Prinsjesdag Concert

Prinsjesdag celebrates not only tradition, but also new beginnings every year. We celebrate with you, with the 75th anniversary of the Prinsjesdag Concert and the festive introduction of our artist in residence for 2024-2025: cellist Jean-Guihen Queyras. A great festive season opening, full of musical promise and with The Residents!

What are you going to listen to?

Tchaikovsky

Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky had a lifelong love for Shakespeare. Not for nothing did he base some of his best notes on the English writer's oeuvre such as the symphonic fantasy "The Tempest. It was Tchaikovsky's mentor Mili Balakirev who suggested to him the idea of writing music to another of Shakespeare's famous stories: the immortal lovers Romeo and Juliet. Under Balakirev's critical supervision, Tchaikovsky put no less than three versions on paper between 1869 and 1880. In the final score, a "fantasy overture," the Russian composer inventively introduces some crucial elements from Shakespeare's play. For example, the choral music of the slow introduction depicts the character of Friar Laurence, the Franciscan monk who provides Juliet with her fateful sleeping drug. The heady first theme echoes the battle of the Montagues and Capulets, complete with sword clashing that echoes in fierce cymbal beats. For the famous balcony scene, Tchaikovsky wrote a melody that still ranks high among the most famous love themes of all time.

Dvorák

Growing up in the Bohemian village of Nelahozeves, a hamlet that had less than fifty houses amidst vast fields and farmlands in gently rolling hills, Antonin Dvorák came into contact with music at an early age. His father ran a butcher shop and an inn but also played the zither excellently. From him, little Dvorák received his first music lessons, which were later continued at the village school. Making music was in the villagers' blood anyway, as Dvorák aptly described in an interview with the British Sunday Times in 1885: "All Slavs love music. They can work all day in the fields, but they are always singing and the true musical spirit burns fervently in them. And how they also love to dance! On Sundays, when church is out, they start making music and dancing, often until early the next morning. Every village has an orchestra of about eight or ten musicians - I belonged to ours as soon as I could fiddle a little." Folk music was instilled into Dvorák with the mother's milk. Not surprisingly, as a composer he combined his expressive lyricism and powerful rhythms with elements of Slavic folk music.

Cello Concerto

"The cello is a beautiful instrument but its place belongs in the orchestra and in chamber music. As a solo instrument, the cello does not come into its own." Remarkable words for a composer like Dvorák, who in the late nineteenth century would compose one of the most famous cello concertos ever. He made his first taste of solo concertos at the age of 23 when writing his first Cello Concerto in A, probably inspired by his love for Josefina Cermáková, the sister of his later wife Anna. Unfortunately, Josefina rejected him and the concerto was never orchestrated. The suitability of the instrument, the "nasal sound in the high register of the cello and the mumbling sound in the low register" made Dvorák hesitate to write another cello concerto, even though he was urged to do so on all sides. Only during his stay in New York - Dvorák was artistic director and professor of composition at the National Conservatory of Music from 1892 to 1895 - did he become so impressed by the Second Cello Concerto of fellow teacher Victor Herbert that Dvorák decided to write another cello concerto himself. In just three months, Dvorák managed to overcome his earlier doubts about the cello as a solo instrument and wrote an absolute masterpiece with beautiful melodies embedded in an extraordinarily beautiful structure. The work even elicited from Dvorák's friend and mentor Johannes Brahms the statement, "Why on earth did I not know that one can write a cello concerto like that. If I had known, I would have composed one long ago."

Working on the second movement, Dvorák received word that his former childhood sweetheart Josefina was seriously ill. Out of respect for his sister-in-law, he incorporated his song "Lasst mich allein" - once written especially for her - into the Adagio. Her death in May 1895 so affected Dvorák that he adapted the ending of the swirling Finale by adding a meditative section with references to the first and second movements, just before the orchestra enters the accelerando to end the concerto majestically.

Jan Jaap Zwitser