The landscape, history, and culture of Scotland fascinated 19th-century Romantics in all of the arts: from the phenomenally popular novels of Sir Walter Scott, the poetry of Robert Burns, and landscape paintings by Alexander Nasmyth and Jacob More to the first truly “romantic” ballet, La Sylphide. Felix Mendelssohn was only one of many 19th-century composers to be inspired by Scotland. One of his finest orchestral works, the Symphony No. 3, was inspired by an 1829 visit to Scotland. The two opening works also have Gaelic inspiration. Glisk, by the young Scottish composer Aileen Sweeney, draws on Scottish traditional music. American composer Christopher Rouse has talked about drawing upon his Irish “genetic memory” in his 1993 Flute Concerto. We are proud to feature our own principal flutist, Julia Pyke, in this work.

Aileen Sweeney

Born: 1994, Glasgow, Scotland.

Glisk

• Composed: 2022.
• Premiere: January 2023, by the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra.
• Duration: 4:00.

Glisk is an old Scots word meaning a sudden glimmer of light—the perfect description of this high-spirited piece.

Background

Scottish composer and accordionist Aileen Sweeney was born in Glasgow and lives and works there today. According to her website:

Her music is rooted in the traditional folk music she grew up with playing the accordion and is often influenced by her interests in fields of cosmology, nature, and folklore, alongside an admiration for many different genres of music. Aileen’s music has been performed across the UK from pubs on the Isle of Skye, to primary schools in Glasgow to the Wigmore Hall and Queen Elizabeth Hall in London.

Sweeney is particularly adept at straddling genres, noting that:

Going forward, I can’t imagine myself fitting perfectly into a particular style or role. I see myself somewhere in between folk music and classical music, composer and performer, the concert hall and a gig venue, and I’m looking forward to cultivating this nomadic approach to music-making.

Her Glisk was one of 20 pieces by young, “rising” composers who were commissioned to write works celebrating the hundredth anniversary of the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra.

What You’ll Hear

Regarding the title, Sweeney says:

Glisk is an old Scots word meaning a fleeting glint or flicker. It’s often used to describe a gleam of sunlight coming through the clouds or, figuratively, ‘a glimpse of the good’ in Shetland. Often used to describe fleeting moments of good weather (that probably won’t last very long!).”

This exuberant little piece opens with rather solemn music led by the brass, but the strings soon introduce an insistent ostinato that is heard through the rest of the piece: in percussion during a quiet interlude and then coming in bursts from the woodwinds during a brassy concluding section. In the end, the music fades away with delicate percussion.

 

Christopher Rouse

Born: February 15, 1949, Baltimore, Maryland.
Died: September 21, 2019, Towson, Maryland.

Flute Concerto

• Composed: 1993. It was commissioned for flutist Carol Wincenc.
• Premiere: On October 27, 1993, with Wincenc and the Detroit Symphony Orchestra, directed by Hans Vonk.
• Duration: 28:00.

Rouse’s Flute Concerto was inspired by Gaelic/Irish musical styles. The central movement is a heartbreaking elegy to a young British toddler who was murdered by two older children.

Background

Baltimore-born Christopher Rouse was a professor at the Eastman School of Music from 1981 to 2002, where he taught composition and the History of Rock. From 1997 to 2019, he taught composition at the Juilliard School. Rouse’s music encompasses a huge scope of musical influences—from great symphonists like Sibelius, Mahler, and Shostakovich to early Rock & Roll and Led Zeppelin. In describing his musical upbringing, Rouse notes that:

My [first] musical recollections are of Elvis Presley and Gene Vincent and Little Richard back when they were new, in the mid-fifties, and actually classical music came just a little later than that…I do remember my mother trying to counter my burgeoning interest in Rock & Roll with the Beethoven Fifth Symphony, and that worked, too—it enthralled me every bit as much.

His penchant for both catchy dance beats and heavy metal drumming shows up in works such as The Infernal Machine) and Bonham (a “rhythmic onslaught” for eight percussionists, written in memory of Led Zeppelin drummer John Bonham). His music runs the gamut from extremely loud and frantic to quiet and tender. His orchestral music, in particular, gained critical acclaim, and his 1991 Trombone Concerto was awarded the Pulitzer Prize. Rouses’s final work, the Symphony No. 6, was premiered posthumously by the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra in October 2019.

What You’ll Hear

The Flute Concerto, composed in 1993, finds Rouse exploring a more quiet and brooding side of his character. In his description of the piece, he writes:

Although no universal credence for the Jungian concept of ‘genetic memory’ exists, for me it seems a profoundly viable notion. Although both of my parents’ families immigrated to America well before the Revolutionary War, I nonetheless still feel a deep ancestral tug of recognition whenever I am exposed to the arts and traditions of the British Isles, particularly those of the Celtic origin.

I have attempted to reflect my responses to these stimuli in my flute concerto, a five-movement work cast in a somewhat loose arch form. The first and last movements bear the title Amhrán (Gaelic for ‘song’) and are simple melodic elaborations for the solo flute over the accompaniment of orchestral strings. They were intended in a general way to evoke the traditions of Celtic, especially Irish, folk music, but to couch the musical utterance in what I hoped would seem a more spiritual, even metaphysical manner through the use of extremely slow tempi, perhaps not unlike some of the recordings of the Irish singer Enya.

