Introduction

It’s always great to be back with the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra and to play in the wonderful acoustic of Symphony Hall. It’s a fantastic orchestra, and one with which I’ve had a fruitful long-term partnership, exploring a wide variety of repertoire. This will be my first time playing Mendelssohn’s Piano Concerto No.1 with them.

This concerto is fairly new to me. I’ve known it as a listener since I was young but learnt to play it after the pandemic and first performed it in 2022 with conductor Alpesh Chauhan.

It is an amazing work; Mendelssohn wrote it when he was 22 in only three days and ‘almost carelessly’, as he put it. Yet he achieved something new in this piano concerto by eliding its movements to give the impression of a one-movement piece. There is no long introduction from the orchestra to start this concerto, but a short, seven-bar burst of energy before the piano jumps in with its impetuous octaves. Unlike a typical concerto of the time, the piano and orchestra then introduce to us the themes and develop them together, creating a sense of a structurally united whole.

Before the slow movement, listen out for the brass and their fanfare-like rhythmic cells, which usher in the piano solo that escorts us into the next chapter. It is this fanfare that opens the final movement, reinforcing the feeling of this piece existing as one long stretch. Near the end of this movement Mendelssohn looks back a final time, now to the first movement’s second subject theme - a fleeting and wistful reminiscence before an explosive coda.

It is a short concerto, lasting for only twenty minutes, yet it is remarkably varied. The first movement is bold, dramatic and stormy, whereas the intimate second is like chamber music with conversational interchanges between the piano and orchestra. The last is incredibly virtuosic but filled with humour. Mendelssohn’s writing here is charming, light and bubbly: like champagne in the form of music.

I think it makes the perfect concerto and I hope you think so too! It’s concise and yet takes us to so many different places and it was a great success for Mendelssohn from its very first performance.

This will be my third time working with Robert Treviño – he is a terrific conductor and an ideal partner on stage. It will be a treat to be back together again in such a great atmosphere.

Benjamin Grosvenor
Piano

Programme Notes

"I wrote it in but a few days and almost carelessly", said Mendelssohn (perhaps too modestly!) about his first Piano Concerto. Benjamin Grosvenor sparkles in the solo role. Mozart’s ‘Prague’ Symphony is effortless elegance itself, while hinting at a dark side. Brahms, on the other hand, laboured over his first symphony for nearly 20 years. It was well worth his trouble – personal, powerful and with a glorious (possibly relieved) finale.

Symphony No.38 in D major, K.504 (Prague)

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756-1791)

I. Adagio - Allegro
II. Andante
III. Finale: Presto

In the days of the Holy Roman Empire, the citizens of Prague never stopped believing that their city – not Vienna – was the true Imperial capital. So when rumours circulated that Mozart’s The Marriage of Figaro had flopped in Vienna in May 1786, they had a new musical hero ready-made. Figaro was a triumph when it was given in Prague in December 1787. “No piece has ever caused such a sensation” stated one newspaper:
Connoisseurs who have seen this opera in Vienna are anxious to declare that it was done much better here…Our great Mozart must have heard about this for himself, for there is a rumour that he will come here in person.

It was more than just a rumour. Mozart arrived in Prague in mid-January 1787, and announced a concert for 19th January. Mozart’s future biographer Franz Niemetschek was in the audience. “The theatre had never been so full as on this occasion”, he recalled. “Never had there been such enthusiasm”. At some point that evening Mozart directed the first known performance of his Symphony in D, K.504.

When you consider that Viennese critics had described Mozart’s music as “too highly seasoned”, the idea that Mozart wrote the symphony specially for the music lovers of Prague gathers weight. After all, what could be spicier than the symphony’s atmospheric introduction? The main Allegro has an almost operatic sense of drama, and the wind instruments perform remarkable feats (the Bohemian players were so good that Mozart could risk it). Indeed, with only 14 string players in the Prague orchestra, the lilting second movement Andante will have taken on an even more intimate quality. The Presto of the finale will have meant exactly that: “as fast as possible”. Mozart drives the music unstoppably onwards before giving this most appreciative of audiences a truly jubilant finish. Niemetschek remembered the reaction:

We gave vent to our emotions in enthusiastic applause…Mozart likewise counted this day as one of the happiest of his life.

Piano Concerto No.1 in G minor, Op.25

Felix Mendelssohn-Bartholdy (1809-1847)

I. Molto allegro con fuoco
II. Andante
III. Presto

Hector Berlioz never lost an opportunity to tease his old friend Mendelssohn. In his book Evenings in the Orchestra he tells of a new piano used for a competition at the Paris Conservatoire. The test piece is Mendelssohn's First Piano Concerto - performed 30 times in a row. The 30th contestant finishes, there's a brief silence, and the piano suddenly begins Mendelssohn's concerto, entirely by itself. It can't be stopped. It's sprinkled with holy water, then hacked to pieces with an axe, but the keys just dance off down the stairs to the tune of the concerto.

