The Origin of the Harp, 1842 (oil on canvas) by Daniel Maclise. Manchester Art Gallery.
Thomas Adès
The Origin of the Harp
Adès’s The Origin of the Harp was originally commissioned by the Hallé orchestra and premiered in 1994. This expanded orchestration, which has its U.S. premiere this evening, is a co-commission of the AMFS, the Scottish Chamber Orchestra, and the Gewandhausorchester Leipzig. The new instrumentation includes two flutes, two oboes, two clarinets (one doubling bass clarinet), two bassoons, two horns,
Maclise captures the moment just before the metamorphosis. While her form is still recognizable, the nymph, her long hair, some seaweed, and an adjacent rock form the shape of a harp.
Adès’s interpretation, in four short sections played continuously, also perpetuates the moment just before transformation, so that the harp “is not featured but suggested at the start of the fourth and final section,” when a cascade of plucked strings and percussion provides the closest imitation of the harp in the piece. But the sound of the harp permeates the rest of the piece in subtler ways.
A characteristic feature of the harp is that, because each note has its own string, melodies and chords tend to continue ringing past their notated duration unless the player specifically deadens the strings. Adès recreates this effect in the orchestra throughout the piece; individual pitches of a melody in one instrument are captured and sustained by another. Often these decay to silence as a harp string would. But just as often they behave unexpectedly: growing louder rather than quieter, changing pitch or timbre, or adding rhythmic variation.
The musical metamorphosis of the nymph into the harp does not happen in a linear way; it ebbs and flows with these changing textures. Beyond this, metamorphosis is the defining feature of the work. Each of the four parts is built on a single melodic or contrapuntal idea that unfolds in repeating cycles, each adding expressivity and complexity until it gives way to the next, building to “a flash of divine intervention” that precedes the pseudo-harp’s entry at the start of the fourth movement.
This is the U.S. premiere of the chamber orchestra version of the work, an Aspen co-commission that was first performed last year. In its original version for three clarinets, three violas, three cellos, and percussion, The Origin of the Harp was commissioned by the Hallé orchestra and is among the earliest works in Adès’s catalogue, premiered in 1994. This expanded version keeps the work’s essential character the same but, using the wealth of expertise in writing for the orchestra that Adès has gained in the intervening decades, amplifies the sense of sadness, loss, and transformation. — © Joel Rust
The Road to Loch Maree, date unknown (oil on canvas) by Joseph Farquharson. Wikimedia Commons.
Max Bruch
Scottish Fantasy, op. 46
Bruch’s Scottish Fantasy was completed in 1880. It was dedicated to Pablo de Sarasate, a virtuoso violinist, but Joseph Joachim was directly involved in preparing the solo part. Joachim premiered the work in Liverpool in 1881 with Bruch conducting the Liverpool Philharmonic Society. The score calls for solo violin, two flutes, two oboes, two clarinets, two bassoons, four horns, two trumpets, three trombones, tuba, timpani, percussion, harp, and strings
Max Bruch was a child prodigy who grew into a gifted composer of extraordinary taste and refinement who could always be relied on to turn out works of professional finish and great beauty. He composed in virtually every medium and was highly successful in most. His cantata Frithjof, Opus 23 (1864), was extraordinarily popular for the rest of the century throughout Europe and America. Similarly his Odysseus and Achilleus, cantatas built on scenes from Homer, as well as a setting of Schiller’s Das Lied von der Glocke (“The Song of the Bell”), were long popular in the heyday of a cantata and oratorio market that was fueled by annual choral festivals in just about every town of any size or cultural pretension in Europe and America. He also wrote three operas, three symphonies, songs, choral pieces, and chamber music. He was active as a conductor in Germany and England and eventually became a professor of composition at the Berlin Academy.
Yet today he is remembered primarily for a few concertos. There can be little doubt that the violin was his preferred solo instrument. With the exception of a double concerto for clarinet and viola, all of his compositions for soloist with orchestra—three concertos, the Scottish Fantasy, a Serenade, and a Konzertstück—feature the violin. The absence of other media in his concerto output was not for lack of opportunity or invitation, but Bruch felt a strong disinclination to compose for the piano. When Eugen d’Albert specifically asked for a piano concerto in 1886, Bruch wrote to his publisher Simrock, “Well—me, write a piano concerto! That’s the limit!” Twelve years earlier, when Simrock had suggested that there might be a market for a cello concerto, Bruch was even more outspoken: “I have more important things to do than write stupid cello concertos!”
(To be sure, there were few cello concertos around to serve as inspiring models at the time—only scores by Saint-Saëns and, more tenuously, Robert Schumann, hold a place in the repertory. Moreover there were relatively few virtuosi of the cello whose performances might have inspired a composer to anything other than humdrum scale work. The earliest cello concerto to be firmly established in the standard repertory is Dvořák’s, and it came a good twenty years after Bruch’s comment. Dvořák had been preceded and inspired by Victor Herbert, who was himself a virtuoso cellist and whose Second Cello Concerto (1893) can still be heard occasionally.)
