Programme — ross fireworks, La Réjouissance (from the Music for the Royal Fireworks)

George Frideric Handel (1685-1759)

La Réjouissance (from the Music for the Royal Fireworks)

Pyrotechnically, the occasion for which George II commissioned the Music for the Royal Fireworks - a spectacular celebration of the Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle in Green Park in April 1749 - was a disaster. At a fairly early stage in the evening the scaffolding on the fireworks “machine” caught fire; the Italian designer of the display was arrested after drawing his sword on the noble organiser of the event; and it rained.

Musically, it was great success. The stirring fourth movement of Handel’s score, La Réjouissance (The Rejoicing), must have been particularly impressive, its festive material passing in turn from some to all of the twenty-four oboes, twelve bassoons, nine horns and nine trumpets assembled for the occasion.

Dmitri Shostakovich (1906-1975)

Festive Overture, Op.96

If there wasn’t much to celebrate in the Soviet Union someone had to invent something - like, say, the 37th anniversary of the October Revolution. Anyway, it was for that numercially unremarkable occasion that Shostakovich was commissioned to write his Festive Overture in 1954. Challenged by the excessively short notice he had been given and happy to take the handsome fee that came with it, Shostakovich immediately sat down at his desk and within an hour was sending the score, page by page, to the Bolshoi Theatre where the orchestra was waiting to rehearse it.

A brilliant example of its kind, the Festive Overture opens with a authentically splendid fanfare and then races off at speed with an irresponsibly cheerful theme on woodwind. It seems unlikely that the graceful tune which later enters on horn and cellos could generate more celebratory energy than the woodwind theme but it does, not least effectively on its hectic last appearance after the climactic return of the opening fanfares.

Johann Strauss II (1825-1899)

Eljen a Magyár (quick polka), Op.332

As if there were not enough occasions to celebrate at home in Vienna, the composer members of the Strauss family were skilled in adapting their art to celebrations anywhere else it was required, from Pest to Pavlovsk. Johann and his younger brother Josef made a brief visit to Pest for the Hungarian National Festival in 1869, Josef taking his Andrássy March and Johann his Eljen a Magyár Polka. Dedicated “to the noble Hungarian nation,” Eljen a Magyár (Long live the Magyar) is a delightful combination of everything expected of the quick polka in ballrooms everywhere with zestful Hungarian-gypsy tunefulness and discreetly exotic orchestration.

Jan Sibelius (1865-1957)

Finlandia, Op.26

Finland celebrated its independence from Russia in 1917. Before that there were years of patriotic struggle involving not only politicians but also writers, artists and composers. It was in that spirit that Sibelius wrote the music for a series of six historical tableaux to be presented in Helsinki in 1899. The work now known as Finlandia accompanied the final tableau “Finland Awakes.” Although the message was apparently lost on the Russians oppressors, it would have been clearly understood by the composer’s compatriots.

It is true that only the musically sophisticated of Finnish patriots would have been able to associate the grim opening bars of Finlandia with Beethoven’s similar image of political oppression at the start of the Egmont Overture. Even so, the anthem-like use of Emil Genetz’s well-known song “Arise, Finland!” and the progressively triumphant demeanour of the work can have left no truly Finnish heart unstirred.

Emmanuel Chabrier (1841-1894)

España

An Auvergnat by birth and a Parisian by choice, Chabrier loved all things Spanish - well, perhaps not the fleas but certainly the traditional dances and no less certainly the women who performed them. The four months he spent in Spain in the summer and autumn of 1882 inspired an orchestral rhapsody - “una fantasia extraordinaria, muy española” as Chabrier described it in his tourist Spanish - irresistible in its joy in the melodies and rhythms he had noted down on his travels. Combining what he called “the vigorous tunes of the jota” of the North with “the free and dreamy phrases of the malaguena” of the South, it is so liberated in matters of rhythm and harmony that Gustav Mahler was moved to identify it as “the beginning of all modern music.”

Johann Strauss I (1804-1849)

Radetzky March, Op.228

The “father of the waltz” might have been a less versatile composer than “the waltz king,” his even more celebrated son, but he was just as good at marches as he was at waltzes and polkas. The most famous example, the Radetzky March, was written to celebrate the comprehensive defeat of Italian forces by Imperial forces - led by the 82-year-old Field-Marshall Count Radetzky von Radetz - at Custozza in July 1848. Based on two Viennese folk songs, brilliantly selected to complement each other, it has since achieved the status of an unofficial Austrian national anthem.