Last nights concert at the NCH Dublin.
RTÉ National Symphony Orchestra
Miguel Harth-Bedoya conductor
Eldbjørg Hemsing violin
Brahms Academic Festival Overture / 10'
Dvořák Violin Concerto in A minor, Op.53 / 32'
Beethoven Symphony No.3 in E-flat major, Op.55 / 47'
Brahms’ ‘jolly pot-pourri’ of student drinking songs, Dvořák’s thrilling Violin Concerto and an historic turning point of epic proportions for the symphony in Beethoven’s
Eroica draw on the full resources of the orchestra for music that stirs the emotions and stiffens the backbone.
When Brahms was awarded an honorary Doctorate from the University of Breslau, the accolade came with strings attached: the expectation that he would write something to mark the occasion. The famously saturnine composer responded with a cheeky riposte to his learned beneficiaries.
The Academic Festival Overture borrows themes from traditional student drinking songs and fashions them into a rousing masterpiece in the style of Franz von Suppé, the prolific composer of gaily colourful operettas. A joyfully boisterous work, it opens with a glancing allusion to the
Rákóczy March, a widely popular Hungarian tune, and ends with the most recognizable quotation –
Gaudeamus Igitur(‘So, Let Us Rejoice’), later used to stirring effect in Sigmund Romberg’s hugely popular operetta
The Student Prince.
Dvořák’s sole Violin Concerto was composed in 1879 in collaboration with the great Hungarian violinist Joseph Joachim (who had also helped shape Brahms’s Violin Concerto at the beginning of the same year) although he never performed it. It’s a tuneful, dancing piece full of innovation and vast emotional range from its serious and dramatic first movement to its nostalgic and gloriously lyrical Adagio and the diamond-like sparkle of its finale which employs traditional Czech folk dances in brilliantly skittish writing for the violin.
Intended as a salute to Napoleon Buonaparte, whom he regarded as kindred libertarian, Beethoven’s Third Symphony transformed the symphony and ushered in the Romantic era in music. Although the composer, enraged by the French dictator’s later imperial ambitions, was to score out Napoleon’s dedication from the title page of his manuscript, the symphony remains a magnificent display of music’s power to act as a clarion call for freedom and to summon up the most noble human emotions.
Leonard Bernstein has hailed its opening as ‘perhaps the greatest two movements in all symphonic music’ and in 2016 a poll of more than 150 international conductors for
BBC Music Magazine rated it as the greatest symphony ever written.
