From Luxembourg to Miami Beach, Christoph König takes the podium in a special concert of chamber orchestra gems by Edward Elgar, Arnold Schoenberg and Franz Joseph Haydn. Schoenberg's bewitching Transfigured Night will have Fellows performing side-by-side with the New York Philharmonic's string principals (Frank Huang, Qianqian Li, Cynthia Phelps and Carter Brey) in a special appearance. George Li—who, at 20, won the silver medal at the 2015 International Tchaikovsky Competition—will join Fellows for Franz Schubert's beloved "Trout" Quintet. 

The January 22 performance will no longer be a WALLCAST® concert in SoundScape Park. 

This concert is part of the Saturday Evening One and Sunday Symphony series. Secure a season of world-renowned artists—including mezzo-soprano Sasha Cooke, People of Earth and NWS alumni Christian Reif and Teddy Abrams—performing an exciting range of orchestral music in one of the world’s most extraordinary and intimate venues for experiencing classical music—the New World Center. Subscriptions for the Saturday One series (4 concerts) begin at $132. Subscriptions to the 5-concert Sunday Symphony series begin at $140. Click to explore the full subscriptions! 

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Program

Edward Elgar

Serenade in E minor for String Orchestra, Op. 20 (1888-1892)
Approximate duration: 12 minutes

For 200 years following Henry Purcell’s death in 1695, the most significant music created in England was the work of foreigners, including Handel, J.C. Bach and Haydn. The man who broke England’s dry spell was an unlikely candidate—the son of a piano tuner, Catholic in a Protestant country and untrained in music except for some violin lessons as a teenager. Edward Elgar gained international recognition with his intriguing Enigma Variations in 1899, and he helped forge a distinctly British sound in the waning years of the Romantic era.

That signature score that made Elgar famous in his 40s was built off of the hard work of his journeyman years, including a period when he supported his family by teaching and conducting in Malvern, a sleepy spa town. It was there that Elgar composed his Serenade for Strings in E minor in 1892, incorporating some material from an earlier work he had abandoned. The Serenade title evoked those quintessential pieces of night music that Mozart wrote to entertain his Austrian patrons, and the genre retained its emphasis on breezy pleasure even as it morphed from glorified background music for outdoor parties to a staple of the 19th-century concert hall with sterling examples by Dvořák and Tchaikovsky. Given his career profile at the time, Elgar had to settle for a modest debut for his Serenade when he conducted a private reading by his students in the Worcester Ladies’ Orchestral Class. It only reached the British public for the first time in 1899, Elgar’s breakout year.

A nimble rhythmic figure ushers in the dance-like first movement, set in a flowing meter that maintains its thrumming pulse under a series of elegant melodies. After a central Larghetto movement featuring one of Elgar’s most tender melodies, the finale rounds out this slim Serenade with more dancing music, including a closing reference to the first movement’s bouncing rhythm.

 

Franz Schubert

Quintet in A major for Piano and Strings, D. 667, "Trout" (1819)
Approximate duration: 22 minutes

When Franz Schubert turned 20 in 1817, he had not yet seen his music published, mentioned in a newspaper or performed publicly a single time, even though he had already composed some 300 songs (half of his lifetime output) and a large body of orchestral and chamber music. That year he wrote one of his most memorable songs, “The Trout,” which transports the listener to a babbling brook from the very first notes of the piano accompaniment. In a later stanza, minor-key music and thicker textures capture the muddied waters and the spectator’s “raging blood” at seeing the fish hooked. With its earworm of a melody and an uncanny sense of drama for such a simple little tale, “The Trout” has always been a favorite within Schubert’s incomparable songbook.

Schubert had occasion to revisit “The Trout” in 1819. While traveling in upper Austria that summer, he met Sylvester Paumgartner, a friend-of-a-friend and an amateur cellist, who asked for a new quintet. Paumgartner specified the instrumentation of violin, viola, cello, double bass and piano, a format favored by Hummel and other composers before Schubert. (The more familiar quintet of two violins, viola, cello and piano caught on later, starting with Schumann.) Paumgartner specifically requested a theme and variations movement based on “The Trout,” a testament to the song’s instant appeal.

The “Trout” Quintet offers many pleasures beyond its signature movement. The opening Allegro vivace plays with a rising arpeggio gesture that interjects and comments around the singing themes, setting up the same kind of active discourse between melody and accompaniment found in so many of Schubert’s songs. (The rising arpeggios also foreshadow the “Trout” music still to come.)

