September's Virtual Concert, ARTISTRY IN STRINGS, is available NOW to subscribers and single access patrons!
ARTISTRY IN STRINGS
The strings of the Chamber Orchestra bring their artistry to the far reaches of the string repertoire, from the joyful dances of Holst’s “St. Paul’s Suite,” to the mesmerizing flow of Pärt’s “Cantus in Memory of Benjamin Britten,” the otherworldly beauty of Tippett’s “Fantasia Concertante on a Theme of Corelli,” and the youthful energy of Mendelssohn’s “Swiss” String Symphony, composed when he was only fourteen years old.
The strings are the heart of the orchestra; repertoire like this shows why.
The strings of the Chamber Orchestra bring their artistry to the far reaches of the string repertoire, from the joyful dances of Holst’s “St. Paul’s Suite,” to the mesmerizing flow of Pärt’s “Cantus in Memory of Benjamin Britten,” the otherworldly beauty of Tippett’s “Fantasia Concertante on a Theme of Corelli,” and the youthful energy of Mendelssohn’s “Swiss” String Symphony, composed when he was only fourteen years old.
The strings are the heart of the orchestra; repertoire like this shows why.
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Available digitally to subscribers and single ticket buyers September 27, 2020
(available for 3 full months)
Holst St. Paul’s Suite
Arvo Pärt Cantus in Memory of Benjamin Britten
Michael Tippett Fantasia Concertante on a Theme by Corelli
Mendelssohn String Symphony No. 9 in C Major, “Swiss”
(available for 3 full months)
Holst St. Paul’s Suite
Arvo Pärt Cantus in Memory of Benjamin Britten
Michael Tippett Fantasia Concertante on a Theme by Corelli
Mendelssohn String Symphony No. 9 in C Major, “Swiss”
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How will the video concerts work?
Our musicians will be recording on each originally-announced concert date in a private, physically-distanced session at First Christian Church. The final recording will include information about the repertoire, reflections on what it is like to perform in this time of Covid-19, and more! The concert videos will be made available to our subscribers via private link on Sunday, September 27; Sunday, October 25; and Sunday, November 22; and you will be able to watch them at your convenience in the comfort of your own home. We hope you’ll sit and relax, grab something to eat and drink, and enjoy these performances, made just for you! In addition to the online video, each concert will be rebroadcast on KCME 88.7 FM. Tune in at 3 p.m. on the Sunday following each video release.
Our musicians will be recording on each originally-announced concert date in a private, physically-distanced session at First Christian Church. The final recording will include information about the repertoire, reflections on what it is like to perform in this time of Covid-19, and more! The concert videos will be made available to our subscribers via private link on Sunday, September 27; Sunday, October 25; and Sunday, November 22; and you will be able to watch them at your convenience in the comfort of your own home. We hope you’ll sit and relax, grab something to eat and drink, and enjoy these performances, made just for you! In addition to the online video, each concert will be rebroadcast on KCME 88.7 FM. Tune in at 3 p.m. on the Sunday following each video release.
ARTISTRY IN STRINGS PROGRAM NOTES
by Mark Arnest
by Mark Arnest
Overview: Gustav Holst
Born September 21, 1874, Cheltenham, Gloucestershire, England; died May 25, 1934, London, England
Work Composed: 1912-13
Gustav Holst – English, despite his first name – is unique in music history. It’s not that his posthumous fame rests almost entirely on a single work, The Planets – music history is replete with one-hit wonders, ranging from Johann Pachelbel’s Canon in D to Bobby Pickett’s Monster Mash. What’s rare is that Holst’s hit is so atypical for his work, and that the bulk of his work, while little known by the general public, is of extremely high quality. Holst deserves more hits.
Holst was a musical omnivore. In addition to mastering the late Romantic style that was ascendant in his youth, he was influenced by the mythology of India, the 17th Century English composer Henry Purcell, and especially British folk song. Although he developed a distinct compositional voice, he never ceased to learn from his peers, and some of his mature work is influenced by Ravel.
St. Paul’s Suite is named for St Paul’s Girls’ School in Hammersmith, London, where Holst taught from 1905 until his death. Although the piece was completed in 1913, Holst continued to revise it until its publication in 1922.
The opening movement, Jig, is more sophisticated that it seems on first hearing. Despite its almost stupidly cheerful mood, it’s full of surprises, such as shifts back and forth from two to three beats per bar, a change in mode for the middle section, and its ending, which is completely convincing despite being in a different key than the beginning.
