MENDELSSOHN
String Quartet in D Op.44 No.1 (32’)
Fuga from Four Pieces Op.81 (5’)
String Quartet in A minor Op.13 (30’)
Music in the Round’s Visiting String Quartet returns to Sheffield for its final immersive afternoon and evening of concerts exploring the music of Felix Mendelssohn. Here, the composer’s passionate String Quartet No.2 (written when he was just 18 years old – and newly in love) is presented alongside his String Quartet No.3, a composition full of light and levity.
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** Please note that the change in venue for this concert.**
MOZART 12 Variations ‘Ah vous dirai-je, Maman’ K265 (8′)
SCHOENBERG Drei Klavierstücke Op.11 (14′)
HAYDN Piano Sonata in D Hob.XVI:42 (11′)
BRAHMS Drei Intermezzi Op.117 (14′)
BEETHOVEN Piano Sonata No.23 Op. 57 ‘Appassionata’ (24′)
In his new recital series, Tim Horton celebrates the music of Vienna, a city famous for its classical music, through works by Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Brahms and more.
Alongside this showcase of the city’s musical traditions and the composers who link them, Tim presents some richly inventive offerings from the dawn of the 20th century. This promises to be a fresh and compelling new exploration of the dazzling musical variety derived from the City of Dreams.
Post-concert Q&A – free
Please join us after the concert for a free Q&A with Tim Horton.
View the brochure online here or download it below.
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Originally thought to have been written in about 1776, more recent research on the manuscript of these delightful variations has led to a dating of 1781–2, during Mozart’s first year in Vienna, possibly written for some of his more advanced piano pupils. The earliest published edition (issued by the Viennese firm of Torricella in 1785) has a dedication to Josepha Barbara Auerhammer (1758–1820) about whom Mozart had mixed feelings, writing to his father that ‘the girl is a fright! But she plays charmingly.’ Clearly Mozart admired his pupil’s gifts as a player since they gave concerts together in Vienna. The anonymous tune and text of ‘Ah, vous dirai-je maman’ first appeared in song collections in the 1760s. In English-speaking countries, the melody eventually came to be associated with Jane Taylor’s nursery rhyme ‘Twinkle, twinkle, little star’ though that was originally set to a different tune (the earliest appearance of words and music together was in 1838).
Following a straightforward presentation of the theme, Mozart embarks on a series of variations, ingenious and playful in mood until Variation VIII when the key changes into the minor for a rather sterner reworking of the tune. A return to the major for Variation IX marks the start of the later variations in which Mozart becomes more creative with his treatment of the theme, particularly in Variation XI – a lyrical Adagio – and the final Variation XII, marked Allegro, in which the tune is transformed into triple time to bring the work to a brilliant close.
Nigel Simeone © 2024
SCHOENBERG Arnold, Three Piano Pieces Op. 11
Schoenberg wrote a famous essay called ‘Brahms the Progressive’, and he drew much inspiration from the intimate sound-world of Brahms’s late piano pieces. But by 1909 he had started to abandon conventional tonality in favour of a free atonal language, without anchoring the music in traditional keys or harmonies. But through the use of recurring motifs, Schoenberg creates a unified work of extraordinary boldness. The composer likened his music to Wassily Kandinsky’s paintings, describing it as ‘an ever-changing, unbroken succession of colours, rhythms and moods’.
Nigel Simeone © 2015
Composed in 1784, this two-movement sonata was originally published as part of a triptych of piano sonatas dedicated to 15-year-old Princess Marie Esterházy to celebrate her marriage the previous year to Prince Nikolaus II (then 17 years old; he later became Haydn’s patron after the death of his father in 1790). The first movement, marked Andante con espressione, is a set of variations. The theme itself is punctuated by silences and by a harmonic scheme which takes some characteristically surprising turns as the writing becomes increasingly florid. The most dramatic variation comes with a shift from D major to minor before a return to the music of the opening. The second movement, Vivace assai, is also full of harmonic quirks, but now the music is energetic and Haydn develops his ideas with conciseness and subtlety, including a good deal of imitative writing, right up to the delightfully inconsequential ending.
Nigel Simeone © 2024
Andante moderato
Andante non troppo e con molto espressione
Andante con moto
These three short pieces were composed at the Austrian spa town Bad Ischl in 1892 and first performed in Berlin on 6 January 1893 by the pianist Heinrich Barth. Like the first of the Ballades Op.10, the first Intermezzo is based on a Scottish poem printed in Herder’s collection, this time a lullaby (and, informally, Brahms sometimes called the whole set ‘Lullabies’). Clara Schumann was enchanted by these pieces when she first saw them, telling Brahms that ‘In these pieces I at last feel musical life stir once again in my soul’. When Brahms’s publisher Simrock suggested using Lullabies instead of Intermezzi as the official title, Brahms’s response was endearingly curmudgeonly: ‘It should then say, lullaby of an unhappy mother or of a disconsolate bachelor’.
© Nigel Simeone
The Sonata in F minor Op.57 only acquired its famous nickname ‘Appassionata’ after Beethoven’s death – an invention by a Hamburg publisher that has stuck. The work was mostly sketched in 1805, finished the following year, and first published in 1807. The manuscript, in the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, came from the family of the French pianist Marie Bigot, to whom Beethoven had given it after she sight-read it for him. Her husband recalled that just before Beethoven’s visit, during his journey back to Vienna from Silesia, he was ‘surprised by a storm and driving rain, which soaked through the case in which he carried the Sonata in F minor which he had just composed’ and, indeed, the manuscript has many water stains, presumably made by this downpour. The Appassionata is recognized as one of the greatest of Beethoven’s middle-period piano sonatas (alongside the Waldstein), and its turbulent emotional world moves from the gloom of the opening to a quotation from a folk song (for the second theme), a set of variations on a deceptively simple chordal theme for the slow movement, leading via a chromatic diminished seventh chord to the finale.
Nigel Simeone © 2011
