Brautigam plays Beethoven

Ronald Brautigam, musician of musicians, plays Beethoven's irresistible Third Piano Concerto tonight. Symphony No. 7 by Emilie Mayer, a forgotten composer, surprises.

What are you going to listen to?

Two Beethovens in this program. The one and only represented in a piano concerto and a symphony by the "female Beethoven," as composer Emilie Mayer was admiringly called by her contemporaries.

2356 Years

Opening tonight is young composition student Katherine Teng in her One Minute Symphony, the collaboration between Residentie Orkest and Royal Conservatoire The Hague. A special One Minute Symphony this time, fitting into the program that simultaneously celebrates Ronald Brautigam's 70th birthday. "Of course my work had to reflect this special occasion. I wanted to write a piece that would celebrate this special milestone in a cheerful and light-hearted way. I did this by incorporating motifs from three different birthday songs: Happy Birthday, the Dutch birthday song Lang zal hij leven and the old Taiwanese pop song Happy Birthday 快樂鳥日子. These short motifs are woven together into a festive tribute that simultaneously honors Brautigam's unsurpassed contribution to classical music."
For more information on the One Minute Symphony: A Musical Birthday Gift for Ronald Brautigam, click here

Greek tragedy

In March 1797, Luigi Cherubini, originally from Italy but living in Paris since 1785, treated his audience to a very intense opera. Médée is a gruesome drama from Greek mythology, full of betrayal, murder and manslaughter, from which even the children of the title heroine do not escape. The overture is at least as dramatic as the opera itself, which with a little imagination could be seen as a character sketch of the protagonist. The response was lukewarm, and it is only with the revival of Maria Callas in the last century, who excelled in the extremely difficult leading role, that the opera has regained some interest.

Chaotic concert

In the early years of the nineteenth century, Ludwig van Beethoven was busy significantly increasing his fame in Vienna as a pianist and composer. A major concert was planned for April 5, 1803, devoted entirely to his own compositions. In it, the Piano Concerto No. 3 had a prominent place, with Beethoven as soloist, of course. But the preparations went anything but smoothly. There was only one extensive rehearsal in which a program of almost four hours had to be rehearsed. That began as early as 8 a.m. in the morning and was not over until seven hours later, after which the concert began at 6 p.m. with the overtired musicians. As might be expected, the whole thing went rather messy and the Third Piano Concerto did not come off best either. Beethoven had not written out his own part in full but had made a kind of excerpt in musical shorthand of it. His poor friend Ignaz von Seifert had to turn pages, but completely lost track, much to the composer's hilarity.

Apart from the mediocre performance, the audience had to get very used to the dramatic nature of the work. The first movement is downright tempestuous in a somber c minor. The ensuing Largo briefly brings tranquility in a mild major, but in the rondo minor prevails again. Until the surprising final bars. There Beethoven sets the main melody of this movement in C major and gives it a dancing rhythm, ending the concerto in a downright exuberant mood.

Heady eloquence

She was one of the most remarkable female composers of the nineteenth century: Emilie Mayer. Born into an affluent middle-class family, her father gave her every opportunity to develop musically. He died when Mayer was 28 years old, but left his daughter a generous inheritance. As a result, she was financially independent, and because she never married, she also enjoyed a fairly large amount of freedom socially. Thus she was able to devote her life to composing which she succeeded very successfully. With great regularity her music was performed and she herself organized concerts consisting entirely of her own compositions. 'We can place her work on a par with most of what the world of young tone artists are producing today, a garland of honor that critics may rightly award to female talent,' a rave review of one of those concerts read. Her style was initially indebted to the Viennese classics such as Mozart and Schubert but later shifted to the high Romanticism, although she would never venture into far-reaching innovations like Liszt and Wagner did in the mid-nineteenth century. It was during this time that she created her Symphony No. 7, a work remotely reminiscent of Schumann's symphonies, but with its heady eloquence and dramatic key of f minor, it has a character all its own. Immediately in the opening bars it storms full speed into Concert Hall . Great is the contrast with the lovely, almost pastoral slow second movement. But in the Scherzo she immediately grabs you again in ferocious harmonies and audacious rhythms. Most extraordinary, however, is the finale. At first it seems to be a cheerful bouncer in major, but towards the end Mayer lets the music fade to minor so that the symphony ends pathetically in the same key in which it began.

Kees Wisse