Subscription Concerts 2023-2024Program B
No. 1999 Subscription (Program B)

Music history has witnessed capable impresarios who have made opportunities for composers to create timeless masterpieces. Besides Sergei Diaghilev (1872–1929) who commissioned talented composers to write innovative ballet scores such as The Rite of Spring by Stravinsky, Johann Peter Salomon (1745–1815) deserves special attention. This German concert producer and violinist who was active in the UK from the early 1780s twice made happen Haydn’s fruitful sojourns in London.

For his residencies in the music capital (1791–1792/1794–1795), Haydn in his mature period penned twelve symphonies (Nos.93–98/Nos.99–104) which are collectively called the Salomon (or London) Set. Since No. 94 Surprise enthralled Londoners during his first stay, Haydn might have seen No. 100 as a symphony with another enjoyable “surprise” for local curious audiences. The nickname Military, not by the composer, is given after the unusual instrumentation including a triangle, cymbals and a bass drum: these three typify the Turkish Janissary (infantry) bands whose music was greatly popular in Europe at the time (Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s Piano Sonata K. Haydn keeps back his mini-Turkish band until the trio (central) section of the second movement. Then we hear an unexpected trumpet fanfare followed by a timpani roll immediately before the orchestra, together with the Turkish band, ends this unique Allegretto movement. After the third movement, an elegant Classical minuet, our Turkish band comes back at the finish of the brisk final movement.

[Kumiko Nishi]

“What a violin! (…) Heavens! What sufferings, what misery, what tortures in those four strings!” exclaimed the twenty-year-old Liszt in 1832, after attending a concert of the violinist Niccolò Paganini for the first time. Liszt, a future piano virtuoso who had already been trained by the renowned teacher Carl Czerny (Beethoven’s pupil), made then a firm resolution to be “Paganini of the piano.” Between 1839 and 1847, Liszt carried out a recital tour on unheard-of scale from the Urals to the Pyrenees, exploiting technical and expressive potential of his instrument as a composer-pianist.

The initial sketches of his Piano Concerto No. 1 date from the early 1830s and the first version was finished in 1835. It was since elaborately revised several times to be completed in 1856, provided that the first public performance by Liszt on the keyboard and Hector Berlioz on the podium was held in 1855 in Weimar. Ahead of his time, the concerto made Liszt a target of fault-findings by contemporary conservatives the best-known of whom was the critic Eduard Hanslick who called it scornfully “Triangle Concerto.” The unexpected, frequent use of a triangle particularly at the starts of the last two movements is indeed noteworthy. The concerto consists of four movements performed seamlessly in a style of fantasy. The imposing theme announced at the very beginning of the first movement is “cyclic,” as it will recur repeatedly in various disguises through to the ultra-virtuosic closing of the work.

[Kumiko Nishi]

Reger’s style was founded on the Austro-German Baroque/Classical music from Bach, Mozart, Beethoven to Brahms, anticipating the neo-Classical movement launched by Igor Stravinsky (1882–1971) a few years after Reger’s death. A solid contrapuntal (polyphonic) writing that he mastered as a Bach-admirer as well as rich late-Romantic harmonies in the style of Liszt and Wagner gave Reger’s traditionalist stance a depth and modernness.

Written around the outbreak of World War I, “Variations and Fugue on a Theme by Mozart” (1914) was premiered under Reger’s baton in Wiesbaden in 1915, a year before he passed away. “A theme” is the one from the first movement (also a theme and variation) of Mozart’s Piano Sonata in A major with Turkish March K. 331 (1783). At the commencement, Reger states the exquisite and faintly melancholic theme faithfully – in Andante grazioso (graceful) in A major as with Mozart – mainly on oboe. This is followed by its eight variations and an elaborate fugue on a subject derived from Mozart’s theme. The seventh variation in F major (marked again Andante grazioso) which restates the theme in the almost original form in a polyphonic texture leads to an elegiac opening of the truly late-Romantic, dramatic eighth variation. This extensive final variation and the ensuing vast fugue account for nearly a half of the entire work: such greater gravity Reger placed on the denouement lets us bask in the compelling afterglow of listening. His musical homage to the past ends with the fugue’s grand coda where trumpets and horns recall Mozart’s A-major theme brilliantly.

[Kumiko Nishi]