Artistic chance has allowed the unusual coincidence of two a priori antagonistic names such as Saint-Saëns and Brahms, in this very Pollença Festival concert. The first one is a Parisian composer of Norman descent, born to a bourgeois Catholic family with a vast and cultivated training beyond his great musical knowledge. The other one belongs to a Hamburger, born in a humble family of Lutheran religion, who barely obtained basic training as a child. Self-conscious about this, as a teenager he developed the ability to read literature books placed on the piano stand while accompanying the songs of drunken sailors in the taverns throughout the port of Hamburg. Over the years, they both became great piano virtuosos, eventually prestigious orchestra conductors, and ultimately, composers destined to be true masters for the music scenes of their respective countries, as we all know.

They were born a little more than two years apart, and the image of two mature-looking men with beards and serious gazes always comes to mind when recalling their appearances, as if they had never been young. It becomes difficult to picture Brahms as an attractive blue-eyed boy. It is also to glimpse Saint-Saëns’ sense of humour as well as his great wanderlust. Their characters’ cores become evident in the two masterpieces we’ll be able to hear, which certainly share a conservative perspective, deeply respectful of the genuinely romantic musical tradition, where the imprint of some of their great masters, such as Franz Liszt or Beethoven respectively, can be sensed.

The first work, the brilliant and evocative Concerto for Piano and Orchestra no. 5 in F major, op. 103, premièred in a concert at the Paris-based Salle Pleyel on June 2, 1896. That very day, Camille Saint-Saëns celebrated the 50th anniversary of his debut as a pianist by playing with the Orchestre de la Société des Concerts du Conservatoire, conducted by Paul Taffanel. The sheet music had emerged during the 1895-96 winter in the city of Luxor (Egypt) on one of his countless trips to exotic places, specifically around North Africa or some Atlantic or Mediterranean islands. This fact makes us understand the reason for the unique sobriquet with which this sheet music is always remembered, «The Egyptian, » which makes sense particularly when one spots its second movement. Written twenty years after the previous concerto, this fifth was the last one he would compose.

From the initial Allegro Animato, its substantial virtuosic demand as well as its romantic nature become evident with Liszt and Chopin echoes seasoned with an inspired lyricism imbued with chromatic phrases. It follows the long-awaited Andante, which from the first solo piano entry makes its «Egyptian» calling clear. The composer himself described it stating: «It is a kind of journey to the East that at times even reaches the Far East, where you can hear a Nubian love song I heard the Nile River rowers sing.» Far from classical masters, this movement is closer to a really free and whimsical rhapsody, not lacking the resonances of the distant Bali island Gamelans, and ultimately, neither the piano and the orchestra’s impressionistic sounds evoking crickets and frogs. The closing movement is a virtuoso Molto Allegro of great performing difficulty. Alfred Cortot described it as «a whirlwind of twinkling stars. » At the beginning, the soloist seems to replicate the sound of the boat propellers down the Nile. That’s how this unique oriental gaze, under a noticeable European light, concludes.

Symphony No. 4 in E minor, op. 98 is the last one composed by Johannes Brahms and a masterpiece of maturity. However, the evocative and autumnal character, which can be sensed already at the highly inspired opening theme, distances us from the exotic and festive spirit of the previous work, as of its first bars. Egypt’s vertical and intense light becomes slanted and contemplative, calling for insight.

Brahms began composing his last symphony in 1884, just after finishing his previous one. He did it during the two summers he spent in the small village of Mürzzuschlag, in the north-east of Styria, located in the middle of the Austrian Alps, where the railway already reached. In 2015, this town opened a small museum dedicated to his memory, commemorating those two summers when Brahms made the most of the time to compose. On October 25, 1885, in Meiningen, Symphony No. 4 première was a great success, conducted by the composer. New and successful performances of the sheet music would follow in various venues through Germany and the Netherlands.

Drawn up in the classic sonata form, the anthological Allegro non troppo gives way to a serene contemplation that turns into the Andante moderato. Thirdly, there’s the Allegro giocoso, a movement of contrasts that harks back to the popular “Hungarian Dances” by the same author. The symphony ends with the Allegro energico e passionato, in which the composer recovers the opening’s dramatic pathos with small ephemeral flashes from a beacon of hope and builds the entire movement upon the structure of a kind of personally handled chaconne. It might also hint at the final fragment of his beloved J. S. Bach’s Cantata no. 150.

Joan Vives Bellalta

Musician and popularizer