In any case Bruch limited himself almost totally to the violin, and of his three concertos for that instrument, the first was one of his earliest successes and remains the most frequently performed of all his works. The fact that his other work has almost totally dropped out of sight may have been caused in large part by his desire to compose music that was immediately accessible, comprehensible to the bulk of the audience on first hearing. Such music rarely retains its interest over the stylistic changes of the centuries. Bruch was certainly never embroiled in the kind of controversy that followed Brahms or Wagner or most of the other great innovators.
As indicated by the full title of the work—“Fantasy for the violin with orchestra and harp among a free employment of Scottish folk melodies,” a mouthful indeed—the Fantasy is not simply a flashy arrangement of some popular tunes, but actually an extensively worked out score that takes the folk melodies as a starting point and treats them in a developmental style, always with a canny eye (or ear) to their effectiveness on the solo violin and in the full orchestra. Though the music does not, for the most part, sound particularly “Scottish,” there are certainly hints of pentatonic melody and of that crisp rhythm known as the “Scotch snap,” a very short note on an accented beat followed by a longer note. In essence the Scottish Fantasy is a full-scale violin concerto with an introductory slow movement that proceeds into the normal three-movement (fast-slow-fast) pattern, without academic pretensions but with plenty of energy and color, ending with a martial splash as of all the Highland clans a-gathering. — © Steven Ledbetter
Religionsgespräch im Marburger Schloss, 1869 (oil on canvas) by August Noack. © Heinrich Stürzl, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0. The Marburg Colloquy took place in 1529, one year before the Augsburg Confession. The debate between Martin Luther (pictured just to the left of the foremost column) and Ulrich Zwingli (to Luther’s right) ended unresolved; the Augsburg Confession resulted from discussions convened in part to continue this debate.
Felix Mendelssohn
Symphony No. 5 in D major, op. 107, “Reformation”
Mendelssohn composed his Reformation Symphony between the autumn of 1829 and April 1830. He conducted the first performance at the Singakademie in Berlin on November 15, 1832. The score calls for two flutes, two oboes, two clarinets, two bassoons, two horns, two trumpets, three trombones, timpani, and strings.
When Mendelssohn began work on the Reformation Symphony in 1829, he was looking forward to a festivity planned in Germany for the following year to celebrate the 300th anniversary of the Augsburg Confession, the formal profession of faith of the followers of Martin Luther. Luther himself did not attend the 1530 conference that produced the Confession, but while it was in session he is thought to have written one of the most famous of his many hymn texts, a paraphrase of Psalm 46, Ein feste Burg ist unser Gott (A mighty fortress is our God). Under the circumstances this hymn became something of a battle cry for the Protestant Reformation. When German Lutherans celebrated the 200th anniversary of the Augsburg Confession in 1730, Johann Sebastian Bach composed a cantata based on Luther’s hymn; nearly a century later, with the 300th anniversary in view, Mendelssohn began to consider the idea of making his own musical contribution to the festivities by employing the very same chorale.
Mendelssohn conceived the Symphony in England—he dropped hints about it to his family in a letter dated September 2, 1829—and finished the score in Berlin the following April. But the church festivity for which he had conceived the work never took place, and so there was no performance in the tercentennial year.
While Mendelssohn was in Paris in 1831–32, Antoine Habeneck planned a performance of the work as part of his series of concerts at the Conservatory. Mendelssohn was surprised at the thought of having a work so redolent of German culture, one that celebrates Protestant Christianity, premiered in the very Catholic capital of France, but he did not oppose the idea. Yet the performance was canceled after a rehearsal on March 17, 1832. The musicians had protested to Habeneck that the Symphony lacked melody and that it was overladen with thick counterpoint. Mendelssohn, humiliated, likely lost confidence in the piece, and although he led a performance of it in Berlin some eight months later, this was to be the last time the Symphony would be heard by audiences in his lifetime. The Symphony would not be published until twenty-one years after his death.
As befits a symphony composed for a historical celebration, Mendelssohn’s work draws on a number of older musical traditions in addition to Luther’s hymn. The first phrase heard in the violas consists of four notes—D, E, G, F-sharp—that can be heard as a transposed version of the main theme in the last movement of Mozart’s Jupiter Symphony or as a still older melody, a traditional contrapuntal figure. In fact the figure may well be derived from the plainsong Magnificat motive, which in turn harkens back to an ancient melody from the Jewish synagogue.
Increasingly insistent fanfares in the woodwinds suddenly give way to another familiar borrowing from the church—a particular form of the Amen as harmonized for the church in Dresden by Johann Gottlieb Naumann in the late eighteenth century. Though used originally in a Catholic church, the “Dresden Amen” quickly spread to Protestant churches and, later, to other musical works as well; Wagner uses it as the Grail motive in Parsifal.
