Festival Dag in de Branding kicks off on Friday evening with a world premiere for a large orchestra by Max Knigge. He composed Eliza May specifically for the Residentie Orkest. In addition, the orchestra will perform Grieg’s well known piano concerto, featuring Antti Siirala as the soloist, as well as the rarely performed Sixth Symphony by Shostakovich. The conductor for the evening is Daniel Raiskin.
Knigge: Eliza May
Max Knigge is one of the great compositional talents of his generation. His work has previously been heard at Dag in de Branding, but never with such a large ensemble. Eliza May is named after the main character from the novel Het lied van ooievaar en dromedaris by Anjet Daanje, the biggest literary hit of recent years. Eliza May Drayden is inspired by Emily Brontë, the author of the classic novel Wuthering Heights. “I was completely captivated by the mysterious and fascinating world surrounding the character Eliza May Drayden, and I tried to capture the colors, mysteries, characters, and motifs in music,” says Knigge.
Daanje’s novel is a literary tour de force, and Knigge deliberately limited his composition to a handful of scenes. The first part, Brow Brown Hill, is about the hill near the village where Eliza May spends her life, which is associated with the heavenly realm. The title Sisters, play & characters speaks for itself: this second part is about Eliza May and her sister, and the idea of social interaction as a form of role-playing. The post office is the place where villagers exchange gossip and reshape their worldview. The fourth part is named after the novel Eliza May wrote during her lifetime, which was scorned at the time but later became a cult book: Haeger Mass. The final part, The loom, is about textile factories where people worked under inhumane conditions; thus, the hellish ending contrasts with the heavenly beginning. The five parts are performed consecutively.
Grieg: Piano Concerto
Grieg had a clear model when he composed this early masterpiece at the age of twenty-four: Schumann’s Piano Concerto. It’s no coincidence that both concertos are in A minor, feature expansive outer movements, and have a relatively short middle section. Like Schumann, Grieg begins with a bang—preceded in his case by a famous swelling timpani roll. After a statement of descending piano octaves, a rather subdued first theme follows, and a musical argument unfolds that remains under constant high tension. It culminates in a powerful solo cadenza, with thunderous octaves and virtuoso cascades of notes sweeping across the keyboard, yet the overall tone remains contemplative. In Grieg’s work, lyricism and emotional expressiveness prevail over mere showmanship.
This applies even more strongly to the brief Adagio, in which the influence of folk music resonates. Sultry strings pave the way for the piano theme, which soars like a songbird to great heights. The singing middle section transitions seamlessly into the finale, which begins with a lively, bouncing dance. It’s a “halling,” a Norwegian folk dance in duple meter that Grieg would often use in his work, including in his stage music for Peer Gynt. This final movement also contains introspective moments, such as the beautifully expansive lyrical second theme, where Grieg draws magnificent colors from the orchestra. The closing sequence possesses a regal grandeur.
Shostakovich: Sixth Symphony
After the success of his Fifth Symphony (1937), Dmitri Shostakovich faced a dual challenge: to write another work that would appeal to both “the people” and the Party, while also being more profound—less “popular” and conservative. This was no casual challenge, as the composer had only just been rehabilitated with his Fifth, after falling out of favor with the communist regime. The reason: a scathing review in the newspaper Pravda of his opera Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District (1936), which was rumored to have been penned by Stalin himself. During that life-threatening period, Shostakovich was working on his progressive Fourth Symphony, which ended up shelved and unperformed, as a public performance under such precarious circumstances could well have sealed his fate. For his Fifth, he therefore chose a different path—successfully. He could breathe freely again.
But how do you begin a new symphony after such stressful years? In Shostakovich’s case: with a grand and expansive Largo full of melodic inventiveness and, if you choose to hear it that way, underlying tension. Shostakovich himself said he wanted to express feelings of “spring, joy, and youth”—yet meanwhile, colleagues and family members were disappearing into labor camps. After the monumental slow opening movement, which makes up nearly two-thirds of the symphony, two relatively short movements follow, bursting with life—ironically or not—an Allegro and a Presto. This gives the unorthodox symphony the feel of one long crescendo. The harmonic language aligns with Mussorgsky, while the unusual structure evokes Mahler’s symphonic form experiments.
