London Symphony Orchestra

for Nicola Benedetti

1 Lamentoso
2 Dance
3 Andante Amoroso
4 Cadenza
5 Presto con fuoco – Finale

I started my Violin Concerto just before the UK’s first Covid-19 lockdown in March 2020, and my initial musical ideas were hopeful, singing, full of life. As the pandemic worsened I quickly realised that it was impossible to ‘carry on as normal’ and the work would need to explore a different set of responses.

The concerto begins, quietly, calmly, as if from nowhere, with a statement of B-flat minor in the strings, over which the violin laments, drawing us into a world of stillness and reflection. A moment of transition launches us directly into the next movement.

Movement two is a fast, energetic dance that is in essence a response to having a huge amount of pent-up energy that I was unable to release during the period of lockdown restrictions. It hurtles us through various balletic tableaux.

Movement three is an impassioned love song tinged with moments of darkness.

The Cadenza fourth movement provides us with another moment of stillness and revisits material from the second movement.

The fifth movement begins with a devilish A minor tarantella that leads directly to the Finale. This opens with a simple melody in the violin which is then passed through winds, strings and brass, guiding us to a wild, raucous, energy-filled climax that leads to the work’s close.

^{Note by Mark Simpson}

^{Commissioned by the London Symphony Orchestra (with the support of the Ernst von Siemens Music Foundation and The Marchus Trust), WDR Sinfonieorchester, Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra and Royal Scottish National Orchestra.}

Mark Simpson
^{b 1988 (United Kingdom)}

Composer and clarinettist Mark Simpson (b 1988, Liverpool) became the first ever winner of both the BBC Young Musician of the Year and BBC Proms/Guardian Young Composer of the Year competitions in 2006. He went on to read Music at St Catherine’s College, Oxford and studied composition with Julian Anderson at the Guildhall School of Music & Drama. Simpson was a BBC New Generation Artist from 2012 to 2014 and received a Borletti-Buitoni Trust Fellowship in 2014. In 2015 he was appointed Composer in Association of the BBC Philharmonic for a period of four years.

Simpson’s oratorio The Immortal was premiered by the BBC Philharmonic at the 2015 Manchester International Festival to immediate critical acclaim. Other works with orchestra include Israfel, premiered by the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra, sparks commissioned for the 2012 Last Night of the Proms and A mirror-fragment… written for the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra. His first opera Pleasure was commissioned by Opera North, the Royal Opera and Aldeburgh Music and premiered in 2016.

Chamber works include Hommage à Kurtág for clarinet, piano and viola, commissioned by the Salzburg and Edinburgh International festivals for premiere in 2016 by Simpson alongside Pierre-Laurent Aimard and Antoine Tamestit, and a solo clarinet work Darkness Moves commissioned by the Borletti-Buitoni Trust. Under his Composer in Association role with the BBC Philharmonic Simpson has composed a Cello Concerto for Leonard Elschenbroich in 2018 and a Clarinet Concerto for himself as soloist in 2019. His most recent work is his Violin Concerto for Nicola Benedetti.

A collection of Simpson's chamber works, entitled Night Music, was released in 2016 by NMC and 2020 brought a recording of wind ensemble music on Orchid Classics combining Simpson's Geysir with Mozart's Gran Partita. Simpson continues to perform widely as a soloist and chamber musician, with recent highlights including Nielsen’s Clarinet Concerto at the BBC Proms with the BBC Symphony Orchestra and Sir Andrew Davis, and Messiaen’s Quatuor pour la fin du temps at the Aldeburgh Festival with Pierre-Laurent Aimard, Isabelle Faust and Jean-Guihen Queyras. In 2016 he performed Magnus Lindberg’s Clarinet Concerto with the BBC Philharmonic in Manchester, with the Mozarteum Orchestra in Salzburg conducted by HK Gruber and at the 2018 BBC Proms. Recent highlights included a feature as composer and performer at the 2020 Trondheim Chamber Music Festival.

^{Composer profile reprinted by kind permission of Boosey & Hawkes}

1 Adagio – Allegro non troppo
2 Allegro con grazia
3 Allegro molto vivace
4 Finale: Adagio lamentoso

When 19th-century composers wrote minor-key symphonies they generally followed the Beethoven ‘darkness-to-light’ model; and even if the finale ended in a dark minor key (like Brahms’ Fourth) it would normally be a fast, passionate movement, more defiant than tragic. The quiet, despairing ending of Tchaikovsky’s Sixth Symphony was unprecedented. This symphony is the record of a deeply personal experience, expressed with a power that leaves one in no doubt either of Tchaikovsky’s musical mastery or the intensity of his feelings, but it is certainly not music for people who are embarrassed by the expression of strong emotions.

In the autumn of 1892 Tchaikovsky sketched a new symphony but soon put it aside, feeling that something was wrong: he realised that he had been writing out of habit, without any deep commitment, and it was an altogether different sort of symphony that he needed to compose. The sketches were recycled into a third piano concerto, and by the following February the new work was well underway. He completed the orchestration on the last day of August and immediately wrote to his brother Anatoly, ‘I’m very proud of the Symphony, and I think it’s the best of my works’.

He conducted the first performance on 28 October 1893 in St Petersburg. The response was polite, but apparently not enthusiastic. Tchaikovsky, who was usually extremely sensitive to audiences’ reactions, was not upset on this occasion: ‘it’s not that it displeased, but it produced some bewilderment. As far as I myself am concerned, I take more pride in it than in any other of my works’, he wrote to his publisher.

