Haydn, Symphony No 85, "The Queen"

A symphony for an ill-fated queen 
Three years before being arrested with her husband in Varennes, and seven years before being beheaded, Marie Antoinette of Austria attended, in February 1786, delighted with life, the performance of a couple of symphonies by Haydn in the salons of the Tuileries Palace. She heard, among others, the Symphony in B-flat, whose music she fell in love with, and so she commented that same evening to her hostesses, while they lavished her with their care. The symphony became one of her favorite pieces, and hence the nickname, "The Queen", the only one of the so-called Paris Symphonies that earned a nickname in the eighteenth century, and which did not lose renown after the unfortunate end of the Queen Consort.

The previous year, Joseph Haydn had learned of the commission for six symphonies to be performed before the French court by the renowned orchestra Concert de la Loge Olympique, an ensemble founded in that innovative decade under the generous patronage of Claude-François-Marie Rigoley, Count of Ogny. The fees were set at thirty gold Louis for each symphony, which amounted to 180 Louis for the total, a considerable amount for the time —and for this one as well (googling, I have learned that the total amounts to the equivalent of 50,000 today's dollars).

Joseph Haydn (1732 - 1809)

Such retribution testifies to the wide fame enjoyed by the maestro, who devoted himself with enthusiasm to the task. By the end of that year, 1785, he completed the first three symphonies. At the beginning of the following year, he finished the remaining three. The six symphonies, which, as already mentioned, are known today as the Paris Symphonies, were generally warmly received, and the maestro was commissioned to write another set of three symphonies, which he completed in 1788-89.

Symphony No. 85, in B-flat major, "The Queen".
Haydn was aware that the Concert de la Loge Olympique had a large number of instrumentalists, perhaps three times the twenty or twenty-five musicians he had at Esterháza. So the maestro felt at ease to compose, without instrumental restrictions. Above all, he took advantage of the opportunities that this license offered him to achieve effects that would have been impossible with a reduced orchestra. The Symphony in B-flat, in four movements, is a brilliant example of this.

Movements:
00:00  Adagio - Vivace  — Remarkable for its quiet introduction, and for the main theme.
10:50  Romanze. Allegretto  — Theme and variations, on a French ballad of the time.
16:44  Menuetto - Trio  — Some Haydian mood.
20:45  Finale. Presto  — Alternating sonata and rondo form.

The rendition is by the American ensemble Ars Lyrica Houston.

George Gershwin, Concerto in F major / Yuja Wang

The first performance of George Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue occurred on February 12, 1924, at New York's Aeolian Hall with the composer at the piano. The now-famous Rhapsody was part of a concert entitled "An Experiment in Modern Music", which marked the first significant rapprochement between jazz and classical music. Gershwin was not correctly a jazz musician, but his sensitivity to African-American music allowed him to create music intelligently colored by its textures and rhythms.

That evening, the German-born American conductor Walter Damrosch was present. Attracted by the novelty, the next day he contacted Gershwin to compose for the New York Symphony Orchestra a large-scale piano concerto in the full line of classical formality.

By this time, Gershwin was working on three Broadway musicals, so he only began sketching the Concerto in May 1925. Returning from a trip to London, he began writing for two pianos. By the end of July, he finished the first movement, in August the second, and the third in September. The complete orchestration of the three movements was finished on November 10.

At the end of that month, Gershwin hired, at his own expense, an orchestra of 55 instrumentalists for a general rehearsal, with the assistance of the commissioner, Walter Damrosch, who was delighted although he suggested some revisions.

George Gershwin, at 37
(1898 - 1937)

At The Carnegie Hall
The work was finally premiered at Carnegie Hall in New York on December 3, 1925, with the composer as soloist and Damrosch conducting. It was a huge box-office success, warmly applauded by the audience. However, his colleagues had mixed opinions. Prokofiev called the work "amateurish". But Arnold Schoenberg praised it without qualms.

George Gershwin lived only 38 years. On February 11, 1937, he played his Concerto in F in a special evening dedicated only to his music. Gershwin was a very gifted pianist, at least playing his own music, but that night suffered from coordination problems and forgetfulness. On July 9 of that year, he had to be hospitalized and fell into a coma. His doctors suggested that he might be suffering from a brain tumor. Indeed, two days after a large tumor was removed. The composer died that same night, on July 11, 1937.

Concerto in F major
On the day of its premiere, despite the success of the public, the critics did not hide their astonishment, unable to define whether they were in front of jazz music or a classical concert.

