Meet the Phil 2006/07 |
|
|
|
 SESSION E: 15th March 2007 11.30am - 1.00pm : Studio 7
Symphony No. 4 Italian, Felix Mendelssohn
1. Allegro vivace
2. Andante con moto
3. Con moto moderato
4. Saltarello: Presto
In the autumn of 1830 Mendelssohn, then twenty one years old, crossed the Alps into Italy where he spent the next ten months. He visited Florence and Naples, but his base was Rome , and it was there, in a sunny room in the Piazza di Spagna, that he wrote most of the Symphony in A known as the 'Italian'.
The work is a paean of praise to the warm south, it celebrates the northerner's response to Goethe's 'land where the lemon-trees bloom'. Mendelssohn, no less than Berlioz (the two composers were in Rome at the same time), was disgusted with what he considered the degraded condition of contemporary Italian musical culture, but his pleasure in the light and colour and animation of the Italian landscape was intense. 'Why should Italy still insist on being the land of Art ' he write to his family, 'when in reality it is the land of Nature , delighting every heart? No lack of music there; it echoes and vibrates on every side - not in the vapid and vulgar theatres.'
The famous opening chord of the work - pizzicato strings, woodwind and horns fortepiano - signals the release of a flow of high spirits unsurpassed in music. The long violin theme which unfolds beneath the luminous, pulsating wind chords has that combination of pace and leisurely stride - like a perfectly ridden thoroughbred - that was Mendelssohn's secret. The mixture of graceful, broadly arched melody and busy accompanying figuration continues throughout the movement.
A new, rhythmical theme in the minor dominates the development, leading to an impassioned climax from which, after a diminuendo, the solo oboe in a long crescendo leads the way back to the reprise - one of the most musical passages in nineteenth century music.
As with the slow movement of Berlioz's Italian symphony, a religious procession inspired by Mendelssohn's Andante. The elements of this beautifully poised and evocative movement are an introductory chant-like figure, which recurs half-way through and again at the end, a continuous patter of marching quavers in the bass, a melancholy tune intoned in unison by woodwind and violas (joined at its reception by the soft counterpoint of two flutes) and a second theme in the major which, as Tovey remarks, introduces a note of human wistfulness into the austerity of the litany.
The minuet-like third movement is a fine example of Mendelssohn taking the classical tradition and making it more Romantic and personal. The poetic trio, in E major (like the Midsummer Night's Dream Overture) begins with the horns of elfland sounding a far-off fanfare, but works up to a vigourously rhythmic forte in A minor which foreshadows the finale.
Like the Roman Carnival music in Berlioz's Benvenuto Cellini, the last movement is a saltarello - an Italian popular dance, quick flowing, but interrupted by sudden hops. Haydn sometimes concluded major key sonata works with finales in the minor, but he liked to end in the major. Mendelssohn, unprecedently, remains in the minor key until the very last bar. He also sustains to the end the music's irresistible sense of furiously rapid movement. This whole finale is a rhythmic tour de force whose excitement is intensified by the masterly contrasts, the scoring, articulation and dynamics. Near the end of the music, still drumming out the rhythm of the saltarello, sinks down to a pianissimo, only to rise up and surge swiftly to its conclusion in a final electrifying crescendo.
Programme note © David Cairns
Read about Felix Mendelssohn |
|
|
 |
|
Listen to R3
