As this happens, specific moments in the piece attain expressive meaning not from how they sound in the present but rather from how they relate to the whole structure of the piece. The musical material changes too: melodies are replaced by fragments of notes that attain their character by the intervals (the distance) between them. If you compare the Second Symphony, with its famous singing melodies and expansive slow movement to the taut Seventh (which lasts less than half as long) you discover that Sibelius developed an uncanny ability to say more profound things in less time. As Sibelius got older, his compositions became shorter and denser. Sibelius’s Seventh Symphony is a formidable mountain for any musician to climb.
That’s the automotive equivalent of bad conducting. This week I’ve been driving a stick-shift car, and after years of driving in America I’ve lost the ability to change gears smoothly. But one of the most important tasks, and one that falls to the conductor alone, is making sense of the structure of a piece of music as a single coherent shape, so that the audience feels safely delivered from point a to point b. Sometimes even great composers didn’t write especially idiomatically for certain instruments in the orchestra, so those musicians have to work harder than usual to make their parts sound natural. It could be finding a way of unlocking a phrase of Haydn that give the music human character and wit, or deciding how best to realize Mozart’s eighteenth-century language with a twenty-first-century orchestra. This might be a question of adjusting the way the instruments balance with each other to create special colours in French music. The difficulty comes in making the piece make sense beyond individual notes. Sure, there might be a few thorny corners that need some polishing, but for the most part everything is there at the first rehearsal.
SIBELIUS SYMPHONY 7 PROFESSIONAL
Simply playing the notes on the page is rarely difficult for a professional orchestra. Compare that to a piece that sounds like simplicity itself, Mozart’s Eine kleine Nachtmusik, and for most musicians there is absolutely no comparison between the two – the Mozart is infinitely more difficult.
Some moments that seem very impressive are actually rather easy to pull off, like the loud and fast music in the finale of Tchaikovsky’s Fourth. What exactly makes some pieces of music more difficult than others? I’m often surprised at how back-to-front audiences’ ideas about this are. It’s a program that looks quite straightforward on paper, but in reality it’s one of the most difficult of the season: Beethoven’s Second Symphony, Mozart’s Clarinet Concerto and Sibelius’s Seventh Symphony. Invariably, everyone asks what the first concert of the New Year is. It’s been wonderful catching up with their news, and also sharing mine, much of which has been about what we’ve been doing in Jacksonville. I’ve spent the last few weeks visiting friends and family in New York, London, Salzburg and Belfast.
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