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Kansas City Symphony
2011-2012 Classical Series
May 18, 19 and 20, 2012
Bernard Labadie, Conductor
Arnaldo Cohen, Piano
J.C. BACH
Symphony in G minor, Op. 6, No. 6
Allegro
Andante più tosto adagio
Allegro molto
MENDELSSOHN
Piano Concerto No. 1 in G minor, Op. 25
Molto Allegro con fuoco
Andante
Presto — Molto Allegro e vivace
Played without pause
— INTERMISSION —
KRAUS
Symphony in F major, VB 145
Largo maestoso — Allegro vivace
Larghetto amoroso e semplice
Presto
HAYDN
Symphony No. 101 in D major, “Clock”
Adagio — Presto
Andante
Menuet: Allegretto
Finale: Vivace
May 18-20, 2012, page 1
Notes on the Program by DR. RICHARD E. RODDA
Johann Christian Bach (1735-1782)
Symphony in G minor, Op. 6, No. 6 (ca. 1775)
Two oboes, two horns and strings.
SIDEBAR – BULLET POINTS:
• J.C. Bach was Johann Sebastian’s Bach’s youngest son and the one who
made his career farthest from his family home
• Mozart met Bach in London in 1764 and was greatly influenced by him
• Bach’s Op. 6, No. 6 Symphony is one of the few from the late 18th century
whose movements are all in minor keys
The definition of the form and style of the symphony was fluid in the decades before the
mature works of Haydn and Mozart in the 1780s. Six of Johann Christian Bach’s most
significant achievements in the field (which numbered more than sixty separate works)
appeared in 1781 as his Op. 6, and they occupy an important place in the development of the
genre between the fledgling symphonies of Boyce and Sammartini and the masterworks of the
Viennese school. Bach’s Symphony in G minor, Op. 6, No. 6, broaches the expressively
unsettled Sturm und Drang (“Storm and Stress”) style that was his brother Carl Philipp
Emanuel’s most characteristic musical speech and was also explored by Mozart and Haydn in
a few of their symphonies around the same time; it is Christian Bach’s only symphony in a
minor key and one of the very few from the late 18th century without a major-key movement.
The Symphony opens with an agitated main theme whose two components — a quick, rising
flourish followed by three repeated notes and a sighing motive — provide much of the material
for the movement; the subsidiary subject is brighter in harmonic color, leaner in texture and
smoother in contour. The sighing phrase figures prominently in the development section.
Materials from the exposition are reprised, though somewhat more loosely than in fully formed
sonata structure, which was just then reaching its maturity. The sonata-form Andante is
music of strong emotion that could also have served well to accompany a tragic scene in one of
Bach’s ten operas. The finale is abundant in energy but serious in mood, with the movement
coming to a highly unconventional ending.
Felix Mendelssohn (1809-1847)
Piano Concerto No. 1 in G minor, Op. 25 (1830)
Pairs of woodwinds, horns and trumpets, timpani and strings.
SIDEBAR – BULLET POINTS:
• Mendelssohn composed the Piano Concerto No. 1 during his extensive
European concert tour of 1829-1830
• the Concerto was probably his most popular work during his lifetime except
for the Overture to A Midsummer Night’s Dream
• Mendelssohn’s friend Ferdinand Hiller said that “he played the piano as a
lark soars, because it was his nature”
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With the exception of the Midsummer Night’s Dream Overture, the G minor Concerto may
well have been Mendelssohn’s greatest success during his lifetime. He recorded that when he
first played it in London in 1832 “the audience went wild and declared it my best work.” Liszt
created a sensation when he gave it in Paris. It quickly made the rounds of all the music
capitals, and was perhaps the most frequently heard concerto of its time. So ubiquitous was it
that Hector Berlioz, in one of his Evenings in the Orchestra, reported on a piano that had
endured so many performances of the work by a passing horde of virtuosi that it started to
play the piece all by itself. Perhaps inevitably, the Concerto eventually slipped from favor,
though it still makes an occasional gracious call upon the concert hall. “He played the piano as
a lark soars, because it was his nature,” wrote Ferdinand Hiller of Mendelssohn. “He possessed
great adroitness, sureness, strength, fluency, a soft, full tone.” These qualities, to which may
be added a sense of controlled virtuosity, marked not only Mendelssohn’s keyboard
personality, but also his compositional style, and are abundantly evident in his First Piano
Concerto.
The Concerto is disposed in the traditional three movements — fast–slow–fast — though,
unlike the Classical model, these are instructed to be played without pause. Among the
Concerto’s other forward-looking attributes: the excision of the opening orchestral introduction
in favor of the immediate presentation of the soloist, a technique to which he returned in his
two later concertos; the omission of a solo cadenza; and the return of the first movement’s
subsidiary melody in the finale. The opening movement (marked “Very fast, with fire”) follows
sonata form, though the return of its thematic materials is considerably compressed so as not
to overwhelm the transition to the second movement. The Andante is a deliciously filigreed
song-without-words given by the soloist above the rich-hued accompaniment of strings without
violins. The finale is a glittering rondo prefaced by a mock-dramatic orchestral strain.
Joseph Martin Kraus (1756-1792)
Symphony in F major, van Boer 145 (ca. 1785)
Two oboes, two bassoons, two horns and strings.