An ostinato is a short musical fragment that’s repeated several times, usually to build tension: At about the same time Holst composed this piece, Schoenberg, Stravinsky, and Bartók were using ostinatos in some of their fiercer passages. But Holst’s Ostinato is a gentle and lyrical piece, revolving around a four-note circular figure we first hear in the second violins. The focus, though, is the gently undulating melody above it and the falling bass line below. The strings are muted throughout, giving the movement a charming delicacy.
The elegiac Intermezzo is in a small five-part form, with three iterations of a stately slow tune alternating with two fast and boisterous sections based on the same motifs. Pungent dissonances in the fast sections suggest an out-of-tune village band.
The Finale exists in an earlier version as the finale of Holst’s Second Suite for Military Band. Its two themes come from The Dancing Master, a 1651 dancing manual containing music and instructions for English country dances. The first theme is called Dargason (the meaning of the word is unclear); the second is Greensleeves, although this version differs slightly from the version we’re used to. The Dargason sections are the suite’s jolliest passages. Holst doesn’t vary the tune, but shows off his inventiveness in the ways he reharmonizes and rescores it. In the Greensleeves sections, Holst cleverly combines the two tunes.
Overview: Arvo Pärt
Born: September 11, 1935, Paide, Estonia
Work Composed: 1977
Until his early 30s, the Estonian composer Arvo Pärt was a typical academic composer, composing music of daunting complexity in various contemporary styles. But in 1968, he had a creative crisis: He realized his music meant nothing to him. He said years later, “I had lost my inner compass and I didn’t know anymore what an interval or a key meant.” He courageously admitted to himself that he had spent decades pursuing the wrong goal. Three years later, he began again in a radically simplified style.
Pärt’s later music has been described as “holy minimalism.” These compositions are often based on a thorough examination of a simple concept – a phrase gets one note longer at each repetition, or goes one note higher, or is repeated with no changes at all except registration. The harmony is simple, diatonic, and often static. The music encourages the listener to enter a meditative state that can have deep emotional power.
The Cantus in Memoriam Benjamin Britten encapsulates Pärt’s sorrow at hearing of the death of English composer Benjamin Britten. He wrote:
Why did the date of Benjamin Britten's death – 4 December 1976 – touch such a chord in me? During this time I was obviously at the point where I could recognize the magnitude of such a loss. Inexplicable feelings of guilt, more than that even, arose in me. I had just discovered Britten for myself. Just before his death I began to appreciate the unusual purity of his music – I had had the impression of the same kind of purity in the ballads of Guillaume de Machaut. And besides, for a long time I had wanted to meet Britten personally – and now it would not come to that.
The Cantus in Memoriam Benjamin Britten basically consists of slowly descending scales that overlap one another over an A minor chord. (There are some fancy rhythmic procedures, but it’s not important for the listener to be aware of them.) The simplicity of the means belies the piece’s almost shattering emotional impact, which feels like a shroud of despair.
Overview: Michael Tippett
Born January 2, 1905, London, England; died January 8, 1998, London, England
Work Composed: 1953
Michael Tippet was a major figure in the renaissance of British music that began with the generation of Edward Elgar. His musical talent was not particularly conspicuous, and he had scarcely any formal training before being admitted to the Royal College of Music at the age of eighteen, where, his biographer Meirion Bowen wrote, “his aspirations were Olympian, though his knowledge rudimentary.”
The early 1920s was not a bad time to be starting out with rudimentary musical knowledge. The revolution in music accomplished by Arnold Schoenberg and Igor Stravinsky in the previous decade – not to mention the humbling carnage of World War 1 – had opened the musical world up to new approaches. In this transformed world, Tippett stood out, not for his talent, but for the determination with which he pursued composition – a determination that included returning to school several years after graduation because he had decided his knowledge of counterpoint was insufficient. He was not established as a successful composer until his mid-30s, with his oratorio, A Child of Our Time.
The Fantasia Concertante on a Theme of Corelli was commissioned by the 1953 Edinburgh Festival to commemorate the 300th anniversary of the birth of the Italian composer Arcangelo Corelli.* In some respects, it is a transitional work, straddling his accessible earlier music and the frankly difficult pieces of his later years, but that is not to imply that it’s not fully realized; the Fantasia has been called Tippett’s most perfect composition. Conductor Charles Hazlewood has said of the piece that “it’s as if he’s looking with great love at an extraordinary work of the past, but through defiantly 20th century spectacles.”
