Classics with Jan Willem de Vriend

Tonight, renowned conductor Jan Willem de Vriend will lead the Residentie Orkest in one of the most beautiful works for string instruments ever written – by none other than Mozart.

What are you going to listen to?

One Minute Symphony

Opening tonight is Australian composition student Lydia Gardiner in her One Minute Symphony, the collaboration between Residentie Orkest and Royal Conservatoire The Hague. She looked for inspiration in the workshop of Ramses Hertman, furniture restorer in The Hague. His detailed way of working Lydia found it interesting to translate into music. During the meeting, Ramses showed photographs of a restoration on the vault painting in the Grote Kerk in Alkmaar that he had been working on. This was an important moment of inspiration for Lydia. After the restoration, the wooden planks had been reconnected and the woodwork showed life as the gray color had disappeared. How this was transformed into music can be heard at the premiere of her One Minute Symphony: Of Warped Wood and Wax.

Beethoven

In 1807, Ludwig van Beethoven wrote the overture for the play Coriolan by the Viennese playwright Heinrich Joseph von Collin, who was assigned the task of writing plays with a political mission under Napoleon's rule in Vienna. The drama tells the story of the fifth-century Roman patrician Coriolanus who was exiled from Rome and threatened to destroy the city with an army troop in revenge. However, his mother Volumnia managed to dissuade him from his plan, and Coriolanus takes his own life out of remorse and shame.

Both elements, the threat of war and maternal love, also form the basis of Beethoven's overture. The threatening, fateful character of the first theme in C minor is reminiscent of his Fifth Symphony, which he wrote not much later. The tender passage in E-flat major refers to Coriolanus' mother's attempts to convince him of goodness with her love. Even within the sonata form in which Beethoven shapes his music, he breaks the rules to allow the loving second theme to prevail over the threatening Coriolanus theme that slowly falls apart.

Mozart

Some thirty years earlier, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart 's career in Salzburg, in the service of the archbishop, was marked by tensions back and forth. In the Austrian provincial city, he was given few freedoms to develop, and after yet another clash, Mozart was fired. Hoping for a better appointment, he left in 1777 with his mother on a trip to Mannheim and Paris, two prominent cities in European musical life.

For several decades, the orchestra in Mannheim was considered among the best orchestras in the world, with its own style of playing and all kinds of orchestral innovations such as the many dynamic shades between hard and soft, driving crescendos with trills in the orchestral parts, or swift figures upward like the "Mannheim rocket. Mozart absorbed all these original ideas, but a permanent appointment in Mannheim or Paris was out of the question.

Very popular in Paris was the so-called "sinfonia concertante," a work for two or more solo instruments and orchestra. Mozart also wrote similar compositions here for the combinations flute-harp or violin-viola-cello, and on his return to Salzburg he began his Sinfonia concertante for violin and viola. Both solo instruments are equal and enter into dialogue with each other like opera characters. The viola soloist had Mozart tune all the strings a semitone higher for a different kind of sound, but this is rarely done today.

The work full of Mannheim rhetoric stands out for its unusual orchestration. With two viola parts in the orchestra, the music has a rich color palette in the middle register. Different themes and rhythmic motifs are always connected in the Sinfonia concertante. This was probably the advice Mozart received in a letter from his father. "Good composition, sound construction, il filo - that distinguishes the master from the tinkerer." The thread connecting all musical elements ("il filo") is the key word and we also observe it in Haydn's late symphonies.

Haydn

Shortly after the Sinfonia concertante, Mozart broke with his employer in Salzburg for good and settled in Vienna, where he met Joseph Haydn. As a viola player, Mozart played string quartet with his musical role model. For Haydn, periods in Vienna were welcome times for inspiration, for much of the year he was at the country home of his breadlord, Prince Nikolaus Esterházy in remote Eisenstadt.

After his death in 1790, Haydn left for Vienna with a good pension to consider his future. Thanks to contacts with the impresario Johann Peter Salomon, he embarked on the adventure of performing his music in London as well. It became a resounding success. Having performed six symphonies (Nos. 93-98) during his visit in 1791, Haydn traveled again to the British capital three years later.

Haydn thoroughly researched the musical tastes of the London public, studying their literature, reading reviews and listening to their favorite artists. On this basis, he carefully shaped his six new London symphonies according to British preferences. In cultural high society, Haydn was embraced as the "Shakespeare of music.

For example, he discovered that major resonated better than minor, and musical jokes such as an unexpected timpani strike or an imitation of a bell also did well in London. Haydn's Symphony No. 104 has been called the highlight of the London series. How the simple opening theme is used optimally to build all the other musical material from it later became a model of classical compositional technique in its utmost perfection.

In the finale, he incorporated a popular tune over a bagpipe-like bourdon tone. Possibly the Londoners recognized in it the sales cries sung in the marketplace, but more likely Haydn used a Croatian folk song popular in the Eisenstadt area. Perhaps Haydn deliberately kept it in the middle.

Frans Boendermaker