Residentie Orkest The Hague 

Richard Egarr, conductor 

Antje Weithaas, violin 

Karmit Fadael (1996)
One Minute Symphony: Ananim (2018) 

Ralph Vaughan Williams(1872-1958) 

Symphony No. 5 (1938-1943) 

• Preludio: Moderato 

• Scherzo: Presto misterioso 

• Romanza: Lento 

• Passacaglia: Moderato 

Break 

Johannes Brahms(1833-1897) 

Violin Concerto in D, op. 77 (1878) 

• Allegro non troppo 

• Adagio 

• Allegro giocoso, ma non troppo vivace - poco più presto 

End of concert approximately 10 p.m. 

Richard Egarr - conductor 

Studies Began as a choirboy at York Minster, then Chetham's School of Music (Manchester) and Clare College Cambridge (organ). Harpsichord studies with Gustav and Marie Leonhardt. 

Current position Permanent guest conductor Residentie Orkest The Hague, artistic partner of St. Paul Chamber Orchestra in Minnesota and music director of the Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra and Chorale. 

Highlights Plays all types of keyboard instruments, performs in a variety of chamber music settings, and is in great demand as a soloist and conductor. Has appeared before The Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment, Orchestra of the Eighteenth Century, Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra, London Symphony and Philadelphia Orchestra, among others, and was associate artist of the Scottish Chamber Orchestra from 2011-2017. Was also chief conductor of the Academy of Ancient Music for 15 years. 

Antje Weithaas - violin 

Studies Began playing the violin as a four-year-old, studied at the Hochschule für Musik "Hanns Eisler" in Berlin. 

Highlights Worked with orchestras such as the Deutsches Symphonie-Orchester, Bamberger Symphoniker, Los Angeles Philharmonic, San Francisco Symphony, Philharmonia Orchestra and BBC Symphony Orchestra with conductors such as Yakov Kreizberg, Sir Neville Marriner, Jun Märkl, Carlos Kalmar and Vladimir Ashkenazy. Was artistic director of Camerata Bern for ten years. Has been professor of violin at Hochschule für Musik 'Hanns Eisler' since 2004. Debuted in 1999 at the Residentie Orkest in Gubaidoelina's Offertorium. 

Prizes Kreisler-Wettbewerb in Graz (1988), Bach-Wettbewerb in Leipzig (1988) and the international Joseph Joachim Violin Competition in Hannover (1991). 

Other Plays a violin by Peter Greiner (2001). 

Residentie Orkest The Hague 

Founded The Hague, 1904 

Current chief conductor Anja Bihlmaier 

Permanent guest conductors Richard Egarr and Jun Märkl 

Chief conductors Henri Viotta, Peter van Anrooy, Frits Schuurman, Willem van Otterloo, Jean Martinon, Ferdinand Leitner, Hans Vonk, Evgenii Svetlanov, Jaap van Zweden, Neeme Järvi, Nicholas Collon. 

To be seen at Amare, Paard, The National Opera, Royal Concertgebouw, De Doelen, TivoliVredenburg among others . 

Education Annual outreach to over 40,000 schoolchildren, adults and amateur musicians in educational projects. Part of this is The Residents, through which the orchestra brings hundreds of children from districts in The Hague into contact with classical music. 

Fadael, Vaughan Willams and Brahms 

This evening begins with the One Minute Symphony by Israeli-Dutch composer Karmit Fadael, who has already written several compositions for the Residentie Orkest. The title of her piece Ananim is Hebrew and means "clouds. A solo violin shines in this short work, as a nod to Brahms' Violin Concerto that will be heard later this evening. It moves like a ray of sunlight among the meandering (sound) clouds, each with its own color and orchestrated to the square millimeter. 

This year marks the 150th anniversary of Ralph Vaughan Williams' birth, but even in his native Britain, he gets a bit of a pass. The BBC recently characterized his music as mostly peaceful pastorales, steeped in the British folk and church music tradition. Music that evokes nostalgia in turbulent times anno today. But Vaughan Williams offers more. 

Vaughan Williams, raised in the rural areas of Gloucestershire and Sussex, also lived in troubled times. After studying music in London, where the British choral tradition was prominent in the curriculum, and after further study with Bruch and Ravel, Vaughan Williams immersed himself in the folk music of his country. He traveled throughout regions, towns and villages listening to folk songs and studying them with fellow composer Gustav Holst. In the combination of these influences, he sought his musical identity. 

After his experiences as an ambulance driver during World War I, no music came out of his pen for many years. Nevertheless, he got back on his feet, wrote nine symphonies, several operas, ballets and church music, among others, and slowly grew into one of the great composers of his generation. The Fifth Symphony ("dedicated without permission to Jean Sibelius") he wrote during World War II. Immediately in the opening bars, the listener is presented with a question: in what key are we entering? The basses play in C, but the horns play a melody in D. Only as the symphony progresses will the composer provide the answer. Despite the bitonality, and sometimes even using old church modes or pentatonics, Vaughan Williams' music is very accessible. He wrote very melodic and quasi-vocal, colorfully orchestrated, but harmonically the music remains subtly ambiguous.  

Notable in the symphony's sketches are such added titles as "Funeral March for the Old Order" (Preludio) and quotations from his opera The Pilgrim's Progress. Work on this opera based on Bunyan's book of the same name, took so much time (nearly forty years) that Vaughan Williams thought he would not be able to complete it. Presumably, therefore, he incorporated much of the material into his Fifth Symphony, but there was no extra-musical significance, according to the composer. He again deleted the added texts and titles, although the church music quotations remain ubiquitous. The final movement is a passacaglia in the Baroque tradition of Purcell, with variations on a repeating theme in bass line. Only here does Vaughan Williams answer his question about the key: a triumphant D major. 

Just as Vaughan Williams absorbed the musical roots of his country, so did Johannes Brahms in Germany. Brahms realized better than anyone how much he was part of the Germanic tradition that ran from Schütz and Bach, through Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven to his generation. So much so that pressure as a torchbearer of such a musical legacy also got in his way.  

Before Brahms realized it, as a young twenty-something he was taken on a tour with Hungarian violinist Ede Reményi. Here he learned about gypsy music AND met violinist Joseph Joachim, two encounters that were of lasting significance for Brahms. 

In the summer of 1878, when Brahms was in his summer cottage on the Wörthersee, his Violin Concerto wrote, he sought contact with his friend Joachim to ask his advice on violinistic matters. A long correspondence with musical proposals back and forth shaped the concerto into the work we hear today. This struggle between symphonist and violinist also characterizes the reception of the Violin Concerto. For conductor Von Bülow, it was even a "Konzert gegen die Violine. 

A large proportion of the prominent melodies were assigned to the orchestra, giving the work a symphonic allure. This sometimes caused frustration among soloists who feared being too low profile. The Spanish violinist Pablo de Sarasate, for example, refused to play the concerto because he did not want to wait so long on stage while the oboe played the longest and most beautiful melody of the piece in the Adagio. Wonderful melodies the concerto certainly contains. According to Brahms, the area around his Austrian cottage was teeming with beautiful melodies, so many that one had to be careful not to step on them. The virtuoso final movement is a nod to gypsy music.  

On New Year's Day, 1879, at the Gewandhaus in Leipzig, Joachim played the premiere of the new Violin Concerto, featuring in the first movement his own great solo cadence that is still performed today. The composer himself, in the rush of forgetting to put on his concert clothes, was on the bandstand.

Frans Boendermaker