Masterworks 7: Mateusz Plays Bruch

Errollyn Wallen

Born: April 10, 1958, Belize.

Mighty River

• Composed: 2007.
• Premiere: February 24, 2007, in London’s Holy Trinity Church by the Philharmonia Orchestra.
• Duration: 17:00.

Wallen’s Mighty River was written to commemorate the 200th anniversary of the British Parliament’s abolition of the slave trade. It is a lively, pulsating work with solo lines passed all around the orchestra. At the beginning and end, you will hear quotations of the familiar Amazing Grace.

Background

Born in Belize, Errollyn Wallen moved to England with her parents when she was a young child. She initially studied dance in London and New York City before turning her attention full-time to music composition and studies at Goldsmith University, King’s College London, and King’s College Cambridge. Among her honors are appointments as Member of the Order of the British Empire (2007) and Commander of the Order of the British Empire (2020), both of which were awarded by Queen Elizabeth II. Wallen lives and works in a lighthouse on the far north coast of Scotland.

Wallen’s Mighty River was composed in 2007 to mark the 200th anniversary of the passage of the Abolition of the Slave Trade Act by the British Parliament in 1807. By the beginning of the 19th century, the British were major players in the transatlantic slave trade, and slave trading was, in fact, among the most profitable businesses in Britain at the time. The Act was introduced in Parliament by William Wilberforce, a leading British abolitionist, and passed overwhelmingly on February 23, 1807. The effects of the Act were far-reaching. Just a year later, the British Navy established a West African squadron specifically to intercept ships of all nations that were bearing enslaved people from Africa to the Americas: over the next 50 years, they seized some 1600 ships and freed over 150,000 Africans. The British also exerted political pressure on other nations. The United States passed a ban on the transatlantic slave trade a month later (though the abolition of slavery itself had to wait for the Emancipation Proclamation of 1863). Within the next 15 years, most European nations had also banned the trade.

Mighty River was commissioned in part by Reverend John Wates, whose wife is a direct descendent of William Wilberforce. In discussing the piece, Wallen noted:

“Composing for the orchestra is my favourite challenge [and this] work is an especially important one for me. It is an innate human instinct to be free, just as it is a law of nature that a river should rush to the sea. That is the concept of Mighty River. Slavery claimed the lives of countless people, but somehow, my ancestors found the grit and determination to persist in spite of the conditions in which they found themselves. I dedicate Mighty River to my great-great-great-great-great-great grandmother. I never knew her, I am driven on by her courage in the face of dreadful odds, and I am driven by her example not merely to strive and survive but to thrive.”

What You’ll Hear

Mighty River opens with a quotation by the solo horn of Amazing Grace, a hymn written by John Newton (a reformed slave trader) and this leads to pulsing music with short fragments of the hymn passed among and developed by instruments from across the orchestra: a texture that Wallen described as evoking the flow of water to the sea. As the piece progresses, Wallen includes brief quotations from African American spirituals, and near the end, quotations of Amazing Grace grow more insistent. Mighty River ends with a solo horn playing a highly ornamented version of the hymn in dialogue with percussion and concludes with a warm string chord.

Max Bruch

Born: January 6, 1838, Cologne, Germany.
Died: October 2, 1920, Berlin, Germany.

Concerto No. 1 for Violin and Orchestra in G minor, Op. 26

• Composed: Between 1857 and 1868.
• Premiere: January 7, 1868, in Bremen, Germany, with soloist Joseph Joachim and conductor Carl Martin Rheinthaler.
• Duration: 23:00.

Bruch’s Violin Concerto, his most famous work, has a remarkably innovative musical form.

Background

Max Bruch is known today primarily for two solo violin works, the G minor concerto and the Scottish Fantasy, and for his Kol Nidrei for cello and orchestra. However, Bruch was a tremendously successful composer in his day, with a catalog of nearly a hundred works that included three operas, three symphonies, several solo pieces, sacred and secular choral works, art songs, and chamber music. He was also a well-regarded conductor and one of Europe’s most sought-after composition teachers—Ottorino Respighi and Ralph Vaughan Williams were among his more famous pupils.

Bruch made the first sketches for a violin concerto as early as 1857. He finished the work early in 1866 and, in April of that year, conducted a preliminary version at a benefit concert in Koblenz, where the solo part was played by a violinist from Cologne, Otto von Königsglöw. After hearing this performance, Bruch made several significant revisions, even considering recasting the work as a “Fantasy” because of its relatively free form. Finally, Bruch solicited the advice of the greatest Austrian virtuoso of the day, Joseph Joachim, who was impressed and suggested several additional changes. Joachim played the premiere of the revised concerto, and Bruch dedicated the published score to him. Almost forty years later, Joachim cited the Bruch G minor as one of the “four German violin concertos”—alongside the concertos of Beethoven, Brahms, and Mendelssohn—calling it the “richest, most seductive” of the four.

