Classic Live: Academy of St. Martin in the Fields and Joshua Bell

Returning to Melbourne for the first time since 2017, the Academy and their violin virtuoso director Joshua Bell present Beethoven's mighty Violin Concerto.

"Go forth on the way in which you hitherto have travelled so beautifully, so magnificently", advised Beethoven in praise of the fourteen-year-old Franz Clement's prowess on the violin. "Nature and art vie with each other in making you a great artist." The young prodigy could have hardly imagined he'd not only be premiering the composer's only violin concerto twelve years later, yet along, as legend has it, providing the jaunty theme of the work's finale. Yet, despite receiving a mostly positive response from critics and audience members alike on December 23rd, 1806, the work was neglected in favour of more flashy virtuosic examples of the genre until the gifted composer and conductor Felix Mendelssohn directed an 1844 rendition in London that captured the public's imagination, in no small part thanks to the twelve-year-old soloist Joseph Joachim who championed the work for the rest of his days.

Just as Beethoven reportedly frantically finished the aforementioned finale the day before the work's first airing, so to Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart penned the overture to his opera 'The Marriage of Figaro' with his typical facility just two days before the first performance. Based on a play that, as Mozart scholar Jan Swafford points out, "is an accurate picture of much of the aristocracy, their often loveless marriages and routine affairs", the opera lost out at the box office to the Spanish composer Martin y Soler's "Una cosa rara" which tells the tale of the rapacious womanizer Don Giovanni attempting to seduce a virtuous country girl. In keeping with his rapier wit Mozart, notes biographer Robert W. Gutman, quoted a little of this work in his own titular opera about the Spanish prince. "Bravi! [It's] Cosa rara!" shouts the Don's servant Leporello as the prince's house-band strike up a tune from Soler's now obscure stage-work.

This concert also ends with music of Mozart; his fortieth and, ultimately, second last symphony, written with two others in the space of roughly three months, most likely for a subscription concert series that never took place due to flagging ticket sales. The profligate composer then decided to take a leaf out of his mentor Joseph Haydn's book and hawk them to the English public, also to no avail. He settled for touring them in German centres such as Leipzig, where the playwright and music critic Johann Friedrich Rochlitz witnessed Mozart trying to coach an orchestra through this dynamic, technically demanding music, stamping his foot over and over to try and speed up his flagging chargers and breaking one of the buckles on his shoes as a result.

"The dragging [of the tempo] would never have stopped if I hadn't first driven them to their limit and made them angry", Mozart commented. "Now they did their best through sheer irritation."

Broadcast live in concert at the Elisabeth Murdoch Hall, Melbourne Recital Centre, Narrm/Melbourne, on October 4, 2023 by ABC Classic. Presenter Genevieve Lang. Producer Duncan Yardley. Engineers Alex Stinson and Jack Montgomery-Parkes.

Program

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart: ‘The Marriage of Figaro’, K. 492: Overture
Ludwig van Beethoven: Violin Concerto in D major, Op. 61
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart: Symphony No. 40 in G minor, K. 550

Artists

Joshua Bell (violin soloist/director)
Academy of St. Martin in the Fields