Lang Lang plays Saint-Saëns, Klaus Mäkelä conducts Ravel and a Lindberg premiere

About the Work

‘Flounce’ is a concert opener of about five minutes, and it was written for one of the most watched concerts in the calendar. BBC Radio 3 commissioned it for the Last Night of the Proms, and the BBC Symphony Orchestra under Sakari Oramo gave the first performance at the Royal Albert Hall in London on 9 September 2017. Lotta Wennäkoski wrote it in the spring of that year, and she has said that knowing who would play it first, and where, was a great source of inspiration.

In her own note on the piece she explains that this time the title came first and steered the music. She was taken with the different meanings of the English word ‘flounce’, as a verb and as a noun: the abrupt, impatient movement of someone flouncing out of a room, and the gathered strip of fabric that trims a skirt or a sleeve. The piece has both. Much of it, she writes, is made of brisk gestures that are ‘non troppo serioso’, not too serious, and these alternate with passages of lace-like ornament in a lighter, more lyrical mood.

Few Proms commissions have a long life after their first night, and this one has. Her publisher, Fennica Gehrman, describes it as a curtain-raiser that became an international hit, and Music Finland counted fourteen performances around the world within two years of the premiere. That same spring it was on the programme of the Helsinki Philharmonic Orchestra and Susanna Mälkki when their tour brought them to this hall. Wennäkoski is no stranger to Amsterdam: according to Music Finland the Concertgebouw Orchestra programmed the Dutch premiere of her flute concerto ‘Soie’ in March 2019. For these concerts the orchestra places ‘Flounce’ at the head of a Finnish first half, before the new work by Magnus Lindberg.

What to Listen For

Wennäkoski describes a double character in the writing as well as in the title. On one side there is an energetic pulse that keeps the music moving forward; on the other there are timbres that she calls sometimes non-conventional, and a feeling of space in the orchestration. So listen for the way the sound is laid out as much as for any tune. The quick, slightly comic gestures tend to arrive suddenly and break off just as suddenly, while the ornamental passages are finer-grained and seem to hang in the air. The orchestra’s own description of the piece speaks of light, clarity and movement, as if the composer wanted to escape the pull of gravity. Five minutes is not long, and the piece does not waste any of them.

About the Work

This is a first performance, and at the time of writing very little about the piece has been made public. The orchestra and the Concertgebouw both list it simply as a new work by Magnus Lindberg, commissioned by the Concertgebouw Orchestra and receiving its world premiere in these concerts. No title, duration or scoring has been announced. Lindberg’s publisher, Boosey & Hawkes, describes it as a new large-scale orchestral work, to be premiered by the orchestra and Klaus Mäkelä in Amsterdam on 7 May 2027.

What can be said is where it comes from. Lindberg is best known for his orchestral music, and the orchestra writes of a special bond with him built up over the years; his publisher’s work list includes ‘Era’, written for the 125th anniversary of the Concertgebouw. Here he is in Finnish company: Mäkelä, the orchestra’s chief conductor designate, opens the concert with Lotta Wennäkoski’s ‘Flounce’ and follows it with the new piece, before the programme turns to France after the interval.

What to Listen For

With no score or description available, any detailed guide would be guesswork. In general terms, Lindberg’s publisher names energy, colour and a thrilling density of material as the hallmarks of his recent style, and Music Finland describes a composer who has moved from the hard-edged modernism of his early years towards an idiom in which melody matters more. The orchestra’s announcement adds that he always manages to draw new sounds from an orchestra. It is reasonable to expect a piece that uses the full ensemble and keeps it busy. This note will be updated when the orchestra publishes more.

About the Work

Camille Saint-Saëns wrote his Second Piano Concerto in a hurry. In the spring of 1868 the Russian pianist and composer Anton Rubinstein was in Paris and wanted to appear there as a conductor, with Saint-Saëns as his soloist. The date that suited was about three weeks off. Saint-Saëns agreed to write a new concerto for the occasion and finished it in seventeen days. He played the solo part himself at the first performance, in the Salle Pleyel on 13 May 1868, with Rubinstein conducting.

