Richard Wagner (1813-1883) 

Siegfried-Idyll (1870) 

Joël Bons (1952) 

'Trailblazer' (2022, world premiere)  

Break 

Hendrik Andriessen (1892-1981) 

Miroir de Peine (1923, orchestrated in 1933) 

• Agonie au jardin 

• Flagellation 

• Couronnement d'épines 

• Portement de Croix 

• Crucifixion 

Richard Strauss (1864-1949) 

Metamorphoses (1945) 

End of concert approximately 10 p.m. 

Leonard Elschenbroich conductor 

Education Yehudi Menuhin School in London; Kölner Musikhochschule. 

Highlights Concerted with orchestras such as Staatskapelle Dresden, London Philharmonic, BBC Philharmonic, Orchestre Philharmonique de Radio France and Chicago Symphony Orchestra with conductors such as Charles Dutoit, Yan-Pascal Tortelier and Andrew Litton. Esteemed guest at (chamber music) festivals and venues worldwide. Debuted in 2017 at the Residentie Orkest, played Shostakovich's Second cello concerto at the Residentie Orkest as recently as May. 

Awards include Leonard Bernstein Award, Förderpreis Deutschlandfunk, Borletti Buitoni Trust Award. 

In the press "A musician of great technical prowess, intellectual curiosity and expressive depth" - New York Times  

Lidy Blijdorp cello

Lidy Blijdorp is a cellist with tremendous narrative power. At the Amsterdam Cello Biennale, she was praised for her "staggering musicality. She graduated cum laude in The Hague, Amsterdam and Paris, and received her Artist Diploma at the prestigious Queen Elisabeth Chapel. She studied with Monique Bartels, Michel Strauss and Gary Hoffman. As a soloist, Lidy has performed with the State Hermitage Orchestra in St. Petersburg, the Orchestra of the 18th Century, the Concertgebouw Chamber Orchestra the NBE and the Residentie Orkest among others. In 2020 she received two Classical Edisons for her debut CD "Journeyers. Lidy plays Anner Bijlsma's Italian Farotti, made available to her by the National Musical Instruments Fund. 

Klaartje van Veldhoven soprano

Soprano Klaartje van Veldhoven studied in Switzerland and the Netherlands at the Schola Cantorum in Basel and the Royal Conservatory in The Hague. In a recent 4-star review of her recent CD Miroir de Peine in NRC, she was mentioned as a singer with "guts and taste. She toured Europe with the European Union Baroque Orchestra conducted by Christina Pluhar. She worked with Johannes Leertouwer, Jos van Veldhoven, Ton Koopman, Sigiswald Kuijken and Concerto Copenhagen conducted by Alfredo Bernardini. She also sang solo with Residentie orkest conducted by Shunske Sato and the Corinthian Chamber Orchestra conducted by Leonard Eisenbroich. She sang at the Festival Oude muziek, Hindsgavl Festival, Festival de Sable, Musica Viva Osnabruck, Grachtenfestival, the Peter the Great Festival, Festival Classique and Oranjewoudfestival. Future engagements include a tour in 2023 with Opera2day/the Theater Alliance with Hernan Schwartzman/Theu Boermans, where she will take on the role of the First Lady in Die Zauberflöte.

Klaartje has participated in several CD productions such as Pergolesi's Stabat Mater. This CD received a ten in Luister magazine. The CD Miroir de Peine, together with organist Matthias Havinga, received five stars in the Volkskrant.

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. 

From Andriessen to Wagner 

On Christmas Day of the year 1870, Cosima Wagner was awakened at 7:30 a.m. by soft music. Thirteen musicians from the Tonhalle Orchester Zurich and their conductor Hans Richter had traveled to Lucerne at Richard Wagner's request to surprise his beloved with a special birthday present: Siegfried-Idyll. In this intimate symphonic poem Wagner had incorporated the lullaby Schlaf mein kind and it sounded birdsong. Only when the piece had ended did Wagner walk into the bedroom with the children to hand Cosima the score of his Siegfried-Idyll , on which was written in elegant letters: 'Idyll from Tribschen with birdsong by Fidi and an orange sunrise, as a symphonic birthday greeting. Composed for his Cosima by her Richard.'  