SIDEBAR – BULLET POINTS:
• J.M. Kraus was born in Germany but became music director at the Swedish
court in Stockholm
• King Gustav III subsidized Kraus’ four-year educational tour of Europe’s
music capitals
• Kraus died in 1792 at 36, the same age as Mozart one year earlier
“The Swedish Mozart” he was called — born in June 1756, five months after Leopold
Mozart’s son in Salzburg, precocious musically, widely traveled, prolific with a special gift for
musical theater, and dead just one year and one week after the composer of Figaro and Don
Giovanni and The Magic Flute — Joseph Martin Kraus was among the most accomplished
musicians of his day. Born in Miltenberg, Germany, he studied at the universities in Mainz,
Erfurt and Göttingen, and moved to Stockholm in 1778 in hope of finding a position at the
Royal Academy, established by King Gustav III seven years before to promote the fine arts.
Kraus struggled for recognition in Stockholm for the next three years, however, but in 1781 he
was elected to the Royal Academy of Music and finally captured the attention of Gustav in
June 1781 with his opera Proserpina, based on a scenario drafted by the king himself. Kraus
was made assistant music director at court and Gustav saw such promise in his young protégé
that he sent him on a four-year educational tour of Europe’s music capitals. Soon after he
returned to Stockholm in 1786, Kraus was appointed director of curriculum at the Royal
Academy of Music and the following year became music director to Gustav III. His burgeoning
May 18-20, 2012, page 3
career took a fateful turn, however, when he was present at the masked ball in January 1792
at which King Gustav was assassinated; he composed a Symphonie Funèbre for the funeral
procession and a cantata for the burial. The shock exacerbated the tuberculosis that had been
undermining his health since shortly after he returned to Sweden, and he died the following
December. Kraus was 36, the same age as Mozart, when he passed away.
Kraus’ Symphony in F major, composed in Paris sometime around 1785, opens with a slow
introduction, broad in pacing but mild in manner. The first movement’s sonata form is
launched by a bracing main theme in quicker tempo presented in unison; the subsidiary
formal material comprises a delicate phrase initiated by the first violins, a quiet four-note
motive traded among the strings, stair-step figurations for the ensemble, and a sweet melody
for the oboe. The secondary motives and then the main theme are given dramatic treatment in
the development section, after which a full recapitulation of the exposition’s materials rounds
out the movement. The Larghetto is framed by a polite melody reminiscent of the gavotte, a
French country dance, but the movement’s central section is given over to an expressive
dialogue for flute and oboe and a surprisingly emotional transformation of the opening theme.
The sonata-form finale takes a vigorous scalar melody in triplet rhythms as its main theme and
a nimble skipping motive as its subsidiary subject. The hunting associations of this bounding
movement are suggested by a delightful passage featuring horns in the development section. A
reprise of the earlier themes brings this handsome Symphony by an underappreciated
composer to a satisfying close.
Joseph Haydn (1732-1809)
Symphony No. 101 in D major, “Clock” (1794)
Woodwinds, horns and trumpets in pairs, timpani and strings.
SIDEBAR – BULLET POINTS:
• Haydn composed the D major Symphony for his second visit to London, in
1794-1795
• the work acquired its subtitle because of the metronomic accompaniment of
the second movement
• the work was received rapturously at its premiere in the elegant Hanover
Square Rooms on March 3, 1794
Haydn left Vienna for his second English visit on January 19, 1794, and arrived in London
sixteen days later. The concerts that Johann Peter Salomon arranged for Haydn’s English visit
during the spring of 1794 were among the season’s most glittering social events. Anticipating a
strong demand for tickets among the nobility, gentry and wealthy society, Salomon set the
price for admission to all twelve Monday evening concerts (February 10th through May 12th,
with two weeks off for the Easter holiday) at a hefty five guineas; a single ticket was available
for one-half a guinea, about the cost of a big meal for four with wine in those days. The
Symphony No. 101 (“The Clock”) was premiered at the fourth concert of Haydn’s 1794 series,
on March 3rd. It was greeted rapturously. The success of the new Symphony is hardly
surprising, since Haydn was not only a peerlessly skilled instrumental composer by 1794 but
also an astute judge of English musical tastes who planted a musical “hook” in several of his
London symphonies to catch the interest of the public. It was the metronomic accompaniment
of the second movement — the mechanical tick-tock that spawned the work’s subtitle — that
set English tongues wagging.
The work opens with a slow introduction in a portentous minor mode. These ominous
measures are balanced by the movement’s nimble main theme, initiated by a scalar motive
that is spun into a melody of unexpected five-measure phrases. After a hold and a pause, the
melody is reworked to serve as a transition to the demure complementary theme. The
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development section dwells at some length on this subsidiary melody. Haydn subjected his
thematic material to some additional elaborations in the recapitulation. The simplicity of the
Andante’s ticking background belies the sophistication and ingenuity of the movement’s formal
plan, a hybrid of variations and rondo. There follows one of the largest minuet movements in
18th-century music, an almost Beethovenian expansion of the old dance form that is by far the
longest such movement among Haydn’s London symphonies. In considering the finale, Haydn
authority H.C. Robbins Landon suggested that it “has claims to being the greatest final
movement he ever wrote, a breathtaking sonata-rondo with everything in it from a virtuoso
double fugue (all held down to pianissimo) to interludes of Beethovenian power.”
©2011 Dr. Richard E. Rodda