New Year’s Eve Concert with Kirill Petrenko and Alexander Malofeev

About the Work

Otto Nicolai is remembered today for two things: he founded the Philharmonic Concerts in Vienna in 1842, the origin of the Vienna Philharmonic, and he wrote Die lustigen Weiber von Windsor (The Merry Wives of Windsor), the comic opera whose overture opens tonight’s programme.

Nicolai had made his name in Italy with a series of Italian operas before settling in Vienna, and the Shakespeare opera, composed mostly in 1845 and 1846, was his first major work in German. The libretto, by Salomon Hermann Mosenthal, follows Shakespeare’s plot: two married women, Frau Fluth and Frau Reich, discover that the vain and penniless Falstaff has sent them identical love letters, and set about humiliating him, first by tipping him into a ditch in a laundry basket and finally at a midnight masquerade in Windsor Forest, where he is tormented by guests disguised as spirits and elves. Around this runs the love story of Anna Reich and the young Fenton, who marry in secret while her parents each try to marry her off to someone else.

The work proved hard to place. The Vienna Court Opera declined to give the first performance, a disappointment that was one of the main reasons Nicolai left the city in 1847. The opera was finally premiered in Berlin on 9 March 1849, with Nicolai conducting, but he died there only a short time later, in May, having just been appointed court music director. Its lasting popularity came after his death, above all in Germany and Austria, where it has remained in the repertoire. The overture became a concert favourite in its own right.

Musically the opera follows the German Singspiel tradition, with musical numbers joined by spoken dialogue, and it combines two strands of German opera of the time: the romantic, supernatural colouring of Weber in the moonlit forest scenes, and the comic style of Albert Lortzing in the scenes with Falstaff and the jealous husbands.

What to Listen For

The overture opens quietly, with a slow, lyrical introduction in the strings that sets a romantic, nocturnal mood before the comedy begins. The main Allegro is quick, light and full of bustle, with themes from the opera tossed between strings and woodwind. Nicolai, an experienced conductor, writes with great clarity; listen for the crisp dialogue between sections of the orchestra and for the brilliant, high-spirited coda.

About the Work

Dmitri Shostakovich wrote his First Piano Concerto in 1933, at the age of twenty-six, for himself to play. The concerto is tailored to his own strengths at the keyboard: brilliance and a light touch, dry humour, and a knack for switching character in an instant.

The unusual scoring came about almost by accident. Shostakovich began by planning a trumpet concerto for the trumpeter Alexander Schmidt. As work went on he added the piano, the piece turned into a kind of double concerto, and in the end the piano took the lead, with the trumpet as a prominent partner and commentator, accompanied only by strings. The official title reflects this compromise: Concerto for Piano, Trumpet and String Orchestra.

The premiere took place on 15 October 1933 at the season-opening concerts of the Leningrad Philharmonic, with Shostakovich as soloist, Schmidt on trumpet and Fritz Stiedry conducting. It was received with enthusiasm and helped establish Shostakovich as a concert pianist as well as a composer.

The concerto is full of jokes and borrowings. Beethoven’s “Appassionata” Sonata is quoted near the start, and the finale takes in a Haydn piano sonata and Beethoven’s rondo Rage over a Lost Penny, along with snatches of Shostakovich’s own theatre music. The effect is of a young composer cheerfully raiding the classical cupboard, sometimes affectionately, sometimes with a sneer. The whole piece lasts about twenty minutes.

What to Listen For

Allegro moderato. The piano begins with a flourish and a quote from the “Appassionata”, before setting out a wistful main theme. The music moves quickly between lyrical moments and sharp, sarcastic ones, with the trumpet adding the occasional comment.

Lento. The emotional centre: a slow, melancholy movement with a long piano solo in the middle that builds to an impassioned climax. Near the end the muted trumpet takes over the melody in a moment of real tenderness.

Moderato. A short, reflective interlude, often played as an introduction to the finale.

Allegro con brio. The finale is a madcap chase full of quotations, abrupt changes of direction and music-hall humour. After a short piano cadenza that parodies the classical concerto, the trumpet comes into its own with fanfares and street-band tunes, and the work ends with a burst of C major.

About the Work

In the summer of 1917, as Russia lurched from the February Revolution towards the Bolshevik seizure of power, the twenty-six-year-old Sergei Prokofiev retreated to the countryside outside Petrograd and wrote a symphony of disarming sunniness and poise. He had made his name as an enfant terrible whose raucous early works had outraged his teachers. Now he set out to write a symphony in the style of Haydn. “It seemed to me,” he later wrote, “that if Haydn had lived in our day he would have retained his own style while accepting something of the new at the same time.”

Unusually for him, he composed away from the piano, believing that the orchestral writing would be more natural and transparent that way. He called the work “Classical”, he said, partly because it was simple and partly out of naughtiness, to “tease the geese”. The Gavotte had been written earlier; the other movements came in 1917, and the score was finished in September. Prokofiev himself conducted the first performance in Petrograd in April 1918. Soon afterwards he left Russia, and he did not settle there again for many years.