The theme (from Corelli’s Concerto Grosso in F, Op. 6, No. 2) is in two parts, a somber adagio and a perky vivace. The following variations are at first based on the entire theme, then only on the vivace section, and finally only on the adagio. The variations are never close to Corelli’s theme or its Baroque style, and the further we get into the piece, the more audacious and free it becomes. Though it never quite detaches from tonality, at times, you might get the impression that some of the musicians have miscounted, or gotten the key signature wrong.
After the variations comes a fugue. It has only a geneological relationship to what we’ve already heard: The source is J. S. Bach’s organ fugue, BWV 579, which is based on a theme by Corelli, but a different theme. It begins as a faithful transcription of Bach, but with an added string party by Tippett that dramatically changes the work’s tone. The fugue becomes almost impossibly dense as it leads to a climax of erotic intensity.
Hazlewood describes the next section as “music of pure heaven” that “could only be as serene and as perfect as it is because it follows the madness, the complexity of that fugue.” Mahler or Bruckner would have ended the piece here; Tippett brings us back to earth with a final, highly decorated statement of the theme.
* The music of Arcangelo Corelli (1653-1715) is rarely heard in concert halls today, but his contributions to the development of the system of tonality that anchored and inspired European art music for over two centuries – from Vivaldi’s concertos to Mahler’s symphonies – has earned him an important place in the history of music.
Overview: Felix Mendelssohn
Born February 3, 1809, Hamburg, Germany; died November 4, 1847, Leipzig, Germany
Work composed: 1823
In the history of musical prodigies, Felix Mendelssohn is the gold standard. Goethe, who heard both Mozart and Mendelssohn in their youth, told Mendelssohn’s teacher, “What your pupil already accomplishes bears the same relation to the Mozart of that time that the cultivated talk of a grown-up person bears to the prattle of a child.” Musicologist Charles Rosen called Mendelssohn “the greatest child prodigy the history of Western music has ever known. Not even Mozart or Chopin before the age of nineteen could equal the mastery that Mendelssohn already possessed when he was only sixteen.”
In addition to his stupendous natural talent, Mendelssohn received extraordinary support. His teacher, Carl Friedrich Zelter, gave him thorough training in both Baroque and Classical styles. Sarah Levy, Mendelssohn’s aunt, had studied with one of Bach’s sons and was a patron of another. And though Mendelssohn’s father had misgivings about his son becoming a musician, once the enormity of Felix’s talent had begun to manifest itself, he went so far as to hire entire orchestras to perform his son’s symphonies in the family home.
Mendelssohn’s brilliance was also evident outside the realm of music. He was an accomplished watercolorist; a translation he made at the age of 16 of Andria by the Roman playwright Terence was good enough to be published; and he attended Berlin lectures by the notoriously opaque philosopher Hegel.
The Sinfonia in C – composed when he was 14 – is further evidence of Mendelssohn’s precocity. Although it lacks the personality and genius of his mature works (that is, the works he composed a couple of years later), at every moment he’s in full command of compositional technique.
In addition to the usual first and second violins, violas, cellos, and basses, Mendelssohn calls for a second section of violas, which adds richness and warmth to the textures.
The piece opens with a slow introduction featuring two themes, both characterized by upbeat figures consisting of repeated notes. Exploiting the rhythmic power of repeated notes is an idea to which Mendelssohn will return again and again, both in this piece and later in his life.
The following allegro begins with a sunny theme that’s nine bars long instead of the usual eight. Also striking in this passage is an energetic theme that rises an octave from E to E. Following Haydn’s practice, Mendelssohn repeats the opening theme to mark the change of key from C to G. (Most composers, including Mendelssohn when he got older, put a contrasting theme in this spot.) Also like Haydn, the continuation of this theme in G differs from its initial appearance – it is more tender and lyrical, though it is motivically related to the initial continuation. More unusually, the octave-rising theme also returns; and most unusual of all is a destabilizing turn towards G minor at the end of the exposition.
That destabilization helps set up the key of E-flat with which the development section begins. (Mendelssohn will return to this key in the finale.) It’s energetic and fugal, and returns to the opening theme via the music he used to introduce the G major section in the exposition.
The recapitulation begins conventionally with a repeat of the first theme. As a transition to the second theme, Mendelssohn essentially repeats the end of the development section heard just a few moments before. Even at 14, Mendelssohn saw how this could seem redundant, and his solution is a stroke of genius: He changes, not the transition, but the arrival, which begins not on the expected C major chord, but on an A major chord. The relatively lengthy coda – a trait of Mendelssohn’s music throughout his life – refers back to the development section.
