Chopin & Saint-Saëns

What are you going to listen to?

Does age sometimes depress quality? It seems not. Two composers today were blood young when they wrote the pieces that are on the desks. A 19-year-old Chopin composed his First Piano Concerto, a 24-year-old Saint-Saëns his Second Symphony. Here they frame works by 65-year-old Arvo Pärt.

The opening, however, belongs to the also young, only 21-year-old Dutch composition student Thijmen Krijgsman. He was looking for inspiration for his One Minute Symphony in The Hague's Mesdag Collection. He was given an inspiring tour of the magnificent collection by manager Wite de Savornin Lohman. Thijmen is fascinated by the artist Mesdag, whose vision and unique approach to art deeply inspire him. For Mesdag, it was not necessary for a painting to be "finished"; the process and interpretation were paramount. The paintings hanging in the museum's collection are therefore chosen with care because they say something about the artist's spirit and personal taste.

Chopin

You would want romantic music to originate in romantic circumstances. Now, sometimes it does. A fierce infatuation Chopin went through at the time he wrote his First Piano Concerto. Constance Gladkowska was the name of the girl who confused him, and she sang. "I found my ideal, perhaps to my misfortune," Chopin said. He was right; it never became anything, Constance was more sensitive to the attentions of Polish officers than to those of the great artist. Does something of Chopin's love shine through in his First Piano Concerto? He wrote of the second movement, "A romance, silent, melancholy, like a rêverie in the blue spring sky but by moonlight; it should give the impression of a tender gazing at a place that awakens thousands of sweet memories..." But it may also be that he had his bosom friend Titus Woyciechowski in mind there.

With the premiere of the First Piano Concerto on Oct. 12, 1830, at the Teatr Narodowy, the National Theater in Warsaw, Chopin bid farewell to Poland. He wanted to pursue a career abroad. After intermission, Constance sang an aria by Rossini, O quante lagrime per te versai (How many tears have I shed for thee). Red roses in her hair, a white dress: she was a beautiful sight. After her performance, Chopin escorted her off the stage; the audience cheered. It was an evening that was also an emotional event for other reasons: the decision to tour abroad was good for his career but perhaps not for Chopin himself, to whom saying goodbye to his country was hard. He would never return there. For his important debut in Paris, seven weeks later, he would also choose this First Piano Concerto.

Pärt

Written for the Berliner Festspiele, Orient & Occidental by Arvo Pärt was premiered in Berlin on September 30, 2000. The orchestra playing was the Lithuanian Chamber Orchestra with whom the composer already had a long-standing artistic collaboration. The work, for string orchestra, is based on the text of the Creed, more specifically the Nicene Creed in Church Slavonic. The main musical idea is a single melodic line, sometimes presented by the orchestra in unison, sometimes hidden in chordal structures. This sounds Eastern in style, although written in harmonic minor that belongs precisely to the Western tradition. Two worlds, East and West, are thus intertwined.

Saint-Saëns

Little played is Saint-Saëns' Second symphony. The rather high opus number 55 misleads: Saint-Saëns wrote the symphony in 1859, at age 24, but publication did not follow until 1878. Strictly speaking, it is his fourth symphony (the first two remained unnumbered and unpublished). It is one of those works that could superficially be accused of "slipperiness," something the easy-composing Saint-Saëns is sometimes accused of. After all, it moves beyond the realms of reason and feeling. What matters here is the beauty of the beautifully proportioned, aristocratic elegance, or what the renowned nineteenth-century critic Eduard Hanslick described as music: "Tönend bewegte Form."

In doing so, the symphony is imaginative enough. Take the first theme of the first movement. Well, theme: a long series of descending thirds, provided with some rhythm. It seems almost impossible to turn this into a symphony. But then a masterpiece of contrapuntal art unfolds! Elsewhere, Saint-Saëns restrains material that his eloquence would allow to be expanded with ease. The delicate Adagio, a Lied ohne Worte, Mendelssohn if this had been a Frenchman, is over before you know it, and - very strangely - the scherzo has no da capo. Although, that Last is only semblance: Saint-Saëns shifts that reprise to sometime in the finale, where, with its relative rigor, it places a masterful dramatic contrast within the rambling rumble of a downright brilliant, dancing tarantella. It is Saint-Saëns all over: beauty that 's pre-eminently in the structure, the form and the succession of elements.

Stephan Westra