(Worcester, 1857-1934)
Concerto for violin and orchestra in B minor (opus 61)
In 1909 the Royal Philharmonic Society of London commissioned Elgar to produce a concertante for violin and orchestra. A year later, on 10 November 1910, it was premiered with the London Symphony Orchestra and Fritz Kreisler, to whom the work was dedicated, as soloist, with Elgar in the title role. Elgar had begun work on a violin concerto in 1890, but being a violinist himself, he was not content with this and destroyed the manuscript. It was Kreisler who asked him to write a violin concerto in 1907, and Elgar was to perform it in the period between his two symphonies when he received a commission from the Royal Philharmonic Society. The concerto’s reputation as one of the most difficult in the violin repertoire meant that the first recording was not made until 1932 by a very young Yehudi Menuhin; because very few people had the courage to do this. After the success of the record, it continued to be programmed and played by the best violinists, and in 2010, on the occasion of the centenary of its London premiere, this concert was performed all over the world. The lead singer visiting us today, Pinchas Zukerkman, was born in Tel Aviv in 1948, the year Israel was founded as a state, and has performed this song many times, almost always with the same approach the young Menuhin did in his time. A more meaningful reading than an energetic reading, at or beyond the fifty-minute practice limit. It is one of Elgar’s longest orchestral compositions and the last of his creations to achieve instant popular success. It is one of the most complex works ever written and a character study whose plot is shrouded in mystery. A mystery contributed by a simple phrase written in Spanish on the sheet music: “Here his soul is locked…” An excerpt from Alain-René Lesage’s Gil Blas, its five ellipses spread over a wide area. Speculations as to who he is have been attributed to scholars of the author of Enigma, Variations on an Original Theme (opus 86). Elgar’s biographer Jerrold Northrop Moore suggests that this refers not to a single person but to many people, including Elgar’s wife Alice and his mother. Elgar said about this concert: «Very beautiful! Terribly emotional! I’m too emotional but I love it.
Johannes Brahms
(Hamburg, 1833-Vienna 1897)
Symphony No. 1 in C minor (opus 68)
In 1854, Johannes Brahms heard Beethoven’s Ninth for the first time and decided to write a symphony. A year later, in 1855, he developed the first sketches of the work but did not finish it until twenty years later, between 1874 and 1876. It has been written that he anticipated the great responsibility that came with being Beethoven’s heir. Eduard Hanslick, the conservative critic who was the most influential in Vienna at the time, recognized the value and importance of Brahms’ achievements after hearing about them, and in 1877 Hans von Bülow named this first work of Brahms’s “Beethoven’s Tenth Symphony” because of the similarities between them. defined. compositions of both authors. Brahms reacted by saying that this was not a plagiarism of the Bonn master’s works, but the use of his musical language as a “conscious act of respect”. It was Robert Schumann who encouraged him to compose the symphony in 1853. Between 1854 and 1856, while Brahms was helping Clara Schumann with her seven children in Düsseldorf while her husband Robert languished in an asylum, he set about sketching a symphony, and in 1862 he showed the results to the now widowed Clara. He held onto these early scores for a dozen years, until in 1874 he decided to complete the first of his four symphonies, grouped two by two (1876-1877 and 1883-1885), which had brought him such fame. Symphony No. 1 was premiered in Karlsruhe on 4 November 1876, under the baton of Felix Otto Dessolf, and played a month and a half later in Vienna, where it was received by Hanslick’s warm article mentioned above. During that period, Brahms went on an important concert tour, sometimes as a pianist and sometimes as a conductor. This work has an extensive discography, which I have listed to remind music lovers: From the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra, Wilhelm Furtwängler’s discography in 1951 (Warner), Karl Böhm’s discography in 1975 and Carlo Maria Giulini’s discography in 1991. on Deutsch Grammophon (DG); In 1976 the Baden-Baden and Freiburg SWR Orchestra (DG) conducted by Sergiu Celibidache, and in 1978 the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by Herbert von Karajan (also in the DG).