Four Norwegian Moods

Intrada

Song

Wedding Dance -

Cortège

If the title suggests that Stravinsky’s Four Norwegian Moods are the composer’s impressions of Norway that is far from what he intended. He had been living in the United States for only four or five years when he thought up the title and, as he later confessed, he had a “poor understanding of English.” He would have preferred, he said, “Quatre pièces à la norvégienne” (Four Pieces in the Norwegian Style) - which would have carried none of the “impression” or “frame of mind” connotations he seriously wanted to avoid. But the whole project, not just the title, was a mistake. A Hollywood studio had commissioned Stravinsky in 1942 to write incidental music for a film on the German invasion of Norway and, not much liking what he gave them, required changes to be made. He refused, withdrew the score, and arranged it as a concert suite. It was first performed in that form by the Boston Symphony Orchestra under the composer’s direction in Cambridge, Massachussets, in 1944.

Stravinsky borrowed the themes for the work from a collection of Norwegian folk music his wife had found in a second-hand bookshop in Los Angeles. Although he clearly did not put much effort into assimilating them and transforming them into distinctive Stravinsky material, the sound of the finished score could not be mistaken for anyone else for more than a few bars at a time. It is not Stravinsky at his most adventurous or most radical - far from it - but it is Stravinsky with his sense of humour and his rhythmic wit intact. The Intrada is a miniature rondo based on a cheerful march tune for horns and including episodes for strings and bassoons respectively. Song is rather less characteristic but only while the cor anglais projects its nostalgic melody against string harmonies in the opening and closing sections of the piece. A very distant relation of Grieg’s Wedding Day at Troldhaugen, the next piece is a short but energetic dance with a playful middle section. It is followed without a break by Cortège, a broader and (except in a hectic violin solo) almost stately piece with a brief development of the main theme before its definitive reappearance towards the end.

Jean Sibelius (1865-1857)

Six Humoresques for violin and orchestra

Commodo in D minor, Op.87, No.1

Allegro assai in D major, Op.87, No.2

Alla gavotta in G minor, Op.89a

Andantino in G minor, Op.89b

Commodo in E flat major, Op.89c

Allegro in G minor, Op.89d

Sibelius was not very good at writing light music. The greater the challenge, the better composer he was. The exception to the rule is the series of Humoresques for violin and orchestra that he wrote in an otherwise undistinguished period of production between the Fifth and Sixth Symphonies in 1917. The composer himself declared that he liked the Humoresques “very much” - which is probably more than he could say of of some of his other pieces for violin and orchestra, in spite of his unfailing skill in scoring for an instrument he knew better than any other.

An explanation for the superior quality of the Humoresques could be that some of them derive from sketches for a projected but never completed Second Violin Concerto. They cannot all have been seriously considered for that purpose, since there would be no room in a concerto for so many instances of light relief, but it is not impossible that the two pieces published as Op.87 originated in that way. The mazurka-like Commodo in D minor would certainly make an entertaining and harmonically intriguing scherzo episode in a concerto - in which case it would be integrated into a larger construction and would not require the ending somewhat perfunctorily tacked onto it here. The moto-perpetuo Allegro assai in D major is obvious finale material and, in fact, is reminiscent of the last movement of the Violin Concerto in D minor completed twelve years earlier. Again the ending, with its curious Hungarian rhapsody flavour, seems a tacked-on rather than organic.

Two short pieces do not make a concert item, however, and it was no doubt to supplement the two Humoresques, Op.87 that Sibelius went on to write the four Humoresques, Op.89. Certainly, when they were first performed - with Paul Cherkassky the soloist and the composer conducting in Helsinki in November 1919 - it was as a group of six. If the complete set does not quite seem to add up to what Sibelius described as “the anguish of existence…fitfully lit by the sun” it is not lacking in variety. While the Alla gavotta in G minor is a charming study in lightly articulated neo-classicsm, the Andantino is a contrastingly wistful impromptu in the same key. The Commodo in E flat major is a delightful quasi-Hungarian dance featuring a passage which, like a famous episode in the Violin Concerto in D minor, whistles the tune in carefree harmonics. Written a little later than the rest of the set, the Allegro in G minor makes a useful conclusion, referring back to a prominent rhythmic feature of the preceding piece, indulging in rather more virtuoso effects than the others and ending in the same key as the opening Commodo.