The Hebrides

Each one is really a very special experience.

The Hebrides Overture by Mendelssohn is an example of something that Mendelssohn did which really impacted his music, which is traveling.

So Mendelssohn traveled to Italy, and after his trip to Italy, he wrote one of his most magnificent symphonies, which is the Symphony No. 4, now nicknamed Italian.

But his trip to Scotland, and especially the Scottish islands, impacted the overture that you will hear to open this program.

The Hebrides Overture is an amazing piece of music.

It's so amazing that Brahms once said that he would pay anything, that he would give anything to have been able to write something as inspired as the Hebrides Overture.

We know that his trip to Scotland impacted him because he did not only write this Hebrides Overture, he also wrote a symphony that we now know as Symphony No. 3, nicknamed Scottish.

So I want you to imagine the beauty of that island, to which I've never been.

You know, program music has been written through the ages, but it's a lot like taking a picture, but then it's gone.

Like the Hebrides Overture, you know, and you hear this, and oh yeah, it's the Hebrides, that's right.

You hear waves, you think you do.

But his pictorial music is so to a program.

So you can get the whole thing in a half an hour.

But they're gonna start the concert with the Hebrides Overture, which is also-

Nice

... you know, 8 to 10-minute work, I believe.

The abundant music paper was perhaps the most strangely tidy feature of the room, for the exquisitely neat notation that covered it suggested the work of a careful copyist rather than the original hand of a composer.

I could not refrain from looking at one piece.

It was a very short and very simple adagio cantabile in the key of F for a solo pianoforte.

It appealed at once to me as a singer, for its quiet, unaffected melody seemed made to be sung rather than to be played.

Then follows a noble rising passage, as if the spirit of the place were ascending from the depths of the sea and pervading with his presence the immensity of his ocean fane.

This, in its turn, is succeeded by a movement that seems to carry us into the brightness outside, though still the plaint of crying birds pursues us in haunting monotony.

It is a wonderful piece, this Hebrides Overture, with all the magic and the mystery of the islands about it.

That is but one of my Scottish impressions, said Mendelssohn.

He wanted to write something appealing, but he didn't compromise his aesthetic, and the structure and the counterpoint and the orchestration are really well-crafted, and it's fun.

And I think it could be enjoyable in more concert programs of, um, instead of, you know, Mendelssohn's "Hebrides" Overture.

Sure.

I think we've heard that enough.