Max van Platen (1996)
One Minute Symphony: Dance of the Magpie (2022)

Johannes Brahms (1833-1897)
Variationen über ein Thema von Joseph Haydn, op. 56a (1873)

William Walton (1902-1983)
Cello Concerto (1956) 

- Moderato
- Allegro appassionato
- Tema ed improvvisazioni

Break 

Igor Stravinsky (1882-1971)
Suite from 'L'oiseau de feu' (1911 - 1945 version) 

- Introduction - Danse de l'Oiseau de feu - Variations de l'Oiseau de feu
- Pantomime I
- Pas de deux: l'Oiseau de feu et Ivan Tsarévitch
- Pantomime II
- Scherzo: danse des Princesses
- Pantomime III
- Khorovode des Princesses
- Danse infernale de Kachtcheï et de ses sujets
- Berceuse
- Finale 

William Walton (1902-1983)
Cello Concerto (1956)
- Moderato
- Allegro appassionato
- Tema ed improvvisazioni 

Igor Stravinsky (1882-1971)
Suite from 'L'oiseau de feu' (1911 - 1945 version)
- Introduction - Danse de l'Oiseau de feu - Variations de l'Oiseau de feu
- Pantomime I
- Pas de deux: l'Oiseau de feu et Ivan Tsarévitch
- Pantomime II
- Scherzo: danse des Princesses
- Pantomime III
- Khorovode des Princesses
- Danse infernale de Kachtcheï et de ses sujets
- Berceuse
- Finale 

Nuno Coelho conductor

Current position Permanent guest conductor Orchestra Gulbenkian (Lisbon).

Studied Violin in Klagenfurt and Brussels and orchestral conducting at the Zürcher Hochschule der Künste.

Highlights Stood for Symponieorchester des Bayerischen Rundfunks, Los Angeles Philharmonic, Orquesta Sinfónica de Barcelona, Dresdner Philharmonie and Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra.As an opera conductor, Coelho led productions of La traviata, Cavalleria rusticana, Rusalka and Das Tagebuch der Anne Frank and assisted Marc Albrecht in a production of Parsifal. Assisting he also did for Bernard Haitink, Susanna Mälkki, Andris Nelsons and Gustavo Dudamel. Makes his debut at the Residentie Orkest.

Prizes include winner Cadaqués International Conducting Competition (2017). 

Nicolas Altstaedt cello

Highlights The German-French cellist is a versatile artist. As soloist, conductor and artistic director, he performs repertoires from old masters to contemporary pioneers. Soloed with the National Symphony Orchestra (Washington), Wiener Philharmoniker, Orchestre National de France and was artist in residence with the NDR Elbphilharmonie Orchester and this season with SWR Symphony Orchestra in Stuttgart. Gave the Finnish premiere of Esa-Pekka Salonen's Cello Concerto with the composer conducting. Conducted himself the Aurora Orchestra and Orchestre Philharmonique de Radio France. Is artistic director of the Kammermusikfestival Lockenhaus and Haydn Philharmonie. Makes his debut at the Residentie Orkest. 

Residentie Orkest The Hague

Founded The Hague, 1904

Current chief conductor Anja Bihlmaier

Permanentguest 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.

Featured at Amare, Paard, The National Opera, Royal Concertgebouw, De Doelen, TivoliVredenburg among others.

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

Brahms, Walton and Stravinsky 

Colorful sounds in which the composers of this program connect old and new. Brahms takes inspiration from an eighteenth-century church song, Walton moves between classical and modern, and Stravinsky brings an old Russian fairy tale to contemporary life. 

Song for Saint Anthony
For a long time it has been thought that the six Feldparthien for winds were by Joseph Haydn, especially since he used the music at the court of Esterhazy, but research has shown this to be highly doubtful on stylistic grounds. Johannes Brahms became acquainted with this music when it was brought to his attention by his friend and Haydn biographer Carl Friedrich Pohl.