The speed showed on the night. Saint-Saëns had had little time to practise what he had written, and the reception was mixed, though the second movement was liked at once and Liszt, by the Boston Symphony Orchestra’s account, admired the work. It went on to become the most popular of his five piano concertos.

Its shape is unusual. A concerto normally runs fast, slow, fast. This one begins with a broad, serious movement, puts a scherzo in second place and ends with a very fast finale, so that it has been described as a symphony with its first movement missing. Each movement is quicker and lighter than the last, which is why the concerto can seem to change character completely between its first page and its final one. Saint-Saëns was thirty-two, organist of the Madeleine in Paris and one of the finest pianists of his day, and the piece draws on both careers. The main theme of the first movement is said to have been borrowed from his pupil Gabriel Fauré, from a ‘Tantum ergo’ that Fauré had set aside.

What to Listen For

I. Andante sostenuto. The piano begins alone, with a long passage that sounds improvised, in the manner of a Bach organ fantasia. It is easy to imagine a held pedal note with the hands roaming above it. The orchestra enters with force, and the piano then gives out the restless main theme. The movement builds to a loud return of that theme and a solo cadenza, and the Bach-like opening comes back at the end, now with the orchestra beneath it.

II. Allegro scherzando. A soft chord and a tapping figure on the timpani set the pace. The piano’s first tune is light and quick; a second, broader tune appears low down, in the bassoons and lower strings. This was the movement the first audience liked best, and it ends as lightly as it began.

III. Presto. A headlong dance in the rhythm of a tarantella, back in G minor. The piano starts it with a rumble low in the keyboard and scarcely stops afterwards. A second idea, marked by a trill and repeated many times, gives a brief change of texture before the rush to the close.

About the Work

The idea for ‘La Valse’ was older than the piece by more than a decade. From about 1906 Maurice Ravel had in mind an orchestral work in honour of the Viennese waltz and of Johann Strauss, which he called ‘Wien’ (Vienna). Nothing came of it before the First World War, in which Ravel served in the French army. He came back to the plan afterwards, when Serge Diaghilev asked him for a score for the Ballets Russes, and he wrote the piece between early 1919 and 1920 under a new title: ‘La Valse, poème chorégraphique’.

Diaghilev turned it down. When Ravel played it through to him on two pianos, the impresario is reported to have called it a masterpiece but not a ballet: the portrait of a ballet. Ravel took offence, and the two never worked together again. The first performance was therefore a concert one, in Paris on 12 December 1920, with the Lamoureux Orchestra conducted by Camille Chevillard. Stage productions followed later in the decade, in Antwerp in 1926 and by Ida Rubinstein’s company in 1928.

Ravel printed a short scenario at the head of the score. Through whirling clouds, waltzing couples can be glimpsed. The clouds scatter to reveal an immense hall filled with a turning crowd; the scene grows lighter, and the chandeliers blaze out at the first fortissimo. The setting is an imperial court, about 1855.

What the scenario does not mention is how the piece ends, and that has occupied listeners ever since. The waltz gathers speed and weight until it tears itself apart. Coming so soon after 1918, this has often been heard as a picture of the old Europe dancing towards its own ruin, and the orchestra’s own note takes that line: every waltz, it says, may be the last. Ravel himself is reported to have resisted the idea, saying that one should see in the piece only what the music expresses, a rising progression of sound. Both things can be true of the same twelve minutes.

What to Listen For

The beginning is the clouds. Double basses rumble very quietly, and fragments of waltz rhythm and melody drift past without settling. A first tune takes shape low in the bassoons and violas. The harps sweep the mist aside, and the violins lead the orchestra into the main waltz in full light.

A chain of waltzes follows, as in a set by Johann Strauss, each with its own character and each scored differently: some mild and a little shy, with oboe, violins and flutes to the fore, others loud and sweeping. Ravel’s orchestra is large, with two harps and a good deal of percussion, and much of the pleasure is in the detail.

Taken as a whole, the piece is one long crescendo, interrupted and begun again. Each time the dance regathers it is louder and less polite than before, and the elegance of the early waltzes gives way to something closer to violence. The final climax is hard to resist and hard to hear as a mere ballroom scene, which is where the arguments about what Ravel meant begin.