Ohlsson Plays Mozart

The orchestral canon is rife with works by composers pushing back against the institutions and conventions that shaped their training, and Tyler Taylor’s Permissions continues this lineage. Written as a dissertation while studying at Indiana University, the piece combines a contemporary voice with reflections on the Romantic orchestral tradition. At once a capstone academic statement and an artistic milestone, it situates Taylor within a tradition of early-career orchestral essays while codifying the evolving voice of a young composer. 

Taylor frames Permissions as “a response to the current state of the American orchestral institution.” Its title reflects this intent in a myriad of contexts. 

Permissions breaks from the familiar model in which winds, brass, and percussion play a secondary role to the strings. Here, the winds and brass are, in the composer’s words, “granted a special kind of permission — one that would give them the opportunity to be the leaders in this scenario.” This redistribution of power reshapes the role of the strings, whose writing becomes more varied and layered. Drawing on his perspective as a horn player, Taylor foregrounds timbres he knows most intimately, creating a powerful interplay in which winds and brass influence and lead the strings from behind, establishing a continual give-and-take between sectional groups and the whole ensemble. 

The work is highly organized, built from four continuous lines or gestures that transform throughout the piece. These are introduced in the opening — a clamor of competing ideas presented “urgently over each other in a manner that makes it impossible to discern any of them individually.” At times, these lines echo with resentment or sympathy; at others, they are met with apathy. Along the way, Taylor deploys percussive punctuations and rhythmic layering. This results in both a strict structure and moments of florid, perfumed counterpoint, juxtaposed with strident, glassy harmonies. 

The play of forces unfolds across 10 minutes, beginning with an eruption of plucked strings, pinging percussion, and trilling winds that heighten the tension. Stacked brass dissonances and the rumble of timpani and bass drum set the stage for a striking contrast: a soaring solo violin in its highest register, expressive and operatic. The violin’s passion soon dissolves into glissandos that weave through the strings. Textures melt and re-form like a Dalí painting, flecked with pointillistic brass and sharp rhythmic interjections. 

New episodes emerge in quick succession, and the climax arrives not with triumph but with interruption. “The progress of the lines is cut short,” the composer explains, “by the executive action of a trio of percussion. … Their ominous warnings freeze the action of all the ensembles except the strings, who, not understanding the severity of the situation, proceed without any input from the other ensembles except the percussion’s brutal hits. Left to their own devices, they slowly evaporate.” The piece ends not with resolution but with unpredictable blows from the percussion over slowly ascending pianissimo strings. 

Permissions is at once a technical statement, a metaphor for power and leadership, and a young composer’s gambit at subverting orchestral hierarchies, embodying the push-and-pull of individuality, compromise, and conflict. While it closes without optimism, Permissions affirms Taylor’s belief that each generation must redefine its relationship to tradition — and that even the most venerable of institutions can be reimagined when new voices are permitted to lead. 

— Nicholas Landrum 

Nicholas Landrum is a composer, performer, author, and educator who serves as director of music & liturgy at the Church of the Annunciation in Minneapolis. He contributes regularly to the Minnesota Orchestra’s pre-concert talks and writes program notes for many of America’s leading ensembles. 

Composer’s Note

This piece is a response to the current state of the American orchestral institution — one which is concerned mostly with music and musical practices from the 18th and 19th centuries. This preoccupation with the music from the past, nuanced as the situation may be, has led to the perpetuation of certain ideas and attitudes that I find highly problematic. My efforts to subvert these ideas led me to each decision I made about this piece. 

Before I wrote a single note, I knew I wanted to write a piece that would grant the winds and brass a special kind of permission — one that would give them the opportunity to be the leaders in this scenario. However, instead of using them as a single unit, they are separated into several “chamber” ensembles based on certain qualities. These qualities include timbre, range, and other instrumental connotations and characteristics. These ensembles create several blended “voices,” each with their own specific musical profile that ache to be noticed, felt, heard, and acknowledged. 

