Prinsjesdag Concert

What are you going to listen to?

The Hague celebrates Prinsjesdag, and we celebrate with you! The Residentie Orkest opens the new season with a vibrant program introducing our new chief conductor and new artist in residence.

Death Dance

Take a scary story and a good poet and you have a wonderful song. The poet was Henri Cazalis, who published his poem Égalité, Fraternité in his collection Mélancholia in 1868. It tells of Death accompanying the skeletons on their dance of death in the cemetery after noon, disappearing again at dawn. Camille Saint-Saëns turned it into a song with a sinisterly dramatic melody. But he saw more in the text inviting an orchestral description. Thus, in 1874, his Danse macabre for orchestra was created. Not just any dance, but a complete symphonic poem to Cazalis' descriptive text. We hear the bells gently striking midnight in the distance. Then Death appears and on his false violin invites the departed to the dance. This is done to the wild melody Saint-Saëns had composed for the original song. Already rougher and wilder becomes the dance in which the rattling skeletons are clearly audible. But then the rooster crows and the sunrise announces itself. With a Last melancholy phrase on the violin, Death lets the skeletons disappear back into the graves and quietly leaves the cemetery.

Virtuoso fantasy

Take a famous opera and a violin virtuoso and you get an extraordinary fantasy. The opera was Gounod' s Faust , a huge blockbuster from its first performance in 1859 that drew full houses night after night. So Gounod treated his audiences to an exciting story full of easy-going melodies. It became hits that were played, sung and whistled everywhere and that everyone knew. In the following years, the opera remained extremely popular, and composers in their own adaptations hitchhiked on the beloved melodies. One of them was the Polish grandmaster on the violin Henryk Wieniawski. He took some evergreens from Faust and incorporated them into a breathtaking virtuoso fantasy for violin, with which he caused a furor at recitals and concerts. It is a veritable potpourri in which he reviews several themes, first played simply, then varied with all manner of dizzying antics on the violin. The audience loved it and it is still Wieniawski's best-known work.

Ballet with obstacles

Take a poetic fairy tale and a skilled choreographer and you get a fantastic ballet. But for Swan Lake , all did not walk on roses. In 1875, Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky received a commission to write a ballet about a fairy tale surrounding a mysterious swan girl. The end result, however, was not encouraging. Tchaikovsky, uncertain because he was composing a full-length ballet for the first time, was not satisfied with the sketchy collaboration with the choreographer, and the dancers were therefore unhappy with the music and choreography. Not surprisingly, it became a fiasco. Later productions were somewhat more successful but did not get much better. After 1890, history took a very unusual turn. Around 1892, the famous choreographer Petipa sought contact with Tchaikovsky to adapt the music as part of a whole new performance by the Mariinsky Theatre in St. Petersburg. But before it came to a serious collaboration, the composer died in 1893. It was conductor Riccardo Drigo of the Mariinsky and brother Modest Tchaikovsky who took the revision firmly in hand. The story of the ballet changed considerably and Tchaikovsky's notes also underwent quite a few changes. The premiere in 1895 of this new version became a huge success and to this day is considered the standard of Swan Lake. Even a suite was composed from the music that found its way effortlessly into the Concert Hall . The ugly duckling had become a beautiful swan after all. But whether all the feathers were by Tchaikovsky's hand is doubtful....

Kees Wisse