Join MTT in kicking off the New World Symphony’s extraordinary 31st academic year with Latin Grammy Award-winning Venezuelan pianist Gabriela Montero. Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart ushered in a new phase of ingenuity with his Piano Concerto No. 14, perfectly captured by Montero’s dazzling genius. Roll call! All Fellows get a chance to shine in a performance of Benjamin Britten’s famous Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra. Johannes Brahms, a true Romantic, has always been able to make hearts yearn with his rich harmonic language and beautiful melodies. Experience the ultimate longing when NWS performs his magnum opus, the Fourth Symphony.

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Program

Benjamin Britten

The Young Person's Guide to the Orchestra (1945)
Approximate duration: 18 minutes

Benjamin Britten had a precocious start in music, studying piano and viola and composing hundreds of works by the time he was a teenager. After graduating from the Royal Conservatory of Music in 1932, he began to make professional inroads in England, and a long visit the United States during World War II helped him clarify his musical and personal outlook. His traveling companion, the tenor Peter Pears, became his lifelong romantic partner and also a peerless interpreter; with Pears singing the title role of Peter Grimes in 1945, Britten’s debut opera placed the 31-year-old composer at the forefront of British music. 

After the success of Peter Grimes, the British Ministry of Education commissioned Britten to write an orchestral work to be used in an educational video. It was fitting that he borrowed source material from Henry Purcell (1659-1695), the most significant composer of English theater music before Britten. Extracting a theme from the incidental music for the play Abdelazer, composed exactly 250 years earlier, Britten developed a set of variations to feature subsets of the orchestra, culminating in a final fugue. The resulting work, The Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra, has earned a rightful reputation as one of the most beloved gateways into classical music, in a rare class with Prokofiev’s Peter and the Wolf and Saint-Saëns’ Carnival of the Animals.

Purcell’s theme first appears in a regal setting for full orchestra.

To demonstrate the main divisions of the orchestra, the theme repeats in settings for the woodwind, string and brass sections, and even in a novel rendition by the percussion group, before one last orchestral statement.

The first variation features flutes and piccolo, accompanied by gossamer violin tremolos and bright glints of harp and triangle.

The variations proceed through the woodwind section, adjusting the pace and mood in line with each instrument’s essential character: For the oboes it’s a heartbreaking Lento, for the clarinets a jaunty game of slurs, and for the bassoons a sarcastic march.

Introducing the strings from high to low, the violins first strut over brass accompaniment in the style of a polacca, a festive folk dance in the Polish style; the violas counter with a more relaxed variant marked “sweet and comfortable.”

The cellos play a rhapsodic and alluring melody, and then comes a turn for the basses, described in the optional narration as “the grandfathers of the string family, with heavy, grumbling voices.”

The harp rounds out the string family with a demonstration of its fanciful chords, arpeggios and long glissandi that sweep across the strings.

A mysterious interlude featuring horns gives the first taste of the brass, followed by a spry march for trumpets and a noble variation showcasing the trombones and tuba.

The percussion variation makes a point of separating out the individual instruments, even the sharp snap of the whip (actually two long boards clapped together).

The finale weaves all these instruments back into the fabric of the orchestra through a dizzying fugue that ends with a climactic, multilayered restatement of Purcell’s theme.

 

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

Concerto No. 14 in E-flat major for Piano and Orchestra, K. 449 (1784)
Approximate duration: 21 minutes

Fed up with his hometown of Salzburg and unable to find a suitable long-term job, the 25-year-old Mozart moved to Vienna in 1781. He was soon married with a growing family to feed, and he kept up a breakneck schedule of freelance gigs that included teaching keyboard lessons, pursuing opera commissions, selling scores for publication, cultivating private patrons and producing subscription concerts where he debuted his new piano concertos and other works that exploited his talents as a performer.

He may have started the Piano Concerto in E-flat major (K. 449) as early as 1782 with the intention of playing it on one of his self-produced concerts, but he set it aside and only finished the score in February of 1784. In his log of compositions, he noted that it was intended for Barbara Ployer, a teenaged piano student for whom he wrote two (or maybe three) of his concertos. She lived in Vienna with her uncle, an agent for the Salzburg court, and he funded this private commission and staged the debut concert in his own house the month after the score was finished.

Surprises abound in this Concerto, beginning in the orchestral tutti, which veers to a turbulent C-minor passage after some 20 seconds, making for a dramatic approach to the pastoral sweetness of the second theme.

The most slippery music comes in the development section, which elaborates on the trilling gesture introduced in the Concerto’s first phrase. After a series of bold declarations from the piano, answered each time by stark orchestral octaves, the soloist makes a cunning ascent through wandering harmonies to arrive suddenly back at the home key for the all-important recapitulation.

On its surface, the central Andantino movement seems to deliver a succession of docile and uncomplicated tunes, but once again the harmonic ground shifts stealthily beneath the listener’s feet. When the strings bring back the main theme, for instance, they have migrated to the foreign territory of A-flat major, setting up an elegant return journey to the proper key of B-flat that unfolds over the next minute-and-a-half. 

Not long after Mozart had arrived in Vienna, a supportive older patron drew him deep into the neglected art of fugue as practiced earlier in the century by Bach and Handel. The crisp counterpoint of this Concerto finale is an enduring sign of Mozart’s respect for that learned tradition, starting with a passage that gives the second violins a prominent counter-line against the bouncy melody played by the first violins.

The same quality fuels an approach to the piano part that often gives equal weight to the right and left hands, rather than splitting them into a hierarchy of melody and accompaniment.

 

Johannes Brahms

Symphony No. 4 in E minor, Op. 98 (1884-85)
Approximate duration: 40 minutes

Brahms, already a very successful composer in his late 30s, lamented to a friend, “I shall never write a symphony! You can’t have any idea what it’s like always to hear such a giant marching behind you!” The giant in question was Beethoven, and his legacy haunted Brahms, especially in the signature genres of symphonies and string quartets. Brahms was 40 by the time he released a quartet, and 43 before his Symphony No. 1 reached the public, after 14 years of effort. Having cleared that hurdle, orchestral music finally began to flow freely, with three more symphonies, three concertos and two overtures coming in the decade that followed.

Brahms began his fourth and final symphony in 1884, and he conducted its premiere the next year with the court orchestra in Meiningen, a group directed by his close friend and champion Hans von Bülow. The Fourth Symphony, in particular its first movement, demonstrates just how well Brahms integrated the Classical style of Beethoven, Mozart and Haydn. The main theme is a marvel of balance and efficiency, saying so much with simple pairs of notes, first falling and then rising.

The mystical air of the slow movement comes in part from Brahms’ use of an even older musical idea, the Phrygian mode developed in pre-tonal church music. The movement is technically situated in the key of E major, but the archaic harmonies and the use of chords borrowed from the minor mode maintain the pathos and tension of the Symphony’s overall trajectory in E minor.

The rousing third movement in C major provides welcome relief from the heavy emotions of the two earlier movements, with piccolo and triangle brought in to add extra sparkle in the treble register.

For the finale, Brahms introduced another historical detail by adopting the Baroque-era form of short, continuous variations known as a passacaglia. The theme that serves as the basis for the passacaglia comes from a cantata by Bach, underscoring Brahms’ reverence for his forebears. 

-- Copyright © 2018 Aaron Grad

Aaron Grad is a composer, guitarist and writer based in Seattle. Besides providing program notes for the New World Symphony, he has been the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra’s program annotator since 2005 and also contributes notes to the Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra and Seattle Symphony.