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| Alisa Weilerstein |
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| Orchestra of St. Luke's |
JULY 11 alisa weilerstein plays haydn
Saturday, 8:00pm ~ Venetian Theater
Tickets: $15.00, $20.00, $35.00, $50.00, $70.00 order online
Alisa Weilerstein, cello; Orchestra of St. Luke's
Alisa Weilerstein, the most brilliant cellist of her generation, returns to Caramoor for a celebration of Haydn and Schubert with the Orchestra of St. Luke's. These beautiful works of the Viennese Masters are infused with the sound and spirit of summer and youthful joy.
At 26, she’s arguably Yo-Yo Ma's heiress apparent as sovereign of the American cello.
- New York Magazine
Joseph Haydn
(1732 – 1809)
Symphony No. 6 in D Major, Hob. 1/6 (Morning)
Franz Joseph Haydn was born in Rohrau, Lower Austria, on March 31, 1732, and died in Vienna on May 31, 1809. He composed his Symphony No. 6 in 1761 as the first of a group of three works with the titles “Morning,” “Noon,” and “Evening.” The first performance is not precisely dated, but it certainly took place at Eisenstadt under Haydn’s direction immediately after the work was composed. The score calls for flute, two oboes, bassoon, two horns, strings (including concertante violin and cello), plus continuo.
Haydn’s Symphony No. 6 (along with its companion pieces, Nos. 7 and 8) is intimately involved with the beginning of his three decades of service to the music-loving princes of the Esterhazy family. His appointment followed a decade of relative instability during which Haydn had really learned his trade. Until he was eighteen, in 1750, Haydn had served as a boy soprano in the Imperial chapel choir in Vienna. Drummed unceremoniously out of the choir when his voice changed, and unwilling to follow his parents’ desire that he enter the priesthood, Haydn moved into an unheated garret room in a building directly opposite the entrance to the palace. There he suffered desperately from poverty, but worked diligently giving lessons and conscientiously extending his own skill in the art of music.
Most of his work from the 1750s is lost, and most of what survives is undatable. But he had evidently composed his first string quartets and his first symphony by the end of the decade, probably for a certain Count Morzin, who became Haydn’s first patron. Before long Morzin, having outrun his financial resources, was obliged to let Haydn go. It was a fateful change, because Morzin placed him with the immensely rich Prince Paul Anton Esterhazy. By the late spring of 1761 Haydn was officially the prince’s assistant Kapellmeister (second in command to the aging Gregor Joseph Werner), though he may have started his duties earlier than the date of his contract. He was to remain legally tied to the family into the 1790s, and emotionally even after.
When Haydn donned the blue-and-gold livery of the princely house, he became a “house officer”—considerably above the rank of mere servant—but with a long and elaborate job description: to be temperate and treat the musicians “modestly, quietly, and honestly”; to refrain from undue familiarity with them; to compose whatever music the prince desired; to ask daily whether the prince wanted a musical performance and to arrange for it; to settle disputes between the musicians; to keep the music library and the instruments of the household in good order; to coach the female singers “in order that they might not forget (when staying in the country) that which they have been taught with much effort and at great expense in Vienna”; to practice regularly on all the instruments with which he was acquainted; and to do anything else necessary for the household music! It was a normal contract for the time, and a good, steady job. Haydn was delighted.
Soon after, Haydn composed three symphonies with the programmatic titles of Morning, Noon, Evening. He never revealed the details of any intended program, though commentators have long surmised that the opening of “Morning” is Haydn’s musical depiction of sunrise. It may well be the first orchestral work that he wrote in his new position.
In order to be sure his work would please, Haydn studied the music in his patron’s library, so as to learn his tastes. He noticed the presence of many Italian solo concerti and concerti grossi. Composers such as Vivaldi, Tartini, and Albinoni were among the prince’s favorites. As an homage to this tradition, Haydn planned his symphony with many solos and even a “concertino” made up of solo violin and cello playing off against statements by the full orchestra, rather in the style of the concerto grosso, though in a more modern musical language. At some point in the symphony, he gave virtually every part of the orchestra a moment alone (including a rare solo for contrabass in the third movement’s Trio); Haydn’s concertmaster, Luigi Tomasini, received many opportunities to display his gifts to splendid advantage. And all this Haydn accomplished while writing a score of considerable formal originality.
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Joseph Haydn
Concerto for Cello and Orchestra
in D Major, Hob. VIIb: 2
Haydn composed the D-major cello concerto in 1783, presumably for Anton Kraft, the principal cellist in the Esterházy establishment, though we have no information regarding a first performance. In addition to the soloist, the score calls for pairs of oboes and horns, plus strings.
Unlike Bach or Mozart, Haydn was not a virtuoso performer on any instrument, though he did once report that he could manage more than capably as a harpsichordist or singer and that he could even play a violin concerto acceptably. His early training consisted of the kind of all-around experience that would best suit a young musician to make a living, though a modest one—as a jack-of-all-trades who could fill in wherever needed in the musical ensemble of some nobleman. Only the greatest virtuosi could be expected to limit themselves to the one instrument that was the basis of their fame, and composers usually made their living in large part as performers (J.S. Bach, Handel, Mozart, and Beethoven, to name the other four biggest names of the eighteenth century, all played both keyboard and stringed instruments at one time or another).
