The Full Works Concert - Monday 19 May 2014
Anne-Marie Minhall features a Mozart favourite and music from Titanic.
Tonight's Concert opens with Brahms' Tragic Overture, written during the summer of 1880. Brahms chose the title to emphasize the turbulent, tormented character of the piece rather than any specific programme. If you are familiar with the composer's Symphony No.2, listen out for some material from its last movement in this overture.
As the recipient both of the glorious Clarinet Quintet (and the Clarinet Concerto), clarinettist Anton Stadler was truly blessed. Mozart refers to this quintet in his letters as ‘the Stadler quintet’. Written when the composer was 33, it pairs Stadler’s new basset clarinet with a standard string quartet. It was considered by many to be almost a dummy run for the great concerto. Mozart’s effortless writing, combined with some simply inspired tunes, means it is still one of the most widely played works in the repertoire today.
Completed when Grieg was just aged 21, the composer wrote of his C minor Symphony that it ‘must never be performed’. For more than a century, the Symphony was written about disparagingly and not performed again until the 1980s. What listeners discovered was an attractive work, full of varied emotions and themes including stirring marches, heroic material and tenderly romantic themes.
After the huge hit he had with the original soundtrack album to Titanic, film composer James Horner spent early 1998 writing and orchestrating new arrangements of his ideas from the score for performance by the London Symphony Orchestra. All the big themes from the movie blockbuster are here, with all the added robustness you'd expect from the LSO and a real-life chorus rather than the synthesised one on the soundtrack.
Johannes Brahms: Tragic Overture Opus 81
Bernard Haitink conducts the London Symphony Orchestra
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart: Clarinet Quintet in A major K.581
Clarinet: Romain Guyot
Chamber Orchestra of Europe
Edvard Grieg: Symphony in C minor
Neeme Jarvi conducts the Gothenburg Symphony Orchestra
James Horner: Titanic - Suite
James Horner conducts the London Symphony Orchestra and the Choir of King's College, Cambridge