Fidi was the pet name of their love baby Siegfried, who was born in 1869. During that birth, Wagner heard birdsong. Only a year later, Wagner and Cosima's marriage took place. The "orange sunrise" refers to the color of the wallpaper in Cosima's bedroom, which reflected the morning light during childbirth. Wagner derived the main themes of the Siegried-Idyll from leitmotifs in his operas Siegfried and Die Walküre, but in the context of his birthday gift, their meaning is transformed into the declaration of triumphant love and affection.  

For a year, Joël Bons (b. 1952) enjoyed working on his cello concerto for Lidy Blijdorp. 'When I started working on this piece, the first question was how the soloist-orchestra relationship would be,' says Bons. 'I didn't want a traditional 'concert' in which the soloist displays all his/her virtuosity and the orchestra provides a warm bedding.'While composing, a form naturally unfolded in which the soloist constantly comes up with new ideas and 'lights up' the orchestral musicians. That then became the basic idea.What always excites me is (the harbinger of) something new. Pathfinders, pioneers, trailblazers - these are the people we need to depend on, who innovate and inspire. A century ago there was suddenly The Sacre, the Bauhaus ... - so new and stimulating, so masterful. Even now there are people all over the world who are developing initiatives for a better world, from inventions to make the ocean plastic-free to effective altruism. That gives hope. 

Trailblazer was commissioned by the Residentie Orkest and resulted in a (three-part) piece for cello and chamber orchestra, consisting of 6 winds, 22 strings and 2 percussionists. The title refers to the role of soloist Lidy Blijdorp: she is the one who takes the initiative and stimulates the musicians of the orchestra to participate. In the work, she always comes up with new musical ideas, to which the orchestra musicians react, by adopting them, commenting on them or going along with them. This creates a lively interaction, a game of tag team, hesitant silences and wild outbursts. One moment sparks fly, the next moment silence is explored by groping. 

At Miroir de Peine by Hendrik Andriessen, five stages in the Passion of Christ are interpreted from the dramatic perspective of Mary, the mother of Jesus. Mary's heart breaks during the Last hours of her son Jesus, whose agony she must watch helplessly. Thus Andriessen, who was no fan of ultra-emotional expressionism, arrived at a melancholy and subdued meditation on the Passion and a hymn to true motherly love. Conscientiously, the composer pursued more internalized forms of expression, reflecting his admiration for the "objective" style of César Franck. The song cycle Miroir de Peine, initially written for soprano and organ, was created in 1923 on texts by the poet Henri Ghéon. Andriessen deliberately chose an archaic song cycle, in which mystical simplicity, universal love and religious devotion set the tone. Thus arose five intimate 'prayers' which - also in the arrangement for orchestra which Andriessen made ten years later - serenely but powerfully express the vain cry for help and the longing for intimacy. Halfway through the Second World War, when he was imprisoned in a German internment camp, Andriessen used the medieval text 'Maria schone vrouwe' to compose another Marian prayer as a gift for his wife in honor of their wedding anniversary. 

Reflections on destruction and death, colors the Metamorphoses (1945) by Richard Strauss, an elongated adagio that includes a series of intensely sad mood images. The trigger for this instrumental lament was the February 1945 bombing raid on Dresden. Desperate, the composer responded, "My beautiful Dresden, Weimar and Munich -all gone! For Strauss, who had remained in Bavaria but despised the barbaric regime of the Nazis, these bombings were the straw in the systematic destruction of a culture he once adored. Although he refused to speak out in any way about the terrible events he witnessed, at the end of the war he gave his response in the form of a "study for 23 solo empires. Metamorphoses. The title of the work refers to Goethe's Die Metamorphose der Pflanzen . A poem from this cycle was found among the score sketches. Strauss drew inspiration from it to express his changing patterns of thought in Metamorphosen . When he had almost finished the work, he realized that one of the themes bore similarity to the main theme of the funeral march from Beethoven'sEroica. Therefore, at the end, he wrote the words "in memoriam" underneath it. It also quotes from Wagner's Siegfried-Idyll.
Despite the somber tone of the beginning and ending, this piece is more than mourning and sorrow. In the lavish middle section, a loving embrace of things past rises to ecstatic heights, only to be swept away by a powerful repetition of the solemn chords with which the work begins. Strauss, who was 81 years old when he wrote this work, had until then been primarily concerned with expressing the emotions of others. But in theMetamorphoses, at the end of his life, he still came to self-expression. Somberly he wrote: "History is an almost unbroken chain of stupid and pernicious acts, of every kind of wickedness, greed, treachery, murder and destruction. And how little have those called upon to write history learned from it.' 

Wenneke Savenije