Netherlands Radio Philharmonic Archives - NativeDSD Music

Bruckner Symphony no. 1

Sjoerd Staal — Sat, 27 Jun 2015 00:00:00 +0000

Anton Bruckner, born in the Austrian village of Ansfelden on 4 September 1824, first worked as assistant schoolmaster at an unsightly school in an equally unsightly hamlet not far away called Windhaag, near Linz. When he took his last breath on 11 October 1896 as one of the greatest composers Austria ever produced, in a tiny chamber (Kustodenstöckl) of the Viennese palace of Belvedere that had kindly been placed at his disposal by the imperial court, the finale of his Ninth Symphony was well under way but still unfinished. Although the rapid advance of industrialisation has made great incursions here and there on the Upper Austrian landscape, and although the ravages of time have eaten away at the integrity of Bruckner’s Lebensraum, there are still more than enough sites to be found which could certainly have formed a backdrop to his early symphonies. In that sense, listening to the First Symphony is a trip of discovery through Bruckner’s countryside, within the triangle formed by Ansfelden (birthplace), St. Florian (with its famous Stift, where Bruckner, first as a choirboy and later as a mature musician, found the much-needed distance from the workaday world to play the extremely beautiful organ) and lastly Linz, with its majestic Cathedral, where Bruckner held the not inconsiderable post of organist until 1868. The powerful organ tones, with their unsuspected force, would be heard like glorious sound pillars in his symphonic epos.

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Simplicius Simplicissimus

Sjoerd Staal — Fri, 05 Sep 2014 00:00:00 +0000

Hartmann completed the original version of Simplicius between 1934 and 1936, and revised the work in 1957. It was his friend, the conductor and contemporary music advocate, Hermann Scherchen (b. 1891, d. 1966), who had prevailed upon the young Hartmann to write the opera. Scherchen felt the theme lent itself perfectly to a political parody of Nazism. He put the composer on von Grimmelshausen’s path, and gave the initial impetus to the libretto, which Wolfgang Petzet and Hartmann himself completed. If von Grimmelshausen and Hartmann have anything in common, it is certainly their astute, unsparing analysis of the reality around them, which so singularly informs their legacy – all the more so because Hartmann did not want to write an opera historicizing the Thirty Years War which had raged in Germany from 1618 to 1648. On the contrary, his aim was to hold up a ruthless mirror to the world of the emerging Third Reich. The setting in which the initially utterly naive shepherd boy Simplicius is placed in this music drama is thus decidedly allusive. Little imagination is needed, for instance, to see the wolf, which appears in the first scene and re-emerges subsequently more than once, as symbolizing Hitler. In the finale to the first scene, in which mercenaries destroy the peasantry, the work as a whole retroactively takes on a powerfully prophetic overtone, with the notorious Kristallnacht having taken place on the night of 9–10 November 1938, only two years after Hartmann had completed his first version of Simplicius.

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Parsifal-1

Sjoerd Staal — Tue, 02 Sep 2014 00:00:00 +0000

Philosopher Ernst Bloch once referred to the ‘Bühnenweihfestspiel’ or consecrational stage festival Parsifal as ‘a metaphysical adagio’. In these few words he summed up the story line and the musical purport of Wagner’s last opera – that is, if such a thing is at all possible in his operas, because as a composer Wagner was never at a loss for words when it came to bandying about statements artistic and non-artistic about the world in general and the universe in particular. Wagner’s musical theatre revolves around fundamental questions of human existence. Tristan und Isolde is about an all-consuming love, but also about the implications of the longing for love and the death wish. The work is about defining an identity through love and the loss of that identity through that same love. Der Ring des Nibelungen is about the incompatibility of love and the pursuit of power; it is also an in-depth exploration of the question of whether man has a free will, and it is about the eternal cycle of destruction and renewal which holds mankind captive on this earth. Parsifal is about all of the above and much, much more. Wagner himself defined the theme of his swan song as ‘Das gro.e Leid des Lebens’, the great suffering of life.

