THE HEBRIDES OVERTURE, OP. 26 (Fingal’s Cave) – Felix Mendelssohn
BORN: February 3, 1809, Hamburg, Germany
DIED: November 4, 1847, Leipzig, Germany
COMPOSED: Begun on August 7, 1829 with the first version completed in December 1831. Mendelssohn would continue to revise the work until the full score was published in 1835. This performance uses Mendelssohn’s London revision of 1832
WORLD PREMIERE: May 14, 1832 (in its not entirely final version). Thomas Attwood conducted the Philharmonic Society of London. On that occasion, the piece was called Overture of the Isles of Fingal
INSTRUMENTATION: 2 flutes, 2 oboes, 2 clarinets, 2 bassoons, 2 horns, 2 trumpets, timpani, and strings
THE BACKSTORY: “Talent,” remarked a British wit, “is nature’s way of being unfair.” If this is so, nature was at its most unfair when it created Felix Mendelssohn, perhaps the most astonishing prodigy in the history of music—no offense to Bach or Mozart. He achieved absolute musical fluency at a young age (fluency as both a composer and a pianist), and by the time he was twenty-one he had been offered—and had turned down—the music professorship of the University of Berlin.
In Mendelssohn’s case, the talent was supported by privilege. He was born into a family that was cultured and wealthy; his grandfather was the noted philosopher Moses Mendelssohn, and his father, Abraham, was a supremely successful banker (one remembered for his remark that he was destined to go down in history as his father’s son and his son’s father). As a result, young Felix, his gifted sister Fanny Cäcilie, and their younger sister Rebecka and brother Paul enjoyed certain perks as they moved through their childhood. One was that Felix had at his disposal a private orchestra to try out his new compositions at Sunday musicales in the family home in Berlin (where the Mendelssohns had moved when Felix was only two). Many of his lifelong friendships were developed during the years of the private house concerts; it was then that he grew close to Ferdinand David (the musician whom Mendelssohn blessed with his two violin concertos), Julius Schubring (the theologian who would go on to compile the texts for Mendelssohn’s oratorios), and Karl Klingemann (eleven years Mendelssohn’s senior, an accomplished amateur musician and a diplomat). Klingemann is at least partly to thank for the existence of the concert overture Fingal’s Cave, one of Mendelssohn’s most popular works.
In 1827, Klingemann left Berlin for London to serve as secretary to the Hanoverian legislation, and two years later he urged Mendelssohn to come for an extended visit. On March 26, 1829, Mendelssohn wrote him a breathless letter announcing that he expected to arrive in London in less than a month. And so in July, Mendelssohn and Klingemann began a journey from London to Edinburgh, a long and sometimes arduous trip by stagecoach that Mendelssohn documented through pencil drawings and pen-and-ink sketches. On July 26 they arrived in Edinburgh, and a few days later they set out on a tour of the Scottish Highlands, which took them as far west as the town of Oban and the Atlantic islands of Staffa and Iona, and then brought them south to Glasgow and back to England.
The first document directly related to the Fingal’s Cave Overture is a drawing, a view from Oban towards the Hebrides islands and Morven, dated August 7, 1829. It preceded by a few hours the letter Mendelssohn penned that evening in the island fishing village of Tobermory. “In order to make you understand how extraordinarily the Hebrides affected me,” Mendelssohn wrote, “the following came into my mind there”—after which he sketches twenty-one measures of the piece we know today as Fingal’s Cave. The work’s fingerprint is already prominent in the germ of Mendelssohn’s conception.
Fingal’s Cave, seventy-six yards deep and sixty-six yards high, occupies the southern coast of the little island of Staffa, seven miles off the Scottish coast, and visitors of a Romantic disposition were drawn to the purple-black rock columns massed at its entrance, of which Keats wrote, “For solemnity and grandeur it far surpasses the finest cathedral.”
