Bach, Liebermann & Schmidt with Jonathan Berman

Johann Sebastian Bach, Arr. Igor Markevitch   
The Musical Offering – Ricercar a 3 (6’) 

Lowell Liebermann
Flute Concerto (25’) 

INTERVAL  (20’) 

Franz Schmidt
Symphony No. 2 (45’) 

Jonathan Berman Conductor
Matthew Featherstone Flute 

This concert is being recorded by BBC Radio 3 for future broadcast in Radio 3 in Concert. It will be available to stream or download for 30 days via BBC Sounds, where you can also find podcasts and music mixes. Visit bbc.co.uk/now for more information on future performances.

When Frederick the Great of Prussia presented Bach with a theme and challenged him to write a fugue on it, Bach’s response was a whole book of music, the Musical Offering. This incorporated two fugues (which he called by the old name ‘ricercar’), 10 canons and a sonata. Bach is generally reckoned nowadays to have had a solo keyboard player in mind, but the music can take orchestration, as Anton Webern and the Modern Jazz Quartet showed in their various selections. Igor Markevitch took on the entire collection because he found previous versions unsatisfactory, principally in how the short canons came across as bitty. He therefore made these into a set of variations. The three-part ricercar, which may represent what Bach improvised for Frederick on the spot, Markevitch set for strings, with soloists on violin, viola and cello to introduce the theme and pick out other passages.

^{Programme note © Paul Griffiths}

^{Further Listening: Arnhem Philharmonic Orchestra/Christopher Lyndon-Gee (Naxos 8572158)}

^{Further Reading: Music in the Castle of Heaven: A Portrait of Johann Sebastian Bach Sir John Eliot Gardiner (Penguin)}

1 Moderato
2 Molto adagio
3 Presto

Matthew Featherstoneflute

If any two artists of different generations ever were destined to find one another and form a fruitful collaboration, it surely must be the Irish flautist Sir James Galway and the American composer Lowell Liebermann. Sir James, born in Belfast in 1939, has become over the course of his long and illustrious career a veritable Pied Piper for beauty, authority and craft through the repertoire he has championed. 

Liebermann, born in 1961 in New York City, has fashioned a body of works that adhere to those same principles – and, while weathering charges of stylistic conservatism, has attracted a broad and diverse audience of keen advocates and admirers, including Sir James and the pianist Sir Stephen Hough. 

A natural musician from childhood, Liebermann earned awards for performing the Carnegie Hall premiere of his First Piano Sonata (1977) at the age of 16. He honed his talents as a pianist and deepened his appreciation of structural integrity in composition, as a student of the venerable pianist Jacob Lateiner at the Juilliard School in the late 1980s. While at Juilliard, Liebermann studied composition with two titans of mid 20th-century American music, David Diamond and Vincent Persichetti, both of whom created works endowed with impeccable craft and ineffable melodicism. Instead of setting out to eclipse the lineage and canon he’d absorbed, Liebermann embraced it.

‘To me, classical music is a continuum and it’s enriched by associations from the past,’ he told the late radio host and interviewer Bruce Duffie in an interview in 1998. ‘Not that a piece of music should be slavishly imitating something, but to me those influences are enriching, and it’s what allows you to place yourself as a composer in a cultural context.’

Liebermann and Galway became acquainted after the flautist heard the young composer’s beguiling Sonata for flute and piano (1987), and commissioned him to write a concerto. This received its premiere on 6 November 1992, with Galway as soloist and Leonard Slatkin conducting the St Louis Symphony Orchestra. (Liebermann has since completed two more works for the flautist: a Concerto for flute, harp and orchestra, and Trio No. 1 for flute, cello and piano.)

As one reviewer noted, the stealthy, marchlike opening of the Flute Concerto recalls Prokofiev, a clear forebear in the art of the brilliant, persuasive concerto. But the work’s enchanting melodies, affecting moods and instant appeal all bear Liebermann’s personal stamp.

^{Programme note © Steve Smith}

^{Further Listening: Sir James Galway; London Mozart Players/Lowell Liebermann (RCA 09026632352)}

^{Website: https://www.lowellliebermann.com}

INTERVAL: 20 minutes

1 Lebhaft
2 Allegretto con variazioni
3 Finale: Langsam

Franz Schmidt’s Second Symphony was premiered in Vienna in 1913 and composed at a time when the progress of European music had reached something of a fork in the road. Mahler had recently died, his late works suggesting a conclusion to the whole Romantic arc. Schoenberg’s first atonal pieces were causing controversy in Vienna, and Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring had been premiered earlier that year. Richard Strauss, however – broadly considered the greatest living Austro-German composer even when Mahler was alive – had abandoned the experimental trajectory of Salome and Elektra and produced the unashamedly luscious Der Rosenkavalier. Schmidt himself was nearing the end of a 15-year stint as a cellist with the Vienna Court Opera (in which time he played frequently under Mahler), and therefore saw exactly how audiences continued to respond to the Romantic stalwarts. It’s easy to look back now and dismiss Schmidt as a conservative, but in 1913 his music would have felt absolutely current.

