CONCERTS

Grieg was very flattered when, in 1874, Ibsen asked him to compose incidental music for his new play Peer Gynt, but Grieg found the task difficult. The story tells of the downfall and subsequent redemption of a Norwegian peasant anti-hero. The influence of folk music on Grieg’s writing was part of the search for a distinctive musical identity amidst a widespread growing nationalist fervour in Norway. Grieg himself said the Hall of the Mountain King, now the theme music for Alton Towers, ‘reeked of cowpats’.

Weber’s interest in the clarinet began in 1811, when he met Heinrich Baermann, the greatest clarinettist in Germany, for whom he composed two concertos. The Concerto no. 2 is the more popular, with a strikingly operatic character to the solo part. The final movement, the Polonaise, finishes with one of the most glittery, virtuosic passages in the clarinet repertoire, consisting mainly of arpeggios and scalic runs in sextuplet semiquavers, and marked “brillante”, made up of largely arpeggios and scalic runs in sextuplet semiquavers.

Shostakovich wrote his Ninth Symphony in 1945 after Russia’s defeat of Hitler. It should have been a glorious ode to Stalin and Russia’s heroes, but instead Shostakovich dreamed up a subversive neo-Classical construction which seemed to make fun of the cult of the leader. According to an American critic, ‘the Russian composer should not have expressed his feelings about the defeat of Nazism in such a childish manner’, but in refusing to celebrate the victory along the lines demanded by Stalin, Shostakovich not only stood up to the dictator’s power, he belittled it. After the premiere, the piece was not performed again until after Stalin’s death.