Lakeland Sinfonia Concert Society

Credit: Dan Brady When Thomas Zehetmair joined Northern Sinfonia as Music Director in 2002 The Guardian reported it as “the best signing since Alan Shearer”. Born in Salzburg, Thomas Zehetmair was taught by his father at the city’s Mozarteum, making his debut at the Salzburg Festival at the age of sixteen. The following year he won first prize at the International Mozart Competition and his first recording was released the year after that. Through his appointment as Music Director of Northern Sinfonia, Zehetmair is centrally involved in the planning of repertoire, commissions, tours, the engagement of guest conductors and soloists, orchestral personnel, recordings and broadcasts. Thomas enjoys a successful international career as a soloist, being a regular guest of the premier orchestras of Europe and the United States. He has given a number of first performances - including violin concertos written for him by Heinz Holliger and James Dillon.

In 1994 he formed The Zehetmair Quartet; the other members of which are Kuba Jakowicz, Ruth Killius and Ursula Smith. Building on Zehetmair’s extraordinary relationship with Northern Sinfonia, his Quartet will also develop strong links with The Sage Gateshead. The Zehetmair Quartet won the 2003 Gramophone Record of the Year Award for its recording of two of Schumann’s String Quartets. Zehetmair also won a Gramophone Award for his recording for EMI Classics with the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra conducted by Sir Simon Rattle in 1997.

In 1904 Sibelius had built the log cabin close to Järvenpää, well away from the capital where he claimed that ‘all melody had died within me’, and so in these new rural surroundings, where he was to live for the rest of his life, work began on the Third Symphony.

The Third was to have been his ‘English Symphony’ dedicated to his English sponsor Granville Bantock and planned to receive its first performance in 1907 under the auspices of the Royal Philharmonic Society in London. Sibelius had not completed it by the date planned and when it eventually appeared in England in February 1908, there had been performances in Helsinki, St. Petersburg and in Germany and France. Sibelius wrote:
‘The third symphony was a disappointment for the audience, as everyone was expecting that it would be like the second.’
On mentioning this to Mahler, Sibelius was told, ‘with each new symphony you always lose listeners who have been captivated by previous symphonies’.

I Allegro moderato (quick & moderately lively) – this first of three movements begins with has been described as ‘the image of a gentleman on a brisk morning walk’. A more lyrical theme is given to the cellos around a rocking figure on violas and violins. It is worth noting that although these two themes are very different in character, they are both based around four notes and it is this material that is developed up to the movement’s conclusion.

II Andantino con moto, quasi allegretto (a little quicker than andante but with movement, light and cheerful) – the main theme, something in the nature of a folksong, is presented four times in different guises. Pairs of woodwind pass the somewhat melancholy music around and muted strings support. ‘It makes no demands, you can’t do anything with it except sit and listen to it’.

III Moderato: Allegro ma non tanto – this final movement falls into two parts: a first section where a series of tiny fragments of themes are held together by long notes; then a more energetic section, where cellos introduce a simple hymn-like theme (the ghost of ‘Finlandia’) featuring repeated rhythms that were such a strong element of the first movement. The ‘hymn’ becomes more powerful as Sibelius, for the first time of any length in this work, demands full orchestral colour as the brass put their characteristic Sibelian stamp on the final bars of the symphony.

‘In the third symphony Sibelius was at the crossroads. After the wild number one and the pathos of number two, he discovered something new – -number three is not always appreciated, but I am tremendously fond of it’.
Osmo Vanska, conductor, in 1998

‘The 9^th of June 1865 was a hard day for my mother but also a happy one. She was alone at home with some of her younger children when she felt the first birth pangs. It was very painful and she went outside, put her arms around a tree and banged her head against its trunk. This is why I think she must have felt very happy and relieved when at last I made my entry into this world’.
Carl Nielsen ‘My Childhood on Funen’ pub. 1927.

Other early ‘musical’ experiences included, at the age of three, arranging logs from the log pile into a scale after sorting them according to the sound they made, and at the age of six being given a small violin when he had the measles. He taught himself some tunes and played them for his father, a painter and a fiddler for dances, who tuned the violin and gave it back to Carl!

As he grew up he learned the piano (he was delighted that, unlike the violin, he did not have to search for the notes; they were ‘in long shining rows before my very eyes’), and at the age of 14 he was accepted into the Danish Army as a bandsman. He was then awarded a scholarship at the Copenhagen Conservatoire and left after two years to continue his studies, financed by playing the violin in the Tivoli Gardens Orchestra and the Royal Chapel Orchestra. He also made a reputation for himself as a conductor and all in all he had created a life pattern that enabled him to compose.

In 1922 he wrote and published a Wind Quintet for friends. Through this work he became fascinated by the individuality of the five instruments and vowed to write a concerto for each of them (flute, oboe, clarinet, bassoon and horn). The flute concerto was composed during a visit to Italy. The first of its two movements was completed in Florence on September 6^th and the other on October 1^st. By then the original flautist of the quintet had left the group and so the concerto was dedicated to Holger Gilbert-Jespersen and Nielsen hoped that Jespersen’s ‘meticulous, refined nature’ would shine through.

Often described as a combination of ‘delicacy and rude humour’, there are some noteworthy and unexpected contributions from the *bass trombone. Also, the flute concerto is unconventional in its scoring – 2 each of oboes, clarinets, bassoons and horns plus bass trombone, timpani and strings – and has only two movements.

