Henze’s Chaconne and Brahms’s Second

About the Work

The evening opens with a contemporary voice: Fleur de verre (‘glass flower’) by the young Danish composer Sophie Søs Meyer. Meyer belongs to a generation of Scandinavian composers for whom orchestral sound is as much about texture, colour and atmosphere as about theme and development, and this piece begins from a vivid image. Its starting point is the skeleton flower, whose petals turn transparent in the rain: at once delicate and brittle, beautiful and on the edge of vanishing, it is the sort of fragile, ambiguous picture from which her music likes to grow.

Placing a work by a young composer at the head of a programme that ends with Brahms is a characteristic piece of Concertgebouw programming: it asks us to hear the great Romantic symphony with fresh ears, and to set the orchestra’s storied sound at the service of music being written right now. Rather than approach Fleur de verre with expectations drawn from the classics that follow, it rewards simply listening to its surfaces and colours.

What to Listen For

Come to this one with open ears and few preconceptions. With music of this kind, the rewards lie less in following tunes than in attending to texture and atmosphere: the way sounds emerge and dissolve, the play of orchestral colour, the sense of a fragile image (glass, light, a flower) translated into shifting sonority. Listen for how Meyer uses the full resources of the orchestra not to build a traditional argument but to conjure a state, an atmosphere, a single sustained image rendered in sound. It is a brief, concentrated opening, a pane of glass held up to the light before the Baroque-tinged Henze and the warmth of Brahms.

About the Work

Hans Werner Henze (1926–2012) was one of the towering figures of post-war European music, and Il Vitalino raddoppiato, for solo violin and chamber orchestra, written in 1977, is one of his most fascinating works. Its starting point is a famous Baroque relic: the great Chaconne in G minor for violin and continuo long attributed, though not beyond dispute, to the Italian composer-violinist Tomaso Antonio Vitali. Henze takes this haunting old piece and ‘doubles’ it (that is roughly what the punning title means), building from it an elaborate set of variations. It has aptly been called ‘a chaconne on a chaconne.’

The genius of the piece is the way it travels through time. It begins very close to the Baroque original, the solo violin spinning out the chaconne’s grave, descending bass pattern in something like its old style; but as the variations accumulate, Henze gradually pulls the music into the twentieth century, the harmonies clouding and fracturing, the textures growing stranger and more luminous, until, in its final third, it arrives at music of acerbic modernity, including what one writer called a ‘hallucinatory cadenza.’ Critics have praised it as both serious and profound: ‘sometimes acerbic, sometimes achingly beautiful,’ in one description. It is a virtuoso vehicle for the soloist and a remarkable meditation on the past, on what happens when a modern composer takes an old masterpiece and lets it slowly transform under his hands.

What to Listen For

The key to this piece is its sense of journey through musical time, so listen for the gradual transformation. At the start, the solo violin presents the old Vitali chaconne theme, a slow, dignified, descending pattern, unmistakably Baroque, and the early variations stay close to that world: ornate, expressive, almost like a period performance.

Then follow how Henze begins to pull the music away from its origins. The harmonies grow more pungent and ambiguous, the orchestral colours stranger, the violin writing increasingly free and virtuosic, until the Baroque frame has dissolved into something thoroughly modern. The high point is the soloist’s extended cadenza late in the work, where the music turns most hallucinatory and intense. Keep one ear on that steady chaconne bass-pattern underneath it all: even as the surface is transformed almost beyond recognition, the old foundation keeps the piece anchored. It is the sound of three centuries collapsing into a single span.

About the Work

If Brahms’s First Symphony cost him more than two decades of labour, weighed down by the shadow of Beethoven, his Second came as if on a holiday. He wrote it in the summer of 1877 during a stay at Pörtschach, a beautiful village on the Wörthersee in the Austrian Alps, and the contrast with the stormy, hard-won C-minor First could hardly be greater. Sunny, songful and pastoral, the D-major Symphony has often been likened to Beethoven’s ‘Pastoral’ Sixth, and is sometimes nicknamed Brahms’s own ‘Pastoral.’ He wrote it quickly and happily, in surroundings he found idyllic, and it shows.

True to character, Brahms could not resist undercutting all this warmth with a joke. He wrote to his publisher that the new symphony was ‘so melancholy that you will not be able to bear it,’ and that ‘the score must come out in mourning,’ edged in black. It was pure Brahmsian irony: the work is among the most genial and life-affirming he ever wrote. Yet the quip is not entirely empty: beneath the sunlit surface there runs a thread of autumnal shadow, a wistfulness that gives the symphony its depth and keeps the brightness from ever turning saccharine.

The premiere was given by the Vienna Philharmonic under Hans Richter on 30 December 1877 (postponed from 9 December because the players were busy learning Wagner’s Das Rheingold), and it was an immediate and lasting success, quickly becoming one of the best-loved of all symphonies.

What to Listen For

The symphony grows from a tiny seed planted in its very first bars: a three-note turn in the cellos and basses (down–up) that recurs, transformed, throughout the work. Listen for it at the warm, flowing opening, and for the gentle horn calls that follow; this first movement is broad and lyrical, but notice the sudden shadow cast early on by soft, solemn trombones, the ‘mourning’ Brahms half-joked about.

The slow movement (Adagio non troppo) is the symphony’s most serious music: deeply felt, harmonically rich, with long-spun cello melody and a searching, complex argument. The third movement is a delight: not a driving scherzo but a graceful, gently rocking intermezzo led by the oboe, twice interrupted by quicker, skipping episodes that grow from the same tune. Then comes the finale, which begins hushed and conspiratorial before bursting into exuberant high spirits; listen for how Brahms builds the momentum and saves his trump card for the very end, where the trombones ring out a blazing D-major peroration to close the symphony in pure jubilation.