Conductor
Edward Gardner

featuring
Johannes Moser, Cello

BEETHOVEN: Leonore Overture No. 3
ELGAR: Cello Concerto
WALTON: Symphony No. 1

March 17, 18, 19 2007
Wells Fargo Center
$27 - $50

Guest conductor Edward Gardner comes to Santa Rosa fresh from his appointment as music director of the English National Opera. He leads the orchestra in Elgar’s standard of the cello literature—a lyrical, concise, and heart-wrenching piece performed by the gifted Munich-born cellist Johannes Moser. William Walton, a contemporary of Elgar and a “pillar” of a new English symphonic tradition, is represented here with his urgent, pervasively serious and poignant Symphony No. 1. And Beethoven’s operatic Leonore overture sets a dramatic tone, complete with an offstage trumpet call.

PROGRAM NOTES
By Steven Ledbetter
LUDWIG VAN BEETHOVEN: Leonore Overture No. 3
Ludwig van Beethoven was baptized in Bonn, Germany, on December 17, 1770, and died in Vienna on March 27, 1827. He began composing Fidelio—a German adaptation by Joseph Ferdinand Sonnleithner of a French libretto, Léonore, ou L’Amour conjugal, early in 1804, completing the composition the following year. The opera was produced unsuccessfully on November 20, 1805, considerably pruned and performed again on March 29 and April 10, 1806, at which time he introduced the overture now known as Leonore No. 3. A thorough reworking of text and music (libretto revisions by G. F. Treitschke) made in 1814 was successfully performed at the Kärntnerthor Theater in Vienna on May 23 of that year. The score calls for flutes, oboes, clarinets, and bassoons in pairs, four horns, two trumpets, three trombones, timpani, and strings.

Beethoven’s struggle with his single completed opera are well documented not only in the different versions of the opera itself but also in the overtures—no fewer than four—that he composed for his work. Of these, three are called “Leonore Overtures,” according to the title that Beethoven preferred (though it was not, in the end, used in performance since Giovanni Simone Mayr had recently written an opera with the same title), and the fourth is called simply the Fidelio Overture.

After using what we now call No. 3 for the March 1806 version of the opera, Beethoven chose to replace it finding it too powerful, utterly overwhelming the light-hearted opening scene. It remains one of the most dramatic and exciting overtures ever written. Beginning with a slow introduction that slips surprisingly from the tonic C major to a dark B minor and then to Aflat (where Beethoven briefly quotes Florestan’s aria “In des Lebens Frühlingstagen”), it takes some time for Beethoven to return to his home key for the Allegro and the main body of the movement. The Allegro presents music of tense excitement not found in the opera itself, then modulates to a bright E major for the secondary theme (Florestan’s aria again, stated by clarinet). The taut development climaxes in a climactic gesture borrowed from the opera—an offstage trumpet signaling the arrival of help and the downfall of the villainous Don Pizarro’s murderous intentions.

EDWARD ELGAR: Concerto in E minor for Cello and Orchestra, Opus 85
Edward Elgar was born at Broadheath, near Worcester, England, on June 2, 1857, and died in Worcester on February 23, 1934; he was knighted on July 5, 1904. He began composing his Cello Concerto, Opus 85, in September 1918 and completed it in August the following year. The work received its world premiere in London on October 26, 1919, with Elgar himself conducting the London Symphony Orchestra and Felix Salmond as soloist. In addition to the solo instrument, the score calls for two flutes (the second doubling piccolo ad lib.), two oboes, two clarinets, two bassoons, four horns, two trumpets, three trombones, tuba ad lib., timpani, and strings.

