Noseda and Szeps-Znaider: Sibelius’s Violin Concerto and Prokofiev from the Opera House

About the Work

Betrothal in a Monastery is the comic opera Prokofiev began in 1940, and its source was an eighteenth-century English comedy: Richard Brinsley Sheridan’s The Duenna, a farce of disguises, elopements and a miserly father outwitted by his daughter and her governess, set in Seville. Prokofiev wrote the Russian libretto himself with Mira Mendelson, later his second wife. The opera went into rehearsal, the war stopped it, and it did not reach the stage until 3 November 1946, at the Kirov Theatre in Leningrad.

Ten years after starting the opera, in 1950, Prokofiev went back to it and drew out a five-movement orchestral suite which he called Summer Night, Op. 123. The suite belongs to the small group of orchestral works from the last years of his life. What he lifted out of the opera was its warm, nocturnal side, the serenades and love music, framed by two livelier pieces, with the plain melodic style he had been cultivating since his return to the Soviet Union. It lasts about twenty minutes and is rarely played, which makes its appearance here, as the first half of a pairing with his very different early opera The Gambler, a real attraction.

What to Listen For

The Introduction is the opera’s short overture: bustling, festive, led by a trumpet tune with the wide, slightly crooked leaps that mark a melody as Prokofiev’s. The Serenade is the music of the lovers Antonio and Louisa, slow and warm, with the tenor’s line from the opera passing to a solo cello. The Minuet belongs to Louisa’s father, Don Jerome, and is a courtly dance that keeps tripping over its own feet, affectionate satire of a man who thinks himself dignified.

‘Dreams’, subtitled Nocturne, is the heart of the suite: the love theme of the opera’s second couple, Clara and Ferdinand, with a solo flute floating over strings divided into many parts. The closing Dance comes from the end of the opera. It starts quietly, on a rhythm that repeats and repeats, and grows to a bright, full climax.

About the Work

Sibelius wanted to be a violinist before he wanted to be a composer. He practised for years with a virtuoso career in mind, and gave the ambition up as a young man. His only concerto, written in 1903 and 1904, is for the instrument he had failed to master, and it asks the soloist for everything he could once imagine and not play.

Its early history was awkward. Sibelius had promised the piece to the German virtuoso Willy Burmester, who meant to introduce it in Berlin. Short of money, the composer instead arranged a premiere in Helsinki, on 8 February 1904, conducted it himself, and gave the solo part to Victor Nováček, a local teacher who had little time to learn a score finished at the last moment. It did not go well. Sibelius withdrew the concerto and revised it, cutting and tightening, and the version played today was first heard in Berlin on 19 October 1905 with Richard Strauss conducting and Karel Halíř, the orchestra’s leader, as soloist. Burmester, passed over a second time, never played it. The dedication went to the Hungarian prodigy Franz von Vecsey, then twelve years old.

The revision produced something unusual among Romantic violin concertos: a display piece in which the orchestra is given real symphonic material, and in which the virtuoso writing grows out of the themes instead of decorating them.

What to Listen For

The opening is one of the most recognisable in the repertoire. Muted violins set up a quiet shimmer in D minor and the soloist enters over it at once, with a long, searching melody that seems to begin in the middle of a thought. There is no orchestral introduction and no waiting.

In the first movement, listen for where the cadenza falls. Normally it comes near the end, as a display before the close. Here it stands in the middle and does the work of the development section, so the soloist alone carries the argument forward. The orchestra’s own themes, dark and heavy in the lower strings and brass, are as important as the violin’s.

The slow movement opens with a short woodwind introduction before the violin enters low in its register with a broad, grave melody; the temperature rises to a passionate climax and falls away again. The finale is a dance over a pounding rhythm in the timpani and low strings, with the soloist leaping across the instrument in double stops, harmonics and rapid scales. The critic Donald Tovey’s phrase for it, ‘a polonaise for polar bears’, has stuck to it, a little unfairly: it is as exhilarating as anything Sibelius wrote.

About the Work

The Gambler is the opera of Prokofiev’s mid-twenties, written in 1915 and 1916 from Dostoevsky’s short novel of 1866. The story is set in a German spa town the novelist calls Roulettenburg. A Russian General, deep in debt, waits for news that his rich aunt has died; the aunt arrives in person, very much alive, and loses a fortune at the tables; Alexei, a penniless tutor in the General’s household, loves the General’s ward Polina and stakes everything on roulette to win her. Prokofiev set Dostoevsky’s prose almost as speech, fast and without arias. A production planned for the Mariinsky Theatre in Petrograd fell victim to the revolution of 1917, and the opera was not staged until the end of the 1920s, in Brussels, in a revised version sung in French.

In 1931 he made an orchestral work from it, and gave it its own opus number, 49. The difficulty was that an opera without set pieces offers nothing to extract. By his own account he took a vocal score, tore out the pages belonging to each of the four main characters, sorted them into piles and recomposed each pile as a portrait. To the four he added a Dénouement drawn from the opera’s final act. The result is less a suite of highlights than a set of character studies, and it carries the nervous, sardonic energy of the young Prokofiev into the concert hall at full strength.

What to Listen For

Alexei comes first: restless, impulsive music that never sits still, the portrait of a man who thinks faster than he judges. The Grandmother (Babulenka) begins as a formidable old lady who knows her own mind, then a solo violin leads into something more touching, as if the composer liked her too much to leave her as a caricature. The General is all bluster and empty ceremony.

Polina has the longest movement and the most ambiguous. It starts quietly and tenderly, grows stronger and more troubled, and ends subdued. The Dénouement returns to the gaming tables and what follows them. It is the most dramatic music of the five, driven and feverish, with a sharp-edged, dissonant close that offers no consolation. Heard after the moonlit Summer Night suite in the first half, it shows how far apart the two ends of Prokofiev’s operatic career were.