It's fair to say that Mendelssohn found Berlioz's sense of humour trying ("sometimes I'd like to strangle him"). But the story wouldn't have been quite so wicked if it hadn't contained a grain of truth. In 1831, Mendelssohn toured to Italy and Switzerland before (in September) fetching up in Munich. The Munich audience expected to hear him play, so in the run-up to his concert on 17th October 1831, he wrote them a piano concerto – just like that. Mendelssohn enjoyed the challenge. “It is a glorious feeling to wake up in the morning and to know that you are going to write the score of a grand allegro with all sorts of instruments, and various oboes and trumpets, while bright weather holds out the prospect of a refreshing, long walk in the afternoon” he wrote home to his family.

That same exuberance sweeps the concerto along. After a short, dramatic opening crescendo (perhaps a memory of Switzerland, and its Alpine storms) the piano bounds straight in. It’s rarely silent throughout the bustling first movement, with its melting, tender second theme, and before you know it, trumpets are sounding a stern fanfare – the cue for the second movement, which follows without a break (Mendelssohn hated it when people applauded between movements).

It’s a quiet, melancholy Andante, a true “song without words”, and Mendelssohn finally gives himself a break, letting the orchestra sing the tune before the piano decorates it with delicate grace. There’s a pause – those trumpets sound once more – and we’re off again: a brilliant finale with an irresistibly catchy tune, in which the piano whirls, glitters and cascades high above a racing orchestra. Mendelssohn’s aim was quite to bring the house down, and by all accounts, he succeeded.

Symphony No.1in C minor, Op.68

Johannes Brahms (1833-1897)

I. Un poco sostenuto - Allegro
II. Andante sostenuto
III. Un poco allegretto e grazioso
IV. Adagio – Allegro non troppo ma con brio

Few symphonies have been more keenly awaited than Brahms’s First. In 1853, at the age of 20, the young Brahms had been “discovered” by Robert and Clara Schumann. Robert didn’t mince his words: Brahms, he announced, was “the chosen one, destined to give ideal expression to our times”, the composer who would, at last, write a symphony worthy to stand alongside Beethoven’s nine. It was a lot to live up to – and for two decades, Brahms struggled to write the symphony people were already anticipating as “Beethoven’s Tenth “You don’t know what it’s like” he told a friend “always to hear that giant [Beethoven] marching along behind me”.

At last, in the summer of 1876, he announced that his First Symphony was complete. Those two decades hadn’t just been devoted to creative struggle: Brahms had lived through the most painful experiences of his life. Just months after he befriended the Schumanns, Robert attempted suicide and was committed to a mental hospital. Throughout this trauma, the 20-year old Brahms was left looking after the Schumanns’ seven children – and falling deeply, and (as it turned out) hopelessly in love with Clara.

Meanwhile, he wrestled with his craft. The result, in his First Symphony, is a first movement as taut and as powerful as Beethoven.The tragic opening bars of Brahms’ First Symphony surely mean exactly what they sound like – the relentless pounding of a heart in torment. The Symphony’s middle movements, however, confused early listeners. Still reeling from the volcanic first movement, they didn’t know what to make of an Andante that seemed to come from another world, a deep, tender song, as warm as the first movement had been dark, and rounded off with a heart-rending violin solo. Beethoven didn’t write violin solos in his symphonies! (But Schumann, as it happens, did).

The same goes for the sweetly-flowing third movement (marked grazioso – gracefully) – but Brahms, as we’re about to find out, is merely taking a breath. The opening of the fourth movement plunges us back into the darkness of the first. As the woodwinds cry out and the strings fumble and struggle, you can almost hear Brahms searching for a way forward. And then the clouds part, and as if from some alpine summit, a solo horn gives a long ringing call. Brightly and sweetly, the flute calls back – and for the first time in the symphony, the trombones are heard, in a quiet hymn.

Now comes the moment for which the world had been waiting since the death of Beethoven: as Brahms launches his finale with a once-in-a-lifetime tune, unmistakably the heir of the Hymn to Joy from Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. But then, “any idiot can see that” said Brahms, whenever anyone pointed out the likeness. This is Brahms’s First, not Beethoven’s Tenth – and after a truly epic struggle, Brahms has found his own, very personal, path to joy. In a letter to Clara, he set his own words to that stirring horn call that heralds the dawn: “High on the mountain, deep in the vale: a thousandfold I send you my greeting”.

© Richard Bratby