Granting this special permission to the winds and brass inherently changes the way the strings participate — the strings shadow and imitate what is happening around them. Without any strong sense of unifying identity, the tutti strings are torn between the various wind and brass ensembles, resulting in a musical profile that is varied and ambiguous. To heighten the drama of this treatment of the tutti strings, the principal players of each string section are removed from their traditional position of leadership and are divided amongst the wind and brass ensembles during portions of the piece. The members of this solo string quintet move fluidly between their roles as participants in the wind and brass ensembles, as a unified ensemble in and of itself, and as the only group sympathetic to the tutti strings. … 

— from a composer’s note by Tyler Taylor 

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart had a way with the piano concerto, like no other composer before or after him. Building upon the achievements of two of J.S. Bach’s sons, Carl Philipp Emanuel and Johann Christian, Mozart gave the word “concerto” a whole new meaning and set expectations not just in the minds of his own audiences, but for generations to come. He continued the idea of alternating orchestral and solo passages, but also completely expanded on the earlier form, making it both more complex and more flexible. In his hands, the piano concerto became capable of expressing diverse characters and feelings, from grandiose and festive to lyrical and intimate, with innumerable shadings in between. 

Throughout the 1780s, Mozart wrote several concertos each season, which he premiered to great acclaim. What we now know as Piano Concerto No. 23 — the group was cataloged and numbered decades after Mozart’s death — was written in 1786, the year Mozart completed his opera The Marriage of Figaro. 

The first movement of this concerto does not open with a fanfare or powerful “curtain-raising” motive, as many other concertos do. It begins instead with a gentle melody, setting the stage for a movement with a unique blend of moods. Here we experience a quiet serenity with occasional touches of wistfulness. In the orchestration, one notes the absence of oboes and the presence of clarinets, resulting in a special, darker-hued sound. Before long, the strings introduce a new theme that is immediately embellished by the piano and later elaborated upon by the orchestra. 

For many of Mozart’s concertos, we do not have a solo cadenza written in the composer’s hand. Most often, he left this part of the score blank and improvised in performance. For the first movement of this concerto, however, an original cadenza by Mozart has survived. This cadenza tells us a great deal about Mozart the improviser. Besides virtuosic passages, it also contains expressive, singing music and expands upon the concerto’s thematic material in simple yet ingenious ways. 

The Adagio movement is extraordinary even among the other slow movements of Mozart’s mature piano concertos. Its dominating sentiment in many ways presages musical Romanticism. The melody moves in the quiet rhythm of the siciliano dance, but contains many wide, expressive leaps, emphasizing chromatic half-steps and melancholic chords. The key of F-sharp minor is extremely rare in Mozart’s music — in fact, this is the only time it appears as a movement’s main key in the composer’s entire catalog. The unusual quality of the key gives the music a certain heightened poignancy that is easier to feel than to describe. 

The third-movement finale, marked Allegro assai, is a playful romp with a multitude of spirited melodies. It is an extended “sonata-rondo,” meaning that a recurring theme (rondo) alternates with a number of episodes but one of the episodes also returns, just as a second theme would in a sonata form’s recapitulation. The fusion of these two forms results in a structure that allows us to enjoy the wonderful melodies several times, while the alternations and transformations of the melodies afford a seemingly inexhaustible diversity. 

Mozart was well aware of the exceptional richness of this concerto. It was one of a select group of works he sent to Prince Fürstenberg in Donaueschingen. In an accompanying letter to Sebastian Winter, a former servant of the Mozart family who later worked for the Prince, the composer wrote that these were “compositions which I keep for myself or for a small circle of music-lovers and connoisseurs (who promise not to let them out of their hands).” He wanted the Prince to be assured that these compositions had not been circulating widely and did not hide his hopes for future commissions. Mozart received a total of 143.5 florins for the scores he submitted (four symphonies, five concertos, and three chamber works), which covered approximately three months’ rent at his Vienna apartment. However, the additional commissions Mozart hoped for never materialized. 

