

First WASO Performance:
26 October 1938. Malcolm Sargent, conductor; Guila Bustabo, soloist.

Most Recent WASO Performance:
8 May 2021. Thaddeus Huang, conductor; Harry Bennetts, soloist

Instrumentation:
two flutes, two oboes, two clarinets, two bassoons, two horns, two trumpets, timpani and strings and solo cello.

Dmitri Shostakovich
(1906–1975)

Symphony No.5 in D minor, Op.47

Moderato – Allegro non troppo
Allegretto
Largo
Allegro non troppo

Shostakovich’s Fifth Symphony is one of the 20th century’s iconic works. In purely musical terms it is a masterpiece, coherently expressed and brilliantly orchestrated in a large-scale architecture whose pacing is expertly judged. But its status derives at least in part from the circumstances in which it was conceived, and the work has become a symbol in the battle for the composer’s ideological soul.

The facts of the symphony’s genesis bear repeating. By 1936 Shostakovich’s opera Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk had enjoyed a very successful two-year run. Then Stalin, whose tastes tended to extend no further than Lehár’s Merry Widow, saw it. An anonymous review in Pravda condemned the work as ‘chaos instead of music’, and Shostakovich took to sleeping in the hallway of his apartment so as not to disturb his family when the secret police arrived to arrest him – though it never came to that. Lady Macbeth was pulled from the stage and he withdrew, or allowed to be withdrawn, his Symphony No.4. He had good reason for alarm. Stalin’s ‘purges’ were at their height, resulting in the incarceration, and often murder, of leading intellects as well as potential political rivals.

Shostakovich’s Fourth Symphony is a blisteringly ironic work where triumphal fanfares turn sour in the space of a single bar and glacial spaces unfold menacingly. The Fifth, by contrast, is essentially a neoclassical piece. The work has four movements in conventional forms; its musical language affirms traditional diatonic harmony in a Beethovenian journey from a striving D-minor opening to the blazing major-key optimism of the finale.

Following the common practice of Russian composers, Shostakovich places the dance-like scherzo second, before an emotionally powerful Largo which alludes briefly to his own setting of Pushkin’s poem Rebirth. At the time Shostakovich claimed that ‘man with all his experiences [is] in the centre of the composition, which is lyrical in form from beginning to end.

In the finale, the tragically tense impulses of the earlier movements are resolved in optimism and joy of living’. Years later Shostakovich’s son Maxim claimed that his father had described it as a ‘heroic symphony’ – not unlike Beethoven’s Third in intent.

The work was a huge success at its premiere, with audience members weeping during the slow movement and cheering as the finale drew to a close. Reflecting the ideals of Socialist Realism and clearly a hit with the masses, the Symphony was Shostakovich’s passport to a return – for now at least – to official favour. When a journalist described it as ‘an artist’s response to just criticism’ Shostakovich didn’t demur, though there is no evidence that it was indeed his expressed view.

During the early stages of the Cold War, Shostakovich was derided in the West as a composer of ‘national advertising’ and a work like the Fifth was seen as Soviet propaganda. In the late 20th century, however, the view emerged of Shostakovich as a secret dissident, encoding anti-Soviet ‘messages’ in his music.

This view gathered strength with the publication in 1979 of Testimony: Memoirs of Dmitri Shostakovich as related to and edited by Solomon Volkov. In it Volkov quotes Shostakovich saying: ‘I think it is clear to everyone what happens in the Fifth. The rejoicing is forced, created under threat, as in Boris Godunov.’

Testimony created a furore, with musicologists and journalists proclaiming the work either a complete fraud or a valuable document of the composer’s thought. In 2004 Laurel Fay cast doubt on the book’s authenticity, having discovered that the eight pages which the composer signed as having read all contained material which was not only innocuous but had been published before. There was no guarantee that he saw, let alone dictated, the rest.

The stylistic change that came about with the Fifth was almost certainly fuelled by Shostakovich’s brush with the regime. But certain facts are inconvenient to a simplistic reading of the man and his work, such as his decision to join the Communist Party in 1960, long after the immediate danger of Stalinism had passed. Moreover the Fifth was at one stage seen as pro- Soviet tub-thumping and then almost overnight regarded as a denunciation of the very same regime. Maybe it’s neither, but as critic Alex Ross puts it, ‘The notes, in any case, remain the same. The symphony still ends fortissimo, in D major, and it still brings audiences to their feet.’

Abridged from Gordon Kerry © 2007

First performance:
21 November 1937, Leningrad. Yevgeny Mravinsky conducting.

Most recent WASO performance:
11 September 2021. Asher Fisch, conductor.

Instrumentation:
two flutes and piccolo, two oboes, two clarinets and E♭ clarinet, two bassoons and contrabassoon; four horns, three trumpets, three trombones, tuba; timpani, percussion, two harps, piano, celesta and strings.