Schmidt’s post meant that he would also have experienced large orchestral works with the Vienna Philharmonic (the concert-giving wing of the Court Opera), but most of his performing under Mahler’s baton would have been in the opera house, a diverse repertoire that Mahler himself constantly updated. It must have been hugely valuable for Schmidt’s development to hear from within the fine details of how composers from Offenbach to Verdi and Wagner constructed their sound-worlds. Indeed, Schmidt is now perhaps most admired for his orchestration and is often compared to his former teacher Bruckner for the grandeur and sheer density of his textures – although his more lightly scored passages can dazzle and twinkle.

The Second Symphony’s irresistibly warm, bright opening recalls Mahler at his most ebullient, perhaps when composing about nature; or Wagner in jovial mode, hurrying through sequences of unrelated keys. It has a shiny, metallic quality, galvanised by the unison clarinets. The middle movement is perhaps the work’s most significant technical achievement, doing the job of what might traditionally have been two separate movements – a sentimental intermezzo and a scherzo – intertwining them in a continuous set of variations. The slower variations blossom calmly in rich, contrasting colours; the more scherzo-like ones burst in and re-energise the music. The symphony is sonically epic, but very concise, flying by in around 45 minutes. Even the extremely grand, joyful chorale which concludes the work feels pacey and perfectly in proportion. This is the work’s most Brucknerian passage, with the swirling string lines propelling the music along.

Schmidt’s music was later co-opted by the Nazis, particularly just before Austria’s annexation in 1938. The composer apparently had little political motivation of his own, being much more preoccupied by personal turmoil. He had by then long been a renowned composition professor who respected and understood much of the music that the regime later condemned as degenerate. But his own output landed on the wrong side of history because it was suitably bombastic and steeped in nationalism. He died soon after this, in 1939, so we cannot know how he would have responded to the era’s worst atrocities. It has taken some time, but Schmidt’s music is now finally being appreciated beyond Austria for its unique qualities.

^{Programme note © Tom Owen}

^{Further Listening: Frankfurt Radio Symphony Orchestra/Paavo Järvi (DG 4838336)}

^{Further Reading: The Music of Franz Schmidt: 1: The Orchestral Music: Harold Truscott (Toccata Press)}

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Biographies

Jonathan Berman conductor

Jonathan Berman has established a reputation as a conductor with wide-ranging achievements both on and off the podium.

He is a champion of the music of Franz Schmidt and Oliver Knussen, but conducts a wide-ranging repertoire, and is particularly acclaimed in contemporary music. He has received return invitations from the Lithuanian National, London and Rotterdam Philharmonic orchestras, Royal Scottish National Orchestra, RTÉ National Symphony Orchestra, Filarmonica ‘George Enescu’, Bucharest, Sinfonietta Riga, Southbank Sinfonia and the City Chamber Orchestra of Hong Kong, as well as to the Aldeburgh and Tanglewood festivals.

Forthcoming and recent debuts include the Cleveland Orchestra, Bilkent, BBC, BBC Scottish and City of Birmingham Symphony orchestras, Orchestre de Picardie, Orchestra di Padova e Veneto, Britten Sinfonia, Hagen and Turku Philharmonic orchestras, London Mozart Players, City of London Sinfonia and the Nash Ensemble. 

In February this year he stood in at very short notice to conduct the London Philharmonic Orchestra at the Royal Festival Hall in repertoire including the world premiere of a piano concerto by Jimmy Lopez.  

As a champion of new music he regularly works with the London Sinfonietta, Ensemble Modern, Birmingham Contemporary Music Group, New European Ensemble, Crash Ensemble Dublin and the Britten Pears Ensemble.

As an opera conductor he has conducted productions for the Nationale Reisopera, English Touring Opera, Aldeburgh Festival, Grachten Festival, Anghiari Festival, Dartington International Festival, Jerwood Opera Course, Opera Studio Netherlands, Dutch National Opera Academy, Mahogany Opera and the Centre for Opera Studies in Italy.

Matthew Featherstone flute

Matthew Featherstone is Principal Flute of BBC National Orchestra of Wales and has also appeared as Guest Principal Flute with Britten Sinfonia, BBC Symphony Orchestra, BBC and London Philharmonic orchestras, Royal Scottish National Orchestra, Ulster Orchestra, RTÉ Concert Orchestra and the Academy of St Martin in the Fields.

He was awarded the Royal Over-Seas League Wind Prize in 2012 and has travelled around the UK giving flute and piano recitals. He has made concerto appearances with various orchestras, including the Nielsen Flute Concerto with BBC NOW and the Mozart Concerto for flute and harp with Catrin Finch. A keen chamber musician, he enjoys performing with his ensemble for flute, harp and viola – Trio Anima, whose debut album Between Earth and Sea is released next month.

He also works as a beatboxer, session singer and songwriter, and released his debut EP in 2019.