The fourth movement jumps straight into the “Trout” theme, outlined by the strings in a simple Andantino treatment. The piano’s sparkling octaves and trills add an element of kinetic motion, and the variations continue to intensify the rhythmic and harmonic elements at play. The variation closest in character to the original song comes last, with the telltale rippling patterns shared between the piano and the strings. Related gestures continue to arise in the enigmatic finale, unifying this very grand quintet around ideas that began with one little fish.

 

Arnold Schoenberg

Transfigured Night, Op. 4 (1899; 1943 string orchestra version)
Approximate duration: 30 minutes

Before Arnold Schoenberg became the teacher and trendsetter at the center of the “Second Viennese School” of composers who explored the wilds of atonality, he was a self-taught amateur steeped in the luxurious Romanticism of Liszt and Strauss. The closest he came to having a composition teacher was through his friendship with Alexander von Zemlinsky, and it was during their vacation together in 1899 that Transfigured Night emerged from three swift weeks of work.

Schoenberg’s great innovation in Transfigured Night was to apply the idea of program music, as found in the tone poems of Liszt and Strauss, to a chamber ensemble. Schoenberg’s original scoring for two violins, two violas and two cellos matched a format pioneered by Brahms, in whose hands the string sextet became a vehicle for pure chamber music with a Classical orientation. Instead of the usual abstract movements, Schoenberg created one continuous score in five sections, following the shape of the poem Verklärte Nacht (Transfigured Night) by Richard Dehmel, about a forlorn couple that, while walking on a moonlit night, works through the revelation that her pregnancy resulted from an affair.  

The musical storytelling relies on the skillful manipulation of tonal harmony over the course of one long journey from minor to major. Supported by a nervous drone, the first section sets the course by plodding down the minor scale in lopsided, dotted rhythms. This stepping pattern becomes a familiar point of reference, returning in different forms to remind us of the couple and their fateful walk together.

The second section, beginning with an unexpected major chord, correlates to the second stanza of the poem, in which the woman “confesses that she is bearing the child of another man.” The music becomes agitated, smeared with rising chromatics, until the third section intervenes with music of a simpler and more somber character, linked to the section of the poem in which “she staggers onward.”

The third section ends on a minor chord, setting up the crucial moment: With a decisive pivot to a major chord, a cello melody gives voice to the man’s wish that his companion should “not burden her soul with thoughts of guilt.” A lustrous violin solo brightens the night, just as “the moon’s sheen enwraps the universe.”

The final section forms a tranquil coda in D major, basking in love’s warmth that “will transfigure the little stranger.” The stepping theme returns with new optimism, and shimmering arpeggios offer a parting view of “wondrous moonlight.”

 

Franz Joseph Haydn

Symphony No. 59 in A major, Hob.I:59, "Fire" (1768)
Approximate duration: 25 minutes

Franz Joseph Haydn trained at a prestigious choir school in Vienna until his voice broke at 17. He spent the next 12 years teaching kids and later working for a count of modest means, until at 29 he landed the job that set him on the course to become the most famous composer in the world. In 1761 he joined the fabulously wealthy Esterházy family as their Vice-Kapellmeister, followed by a promotion five years later to Kapellmeister. Initially he was responsible for producing two concerts each week with the court’s private orchestra, and in later years his duties grew to include writing and producing operas. He spent months on end cloistered at the family’s remote summer palace, providing entertainment for the insatiable Prince Nikolaus Esterházy, a pressure-cooker environment in which, as Haydn later wrote, “I was forced to become original.”

One new direction Haydn explored in the late 1760s and early 1770s was the Sturm und Drang (“Storm and Stress”) aesthetic that was also cropping up in the theater, literature and artwork of the time. This tendency toward heightened emotion and drama tends to be associated with Haydn’s music in minor keys, but the same extremes of expression fueled major-key symphonies as well, including the Symphony known by the nickname “Fire,” composed around 1768.

The Symphony No. 59 is fiery indeed, especially in the unusually speedy Presto first movement punctuated by shuddering bow strokes from the violins and forte blasts from the horns. The slow movement’s key setting of A-minor brings an unexpected chill to the atmosphere, and the Minuet reinforces the dichotomy of major and minor keys. The finale, heralded by horns and oboes, bristles with the manic energy of a hunt.

-- © 2022 Aaron Grad

Aaron Grad is a composer and writer based in Seattle. In addition to providing program notes for the New World Symphony, Orpheus Chamber Orchestra, Baltimore Symphony Orchestra and others, he is also the artistic director of Many Messiahs, a project that reframes George Frideric Handel's masterpiece as a collective call for justice.

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