Gustav Mahler (1860-1911)
What the Wild Flowers Tell Me (1893-1896) 

(adaptation Benjamin Britten, 1941) 

Ernest Chausson (1855-1899)
Poème, op. 25 (1896)

Maurice Ravel (1875-1937) 

Tzigane, rhapsody de concert (1924) 

Break 

Charles Baumstark 

One Minute Symphony: Dernier écho du chant éclatant d'un vent de minuit (2022) 

Jean Sibelius (1865-1957) 

Symphony no. 2 in D, op. 43 (1902) 

• Allegretto, Poco allegro 

• Tempo andante ma rubato, Poco allegro, Andante, Pesante 

• Vivacissimo, Lento e soave 

• Finale: Allegro moderato, Largamente

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. 

Simone Lamsma violin 

Studies Yehudi Menuhin School, graduated cum laude from the Royal Academy of Music in London at the age of nineteen. 

Highlights Worked with conductors such as Jaap van Zweden, Vladimir Jurowski, Sir Neville Marriner, Yannick Nézet-Séguin, Jukka-Pekka Saraste, James Gaffigan and Sir Andrew Davis and has performed with the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra, Chicago Symphony Orchestra, Cleveland Orchestra, BBC Symphony, Orchestre Philharmonique de Radio France and Hong Kong Philharmonic, among others. 

Violin Plays the "Mlynarksi" Stradivarius (1718). 

Other Is this season artist in residence of Residentie Orkest, Royal Conservatoire The Hague and Amare. 

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. 

Mahler, Chausson, Ravel and Sibelius 

Pastoral 

We are writing 1941 when Benjamin Britten receives a request from his publisher Erwin Stein. Whether the composer feels up to arranging a movement from Gustav Mahler's colossal Third Symphony for a slimmed-down symphony orchestra. Call it an attempt to bring Mahler's music, then not yet "ironclad repertoire" in England, to the attention of a wider audience. 

Mahler's Third Symphony is known as his symphony of nature. In six movements, the Viennese fin-de-siècle composer lets various elements of creation pass in review. From rocks and stones in the first movement, to divine love in the Last. Part two, "What the meadow flowers tell me," is a pastoral minuet with an oboe playing for shepherd in the opening measures. 

Exotic love song 

Ernest Chausson was what has been called a musical late bloomer. The only child of a wealthy family, he was destined for a well-paid career as a lawyer. However, he spent his law studies mainly in Parisian salons, where he ended up in the capital's art world. Exit law, in other words. 

It is 1879 when Chausson enters the Paris Conservatoire. There he takes counterpoint lessons with Cesar Franck, whose ideas on harmony and motivic development he eagerly makes his own. Another major influence is the music of Richard Wagner. No less than three times Chausson would travel to Germany to attend his revolutionary Musikdramas. 

That both Franck and Wagner continue to leave a major mark on Chausson's music is evident in his Poème for violin and orchestra, written in 1896 for Eugène Ysaÿe. At the same time, the subtitle, Le Chant de l'amour triomphant, refers to more exotic sources of inspiration. In Ivan Turgenev's story of the same name, two friends compete for the hand of the same woman. When the musician Muzzio loses out, he goes on a journey in the Orient, where he learns to play a mysterious love song on the sarangi (Indian string instrument). 

Gipsy-style 

In 1922 Maurice Ravel became acquainted with the Hungarian violinist Jelly d'Arányi, the second cousin of the renowned Joseph Joachim. The French composer must have been duly impressed by her fiery playing, for he immediately conceived the plan to write a piece for her. 

The result is better known today as Tzigane (1924), a work that shows once again that Ravel had an open ear when it came to exotic musical styles. As the title suggests ("tzigane" is French for "gypsy"), Ravel drew much of his inspiration from gypsy music, which is clearly audible in Eastern European-spiced scales of the long introductory solo and the dizzying czárdás dance of the final bars. But he was also inspired by the technical aspects of gipsy-style violin playing, as evidenced by the arsenal of pizzicati, double handles and rasping sounds presented to the soloist. 

Visionary shape experiment 

Around 1900, Jean Sibelius became the figurehead of Finnish music. His success has everything to do with the radical stylistic choices he made in the 1890s. In works such as the symphonic cantata Kullervo, the Karelia Suite and symphonic poems En saga and Finlandia , he experimented with influences from Finnish folk music and drew inspiration from national myths and sagas. His music thus became a resounding symbol of Finnish independenceism, which came to a boiling point around 1900 in reaction to Russian domination. 

Sibelius' Second symphony, completed in 1902, is also often attributed a nationalistic undertone. For example, conductor Georg Schnéevoigt, a close friend of Sibelius, claimed that the work would be a sketch of pastoral Finnish life cruelly disrupted by the Russians. Hear the pastoral opening that quickly gives way to a darker sound world, though the finale suggests that the Finns triumph in the end.

Yet it is questionable whether Sibelius really had such a patriotic program in mind. After all, his Second Symphony can also be listened to more abstractly: as the work of a composer who self-consciously claims his place within the classical symphonic tradition. Not for nothing do we hear Sibelius experimenting with his own visionary ideas about form, thematic development and motivic coherence. Illustrative is the first movement. Normally, the main themes are presented here in full only to disintegrate into separate motifs in the so-called "working through. But as American musicologist Burnett James notes in The Music of Sibelius , the opposite happens here: Sibelius begins with loose motifs that he then organically blossoms into full-fledged melodies. The opening of the second movement with rolling timpani and double basses played pizzicato is also remarkable, as is the lyrical oboe theme of the Trio section of the Scherzo. 

Joep Christenhusz