The second movement begins surprisingly. It’s in E major, four sharps away from the first movement’s C (a movement that furthermore mostly modulated to keys on the flat side, such as E-flat and A-flat); and it’s strikingly scored for four solo violins. But even with this strong contrast, its repeated note upbeats give it an audible connection to the first movement. The theme itself is a precursor to the even more beautiful slow movement of his Piano Trio in D minor, Op. 49. The four treble instruments are succeeded by bass instruments, transforming the lyrical theme into a fugue. The violins return, restating the opening theme; soon the violas join them, and only at the very end of the movement do we hear the entire string orchestra.
Mendelssohn was a master of scherzos, and though he would go on to write even greater ones, this one is marvelous. It also plays with repeated-note upbeats, now expanded to five. The slower trio is marked La Suisse, which probably refers to its rustic character, strongly reminiscent of Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony.
This energetic scherzo is followed by an equally energetic finale in C minor. The introduction is propelled by repeated-note triplets, and the main theme by repeated-note upbeats. It’s a sonata form, but highly inventive, with a contrapuntal transition to the charming second theme. This builds to a jubilant climax before the exposition dies away. The development is also contrapuntal, before sequential repetitions of the main theme lead back to C minor. When the second theme is repeated, it’s now in C minor, giving it a poignancy it lacked in the exposition. Mendelssohn then returns to C major with surprising abruptness, and it remains in C for the barn-burning coda.
Born September 21, 1874, Cheltenham, Gloucestershire, England; died May 25, 1934, London, England
Work Composed: 1912-13
Gustav Holst – English, despite his first name – is unique in music history. It’s not that his posthumous fame rests almost entirely on a single work, The Planets – music history is replete with one-hit wonders, ranging from Johann Pachelbel’s Canon in D to Bobby Pickett’s Monster Mash. What’s rare is that Holst’s hit is so atypical for his work, and that the bulk of his work, while little known by the general public, is of extremely high quality. Holst deserves more hits.
Holst was a musical omnivore. In addition to mastering the late Romantic style that was ascendant in his youth, he was influenced by the mythology of India, the 17th Century English composer Henry Purcell, and especially British folk song. Although he developed a distinct compositional voice, he never ceased to learn from his peers, and some of his mature work is influenced by Ravel.
St. Paul’s Suite is named for St Paul’s Girls’ School in Hammersmith, London, where Holst taught from 1905 until his death. Although the piece was completed in 1913, Holst continued to revise it until its publication in 1922.
The opening movement, Jig, is more sophisticated that it seems on first hearing. Despite its almost stupidly cheerful mood, it’s full of surprises, such as shifts back and forth from two to three beats per bar, a change in mode for the middle section, and its ending, which is completely convincing despite being in a different key than the beginning.
An ostinato is a short musical fragment that’s repeated several times, usually to build tension: At about the same time Holst composed this piece, Schoenberg, Stravinsky, and Bartók were using ostinatos in some of their fiercer passages. But Holst’s Ostinato is a gentle and lyrical piece, revolving around a four-note circular figure we first hear in the second violins. The focus, though, is the gently undulating melody above it and the falling bass line below. The strings are muted throughout, giving the movement a charming delicacy.
The elegiac Intermezzo is in a small five-part form, with three iterations of a stately slow tune alternating with two fast and boisterous sections based on the same motifs. Pungent dissonances in the fast sections suggest an out-of-tune village band.
The Finale exists in an earlier version as the finale of Holst’s Second Suite for Military Band. Its two themes come from The Dancing Master, a 1651 dancing manual containing music and instructions for English country dances. The first theme is called Dargason (the meaning of the word is unclear); the second is Greensleeves, although this version differs slightly from the version we’re used to. The Dargason sections are the suite’s jolliest passages. Holst doesn’t vary the tune, but shows off his inventiveness in the ways he reharmonizes and rescores it. In the Greensleeves sections, Holst cleverly combines the two tunes.
Overview: Arvo Pärt
Born: September 11, 1935, Paide, Estonia
Work Composed: 1977
Until his early 30s, the Estonian composer Arvo Pärt was a typical academic composer, composing music of daunting complexity in various contemporary styles. But in 1968, he had a creative crisis: He realized his music meant nothing to him. He said years later, “I had lost my inner compass and I didn’t know anymore what an interval or a key meant.” He courageously admitted to himself that he had spent decades pursuing the wrong goal. Three years later, he began again in a radically simplified style.