Given that Mendelssohn sketched the work’s opening before he set eyes on Fingal’s Cave, we might conclude that the Overture was not quite so directly inspired by that curious bit of geology as is often suggested. Instead, it seems to have been born more from a general impression of the Hebrides islands (of which Staffa does not happen to be an official part) and from Mendelssohn’s vivid romanticizing of the experience. In fact, the composition of this piece traces a terrifically convoluted trajectory, to which the name Fingal’s Cave became attached only late in the process. Mendelssohn continued working on the piece during his trip to Italy, in the autumn of 1830 (the same trip that would inspire his Italian Symphony), and on December 11, 1831, he completed the first version, which he titled Overture to the Lonely Island. Five days later, another autograph score was completed, incorporating several adjustments and boasting a different title: Die Hebriden (The Hebrides). But Mendelssohn was not yet satisfied with what he had composed. On June 6, 1832, he is thought to have presented another autograph score to the Philharmonic Society of London, this time called Overture to the Isles of Fingal.
THE MUSIC: One looks in vain for explicit citations of Scottish music in this work. Unaware of the title, a listener would probably not identify the opening as a depiction of surging waves, guess that its boisterous development section represents a storm, or imagine the “veiled effects on trumpets” to sound as if they were “played through a curtain of water” (as did one early critic). Yet Mendelssohn provided here a concert piece of enduring popularity, one so finely crafted that it would not have been out of place as the first movement of a full symphony. – program notes by James M. Keller
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CONCERTO NO. 1 FOR DOUBLE BASS – Edgar Meyer
BORN: 1960
COMPOSED: 1993
INSTRUMENTATION: solo double bass, 2 flutes, 2 oboes, 2 clarinets, 2 bassoons, 2 horns, and strings
PROGRAM NOTES: Composer and multi-instrumentalist Edgar Meyer began studying bass with his father at the age of five. He won numerous competitions and is the only bass player to receive the Avery Fisher Career Grant and Avery Fisher Prize. The album Appalachian Journey (2000) won a Grammy for Meyer and colleagues Yo-Yo Ma and Mark O’Connor, and in 2002 Meyer received a MacArthur Award.
“Most of the music I’ve become interested in is hybrid in its origins,” Meyer says. “Classical music, of course, is unbelievably hybrid. Jazz is an obvious amalgam. Bluegrass comes from 18th-century Scottish and Irish folk music that made contact with the blues. By exploring music, you’re exploring everything.”
Meyer’s Bass Concerto No. 1 was composed in 1993 (he has since written another solo concerto and a Double Concerto for Cello and Bass) at the instigation of Peter Lloyd, principal bass of the Minnesota Orchestra, the ensemble with which Meyer played the premiere, conducted by Edo de Waart.
The opening solo lick, a bluesy upward swagger with an emphatic punctuation, sets the stylistically protean tone for the piece. The orchestra suggests something more ominous, eventually luring the soloist up into chill and glossy heights. The sense of barely stilled worry ends with the understated return of the opening lick.
The middle movement is in the three-part song form typical of classical concertos. In the first section the bass soars lyrically over a pizzicato accompaniment, sounding like a thoroughly acculturated Satie gymnopédie, although Meyer says that he picked up the idea from Haydn’s C-major Violin Concerto. The contrasting central section is agitated and driven, bustling urgently before slipping back into a state of lyric grace, this time with oboe joining the bass in tandem lines.
The finale explodes with fiddling fury, given only more energy by its rooted weight in the bass register, though this too slips its moorings and spins off into instrumental thin air. “I got the idea for this type of tune and the way of playing it from hearing Sam Bush play the violin and mandolin,” the composer says. (Bush was a partner in several projects with Meyer, going back to the 1980s and the newgrass band Strength in Numbers.) Celtic modality, blues engines, suggestions of John Adams in the scoring, and strenuous virtuosity all combine in this movement, also in a three-part form, with a free-floating middle and cadenza. – program notes by John Henken
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CONCERTO NO. 2 FOR DOUBLE BASS IN B MINOR – Giovanni Bottesini (arr. E. Meyer)
BORN: 1821
DIED: 1889
COMPOSED: 1845
INSTRUMENTATION: solo double bass and strings
Double bassists owe a huge debt to Giovanni Bottesini. Without him, the double bass might still be languishing at the back of the string section, its players unknown and its potential as a solo instrument unrealized. Through his brilliant playing, Bottesini singlehandedly gave the double bass a new identity as a virtuoso instrument. He also composed a number of works that feature the double bass, although many are seldom performed today because of their extreme technical difficulty.
