Symfonieorkest Continuo is the alumni and staff orchestra of Ghent University. It stands alongside the Ghent University Symphony Orchestra (GUSO), which consists mainly of students. With just over ten thousand employees, Ugent is not only the largest employer in the city, it also maintains various ensembles, in addition to a choir and a brass band. Symfonieorkest Continuo rehearses weekly and performs two programmes per year, with two concerts in January (or early February, as this year) and two in June.
Added Value
A Continuo concert is not only about enjoying the music, but also the concept, the title, the presentation and the programme booklet. That booklet is very comprehensive and has a beautiful layout. With Continuo there is always a pronounced thread running through the programme. Last year the thread was chemistry, this year it is "Liebestod", the title on the poster. That concept, that thread is definitely an added value to the experience of a symphonic concert.
Before the concert there is an introduction where speaker Dirk Moelants does not just give some explanation, for half an hour he tells in an amusing and witty way about love and death, eros and thanatos and how they connect the works to each other. We see the man back on the podium at the double basses.
It begins with the work to which the Liebestod refers, the famous Vorspiel from Tristan und Isolde by Richard Wagner. We see and hear how conductor Kevin Hendrickx keeps his troops firmly together and maintains the tension in the swelling, slow music until the final chord. This is not a professional orchestra, I readily overlook the intonation inaccuracies.
Legacy
During the Liebestod the piano is already on stage for the second work, the rarely performed Fantaisie variée for piano and orchestra by Nadia Boulanger. At the end of Wagner something happens that I have never seen at a symphonic concert before. While the orchestra plays the final sighs of Wagner's Liebestod, the soloist creeps past the first violins to the piano. After Wagner's final chord, the orchestra immediately continues with Boulanger's Fantaisie, without interruption or applause. A nice trick to emphasise the connection between the two works, which the speaker in the introduction had told us about.
Nadia Boulanger is primarily known as a pedagogue and mentor to many composers and conductors of the twentieth century. She has also left behind an extensive oeuvre, rooted in the French tradition with some Russian characteristics. Boulanger not only had a French father but also a Russian mother. Soloist Nathalie Matthys is a young woman in her thirties with considerable international experience. In the US she studied, among others, with Emil Naoumoff, the last pupil of Nadia Boulanger. In this way Nathalie Matthys received the tradition first-hand, a special legacy.
Morendo
After the interval there is love and death again, the red thread continues with the sixth symphony by Tschaikovsky, the Pathétique. He wrote his last symphony as a farewell, a final passionate sigh, his requiem. Against convention, the last movement is a slow movement. "Morendo" appears above the final notes of the cellos. A few days after the premiere, Tschaikovsky died at the age of fifty-three from cholera, after he had apparently deliberately drunk contaminated water in a restaurant.
In terms of orchestral playing and dynamics, Tschaikovsky's Sixth is more complex than Wagner's Liebestod and therefore a heavy task for a semi-professional orchestra. Actually, the Pathétique was originally called the passionate symphony. You feel that the structure, the tempi, the build-up are in place, you feel the passion in the musicians under the expert and passionate direction of conductor Kevin Hendrickx.
