RO meets Storioni Trio

Innovation is of all times. Tonight Fagerlund's brand new work for piano trio and orchestra as well as Beethoven's Third, which took us into the Romantic era.

What are you going to listen to?

One Minute Symphony

Opening tonight is Anat Spiegel's One Minute Symphony, titled The Fool Card. According to Spiegel, "the fool (The Fool) reminds us of the freedom that comes from trusting that 'something' will catch us when we fall. The Fool calls us to remember our innocence, our folly and the greater cosmic power involved. He challenges us to think about what is orderly and encourages us to be unruly and misunderstood." You can hear how all of this was turned into notes at the premiere of her One Minute Symphony: The Fool Card.

Mendelssohn

Tranquil landscapes with rugged cliffs, the occasional waterfall, ruin or cityscape. Looking online at Felix Mendelssohn 's smooth, but extremely precise drawings and watercolors, one immediately gets an impression of the journey the 20-year-old composer undertook through England and Scotland in 1829. Foreign travel, in addition to visual art, music, philosophy and literature, was a natural part of the Mendelssohns' cultural education. The poetic verses of Ossian, the mythical, blind singer who is said to have lived in a cave (Fingal's Cave) on one of the Hebridean islands off the Scottish west coast, were passed on to Mendelssohn from home. The actual visit to the cave with its special acoustics of waves and wind must have made a deep impression on the composer. Despite his seasickness.

In the first sketches of the Overture "Die Hebriden" that Mendelssohn made during this voyage, ancient melodies emerge from the rippling sea as if from the mist. The wave motion of the music remains palpable throughout the piece, from hushed memory to romanticized sea storm. Although the musical result was fine-tuned for years to come, it creates the impression of a quick, striking watercolor, sketched on the spot.

Storioni Trio

Sebastian Fagerlund 's new work, also inspired by the sea, fits into the extensive series of triple concertos written for the Storioni Trio. As is his custom, the Finnish composer first explored the ensemble in a separate composition, in this case Remain from 2022 for piano trio. The slow movement of this then became the starting point for his Triple Concerto Lanterna which has its Dutch premiere in this program.

When writing the new concert, Fagerlund had in mind the image of a lantern at sea. "If you are close to it you can see it clearly, from when you start moving away from it, it fades. Sometimes you can't see the light at all; there may be waves or fog in between, for example," the composer explains. The seven movements - or "situations" as he calls them - merge seamlessly. The orchestra paints, as it were, the sea panorama into which the three soloists gradually begin to move. First the violin, followed by the cello and only in the third movement the piano. Gradually, the soloists and orchestra blend together.

Beethoven

In the early nineteenth century, the new ideals of liberty, equality and fraternity were buzzing in Vienna. The yearning for revolution was also pervasive among Ludwig van Beethoven, in which he had become a great admirer of Napoleon, who had defeated the French nobility under his own steam and was meanwhile making advances in the rest of Europe. The Third Symphony Beethoven dedicated to the French general in 1803 was therefore to be a work of revolutionary innovation, titled "Bonaparte.

With a scope of nearly an hour full of power and intensity, his composition transcended all previous symphonies. Each of the movements seems to have been liberated from the traditional forms expected by the audience. For example, themes are suddenly resumed in unexpected keys and later interrupted aggressively by series of loud chords. "Heaven and earth will tremble when it is performed," predicted one of Beethoven's pupils when he played it at home on the piano. The second movement is a monumental funeral march, followed by a hopeful, combative Scherzo that is nothing like the traditional minuet. The Finale contains a series of variations on a theme Beethoven wrote earlier for his Prometheus, a ballet about the mythical hero punished for having robbed fire and given it to mankind.

Even before the first performance in 1805, news reached Vienna that Napoleon had crowned himself emperor. Beethoven was furious and felt betrayed by his Corsican hero. He scratched the name "Bonaparte" off the manuscript with a knife and renamed the symphony "Sinfonia eroica, composed to celebrate the memory of a great man.

Some of the audience did not know what to make of the revolutionary work. "The composition is too violent and bizarre, so that one cannot get a grip on the whole. The sense of unity is completely lost," wrote the reviewer of the Allgemeine Musikalische Zeitung. For another part of the audience, however, music history had broken new ground forever with this masterpiece.

Frans Boendermaker