Daniel Harding & Johan Dalene

sep.

Saturday 19:00

Talks included in the concert ticket

EVENT DATE PASSED

In six movements, Richard Strauss’ symphonic poem for a large orchestra, Ein Heldenleben, recounts parts of a hero’s life. Chief conductor Daniel Harding leads the Swedish Radio Symphony Orchestra in this philosophical epic from 1898. The violin was almost considered a hero by the German composer Max Bruch; he found that it could “sing a melody better than a piano, and the melody is the soul of music.” He was close to many of the most prominent violinists of the 19th century, and he wrote nine works for the instrument; most famous is his first concert, Opus 26, in G-major from 1866. In tonight’s concert, the young Swedish-Norwegian shooting star Johan Dalene tackles Bruch’s opus.

The concert is broadcast live on Swedish Radio P2

The concert is broadcast live on Berwaldhallen Play

Participants

Swedish Radio Symphony Orchestra

The Swedish Radio Symphony Orchestra is a multiple-award-winning ensemble renowned for its high artistic standard and stylistic breadth, as well as collaborations with the world’s finest composers, conductors, and soloists. It regularly tours all over Europe and the world and has an extensive and acclaimed recording catalogue.

Daniel Harding has been Music Director of the SRSO since 2007, and since 2019 also its Artistic Director. His tenure will last throughout the 2024/2025 season. Two of the orchestra’s former chief conductors, Herbert Blomstedt and Esa-Pekka Salonen, have since been named Conductors Laureate, and continue to perform regularly with the orchestra.

The Swedish Radio Symphony Orchestra performs at Berwaldhallen, concert hall of the Swedish Radio, and is a cornerstone of Swedish public service broadcasting. Its concerts are heard weekly on the Swedish classical radio P2 and regularly on national public television SVT. Several concerts are also streamed on-demand on Berwaldhallen Play and broadcast globally through the EBU.
Daniel Harding, music director

Daniel Harding is Music and Artistic Director of the Swedish Radio Symphony Orchestra, with whom in 2022 he celebrated his 15-year anniversary. In the 2014/2015 season, he devised and curated the celebrated Interplay Festival, featuring concerts and related inspirational talks with renowned artists and academics. As Artistic Director, he continues this type of influential programming. Harding is also Conductor Laureate of the Mahler Chamber Orchestra, with whom he has worked for over 20 years, and Music Director of Youth Music Culture, The Greater Bay Area in China. The 2024/2025 season will be his first as Music Director at the Academia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia in Rome.

Harding is a regular visitor to the world’s foremost orchestras, including the Wiener Philharmoniker, Berliner Philharmoniker, Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra, Symphonieorchester des Bayerischen Rundfunks, Staatskapelle Dresden and the Orchestra Filarmonica della Scala. In the US, he has appeared with the Boston Symphony Orchestra, The Cleveland Orchestra, Chicago Symphony Orchestra, Los Angeles Philharmonic, New York Philharmonic, and the San Francisco Symphony. A renowned opera conductor, he has led acclaimed productions at the Teatro alla Scala Milan, Wiener Staatsoper, Royal Opera House at Covent Garden, and at the Aix-en-Provence and Salzburg Festivals. He was Music Director of the Orchestre de Paris, the Anima Mundi festival of Pisa, and Principal Guest Conductor of the London Symphony Orchestra.

Daniel Harding tours regularly with the Swedish Radio Symphony Orchestra, performing at prestigious venues all over Europe and the world, and has recorded several acclaimed and award-winning albums with the orchestra. His tenure as Music and Artistic Director will last throughout the 2024/2025 season. “It is increasingly rare that the relationship between a conductor and an orchestra not only lasts for more than a decade, but keeps growing,” he says about working with the orchestra.

In 2002, Harding was awarded the title Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the French Government, and in 2017 nominated to the position Officier des Arts et des Lettres. In 2012, he was elected a member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Music. In 2021, he was appointed Commander of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire. Daniel Harding grew up in Oxford, England, and played trumpet before taking up conducting in his late teens. He is also, since 2016, a qualified airline pilot.
Johan Dalene, violin

22-year-old Swedish-Norwegian violinist Johan Dalene is already making an impact on the international scene, performing with leading orchestras and in celebrated recital halls both at home and abroad. His ability to “make his Stradivarius sing like a master” (Le Monde), coupled with his refreshingly honest musicality and engagement with musicians and audiences alike, has won him countless admirers. This talent was heralded most recently as winner of the Norwegian Soloist Prize and First Prize at the prestigious 2019 Carl Nielsen Competition.

Dalene was recently selected as a European Concert Hall Organisation (ECHO) Rising Star, and during the 2021-22 season, performed recitals in some of Europe’s most prestigious concert halls, while also engaging in Education, Learning and Participation work with diverse communities in cities across the ECHO network. Johan was also a BBC New Generation Artist from 2019-22 during which time he performed recitals, chamber music and concerti with the BBC orchestras, all broadcast on BBC Radio 3.