Pärt’s later music has been described as “holy minimalism.” These compositions are often based on a thorough examination of a simple concept – a phrase gets one note longer at each repetition, or goes one note higher, or is repeated with no changes at all except registration. The harmony is simple, diatonic, and often static. The music encourages the listener to enter a meditative state that can have deep emotional power.
The Cantus in Memoriam Benjamin Britten encapsulates Pärt’s sorrow at hearing of the death of English composer Benjamin Britten. He wrote:
Why did the date of Benjamin Britten's death – 4 December 1976 – touch such a chord in me? During this time I was obviously at the point where I could recognize the magnitude of such a loss. Inexplicable feelings of guilt, more than that even, arose in me. I had just discovered Britten for myself. Just before his death I began to appreciate the unusual purity of his music – I had had the impression of the same kind of purity in the ballads of Guillaume de Machaut. And besides, for a long time I had wanted to meet Britten personally – and now it would not come to that.
The Cantus in Memoriam Benjamin Britten basically consists of slowly descending scales that overlap one another over an A minor chord. (There are some fancy rhythmic procedures, but it’s not important for the listener to be aware of them.) The simplicity of the means belies the piece’s almost shattering emotional impact, which feels like a shroud of despair.
Overview: Michael Tippett
Born January 2, 1905, London, England; died January 8, 1998, London, England
Work Composed: 1953
Michael Tippet was a major figure in the renaissance of British music that began with the generation of Edward Elgar. His musical talent was not particularly conspicuous, and he had scarcely any formal training before being admitted to the Royal College of Music at the age of eighteen, where, his biographer Meirion Bowen wrote, “his aspirations were Olympian, though his knowledge rudimentary.”
The early 1920s was not a bad time to be starting out with rudimentary musical knowledge. The revolution in music accomplished by Arnold Schoenberg and Igor Stravinsky in the previous decade – not to mention the humbling carnage of World War 1 – had opened the musical world up to new approaches. In this transformed world, Tippett stood out, not for his talent, but for the determination with which he pursued composition – a determination that included returning to school several years after graduation because he had decided his knowledge of counterpoint was insufficient. He was not established as a successful composer until his mid-30s, with his oratorio, A Child of Our Time.
The Fantasia Concertante on a Theme of Corelli was commissioned by the 1953 Edinburgh Festival to commemorate the 300th anniversary of the birth of the Italian composer Arcangelo Corelli.* In some respects, it is a transitional work, straddling his accessible earlier music and the frankly difficult pieces of his later years, but that is not to imply that it’s not fully realized; the Fantasia has been called Tippett’s most perfect composition. Conductor Charles Hazlewood has said of the piece that “it’s as if he’s looking with great love at an extraordinary work of the past, but through defiantly 20th century spectacles.”
The theme (from Corelli’s Concerto Grosso in F, Op. 6, No. 2) is in two parts, a somber adagio and a perky vivace. The following variations are at first based on the entire theme, then only on the vivace section, and finally only on the adagio. The variations are never close to Corelli’s theme or its Baroque style, and the further we get into the piece, the more audacious and free it becomes. Though it never quite detaches from tonality, at times, you might get the impression that some of the musicians have miscounted, or gotten the key signature wrong.
After the variations comes a fugue. It has only a geneological relationship to what we’ve already heard: The source is J. S. Bach’s organ fugue, BWV 579, which is based on a theme by Corelli, but a different theme. It begins as a faithful transcription of Bach, but with an added string party by Tippett that dramatically changes the work’s tone. The fugue becomes almost impossibly dense as it leads to a climax of erotic intensity.
Hazlewood describes the next section as “music of pure heaven” that “could only be as serene and as perfect as it is because it follows the madness, the complexity of that fugue.” Mahler or Bruckner would have ended the piece here; Tippett brings us back to earth with a final, highly decorated statement of the theme.
* The music of Arcangelo Corelli (1653-1715) is rarely heard in concert halls today, but his contributions to the development of the system of tonality that anchored and inspired European art music for over two centuries – from Vivaldi’s concertos to Mahler’s symphonies – has earned him an important place in the history of music.
