Mendelssohn, Britten And A Surprising New Talent

This delightful work is a souvenir of the time Britten spent in North America during the early years of the Second World War. He arrived here from England in May 1939. Before moving on to New York, he spent several weeks in Canada. The folk songs he heard here inspired him to set some of them, in his own individual way, as the Canadian Carnival. He completed it by December, and it was first heard on a BBC radio broadcast seven months later. It begins and ends with distant trumpet fanfares. They are set amid suggestions in the strings and percussion of icy northern landscapes. In between comes a medley of tunes, rambunctious and lyrical by turns, filled with echoes of brass bands and country fiddling. They include Là-bas sur les montagnes, Jardin d’amour, and La Perdriole, but the undoubted highlight is Britten’s delightfully jazzy setting of the familiar Québecois counting-song, Alouette.
Program Notes © 2019 Don Anderson

My piano concerto was premiered in 2017 in Austria, with the Vienna Chamber Orchestra. It is in E-flat Major, which is one of my favourite keys, and which was my absolute favourite when I was younger. I wrote the piano concerto “back to front,” starting from the third movement, and then second and the first movement only at the end. The first movement was written in the spring of 2017. The main idea for it came to me when I was on a flight from England to Vienna. I heard a motive, and almost immediately two versions of this motive played in my head: a dark and dramatic version, and a light and much more lyrical version. For a while, these two versions “fought” one another in my head, and eventually the whole movement turned into a conflict between light and darkness. The orchestral introduction starts with just two happy bars of E-flat Major, but it then plunges into the dark version of the motive in the third bar. After this dark chord, the orchestra cannot continue happily, and the rest of the orchestral introduction is in the darkness. It’s only the entrance of the piano that brings back the light, with a much happier version of the orchestral theme. The darkness comes back at various points during the movement, and especially at the end, where it tries to have the last word with fortissimo chords. But the light finally overcomes it.

The second movement, the Adagio, was finished in February 2017. But its birth goes back nearly two years before. A few days after grandmother in Israel passed away in 2015, I was sitting in her house and improvising on her piano, when a very sad melody came into my head. It was in an unusual key, B-flat Minor, and I heard an oboe playing it.

The third movement goes back even longer in time, to a set of jocular variations that I composed when I was nine. I heard the theme for these variations in the middle of the night, and I sneaked out of bed to write it down. Two years later, I adapted these variations into a third movement of a concerto, which is a mixture between a rondo and variations. During the movement, there is quite a lot of “argument” going on between the soloist and the orchestra, with the orchestra trying to go in one direction and the soloist going in completely different directions. But eventually, the soloist and the orchestra make peace, and continue playing happily together.

The concert concludes with music by another musical prodigy. An early nineteenth-century man of means such as Mendelssohn could expect a “grand tour” of Europe as part of his education. He had already visited several countries when he set out on a further three-year expedition in April 1829. England was the first stop, followed by Scotland. A visit to the ruined chapel of Holyrood Castle near Edinburgh sparked Mendelssohn’s imagination. “This evening in the deep twilight,” he wrote home, “we went to the palace where Queen Mary lived and loved; there is a small room with a winding staircase leading up to it…The adjacent chapel has lost its roof; grass and ivy grow thickly within; and on the broken altar Mary was crowned Queen of Scotland. Everything there is in ruins and ramshackle, open to the blue sky. I think I have today found the opening of my ‘Scottish’ Symphony.” The tour continued to Italy, where Mendelssohn kept working on the symphony, but gradually the sunny climate dissipated the call of his Celtic muse. He did not complete it until January 1842. He conducted the first performance six weeks later, in Leipzig.

It opens with a plaintive, darkly coloured introduction based upon the ‘Holyrood Castle’ theme. This leads to a highly active and dramatic first movement proper. Mendelssohn offered only token relaxation through a sad, sighing second theme. The second movement emerges out of the quiet close of the first. It is a jaunty, featherweight scherzo that displays the influence of Scottish folk music.

The third movement is a slow, almost mournful procession that grows increasingly forceful. The warlike finale is highly rhythmic, with materials passed about rapidly between the sections of the orchestra. As in the first movement, the tumult dies down to a whisper. But this time the music rises up in glory through a majestic, hymn-like transformation of the “Holyrood Castle” theme that sets an uplifting seal of triumph upon the symphony.

Program Notes © 2019 Don Anderson