Introduction

Mozart’s Piano Concerto No.26 is not often performed but is a piece that I have fond memories of. It was one of the very first piano concertos I ever came across when listening on tape in the car as a child and so I am excited to perform it during my debut with the CBSO.

I have been on the long journey of learning all of Mozart’s piano concertos, now only having three or four left to learn! Mozart’s music is very special; the more you can get inside the music, the more satisfying his music is to play. Studying them in such detail allows me to move more and more freely, with hope to achieve an effortless style wherein it feels like the music has fallen straight from heaven. It requires a lot of hard work, but in the good moments there is something almost paradisal about the experience of playing Mozart’s music.

Piano Concerto No.26 does not have the typical conventions you may be expecting from Mozart’s music. There is no melancholy or sadness in this concerto, nor his usual compositional surprises. Instead, we are welcomed with splendour and shine.

The middle of the first movement doesn’t change much melodically and emotionally, but harmonically Mozart goes completely wild. It almost feels like Mozart goes through the circle of fifths twice, losing orientation in a way that isn’t unsettling emotionally but feels really fun and a little crazy. The recapitulation returns to the main theme and it is a wonderful moment after the wild journey in the development.

This piano concerto was actually written without a left-hand part, the first edition reconstructed by a publisher, but we cannot be sure how Mozart would have fully intended it to be played. Many of the virtuosic runs, scales and broken chords are improvisatory in style. There are very few pianists who would dare to improvise live in concert – as a piece that is already increasingly difficult to play and memorise,
I certainly will not be!

This piano concerto makes for a wonderful piece for the festive season. I am particularly excited to work with Kazuki in this concert – in fact, we’ve wondered why it’s taken us so long to perform together in Birmingham. He is a very good friend of mine and one of my absolute favourite partners to collaborate with, so I very much look forward to this occasion.

Martin Helmchen
Piano

Programme Notes

Martin Helmchen is perfect for the dazzling Concerto No.26, one of Mozart’s most strenuous workouts for a solo pianist. Kazuki leads the orchestra in Bruckner’s stirring Symphony No.9 in the year that marks his 200th birthday. It remained unfinished at his death, but its three mighty movements are a powerful final statement from this uniquely brilliant composer.

Piano Concerto No.26, K.537

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756-1791)

I. Allegro
II. Larghetto
III. Allegretto

Mozart never worked in isolation. Born into a family of musicians, in the middle of a thriving urban musical community, his entire life’s work was a response to the musicians and audiences around him. But the piano concerto that we know as No.26 tells a slightly different story. He entered the score in his personal catalogue on 24th February 1788. At this point in his career he’d practically stopped performing concertos in public – the market just wouldn’t support them.

So this was his first completed concerto since December 1786, and its premiere came on 26th February: in the interval of an oratorio by CPE Bach. Mozart directed an orchestra of 86 players, to some acclaim, though the concerto seems to have gone largely un-noticed. Perhaps everyone had popped out for a glass of wine.

And yet it’s a wholly new kind of Mozart piano concerto. His music had been criticised in Vienna as “too highly spiced”, and the idea that Mozart was a composer who wrote for the head rather than the heart was gathering currency. So he adapted. This new concerto demonstrates its simplicity from the very first bar. The surprises that lie ahead in this spacious first movement – by turns lyrical and courtly – tend to charm, rather than astonish. The same goes for the elegant conversation of the Larghetto and the courtesy and grace of the piano melody that opens the final Allegretto.

Yet Mozart’s manuscript score reveals two intriguing facts. Firstly, the concerto was written so that it could be performed with different numbers of wind players, or even none at all. That made it ideal for touring and for occasions - like the coronation of Emperor Leopold II in Frankfurt in October 1790 - on which Mozart could not be certain in advance how many musicians he might be able to afford (he was expected to hire his own orchestra).

And secondly, Mozart left large stretches of the piano part completely blank – meaning that he either played entirely from memory, or improvised on the night. For an improviser of his brilliance, that might simply have been a matter of saving time. But in a changing musical world, it also enabled him to adapt his solo performance to his public: giving every audience a bespoke experience, perfectly tailored to their tastes and mood. He might even have added trumpets and drums for the coronation performance - this was an imperial occasion, after all.

