Elgar, Debussy & Ravel

What are you going to listen to?

Music travels far beyond time and place - that can be heard with excellence tonight. The Residentie Orkest takes its place in large ensemble and takes you to France, Spain and England. Three countries connected by water and history. We play music full of emotion, with both stunning scenic scenes and poignant passages.

One Minute Symphony

What happens when a composer gives space to his inner child and writes a mini-overture? It is composition student Tanishq Bhat who takes up this challenge in his One Minute Symphony, premiered tonight. For Bhat, it is also a tribute to Edward Elgar who has been very important to his musical development.

Elgar

The horrors of World War I had deeply affected Edward Elgar. Constant reports came in of tens of thousands of British soldiers killed, an amount almost unimaginable. And in his summer cottage on the coast in Sussex, he could hear the artillery fire across the street daily. In March 1918, the composer had to go to the hospital to have his inflamed tonsils removed, at that time a painful and not harmless operation for someone of age. A few days after the operation - he was still in the hospital - he gestured for a piece of note paper and wrote down a motif, to which he paid no further attention. A few months later he carefully set himself back to work and in a fairly short time a violin sonata, a string quartet and a piano quintet were produced.

Elgar had not forgotten the motif from the hospital, however, and slowly the idea of using it in a cello concerto grew. He had already made some sketches, which he showed to conductor Landon Ronald and cellist Felix Salmond. Their enthusiasm gave him great impetus to finish the work. Every morning he was working at his piano before five in the morning, and by the end of July he could report that the Cello Concerto was nearly complete. The premiere conducted by Elgar himself with Salmond as soloist on October 27, 1919, went downright miserable, which was mainly due to the far too short preparation time. But within a year of this fiasco, the work experienced more than a hundred performances worldwide.

Debussy

Claude Debussy liked to fuse past and present in his music. His artistic starting point was mainly French music, especially composers from his own circles, such as Massenet, Lalo, Chabrier, Gounod, Bizet and Fauré. But he found his own style, so recognizable, through Wagner, Mussorgsky, Gregorian chant and exotic music. His Images pour orchestre (1905-1912) is a triptych that shows the composer's impressionist style at its peak. Each movement has its own unique atmosphere that brings to mind a landscape impression, where timbre and orchestration are central. The first movement, Gigues, is inspired by English folk music and evokes a melancholy image of misty landscapes, with rhythmic motifs reminiscent of dancing. The second movement, Ibéria, is the best known. In it Debussy paints a vivid portrait of Spain, with sultry scents, festive sounds and street noises. The Last movement, Rondes de printemps, is an ode to spring in France, in which children's songs and folk melodies are woven into a colorful musical tapestry.

Ravel

One of the best dancers of the Ballets Russes in Paris was Ida Rubinstein. In 1911, however, she left the company and founded her own "Ballet Ida Rubinstein. In 1928, she approached Maurice Ravel with a request for a new ballet. A concept grew of alternately continuously repeating two melodies in an increasingly strong crescendo to a deafening climax. Despite the originality of this idea, Ravel had a hard head about whether it would be a success, especially since he himself did not take his Boléro, as the ballet was to be called, very seriously. On top of that, Ida and he had completely different ideas about the choreography. In her version, it was a Spanish dancer jumping on a table in an inn and performing an increasingly ferocious dance, encouraged by the bystanders. Ravel, on the other hand, envisioned an open field with a factory in the background, from which increasingly loud monotonous mechanical sounds resound and to which a dancer dances ever more wildly. The music proved more powerful than the dance because the Boléro is rarely danced, played in the Concert Hall all the more.

Jan Jaap Zwitser and Kees Wisse