On Saturday 22 February Southern Pro Musica is presenting Classics by Candlelight at St Peter’s Church in Petersfield. The repertoire is Grieg – Holberg Suite; Haydn – Cello Concerto no. 1 in C; Malcolm Arnold – Sinfonietta no.1; Haydn – Symphony no. 44 (Trauer).
This concert is a tribute to classical music influenced by Baroque music. Grieg’s Holberg Suite, of course, was like a tribute to these old gallant dances of the Baroque era, and Haydn’s Cello Concerto similarly, although he himself is one of the greatest classical composers. This particular concerto is not in the style of the classical concertos we think of as Mozart concertos. It’s much more with one foot in the Baroque era with these Ritornello-style movements, where a theme repeats and comes back and is embellished. So it’s a real tribute to the Baroque style of writing. The role of the cello in the orchestral tuttis and accompaniment is more as a basso continuo.
I recently did the Haydn Concerto – which I love – in a reduced arrangement for a sextet, and this was interesting because it gave us a chance to actually bring this concerto a bit closer to how it would have been originally performed. Nowadays, if you imagine a concerto, the cellist will sit in front of the orchestra and you’re a kind of soloist. I don’t particularly like this because I feel that concertos are just an extended form of chamber music, especially these early classical Baroque concertos.
What it allows us to do in the reduced arrangement is as follows. If you look at a concerto score, you’ll usually have the brass and wind above the written solo part, the strings underneath and the solo part will be in the middle; in a Haydn cello concerto score, the solo part is just written as part of the cello section, underneath the violas. So you have one violin, two violas, cellos, double basses. This suggests to us that, with regards to where the “soloist” would be seated, this is how it normally would have been performed.
You’d sit within the orchestra as a violinist or a pianist would, and you’d play the basso continuo (the accompaniment line) while the orchestra introduced the themes. And then you just break out of that and play the solo part, so you won’t sit there waiting to play the big solo bit. It was just an organic continuation of the cello part. And I love this because this is what chamber music and even concerto performing is for me. I know how later on the concerto then develops and becomes a different thing. But in essence it always remains a piece of chamber music. And so it’s really lovely with the Haydn concerto in particular.
In this concert it’s going to be great to actually consider yourself as part of the orchestra and not as a soloist. And this whole psychology of the concerto is something I really love. It’s a beautiful part of these early classical concertos where it really feels like just you’re playing in a big quartet or a sextet with all this kind of dialogue and spontaneity.
This is one reason I’d encourage people to come to this concert, and not simply because of the repertoire. This orchestra comprises really great players, so good that they can literally meet up on the day and rehearse. Having all this challenging repertoire, there’s something very spontaneous and electric in the air. For a great performance in music, it always needs to be on the edge where it feels like “Oh my God, it could fall apart.” But it never quite does. And then it creates this really amazing sort of explosive excitement, especially at the end of a piece. With this orchestra, it’s always like that: you feel like you’re taking risks, simply by doing this very challenging repertoire after one rehearsal. So it’s a really exciting evening doing a concert with an orchestra like Southern Pro Musica.
Jonathan Willcocks gave me a choice about doing either the Haydn D major or C major Cello Concerto. It’s impossible to make up your mind as they’re both such amazing works.
The last time I played the C major it must have been 30 years ago or something like that. As a young cellist this is probably the first concerto you will play, and then later on you do the Haydn D major, which is a really technically challenging piece. And when Jonathan asked me, I couldn’t make up my mind, so he chose to do the C major. I am so grateful to him for that choice because it just brings all these memories flooding back from when I was 17 years old: then, for a year, all I played was the C major, and I haven’t played it since. So it’s going to be a bridge back to the past, to my youth. Haydn wrote it at the age of just 30, and it’s considered one of his early works, and it’s so youthful. Not only does it bring back memories of youth, but the music itself is so uplifting, even in the minor, more lyrical, more melancholic passages. It has such a young energy in it that it just leaves you absolutely thrilled and uplifted and with a bounce in your step. So it’s a really wonderful piece to programme in a concert.
