Sheku’s Saint-Saëns and ‘Pictures at an Exhibition’

About the Work

Frenzy is one of John Adams’s most recent orchestral works, and it receives its Dutch premiere tonight. Composed in 2023, it was first performed in London in March 2024 by the London Symphony Orchestra under Sir Simon Rattle. Adams subtitled it ‘a short symphony,’ and it packs into a relatively brief span a varied yet unified symphonic argument, a single, tautly organised orchestral journey.

The title is apt. This is music of high energy and propulsive momentum: the rhythmic drive that has been an Adams hallmark since his minimalist beginnings, now channelled into a densely worked, virtuosic showpiece for a great orchestra. Hearing it open a programme that runs back through Saint-Saëns to Mussorgsky places a brand-new American work in dialogue with the Romantic past, and lets the Concertgebouworkest show off its brilliance in music written for our own moment.

What to Listen For

Frenzy lives up to its name: come ready for momentum and brilliance. Listen for the relentless rhythmic energy that drives the piece forward, and for Adams’s dazzling, kaleidoscopic orchestration: the way ideas are tossed around the orchestra, woodwinds and brass flashing against churning strings and busy percussion.

Though continuous, the work has the shape of a compact symphony, so listen for its changes of pace and character: passages of headlong drive giving way to broader, more lyrical or mysterious episodes before the energy regathers. Adams is a master of the long build, and of sudden shifts of harmonic colour that light the music up from within. Simply follow the surging, restless energy and the sheer orchestral dazzle of one of today’s most communicative composers writing at full tilt.

About the Work

Saint-Saëns’s First Cello Concerto, composed in 1872, is one of the cornerstones of the cello repertoire; composers as different as Rachmaninoff and Shostakovich ranked it among the greatest of all cello concertos. He wrote it for Auguste Tolbecque, a distinguished French cellist, viol player and instrument maker, who gave the premiere with the orchestra of the Société des Concerts du Conservatoire in Paris on 19 January 1873.

What makes the concerto special is partly its form. Saint-Saëns broke with the traditional three-separate-movements design and cast the whole work as a single continuous movement, lasting under twenty minutes, within which three connected sections do the work of the usual fast–slow–fast scheme. The result is wonderfully concentrated and forward-moving: there is no time for padding, and the cello sings almost throughout. It is also beautifully judged for the instrument: Saint-Saëns, ever the craftsman, makes the cello brilliant and virtuosic without ever letting the orchestra cover its often low-lying voice.

Elegant, passionate and impeccably made, it is Saint-Saëns at his most appealing, and a perfect vehicle for a charismatic soloist.

What to Listen For

There is no orchestral introduction: after a single crisp chord, the cello bursts straight in with the surging, agitated main theme, one of the great concerto openings, immediately gripping. Listen for how this restless A-minor music drives the first section forward, the soloist rarely silent.

The magic of the piece is its seamlessness. Notice how the agitation gives way, without a real break, to the central section: a delicate, courtly minuet, the orchestra playing a graceful, slightly antique dance under which the cello muses and decorates, a moment of poise and charm at the work’s heart. Then the music gathers itself again and the opening energy returns, leading to new material and a broad, singing melody before the finale. Keep your ear on the cello line throughout: Saint-Saëns keeps it almost continuously in song, and the whole concerto unfolds as a single, beautifully paced arc from its stormy opening to its triumphant close.

About the Work

Pictures at an Exhibition began as a private act of mourning. In 1873 Mussorgsky’s close friend, the architect and artist Viktor Hartmann, died suddenly at only thirty-nine. A memorial exhibition of his drawings and designs was mounted in St Petersburg the following year, and Mussorgsky, deeply moved, responded by composing, in a white-hot three weeks in June 1874, a suite of piano pieces depicting ten of Hartmann’s works, linked by a recurring ‘Promenade’ theme representing the composer himself walking through the gallery from picture to picture. It is one of the most original and pictorial works in all music.

For decades Pictures was known mainly to pianists. Its journey to worldwide fame came through orchestration, and above all through the version made by Maurice Ravel in 1922, commissioned by the conductor Serge Koussevitzky and premiered in Paris on 19 October that year. Ravel, the supreme orchestral colourist, treated Mussorgsky’s vivid but pianistic score as a box of paints, conjuring an astonishing range of instrumental colour: the lonely alto saxophone of the ‘Old Castle,’ the braying brass of the ox-cart, the glittering chicks, the shattering grandeur of the final ‘Great Gate of Kiev.’ His orchestration is so brilliant that for many listeners it has become the definitive form of the work, a perfect marriage of Russian imagination and French orchestral genius.

What to Listen For

The piece is a gallery walk, and the recurring Promenade is your guide, first heard at the very start on solo trumpet, then returning between several pictures, changing mood and colour to reflect the composer’s state of mind as he moves on.

Follow the pictures themselves, each a vivid character study: Gnomus, a lurching, grotesque dwarf; The Old Castle, a melancholy troubadour’s song carried by the alto saxophone; the chattering children of the Tuileries; the heavy, trudging ox-cart Bydło; the Ballet of the Unhatched Chicks, all twittering pizzicato and trills; the two Jewish figures of ‘Samuel’ Goldenberg and Schmuÿle, one pompous, one whining; the bustling Marketplace at Limoges; the eerie Catacombs; the witch Baba Yaga tearing through the air in her flying mortar. Listen for how this last picture drives without a break straight into the finale, The Great Gate of Kiev, where Hartmann’s design for a grand city gate becomes a blazing, bell-crowned hymn, the Promenade theme transformed into overwhelming splendour to bring the work to its magnificent close.