The orchestra is the size Haydn would have known: pairs of woodwind, horns and trumpets, timpani and strings, with no trombones. At around fifteen minutes it is by far the shortest of Prokofiev’s seven symphonies, and it became one of the most frequently played symphonies of the twentieth century. It is often cited as an early example of the neoclassicism that Stravinsky and others would take up in the 1920s.

What to Listen For

Allegro. A crisp sonata-form movement that opens with a rocket-like arpeggio. Listen for the way Prokofiev uses classical gestures (scales, trills, sudden contrasts of loud and soft) and then gives them a small twist, jumping into an unexpected key and straight back again. The second theme, for the violins, is famous for its huge leaps and delicate grace notes.

Larghetto. A graceful slow movement whose melody floats high in the first violins over a gently ticking accompaniment.

Gavotta. Barely more than a minute long, a stately old dance with heavy-footed bass notes, wide leaps and harmonic surprises.

Finale: Molto vivace. A breathless finale that Prokofiev wrote, by his own account, without a single minor chord. It races along with sparkling woodwind writing and cheerful good humour to the end.

About the Work

Richard Strauss wrote Till Eulenspiegel in 1894 and 1895, in the wake of a failure. His first opera, Guntram, had met a lukewarm reception in Weimar and a disastrous one in Munich, his home city. His first idea for revenge was another opera, in which the medieval prankster Till Eulenspiegel would take on the narrow-minded burghers of Schilda, a thinly disguised Munich. He dropped the opera and poured the idea into an orchestral piece instead.

Till Eulenspiegel is an old figure of German folk tales, a peasant trickster who plays pranks on everyone from market traders to priests and professors. Strauss’s full title describes the piece as “Till Eulenspiegel’s merry pranks, after the old rogue’s tale, set in rondeau form for large orchestra”. The French spelling “rondeau” was itself something of a joke: the music is less a textbook rondo than a series of adventures held together by the return of Till’s themes. Strauss later wrote notes into a friend’s copy of the score that tell the story section by section.

The piece was dedicated to Strauss’s friend Arthur Seidl and first performed in Cologne in 1895 by the Gürzenich Orchestra under Franz Wüllner, with great success. It is Strauss’s most compact tone poem, at around fifteen minutes, and one of his most often played, even though it calls for a larger orchestra than any of his earlier ones, including a ratchet and a shrill clarinet in D.

What to Listen For

After a few gentle bars in the strings that suggest “once upon a time”, the horn plays Till’s first theme, a long, lilting phrase that rises, falls and ends with three emphatic notes. Soon the D clarinet answers with his second theme, a cheeky, wheedling figure that seems to laugh at its own joke. These two ideas return throughout the piece in endless disguises.

Then the adventures begin. Till rides his horse through the market, scattering the stalls (listen for the rattle of the ratchet). He disguises himself as a priest, and the music turns mock-solemn until his theme pokes through. He flirts with the girls, with a love theme in the first violins. He mocks a group of pompous scholars, their pedantic theme given to the bassoons.

The mood changes abruptly with a loud drum roll. Till is arrested and put on trial, and the heavy chords of the court alternate with his increasingly nervous attempts to joke his way out. The sentence is death. The D clarinet screams as he is hanged, and then the music falls silent. But Strauss adds an epilogue: the “once upon a time” music returns, and a final burst from the whole orchestra suggests that the spirit of a Till Eulenspiegel can never really be killed.

About the Work

After the enormous success of Die Fledermaus in 1874, Johann Strauss II struggled for a decade to repeat it. His second lasting hit came from Hungary. His wife Adele introduced him to Saffi, a story by the Hungarian writer Mór Jókai, and in 1883 Strauss met Jókai, who was delighted with the idea of an operetta and suggested the librettist Ignaz Schnitzer.

The story is set in eighteenth-century Hungary. Sándor Barinkay returns from exile to reclaim his family estates and falls in love with Saffi, a Gypsy girl who turns out to be the daughter of a Turkish pasha and the heir to a buried treasure. Strauss wrote music of unusual weight for the genre, and Der Zigeunerbaron (The Gypsy Baron) is sometimes described as closer to comic opera than to operetta. Its score is full of Hungarian colour.

Strauss took his time, and the piece was not finished until the autumn of 1885. The premiere, conducted by the composer at the Theater an der Wien in October 1885, was a triumph, and the operetta soon became an international success. During Strauss’s lifetime only Die Fledermaus was more popular.

What to Listen For

The overture is a medley of the operetta’s best tunes, in the manner of a Viennese potpourri. It moves between Hungarian and Viennese moods: dark, chromatic themes and the fiery accelerations of the csárdás on one side, lilting waltz melodies on the other, above all the tune of the famous Schatz-Walzer (Treasure Waltz). Listen for the colourful orchestration that gives the Hungarian passages their flavour, and for the way Strauss builds the final pages into a whirlwind of speed and brilliance, a fitting close to a New Year’s Eve programme.