When composing it, Tchaikovsky had admitted that it was a symphony ‘with a programme, but with a programme of a kind which remains an enigma to all – let them guess it who can’. We cannot know exactly what Tchaikovsky had in mind; he never wanted to ‘explain’ his music in any other terms, and when the work was performed it was simply billed as: Sixth Symphony, B minor. On the morning after the first performance, about to send the score for engraving, Tchaikovsky could not make up his mind whether to give it a title at all. He didn’t like the idea of either ‘Tragic Symphony’ or ‘Programme Symphony’, and it was his brother Modest who suggested a title in French: ‘Pathétique’. It sounds odd in English, with its suggestion of weakness or inadequacy. In French and Russian (‘Pateticheskaya’) the word is more serious, implying the expression of deep feeling and suffering.

Listening Guide

The first movement of the ‘Pathétique’, from its opening bassoon crawling up from the depths to its hushed ending, includes a wide variety of musical images. As always in Tchaikovsky, it is the lyrical idea that propels the music; and the economy of texture, rhythmic vitality and clarity of instrumentation ensure that these images strike the listener with immediate force. It is a drama of contrasts, of personal passion struggling against hostile forces.

The second movement is calm and urbane, redolent of the world of Tchaikovsky’s ballets. It sounds like a waltz, although it is not written in a triple-time waltz metre but with a strangely unsettled five beats to the bar. The following march is as brilliant and thrilling as anything Tchaikovsky wrote, but for all its frantic activity there is a deliberate lack of melodic focus: it is long before the march rhythms and orchestral ferment settle down to reveal an actual tune.

In both the second and third movements there appears a figure of a downward scale which is heard so often in Tchaikovsky’s music, and which he associated with Fate, that power which Tchaikovsky believed ruled his life and which he once grimly described as: ‘the fatal force which prevents our hopes of happiness from being realised, and which watches jealously to see that our bliss and happiness are never complete and unclouded … it is inescapable and it can never be overcome’.

This descending ‘Fate’ figure shapes both themes of the Finale. On its first appearance the second of them begins consolingly in the major mode and rises to a climax of passionate protest – perhaps a last desperate attempt to find love and happiness. On its reappearance it sinks lower and lower, ebbing away into darkness and silence.

His Last Symphony

Five days after conducting the ‘Pathétique’, Tchaikovsky was taken ill, and he died four days later. The official version of events was that he drank a glass of unboiled water and contracted cholera. There were vague rumours of suicide – in the 1970s a story emerged from Russia, passed down over 80 years by word of mouth, that Tchaikovsky had been summoned to a ‘court of honour’ composed of ex-students of the St Petersburg School of Jurisprudence, where he had studied as a young man. This court, apparently, presented Tchaikovsky with two alternatives: they would publicly expose an affair he had been having with a young nobleman, prompting disgrace and probable criminal proceedings, or Tchaikovsky could die by suicide. For all its implausibilities and the absence of any corroborating evidence, it is a story with weight for those who would like to hear the Sixth Symphony as a premonition of an ending to an unhappy life.

Whatever the truth of the events surrounding Tchaikovsky’s death, though, there is no evidence at all of suicidal depression during the time he planned and composed the Sixth Symphony. The obvious pride he took in it suggests, on the contrary, a rare period when his art was able to compensate for the loneliness of his life, when the perfect musical expression of his own character allowed him greater peace of mind than he had enjoyed for many years.

^{Note by Andrew Huth}

Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky
^{1840 to 1893 (Russia)}

Born in Kamsko-Votkinsk in the Vyatka province of Russia on 7 May 1840, Tchaikovsky’s father was a mining engineer, his mother of French extraction. In 1848 the family moved to the imperial capital, St Petersburg, where Pyotr was enrolled at the School of Jurisprudence. He overcame his grief at his mother’s death in 1854 by composing and performing, and music remained a diversion from his job – as a clerk at the Ministry of Justice – until he enrolled as a full-time student at the St Petersburg Conservatory in 1863.

His First Symphony was warmly received at its St Petersburg premiere in 1868. Swan Lake, the first of Tchaikovsky’s three great ballet scores, was written in 1876 for Moscow’s Bolshoi Theatre. Between 1869 and the year of his death Tchaikovsky composed over 100 songs, cast mainly in the impassioned Romance style and textually preoccupied with the frustration and despair associated with love, conditions that characterised his personal relationships.

Tchaikovsky’s hasty decision to marry an almost unknown admirer in 1877 proved a disaster, his homosexuality combining strongly with his sense of entrapment. By now he had completed his Fourth Symphony, was about to finish his opera Eugene Onegin, and had attracted the considerable financial and moral support of Nadezhda von Meck, an affluent widow. She helped him through his personal crisis and in 1878 he returned to composition with the Violin Concerto. Tchaikovsky claimed that his Sixth Symphony represented his best work. The mood of crushing despair heard in all but the work’s third movement reflected the composer’s troubled state of mind. He died nine days after its premiere on 6 November.

^{Composer profile by Andrew Stewart}

Share Your Thoughts

We hope you’ve enjoyed the concert. If you have five minutes we would really appreciate your feedback via our survey.

Or if you only have a few seconds, you can give us a rating and send us a message below.

Programme Contributors

Andrew Huth is a musician, writer and translator who writes
extensively on French, Russian and Eastern European music.

Andrew Stewart is a freelance music journalist and writer. He is the author of The LSO at 90, and contributes to a wide variety of specialist classical music publications.