Jörg Widmann conducts Mendelssohn and his own Second Violin Concerto

About the Work

In the spring of 1829 Felix Mendelssohn, twenty years old and already the composer of the Octet and the Midsummer Night’s Dream overture, went to London. When the concert season ended he set off north with his friend Karl Klingemann for a tour of Scotland. In early August they reached the west coast, within sight of the Hebrides. Mendelssohn wrote home at once: ‘In order to make you understand how extraordinarily the Hebrides affected me, the following came into my head there.’ Beneath the sentence he wrote out twenty-one bars of music, with notes on the orchestration. They are the opening of this overture, almost exactly as we know it.

The boat trip to the island of Staffa and its basalt sea cave, Fingal’s Cave, came only after that letter was begun. The cave gave the piece its nickname, but the music was already under way before he saw it.

Finishing it was harder. A first version was complete by the end of 1830, and Mendelssohn kept revising it. The overture was first played in London in May 1832, by the Philharmonic Society. He could not settle on a title either: The Lonely Island, The Isles of Fingal, The Hebrides and Fingal’s Cave were all used at one time or another, and the last two have both stuck.

It is a concert overture, which means that it introduces no play or opera. It stands alone, about ten minutes long, and it does not tell a story. It paints a place and the feeling of being there.

What to Listen For

The first bar is the idea Mendelssohn sent home: a short falling figure in the violas, cellos and bassoons, repeated higher, then higher again, while the violins and woodwinds hold long notes above. It sounds like water moving under still air, and nearly everything that follows grows out of it.

The second theme rises out of the cellos and bassoons, in the major: a long, warm melody that the violins then take over. The middle of the piece is stormier, with fanfares in the brass and the wave figure driven hard through the strings. Near the end, listen for the second theme coming back quietly on the clarinets, like a memory, before a last squall and a close that fades to almost nothing.

About the Work

Jörg Widmann and his younger sister Carolin made music together as children, he on the clarinet and she on the violin. His First Violin Concerto, of 2007, was first played by Christian Tetzlaff. The Second, composed in 2018, was written for his sister and is dedicated to her.

It was commissioned by Suntory Hall in Tokyo together with the Orchestre de Paris and the Frankfurt Radio Symphony. Carolin Widmann gave the first performance at Suntory Hall on 31 August 2018, with the Tokyo Metropolitan Symphony Orchestra conducted by the composer, and then played it in Paris, Frankfurt and Stockholm. These concerts are its first performances in the Netherlands.

Widmann has called the violin concerto a ‘sacred’ genre, and one to which a composer entrusts the most personal things, all the more so in a piece for his sister. He hears the violin as an instrument close to the human voice. He has also described the concerto as an exercise in holding back. Across its three movements he keeps to a strictly limited stock of notes and gestures and varies them constantly; invention and colour had always come easily to him, he wrote, but the concentration on reduction and form was new.

The concerto lasts about thirty-five minutes.

What to Listen For

The first movement is called ‘Una ricerca’, a search. In the composer’s words it is the violin’s search for itself, for its own voice: sounds, gestures and shapes are tried out one after another, and the orchestra answers only now and then. It lasts about five minutes.

The second movement, ‘Romanze’, is by far the longest and is the centre of the piece. Widmann calls it a journey inward. Tender, song-like passages stand next to loud and brutal ones, and the mood changes many times, but the violin remains the narrator throughout: listen for how rarely it stops playing.

The finale, ‘Mobile’, is as short as the first movement. Patterns from the earlier movements are thrown into constant high speed and pushed to extremes, yet the composer asks for the touch to stay light almost to the end.

About the Work

Jörg Widmann wrote the Fantasie in 1993, when he was about twenty and still a clarinet student. He has called it his first real piece for his own instrument. He played the first performance himself, in March 1994 at the Bavarian Radio in Munich.

The model was Stravinsky’s Three Pieces for solo clarinet of 1919, which Widmann knew as a player. He described his own piece as eccentric in its virtuosity and cheerful and ironic in character, and as ‘a little imaginary scene’ in the spirit of the commedia dell’arte, in which several characters talk at close quarters. All of them are played by one clarinettist.

For the most part the Fantasie uses the warm, singing clarinet sound that the Romantic composers loved. Against that it sets what Widmann’s publisher calls ironic side trips into dance music, klezmer and jazz. It lasts about seven minutes.

In this concert the composer plays it himself, between conducting his Second Violin Concerto and Mendelssohn’s ‘Reformation’ Symphony.

What to Listen For

The piece begins with a multiphonic, a way of fingering and blowing that makes the clarinet sound several notes at once. It is a knowing nod to the avant-garde, and the piece then heads somewhere else entirely.

After that, follow the characters. Widmann thought of the piece as a scene in which several people talk at once, so listen for the changes of voice: a singing line is cut off by a burst of fast notes, a dance rhythm appears and is dropped, and turns of phrase borrowed from klezmer and jazz slip in and out. Much of the comedy lies in the speed of these changes, as if the players in the scene kept interrupting one another.

It is also a display piece, full of virtuoso flourishes and of the unusual playing techniques that Widmann, as a clarinettist, knew at first hand.

About the Work

Mendelssohn began this symphony on the same journey to Britain that produced The Hebrides. In September 1829 he wrote to his family from England that he had a new work in mind, and he decided to start on it in London. The occasion he was aiming at lay the following summer: 25 June 1830 was the three-hundredth anniversary of the Augsburg Confession, the statement of faith that Luther’s followers presented to Emperor Charles V in 1530, and celebrations were planned in Protestant Germany. Mendelssohn, born into a Jewish family and baptised a Lutheran as a child, wanted to contribute a symphony built on Luther’s hymn ‘Ein feste Burg ist unser Gott’ (A mighty fortress is our God).

He finished the score in Berlin in the spring of 1830, too late for it to be taken up, and the anniversary passed without it. Two years later, in Paris, François-Antoine Habeneck put it into rehearsal with the Conservatoire orchestra and then dropped it; the players are said to have found it too learned, with too much counterpoint and too little melody. Mendelssohn conducted the first performance himself in Berlin in November 1832. He never performed it again, came to dislike it and would not let it be printed.

The score was finally published in 1868, twenty-one years after his death. That is why it is called No. 5, although it was the second of his five symphonies for full orchestra to be written. It lasts about half an hour.

What to Listen For

The slow introduction starts with a rising four-note figure in the violas that passes up through the strings, as in old church counterpoint. Fanfares in the winds grow more insistent, and then the strings, very quietly, play a rising cadence known as the Dresden Amen, a formula from the church music of Dresden. Wagner later used the same phrase for the Grail in Parsifal. The fast main section is in D minor and has a fierce, dotted theme; the Amen returns, just as quietly, before the reprise.

The second movement is a scherzo in B-flat, light on its feet, with a relaxed trio in G major. The third is short: a sad song in G minor for the first violins, more like an aria than a symphonic slow movement.

Then comes the finale. A single flute plays the first line of ‘Ein feste Burg’, alone and unharmonised. Other instruments join in, a few at a time, and fill out the harmony. The Allegro that follows treats the tune in several ways, including passages of fugue, and the weight of the bass is increased by a contrabassoon (Mendelssohn also asked for a serpent, an obsolete bass wind instrument, in this movement). At the very end the full orchestra plays Luther’s hymn in broad, plain chords.