Above all, Finnish composer Jean Sibelius was a master of the musically evocative. Sights, sounds, smells, emotions, textures—all of these and more radiate from his music and sweep the listener away to a different time and place. This intensely expressive sound world is a core characteristic of his music and is present and immediately identifiable in nearly all of his works, despite the broad range of styles and forms he employed during his long career. Although his legacy now mostly rests upon his symphonies and other orchestral music, Sibelius wrote much vocal music as well, including nearly 100 songs, a significant amount of choral music, and several pieces for orchestra and solo voices.
Living somewhere in the space between an orchestral song and a tone poem, Luonnotar is one of the dozen or so Sibelius works—including such well-known pieces as Kullervo, The Swan of Tuonela, and Tapiola—based on the Kalevala, Finland’s national epic poem. The Finnish text for Luonnotar is drawn directly from the Kalevala’s first “song.” A musical creation myth, it tells part of the story of its title character, a nature spirit / mother goddess who helps to bring forth the earth, moon, and stars from a vast emptiness of sea and sky. The vocal writing poses a degree of difficulty that befits Luonnotar’s divinity, requiring an extremely wide range, impeccable breath control, and accurate intonation despite being dangerously exposed at almost all times—not to mention the linguistic challenge for any non–Finnish speaker. The orchestra, meanwhile, provides not an accompaniment but the environment that Luonnotar inhabits: first the swirling celestial void; then the surging waves and gusting winds of the endless primordial ocean; and finally the soft, twinkling beauty of the newly moonlit and star-studded night sky that precedes the dawn of a new age.
—Jay Goodwin
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart is often depicted as playing the piano or harpsichord, but what is sometimes forgotten is his extraordinary accomplishment as a string player. Although he preferred to play the viola, and later featured it in some of his most impressive chamber works (the string quintets, K. 174, 515, and 516, which add a second viola to the string quartet), Mozart was a distinguished violinist. In 1777, he wrote to his father, “I played as if I were the finest fiddler in all Europe,” to which his father replied, “You yourself do not know how well you play the violin.” Strong praise indeed from Leopold, who usually had nothing but scorn for other violinists!
When Mozart and his father returned from two trips to Italy in the late 1760s and early 1770s, Mozart found himself back in Salzburg without the opera commissions or a permanent position in Italy he had so desired. It was then that he turned his attention to instrumental composition, writing many of his famous serenades (including the “Serenata notturna,” K. 239; “Haffner,” K. 250; and “Posthorn,” K. 320), his first original piano concerto (K. 175), and, of course, the violin concertos.
Mozart’s compositional development in the concerto genre can be traced through an examination of these five violin concertos. Although they were all written within a mere two years of each other, one can clearly see in them Mozart’s progression from a competent composer indebted to the past, to a master of the genre, experimenting with innovative techniques such as abrupt shifts in tone, texture, and passion within a single movement. Perhaps these techniques are traceable in part to his father’s precept that a good performer should be able to move without effort from the “mournful to the merry … in a word, he must play everything in such a way that he will himself be moved by it.” Mozart’s concertos move seamlessly between extremes of emotion and passion; and when experiencing a good performance, the audience should too.
The Violin Concerto No. 1 in B-flat Major, K. 207, was written in Salzburg in April 1773, perhaps in anticipation of a trip that Mozart and his father took to Vienna in July of that same year. K. 207 is Mozart’s very first surviving original concerto for any instrument, preceding the D-Major Piano Concerto, K. 175, by several months.
This first violin concerto stands out stylistically from the rest. It contains the signature Mozartean grace and charm, especially evident in the second movement, but many of the sequential patterns in the first and last movements are indebted to the Italian concerto tradition popularized by Antonio Vivaldi and Luigi Boccherini. Mozart undoubtedly heard many of these concertos while traveling in Italy with his father. But even in this first, most traditional concerto, there are hints of innovations to come. In the third movement, Mozart chooses an unusual form, a concerto/sonata hybrid rather than the traditional, lighter rondo form. In 1776, Mozart replaced it with another movement, the Rondo, K. 269. Usually (as on the present occasion) the original presto movement is performed with the concerto and the rondo is reserved as a concert piece.
—Steven Ledbetter
The extraordinary demand for new music by English composer, conductor, and pianist Thomas Adès has led to one high-profile work after another in the past two decades. These include the operas The Tempest and The Exterminating Angel, the piano concerto In Seven Days and the Concerto for Piano and Orchestra (the latter a Boston Symphony Orchestra commission), the orchestral works Tevot and Polaris, and Totentanz, a dramatic 40-minute work for mezzo-soprano, baritone, and orchestra. His latest big work, completed in 2021, is a three-part ballet based on Dante’s Divine Comedy, composed for the UK’s Royal Ballet. Co-commissioned by the Los Angeles Philharmonic, Dante is also readily performable as concert music, adding another big piece to the composer’s repertoire as an orchestral conductor. He also created an Exterminating Angel Symphony based on music from his opera.
