Residentie Orkest The Hague

Anja Bihlmaier conductor

Vivi Vassileva percussion
Tobias Melle photography and live projection

Iris Bramberger (2000)
One Minute Symphony: Still round & round (2023)

Gregor Mayrhofer (1987)

Recycling Concerto (2021; Dutch premiere)

- The happy tsunami of wealth

- Meltdown - Meltup

- Plastic Bottle Cadenza

- Recycling Music

Break

Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827)

Symphony no. 6 in F, op. 68 'Pastorale' (1808) / Pastorale in Images by Tobias Melle

- Erwachen heiterer Empfindungen bei der Ankunft auf dem Lande (Allegro ma non troppo)

- Szene am Bach (Andante molto moto)

- Lustiges Zusammensein der Landleute (Allegro)

- Gewitter, Sturm (Allegro)

- Hirtengesang. Frohe und dankbare Gefühle nach dem Sturm (Allegretto)

End of concert approximately 10 p.m.

Anja Bihlmaier - conductor

Studies Musikhochschule Freiburg, Mozarteum Salzburg.

Current position Chief Conductor Residentie Orkest, regular guest conductor Lahti Symphony Orchestra.
Highlights Recently she has conducted the Deutsches Symphonie-Orchester Berlin, Deutsche Radio Philharmonie Saarbrücken Kaiserslautern, Royal Stockholm Philharmonic, Lahti Symphony Orchestra, Tampere Philharmonic, City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra, BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra, Orquestra Symfónica de Barcelona, Basque National Orchestra, Gothenburg Symphony, Finnish Radio Orchestra, Orquesta Sinfónica de Madrid and MDR-Sinfonieorchester. In recent seasons she also conducted several opera productions in Vienna (Volksoper), Trondheim and Malmö. Was permanently associated with the opera houses of Kassel and Hannover.

Vivi Vassileva - percussion

Studies with Claudio Estay; Hochschule für Musik und Theater in Munich and with Martin Grubinger at the Universität Mozarteum Salzburg.

Highlights Soloed with various orchestras such as the Wiener Symphoniker, Britten Sinfonia, Gürzenich Orchester Köln and Neue Philharmonie München. Can also be found at such important festivals as Heidelberger Frühling and Schleswig-Holstein Music Festival. Expands the percussion repertoire by commissioning composers such as Bushra El-Turk, Claas Krause and Gregor Mayrhofer.

Makes her debut at the Residentie Orkest.

Prizes include two awards at the renowned ARD-Musikwettbewerk (2014) and Bayerischer Kunstförderpreis (2017).

Website www.vividrums.com

Tobias Melle - photography and live projection

Has been working in the tension between musical and visual worlds for over thirty years. For his "symphonies in pictures," he often travels for months with a camera and score to find the right pictures. What makes his work special is the structurally and emotionally coherent translation of musical contexts into associative images, which he always performs personally and live - like a musical soloist, he adapts to the conductor's interpretation. His "symphonies in images" have been performed by orchestras at home and abroad, including Tonhalle Orchester Zurich, Houston Symphony Orchestra and Hong Kong Philharmonic Orchestra.

More information (in German) about the Pastoral in Images can be found here.

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.

Mayrhofer and Beethoven

A concert where you will not only be short of ears but also eyes. In his Recycling Concerto , composer Gregor Mayrhofer not only lets us hear but also see what he wants to say with his composition. And to the sounds of the "Pastorale," photographer Tobias Melle bridges in images the contrast between Beethoven's ideal nature and our current struggle with that same nature.

How current do you want to be as a composer? Considerably, if it is up to the German Gregor Mayrhofer. In several of his works, he musically puts his finger on the sore spot of global problems that threaten humanity, but arrives at a solution at least as creatively. In Recycling Concerto , he tackles the challenge of the enormous mountain of waste. Musical starting point is the principle that you can label as percussion any object that you can strike and which produces a usable sound. This makes Recycling Concerto basically a solo concerto for percussion and orchestra, written especially for Vivi Vassileva.

Right at the beginning, orchestra and soloist create quite a pile of trash on stage. Vivi plays professional instruments like marimba, vibraphone and glockenspiel, which, in addition to skillful playing, she gets sound out of by sprinkling it with junk like used corks and empty coffee cups. The orchestra members bravely help her along by throwing used plastic bags at her. But in the parts that follow, the percussionist takes a different tack. She abandons the classical instruments and switches to an arsenal of discarded utensils. But one that has music in it. What about a marimba made from PET bottles, a xylophone made from pots, pans, and cups, or a glockenspiel made from small bottles? She turns them into fully-fledged musical instruments on which she plays with great virtuosity. The highlight, however, is a cadenza in which she manages to extract a range of sounds from just one plastic bottle.

Despite the topicality of the composition, you don't feel like you're listening to a state-of-the-art piece. Mayrhofer ensures that the interplay of harmony, melody and rhythm, are pleasant, but above all fascinating to listen to. Thus recognizable melodies pass by, but also jazzy passages and even in the second movement a passacaglia based on a twelve-tone motif.

Set of postcards

While Ludwig van Beethoven's Vienna may not have known any real environmental pollution, it was not particularly clean either. Like many other large cities, Vienna was downright filthy. There were hardly any sewers, the streets were full of horse droppings that became a filthy mush after a rainy period, and everyone just threw their dirt on the street. Especially in summer, the heat made the stench unbearable, and everyone who could fled the city. The imperial family went to the Schönbrunn country house or to the spa town of Baden near the city where the rest of the nobility and wealthy bourgeoisie also had a good time. Beethoven, too, often left summer Vienna for what it was and took up residence for a few months in one of the villages around the city. There he enjoyed the quiet and made long walks through the woods and fields. It was inevitable that he would incorporate these impressions into a composition. It became his Sixth symphony , which he appropriately called the "Pastoral. He described it as "Erinnerungen an das Landleben," and although he claimed it was "more expression than painting," it has the effect of a set of poetic postcards depicting rural life. The subtitles of the various parts leave nothing to be desired in this regard. This begins in the first movement with a cheerful sunrise in the crisp morning. During a languid afternoon, Beethoven lies in the shade of a tree with his feet in a cool stream and enjoys the birds he literally blows in. Then follows a village festival that is rudely interrupted, however, by a strong thunderstorm. This is where the rugged Beethoven briefly comes around the corner. With heady passages and sometimes almost atonal harmonies, he hits you with lightning and thunder. When the Last rumbling in the distance has disappeared, the villagers thank the Most High with a sweet devotional hymn as the sun sets.

Kees Wisse