Everything he still wanted to say at the end of his life about life, love, sex, psychology, politics, society, nature, art, Christianity, Buddhism, Judaism and anti-Semitism was mixed together in a grail chalice (poisonous, according to some) to form a ‘metaphysical adagio’ of four hours of consecrational musical drama. Consecrational in the literal meaning of the word. Wagner’s own name for the genre, ‘Bühnenweihfestspiel’ means a consecrational stage festival. The plot of Parsifal refers implicitly and explicitly to Christianity and religious rites. Indeed, it was one of Wagner’s many ambitions to replace European Christianity by his own ritual art.

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Parsifal-2

Sjoerd Staal — Tue, 02 Sep 2014 00:00:00 +0000

Philosopher Ernst Bloch once referred to the ‘Bühnenweihfestspiel’ or consecrational stage festival Parsifal as ‘a metaphysical adagio’. In these few words he summed up the story line and the musical purport of Wagner’s last opera – that is, if such a thing is at all possible in his operas, because as a composer Wagner was never at a loss for words when it came to bandying about statements artistic and non-artistic about the world in general and the universe in particular. Wagner’s musical theatre revolves around fundamental questions of human existence. Tristan und Isolde is about an all-consuming love, but also about the implications of the longing for love and the death wish. The work is about defining an identity through love and the loss of that identity through that same love. Der Ring des Nibelungen is about the incompatibility of love and the pursuit of power; it is also an in-depth exploration of the question of whether man has a free will, and it is about the eternal cycle of destruction and renewal which holds mankind captive on this earth. Parsifal is about all of the above and much, much more. Wagner himself defined the theme of his swan song as ‘Das große Leid des Lebens’, the great suffering of life.

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Symphony no. 3

Sjoerd Staal — Tue, 08 Jul 2014 00:00:00 +0000

Bruckner – Symphony no. 3 Anton Bruckner meticulously noted it in his calendar: autumn 1872, first rejection of the performance of the Third Symphony in Vienna; autumn 1875, second rejection; September 27, 1877, third rejection. Thanks to the efforts of his good friend Johann (von Ritter) Herbeck (who had conducted the premiere of Schubert’s “Unfinished” Symphony), Vienna’s Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde decided to programme the work on December 16, 1877, the second concert in the Gesellschaft series. Herbeck was to conduct the Vienna Philharmonic for the occasion in the “Golden Hall” of Vienna’s Musikverein. On October 28, however, Herbeck unexpectedly died, putting the premiere in doubt. That same evening, Bruckner sought the support of the influential Reichstag delegate and later Bruckner biographer August Göllerich, a close friend of Nikolaus Dumba, the Gesellschaft’s president. His efforts paid off, and the performance of the Third Symphony was saved. Alas, no conductor could be found who wanted to perform the work, so Bruckner, who was not used to leading an orchestra, took on the – to his mind, thankless – task. The results were predictable. Already in the rehearsals, things started going wrong. The orchestra’s musicians showed scant respect for the poor composer. They sabotaged the proceedings by intentionally playing out of tune and weaving odd notes and ornaments into the music. They stubbornly refused to repeat certain phrases and repeatedly laughed at Bruckner to his face. The great composer was the helpless conductor who baptized one of the most impressive compositions in music history in an exceedingly unpleasant atmosphere created largely by notorious troublemakers. Aside from the unfortunate rehearsals, other aspects of the concert were unfavourable for Bruckner: before the intermission, Joseph Hellmesberger conducted a programme that, to put it mildly, was excessively long: Beethoven’s Egmont Overture and the Violin Concerto in D minor by Louis Spohr followed multiple arias from Mozart’s Le nozze di Figaro and Peter von Winter’s Das unterbrochene Opernfest (already largely forgotten). Were that not enough, there was Beethoven’s Meeresstille und glu?ckliche Fahrt before Bruckner could present the Third Symphony.

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Bruckner Symphony No. 8

Sjoerd Staal — Sat, 28 Jun 2014 00:00:00 +0000

Despite the big differences between them, there is a certain kinship between Bruckner’s ‘official’ nine symphonies (the ones he decided to call ‘valid’): the broadly expansive themes with their lengthy build-up of tension and the expectant tremolo of the strings (first introduced by Beethoven in his Ninth Symphony) at the beginning, from which the main theme wells up. Bruckner often gives the singsong, sometimes distinctly lyrical second theme a contrapuntal second voice. The third theme, on the other hand, is often monolithic, full of clenched energy, that bursts out in unison and goes on to develop a huge rhythmic force. Then there are the long drawn-out Adagios with their heavenly cantilenas and the starkly contrasting, waggish Scherzos, almost smelling of earth. They are all just as characteristic of Bruckner’s compositions as the broadness of the codas in the outer movements, introduced by a soft roll of the timpanis. But despite the similarities, all his symphonies are fundamentally and completely different and are certainly not interchangeable. This can be said of each of the movements separately and of the entire work.