During the years of World War I, Elgar largely withdrew from the musical world and, with his wife, lived quietly by himself. Then, in 1918 and 1919, Elgar’s creative impulse exploded in a sudden outpouring of chamber music—a string quartet, a violin sonata, and a piano quintet, all his very first ventures into each medium—capped by his most personal concerto.
The years immediately before had been made bleak by the death of friends, by war news from the European fronts, and by his own ill health. One of the first ideas for the Cello Concerto was the gently lilting Moderato theme of the first movement. Elgar played the theme to a violinist friend who called it “an infinite tune,” one that “seems to have no beginning and no end.” Elgar noted on the sketch, “very full, sweet, and sonorous.”
In the spring of 1919, Elgar invited Felix Salmond, cellist of the quartet that had recently performed his String Quartet and Piano Quintet, to premiere the Cello Concerto and consult with him on the draft. The premiere was scheduled for November 26 with the London Symphony Orchestra. Ironically the last major premiere of Elgar’s life—when he was regarded as the greatest English composer of his age—was undercut by insufficient rehearsal, the same problem that had ruined the premiere of his greatest masterpiece, The Dream of Gerontius. Elgar conducted his own work, but Albert Coates, who was leading the rest of the concert, took most of the rehearsal time, so the Cello Concerto had a disastrous premiere. The audience was more polite than on the earlier occasion, if only out of deference to Elgar’s reputation, and some of the critics recognized that the work was seriously under rehearsed.

Even a superb performance would probably have left the first audience at a loss; the Cello Concerto is about as atypical a concerto as it is possible to go. Elgar’s music fit the new times. The Great War had finally put an end to old notions of chivalry and military glory. The English were concentrating on individual sorrows rather than nationalistic glories. And Elgar sensed his own mortality. No wonder the introspective element dominates, giving the work an autumnal quality.

The cello solo opens with a poignant recitative moving gradually downward in a mood of elegiac lassitude. The violas enter with the “infinite tune,” which seems to have started somewhere before we are able to hear it. Eventually the full orchestra presents it in the manner noted on Elgar’s sketch: “very full, sweet, and sonorous.” The middle section begins in 12/8 with a dialogue between the clarinets and bassoons on the one hand and the solo cello on the other. It is brighter than the first theme, moving to the major mode, but retaining the same lazy, rocking character. The opening material returns and dies away over a lowheld E in the cellos and basses.

The second movement begins with a brief reference in the solo cello (pizzicato) to the introductory recitative of the first movement; the soloist then tentatively investigates a figure with many repeated notes. This eventually launches into a fast movement in G major built up on the repeatednote theme laid out in a free sonata form with one of Elgar’s impetuous, warmhearted lyrical phrases as the contrasting idea.

The slow movement is a long elegiac song in a single breath, set in the key of Bflat major, as far away from the concerto’s home key of E minor as it is possible to get. The movement ends on its dominant and leads into the introduction of the finale, which opens in the distant key of Bflat minor.
The orchestra hints at the main theme to come and modulates quickly to E minor for the entrance of the soloist in a recitative, rather like the one that opened the concerto. Once the orchestra reenters in the Allegro tempo, the finale is underway, laid out as a free rondo. This is by far the longest and most elaborately developed movement in the concerto.

Towards the end the lighthearted vigor with which the finale began is replaced by a surprising pathos in a new, slow theme colored by complex chromatic harmonies. The cello sings a passionate new theme in 3/4 time, one of Elgar’s great emotional outpourings. It flows directly into a brief reminiscence of the slow movement, then recalls the concerto’s very beginning before the orchestra concludes the work with an abrupt final statement.

The concerto is both a valedictory to an age and the farewell of a great composer. Alice’s death on April 7, 1920 left Elgar utterly devastated. Her complete confidence in his creative genius had, time and again, given him the strength to overcome doubt and depression. In the remaining fifteen years of his life he planned and sketched a third symphony and an opera, among other things, but completed no substantial work. It is well known that Elgar wrote on his score of The Dream of Gerontius, “This is the best of me.” Although he didn’t say it in so many words, Michael Kennedy suggests that the pathos of the Cello Concerto tells us, “This is the last of me.”

SIR WILLIAM WALTON: Symphony No. 1 in B-flat minor

William Walton was born in Oldham, Lancashire, England, on March 29, 1902, and died on the island of Ischia, Italy, on March 8, 1983. He received a knighthood in 1951. Walton composed his First Symphony between 1931-35. The work was given its premiere with the London Symphony Orchestra under Sir Hamilton Harty on November 6, 1935 (the same forces had performed the first three movements the previous December). The score calls for two flutes (2nd doubling piccolo), two oboes, two clarinets, two bassoons, four horns, three trumpets, three trombones and tuba, two timpanists plus cymbals, field drum, tamtam, and strings.

