ON YOUR COVER CD
Remembering a great all-round musician
Julian Haylock introduces the works performed on our disc by the much-loved pianist and conductor Lars Vogt
Sergei Prokofiev
Symphony No. 1, ‘Classical’*
Ludwig van Beethoven
Piano Concerto No. 2*
Sergei Rachmaninov
Piano Concerto No. 2**
Frédéric Chopin
Nocturne in C sharp minor
Artists
Lars Vogt (piano)
*Royal Northern Sinfonia
**BBC Symphony Orchestra
*Lars Vogt (conductor/director)
**Jakub Hrůša (conductor)
Sergei Prokofiev
Symphony No. 1 in D major, Op. 25 ‘Classical’*
1 I Allegro 4:23
2 II Larghetto 4:10
3 III Gavotte: Non troppo allegro 1:30
4 IV Finale: Molto vivace 4:10
Ludwig van Beethoven
Piano Concerto No. 2 in B flat major, Op. 19*
5 I Allegro con brio 14:03
6 II Adagio 8:19
7 III Rondo: Molto allegro 6:15
Sergei Rachmaninov
Piano Concerto No. 2 in C minor, Op. 18**
8 I Moderato 11:26
9 II Adagio sostenuto 12:06
10 III Allegro scherzando 12:00
Frédéric Chopin
11 Nocturne in C sharp minor, Op. posth. 4:00
TOTAL CD DURATION: 82:49
Tracks 1-7 recorded live at Sage Gateshead on 17 March 2017
Tracks 8-10 recorded live at the Royal Opera House, Oman on 19 November 2012
Track 11 recorded live at Symphony Hall, Birmingham on 10 January 2014
CD editing and mastering Jennifer Howells
With thanks to Royal Northern Sinfonia www.sagegateshead.com/royal-northern-sinfonia/
All rights of the producer and of the owner of the recorded work reserved. Unauthorised copying, hiring, lending, public performance and broadcasting of this record prohibited. Not for resale.
This month’s cover CD celebrates the late Lars Vogt’s multi-faceted abilities as a piano soloist, concerto pianist and conductor.
Of the five ingredients that Prokofiev once summed up as essential to his musical style – ‘the classical, innovative, motoric, lyrical and grotesque’ – by his own admission, the ‘Classical’ came to the fore when composing his First Symphony between 1916 and ’17. By that time, Prokofiev was widely viewed as an avant-garde maverick, so the ‘Classical’ Symphony’s accessible tonal language and delightful neoclassical gesturing feels almost like a creative volte-face.
Yet at the time there were those who felt he had sullied the purity of the Classical style with his meddling. Prokofiev himself was concerned how the players might react when he conducted the first rehearsal, but he needn’t have worried. Despite a few dissenting voices along the way, the ‘Classical’ Symphony quickly established itself as one of his most popular works.
Youthful flair
When listening to Beethoven’s Second Piano Concerto, it is easy to forget that he was not only the finest composer of his generation but was also the most celebrated and individual pianist. Pianos would literally buckle under the pressure exerted by his revolutionary playing, leaving hapless technicians attempting to prise out broken strings as he continued playing, apparently unaware of the mayhem going on around him.
During the summer of 1791, just as Beethoven was starting work on the concerto, he gave a recital at which a member of the audience was invited to provide a theme for him to extemporise on. Everyone looked on in amazement as he improvised a series of variations that in terms of their majestic invention appeared limitless. Little wonder that a Viennese journal reported excitedly ‘the greatness of this young man may be estimated from the inexhaustible wealth of his ideas, the unique expression in his playing and his great powers of execution.’
Perfect Romance
Rachmaninov’s Piano Concerto No. 2 is a work of such bracing confidence and melodic allure it seems scarcely believable that during the three years that separates it from the disastrous 1897 premiere of his Symphony No. 1, he suffered psychosomatic pains in his arms and legs and barely wrote a note. This was in part the result of Glazunov’s deeply unsympathetic conducting (fuelled by alcohol), but also because the Symphony encapsulated his feelings for a married lady of gypsy extraction, with whom he was hopelessly in love. The Symphony’s failure therefore inf licted a searing emotional wound that went way beyond mere musical pride.