Bottesini became a bass player by accident. At 14, he entered the Milan Conservatory, but the only scholarships available were for bassoon and double bass. Bottesini quickly became a virtuoso player; after he left the conservatory, he soon established himself as an outstanding soloist. Bottesini performed throughout Europe and also toured America; it was during this time that he earned the nickname “Paganini of the double bass.” In later life he became a noted conductor and composer, but it is for his double bass techniques that Bottesini is best remembered, and where he made his most significant musical contributions.
Edgar Meyer considers this concerto his favorite in the bass repertoire. “In my headlong desire to put my mark on the piece, I indulged in some rewriting of the concerto,” he admits, referring to his rewriting of the first movement cadenza. “It [the cadenza] consists primarily of whatever tricks I knew on the bass.” These “tricks” include lightning-fast glissandi and technically demanding phrases played in double-stops, as well as forays into the highest and lowest ends of the bass’s range.
The second movement is an aria for double bass, warm and lyrical, with an understated string accompaniment, while the third features a vigorous, muscular theme that transforms into a march. The third movement also includes another solo cadenza by Meyer, which showcases his breathtaking virtuosity and speed; it also ranges over an unheard-of six octaves. “Of course, that last octave or so, once you get well past the end of the fingerboard, is really novelty material,” says Meyer modestly. – program notes by Elizabeth Schwartz
Edgar Meyer, Double Bass
In demand as both a performer and a composer, Edgar Meyer has formed a role in the music world unlike any other. Hailed by The New Yorker as “…the most remarkable virtuoso in the relatively un-chronicled history of his instrument”, Mr. Meyer’s unparalleled technique and musicianship in combination with his gift for composition have brought him to the fore, where he is appreciated by a vast, varied audience. His uniqueness in the field was recognized by a MacArthur Award in 2002.
As a solo classical bassist, Mr. Meyer can be heard on a concerto album with the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra conducted by Hugh Wolff featuring Bottesini’s Gran Duo with Joshua Bell, Meyer’s own Double Concerto for Bass and Cello with Yo-Yo Ma, Bottesini’s Bass Concerto No. 2, and Meyer’s own Concerto in D for Bass. He has also recorded an album featuring three of Bach’s Unaccompanied Suites for Cello. In 2006, he released a self-titled solo recording on which he wrote and recorded all of the music, incorporating piano, guitar, mandolin, dobro, banjo, gamba, and double bass. In 2007, recognizing his wide-ranging recording achievements, Sony/BMG released a compilation of “The Best of Edgar Meyer”. In 2011 Mr. Meyer joined cellist Yo-Yo Ma, mandolinist Chris Thile, and fiddler Stuart Duncan for the Sony Masterworks recording “The Goat Rodeo Sessions” which was awarded the 2012 Grammy® Award for Best Folk Album.