During the half century and more of his career, William Walton was first of all a notorious “bad boy” for the prankish and sassy Facade, composed when he was barely twenty; then a composer of fashionably modern (though not “modernistic”) music in his Viola Concerto and the brilliant oratorio Belshazzar’s Feast, which inverted many of the conventions of the Victorian “dramatic cantata”; and finally as a respected senior composer often regarded as old-fashioned for a generally conservative musical language. Walton was a private man who regularly withdrew to Italy, finally settling on the island of Ischia for the last thirty-five years of his life, working carefully and at his own pace on his compositions.

His First Symphony was an expansive work in a broadly romantic vein, with a Beethovenian character of “struggle to triumph”—yet at the same time it revealed that sense of pageantry which is thoroughly English and reminiscent of Edward Elgar. It is not surprising that a composer capable of such good, ringing, broad tunes should be commissioned to write a march for a royal coronation. Indeed, Walton was twice so commissioned, in 1937 for the coronation of George V, and again in 1953 for the coronation of Queen Elizabeth.

The symphony had an unusually long gestation. Walton composed the first three movements while living with the Baroness Imma Doernfeld, a twenty-eight year old widow of a German baron twice her age who had died soon after they were married. Walton met her when he went to Germany for a performance of his Viola Concerto by Paul Hindemith, and fell in love with her at first sight. They lived together in Switzerland from 1931 to 1933, while he worked on the opening movements of the symphony. There were starts and stops, as well as periods in which he wrote to his friend Siegfried Sassoon that he had been “doing a good deal more ruminating than actual work” but added “nevertheless I’ve collected a number of symphonious bars which promise well.”

Sir Hamilton Harty was eager to give the first performance in March 1934, but Walton completed only the first three movements. Part of the problem was that Imma left him in the middle of 1933. By the end of 1934 Walton allowed the first three movements to be performed without the finale. The favorable response encouraged him to finish the symphony. He took up the finale again in 1935, drawing together threads that he had been working on for years to create a powerful finale. The response to the complete work was so strong that the symphony was recorded only five weeks later.

The first movement begins the rapid presentation of four thematic fragments in the first half minute: an expanding sonority in the horns, a nervous rhythmic figure in the strings, a long-held note in the oboe ending with a melodic flourish, and a pizzicato figure in the basses built on large intervals. These become the basis of the movement through a very imaginative process of development.

The second movement bears the unusual heading “Presto, con malizia” (“with malice”). It is a powerful driving scherzo with a certain bite that may have been influenced from the recent music of Prokofiev, regarded at the time as ultra-modern. The slow movement opens with a tune that Walton had originally thought of as the opening of the symphony years before, at which time he regarded it as an allegro theme. But having found other music to begin with, he slowed down the theme to make a melancholy and pensive opening for the slow movement. The winds play the leading roles in unfolding this “Andante con maliconia” (“with melancholy”).

The finale opens with a fanfare telling us immediately that this music was composed by an Englishman, aware of the traditions of “pomp and circumstance.” It explodes with an outburst of energy that overcomes the “malice” and “melancholy” of the earlier movements. When Walton was stuck on how to finish the work from the middle of the last movement, Constant Lambert suggested a fugue. Walton replied, “But I don’t know how to write one.” Lambert pointed him to the article on the subject in Grove’s Dictionary, and, thus informed, Walton generated a vigorous theme that leads into lively fugal passage. For all the darkness of its opening movements, the symphony closes with a power lift of enthusiasm and energy—no doubt one of the reasons that it was so warmly received in a difficult decade in England. But that energy and drive are just as welcome today whenever we have one of the all-too-rare experiences of hearing this majestic work with its closing triumphant pages.

© Steven Ledbetter (www.stevenledbetter.com)