The virtuoso player who was also a composer was naturally likely to compose works for himself. There were two advantages to this procedure: his music could exactly suit his strengths and it belonged to him alone, giving him a monopoly on performances if the work should prove popular. Haydn, who never claimed to be a virtuoso, did not have that kind of impetus. His concerto output, as eighteenth-century composers go, was unusually modest, even allowing for a number of works that have been lost. But he did have occasion to compose for virtuosi in the service of the Esterházy family. One of these was the principal cellist, Anton Kraft, for whom Haydn wrote this concerto about 1783.
This is the second of two known Haydn cello concertos. The first, in C Major, which was lost until 1961, was composed perhaps twenty years earlier and still retains traces (especially in its first movement) of Baroque rhythms, but its finale builds a vigorous conclusion in a more up-to-date style. The concerto in D is more “modern” in many respects, though it has none of the symphonic development that Mozart’s concertos of the same period showed. Haydn may not have known Mozart’s concertos at this time, and, in any case, he was apparently determined to write a virtuoso showpiece—and this he certainly did—beginning with hair-raising demands almost from the soloist’s very first entrance. The result is an unusually relaxed score—for everyone but the cello soloist! Haydn consulted closely with Kraft on the details of the cello part—to such a degree that the concerto was long believed to have been written by the cellist, though we have Haydn’s own autograph manuscript to prove the contrary.
Each of the concerto’s three movements offers opportunities for soloistic display. Double stops appear at the soloist’s appearance; rapid scales and singing melodies in a high register add to the demands. The Adagio offers a mellow, slow theme richly sounded by the orchestra, then taken up by the soloist with decorations and extensions to the upper octave. The closing rondo congenially makes room again and again for technical difficulties, such as octave writing in the solo instrument, alternating with a cheerfully ambling 6/8 tune that makes the pre-eminent Haydn authority H.C. Robbins Landon think of “Here we go gathering nuts in May.” In the eternal competition between the demands of the soloist for display and of the composer for cohesion and variety, Haydn in this instance clearly bowed to his cellist friend.
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Franz Schubert
1797 – 1828
Symphony No. 5 in B-flat Major, D.485
Franz Peter Schubert was born in Liechtental, a suburb of Vienna, on January 31, 1797, and died in Vienna on November 19, 1828. He composed the Symphony No. 5 in September and early October 1816, completing the score on October 3; the work was played privately at the home of the violinist Otto Hatwig that fall. It was not heard in public until well after the composer’s death, on October 17, 1841, when Michael Leitermayer conducted it in a concert at the Josefstädter Theater, Vienna. The score calls for flute, two oboes, two bassoons, two horns, and strings.
As a young choirboy in the Imperial Chapel of Vienna between the ages of ten and fifteen, Schubert enjoyed the opportunity of a first-rate musical education, not only in singing, but in piano and violin, as well as a strong basis in the fundamentals of composition. His teacher there was the eminent Antonio Salieri (whose pupils also included Beethoven and Liszt). Salieri taught him, among other things, to date his manuscripts, for which historians are deeply grateful. And during that time he played in the school orchestra under the direction of Joseph Spaun, a law student who would become his lifelong friend.
All of these experiences were formative, particularly the opportunity to learn from the inside, by way of performance, how a symphony worked as a musical genre. Soon after leaving the seminary, he composed his first symphony, three years before the work to be performed here. He had a chance to perform these works with his school friends and family (probably with only one or two strings on a part, not with a full orchestra), and he continued to learn and grow in his understanding of the orchestra.
The next few years were incredibly busy, partly with his short-lived career as a teacher in his father’s school, but primarily with composing: three more symphonies, his first opera, and dozens of songs (more than 150 in the year 1815 alone!). He was not yet twenty when he turned out the brilliantly achieved Symphony No. 5. It is the shortest of the sixth symphonies he wrote in his youth, and also the smallest in terms of its orchestral requirements (it does not require clarinets, trumpets, or drums). Probably Schubert composed it for the specific make-up of the ensemble that gave the first performance at Hatwig’s.
There is a spaciousness and proportion to Schubert’s ideas that tells us from the ravishing opening gesture—a gentle slow breath in the woodwinds into which the strings introduce a scurrying figure—that we are in the hands of a master. There follows a cheerful theme whose opening figure dominates the discourse of the first movement, and the development turns to ingenious combinations of the buoyant figure and flowing idea from the opening.
The second movement, Andante con moto, presents an idyllic pastoral figure, developed and enriched with one of Schubert’s magical changes of harmony—here, for perhaps the first time, we find the mature control of the composer whose harmonic inventions went beyond anything known at his time. Though he calls the third movement a “minuet,” its fiery qualities are those of a Beethovenian scherzo, to which the Trio offers a serene contrast. The finale recaptures the joyous spirits of the opening with a chipper little tune that Schubert puts through its paces with a brilliant sense of mastery.
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