Mendelssohn and Mozart with François Leleux

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Felix Mendelssohn
A Midsummer Night’s Dream – overture c.12’

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (arr. Leleux)
Arias from ‘The Magic Flute’ and ‘Don Giovanni’ c.20’

INTERVAL: 15 minutes

Louise Farrenc
Overture No.1 c.7’

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

François Leleux director/oboe

Tonight’s concert is being recorded for broadcast on BBC Radio 3 and BBC Sounds on Thursday 14 October. After broadcast it will be available to stream or download for 30 days.

The Magic Flute (1786)
1 Aria ‘Der Vogelfänger bin ich ja’ (I am the birdcatcher)
2 Aria ‘Dies Bildnis ist bezaubernd schön’ (This image is enchantingly beautiful)
3 Aria ‘Ein Mädchen oder Weibchen’ (A girl or a wife)
4 Aria ‘Alles fühlt der Liebe Freuden’ (Everyone feels the joys of love)

Don Giovanni (1787)
5 Canzonetta ‘Deh vieni alla finestra’ (Oh, come to the window)
6 Aria ‘Non mi dir, bel’idol mio’ (Say not, my beloved)

François Leleuxoboe

MThe Harmonie or wind band became quite the thing in central Europe by the end of the 18th century, playing arrangements of hit arias from the latest operas as entertainment for wealthy patrons. Little is known about Joseph Heidenreich, who made wind-band arrangements of music from Mozart’s The Magic Flute, while Joseph Triebensee, who arranged excerpts from Don Giovanni, was an oboist, and a member of the orchestra in The Magic Flute’s first performances.

Jump forward to our own times, and oboist François Leleux, tonight’s conductor and soloist, has taken the idea of arrangement one step further: ‘I have always played Mozart opera wind octet arrangements, and I thought I should take the first oboe part and play with an orchestra. After 20 years of playing with an octet, I finally did it. The arrangement is more about reducing the orchestra size than changing anything from the original music.’

Leleux plays four arias from The Magic Flute and two from Don Giovanni. The comic birdcatcher Papageno introduces himself in ‘Der Vogelfänger bin ich ja’, while in ‘Dies Bildnis ist bezaubernd schön’, the hero Tamino falls in love with a portrait of a beautiful woman, whom we later discover to be the heroine Pamina. Papageno longs for the affection of a wife in ‘Ein Mädchen oder Weibchen’, and the otherwise sinister slavemaster Monostatos sings of everyone’s need for love in ‘Alles fühlt der Liebe Freuden’. Across in Don Giovanni, the womanising Don serenades a young serving girl in ‘Deh vieni alla finestra’, while Donna Anna asks her suitor Don Ottavio to cool his advances in ‘Non mi dir, bel’idol mio’.

INTERVAL: 15 minutes

For an example of talent, determination and sheer hard graft overcoming apparently insurmountable obstacles, look no further than French composer Louise Farrenc. Born in Paris in 1804, she wowed Europe as a touring piano virtuoso before settling down to teach and compose following the birth of her daughter in 1826. As a professor of piano at the Paris Conservatoire, she made history as the institution’s only salaried woman professor during the whole of the 19th century – though she had to tolerate an income of barely half that of her male colleagues, until she successfully demanded parity. Ironically, part of her success came from audiences who could barely believe a woman might be capable of the powerful, passionate music she created.

Both power and passion are more than evident in her Overture No. 1 of 1834, which packs plenty of drama (though of an abstract, unspecific nature) into its brief duration, contrasting pompous swagger in its slow introduction with driving, stormy energy in its later music.

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

We met Mendelssohn the precocious teenager at the start of tonight’s concert, and we close a few years later with Mendelssohn the gap-year traveller. It was more like three gap years, in fact, off and on between 1829 and 1831, and it’s probably fairer to describe his travels as excursions in the tradition of a Grand Tour, in which a wealthy young man completed his education by ticking off the cultural highlights of Europe. Mendelssohn began – unconventionally – with a three-week visit to Scotland in 1829, which inspired both his Hebrides Overture and his ‘Scottish’ Symphony. But, encouraged by the eminent writer Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, whom Mendelssohn counted as a friend, and his composition teacher Carl Friedrich Zelter, he set off for the more traditional destination of Italy in October 1830. He spent 10 months in the country, making his way from Venice to Naples via Bologna, Florence and Rome, then back home again through Genoa and Milan.

If his Scottish trip had been about brooding landscapes, swirling mists and blood-soaked history, his Italian trip, as he wrote home to his parents, was about light, sunshine and happiness: ‘This is Italy! And now has begun what I have always thought to be the supreme joy in life. And I am loving it.’

He devoted time during his travels to planning what he called ‘the jolliest piece I have ever done’ in a letter to his sister Fanny, completing his ‘Italian’ Symphony back home in Berlin on 13 March 1833. It was an immediate success at its premiere in London two months later.

Mendelssohn described the symphony as ‘blue sky in A major’, and bright optimism is certainly encapsulated in the first movement’s bounding opening theme, though the movement’s central development section brings in somewhat darker, more impish material.

The slow second movement was inspired by religious processions that Mendelssohn watched in Rome: it contrasts a noble melody in the woodwind and violas with a plodding bass line, slipping away at its conclusion as if the procession has moved into the distance.

Following an elegant third-movement minuet (complete with distant horn calls in its gently martial trio section), Mendelssohn closes with a finale that blends two breathless Italian dances: the Roman saltarello (which gives the movement its name) and the Neapolitan tarantella.

The ‘Italian’ is one of very few symphonies in the repertoire that begins in the bright positivity of the major and ends in the more serious minor (often the journey is the other way round, as in Beethoven’s Fifth). The finale’s whirling energy, however, alongside a melancholy memory of the symphony’s opening melody just before the end, ensures a propulsive, somewhat delirious conclusion.

^{Programme notes © David Kettle
David Kettle is an Edinburgh-based writer and editor who contributes regularly to The Scotsman, The Daily Telegraph, The List and The Strad.}