The main part of the first movement, an Allegro con fuoco in D minor, takes the melodic outline of the Dresden Amen (a rising fifth moving up the scale) and reduces it to the two outer pitches. Presented by Mendelssohn in a characteristic dotted rhythm, it is hard not to hear it as an allusion to the slow introduction of Haydn’s London Symphony, which begins with the same dotted rhythmic figure outlining the interval D–A. Already the young Mendelssohn has hinted at an astonishing number of historical musical antecedents. The wonder of the movement is that all his historicizing fits perfectly into a sonata form. The movement builds its lengthy development section through contrapuntal interplay between the two principal themes of the movement. The “Dresden Amen” then introduces the recapitulation, which is hushed where the exposition was aggressive. The coda returns to the energy and vigor of the exposition.
The second movement is a scherzo in B-flat major based on a single reiterated rhythm running through the main body of the movement. The middle section is a leisurely waltz in the surprisingly bright key of G major. The scherzo returns, but the movement does not end before a quiet coda partly reconciles the material of the main section with the contrasting middle part.
The slow movement, in G minor, is an aria for the violins with the accompaniment of repeated-note chords in the other strings along with an occasional response from the woodwinds. It comes to an end on a sustained G in the cellos and basses. Here the flute sings—unaccompanied and unharmonized—the opening phrase of Luther’s great hymn. Gradually more instruments join in, but just as the tune is about to close, the flute diverts it in a little cadenza, and the strings begin a lively, syncopated passage that modulates from G to the home tonic of D for the real beginning of the last movement. Here the themes become more stereotyped—all arpeggios and scales without much shapeliness—though Mendelssohn works hard at creating a sense of monumentality, with brief fugal sections and various other contrapuntal devices. “Ein feste Burg” runs through the development section. Following the recapitulation of the ideas we have already heard, the coda renders a final majestic proclamation of the great chorale. — © Steven Ledbetter
Marie Jacquot stands at the forefront of exciting young conductors thanks to her consistent musical work, her interest in exploring a wide-ranging repertoire, and numerous outstanding debuts with top-class orchestras. After studying trombone in Paris, she studied conducting in Vienna and Weimar, winning a scholarship from the Conductors’ Forum of the German Music Council. Her awards include the 2019 Ernst Schuch Prize and the palm honoring an outstanding emerging conductor at the thirty-first Victoires de la Musique Classique. Since the 2024–25 season Jacquot has been chief conductor of the Royal Danish Theatre Copenhagen, where she conducted productions of Manfred Trojahn’s Orest and Giacomo Puccini’s Trittico in her first season, as well as works by Richard Strauss, W. A. Mozart, E. W. Korngold, and Signe Lykke on the concert podium. Since the 2023–24 season she has been principal guest conductor of the Wiener Symphoniker, and beginning in 2026 she will be chief conductor of the WDR Symphony Orchestra in Cologne. In 2024–25 Jacquot debuted with the Orchestre National de France, BBC Symphony Orchestra, Oslo Philharmonic, Hamburg Philharmonic, and Orchestre Symphonique de Montréal, and returned to the U.S. with concerts in North Carolina and Detroit. Successful debuts and re-invitations of past seasons include Deutsche Staatsoper Berlin, Copenhagen Opera, Dallas Symphony Orchestra, Yomiuri Nippon Symphony Orchestra, Gewandhausorchester Leipzig, Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra, the Deutsches Symphonie-Orchester Berlin, the Bavarian State Opera, the Karajan Academy of the Berlin Philharmonic, and Orchestre de Chambre de Lausanne.
Stefan Jackiw is one of America’s foremost violinists, captivating audiences with playing that combines poetry and purity with impeccable technique. Jackiw has appeared as a soloist with the orchestras of Boston, Chicago, Cleveland, New York, Philadelphia, and San Francisco, among others. Jackiw tours frequently with his musical partners, pianist Conrad Tao and cellist Jay Campbell, as part of the Junction Trio, which debuted in Carnegie Hall to great success in the 2023–24 season. In 2019 he recorded Beethoven’s Triple Concerto with Inon Barnatan, Alisa Weilerstein, Alan Gilbert, and the Academy of St. Martin in the Fields. Jackiw has performed in numerous major festivals and concert halls around the world, including the Aspen Music Festival, Ravinia Festival, New York’s Mostly Mozart Festival, and the Celebrity Series of Boston. Born to physicist parents of Korean and Ukrainian descent, Stefan Jackiw began playing the violin at the age of four. His teachers have included Zinaida Gilels, Michèle Auclair, and Donald Weilerstein. He holds a Bachelor of Arts degree from Harvard University, as well as an artist diploma from the New England Conservatory, and is the recipient of a prestigious Avery Fisher Career Grant. Jackiw plays a violin made in 1705 by Vincenzo Ruggieri.