A fascination with music history and tradition has led Adès increasingly to put his stamp on the major compositional genres—demonstrably in the sketchily definable forms of ballet and opera but more pointedly in “symphony” and “concerto.” His Grawemeyer Award–winning Asyla is a symphony in all but name, though by not calling it a symphony he could deflect direct comparisons to the genre. Though his In Seven Days for piano and orchestra is a programmatic work, doubling as a tone poem on the creation myth from the Bible’s Book of Genesis, with his 2019 Concerto for Piano and Orchestra, his choice of title was deliberate in marking the piece out as what he deemed “a proper concerto.” Though his Violin Concerto, Concentric Paths (2006), comes equipped with a subtitle suggesting some of its musical characteristics, it’s nonetheless called a concerto, and its three-movement form adheres, to a point, to the genre’s traditional expectations.
Adès’s new work for violin and orchestra for Anne-Sophie Mutter is a different kind of piece—a single movement that sets out on a singular journey. There’s a subtitle here, too: “Homage to Sibelius.” Music of Jean Sibelius has had a strong presence in Adès’s repertoire since the blossoming of his major career as a guest conductor some two decades ago. As a conductor with the BSO for more than 10 seasons, Adès has led music of Sibelius more frequently than that of any composer other than himself. That he designated his new work for violin and orchestra, Air, as an “Homage to Sibelius” further underlines his affinity with the Finnish master.
That affinity probably lies, as much as anything, in Adès’s admiration for the formal individuality of Sibelius’s later music, spanning the period of the Fourth through the Seventh symphonies. In these increasingly innovative pieces, ideas barely identifiable as “theme” or “motive” are the basis for large-scale, dramatically varied movements created through the organic transformation of those ideas. The pacing of events could, however, be even more protracted. In such tone poems as The Bard and The Swan of Tuonela, Sibelius sustained remarkable consistency of atmosphere over relatively long stretches of musical time. It’s this latter achievement that relates most closely to Air.
Air was composed in 2021–2022; Anne-Sophie Mutter gave the world premiere under the composer’s direction in Lucerne in August 2022, and she was soloist in the American premiere last week with the BSO and Andris Nelsons in Boston. Considered, since her late teens, one of the preeminent violinists in the world, Mutter has earned accolades for her performances of the great violin concerto canon populated by works of Mozart, Beethoven, Mendelssohn, Brahms, Tchaikovsky, and Sibelius. In addition, she has been responsible for expanding the solo repertoire, actively commissioning and premiering major works by such composers as Henri Dutilleux, Sofia Gubaidulina, Witold Lutosławski, Krzysztof Penderecki, and Wolfgang Rihm, among others. Mutter’s longstanding connection to the Boston Symphony Orchestra includes the premieres of André Previn’s Violin Concerto Anne-Sophie as well as his Double Concerto for violin, double bass, and orchestra. In 2021, she gave the first performances of John Williams’s Markings and his Violin Concerto No. 2 with the BSO under the composer’s direction. She recorded both Williams’s and Previn’s concertos with the BSO. With Adès’s Air, her legacy of introducing new works with the BSO becomes even more firmly established.
Adès composed Air immediately following the long journey of composing and bringing to the stage The Dante Project. Though requiring a virtuosic level of tone control and expressive intensity, the piece avoids flash, fireworks, or episodes of transcendent athleticism, and for the most part maintains a nearly constant mood throughout, like the Sibelius tone poems referenced above and, among Adès’s own works, his Dawn and Shanty—Over the Sea.
Air employs one of the composer’s favorite formal or procedural ideas, that of a passacaglia (or chaconne) in which a repeated, short harmonic/melodic progression is the foundation and background for ever-transforming music in the foreground. This relates to the ever-climbing concentric circles of the Paradiso section of Dante (as well as to ideas in Concentric Paths and other works), leading to a clear culmination, a point of change. He writes, “[Air] is actually an enormous canon or a series of canons at the 10th [that is, an octave and a third]. They rise and at the same time descend, so that with so many modulations [key changes] you end up arriving again at the point where you started, but transformed into something else. Anne-Sophie’s part is the freest agent within this mix.” A canon is a special musical idea in which one line is imitated at a fixed pitch interval and duration, as in the round “Frère Jacques” (which is a canon at the unison, or the same pitch, following at a distance of four beats). Adès suggests that over the course of Air the solo part, like its quasi-namesake Ariel, dreams of escaping the predetermined constraints that govern the music’s journey. This seems to transpire in a kind of coda and cadence at the end of the piece.
The canon’s predetermination still allows for subtlety and nuance. In addition to the constantly changing harmonic colors, Adès adds instrumental details throughout the piece that, within its serene surface, have outsized effects. The instrumental landscape of the instruments in canon continually shifts—strings, horns, flutes, clarinets. Deep bass notes in percussion, piano, and low strings that punctuate the higher melodic lines add extraordinary dimension as the thread of the piece spins out. A varied texture of piano, harp, marimba, and tuned gongs provides a gamelan-like, steady-state background pulse.