As a composer, Mr. Meyer has carved out a remarkable and unique niche in the musical world. One of his most recent compositions is the Double Concerto for Double Bass and Violin which received its world premiere July 2012 with Joshua Bell at the Tanglewood Music Festival with the Boston Symphony Orchestra. Mr. Meyer and Mr. Bell have also performed the work at the Hollywood Bowl with the Los Angeles Philharmonic, the Aspen Music Festival, and with the Nashville and Toronto symphony orchestras. In the 2011-12 season, Mr. Meyer was composer in residence with the Alabama Symphony where he premiered his third concerto for double bass and orchestra. Mr. Meyer has collaborated with Béla Fleck and Zakir Hussain to write a triple concerto for double bass, banjo, and tabla, which was commissioned for the opening of the Schermerhorn Symphony Center in Nashville. The triple concerto was recorded with the Detroit Symphony Orchestra under Leonard Slatkin and featured on the 2009 recording The Melody of Rhythm, a collection of trio pieces all co-composed by Mr. Meyer, Mr. Fleck and Mr. Hussain. Mr. Meyer has performed his second double bass concerto with the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra and his first double bass concerto with Edo de Waart and the Minnesota Orchestra. Other compositions of Mr. Meyer’s include a violin/piano work which has been performed by Joshua Bell at New York’s Lincoln Center, a quintet for bass and string quartet premiered with the Emerson String Quartet and recorded on Deutsche Grammophon, a Double Concerto for Bass and Cello premiered with Yo-Yo Ma and The Boston Symphony Orchestra under Seiji Ozawa, and a violin concerto written for Hilary Hahn which was premiered and recorded by Ms. Hahn with the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra led by Hugh Wolff.
Collaborations are a central part of Mr. Meyer’s work. His longtime collaboration with fellow MacArthur Award recipient Chris Thile continues in 2014 with the release on Nonesuch Records a recording of all new original material by the two genre bending artists, a follow up to their very successful 2008 cd/dvd on Nonesuch. Mr. Meyer and Mr. Thile will embark on a nationwide tour in Fall 2014 appearing in many of the major cities in the US. Mr. Meyer’s previous performing and recording collaborations include a duo with Béla Fleck; a quartet with Joshua Bell, Sam Bush and Mike Marshall; a trio with Béla Fleck and page 1 / 2 Edgar Meyer Biography by IMG Artists – IMG Artists imgartists.com Mike Marshall; and a trio with Yo-Yo Ma and Mark O’Connor. The latter collaborated for the 1996 Appalachia Waltz release which soared to the top of the charts and remained there for 16 weeks. Appalachia Waltz toured extensively in the U.S., and the trio was featured both on the David Letterman Show and the televised 1997 Inaugural Gala. Joining together again in 2000, the trio toured Europe, Asia and the US extensively and recorded a follow up recording to Appalachia Waltz, Appalachian Journey, which was honored with a Grammy® Award. In the 2006-2007 season, Mr. Meyer premiered a piece for double bass and piano performed with Emanuel Ax. Mr. Meyer also performs with pianist Amy Dorfman, his longtime collaborator for solo recitals featuring both classical repertoire and his own compositions, Mike Marshall in duo concerts and the trio with Béla Fleck and Zakir Hussain which has toured the US, Europe and Asia together.
Mr. Meyer began studying bass at the age of five under the instruction of his father and continued further to study with Stuart Sankey. In 1994 he received the Avery Fisher Career Grant and in 2000 became the only bassist to receive the Avery Fisher Prize. Currently, he is Visiting Professor of Double Bass at the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia.
