Program
Stéphane Denève, conductor
Shai Wosner, piano
Brahms-Fantasie (Heliogravure for Orchestra) (2011–2012)
Ludwig van Beethoven
Piano Concerto No. 1 in C major, op. 15 (1795)
Allegro con brio
Largo
Rondo: Allegro scherzando
Shai Wosner, piano
Johannes Brahms
Symphony No. 1 in C minor, op. 68 (1885)
Un poco sostenuto; Allegro
Andante sostenuto
Un poco allegretto e grazioso
Adagio; Più andante; Allegro non troppo, ma con brio
Program Notes
By Tim Munro and Paul Schiavo
Brahms-Fantasie
Detlev Glanert
Born September 6, 1960, Hamburg, Germany
Music Director Stéphane Dèneve has no doubts. For him, Detlev Glanert is “Germany’s best living composer.” Glanert’s works are known in Europe, but his music is rarely performed in the United States.
Glanert is a true creature of the theater. His ten operas paint a humanity often threatened by evil. “Our dark side,” Glanert has said, “is more interesting than the good. In secret we want to explore that hidden side. Adam and Eve want to keep away, but the temptation is too great.”
Glanert and Johannes Brahms share the same hometown: Hamburg. Glanert feels that he and Brahms share “a specific North German tradition.” It has something to do, he has said, “with a melancholy in [Brahms’] pieces, with a certain severity.”
Glanert loves to live in Brahms’ musical shadow. In Four Serious Songs, Glanert’s music is in direct conversation with Brahms’ songs. In Distant Country, notes from Brahms’ Fourth Symphony are transformed beyond recognition.
For Brahms-Fantasie, the older German recedes further into the distance. Glanert’s work carries only a vague memory of Brahms, an evocation of the emotions and styles and personality of his music. There is outrage and trepidation, there are languid waltzes and wild romps.
Glanert says that music “must tell you something about your life and what you are. If it does not, it will die.” Music must deal with the conflicts that makes us human. “Love, hate, death: my work deals with all these things and how they interact.”
First performance: March 22, 2012, by the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra, in Glasgow, Scotland, Donald Runnicles conducting
First SLSO performance: These concerts
Instrumentation: 2 flutes, 2 oboes, 2 clarinets, 2 bassoons, contrabassoon, 4 horns, 2 trumpets, 3 trombones, timpani, strings
Approximate duration: 12 minutes
Piano Concerto No. 1
Ludwig van Beethoven
Born December 16, 1770, Bonn, Germany
Died March 26, 1827, Vienna, Austria
Ludwig van Beethoven had a sense of musical humor, as we shall hear in the concluding movement of his Piano Concerto No. 1 in C major. Beethoven also was a superb keyboard virtuoso, by all accounts one of the greatest of his day. Carl Czerny, the composer’s student and himself a fine pianist, declared: “Nobody equaled him in the rapidity of his scales, double trills, skips, etc.” Moreover, Czerny asserted, “Beethoven’s performance of slow and sustained passages produced a magical effect on every listener.”
Beethoven composed two works for piano and orchestra during his early years in Vienna, where he settled in 1792. The Piano Concerto in C, completed in 1795 or 1796 and now known as No. 1, op. 15, actually was the second he produced; but since the composer preferred this work to its predecessor, the Piano Concerto in B-flat major, op. 19, it was published earlier and consequently given a more forward position in the catalog of his works. Beethoven may have played the concerto in Vienna as part of a charity concert given in the Austrian capital in December 1795. He probably also presented the work during a trip to Berlin the following year, and he definitely performed it in Prague in 1798, at which time Jan (Johann) Tomašek, another accomplished pianist, heard him and reported on “Beethoven’s magnificent playing . . . ; indeed, I found myself so profoundly bowed down that I did not touch my pianoforte for several days.”
The brilliancy of Beethoven’s piano playing is very much on display in the C-major Concerto. The work begins in the tradition of the “military concerto” openings often used by Mozart. (The martial character of the initial theme is established by its conspicuous fanfare motif, the use of trumpets, and its proud demeanor.) The Largo second movement is elegant and dream‑like. Beethoven, in his own performance, certainly must have “produced a magical effect,” as Carl Czerny described. The finale, by contrast, brings the type of musical humor often found in the works of Beethoven’s occasional teacher, Franz Joseph Haydn, including an energetic episode in “Turkish” style. During the closing bars Beethoven slows the tempo to a decorous Adagio only to pull the rug from under us with a sudden rush to the final measure.
First performance: Unknown, but before 1798; in all probability Beethoven played the solo part and conducted from the keyboard
First SLSO performance: February 2, 1923, Rudolf Ganz as conductor and soloist
Most recent SLSO performance: March 11, 2017, Stéphane Denève conducting with Steven Osborne as soloist.
Instrumentation: solo piano, flute, 2 oboes, 2 clarinets, 2 bassoons, 2 horns, 2 trumpets, timpani, strings
Approximate duration: 36 minutes
Symphony No. 1
Johannes Brahms
Born May 7, 1833, Hamburg, Germany
Died April 3, 1897, Vienna, Austria
From his teen years, Johannes Brahms was in training. He was always working on a large-scale work: a piano sonata, a sextet, a piano concerto, an orchestral serenade. Honing his skills, keeping his eyes on the ultimate goal: to write a symphony.
As a genre, the symphony was in crisis. Ludwig van Beethoven’s five-decade-old symphonies dominated concert programs. New works were ignored, and composers moved to newer, trendier genres. But for Brahms, a symphony remained the ultimate musical achievement.
As an unknown twenty-something, Johannes Brahms began work on the First Symphony. One summer, he sent a draft of the first movement to a confidante, then set it aside. It would be fourteen years until he completed the work.
Friends nudged him, critics needled him. As a thirty-something, rising in renown, Brahms jotted the finale’s heroic horn melody. As a forty-something, he was finally able to “look this symphony straight in the face,” completing it during an idyllic summer retreat.
The First Symphony is ambitious in scope. Its first movement is carved from granite, stern, unyielding. The middle movements capture the subtle light of a winter’s afternoon, clear, dappled. The finale begins with nervous energy, but ends in a blaze of unambiguous light.
Brahms’ music can baffle with its fussy detail, its closely worked intelligence. This complexity is partly political. Brahms believed that slipping standards were destroying Vienna’s proud musical world. He fought back with his only weapon: his music’s finely worked craftsmanship.
By the time the symphony was premiered, Brahms was a professional success. His journey from obscurity to fame had been long, and the First Symphony had been his private companion. Now it would belong the world.
First performance: November 4, 1876, in Karlsruhe, Germany, Felix Otto Dessoff conducting
First SLSO performance: February 18, 1910, Max Zach conducting
Most recent SLSO performance: November 22, 2015, David Robertson conducting
Instrumentation: 2 flutes, 2 oboes, 2 clarinets, 2 bassoons, contrabassoon, 4 horns, 2 trumpets, 3 trombones, timpani, strings
Approximate duration: 45 minutes
Tim Munro is the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra’s Creative Partner. A writer, broadcaster, and Grammy-winning flutist, he lives in Chicago with his wife, son, and badly behaved orange cat.
Program Notes are sponsored by Washington University Physicians.