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Bruckner Symphony no. 6

Sjoerd Staal — Sat, 28 Jun 2014 00:00:00 +0000

In the early days of the symphonies history, there was nothing like the meticulousness of our approach to Bruckner’s work. On February 26, 1899, Gustav Mahler gave in Vienna the first performance of the Sixth, in his own version, in which he substantially reworked both the instrumentation and notes and showed no aversion to sweeping cuts. The first printed score of Bruckner’s Sixth appeared in the summer of 1899, however it deviated greatly from the original work. Largely responsible for this was Josef Schalk (1857-1900), a highly respected conductor in Vienna and an early Bruckner admirer (Bruckner often referred to him as “Herr Generalissimus”). Did Bruckner ever hear his “keckste” composition performed? That cannot be answered with any certainty.

We know that during a concert in Vienna on February 11, 1883, the Vienna Philharmonic performed only the Adagio and Scherzo, conducted by Wilhelm Jahn, but the composer possibly heard the complete symphony during the rehearsals – or perhaps in or around October 1882 during the orchestra’s

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War Requiem

Sjoerd Staal — Tue, 24 Jun 2014 00:00:00 +0000

Netherlands Radio Philharmonic Orchestra,
Netherlands Radio Choir & Netherlands Children’s Choir
Jaap van Zweden
Reinbert de Leeuw
Conductor Netherlands Radio Choir: Celso Antunes
Conductor Netherlands Children’s Choir: Wilma ten Wolde
Evelina Dobracheva soprano
Anthony Dean Griffey tenor
Mark Stone baritone

During the late 14th and early 15th centuries, a church dedicated to the Archangel Michael was erected in Coventry. In 1918, it was designated a cathedral. The cathedral was almost entirely destroyed during a German air raid in 1940, with only the outer walls, bell tower and tomb of the first bishop remaining intact. These were preserved as a memorial. In the 1950s, the decision was made to incorporate the ruins in a new building. The first stone was laid by Queen Elizabeth II in 1956 and the new cathedral opened on May 25, 1962. Five days later, it was musically inaugurated with Benjamin Britten’s War Requiem, in a performance broadcast live by the BBC.

At the time, Britten was probably the only British composer able to strike a collective chord with his countrymen – even though in his operas, he always sided with eccentrics and outcasts. As a pacifist and homosexual, he had been personally familiar with the conflict between the individual and establishment since the 1930s. Yet Britten was not a political activist, for he was decidedly a member of a generation that held its peace when confronted with the dark aspects of community, family or the military. Artistically, however, Britten was an activist, as witness his antithetical heroes: Peter Grimes, Albert Herring, Billy Budd and Owen Wingrave. At times, his political message was so encoded that it seemed like a message in a bottle for a better future.

Britten’s political consciousness embedded a number of these hidden messages in the War Requiem in a way that only like minds would recognize themselves as being addressed. Take for instance the soloists he had in mind for the premiere of the War Requiem. To the soprano Galina Vishnevskaya, he confided that he wanted to bring together three soloists here as representatives of the countries that had suffered most in the war. Britten was thinking of an Englishman (the tenor Peter Pears), a German (the baritone Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau) and a Russian (Vishnevskaya). The soloist group in no way reflected the Allied forces. On the contrary, they were former enemies that came to stand before an imaginary reconciliation committee. Take for instance the last movement, Libera me, in which a fallen British soldier talks with a German soldier he has killed. Such understanding between enemies was bound to lead to problems. The Soviet authorities thought it was inappropriate for Vishnevskaya to perform under such circumstances with a German and an Englishman. The combination of “‘Cathedral’ & Reconciliation with W. Germany” (as Britten called it) went too far. A replacement had to be found, and Heather Harper had but 10 days to learn the part.

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