I Allegro moderato – rather dissonant, strident music opens the work before what Nielsen calls ‘its gentler zone’ is reached. Solo passages, dialogues between solo flute and orchestra and a clarinet and bassoon conversation characterise the music. Moments of vigour fade into warblings for the flute, but the timpani interrupt this idyll and the trombone has a stormy exchange with the flute. The movement calms down with two cadenzas and a flute and clarinet duet ends the movement peacefully.

II Allegretto – Nielsen describes the opening of this movement as having ‘a little nastiness in some notes cast forth by the orchestra but the atmosphere quickly relaxes again and when the solo flute enters it does so with childish innocence’. Exchanges between the flute and other instruments follow, before a mournful melody on the flute is picked up by the strings. A little march brightens things up and then the ‘rude’ trombone interrupts several times before the flute seems to be back in control. There is one last contribution from orchestra and bass trombone as the flute draws a veil on the concerto.

*Nielsen played the trombone in a military band and no doubt enjoyed the raucous part he wrote for that instrument. The composer Robert Simpson, described its role thus: ‘This coarse individual spreads itself all over the score with a grotesque and aimless blether as if looking for something he has never even remembered to forget, while the aristocratic flute expresses its outraged sensibilities’.

In early 1877, when Tchaikovsky began sketching his 4^th symphony, he could savour the satisfaction of his recently completed opera Eugene Onegin, following on from his first ballet masterpiece Swan Lake and the completion of his First Piano Concerto. The wealthy widow, Nadezhda von Meck, was sending him regular allowances and the security this established was certainly beneficial for the composer.

On the other hand, 1877 saw him enter into a very short, disastrous marriage to a young infatuated student, Antonia Milyukova, from which he fled, in a state of shock and horror, to St. Petersburg and then on to Switzerland where he gradually recovered his peace of mind. With the help of Mme. Von Meck, he went back to work on his symphony, a work he dedicated to her – ‘To my best friend’. She had forbidden him to use her name, wanting to keep her association with the composer a secret (it is thought that they met at a variety of social functions over the years of her patronage, but never spoke or acknowledged each other).

The meaning of this 4^th symphony was made clear in a long and detailed letter to Mme. von Meck, excerpts from which describe the work entirely from the composer’s viewpoint: ‘The introduction is the kernel, the chief thought of the whole symphony’.

I Andante maestoso: moderato con anima, in movimento di valse – the opening fanfare on horns, then on the rest of the brass ‘is Fate, the fatal power which hinders one in the pursuit of happiness: from gaining the goal, which jealously provides that peace and comfort do not prevail…There is nothing to do but submit and vainly complain’.

Tchaikovsky’s direction of ‘in movimento di valse’ for the main body of the movement might suggest something lighter and more positive, but the strangely lethargic rhythms are described as ‘Oh joy, a sweet and tender dream… but deeper and deeper the soul is sunk in dreams’. Then ‘roughly we are awakened by Fate… we see that life is an everlasting alternation of sombre reality and fugitive dreams of happiness. Something like this is the programme of the first movement’.

This movement is almost as long as the rest of the symphony and its ‘fate’ motto casts a long shadow over the work as a whole.

II Andantino in modo di canzona – ‘the second movement shows another phase of sadness – a melancholy feeling – one mourns the past and has neither the courage nor the will to begin a new life. One is rather tired of life’.

Despite this gloomy diagnosis, there is much to enjoy! The beautiful opening oboe melody (20 bars) seems as if it could on forever. It is passed to the cellos, then to the full strings and then to bassoons, who bravely vary it. There is a faster, rather plodding central section but then the original melody returns, this time decorated by little woodwind phrases first heard in the opening movement. The final appearance of the long melody is in the hands of the bassoon, but subsequent attempts to take up the melody notes by violins, clarinet and bassoon falter, and the bassoon has the last word as the movement fades on a long dying note.

III Scherzo: pizzicato ostinato (plucked unceasing) – at last, something ‘ungloomy’! Strings pluck throughout and set off this inspired movement. Their part in the movement is stopped abruptly, by a high oboe note which signals the turn of the woodwind to join in with a ‘picture of a drunken peasant and a gutter song’. The brass take over as ‘military music is heard passing by in the distance’ with clarinet and piccolo adding their colour to the distant parade. Woodwind and strings disagree as to who is to return to the opening music of the movement and, quite rightly, the strings resume their plucking. Woodwind and then brass join the strings and this delightful mini-guide to the orchestra, flutters to an end.

IV Allegro con fuoco – ‘if you find no pleasure in yourself, look around you – go to the people – see how they enjoy life’.

Happy music is thrown at the listener as the ‘people’ are represented by the folk tune ‘In the field there stood a birch tree’. The last two notes of this folk tune are developed, accompanied by scurrying string scales as Tchaikovsky propels the music to a full-blown march for the entire orchestra. From this blazing sound the ‘birch tree’ appears and again, via avalanches of sound, Tchaikovsky takes us to the march. The ‘birch tree’ theme reappears and a pattern seems to be emerging but this time ‘Fate’(the opening horn call) stops the music in its tracks. Timpani rumble as if to herald a new beginning and the march theme winds up the music. The opening ‘happy music’ joins in, as does the solitary ‘birch tree’, but this is swept aside in an orgy of notes as the symphony gallops to its triumphant ending.

‘There is happiness – rejoice in the happiness of others – and you can still live.