https://edgarmeyer.com/
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SYMPHONY NO. 3 “SCOTTISH” – Felix Mendelssohn
COMPOSED: Although he made a short preliminary sketch in August 1829, Mendelssohn composed his Scottish Symphony in earnest from late 1840 to January 20, 1842. He dedicated the score to “H.M. Queen Victoria of Great Britain and Ireland”
WORLD PREMIERES: March 3, 1842. The composer conducted the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra. After slight revision, the work was re-introduced in what would be its final form on March 17, under the direction of Karl Bach
INSTRUMENTATION: 2 flutes, 2 oboes, 2 clarinets, 2 bassoons, 4 horns, 2 trumpets, timpani, and strings
THE BACKSTORY: Felix Mendelssohn was born into a family that was both cultured and wealthy. His grandfather was the noted philosopher Moses Mendelssohn, and his father, Abraham, was a supremely successful banker (one remembered for his astute observation that he was destined to go down in history as his father’s son and his son’s father). As a result, young Felix, his gifted sister Fanny Cäcilie, and their younger sister Rebekka and brother Paul enjoyed certain advantages as they moved through their childhood. Even as youngsters, the Mendelssohn children associated with the rich and famous, received well-rounded educations from the best teachers imaginable, and traveled widely. One of the many pleasant perks young Mendelssohn enjoyed was having a private orchestra at his disposal to try out his new compositions at every-other-Sunday musicales instituted in 1822 at the family home in Berlin (the Mendelssohns having moved there from Hamburg in 1811). The composer’s early works were unveiled at these gatherings, among them several of his twelve completed string symphonies, ebullient compositions that chart his progress towards increasing subtlety and refinement in manipulating orchestral forces. The last of the string symphonies was introduced at the end of December 1823. Three months later Mendelssohn, who had just turned fifteen, completed his first symphony for full orchestra, the Symphony No. 1 in C minor (Opus 11), a youthful work still but nonetheless meriting an opus number and, with it, admission to the canon of his “mature” works.
Four symphonies would follow Mendelssohn’s string symphonies and his Symphony No. 1, though not in the order that their eventual numbering implies. The next to be written was the Reformation Symphony, mostly composed in 1829-30 and premiered in 1832, but not published until 1868, when it was identified as the fifth of Mendelssohn’s symphonies. The Italian Symphony followed in 1832, but publication waited until 1851 (four years after the composer’s death), when it was assigned position number four among the symphonies. The Symphony No. 2, a sort of symphonic cantata subtitled Lobgesang—Song of Praise—was the next to be written (in 1841, with publication the following year), and the Symphony No. 3 came last, being completed in 1842 and premiered in 1843. The official numbering of Mendelssohn’s symphonies reflects their publication dates; a chronological lineup based on order of composition would run 1, 5, 4, 2, 3.
Though he did not embark on its composition in any sustained way until 1840, Mendelssohn first thought about writing a piece such as the Scottish Symphony in 1829, when he toured the British Isles in the company of Karl Klingemann, a friend eleven years his elder who had left Berlin for London to serve as Secretary to the Hanoverian Legislation. On March 26, 1829, Mendelssohn wrote him a breathless letter announcing that he expected to arrive in London in less than a month and proclaiming, “NEXT AUGUST I AM GOING TO SCOTLAND, with a rake for folk songs, an ear for the lovely, fragrant countryside, and a heart for the bare legs of the natives.” Mendelssohn plunged eagerly into the cultural swirl of London.
In July, Mendelssohn and Klingemann began their journey from London to Edinburgh, a long and sometimes arduous trip by stagecoach that the composer documented through pencil drawings and pen-and-ink sketches. On July 26 they arrived in Edinburgh, and a few days later set out on a tour of the Scottish Highlands, which took them as far west as the town of Oban and the Atlantic islands of Staffa and Iona, and then brought them back south to Glasgow and back to Cumberland, England, on August 15, finally reaching London again on September 6.
Though the composer would visit England ten times beginning with that first trip, he would never again go as far north as Scotland. But those three weeks he spent in Scotland in 1829 left a deep impression on Mendelssohn, which was made most immediately evident by his composing the concert overture The Hebrides (also known as Fingal’s Cave Overture). Already during the trip he had fixed on the idea of commemorating Scotland through a symphony, and on July 30, 1829, he made a first step in that direction. The inspiration was specific, as he reported in a letter home that night following his visit a few hours earlier to the Palace of Holyrood in Edinburgh:
In the evening twilight we went today to the palace where Queen Mary lived and loved; a little room is shown there with a winding staircase leading up to the door: up this way they came and found Rizzio in that dark corner, where they pulled him out, and three rooms off there is a dark corner, where they murdered him. The chapel close to it is now roofless, grass and ivy grow there, and at that broken altar Mary was crowned Queen of Scotland. Everything round is broken and mouldering and the bright sky shines in. I believe I have found today in that old chapel the beginning of my Scottish Symphony.