Dalene began playing the violin at the age of four and made his professional concerto debut three years later. In Summer 2016, he was student-in-residence at Switzerland’s Verbier Festival (where he made his performance debut in 2021) and in 2018 was accepted on to the Norwegian Crescendo programme, where he worked closely with mentors Janine Jansen, Leif Ove Andsnes and Gidon Kremer. Andsnes subsequently invited Johan to play at the Rosendal Chamber Music Festival and they performed together again in May 2019 at the Bergen International Festival. In 2019 he joined Janine Jansen and other members of the Crescendo Programme for a performance at the Wigmore Hall in London, and at the International Chamber Music Festival in Utrecht. In April 2020, during lockdown in Sweden, Johan performed Bach’s Concerto for 2 Violins with the Swedish Radio Symphony Orchestra, alongside Janine Jansen. During the 2020/21 season, he was Artist in Residence with the Swedish Radio Symphony Orchestra, performing concerti, recitals, and chamber music together with members of the orchestra.

Dalene studies with Per Enoksson, Professor at the Royal College of Music in Stockholm, as well as with Janine Jansen, and has also participated in masterclasses with a number of distinguished teachers, including Dora Schwarzberg, Pamela Frank, Gerhard Schulz, and Henning Kraggerud. He has been awarded various scholarships and prizes, notably from the Royal Swedish Academy of Music, The Anders Wall Giresta Scholarship, Queen Ingrid’s Honorary Scholarship, The Håkan Mogren Foundation Prize, Equinor Classical Music Award, Sixten Gemzéus Stora Musikstipendium, The G.T. Bäckmans Kulturstipendium, Norrköping Kommuns Kulturstipendium and Rolf Wirténs Kulturpris.

Johan Dalene plays a Stradivarius violin from 1736, generously on loan from the Anders Sveaas’ Charitable Foundation.

Programme

Concert length: 2 hours with intermission

RICHARD STRAUSS: Wiener Philharmoniker Fanfare

3 min

Richard Strauss was the son of one of the foremost horn players of the 19^th century, Franz Strauss, which is likely to have affected the quality of his son’s works and segments written for the horn family. One example is the fanfare Strauss wrote for a ball that the Wiener Philharmoniker, performed for the first time in 1924 in aid of the orchestra’s pension fund. Strauss was already intimately connected with the Wiener Philharmoniker. In 1901, it was the first orchestra to perform an entire concert dedicated to his music, and the two continued their artistic collaboration from then on. Wiener Philharmoniker Fanfare for 6 trumpets, 8 horns, 6 trombones, 2 tubas and 3 timpani was played at the arrival of special guests. It has been a recurrent feature of the orchestra’s annual ball since 1924.

The Fanfare is one of two that Strauss wrote in 1924, after he lost interest in writing orchestral works (the Alpine Symphony being a notable exception) following the premiere of his opera Salome in 1905. He was not inspired to write exclusively orchestral works again until the 1940s. One example is Metamorphosen for strings from 1945.

The approximately three-minute-long Wiener Philharmoniker Fanfare is romantic, bombastic and masterly orchestrated. The simple foundation has a sophisticated, richly melodious superstructure characterised by colourful modulations. It is a strikingly uplifting piece of music from the initial, urgent triplets in the trumpet section to the sometimes almost clattering, sometimes soft notes in the other brass instruments alongside the subdued rumbling of the timpani.

Text: Bodil Hasselgren
MAX BRUCH: Violin Concerto in g Minor

27 min

I. Vorspeil: Allegro moderato
II. Adagio
III. Finale: Allegro energico

In his old age, Max Bruch resented the fact that all people remembered him for was Violin Concerto No. I. He was a respected teacher, and the Scottish Fantasy for violin and Kol Nidrei for cello would have been performed with some regularity.
But there was so much more, not least another two violin concerts and as many as three symphonies, a strong genre for Bruch until Johannes Brahms wrote his first. Add to that all the great choral works for which he was best known at the height of his career. All this is strangely overlooked today. Bruch fell into a category where, at his death, many were surprised that he had only recently been alive, although he had written music until the very end. There are gems, but hardly anything that matches his first violin concerto.

The violin concerto in G-Minor consists of an abundance of immortal melodies, fantastically well composed for the instrument, although not before stars such as Ferdinand David and Joseph Joachim had been consulted. This masterpiece was Bruch’s first published major orchestral work, and it had not been easy. He started to work on it in 1857, and it was first performed in 1866, but it was withdrawn and did not appear in its final form until 1868. The original idea was to write a fantasy for violin and orchestra, which is marked by the first movement, Vorspiel. The delightfully lyrical second movement follows on directly from the first, offering without a doubt one of the most rewarding musical moments of the Romantic movement. The finale is a cheerful dance in a vaguely Hungarian style, perhaps as a tribute to the Hungarian Joachim. This is music that can even be said to herald Brahm’s violin concerto, which appeared ten years later. Both concertos were dedicated to Joseph Joachim, and it was of course he who performed them for the first time.