For a while it seemed as though Rachmaninov’s creative gift had completely deserted him, until a course of experimental hypnotic treatment with Moscow physician Nikolai Dahl got him up and running again within a remarkably short space of time. Yet there may be another reason. During his period of recuperation, Rachmaninov became close to one of his cousins, Natalya Satina, who doted on the charismatic genius and went on to marry him just a year after the Concerto’s 1901 premiere.
To finish, by way of a solo encore, Lars Vogt plays Chopin’s posthumously published C sharp minor Nocturne, one of a selection Felix Mendelssohn heard Chopin play in 1835. ‘There is something entirely original in his playing,’ Mendelssohn reported excitedly to his sister Fanny in a letter, ‘which is so masterly he may be called a perfect virtuoso.’
Further listening
‘This is Brahms playing of the highest quality’ wrote our reviewer of Lars Vogt and the Royal Northern Sinfonia’s recording of Brahms’s Second Piano Concerto in 2020 (Ondine ODE 1346-2).
For an all-Chopin solo recital, including the Ballade No. 1, Scherzo No. 1 and six of the Nocturnes, head for Vogt’s elegantly played recording from 2014 (Avi Music AVI8553267).
Vogt’s skills as a chamber musician, meanwhile, can be enjoyed in his and violinist Christian Tetzlaff’s superlative disc of Beethoven’s Op. 30 Violin Sonatas, recorded late last year (Ondine ODE 1392-2).
Lars Vogt 1970-2022
Lars Vogt was a sublimely talented pianist, a gifted and insightful conductor and, above all, the warmest of characters for whom music was something to be enjoyed in the company of friends. Tenor Ian Bostridge, one of his regular recital partners, told The Guardian about watching Vogt conduct: ‘I was struck not only by his total dedication to the music but also by the wonderful atmosphere of collaboration and friendship he created with the orchestra.’
Born in Düren, Germany, in 1970, Vogt first came to public attention when he won second prize at the 1990 Leeds International Piano Competition, leading to international appearances as a soloist in repertoire ranging from Bach to Lutosławski. Mozart and Brahms were perhaps the composers in which he excelled most, and his 2020 recording of the latter’s Second Piano Concerto (see ‘Further listening’), for which he directed the Royal Northern Sinfonia from the piano, earned glowing reviews.
By the time of that recording, he and the Royal Northern Sinfonia were well acquiainted, as he had been the ensemble’s music director since 2015, building a firm rapport with audiences at the Sage Gateshead and across the north east. In July 2020 he took up the post of music director of the Orchestre de chambre de Paris.
Though diagnosed with cancer in early 2021 and despite the debilitating demands of treatment, Vogt continued to perform regularly and with the same distinction that had marked his playing and conducting from the outset. See BBC Music Magazine Interview
Listening guide
Sergei Prokofiev
Symphony No. 1 ‘Classical’
For his ‘Classical’ Symphony of 1917, Prokofiev went back in time to the 18th century. ‘I imagined if Haydn had lived to our day, he would surely have preserved his manner of writing,’ Prokofiev explained, ‘and at the same time would have absorbed something of the new. That was the kind of symphony I wanted to write: a symphony in the Classical style.’
The opening Allegro is on its very best behaviour, with both main ideas announced in spick-and-span fashion by the first violins. This bracing movement is peppered throughout with in-jokes for the cognoscenti, including the very opening, which mimics a crescendo device known as the ‘Mannheim skyrocket’, named after the city whose composers delighted in this exciting effect. The slow movement opens with a ‘vamp-until-ready’ figure before the violins soar away with one of Prokofiev’s most radiantly lyrical ideas. The delightful Gavotte third movement was later adapted by the composer as part of his classic ballet score, Romeo and Juliet, while the finale is a moto perpetuo of sparkling invention and insatiable optimism.
