{ program notes
Robert Romik
Henning Kraggerud
Norwegian violinist Henning Kraggerud is artistic director of the Arctic Philharmonic Chamber Orchestra, with a tenure recently extended to 2020.
He frequently joins orchestras around the world, this season including the Toronto, Vancouver and Baltimore symphony orchestras, and Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra, as well as the Danish National Symphony and the Swedish Chamber Orchestra. This season he also debuts with the Brussels Philharmonic and the Tonkünstler Orchestra in Vienna, and performs with the China NCPA and Macao orchestras.
Mr. Kraggerud has more than 200 compositions to his name; among the ensembles that have commissioned or premiered his works are the Brodsky Quartet and Ostrobothnian Chamber Orchestra. The Britten Sinfonia gave the first performance of his The Last Leaf for violin and chamber orchestra in 2014. In the same year, he premiered Equinox: 24 Postludes in All Keys for Violin and String Orchestra.
At the 2016 Risør Chamber Music Festival with the Norwegian Chamber Orchestra, Mr. Kraggerud played the Johan Halvorsen Violin Concerto, a work originally premiered by 1909, and subsequently considered lost until its rediscovery over 100 years later.
This season, he performs with Imogen Cooper and Adrian Brendel at London’ s Kings Place, and is featured at Budapest’ s kamara. hu festival, Trondheim Chamber Music Festival and West Cork Chamber Music Festival. His regular recital partners include Christian Ihle Hadland, Håvard Gimse and Kathryn Stott.
Mr. Kraggerud’ s discography includes many recordings on the Naxos label, recently, Mozart Concertos Nos. 3, 4 and 5 with the Norwegian Chamber Orchestra, chosen as Classic FM’ s Album of the Week and NDR Kultur’ s CD of the Week.
Born in Oslo, Mr. Kraggerud is a recipient of Norway’ s prestigious Grieg Prize and in 2007, was awarded the Sibelius Prize for his interpretations and recording
of Sibelius’ music. He is a Professor at the Barratt Due music conservatoire in Oslo, where he play / directs the Oslo Camerata. Since September 2015, he has been international chair in Violin at the Royal Northern College of Music in Manchester.
Henning Kraggerud last appeared with the BSO in May of 2005, performing Mozart Violin Concert No. 5, Kwame Ryan, conducting.
About the concert:
Suite from Dardanus
Jean-Philippe Rameau
Born in Dijon, France, September 25, 1683; died in Paris, September 12, 1764
A contemporary of both Bach and Handel and the greatest of the French Baroque composers, Jean-Philippe Rameau lived long enough— to just days before his 81 st birthday— to combine two disparate musical careers into one lifetime. For his first career, he was one of France’ s most renowned organists as well as one of the 18 th century’ s most important music theoreticians. Rameau was largely self-taught as a composer, and his Treatise on Harmony and numerous other books about the principles of musical composition instructed musicians for generations to come.
In the early 1730s, when he had reached the age of 50— an age when most people of this period would have already been in their graves— Rameau finally turned his attention to dramatic music for the Paris stage. Astonishingly, he then created some 60 operas, ballets and sets of theatrical incidental music before his death in 1764, in the process expanding the emotional range and sheer musical quality of these genres.
His great tragic opera Dardanus, hampered by a fantastic and barely comprehensible libretto, is remembered today only for its rich and beautiful instrumental and dance episodes. In this story of love and war in ancient Greece, the warrior Dardanus loves the Grecian princess Iphise, daughter of his enemy. Iphise returns his love, but her father has promised her to an ally, Antenor. The rivals battle both for territory and Iphise’ s hand, but Venus, the goddess of love, intervenes to ensure that Dardanus wins and true love is rewarded.
Rameau himself was so troubled by criticism of Dardanus’ plot that he composed two different versions of the opera in 1739 and 1744. The result is that we are left with even more wonderful music to choose from in assembling concert suites from this opera.
The opening“ Entry of the Warriors” is the music for one of the opera’ s grand tableaux, Act I’ s procession of the troops arrayed against Dardanus. Marked“ majestically,” it combines Baroque stateliness with a militant march beat.
In his dance episodes, Rameau features a number of tambourins. The tambourin is a high-spirited, leaping dance from Provence named for the Provençal drum that provided its traditional accompaniment.
The final“ Rondeau gai” follows the rondo form that would be used in symphonic music of Mozart, Haydn and Beethoven. In this form, a refrain— here a gracious descending melody— keeps returning to link brief contrasting episodes. Throughout all this music, notice that Rameau does not use the elaborate contrapuntal style of many independent lines favored by Bach and Handel. Instead, he emphasizes appealing melodies crafted to capture the mood of each scene and strengthened by lively rhythmic play.
Instrumentation: Two flutes, two oboes. two bassoons, strings.
Violin Concerto in G Major, K. 216
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
Born in Salzburg, Austria, January 27, 1756; died in Vienna, December 5, 1791
Throughout his career, Mozart would apparently fall in love with a particular musical genre and then explore its possibilities in a series of masterpieces created within a short period of time. An early explosion of such focused creativity produced his five violin concertos, composed between April and December 1775, when the composer was only 19. The external inspiration
36 Overture | bsomusic. org