But Gershwin himself provided a brief but very accurate description of the concerto.

"The first movement employs the charleston rhythm. It is fast and pulsating, and represents the young and enthusiastic spirit of American life. It begins with a rhythmic motif given by the timpani.... The main theme is announced by the bassoon. Later, the piano introduces a second theme. The second movement has a poetic, nocturnal atmosphere similar to American blues, but in a purer form than usual. The final movement returns to the style of the first. It is an orgy of rhythms, which begins violently, maintaining the same vivacity throughout the movement."

Movements:
00:00  Allegro
14:00  Adagio - Andante con moto
26:25  Allegro agitato

The performance is by brilliant Yuja Wang, accompanied by the London Symphony Orchestra conducted by American conductor Tilson Thomas.

Richard Strauss, "Till Eulenspiegel's Merry Pranks"

The German Rogue

Till Eulenspiegel is a character from German folklore, a rogue who, unlike his Latin congeners, seems to have really existed. It is said that he was born around 1300, growing up in contact with the lower classes of German feudal society. A tireless globetrotter, he traveled throughout the Holy Roman Empire, mocking everyone, kings or vassals. Sentenced to death on more than one occasion, he would have escaped them all to finally die because of the Bubonic Plague that ravaged Europe during the 14th century.

The stories of Till's adventures became legendary. In 1890 a new, beautifully illustrated account of his adventures appeared, which caught the attention of a young Richard Strauss, only twenty-five years old.

The young Richard had been appointed assistant conductor of the Munich opera at the age of twenty-two, and in the early 1890s, he was in Weimar as conductor of the Weimar Theater. And only recently, in 1889, he had premiered his first great masterpiece, the symphonic poem Don Juan, hailed by audiences and critics alike in Weimar, and later the world.

But, in the case of Till, his first idea was to make him the hero of an opera. He went so far as to write a libretto: the stories were at hand.

Richard Strauss (1864 - 1949)

But he soon abandoned the idea, perhaps moved by the success of Don Juan, opting for the composition of a purely instrumental symphonic poem, which would tell the story, the adventures of Till, in music, which did not seem at all simple if we remember that the most common amusement of the German rogue was to pretend not to understand what is spoken to him, taking literally the figurative expressions of his interlocutor, to make fun of him.

But the decision was a happy one. Written for a large orchestra between 1894 and 1895, the work had its premiere and warm reception on November 5, 1896, in Cologne.

"Till Eulenspiegel's Merry Pranks", tone poem, opus 28
The structure of the work is generally based on the rondo form. The central theme goes with Till's personality, and his adventures as episodes that appear between one and another repetition of the central theme, or the other themes. The clarinet, alternating with the horn, represents Till Eulenspiegel.

Lasting approximately fifteen minutes, Till's antics, told in music, unfold according to the following steps: Introducing the character / Till's antics / The trial / Sentence and execution / Epilogue.

As we can appreciate, the German antics end badly.

The version is by the WDR Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Semyon Bychkov.

Beethoven: "Choral Fantasy"

A pre-cursor to his Ninth Symphony

On December 22, 1808, a monumental concert was held in the recently opened Theater an der Wien in Vienna. For his own benefit, Beethoven organized an evening of his own works in which he would perform as a pianist and conductor. The works to be presented required the participation of a full orchestra, choirs, soloists, and piano. The program included no less than the simultaneous premieres of the Fifth and Sixth Symphonies and the Piano Concerto No. 4. In addition, excerpts from the Mass in C minor were performed, and as usual, a couple of arias were sung.

To conclude the evening of this memorable four-hour concert "in a cold and unpleasant theater", Beethoven opted for a brilliant finale that should fuse all the musical components of the evening – orchestra, choirs, and piano – in the same work. The genre chosen was the Fantasy.

A cold and unpleasant venue.
The concert indeed took place under disastrous conditions, due to the prevailing cold, the length of the concert, and the fact that the orchestra's performance was calamitous, as its members had been hastily assembled and had only one rehearsal. To make matters worse, the Bonn maestro had decided on his "grand finale" only a fortnight before.

The Fantasy for piano, choirs, and orchestra, also called Choral Fantasy, was composed in the second half of December, an unusually short time by the maestro's standards. So, a possible error in its performance was highly probable. And this is how J.F. Reichard tells it, in his Selected Letters, written on a trip to Vienna.