Overview: Felix Mendelssohn
Born February 3, 1809, Hamburg, Germany; died November 4, 1847, Leipzig, Germany
Work composed: 1823
In the history of musical prodigies, Felix Mendelssohn is the gold standard. Goethe, who heard both Mozart and Mendelssohn in their youth, told Mendelssohn’s teacher, “What your pupil already accomplishes bears the same relation to the Mozart of that time that the cultivated talk of a grown-up person bears to the prattle of a child.” Musicologist Charles Rosen called Mendelssohn “the greatest child prodigy the history of Western music has ever known. Not even Mozart or Chopin before the age of nineteen could equal the mastery that Mendelssohn already possessed when he was only sixteen.”
In addition to his stupendous natural talent, Mendelssohn received extraordinary support. His teacher, Carl Friedrich Zelter, gave him thorough training in both Baroque and Classical styles. Sarah Levy, Mendelssohn’s aunt, had studied with one of Bach’s sons and was a patron of another. And though Mendelssohn’s father had misgivings about his son becoming a musician, once the enormity of Felix’s talent had begun to manifest itself, he went so far as to hire entire orchestras to perform his son’s symphonies in the family home.
Mendelssohn’s brilliance was also evident outside the realm of music. He was an accomplished watercolorist; a translation he made at the age of 16 of Andria by the Roman playwright Terence was good enough to be published; and he attended Berlin lectures by the notoriously opaque philosopher Hegel.
The Sinfonia in C – composed when he was 14 – is further evidence of Mendelssohn’s precocity. Although it lacks the personality and genius of his mature works (that is, the works he composed a couple of years later), at every moment he’s in full command of compositional technique.
In addition to the usual first and second violins, violas, cellos, and basses, Mendelssohn calls for a second section of violas, which adds richness and warmth to the textures.
The piece opens with a slow introduction featuring two themes, both characterized by upbeat figures consisting of repeated notes. Exploiting the rhythmic power of repeated notes is an idea to which Mendelssohn will return again and again, both in this piece and later in his life.
The following allegro begins with a sunny theme that’s nine bars long instead of the usual eight. Also striking in this passage is an energetic theme that rises an octave from E to E. Following Haydn’s practice, Mendelssohn repeats the opening theme to mark the change of key from C to G. (Most composers, including Mendelssohn when he got older, put a contrasting theme in this spot.) Also like Haydn, the continuation of this theme in G differs from its initial appearance – it is more tender and lyrical, though it is motivically related to the initial continuation. More unusually, the octave-rising theme also returns; and most unusual of all is a destabilizing turn towards G minor at the end of the exposition.
That destabilization helps set up the key of E-flat with which the development section begins. (Mendelssohn will return to this key in the finale.) It’s energetic and fugal, and returns to the opening theme via the music he used to introduce the G major section in the exposition.
The recapitulation begins conventionally with a repeat of the first theme. As a transition to the second theme, Mendelssohn essentially repeats the end of the development section heard just a few moments before. Even at 14, Mendelssohn saw how this could seem redundant, and his solution is a stroke of genius: He changes, not the transition, but the arrival, which begins not on the expected C major chord, but on an A major chord. The relatively lengthy coda – a trait of Mendelssohn’s music throughout his life – refers back to the development section.
The second movement begins surprisingly. It’s in E major, four sharps away from the first movement’s C (a movement that furthermore mostly modulated to keys on the flat side, such as E-flat and A-flat); and it’s strikingly scored for four solo violins. But even with this strong contrast, its repeated note upbeats give it an audible connection to the first movement. The theme itself is a precursor to the even more beautiful slow movement of his Piano Trio in D minor, Op. 49. The four treble instruments are succeeded by bass instruments, transforming the lyrical theme into a fugue. The violins return, restating the opening theme; soon the violas join them, and only at the very end of the movement do we hear the entire string orchestra.
Mendelssohn was a master of scherzos, and though he would go on to write even greater ones, this one is marvelous. It also plays with repeated-note upbeats, now expanded to five. The slower trio is marked La Suisse, which probably refers to its rustic character, strongly reminiscent of Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony.
This energetic scherzo is followed by an equally energetic finale in C minor. The introduction is propelled by repeated-note triplets, and the main theme by repeated-note upbeats. It’s a sonata form, but highly inventive, with a contrapuntal transition to the charming second theme. This builds to a jubilant climax before the exposition dies away. The development is also contrapuntal, before sequential repetitions of the main theme lead back to C minor. When the second theme is repeated, it’s now in C minor, giving it a poignancy it lacked in the exposition. Mendelssohn then returns to C major with surprising abruptness, and it remains in C for the barn-burning coda.