BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra: Sibelius 7

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Johann Sebastian Bach
‘Es ist genug’ from Cantata No.60 c.2’

Magnus Lindberg
Chorale c.6’
Violin Concerto No.1 c.35’

INTERVAL: 15 minutes

Ludwig van Beethoven
Leonore Overture No.3 c.14’

Jean Sibelius
Symphony No.7 in C major, Op.105 c.24’

The first half of the concert will be played through continuously without breaks.

Pekka Kuusisto violin

BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra
Joana Carneiro conductor

Tonight’s concert is being broadcast live on BBC Radio 3 and BBC Sounds. After broadcast it will be available to stream or download for 30 days.

Magnus Lindberg composed his Chorale for a concert conducted by his friend and fellow Finn Esa-Pekka Salonen that featured Berg’s Violin Concerto (which also quotes Bach’s ‘Es ist genug’). 

Here, Lindberg drags Bach’s chorale into the 21st century producing more an orchestral hallucination than a quotation, in which the original tune is obscured by complex but delicately scored orchestral layerings, including interjections and overlappings. The block movement of the hymn is submerged but identifiable, as is the whole-tone harmony implied by Bach cheekily twisting that fourth note almost 280 years earlier. The result is dissonant but entrancing. 

^{Programme note by Edward Bhesania © BBC}

Magnus Lindberg 

Magnus Lindberg is one of the most widely heard of living composers and the most popular Finnish composer since Sibelius. 

After the very Expressionist zeal of Kraft (1983–5) there came a new inclusiveness in his style. The pieces he has composed since that Damascene moment have combined modernist colour and Classical symphonic strength in a musical language of ever-increasing resourcefulness and approachability. The sheer physical impact of Lindberg’s major scores accounts for some of their immediate appeal but there’s another factor involved, something rare in contemporary music – a sense of fun. 

Lindberg has held residencies with the New York Philharmonic and the London Philharmonic Orchestra and his new orchestral work Serenades will be performed in December by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra under Hannu Lintu.

^{Composer profile © Martin Anderson
Martin Anderson writes on music – often on Nordic and Baltic composers. He publishes books on music as Toccata Press and releases recordings of unfamiliar music as Toccata Classics.}

INTERVAL: 15 minutes

In three movements

Pekka Kuusisto violin

In 2006, the first of Magnus Lindberg’s violin concertos was premiered at the Mostly Mozart festival in New York. A more subtle, sculpted form of melody had recently been emerging in Lindberg’s music. Here, that melodic distinction was combined with a smaller orchestra (of the size Mozart would have known) to create a piece with clearer, more translucent textures. 

At least one violinist has observed the changing relationship between the violin and the orchestra across the concerto’s three movements. That relationship begins with tension; in the opening movement, the orchestra can knock the solo violin off its perch entirely. In the second movement the two elements build bridges, and by the third they are apparently enjoying one another’s company. 

The concerto’s material is built from a group of recurring motifs, the first of which is heard, courtesy of the soloist, right at the start. The transformation of these simple motifs is what holds the music together – through periods of fulsome drive, violence and lyrical flight. 

Often, Lindberg’s music breaks out into characteristically broad vistas – moments of release and apparent luminescence. After one such moment, in the second movement, the soloist plays a cadenza – a monologue that riffs on themes already heard and tests the technical capabilities of the player. When the monologue turns hesitant, the low strings of the orchestra lend support, and the music collapses into Lindberg’s charged final movement. 

Here, driving rhythms are derived from a dance motif first heard on strings in the opening movement. The speed tightens and then slackens, opening up another broad, magnificent view – outlined by the orchestra’s brass and defiantly beheld by the solo violin. 

^{Programme note © Andrew Mellor
Andrew Mellor is a journalist and critic based in Copenhagen, where he writes for national and international publications. His book The Northern Silence – Journeys in Nordic Music and Culture will be published next year (Yale UP).}

In all of Beethoven’s output, nothing was subject to quite the same torturous process of composition as his only opera, Fidelio. ‘Of all my children, this is the one that cost me the worst birth-pangs and brought me the most sorrow’, he later lamented to his biographer, ‘and for that reason it is the one most dear to me.’ Fidelio, as the opera would eventually become known, began life as Leonore in 1803. But the three-act Leonore (originally named after the heroine), was subsequently revised and reduced into the two-act Fidelio (‘the faithful one’), and was not premiered in its final version until 11 years later. 

The overture, meanwhile, appeared in no fewer than four separate versions, of which the second incarnation – confusingly now known as Leonore Overture No.3 – seems to have earned its place as the concert hall favourite. While the fourth and final Fidelio overture would take themes from the opera and use them to create a chronological precis of the opera’s main dramatic action, the Overture No.3 was instead composed as a dramatic curtain-raiser in its own right. Indeed, its tone is so dramatic that it is often at risk of overshadowing the opera itself, hence its more fitting place in the concert hall. 

The overture begins morosely and in darkness in Florestan’s prison cell, his thoughts gradually drifting towards happier, earlier times. As minor transforms to major and Florestan’s fighting spirit returns, the overture unfurls into a buoyant work of irrepressible energy, a triumph of liberty in the face of adversity, the epitome of Beethoven’s ‘heroic’ style.

^{Programme note © Jo Kirkbride
Jo Kirkbride is Chief Executive of the Edinburgh-based Dunedin Consort and a freelance writer on classical music. She studied Beethoven for her PhD.}

In one movement

The first performance of Sibelius’s Seventh (and last) Symphony was conducted by the composer in Stockholm in 1924, a year after the premiere of the Sixth and at a particularly difficult time in Sibelius’s life. It had been 10 years in the planning – 10 long years during which Sibelius worked on his last three symphonies together, constantly reworking and refining their inter-relationships to a level of extraordinary subtlety.

The Seventh is truly the summit of this achievement. Cast in a single 23-minute movement (it was initially entitled Fantasia sinfonica), everything in it relates to everything else with an implacable logic. And here Sibelius rises beyond the nature-man metaphor that so animated the Sixth Symphony, to something even more abstract, leaving worldly matters behind in a Beethovenian vision of the triumph of the human spirit. The sheer continuousness of the music, revolving almost weightlessly, as Robert Simpson has said, ‘like a great planet in orbit, its movement vast, inexorable, seemingly imperceptible to its inhabitants’ makes listening to it a more spiritual experience than anything else in Sibelius.

The basic shape of it is three slow sections alternating with two fast ones, but the speeds change almost imperceptibly, and sometimes the slow music seems to form a backdrop to the fast. At the centre of it all is the solo trombone theme that emerges in full at the first big climax and, most movingly, at the closing peroration, whose strings-rich C major ends this great series of symphonies not bombastically, but with life-affirming warmth. Sibelius was to labour for many years after on an eighth symphony, which eventually, as far as anyone knows, he destroyed. As a final word on the musical form that he had made his life’s work, the Seventh was really everything he needed to say.

^{Programme note by Hugh Macdonald © BBC
Hugh Macdonald is Co-Artistic Director of the Lammermuir Festival and for 20 years worked at BBC Scotland, latterly as Director of the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra.}