New Year's Concert

What are you going to listen to?

A cheerful concert to start 2026 with. Of course with festive trumpet music, but also with carnival in Rome, a ballet of mischievous ladies, a Neapolitan song, and the most beautiful girl in Arles.

Moonlight

The program begins quietly and serenely in the moonlight. Around 1890, Claude Debussy wrote a number of imaginative piano pieces. One of these was Clair de lune, based on a poem by Paul Verlaine. It would be his first and immediately very successful attempt at impressionist music, with its subtle fragments of melody and harmony. It became his most popular piano piece, conquering the world in all possible arrangements.

Unplayable notes and challenging darlings

In 1948, Henri Tomasi of the Paris Conservatory was asked to write a highly virtuoso trumpet concerto for his trumpet students. The piece he delivered was so virtuoso that the conservatory dismissed it as unplayable. Tomasi had his own opinion and offered it to the Dutch trumpeter Jas Doets. In November of that year, Doets gave a brilliant premiere with the Radio Philharmonic Orchestra, after which the conservatory reluctantly admitted a year later that it was indeed playable. Since then, it has been the ultimate solo piece that every concert trumpeter has in their repertoire.

The renowned impresario Sergei Djaghilev not only managed to attract greats such as Stravinsky and Ravel to his famous Ballets Russes in Paris. He also asked Poulenc to compose music for a ballet. The result was Les biches, a virtually untranslatable French term that is best approximated by the English word 'sweethearts'. The ballet has no real story but, with an enormous blue sofa as its only set piece, tells the tale of three young men who revel in the keen interest of sixteen young women. For the Concert Hall , Poulenc Concert Hall a number of pieces from the cheerful ballet music that have become known as an orchestral suite.

Roman carnival and album page

Hector Berlioz's first major opera about the famous sculptor Benvenuto Cellini did not have a happy life. He found the libretto rather weak and the music far too complicated. The premiere in Paris on September 10 was a huge fiasco, and performances in Germany and England in a simplified version were also unsuccessful. In order not to lose all the music from the opera, which is set in Rome during carnival, Berlioz turned the most beautiful melodies into a separate overture, which he called Le Carnaval romain . It was a stroke of genius, because in his later career this overture was one of Berlioz's most frequently performed orchestral works, which he had to conduct at countless concerts.

Alexander Glazunov was, alongside greats such as Tchaikovsky and Mussorgsky, the most famous Russian composer of his time. He was particularly loved for his large orchestral works and ballets. But among all those extensive compositions was one little gem that he wrote in 1899, the year he became a teacher at the prestigious St. Petersburg Conservatory. Albumblatt was a small salon piece for trumpet and piano, which might have been forgotten had it not been made an evergreen by Timofei Dokshizer, the legendary trumpeter of the Moscow Bolshoi Theater.

Arles and Naples

The most beautiful girl in Arles falls in love with a young farmer from the countryside. But even before the wedding, it turns out that she is unfaithful, and in despair, he takes his own life. That, in short, is the story of the book L'Arlésienne, published by Alphonse Daudet in 1869. Shortly afterwards, he adapted it for the stage with extensive incidental music by Georges Bizet. The success was only moderate and Bizet soon decided to bring together the best parts in a suite, from which Carillon is performed tonight. It premiered in the same year as the play in 1872 and was very well received. But a second suite followed. Bizet's friend Ernest Guiraud took a number of melodies from the original stage music, allowing himself quite a few liberties. He adapted several themes on his own initiative and even added a 'minuet' from one of Bizet's operas. This suite ends with a festive Farandole, a Provençal dance.

Herman Bellstedt was America's greatest cornetist around 1900. He was called 'Wonder Boy', played with various wind orchestras, including that of the march king Sousa, and also had his own Bellstedt-Ballenger Band for several years. Napoli is one of the bravura pieces he wrote for his own instrument. It is a series of virtuoso variations on the well-known Neapolitan song Funiculì, Funiculà.

Kees Wisse