But if he did, it was wasted money. His Frankfurt concert on 15th October 1790 was a financial flop. “People here are even greater skinflints than the Viennese!”, he wrote to his wife Constanze. No matter: to this day, this beautiful (and resourceful) masterpiece is still known as the “Coronation” concerto.

Symphony No.9 in D minor

(1951 version, ed. Nowak)

Anton Bruckner (1824-1896)

I. Feierlich, misterioso
II. Scherzo: Bewegt, lebhaft - Trio. Schnell
III. Adagio: Langsam, feierlich

Anton Bruckner died of a heart attack on 11th October 1896, but he had been unwell for some years. His physician, Dr Richard Heller, noticed that he’d been struggling to write music, spending longer and longer each day asleep in the armchair at his apartment at Vienna’s Belevedere Palace – grace-and-favour lodgings, granted to him by the elderly Emperor Franz Joseph of Austria. When Bruckner finally fell asleep forever, he left relatively few belongings: a brass bed, a crucifix with an ivory Christ, a harmonium, his Bösendorfer piano and the unfinished manuscript of the work he had struggled for more than five years to complete – the first three movements of his Ninth and final symphony.

Bruckner had long suspected that his Ninth Symphony would be his last. “I don’t like to even start on the Ninth” he’d told a friend, some years earlier - “I am scared to, for Beethoven, too, concluded his life with his Ninth”. Undaunted, he began work in earnest early in 1892 and worked intensely on the symphony for the next three years. On 13th November 1893, suffering from breathlessness and heart pain, he made his will. Then he returned to the symphony and by November 1894 he had completed the first three movements. Visitors would be regaled with excerpts from the work-in-progress, and Heller recalled one such occasion:

Among other things he told me this: “You see, I’ve already dedicated symphonies to two great monarchs, poor King Ludwig and our illustrious Emperor – for me, the most exalted of all earthly rulers. And now I offer my last work to the King of Kings, the Dear Lord himself, and I hope that He will grant me enough time to finish it, and that He will graciously accept it.”

The devoutly Catholic Bruckner had dedicated his Seventh Symphony to King Ludwig of Bavaria and his Eighth to Emperor Franz Joseph. But now he was aiming for the highest summit of all. He was intensely aware of his failing strength, and prayed daily before beginning work: “there would be several ‘Dear Lords’ and ‘Hail Marys’, and he would often conclude with a free prayer: ‘Dear God, let me soon be well again; you see, I need my health so I can finish the Ninth’”, recalled Heller. Heller believed that in his mind, he had drawn up a contract with his ‘dear Lord’. If He willed that the symphony, which was to be a hymn of praise to God, should be finished, He would give Bruckner the time he needed for his task. If he died too soon, God had only Himself to blame.

Bruckner was too humble a Catholic to question divine will. But he certainly had a fourth movement in mind. He spoke of ending the symphony with an “Allelujah”; “a song of praise to the Dear Lord”. The final victory, for a believer like Bruckner, was never in doubt.

What seems clear, however, is that Bruckner conceived the symphony as a sort of struggle towards Heaven – and that when he used terms like Feierlich (solemn, or ceremonial) and Misterioso (Mysterious) he meant them in a religious as well as a purely musical sense. Like Beethoven, Bruckner begins his first movement in an air of mystery and darkness. If the turmoil and anguish that follows is intensely real, so too are the contrasting moments of wonder and hope. The second movement is a classical scherzo on the mightiest of scales: a cosmic dance, driven by the repeated rhythms in which the number-obsessed Bruckner heard the architecture of the universe. But it’s playful, too; and in the central Trio section, the atmosphere lightens and brightens before the thunder returns.

And then, with a yearning cry set against the deep, dark chords of three Wagner tubas, he launches into the Adagio – a meditation set to glowing harmonies. But it’s a meditation with a very definite direction and purpose: one that’s hinted at in the moments of deep quiet, the solemn chorales, the tragic outbursts and the shining, trumpet-crowned visions of glory that shape this unforgettable movement. “Yes, the victory is death”, Bruckner told one friend, and some have heard this Adagio as music of release: the transition between the struggles of worldly life and the heavenly triumph that Bruckner intended as his finale. Human to the last, he was destined never to reveal that final vision to earthly ears. Instead, the symphony leaves us where Bruckner himself left us: in music of profound tenderness and consolation.

© Richard Bratby