Ludwig van Beethoven
Piano Concerto No. 2
Beethoven’s Second Piano Concerto actually predates his First, yet it is still brimful of original touches. Aficionados at the time, for example, would have expected the opening movement’s second theme to arrive in the ‘correct’ key of F major (the dominant of the home key, B flat), whereas Beethoven plunges us into the remote world of D flat! Although less dramatically signalled, the Adagio slow movement has a central ‘development’ section that lasts a mere six bars. Then, as the main theme makes its expected reappearance, instead of leaving it unvarnished for the player to extemporise on in performance, Beethoven circumvents convention (and second-rate soloists) by writing out everything in full in the manuscript.
Beethoven saves his most hilarious piece of circumvention for the finale, in which the skipping main rondo theme sounds as though it should arrive before the beat, but actually lands on it. He eventually gets things sorted out towards the end with the expected upbeat, except now he’s ended up in the ‘wrong key’ – G major. The world of music had been turned topsy-turvy in an instant.
Sergei Rachmaninov
Piano Concerto No. 2
The glorious melodic luxuriance of Rachmaninov’s Second Piano Concerto feels so familiar, it is easy to forget how revolutionary it felt back at the turn of the 20th century. No one had heard anything quite like it before, least of all from Rachmaninov, whose last major work – his First Symphony – was a Sturm und Drang blockbuster, fuelled by angular and uncompromising thematic angst.
Rachmaninov’s change in style owed much to the experiences of his formative years. The wide-open spaces of the large country estate he was brought up on found a natural outlet in freshly expansive melodies. His fixation with the sound of bells, which as a child were employed as signals, alarms and calls to worship, haunt the concerto’s opening chords, which not only emulate their relentless tolling, but also their colossal swaying motion. No less potent was the sound of ancient chants that echoed around Rachmaninov during boyhood church services. Their stepwise motion and slowly uncoiling shape, preponderantly in the middle-to-lower registers, made such an impact on the concerto’s melodic writing that at times one can almost smell the incense burning.
Frédéric Chopin
Nocturne No. 20, Op. posth
Lars Vogt finishes with an enchanting solo piano encore. Chopin took the nocturne to a pinnacle unmatched by any composer, producing a total of 21 miniatures between 1827 and 1848. Incredibly, the C sharp minor Nocturne of 1830, one of the most popular of the series, was first published in 1870, more than two decades after Chopin’s death.
Julian Haylock
Artist biography
LARS VOGT (piano and conductor)
For more than 30 years, Lars Vogt enjoyed major success as both a pianist and conductor. Born in Düren, Germany, in 1970, he sprang to prominence when he won second prize at the Leeds International Piano Competition in 1990. From 2015-20, he was music director of the Royal Northern Sinfonia, and thereafter held the post of principal artistic partner. He was also music director of the Orchestre de chambre de Paris until his death in September 2022.
JAKUB HRŮŠA (conductor)
Chief conductor of the Bamberg Symphony in Germany, the Brno-born Jakub Hrůša is also principal guest conductor of the Philharmonia and the Czech Philharmonic orchestras. A specialist in Czech repertoire in particular, in 2020 he won BBC Music Magazine Awards for his recordings of Dvořák and Martinů Piano Concertos (with pianist Ivo Kahánek and the Bamberg Symphony) and Barber’s opera Vanessa from Glyndebourne.
ROYAL NORTHERN SINFONIA
Founded in 1958, the Royal Northern Sinfonia is one of the UK’s leading professional chamber ensembles – previously the Northern Sinfonia, it had the ‘Royal’ bestowed by Queen Elizabeth II in 2013. In September 2021, Dinis Sousa took over from Lars Vogt as chief conductor, joining a prestigious list that includes Richard Hickox, John Wilson and Thomas Zehetmair. Resident orchestra at the Sage Gateshead since 2004, it has recorded widely for labels including Chandos, Naxos and Ondine.