A London Festival: A Handel-Haydn celebration in honor of the 250th anniversary of the death of George Frideric Handel (1685-1759), and the 200th anniversary of the death of Franz Joseph Haydn (1732-1809).

George Frideric Handel was one of the greatest composers of the Baroque era, and MSCO will perform two of his works on our first program. Music for the Royal Fireworks was conceived for a major London outdoor celebration in 1747, played by a band of 100 players for an audience of 12.000. Handel re-transcribed it for the orchestral version we will perform, and it remains one of his most exciting instrumental works.

Handel was also one of the greatest organists of his day and wrote many concerti for his own performance. Our soloist Paul Rosas, organist of Los Altos United Methodist Church, will perform Handel’s witty Organ Concerto in F major known as “The Cuckoo and the Nightingale”.

Franz Joseph Haydn, one of the greatest composers of the Classical era, is known for having raised the symphony from a short piece of passing entertainment value to a form of major significance. His twelve “London” Symphonies, written for concerts during his two trips to London in 1790 and 1793, are among his crowning achievements, and continue to be appreciated for their beauty, imagination, wit and sophistication. MSCO will perform the ninth of these works, his symphony No. 101 in D major, known as “the Clock” for the tick-tock accompaniment in the second movement.

For our second program we present two delightful works by the great Viennese composer Franz Schubert (1797-1828). We begin with his charming Overture in D major, subtitled “In the Italian Style” (not by Schubert) because of its deliberate similarity to the overtures of Rossini, who was all the rage in the Vienna of 1817. Guest conductor Pamela Martin will conduct the overture. Schubert’s lively symphony No. 3 in D major closes the program as we continue our examination of his early symphonies.

In between we present Schubert’s favorite composer of the past, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, with his final concerto for violin No. 5 in A major K.219 sometimes called the “Turkish”. Mozart was an excellent violinist and may have written his concerti for his own performances as concertmaster of the Salzburg orchestra. Our soloist in these performances is the outstanding Bay Area violinist Christina Mok.

The symphony was completed in 1787. It is one of Haydn's best-known works, even though it is not one of the Paris or London Symphonies and does not have a descriptive nickname.

The work is in standard four movement form and scored for flute, two oboes, two bassoons, two horns, two trumpets, timpani, continuo (harpsichord) and strings.

The first movement begins with a brief introduction which quickly settles to the dominant chord to prepare for the main body of the movement. The strings open the Allegro stating the main theme and the rest of the movement develops from there, with almost every statement deriving from a previous idea. The exposition is monothematic and the development continues to make use of that single melodic idea. In the recapitualation, the initial statement of the theme is embellished by a solo flute.

The slow movement in D major consists mainly of embellishments of the legato oboe theme which opens it, though every so often is punctuated by chords played by the whole orchestra. After hearing this slow movement, Johannes Brahms is said to have remarked, 'I want my Ninth Symphony to sound like this'. It is the first of Haydn's symphonies to use trumpets and timpani in the slow movement. Mozart had previously used trumpets and timpani in the slow movement of his Linz Symphony.

The minuet is in G major. The trio has an unusual feature to it: after stating a rather simple theme, the fifths held in the bassoons and violas shift down a fourth in parallel, an effect typically avoided by the classical composers.

The finale is a sonata-rondo, with the rondo theme first presented in binary form. The first section of this is noteworthy for ending on unusual cadence on the mediant. A "perpetual-motion finale," it is considered one of the most cheerful Haydn ever wrote.

In 1807 Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827) accepted a commission from Prince Nicholas Esterhazy to compose a mass in honor of the nameday of the Prince’s wife as Beethoven’s teacher Josef Haydn had done when he was in the prince’s service.

In composing his first mass Beethoven clearly respected his teacher’s late masses, and the result was a work of enormous beauty and reverence combined with moments of drama.

we begin with Carl Maria von Weber’s beautiful overture to his final opera Oberon, which begins the magical call from Oberon’s horn and leads to an exciting musical adventure

Weber conducted the premiere of his opera Oberon in London on April 12, 1826, three days after completing the score. Hans Kindler conducted the National Symphony Orchestra's first performance of the Overture, on October 30, 1932.

The score calls for flutes, oboes, clarinets and bassoons in pairs, 4 horns, 2 trumpets, 3 trombones, timpani, and strings.

Franck’s work begins with a dramatic introduction that leads to a joyful conclusion. He began work in the summer of 1885, and completed it on December 12. In his ultimate, old master phase, Franck transformed everything he touched.

The strings open with a menacing dotted figure in unison, answered by the piano with a plaintively drooping phrase whose dialogue gives way to a second theme introduced by pizzicato woodwinds and strings. An appasionato development leads shortly to six seamless variations on the second theme through which the piano decorates, comments, alludes, and accompanies, as the mood shifts from triumphant assertion to mystical absorption and languishing, muted sighs. A sudden trill in both hands, two octaves apart, prompts the orchestra to begin the extensive, rhapsodic finale in which the thematic material of the preceding is wrought to an incandescent apotheosis. Without doubt, the irresistible, surefire breeziness of this finish has insured the Variations symphoniques first place in popularity among Franck's works.

The Burleske in D minor for piano and orchestra (sometimes seen as Burlesque) was written by Richard Strauss in 1885-86, when he was 21. Its original title was Scherzo in D minor, and it was written for Hans von Bülow, who had appointed Strauss assistant conductor of the Meiningen Orchestra.

Strauss’s rambunctious and virtuosic Burleske fully lives up to its name after beginning with a lively duet between piano and timpani. The piano then enters in a state of high excitement. A second, more lyrical Brahmsian theme, emerges, and this is followed by waltz-like measures not unlike the waltzes from Der Rosenkavalier. The work ends quietly, again on the timpani. The piece takes about 22 minutes to perform.

Our program concludes with MSCO’s first performance at these concerts of the original “victory” symphony, Beethoven’s Symphony No. 5 in C minor. The drama begins with the famous ta-ta-ta-TA motif at the beginning, and takes us through a wonderful range of moods and musical ideas before the triumphant conclusion that caused Beethoven to enlarge the orchestra by adding trombones in a symphony for the first time.