The title’s layered meanings take in the English equivalent of “aria” (e.g., Bach’s “Air” from his Orchestral Suite No. 3) as well as the air of our environment, our medium of sound. What marvelous things composers have created from the subtle manipulations of air.
—Robert Kirzinger
Sibelius celebrated his 50th birthday on December 8, 1915, with the first performance of his Fifth Symphony. The composer had completed his First Symphony in 1899, Finlandia in 1900, and the Second Symphony in 1902. Already in the spring of 1889, in his last days as a conservatory student, he was hailed by the influential Finnish critic Karl Flodin as “foremost amongst those who have been entrusted with bearing the banner of Finnish music.” On April 28, 1892, the first performance of the 26-year-old composer’s 80-minute symphonic poem Kullervo for soloists, male chorus, and orchestra had proved something of a national event. The Violin Concerto was composed in 1903 and revised in 1905. The Third and Fourth symphonies were written in 1907 and 1911, respectively.
Professionally Sibelius was secure, with international recognition constantly growing, and even reaching across the ocean: He received an honorary doctorate from Yale University in 1914, the year of his only visit to America, and he conducted his newly composed tone poem, The Oceanides, in Norfolk, Connecticut. He was offered the directorship of the Eastman School of Music after the First World War but never returned to America despite his popularity there. At the same time, however, his financial situation was and would for a while longer remain precarious, even with the establishment already in 1897 of the state pension for life that was meant to free him from teaching, and from churning out minor works simply to pay the bills. In any event, Sibelius’s 50th birthday found him, in Harold Johnson’s words, “unchallenged as his country’s greatest composer.” The date was celebrated as a national holiday.
Sibelius was hard-pressed to finish the Fifth Symphony and made last-minute changes during the final rehearsal. Though the public responded favorably, he remained dissatisfied and withdrew the work, introducing a second, much-revised version a year later, on December 14, 1916. Still dissatisfied with what he hoped would be its “definitive form,” he withdrew it yet again. At this point the composition of the Fifth becomes intertwined with that of his Sixth and Seventh, the composer observing in a letter of May 20, 1918: “It looks as if I may come out with all three symphonies at the same time.” Actually, the Sixth appeared in 1923, the Seventh in 1924; but regarding the Fifth, the composer continued: “The Fifth Symphony in a new form—practically composed anew—I work at it daily … The whole, if I may say so, a vital climax to the end. Triumphal.”
In its original form, in its revised version of 1916, and even as late as May 1918, the symphony had four separate movements. It is unclear just when Sibelius decided to combine the original first two movements into the single movement we know today, but what happens in the music we know is that a scherzo-like dance movement short-circuits the first-movement sonata-form scheme one might have expected, and moves through several faster tempos to a final climax serving as recapitulation for the whole. In short, Sibelius has taken his original two movements and reworked them into a single structure whose thematic content is organically related.
In this final version, the symphony had to wait for its premiere until after the brutal civil war that kept Finland from political stability until the spring of 1919. It was given on November 24, 1919, and Sibelius must finally have been deeply satisfied, especially if he recalled the words he had entered into his notebook five years earlier, in late September 1914: “In a deep dell again. But I already begin to see dimly the mountain that I shall certainly ascend … God opens his door for a moment and His orchestra plays the Fifth Symphony.”
At the beginning of the Sibelius Fifth, the ear recognizes the various contributions to the orchestral texture without at first consciously thinking to isolate the individual sounds. Events proceed naturally and logically, each instrument adding to the total effect. The music expands into and through a varied statement of the opening materials, after which the texture thins out for a mysterious, fugue-like string passage. Over this, a solo bassoon paves the way for a development-like section with a climax of its own, but which then turns into something rather unexpected: an Allegro moderato whose dancelike character stands in sharp contrast to what has gone before, even though its thematic materials are clearly derived from what we have already heard.
Of the Andante, Donald Francis Tovey writes that this “little middle movement … produces the effect of a primitive set of variations … But it produces this effect in a paradoxical way, inasmuch as it is not a theme preserving its identity … through variations, but a rhythm … built up into a number of by no means identical tunes.” The movement starts as a simple idyll, the strings’ material initially changing character from subdued to animated over long-held notes in the woodwinds. A lively middle section is filled with ominous undercurrents.
The finale begins with a rush of violins and violas to which woodwinds soon add their chatter. Once this subsides, a bell-like tolling figure emerges in the horns—or, to quote Tovey once more: “The bustling introduction … provides a rushing wind, through which Thor can enjoy swinging his hammer.” As the movement proceeds, these materials are shared by the other members of the orchestra. Following the Misterioso repetition of the agitated opening material (the tolling figure now being heard in tremolo violins and cellos), a woodwind phrase from very near the beginning blossoms into the most overtly emotional material of the entire score. Trumpets take up the tolling motif. The texture thickens, filled with dissonance and accents placed at odds with each other. The final resolution—four chords and two unisons introduced after a sudden silence—is startling in its simplicity and spareness: “triumphal,” perhaps, but at the same time demanding an acceptance of forces not always within our control.
—Marc Mandel