Text: Gunnar Lanzky-Otto
Intermission

20 min
RICHARD STRAUSS: Ein Heldenleben

54 min

I. The Hero
II. The Hero’s Adversaries
III. The Hero’s Companion
IV. The Hero at Battle
V. The Hero Works for Peace
VI. The Hero’s Retirement from this World and Completion

Ein Heldenleben, A Hero’s Life, from 1898 is divided into six consecutive sections. The first section, simply titled “The Hero”, opens with a lofty, almost stereotypical heroic theme played by no fewer than eight French horns and the cello section. Strings and woodwinds contribute a more lyrical secondary theme, and it is around these that the hero develops. The second section, suitably named “The Hero’s Adversaries”, begins after the only pause. It begins with restlessly searching, almost spiteful woodwind parts over subdued fifths in the brass section. The heroic theme returns, now slower, hesitantly in a minor key played by the woodwind section.

The third part, “The Hero’s Companion”, is almost twice as long as any of the other five, and the only part that Strauss mentioned whom it referred to: his wife, Pauline de Ahna. Strauss wrote to the author Romain Rolland that, “She is very complex, a trifle perverse, a trifle coquettish, never the same, changing from minute to minute.” A solo violin now takes the lead in a long and extremely detailed solo cadenza, which ends in what has rightfully been described as “a voluptuously scored love-scene”.
Not unlike a best-seller or blockbuster the story continues with “The Hero at Battle”. Percussion and solo trumpet immediately set the tone, and the heroic theme returns under these musical memes. Romantic and military rhythms run parallel, almost engaging in open conflict. A rippling harp signals the transition to “The Hero’s Works for Peace”, a tender elegy featuring woodwinds, primarily bassoon and English horn, in the foreground. The crowning glory is “The Hero’s Retirement from this World and Completion”, in which the heroic theme after an idyllic interlude heralds a returning motif from the love section, and, finally, ends in a majestic finale in E-flat, reflecting the opening key.

According to Strauss, the work was not about “a single poetical or historical figure, but rather a more general and free ideal of great and manly heroism.” He described himself as “no hero: I’m not made for battle.” But there seems no doubt that the piece is about Strauss. Apart from many big and small clues, Strauss evokes nine of his other works in the fifth section, “The Hero Works for Peace”, he confessed that the “companion” that features in the third section was his wife, and in the second section the hero’s “adversaries” were his critics, to whom he dedicated these musical caricatures.

Text: David Saulesco

About the concert

The German composer Max Bruch was something of a prodigy. He began composing music at the early age of nine, and a septet he wrote two years later showed early signs of his later musical style. Bruch was employed as music director to the court of Koblenz, and it was there he wrote his first violin concerto, which came to be his most famous work. Bruch was a close to and inspired by the most famous violinists of his time, among them were Joseph Joachim and Willy Hess, and he came to write no less than nine works for violin, three of them concertos. It was an instrument he considered superior when it came to ”singing a melody”. Bruch focused on melodies in his work. In his violin concerto this is especially prominent in the second movement adagio, which many describe as the heart of the work.

It was first performed by the violinist Otto von Königslow and conducted by Bruch himself in 1866. Bruch later made some major revisions in collaboration with Joseph Joachim; it is this version, from 1867, that is usually performed today. In tonight’s concert another prodigy, in the form of Swedish-Norwegian violinist Johan Dalene, takes up his bow in a concert that he, at the age of twenty-three, has already played all over the world.

Max Bruch was a much appreciated teacher of composition, but his work never enjoyed great popularity, partly on account of his outspoken aversion to the new German school, primarily represented by Richard Wagner and Franz Liszt.

Richard Strauss too was something of a prodigy, but contrary to Bruch he was a dedicated Wagnerian as well as successful during his lifetime. Strauss’ symphonic epic Ein Heldenleben from 1898 was a sequel to Don Quixote, which he completed in 1897.

Both poems deal with and humorously criticize heroes and antiheroes, but if the plot in Don Quixote was based on Cervantes’ novel about the errant knight and his sidekick Sancho Panza, Strauss modelled the hero in Ein Heldenleben on his own life and character. Many have interpreted it as an expression of Strauss’ artistic egoism, especially since he in the fifth section quotes his earlier tone poems. But there are also elements of Friedrich Nietzsche and the struggle between the individual and his outer and inner worlds. Strauss claimed that the work was about the masculine hero. Regardless of how you interpret it, the tone poem, Strauss’ last, is rather heroic in musical terms.

Text: Bodil Hasselgren