Dima Slobodeniouk and Yo-Yo Ma: Dean, Schumann and Mendelssohn

About the Work

Brett Dean, the Berliner Philharmoniker’s Composer in Residence this season and a former violist of the orchestra, opens the evening with a short piece about remembering. The orchestra’s programme lists it as Locket, in a version for chamber orchestra, and its introduction to the concert calls it Recollections: Locket, a nostalgic work in which Dean quotes a theme by Clara Schumann.

Recollections is a set of six short movements that Dean wrote in 2006 for an ensemble of eight players: clarinet, horn, percussion, violin, viola, cello, double bass and piano. It was commissioned for the 2006 edition of the festival “Spannungen”, which is held in the power station (Kraftwerk) at Heimbach in Germany, and is dedicated to Lars Vogt and the festival’s musicians. The first performance took place there on 18 June 2006. Locket is the last of the six.

In his own note on the work, Dean says that Recollections is about aspects of memory, and about how fickle and misleading memory can be, making things rosier or bleaker than they were. Each title points to a different kind of reminiscence. Two of the movements, Relic and Locket, stand for older and more distant memories. In Locket he quotes a piano piece by Clara Schumann, which he identifies as a Romanza in A minor, and he describes the quotation as an artefact found beneath a layer of dust, in an attic perhaps, something that carries you back in time.

The choice of this movement suits the programme: Clara Schumann’s music is heard, at one remove, just before her husband’s Cello Concerto. We have found no published description of the chamber orchestra version beyond the orchestra’s own listing, so what follows describes the movement as Dean and its first reviewers present it.

What to Listen For

Listen for the moment when an older music comes into focus. A critic at the first performance wrote that the last movement lets the quotation from Clara Schumann hover behind a veil of new sounds. Her melody is not presented plainly, the way a set of variations would state its theme. It is glimpsed through Dean’s own textures, as a keepsake might be recognised under the dust he mentions.

The title fits that image. A locket holds something small and private from the past, and the music treats its borrowed melody the same way, as something kept and briefly opened.

About the Work

Schumann wrote his Cello Concerto in the autumn of 1850, very quickly, soon after he and his family had moved to Düsseldorf, where he had taken up the post of municipal music director. The first months there were productive ones. The “Rhenish” Symphony belongs to the same period.

He never heard the concerto. No performance could be arranged in his lifetime, and it was first played in 1860, four years after his death, with Ludwig Ebert as the soloist. For decades afterwards it remained little known. Part of the reason lies in what the piece declines to do. Schumann had no taste for display for its own sake, and although the solo part uses the whole instrument, it gives the cellist very little of the brilliant passagework that audiences of the time expected from a concerto. The music is inward and lyrical, and it asks to be listened to closely.

It is also unusual in shape. The three movements are short and run into one another without a break, so that the concerto unfolds as a single span of about twenty-five minutes. Ideas from the opening return later in new moods. The orchestra is modest in size, with pairs of woodwinds, horns and trumpets, timpani and strings, and it often plays like an enlarged chamber group around the soloist.

What to Listen For

Nicht zu schnell (Not too fast). There is no long orchestral introduction. A few quiet chords in the woodwinds, and the cello enters at once with the main theme, a long, rising and falling melody. Much of the movement has the feeling of an improvised fantasy, with the soloist leading and the orchestra answering.

Langsam (Slowly). The brief slow movement is the heart of the concerto. The soloist sings over plucked strings and occasionally plays two notes at once. Listen for a second cello voice: Schumann has the orchestra’s principal cellist join the soloist in a duet, an unusual and very tender touch.

Sehr lebhaft (Very lively). The finale is lighter and more resolute, with a march-like main theme. Near the end comes the concerto’s only cadenza, and it too is unconventional, because the orchestra goes on accompanying the soloist instead of falling silent. It leads straight into the coda, where the music turns from A minor to a bright A major.

About the Work

Mendelssohn wrote music for Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream twice, at either end of his career. In 1826, aged seventeen, he composed an overture. It was a concert piece, complete in itself and not tied to any staging of the play.

Many years later the overture found its play. King Frederick William IV of Prussia commissioned him to write music for the whole play. The result was the incidental music Op. 61, composed for a production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream that opened at Potsdam on 14 October 1843. Mendelssohn took his youthful overture as the starting point and added thirteen further numbers: interludes to be played between the acts, settings of the songs in the play, and short passages of music to accompany the action and the spoken text. He bound the new pieces to the old by drawing on themes from the overture throughout, so that music written by a boy of seventeen and music written by a man in his thirties sound like a single work.

The score calls for two solo women’s voices and a women’s chorus as well as the orchestra. The Berliner Philharmoniker perform excerpts, with a soprano, a mezzo-soprano and a choir; at the time of writing the orchestra had named neither the singers nor the numbers chosen. The notes below describe the movements most often heard in concert.

What to Listen For

Scherzo. The first interlude, played after Act I. The first act is set in Athens, by day and among humans; this music opens the door to the forest, the night and the fairies. It is quick, light and dominated by chattering woodwinds.

“Ye spotted snakes”. The song with chorus with which the fairies sing their queen, Titania, to sleep. This is one of the numbers that needs the singers.

Intermezzo. Played after Act II, as Hermia, abandoned in the wood, goes anxiously in search of Lysander. A restless little figure is passed between woodwinds and violins over trembling strings. Then the mood changes and a rustic march brings on Bottom and his fellow tradesmen.

Nocturne. Music for the sleeping lovers at the end of Act III. The melody is given to a solo horn, supported by the bassoons.

Wedding March. The interlude between the last two acts, and by a wide margin the most familiar music Mendelssohn wrote: it has accompanied weddings around the world ever since.

Finale. “Through this house give glimmering light”, for soprano and women’s chorus, in which the fairies bless the house. If the performance includes it, listen at the very end for the four woodwind chords that began the overture, which return to close the circle.