He was deeply impressed by the particle Chorale St. Anthone from the second Feldparthie, which was based on a devotional anthem of Haydn's time. Brahms used it in 1873 as the basis for a series of variations for orchestra, which he also arranged for two pianos shortly thereafter.

Very discreetly, Brahms presents the theme in its original form with the original harmonies and largely the same wind instrumentation. What follows is a series of variations in true nineteenth-century style in which Brahms treats the theme very freely.

All in all, it seems as if Haydn has nothing to do with the Haydn Variations named after him . Almost nothing then, because in the finale Brahms quotes a small motif from Haydn's Symphony No. 101 at the very end .  

Progressive and conservative
It is almost impossible to lump William Walton's oeuvre under one heading. According to critics, he began his long career as an enthusiastic avant-gardist but ended it as a somewhat old-fashioned composer in a Romantic tradition.

Both are only partly true, and listening to his Cello Concerto , one can really only conclude that he moves subtly between progressive and conservative. There are no raw hyper-modern sounds to be heard in the work and it remains fundamentally euphonious.

But also tonality you will search in vain so endlessly he robustly changes key every few bars. It makes the music diffuse and sometimes elusive, but it is a kind of indeterminacy where it is pleasant to dwell. 

Each of the three movements has its completely distinct character. The opening movement is a succession of melodic lines that move freely through the orchestra and cello part, thus having the effect of an "endless" melody.

The contrasting second movement is a rapid rhapsody based primarily on rhythm. Walton calls the final movement not a "theme with variations," but "theme with improvisations."

For what follows the theme are not variations in the classical sense of the word. Much more are improvisations, in which the theme can only be heard fragmentarily and purely associatively. 

White, gray and black magic
It is one of those golden combinations in art history: impresario Serge Diaghilev, leader of the renowned Ballets Russes in Paris with a fine nose for innovative ballets and composer Igor Stravinsky, who possessed an extraordinary talent for theatrical music. 

L'oiseau de feu - a Russian folk tale of a young prince who, with the help of the legendary firebird, rescues a beautiful princess from the hands of an evil sorcerer - was their first collaboration, and immediately one that met with great success.

While the choreography was still quite classical, Stravinsky's music certainly was not. With the huge orchestra at his disposal, he turned it into a completely colorful symphonic poem.

The beauty of this is that he portrays the fairy tale characters recognizably on different levels. The white magic of the prince and princess is warm and tonal, the gray magic of the firebird is chromatic in character, the black magic of the evil wizard and his henchmen is extremely dissonant, verging on the atonal. 

Stravinsky did realize that his music was worth listening to even without fancy sets, costumes and dancers. As early as 1911, he composed a suite from the work that could be played at Concert Hall . In 1919 he created a new suite in which he prescribed a slightly smaller orchestra.


For a third time he took up the suite in 1945. By now he had been living in America for several years, and in order to avoid the rights in the Soviet Union, which included the original ballet and the two suites, he made a new version entirely under American copyright.
Kees Wisse 

How famous Stravinsky was thanks to his "Firebird," as the English title of "L'oiseau de feu" goes, he himself told an American journalist: "Once when I was on the train in America , I was addressed in awe as Mr. Fireberg."

Brahms wrote the Haydn Variations in the summer of 1873 while on vacation in Tutzing, Bavaria, at what is today called the Brahms Pavilion.

Walton received for his Cello Concerto a, for the time, princely sum of $3,000.00. With slight self-mockery, he said of this, "I'll write anything anyone asks me to, but I compose a lot better when I get paid in dollars."

One Minute Symphony
Composition student Max van Platen sought inspiration for his One Minute Symphony at the Art Museum. Here he spoke to Doede Hardeman, the museum's Head of Collections, about the work The Blue Flame by Constant (1920-2005). In particular, the idea of redesigning the world and achieving a utopia where one can have a free spirit appealed to Max.