The Program:


Ter Veldhuis: Rainbow Concerto
Beethoven: Symphony No. 3 in E-flat major, “Eroica”




Rainbow Concerto for cello and orchestra by Jacob Ter Veldhuis







Born in 1951, JacobTV, aka Jacob Ter Veldhuis, is a self-proclaimed “avant pop” composer. Starting as a rock musician, he went on to study composition and electronic music at the Groningen Conservatory under Willem Bon, earning the Dutch Composition Prize in 1980. He has become one of the most popular European composers of the 21st century, but remains less well known in the United States.



JacobTV is a product of this modern age. He understands the media and draws artistic inspiration from it. His music is unconventional and provocative, but is at the same time energetic and emotional with an architectural form. The compositions are largely tonal, lacking the overpowering dissonance inherent in his contemporaries. JacobTV’s works are thought-provoking social commentaries with media sources ranging from jazz musicians, Martin Luther King, and an examination of the role of religion in human history to death row inmates, American talk shows, and the Gulf and Iraq Wars. Garnering him much attention are his “boombox” compositions that juxtapose music for one or more instruments with a soundtrack incorporating spoken text or “speech melody.”



The Rainbow Concerto was commissioned by the Rotterdam Philharmonic Orchestra for principal cellist Marien van Staalen and was premiered February 21, 2003. Today’s Bryan Symphony Orchestra performance is the American premiere. The work is in two movements that are performed without pause. The slow first movement opens with the cello soloist and the strings in a simple texture expressing a melancholy yearning. The second movement is fast and rhythmic with mixed meters forming the underlying texture with the cello often soaring above.



JacobTV describes his creation process and the concerto as:



“My credo as a composer is simple: I work intuitively, and only write music I like to listen to myself. If I don't find the music I'm looking for in a record-shop, I know that it is yet to be composed. The Rainbow Concerto is a piece like that.



While composing it, I often had to think of a horizon, an unreachable ‘yonder’ which never gets closer. You can hear a vague longing for ‘elsewhere’ in the slow first part. Could this be the unattainable Paradise? As in my oratorio Paradiso, the permanent pendulum motion between two adjacent notes gives musical expression, to ‘eternity’; there is a complete absence of real dissonance. The work is in two parts: a heavenly adagio flowing into an earthy allegro.



I associate the seven-tone diatonic scale I use with the seven-coloured rainbow; to me each of the seven notes has its very own sound. I often have to wrestle with the concept of melody: is it possible to create one that does not yet exist? Often I work from a single note and try to tease new melodic turns out of it. From some notes, musical ‘bows’ come, contours like those of a rainbow. Just like music, rainbows are ethereal, an illusion.”







Symphony No. 3 “Eroica,” in E flat, Op. 55 by Ludwig van Beethoven







The exact beginning of Beethoven’s (1770-1827) deafness is undetermined. Experiencing worsening symptoms associated with tinnitus, the condition had become undeniable by the time he was twenty-eight. He eventually had to except the fact that the doctors were unable to help and the hearing loss was progressive and incurable. On his physician’s recommendation in the summer of 1802, he vacationed in the village of Heiligenstadt outside of Vienna in an effort to let his health improve. Unfortunately, it did not and the quiet of the countryside caused him to become more depressed about his situation. The Heiligenstadt Testament is an unsent letter to his brothers that was discovered after Beethoven’s death. At first he expresses concern about being a composer and going deaf. “Ah, how could I possibly admit an infirmity in the one sense which ought to be more perfect in me than in others.... [W]hat a humiliation for me when someone standing next to me heard a flute in the distance and I heard nothing....” Then he admits contemplating suicide. “I would have ended my life - it was only my art that held me back.... Ah, it seemed impossible to leave the world until I had brought forth all that I felt was within me.” Not a normally expressive man in conventional terms, this letter seems to have unburdened Beethoven and he returned to Vienna with sketchbooks full of musical ideas and works in progress.



It was in 1802 that he confided to his friend violinist Wenzel Krumpholz, “I am only a little satisfied with my previous works. From today on I will take a new path.” Many scholars point to this time in Beethoven’s career as the beginning of his second compositional period, often referred to as his “heroic” period.



He began work on Symphony No. 3 in the summer of 1803 in Baden and Ober-Döbling. The work was completed in August of 1804 with a first read-through performance at the home of Prince Lobkowitz, for whom it is dedicated. The formal public premiere was held in April 1805 at Theater-an-der-Wien.



Ferdinand Reis, a piano and composition student of Beethoven’s who contributed to an early biography of the composer, claims that in the spring of 1804 the cover page of the symphony read Buonaparte at the top. On May 18, Napoleon assumed the title of Emperor. Beethoven exploded upon receiving this news; saying “Is he then, too, nothing more than an ordinary human being? Now he, too, will trample on all the rights of man and indulge only his ambition. He will exalt himself above all others, become a tyrant!” Beethoven reportedly seized the music and tore the title page in half. He seems to have been indecisive about this change because in a correspondence to the publisher in August he included the comment that “[t]he title of the symphony is really Bonaparte.” Either way, that title was ultimately removed, but the name Eroica was not used until it was published in 1806. Symphony No. 3 carries the inscription “Heroic Symphony to celebrate the memory of a great man.”



The original reception of the symphony was hampered by its complexity and length, twice that of the typical symphonies of his contemporaries. The innovations of this piece include an unheard of emotional tone for instrumental music, the use of three horns for the first time in the orchestra, and the expressive use of wind instruments. Beethoven also broke the “rules” by expanding the development and coda and using non-traditional forms.



The first movement, Allegro con brio, begins with two forceful chords played by the full orchestra. It then develops into a loose sonata form with the first glimpse of the theme originating with the cellos and theme two in the woodwinds. The rhythm, full of syncopation and hemiola, is accented with dissonances. The lengthy development finally reaches a string tremolo against which is heard a solo horn playing the opening triad. This surprising orchestration has been interpreted as an early entrance and Reis is reported to have exclaimed at a reading, “Too soon, too soon! The horn is wrong.” Supposedly, Beethoven nearly struck him for that comment.



The slow Marcia Funebre begins with a sorrowful melody expressed by the strings and repeated by the oboe. The mood lightens somewhat only to return to the tragic tone of the opening and develop into a fugato that leads to the climax of the movement. At the close of the movement, the main melody is heard in fragments as it dies away.



The third movement, Scherzo and Trio, is Beethoven’s first symphonic use of the scherzo, which means “joke” or “play.” This energetic movement begins at a pianissimo dynamic before blossoming into a rollicking full orchestra melody. The horns take the lead in the Trio in three-part harmony before the Scherzo theme returns in the orchestra.



The Finale consists primarily of a theme and variations setting of a contredanse completed in 1801 and used in both The Creatures of Prometheus ballet music and the Prometheus Variations for piano, op. 35. This movement culminates in a poco andante which recalls the earlier funeral march. The coda finishes with an impressive presto revisiting the sound of the opening flourish.



While this piece should not be interpreted as programmatic, it is apparent that it does at least celebrate the heroic. Beethoven’s attraction to the Prometheus story and his calculated use of that tune along with his consideration of the “Bonaparte” title seem to indicate, at the very least, that an admiration of heroism was a guiding force in the creation of this piece.







Notes by Kristin Hauser
October 21, 2008