SUPER AUDIO CD Mendelssohn IN BIRMINGHAM Violin Concerto in E minor Incidental Music to ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream’ Jennifer Pike violin City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra VOL. 4 Edward Gardner Painting by Thomas Hildebrandt (1804 – 1874) / Stadtgeschichtliches Museum, Leipzig / AKG Images, London Felix Mendelssohn, 1845 Mendelssohn, Felix Felix Mendelssohn (1809 – 1847) Mendelssohn in Birmingham, Volume 4 Concerto, Op. 64* 27:56 in E minor • in e-Moll • en mi mineur for Violin and Orchestra 1 Allegro molto appassionato – Cadenza ad libitum – Tempo I – Più presto – Sempre più presto – Presto – 12:55 2 Andante – Allegretto non troppo – 9:01 3 Allegro molto vivace 6:00 Incidental Music to ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream’, Op. 61† 39:44 (Ein Sommernachtstraum) by William Shakespeare (1564 – 1616) 4 Overture (Op. 21). Allegro di molto – [ ] – Tempo I – Poco ritenuto 11:25 5 1 Scherzo (After the end of the first act). Allegro vivace 4:30 6 3 Song with Chorus. Allegro ma non troppo 3:57 7 5 Intermezzo (After the end of the second act). Allegro appassionato – Allegro molto comodo 3:21 3 8 7 Notturno (After the end of the third act). Con moto tranquillo 5:34 9 9 Wedding March (After the end of the fourth act). Allegro vivace 4:30 10 11 A Dance of Clowns. Allegro di molto 1:33 11 Finale. Allegro di molto – Un poco ritardando – A tempo I. Allegro molto 4:28 TT 67:57 Rhian Lois soprano I† Keri Fuge soprano II† Jennifer Pike violin* CBSO Youth Chorus† Julian Wilkins chorus master City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra Zoë Beyers leader Edward Gardner 4 Mendelssohn: Violin Concerto in E minor / A Midsummer Night’s Dream Introduction fine violinist himself. A student concerto The music of Felix Mendelssohn for violin and strings in D minor survives (1809 – 1847) is probably more highly from his fourteenth year, though it remained valued and widely loved today than it has unpublished until Yehudi Menuhin acquired been at any period since his lifetime. Yet one the manuscript in the 1950s. Quite when still sometimes hears the allegation that he Mendelssohn first conceived the E minor failed quite to fulfil the promise of those Concerto is uncertain, though he had miraculous youthful masterpieces, the Octet, evidently fixed on its opening theme by 1838, completed at sixteen, and the Overture and in 1840 he informed the English music Ein Sommernachtstraum (A Midsummer critic Henry Chorley that it was almost Night’s Dream), of a year later. This compact finished. But the composition of his major disc contains two of his later works, which works rarely ran smoothly for Mendelssohn. most roundly confute that accusation: the Not till September 1844 was the full incidental music for A Midsummer Night’s score completed – then duly submitted to Dream (1843), in which he managed to months of further tinkering that typified his recapture and amplify the unique magic of anxiety to achieve perfection. Mendelssohn his early years, and the Violin Concerto in had always intended the concerto for his E minor (1844), which ever since has retained friend and fellow composer Ferdinand its standing among the three or four greatest David, Konzertmeister of the Gewandhaus of its genre. Orchestra, who gave the first performance in Leipzig on 13 March 1845, under the baton of Violin Concerto in E minor, Op. 64 Niels Gade. Mendelssohn himself directed a It is hardly surprising that even the earliest further performance on 23 October. works of Mendelssohn show an idiomatic His nervousness is understandable, feeling for string writing, as, among his for beneath the appealing, vivacious, and myriad other accomplishments, he was a perfectly resolved surface of the music, the 5 work offered quite a new angle on what a been placed close to the end of the first violin concerto might be. Up till then, most movement, he suddenly introduces it at concertos had conformed to the classical the end of the development – its scudding outline, exemplified by Beethoven’s Violin arpeggio patterns ultimately becoming the Concerto, in which the soloist was cast as an accompaniment to the return of the opening obbligato player in a symphonic argument, melody. As he often does, Mendelssohn usually only entering after the orchestra shortens the recapitulation, dwelling mainly had played a complete exposition of the on the second subject before allowing the main themes; or they had followed the more tempo to pick up in a fraught coda. This romantic course of Paganini, of confining suddenly cuts off, leaving a solitary bassoon the orchestra mainly to a frame and an to steer the music into the Andante second accompaniment to the solo pyrotechnics. movement, which unfolds as a dulcet song Mendelssohn not only links all three without words in C major, with a more traditional movements together, so that his restless contrasting central section in concerto plays continuously, but reconstitutes