At that point he wrote down sixteen measures of music in the piano score with jottings added to indicate instrumentation; and eventually they would grow into the andante opening of his Scottish Symphony. Mendelssohn made occasional desultory stabs at the piece, but not until late 1840, and mostly in the fall of 1841, did he dedicate himself in earnest to what would become his final symphony.
When he conducted the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra in the work’s premiere, he presented it as a piece of strictly “absolute” music, and the program carried no reference to any programmatic or depictive connection. Nonetheless, critics, including Robert Schumann in the Neue Zeitschrift für Musik, perceived a folk character in many of the work’s themes.
THE MUSIC: In fact, Mendelssohn’s symphony does not employ folk melodies from Scotland or anyplace else. But his writing does conjure up a spirit that would have been deemed folk-like by many of its contemporary listeners, saturated in a passion for Ossianic ballads and other pseudo-exoticisms that stirred Romantic souls.
The Introduction, refined from Mendelssohn’s off-the-cuff sketch of 1829, is dark and brooding, its character underscored at the outset by a rich, mid-range orchestration of oboe, clarinets, bassoons, horns, and divided violas. Violins enter, and then the rest of the full orchestra, with more impassioned strains. And yet it is a quiet, simmering passion; here, as through much of the symphony, loud outbursts and sforzando accents are doled out to stand in telling contrast to the overriding quiet. The Introduction fades away into near-silent pianissimo, and it is at that dynamic that the principal, faster portion of the opening begins. But even the opening pages of this section seem transitional when, after building in volume and texture, the movement breaks, fortissimo, into a full gallop, at which tempo it remains till its end.
The first movement’s forceful ending serves as a semicolon rather than a period, and woodwinds waft out of its emphatic “closing chords” as transition to a recollection of the doleful opening melody of the Introduction. This proves only momentary, however, and gives way to the Scherzo, in which the strings scurry with repeated staccato figures, against which the winds inject fanfare-like outbursts. A solo clarinet announces the bubbling main theme of this movement, a tune that we would be hard-pressed to hear as anything other than Scottish; its opening phrases even wind up with a so-called “Scotch snap,” a rhythmic figure consisting of a quick note on an accented beat followed by a longer note on an unaccented one.
The Adagio follows, in which Mendelssohn mixes one of his signature, sweetly Victorian “song without words” melodies with passages of darker, even forbidding import; Mendelssohn biographer Larry Todd imagines that the “regal dotted rhythms” of the latter “plausibly allude to the tragic figure of Queen Mary.” “And,” he continues, “the breathless, energetic finale, with its jagged dissonances and contrapuntal strife, generalizes the topic of conflict in Scottish history.” Musicologist Thomas Grey is more specific, not unreasonably building on Mendelssohn’s marking of Allegro guerriero (Quick and warlike) for the last movement. From there he extrapolates, and, in a gender-associative interpretation that so-called “new musicologists” find irresistible, suggests that the Adagio may be taken as an inherently feminine prayer that leads to a masculine finale of military vitality. The fact is that no listener is likely to be unmoved at the point near the end of the finale when the low woodwinds, horns, and violas—practically the same instruments that uttered the lament at the symphony’s beginning—swing from simple into compound meter and from minor mode into bright A major to sing out what sounds for all the world like a hymn of victory—a passage that Mendelssohn himself likened to the singing of a classic German Männerchor (men’s choir). The scholar Peter Mercer-Taylor has proposed that this “Männerchor” is the key to the ultimate meaning of this symphony, which is that it celebrates the German “present” through memories of a Scottish past. Our modern exegetes argue their cases with conviction and some of them follow their fancies to quite astonishing and detailed lengths. We are all free to join them, or not, in their intellectual excursions.— program notes by James M. Keller