The second (Alla marcia) and fourth (Scherzo) movements are both fast in tempo. The second is a rather sprightly march, which shares some of its musical material with the fourth, a scherzo, which refers more and more as it progresses to that most Irish of dances, the jig. However, by the time the jig is stated in its most obvious form, the tempo has increased to the point that the music seems almost frantic and breathless in nature.

In a world of daily horrors too numerous and enormous to comprehend en masse, it seems that only isolated, individual tragedies serve to sensitize us to the potential harm man can do to his fellow man. For me, one such instance was the abduction and brutal murder of the two-year-old English lad James Bulger at the hands of a pair of ten-year-old boys. I followed this case closely during the time I was composing my concerto and was unable to shake the horror of these events from my mind. The central movement of this work (Elegia) is an elegy dedicated to James Bulger’s memory, a small token of remembrance for a life senselessly and cruelly snuffed out.

 

Felix Mendelssohn

Born: February 3, 1809, Hamburg, Germany.
Died: November 4, 1847, Leipzig, Germany.

Symphony No. 3 in A minor Op. 56 (Scottish)

• Composed: Though he did initial sketches for the symphony in Scotland in 1829, most of it was composed in 1840-1842 while in Berlin.
• Premiere: Mendelssohn led the first performance in the Leipzig Gewandhaus on March 3, 1842.
• Duration: 40:00.

As a young man, Mendelssohn was able to tour Europe and became a kind of musical sponge, absorbing musical and other influences everywhere he went. His famous “Scottish” symphony was directly inspired by a visit to Scotland in 1829.

Background

As the son of a wealthy German family, Mendelssohn was able to indulge in the “grand tour”—years of wandering Europe during his young adulthood. This was no idle tourism, however: he intended to refine his skills and to pick up musical influences from across the Continent. Well-known as a musical Wunderkind, he presented concerts and wrote music wherever he went. He met a particularly enthusiastic reception when he arrived in London in the spring of 1829, presenting concerts of his own works and appearing as a piano soloist. That summer, he and a friend left for an extended tour of Scotland. Mendelssohn was deeply affected by this visit, sketching landscapes, writing enthusiastically to family and friends, and, in a couple of cases, finding inspiration for musical works: the concert overture The Hebrides and his fine “Scottish” symphony.

That he found Scotland so attractive is hardly surprising: the romantics loved Scotland, and Mendelssohn’s letters are filled with appreciative descriptions of what he saw and experienced. Soon after arriving in Edinburgh, Mendelssohn visited Holyrood Abbey. He wrote to his parents that: “The chapel beside it has now lost its roof, it is overgrown with grass and ivy, and at the broken altar Mary was crowned Queen of Scotland. Everything is ruined, decayed, and open to the sky. I believe I have found there today the beginning of my Scottish Symphony.” Apparently, that same day, he sketched out the opening theme of the Andante introduction. The work was largely set aside for more than a dozen years, however. It was not until late 1840, while Mendelssohn was engaged as a conductor in Berlin, that he began serious work on the symphony. He worked on it through most of the following year, finishing it in time for its premiere in Leipzig in the spring of 1842. This was to be his last completed symphony, and many agree that it is also his finest.

What You’ll Hear

Mendelssohn was clearly uncomfortable about writing a symphony that could be understood as purely “programmatic,” but a few musical elements of the symphony would have been recognized as distinctly “Scottish” in character: the “Scotch snap” (a reverse dotted rhythm), the occasional use of bagpipe-style drones, and the clarinet’s folk-dance melody at the beginning of the second movement. As a whole, however, the symphony works perfectly in purely musical terms: most of the musical material grows organically from the opening motive. He also specified that the movements be played without pauses.

The first movement begins solemnly (Andante con moto), with the theme Mendelssohn sketched out in 1829. This introduction leads almost seamlessly into the main body of the movement (Ç). Both main themes are derived from Mendelssohn’s 1829 idea: a restless melody introduced by the low strings and flutes and an almost hesitant closing theme played by the violins. The development focuses on the main Allegro theme, working it out in an intensely contrapuntal manner. The recapitulation is conventional enough, but the end is a surprise: after a sudden storm, the movement rather suddenly dies away, and there is a reminiscence of the opening bars before it moves directly into the scherzo.

The scherzo (Vivace non troppo) opens with a playful dance theme introduced by the clarinet. In place of the usual contrasting trio, there is a rather agitated development section that again fades suddenly to provide a transition to the next movement. The Adagio’s main idea is a lovely, long-breathed melody spun out by the strings. This sublime mood alternates with uneasy march-like music from the brass and woodwinds.

The beginning of the fourth movement is the only abrupt transition in this symphony. Though the opening of this movement is marked Allegro vivacissimo in the score, Mendelssohn suggested in his preface that this be described in the program as Allegro guerriero—a “warlike Allegro.” Warlike associations are there, to be sure: an insistent pulsing background and an almost angry theme. A more peaceable contrasting idea bears a clear family resemblance to the first movement’s main theme. This idea is quickly swept away by more intense music several times until it finally wins out in a long duet for clarinet and bassoon. This introduces the final section (Allegro maestoso assai), where low strings introduce a broad theme. The full orchestra quickly takes this up, bringing the symphony to a stirring conclusion.

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Program notes ©2024 by J. Michael Allsen