What You’ll Hear

The concerto is set in the traditional three movements, but none of the three follows a strict classical form. Bruch titles the first movement “Prelude,” and it serves as a kind of extended free-form introduction to the second movement. Two ideas are introduced and briefly developed: a very lyrical solo line played over a quiet orchestral accompaniment and a contrasting melody played above pizzicato basses. The prelude builds to a peak and then dies away, leaving space for a lovely cadenza, which ties directly into the second movement (Adagio). The Adagio is carried entirely by the solo part, which plays almost without pause until a brief orchestral passage in the middle. The violin introduces three unhurried and beautiful themes, developing each in turn.

Joachim placed this piece alongside the more famous violin concertos of Beethoven, Mendelssohn, and Brahms, and it is in the finale (Allegro energico) that the resemblance is clearest. Though Bruch does not use the same classical rondo form as the others, the spirit is the same. After an opening orchestral flourish, the violin introduces the main theme—a lively Hungarian-style melody played in double stops. The family resemblance between this and the main theme of Brahms’s finale (written ten years later) is particularly close. The movement proceeds in a loose sonata form, with a slightly more solemn second subject. The main theme dominates the solo part and accompaniment, eventually becoming the basis for a flashy and exhilarating coda.

Jean Sibelius

Born: December 8, 1865, Hämeenlinna, Finland.
Died: September 20, 1957, Järvepää, Finland.

Symphony No. 1 in E minor, Op. 39

• Composed: 1898-99.
• Premiere: Sibelius conducted the first performance in Helsinki on April 26, 1899. A much-revised version was premiered the next year in Stockholm.
• Duration: 38:00.

Written under the influence of Tchaikovsky’s Symphony No. 6 (Pathétique), Sibelius’s first symphony is a highly original work, heralding his future as one of the great symphonists of the early 20th century.

Background

By the late 1890s, Sibelius was already a star in his native Finland and was attracting increasing notice in other musical centers in Europe. He had made his mark with grand, nationalistic works like the choral symphony Kullervo and other self-consciously Finnish pieces—mostly on themes from Finland’s national epic, the Kalevala. By the end of the decade, Finnish audiences were waiting just as expectantly for his first symphony as Viennese audiences had waited for Brahms’s first a few decades before. A young, important composer was expected to write a symphony, the most important of all orchestral genres, and Sibelius would become one of the finest symphonists of his age. But at least part of the expectation came from nationalistic pride. Finland was under the thumb of Russia at the time: in early 1899, Czar Nicholas II instituted a whole series of repressive laws aimed at stifling Finnish culture and political freedom. In this atmosphere, Sibelius was increasingly a symbol of Finnish cultural independence.

However, the first symphony he produced was not a stirring patriotic work or even a particularly “Finnish” one—though he was certainly writing plenty of those at the same time. (His enduringly popular tone-poem Finlandia was premiered just a month after the symphony.) If Finland was under the political yoke of Russia, this symphony was just as clearly influenced by Russian music, particularly Borodin and Tchaikovsky. Sibelius had heard Tchaikovsky’s “Pathétique” symphony in Helsinki in 1894 and was deeply impressed. When some colleagues remarked on the echoes of the Pathétique in his Symphony No.1, Sibelius replied that, “…there is much in that man that I recognize in myself.” But this is just as clearly a work by a skilled composer who already had a musical voice of his own, and much of the musical personality that makes the later symphonies so distinctive is already there in the first.

What You’ll Hear

The opening movement begins quietly, almost mysteriously, with a melancholy clarinet solo (Andante, ma non troppo). Without a transition, this idea is transformed into a declamatory main theme (Allegro energico). This is built into a great orchestral climax before harp and flutes introduce a lighter contrasting idea. The woodwinds introduce a third idea, a solemn canon marked tranquillo. The development is long and intense and freely intermixes elements from all of these themes. In the recapitulation, Sibelius freely shifts which instruments play his main themes. The coda contains a brief reminiscence of the opening clarinet solo, a flurry of activity, and a savage trombone phrase, before the movement ends with a pair of dry pizzicato chords from the strings. (The same chords will reappear at the close of the finale.)

The slow movement (Andante, ma non troppo lento) begins with a complete change of mood, a quiet string theme above a pulsing background. There is a brief fugato from the woodwinds before a broader version of the main theme. Horns introduce a tranquil new idea, and there is a brief section of contrasting mood before the opening character returns. This builds into a turbulent orchestra climax before subsiding quietly.

The scherzo (Allegro) begins with rough, rhythmic ideas passed from section to section. This music is developed furiously until the mood is broken by a serene idea from the horns. After all of the ferocity of the opening, this middle section is surprisingly quiet and pastoral. The movement closes with a varied reprise of the opening music.

The finale is marked Quasi una Fantasia (In the Manner of a Fantasia), possibly a reference to the close interconnections between all of its themes. The beginning is a reprise of the quiet clarinet theme from the opening movement, now transformed into a passionate string passage. After a brief interlude, the cellos introduce an impassioned idea that seems like a moment of pure Tchaikovsky, and the music that follows is turbulent and highly dramatic. The contrasting cantabile music is pure Sibelius, however: emotional yet reserved. The turbulent music returns in a long development, and worked into an even higher peak of tension. The opening movement’s melody returns again, now returned to the clarinet, and gradually reworked, leading to a fervent reprise of the cantabile. There is one final grand peak before the music ends with two string chords.  

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Program notes ©2024 by J. Michael Allsen