— Peter Laki 

Peter Laki is a musicologist and frequent lecturer on classical music. He is a visiting associate professor at Bard College. 

When Robert Schumann visited Beethoven’s grave in Vienna in 1838, he found there an old steel pen, which he kept for use on special occasions. It is no accident that Schumann chose to use it when he embarked on his first symphony two years later, for all his symphonies offer audible testimony to his profound respect for Beethoven as the father of the Romantic symphony. He was distressed to find that Vienna seemed to pay little respect to Beethoven’s memory or his music. One of Schumann’s crusading purposes as a critic and composer was to raise Beethoven to the level he deserved, and the most effective means at his disposal was to compose symphonies of his own that would demonstrate their lineage. 

In September 1850, Schumann and his wife, pianist-composer Clara Wieck Schumann, moved from Dresden, where they had lived for nearly six years, to Düsseldorf, a city on the Rhine whose musical reputation had risen in the three years that Mendelssohn was conductor there, and even more under his successor Ferdinand Hiller, an important and versatile musician with considerable influence in German musical circles. When Hiller moved on to Cologne, he proposed his friend Schumann as successor. After much hesitation, Schumann accepted, little knowing that his years there would be plagued by declining health and growing controversy over his abilities as a conductor. 

At the start, though, he was warmly welcomed by the Düsseldorfers, especially when he presented them with a series of new works, including his fourth and final symphony (though published and known as No. 3). It was performed in February 1851 during his first season. Since his student days in Heidelberg, Schumann had always loved the Rhineland (the long expanse of land along the Rhine River in central Germany), and the immediate inspiration for the symphony, along with its familiar nickname “Rhenish,” came, as Schumann himself explained, from his visit to Cologne Cathedral the previous September.

Modern visitors to Cologne are inescapably impressed by the massive twin spires at the west end of the cathedral, but when Schumann was there, there were no spires — the medieval structure had been left unfinished for over three centuries. But in 1842, the immense task of completion began, and the cathedral was finally finished in 1880. Schumann was able to see the work in progress and was perhaps as much impressed by the solemn occasion he witnessed there — the enthronement of Cardinal Archbishop Geissel — as by the building itself. Solemnity is clearly an element of the symphony, especially the extra movement, fourth of the five, which is marked feierlich (solemn) and introduces trombones to give breadth and grandeur. 

There is a similar weight and dignity to the opening of the first movement, when Schumann overcomes his tendency to think in short phrases and writes a splendid theme that launches the work with great panache. The orchestration is rich and full, never featuring instruments on their own, even in a more reflective theme that suits the winds but is actually shared with the strings. He was writing for an orchestra he did not yet know, and in this case, a policy of safety contributes to the solemnity. 

The second-movement scherzo is not swift or jocular; the model is more Mendelssohn than Beethoven, especially in its middle section, where more rapid figures are passed back and forth. 

The slow movement also has touches of Mendelssohn, but here we are closer to the world of Schumann’s songs. There is some beautiful writing for strings, and even the woodwinds have no cause to complain. When the movement introduces the steady tread of a solemn procession, Schumann’s private musings come to an end and the public ceremonial takes over, with echoes of J.S. Bach in the counterpoint and pre-echoes of Bruckner in its breadth. 

The fourth movement’s strange, uncertain ending in the minor key is blown away by the positive vigor of the fifth-movement finale, as the shy, taciturn Schumann presents himself to the Düsseldorf public as a man of faultlessly extrovert temper. 

— Hugh Macdonald 

Hugh Macdonald is Avis H. Blewett Professor Emeritus of Music at Washington University in St. Louis. He has written books on Beethoven, Berlioz, Bizet, and Scriabin, as well as Music in 1853: The Biography of a Year.