Mitsuko Uchida plays Beethoven, Vladimir Jurowski conducts Bruckner’s Third

About the Work

In the late 1760s Joseph Haydn, then in his mid-thirties and in charge of the music at the Esterházy court, began to write symphonies in minor keys, something he had hardly done before. They are restless, abrupt pieces, and later writers borrowed a label from German literature for them: Sturm und Drang, storm and stress. The Symphony No. 26 in D minor is one of the earliest. Haydn’s manuscript is lost, so the date cannot be fixed, but the scholar H. C. Robbins Landon placed it in 1768 or perhaps 1769.

The nickname, which was in use in Haydn’s lifetime but probably did not come from him, points to what makes the piece unusual. It seems to have been written for Holy Week, and Haydn built old church melodies into it. In Austria at the time the Passion story was chanted in the days before Easter to traditional plainsong formulas, and the Lamentations of Jeremiah were sung to chant as well. Haydn quotes the Passion chant in his first movement and returns to chant in the second. Some scholars, Landon among them, have gone further and heard the first two movements as a kind of illustration of the Passion story, with separate phrases for the narrating Evangelist, for Christ and for the crowd. Others doubt that Haydn meant anything so literal and point out how freely he treats the borrowed tunes. For a long time the Easter connection was forgotten altogether, and an early twentieth-century edition called the piece a Christmas symphony.

The orchestra is small: two oboes, two horns and strings, with a bassoon and perhaps a harpsichord joining the bass line. The symphony has three movements and lasts a little over a quarter of an hour.

What to Listen For

The first movement opens in a rush, with driving syncopations in the strings that seem all rhythm and no tune. Then the music brightens abruptly into F major, and under a busy line of running notes in the first violins the first oboe and the second violins play the chant: plain, even notes that sound like something from another world dropped into the middle of a symphony. Listen for the loud, declaiming phrases and the quiet, slow-stepping answer between them. When this music comes back at the end of the movement it is in D major, with the horns added, which gives it a blaze it did not have before.

The Adagio is built on chant in the same way. The oboe and second violins carry the melody in long notes, like the tune in a chorale prelude, while the first violins walk gently around it. It is calm, consoling music, and the simplest thing in the symphony.

Haydn then ends, unusually, with a minuet and no fast finale. It is no courtly dance. The minuet returns to D minor and is full of sharp contrasts of loud and soft and phrases of irregular length, and the trio in the major, with its offbeat accents, gives only brief relief. The symphony closes in the minor.

About the Work

The numbering is misleading. The Concerto in B-flat was the first of Beethoven’s five piano concertos to be composed and the second to be printed. He began it in Bonn in the late 1780s, while still in his teens, and went on revising it for more than a decade as he carried it with him through the first years of his career in Vienna. It was his own display piece. Having made his name in the private salons of the Viennese nobility, he appeared before the wider public as a pianist for the first time at the Burgtheater on 29 March 1795, and the concerto he played there was most probably this one, though it may have been the Concerto in C. He played the B-flat again in Prague in 1798, and it was finally published in December 1801 as Op. 19, by which time the later Concerto in C had already come out as No. 1.

Beethoven is reported to have told a publisher that the piece was not one of his best, and by 1801 it must have seemed old-fashioned to a composer who had by then written his First Symphony and begun his Third Piano Concerto. It is the smallest of his concertos, with no clarinets, trumpets or drums in the orchestra, and the one that stands closest to Mozart, whose piano concertos Beethoven knew and admired. Yet he cared enough about it to write out a cadenza for the first movement, by most accounts well after the concerto itself. That cadenza, a dense and rather stern piece of counterpoint, is in a noticeably later style than the music around it, and hearing the two side by side is one of the pleasures of the work.

What to Listen For

The first movement begins with a brisk call to attention, a dotted fanfare figure on the notes of the B-flat chord, answered at once by a soft, smooth phrase in the violins. That pairing of bluntness and grace sets the tone. The orchestra lays out the themes, and the piano then slips in not with the fanfare but with a quiet idea of its own. Much of the solo writing is quick, glittering passagework of the kind Beethoven was famous for improvising. Near the end comes the cadenza: listen for the way it starts like a fugue, a far more severe sound than anything else in the movement.

The Adagio is the heart of the concerto. Its theme is a slow, hymn-like melody for the strings, which the piano decorates with increasingly elaborate lines. Just before the end the orchestra falls silent and the piano is left almost alone, playing a halting line of single notes through a haze of pedal. It is a strikingly bare and personal moment in so early a work.

The finale is a rondo with a joke in its main tune: the accents fall in the wrong places, short note first, so that the theme seems to hiccup. A stormier episode in the minor comes in the middle. Near the end, just when the movement appears to be heading home, the piano tries the tune gently in a quite unrelated key before the orchestra puts things right, and the concerto finishes lightly.

About the Work

In September 1873 Anton Bruckner called on Richard Wagner, whom he revered, with two symphonies under his arm and asked him to accept the dedication of whichever he preferred. Wagner chose the one in D minor, the still unfinished Third. A much-repeated story adds that the two men drank so much beer that Bruckner could not remember the next morning which had been picked, and had to send a note asking whether it was the symphony ‘where the trumpet begins the theme’. Bruckner finished the score soon afterwards. In its first form it included quotations from Wagner’s operas, and it has been known ever since as the ‘Wagner Symphony’.

Getting it played was another matter. By most accounts the Vienna Philharmonic tried the piece in rehearsal and turned it down. Bruckner shortened and revised it, and a performance was at last arranged for 16 December 1877 under Johann Herbeck. Herbeck died shortly before the concert and Bruckner, an inexperienced orchestral conductor, had to direct it himself. The evening was the worst humiliation of his life: the audience drifted away during the performance, and at the end only a small group of supporters remained, the seventeen-year-old Gustav Mahler among them.

Bruckner kept returning to the score. He removed most of the Wagner quotations and cut the outer movements heavily, and in 1888 and 1889 he reworked the whole symphony again, shortening the finale still further. In that last form Hans Richter conducted it with the Vienna Philharmonic on 21 December 1890, to great success. The result is that there is no single Third: three versions are in regular use today, the long original of 1873, the version of 1877 and the tauter one of 1889. The orchestra’s announcement does not say which of them Vladimir Jurowski has chosen. Whichever it is, the work is where Bruckner first sounds wholly like himself.

What to Listen For

The opening is one of Bruckner’s most characteristic. The strings set up a soft, circling pattern over a held bass note, and out of this mist a solo trumpet plays a plain, signal-like theme built from the simplest intervals. The music swells in two great waves to a jagged statement for the whole orchestra in unison. That trumpet theme is the motto of the symphony. A second, gentler group of themes follows in the strings, and it uses the rhythm Bruckner made his own, two even notes followed by three. The movement ends starkly, on a bare open fifth, neither major nor minor.

The slow movement, in E-flat major and marked ‘solemn’, begins as a warm string hymn and alternates it with a more flowing melody first given to the violas. The scherzo is short and fierce: a whirling figure in the violins grows from a murmur to a stamping dance for full orchestra, while the trio in the middle is a relaxed country waltz, the sound of Bruckner’s Upper Austrian home.

The finale sets off in a storm, but its most famous passage is the second theme, where two kinds of music are heard at once: the strings play a light, skipping dance while the horns and brass intone a slow chorale beneath it. After many struggles and sudden silences the key turns to D major, and the trumpet theme from the first bars returns in triumph to end the symphony.