MENDELSSOHN & NEEDLEMAN
FROM THE STAGE
by Katherine Needleman
I believe I last played the Martinů Oboe Concerto in public a bit more than 17 years ago with the Baltimore Symphony. I learned the piece as a child and played it with several orchestras beforehand. I remember having a young baby at home when I last played it, and she is now about to graduate from high school.
Whenever a composer asks me to point to music that deploys the oboe especially well, this is among the few pieces to which I always direct them. Martinů manages to write exciting, athletic pyrotechnics with the honest long lines the oboe is known for, with plenty of opportunities to explore one’ s anxiety about whether the world is about to fall apart. It is like having a lovely dinner party in your own home, with great cocktails, but also deep conversation where you solve the world’ s problems. And the bonus is some magic
Bohemia for Paris, where study with Albert Roussel instilled the sense of clarity and order so esteemed among French composers. He stayed there for 17 years, but following the Nazi invasion, he and his wife made their way to New York, where he was widely admired as a composer and teacher, including a stint at Princeton University. He spent his final decade moving about in quest of a satisfying place to live: to Nice( 1953 – 55), then back to America( 1955, teaching briefly at the Curtis Institute), then Rome, and finally Basel, where he died of cancer.
He composed his Oboe Concerto just prior to leaving Nice. It occupied him in house elf comes and does the dishes for you afterward.
Of course, the work of bringing this piece to the public is in the lifetime of preparation. I see this piece a little differently than the last time I played it. There is also a new scholarly edition which did not exist when I was a child. We oboists passed around bootlegged handwritten copies of the second cadenza in the last movement, and errata lists several pages long. Most of the new edition corrections I already knew, but some I cannot abide and will not adopt.
The orchestral accompaniment is devilishly difficult from a coordination standpoint. It is a privilege to play this Concerto at different points in my life with this Orchestra I grew up hearing, knowing, and loving since I was a child first studying.
April and May of 1955 and he dedicated it to Jiří Tancibudek, a noted Czech oboist who escaped his homeland during World War II and settled in Australia, where he played the premiere the following year. It is a genial work, although perhaps more genial to general listeners than to oboists, who are faced with formidable technical challenges involving range( its line goes high, up to a G-flat), balance( since the chamber orchestra is somewhat heavily scored overall), and stamina( since the soloist works hard for much of the work’ s 16- or 17-minute duration). In fact, Tancibudek reported that Martinů had asked him to send“ some material, namely passages of virtuoso character— kind of preluding— which would particularly suit my finger technique, etc.” Tancibudek did this, but the materials never arrived. As a consequence, Martinů turned instead to classic etudes by Eugène Bozza to inspire him in an idiomatic direction.
The compact first movement opens with the combination of shimmering string timbre and rhythmic propulsion that is a Martinů hallmark; once the oboe enters, the music takes on a more pastoral character. The second movement displays a folkish mien, very subdued and serious at first, taking on a mysterious, nervous edge in two cadenza-like passages. The finale has a folkish tinge, too, beginning with music suggestive of a Czech polka. An ornamented descending motif, heard a minute into the finale, seems possibly borrowed from the Oboe Concerto composed by Richard Strauss just a decade earlier; together these two pieces are among the finest in the oboe’ s 20th-century concerto repertoire.
Instrumentation: Solo oboe, two flutes, two clarinets, bassoon, two horns, trumpet, piano, and strings.
Felix Mendelssohn
Born: February 3, 1809, in Hamburg, Germany Died: November 4, 1847, in Leipzig, Germany
SYMPHONY NO. 3 IN A MINOR, OP. 56,“ SCOTTISH” [ 1840 – 42 ]
The numbering of Mendelssohn’ s symphonies confusingly reflects their publication dates rather than the order in which they were composed. The“ Scottish”— his Symphony No. 3— was the last of the five“ mature” symphonies he completed. Though he did not embark on its composition in any sustained way until 1840, he first thought about writing such a piece in 1829, when he toured the British Isles with a friend who was living in London. They left in July on their journey to
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