Beethoven & Bruckner

Prior to this concert, there will be a Starter. You can attend this in the Tango, on the second floor. The Starter starts 45 minutes before the start of the concert.

Katherine Ching-Fang Teng (2000)
One Minute Symphony: Lost Letters (2023) 

Opening tonight is a special One Minute Symphony written by young composition student Katherine Teng. This time not a meeting turned into music but a musical tribute to Mr. Poorter who included Residentie Orkest in his will.  

"His kindness and tremendous dedication to the Residentie Orkest I take with me in the composition process," said the composer. "He was a loyal visitor and could be found at almost all concerts since many years. In addition, he wrote many letters to the orchestra to express his gratitude. Although I was not able to read those letters, I felt from everything that he greatly appreciated and supported the orchestra. His conviction was to use the power of music to bring people together. I felt very honored to pay a musical tribute to him with my composition." 

Want to read more about the One Minute Symphony? Check out A musical tribute - Residentie Orkest 

Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827)
Piano Concerto No. 4 in G, op. 58 (1806) 

• Allegro moderato 

• Andante con moto 

• Rondo: Vivace 

Monster concert
Thursday, Dec. 22, 1808, was a dramatic date for Ludwig van Beethoven. On that day he gave a concert featuring only his own compositions. No less than two symphonies, the Choral Fantasy and several vocal pieces were on the program. On top of all this was the Fourth Piano Concerto in which the composer himself played the solo part. The "monster concert," which lasted four hours, took place in a stone-cold theater where, as the concert progressed, the audience left the hall half-frozen. What was supposed to be a highlight of the composer's career thus ended in a fiasco. The piano concerto was certainly not flawless either. Beethoven's progressive deafness affected him in such a way that he could hardly hear the orchestra and was constantly out of sync. Consequently, it was the Last time in his life that he would perform in public as a pianist.

Unique artistic and complex
The performance may have left something to be desired, but the quality of the work certainly did not. The opening alone is surprising in which, unlike what was common at the time, the soloist begins. It is only a few bars in which a fragment of the first theme can be heard. The orchestra responds in a totally unexpected key before, after some ingenious harmonic artifice, the first theme in the main key really kicks in. The middle movement is nothing more than a brief interlude, a question and answer game between the orchestra's strings playing in unison and the piano. And the third movement, too, is unusual. It is the orchestra that gently introduces the rondo theme, but in the wrong key, repeated by the piano. Only then does the music erupt in the right key, and soloist and ensemble make it a joyously dancing finale. Six months after the bizarre marathon concerto, the Algemeine Musikalische Zeitung praised the Fourth Piano Concerto as an "admirable, unique, artistic and complex concerto," but the public did not get to hear it again for the time being. Not until 1838 was it Felix Mendelssohn who performed the work again in which he himself played the solo part.

In the intermission we serve a free drink

Anton Bruckner (1824-1896)
Symphony No. 4 in E-flat 'Romantic' (1874-1888) 

• Moves, nicht zu schnell 

• Andante quasi Allegretto 

• Scherzo. Bewegt - Trio. Nicht zu schnell. Keinesfalls schleppend 

• Finale. Bewegt, doch nicht zu schnell 

Sunrise, prayer and hunting
How much Anton Bruckner, like Beethoven, would have liked to be famous in his younger years. But it wasn't in the cards. When he moved to Vienna in 1868, now 44 years old, to become a teacher of harmony and counterpoint at the conservatory, he had achieved some national and international fame as an organist, but as a composer he lived in almost complete anonymity. That did not prevent him from engaging in an almost feverish activity of writing symphonies in his new home. Between 1869 and 1875 he composed no less than five of them, none of which, except for an unsuccessful performance of the Third Symphony , made it to Concert Hall . The Fourth Symphony took up most of 1874, and in the years that followed he continued to continually sand and polish the work. He even created a completely new scherzo and finale in 1878, though he rejected it again Last and largely reverted to the original version.  

Bruckner gave the work the nickname Romantic . By this he did not mean pathos so much as lyricism in which he envisioned a programmatic image for some movements. For example, the opening movement was the awakening in a medieval city where the horns of the first bars announce the beginning of the day. The second movement takes place in a chapel where a devout prayer resounds. Then follows a hunting scene with exuberant horn blaring but reduced in the trio to a pastoral Ländler, a quiet folk dance popular in the Vienna area in the nineteenth century. About the finale Bruckner did not let on. He did briefly let the horn signal of the opening be heard, thus completing the symphonic circle. 

Fame at last
It was not until 1881 that Bruckner first heard something of the Fourth Symphony when Hans Richter performed the work with his Vienna Philharmonic in a private concert. The general public had to wait a few more years. Only when Bruckner's Seventh in 1886 led to stormy enthusiasm among listeners, the Fourth followed six months later with, if possible, even more success. Bruckner was now 63 years old, but at last he had achieved the same fame as Beethoven 75 years earlier. 

Kees Wisse