Sibelius
Shostakovich
Mendelssohn

Jean Sibelius
Pelléas et Mélisande – suite 28’

Dmitry Shostakovich
Cello Concerto No. 1 in E flat major 27’

INTERVAL: 20 minutes

Felix Mendelssohn
Symphony No. 4 in A major, ‘Italian’ 30’

Jakob Kullberg cello

John Storgårds conductor
BBC Philharmonic

Tonight’s concert is being recorded by BBC Radio 3 for broadcast in Radio 3 in Concert on Friday 8 October at 7.30pm. It will be available for 30 days after broadcast via BBC Sounds, where you can also find podcasts and music mixes.

1 At the Castle Gate
2 Mélisande
3 At the Seashore
4 A Spring in the Park
5 The Three Blind Sisters
6 Pastorale
7 Mélisande at the Spinning Wheel
8 Entr’acte
9 The Death of Mélisande

Maurice Maeterlinck’s tragic Symbolist play Pelléas et Mélisande is rarely seen in theatres today, but it cast a peculiarly long shadow over composers at the turn of the 20th century. Gabriel Fauré scored the first London production in 1898, four years before Claude Debussy completed the final version of his landmark opera and Arnold Schoenberg started work on his symphonic poem. Jean Sibelius got in on the act soon after, writing music for a Helsinki production and then reworking it into this nine-part concert suite.

After the grand swells of the opening, which has found a 64-years-and-counting afterlife as the theme to BBC TV’s The Sky at Night, we meet the woman at the centre of the play’s love triangle: married to one man but soon to fall in love with his brother. The doomed lovers meet by the sea (to a decidedly ominous soundtrack) and in the park (to a jaunty waltz), before Mélisande’s hopes of happiness start to fade – and then, in ‘Mélisande at the Spinning Wheel’, appear to come crashing down entirely. The oddly perky ‘Entr’acte’ (originally the prelude to the play’s penultimate act) feels shipped in from another piece entirely, before Sibelius brings things to a suitably yearning yet tragic conclusion. No happy endings here

Jean Sibelius

It’s an overstatement to suggest that Jean Sibelius shaped a nation, but he certainly provided its soundtrack: no composer’s music is as deeply rooted in his mother country as Sibelius’s is in his native Finland. Born in 1865 and christened Johan – ‘Jean’ was a student affectation borrowed from an uncle – Sibelius turned to composition only after realising he wouldn’t fulfil his childhood dream of becoming a violinist – but he quickly found fame in his mid-20s with Kullervo, one of numerous works he wrote in evocative homage to his homeland. Best known today for his seven symphonies and dozen-plus symphonic poems, most of the latter inspired by Finland and its mythology, Sibelius lived a long life but worked a comparatively short career, writing little during what amounted to a 30-year retirement.

1 Allegretto
2 Moderato –
3 Cadenza –
4 Allegro con moto

Jakob Kullberg cello

The Second World War was raging when Mstislav Rostropovich, a 16-year-old prodigy from Baku, began his studies in 1943 at the Moscow Conservatory in cello, composition and in orchestration, the latter with Dmitry Shostakovich, who was two decades his senior and a controversial figure in Soviet Russia. The pair’s pupil–teacher relationship blossomed into a friendship born of mutual admiration: ‘He was the most important man in my life after my father,’ said the cellist. And it was Rostropovich, by then a world-class virtuoso, for whom Shostakovich wrote the first of his two cello concertos in 1959.

It’s a relentless work, and fearsomely difficult to boot. The soloist is exposed from the opening bars, a variation on the four-note motif (D–E flat–C–B natural; or D–Es–C–H in German notation, for ‘D. Schostakowitsch’) that the composer used as his musical signature in numerous works, and further riffs on this motif give the first movement its structure. The elegant, elegiac second movement is the heads to its tails – but it’s followed, almost rudely, by an electric shock of a solo cadenza. Three-quarters done, the concerto feels full of loose ends, but Shostakovich seamlessly ties them up in a cascading final movement that ends as abruptly as the piece began.

Dmitry Shostakovich

One of the 20th century’s greatest composers, Dmitry Shostakovich is also among its most fascinating and elusive musical figures. Raised to adulthood in Revolutionary Russia, he spent much of his life under fearsome scrutiny from a Soviet leadership who alternately praised his patriotism and damned his insolence – unable to quite determine whether he was with them or against them. Even today, opinion is split as to whether Shostakovich was a Communist lackey or a dissident democrat – and the breadth of his astonishing output, from dazzling ballets and fizzing jazz suites to intense symphonies and introspective string quartets, offers clues but no concrete confirmation. Nearly 50 years after his death, Shostakovich’s music is more popular than ever, but the man himself remains tantalisingly out of reach.

INTERVAL: 20 minutes

1 Allegro vivace
2 Andante con moto
3 Con moto moderato
4 Saltarello: Presto

Unaffected by the poor health that ultimately sent him to an early grave, the young Felix Mendelssohn seized every chance to travel – and, as if sending home postcards to family and friends, he used what he saw to inform what he wrote. His ramblings through Britain as a 20-year-old star musician inspired the ‘Scottish’ Symphony (No. 3), among other works; and an extended Italian trip the next year led to what the composer described as ‘the most cheerful thing I have composed so far’, premiered – before the ‘Scottish’, despite the numbering – when Mendelssohn was just 24. Although he wasn’t happy with the work, revising it incessantly and even forbidding its publication, it’s now among his most popular pieces.

For much of the ‘Italian’ Symphony’s 30-minute duration, there’s nothing recognisably Italian about it. Mendelssohn appears less interested in representing the country than in sharing the feelings it inspired in him – as with the opening, a joyous blast of southern sunshine. Apparently inspired by a religious procession in Naples or Rome (you’d never tell), the stately second movement is followed by a classically Mozartian minuet and trio – before Mendelssohn at last cracks open the Italian fizz with a conclusion that transports folk dance rhythms from the village square to the concert platform.

Felix Mendelssohn

Born to a prominent Jewish family in Hamburg in 1809, Felix Mendelssohn was among the most prodigiously talented musicians of his age: a performer by 9, a capable composer just three years later. He was later described by contemporary Robert Schumann as ‘the Mozart of the 19th century’, and it’s fair to say that his music looks back to Mozart’s Classicism (and to the music of Bach, whom Mendelssohn idolised) more than it looks forwards to the turbulent innovations of Wagner and other Romantic-era composers who followed in his wake. His vast catalogue, which includes a beloved Violin Concerto, five soaring symphonies and dozens of songs, was cut tragically short when he succumbed to ill health in 1847 at the age of just 38.

^{Notes and profiles © Will Fulford-Jones
Will Fulford-Jones is a writer and editor who works widely across music and the arts.}