"Finally, a long Fantasia, with the intervention of the piano, the orchestra, and, finally, the choir. This strange and interesting idea had a desolating manifestation in the performance, for the orchestra fell into such a state of complete bewilderment that Beethoven, possessed by the artist's fire, forgot his audience and those around him and rose from the piano shouting, "Stop, stop and start again from the beginning!" You can imagine how all of us present suffered for him. At that moment, I even wished I had dared to leave the theater much earlier...".

What had happened? The maestro had agreed with the concertmaster that a certain piece was to be played without the repetitions. But at the time, Beethoven forgot his own suggestion and repeated the parts while the orchestra went the other way. It is also said that it was the concertmaster who stopped the performance and who reportedly asked Beethoven: "With repetitions this time?  to which the maestro replied positively.

Fantasia for piano, choirs and orchestra, opus 80
The work, dedicated to King Maximilian Joseph of Bavaria, is conceived in two parts of unequal length: an Adagio (initiated by an improvised piano solo cadenza of 26 bars) and a Finale formed by several sections of different tempo: allegro, meno allegro, allegro molto, adagio ma non tropo, marcia, allegro, allegretto, presto.

The theme developed – universal brotherhood through the meeting of the arts – is quite similar to that of Schiller's Ode to Joy, which took its final form in the finale of the Ninth Symphony. The texts, by the poet Christoph Kuffner, are also similar, as is the choral treatment.

Beethoven was aware of the kinship of the two works. In a letter of 1824, when he was writing the Ninth Symphony, he described his project as "an arrangement of the words of Schiller's immortal Ode to Joy, in the same manner as my fantasia with piano and chorus, but on a much larger scale."

The work lasts just over twenty minutes.

The Singapore Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Andrew Litton, performs this version.
At the piano, Malaysian piano wunderkind Tengku Irfan.

Chopin, Waltz Opus 34 No 2

Chopin was 19 years old when he traveled for the first time to Vienna, in August 1829, to give his first recital as a concert pianist abroad. The success was apotheosis, although some critics resented the interpreter's low volume and weak sonority, more appropriate for salons than for a concert hall. A year later, after leaving Warsaw for good on a trip to Paris, he spent eight months in the capital of the Austrian Empire, with opposite results. Music impresarios and other artists received him with indifference. During that extended stay, he gave only two recitals. With his delicate touch, it was not easy to conquer the boisterous Viennese public, an audience that, according to him: "...only wants to listen to the waltzes of Lanner and Strauss".

Chopin, of course, was completely alien to the Viennese waltzes. Sometime later, already installed in Paris, he commented to a friend: "I have not acquired anything of that which is particularly Viennese, so I am still unable to play waltzes". Perhaps precisely for this reason, Chopin would reinvent the form in his own particular terms, with an exquisite production of short pieces with 3/4 meter, deeply personal.
According to scholars, his production of waltzes basically follows two lines: on the one hand, there are the grandiose, brilliant, and ornamental, almost elaborated for the ballroom; and on the other, there are the miniatures, abstract, charming, at the antipodes of the fashionable Viennese waltz of the time.

The three waltzes of Opus 34
Composed between the years 1834 and 1838, they were published by the editor with the title of Three Brilliant Waltzes, although the denomination is only adequate for the first of them, the waltz Opus 34 No 1, in A flat, the only grandiose and brilliant, thus placing it in the first category established by the scholars, and the two remaining ones, in the second (and it could not be otherwise if the waltz Op 34 No 3 is popularly known as "the Waltz for a Kitten").
The year 1838 is the year of Chopin's departure to Majorca, the ill-fated trip he will make with George Sand and her children, in October of that year. Before setting out on the voyage, Chopin sent for publication the four mazurkas of Opus 33 and the three waltzes of Opus 34. By that stage of his life, at the age of 28, Chopin had written, but not published, eight of his fourteen waltzes.

Waltz Opus 34 No 2
Written in A minor, it was Chopin's favorite, as well as others (the movie The Pianist incorporated it into its soundtrack). Although it bears the No. 2, it was the first to be written.

It is a slow, somewhat sad, melancholy waltz. A "waltz for the souls", as Robert Schumann once remarked of Chopin's waltzes. Never better said, precisely, of this waltz.
Full of languor and longing, at minute 0:56 the change to major mode gives way to a melody of surprising beauty that will be repeated in minor mode a few bars later. Everything resumes again, to give way to a new section, at 4:10. At the end, the opening bars will return, this time to serve as a stifled conclusion.

The performance is by the superb Ukrainian pianist Valentina Lisitsa.