C minor. A brief intermezzo-like link of the classical forms in an intensely lyrical just fifteen bars then sets up theAllegro molto spirit, the soloist leading from first to last, vivace E major finale, once more in sonata generating the tuttis and dialoguing with form, which contrasts a capricious violinistic orchestral sections and lead players as the opening idea with jubilant hammerings from music unfolds. the orchestra. During the development, the A mere bar and a half of undulating string opening idea generates a more sustained and timpani accompaniment serve to launch countersubject, which inaugurates the the plaintively passionate opening violin recapitulation, the skittering first subject melody, which is not passed to the orchestra serving, in effect, as its accompaniment. until some forty-five increasingly stormy bars Such is the ebullience of the music that later – though the music then gradually calms performances tend to accelerate towards the via a winding transitional idea to a second end, though the score requests no such thing. subject that seems tranquillity itself. But While composers such as Brahms and Mendelssohn has a further surprise in store. Elgar continued to uphold the symphonic Where the solo cadenza had traditionally tradition of violin concerto exemplified 6 by Beethoven, Mendelssohn’s reinvention sonata-form structure – as the introduction of the genre as a more slender, soloist-led, to the new production, running allusions to lyrical form was to prove lastingly influential, its themes through the thirteen new numbers touching works as varied as the violin that constituted his incidental music in order concertos of Bruch, Tchaikovsky, Sibelius, to create an exceptional dramatic unity. Glazunov, Prokofiev, and Walton. Six of those numbers are melodramas: patches of music to accompany or intersperse Incidental Music to Shakespeare’s ‘A the spoken texts at key moments, such as Midsummer Night’s Dream’, Opp. 21 / 61 Oberon’s magic spells or Puck’s leading Among the more unavoidable tasks that astray of the contending lovers. These are Mendelssohn faced during his increasingly omitted from the present recording. After the overworked later years was the fulfilment Overture, no further music was required for of recurrent demands of King Friedrich the first of Shakespeare’s five acts, in any case. Wilhelm IV of Prussia for elaborate But to prelude the appearance of Puck at the incidental music to a succession of classical beginning of Act II, Mendelssohn composed play productions at Potsdam, including his Scherzo, showing that he had lost none of the Antigone and Oedipus at Colonus of his unique touch for scoring feather-light fast Sophocles and Athalie by Racine. These music, and culminating in a fluttering flute Mendelssohn tackled with varying degrees of solo that runs for no fewer than thirty-four enthusiasm, finally baulking at having to set unbroken bars. The next substantial cue is the choruses of the Eumenides of Aeschylus. the setting of the fairy lullaby to Titania, However, the commission to supply music ‘You spotted snakes’, a Song with Chorus for to the celebrated Schlegel translation of two sopranos, women’s chorus, and a delicate Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream orchestral backing of rippling, pattering (Ein Sommernachtstraum) was another matter sonorities. Then, as a link between Acts II for this very text had inspired his earliest and III, Mendelssohn devised an Intermezzo. outright orchestral masterpiece. Mendelssohn This begins as fraughtAllegro appassionato, as duly recycled his Overture, Op. 21 – its Hermia awakes from a nightmare, finds her magical fairy music, regal fanfares, and bucolic lover gone, and rushes into the forest to find brayings all perfectly integrated into a spacious him, but then calms into a rustic procession as 7 the rude mechanicals come to rehearse their Shakespeare’s comedy with Mendelssohn’s play at the beginning of Act III. complete incidental music, and perhaps the By the end of the Act, the four lovers twentieth-century rise of the film score has have been reassembled and enchanted into put paid to the whole notion of incidental a restorative sleep, to which Mendelssohn music. But how the nineteenth-century genre adds the benediction of his Notturno, with its enriched the concert repertoire with orchestral golden-toned horn solo, by way of postlude. gems! One thinks of Schubert’s music for By contrast, the C major Wedding March Rosamunde, Bizet’s for L’Arlésienne, Grieg’s (in which the full orchestra initially enters in for Peer Gynt, Fauré’s and Sibelius’s music for E minor!), serves as prelude to Act V, during Pelléas et Mélisande, and so on. Yet none of which, having performed their play, the these shine more brightly than the Scherzo mechanicals round it off with their Dance and Notturno from A Midsummer Night’s of the Clowns, based on the bucolic music Dream, while the Wedding March has escaped from the Overture.