Programme Notes · London Symphony Orchestra · 20 May 2027
Stutzmann and Jansen: Mozart’s ‘Turkish’ Concerto and Bruckner’s Fifth
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756–1791)
Violin Concerto No. 5 in A major, K. 219 ‘Turkish’30 min
About the Work
Mozart’s five violin concertos are music of his Salzburg youth, and the A major, K. 219, is the last and largest of them. It dates from December 1775, when he was nineteen and living in Salzburg. Nobody knows for certain whom it was written for. Mozart was by all accounts an accomplished violinist, and he may well have played it himself.
Like all his violin concertos it is an early work, but it is the most adventurous of the set, with several ideas that have no precedent in the other four. The scoring is modest, two oboes, two horns and strings, but almost every movement contains something a listener of 1775 would not have expected.
The nickname ‘Turkish’ comes from a single episode in the finale. Turkish subjects were in fashion across Europe, in coffee houses, stage plays and operas, and the percussion-heavy bands of the Ottoman janissaries had given composers a stock of exotic effects to imitate. Mozart would use them again in The Abduction from the Seraglio and the Rondo alla turca. Here he has no drums or cymbals to hand and makes his ‘Turkish’ noise out of an ordinary orchestra.
What to Listen For
The first movement is marked Allegro aperto, ‘open’, a direction Mozart rarely used in instrumental music. The orchestra sets off briskly, and then the soloist does something no one expects: instead of joining in, the violin enters with six bars of slow, rapt Adagio, as if stepping onto the stage in a different play. Only then does the Allegro resume, and the violin’s real theme arrives, soaring over the music the orchestra began with.
The slow movement is a long, unhurried Adagio in E major, a test of sustained tone and line more than of fingers.
The finale begins as a courtly minuet, all poise. Halfway through, the key drops to A minor, the metre changes from three beats to two, and the ‘Turkish’ music bursts in: stamping accents, swirling chromatic scales with sudden crescendos, and cellos and basses striking their strings with the wood of the bow to stand in for percussion. Then the minuet returns as if nothing had happened, and the concerto ends not with a flourish but quietly, with a polite upward gesture.
Anton Bruckner (1824–1896)
Symphony No. 5 in B-flat major, WAB 105 (ed. Cohrs)80 min
About the Work
Bruckner began his Fifth Symphony in February 1875, at one of the low points of his years in Vienna. He was fifty, underpaid, and had just seen his hopes of a university post disappointed again. He started, unusually, with the slow movement, and had the whole symphony substantially finished by May 1876; some retouching followed over the next two years. He called it his ‘contrapuntal masterpiece’ and is also said to have referred to it as the ‘Fantastic’, though he never gave it a title.
He never heard it played by an orchestra. A performance on two pianos took place in Vienna in 1887. The orchestral premiere had to wait until April 1894, in Graz, under his pupil Franz Schalk, and by then Bruckner was too ill to travel. That may have been a mercy, since Schalk had reorchestrated the score and cut the finale heavily. Bruckner’s own text was not performed until 1935. The edition used in this concert is a recent one by the German conductor and scholar Benjamin-Gunnar Cohrs, prepared for the Anton Bruckner Urtext Gesamtausgabe, a new series of critical editions of the composer’s works.
The Fifth is the most severe and the most tightly built of Bruckner’s symphonies, about eighty minutes long. Its peculiarity is that the weight falls at the very end. The first three movements, however grand, are preparation; the summit is the chorale that crowns the finale. A performance has to hold something back for well over an hour to make that work.
What to Listen For
This is the only Bruckner symphony to open with a slow introduction. Low strings walk quietly, pizzicato, under a web of violas and violins; then come a blazing fanfare for the full orchestra and a solemn brass chorale. These three ideas, set down like foundation stones, are the material much of the symphony grows from. The Allegro that follows moves between a restless main theme, a second idea begun pizzicato, and great swells that break off at their peak, a habit this symphony never loses.
The Adagio opens with plucked strings in a slow six, against which an oboe sings a bleak melody in a rhythm of four: two metres at once. The warm, full-throated string theme that answers it is one of Bruckner’s great tunes. The Scherzo starts with the very same string figure as the Adagio, now at high speed, and keeps swerving into a heavy-footed country dance.
The finale begins by remembering. The slow introduction returns, and a solo clarinet interrupts with a cheeky falling octave; fragments of the first movement and the Adagio pass by, much as Beethoven reviews his earlier movements in the Ninth. The clarinet’s octave turns out to be the head of a fugue subject. Later the brass announce a broad chorale, which becomes the subject of a second fugue, and then the two are combined in a double fugue of enormous energy. In the last pages the main theme of the first movement joins them, and the chorale, in full brass over the whole orchestra, has the final word.
Tonight's Artists
Janine Jansenviolin
Janine Jansen is the subject of the LSO’s Artist Portrait this season, a series of three appearances with concertos by Mozart and Richard Dubugnon, alongside a recital with Sir Antonio Pappano at the piano. This is the Mozart evening of the series. Nathalie Stutzmann, whose passion for Bruckner the orchestra’s own listing singles out, takes the second half. It is a single Barbican concert on 20 May 2027, and a long one: the orchestra expects it to end at about 9.25pm.
Janine Jansen, born in Soest in 1978, is one of the most charismatic and admired violinists in the world. From a musical Dutch family, she studied with Coosje Wijzenbeek, Philippe Hirschhorn and Boris Belkin, and has built a career of the highest distinction as soloist and chamber musician, recording widely and founding the International Chamber Music Festival in Utrecht. She is the LSO’s Portrait Artist this season. Renowned for the intensity, communicative warmth and fearless commitment of her playing, she also has a long creative partnership with the composer Richard Dubugnon, who has written several works for her, which makes her the natural soloist for tonight’s premiere.
Further reading
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Accessible Mozart: The Reign of Love
Jan Swafford, Harper Perennial 2021
Swafford is especially good on the Salzburg years: the bored court musician of nineteen, his father’s ambitions for him as a violinist, and the run of concertos that ends with K. 219.
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Accessible Bruckner
Derek Watson, Oxford University Press 1996
A compact life and works in the Master Musicians series, with a clear chapter on each symphony; the best first guide to how the Fifth is built and why it waited so long to be heard.
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Deeper The Cambridge Companion to Bruckner
John Williamson (ed.), Cambridge University Press 2004
Essays on the editions problem, on Bruckner’s counterpoint and on the reception of the symphonies: the background to why a new Urtext of the Fifth, free of Schalk’s alterations, still matters.