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drplaceboIt's Forgotten Masterpiece Friday!
Johan Halvorsen (1864-1935) was a prominent violinist in his day, touring widely and serving as concertmaster of several major European orchestras before returning to Norway and establishing himself as an opera and theater conductor. He came to focus on composition relatively late, with all but a few of his compositions written after he made conducting his primary occupation in 1893. As a composer, he followed in Edvard Grieg's footsteps in drawing from Norwegian folk music, but his output was far more weighted toward orchestral music than Grieg's. (Halvorson in fact arranged a number of Grieg's piano pieces for orchestra, married Grieg's niece, and composed music for Grieg's funeral.) Halvorsen is best known today for the incidental music he wrote for more than thirty plays, as well as for a few show pieces he composed for violin or viola; his most performed work is an extremely virtuosic Passacaglia on a theme by Handel for an unaccompanied duo of violin and viola.
In January 2016, librarians at the University of Toronto stumbled across one of the most significant musical discoveries in recent years: Halvorsen's only violin concerto, believed lost for over a century, turned up in the process of digitizing the library's music collection. Composed in 1908, the concerto had been dedicated to a Canadian violinist named Kathleen Parlow. Parlow performed the concerto three times in 1909 to widespread acclaim. She reportedly intended to continue performing the piece, but apparently misplaced the score and orchestral parts; the Norwegian music community was almost immediately aware of the disappearance Halvorsen's "Lost Concerto." Upon Parlow's death in Toronto in 1963, her papers were donated to the University of Toronto library, but the violin concerto was not among her music collection. Instead, it was misplaced alongside Parlow's pictures and other personal items and remained lost until 2016. The "Lost Concerto" received its modern premiere in July 2016 at the International Musicological Society's annual conference, with Halvorsen's countryman Henning Kraggerud playing the solo violin part. Kraggerud has continued to perform the Halvorsen concerto, and in early 2017 recorded it with the Malmö Symphony Orchestra. It is this recording that you are hearing today.
Halvorsen may have drawn some inspiration for his violin concerto from Max Bruch's 1st violin concerto: it shares the same key and much of the same unorthodox form. Noting Bruch's own penchant for drawing from Scottish music, some modern critics have referred to Halvorsen's concerto as a "Norwegian Bruch concerto," though they probably overlook Halvorsen's close connection to Grieg. The last movement, in particular, is based on a rather acrobatic Norwegian folk dance called the halling. In one interview, the modern soloist Kraggerud described the conclusion as especially apt: "It's a dance which always ends by the main dancer trying to kick a hat either off a person or off a staff, held high in the air. At the very last chord, you can hear the violin hitting a high harmonic on the G-string as a musical equivalent of this trademark of that dance. . . . You never know if you're going to miss the hat, or in the case of the violin, the harmonic! It's a very exciting dance."
Johan Halvorsen (1864-1935) was a prominent violinist in his day, touring widely and serving as concertmaster of several major European orchestras before returning to Norway and establishing himself as an opera and theater conductor. He came to focus on composition relatively late, with all but a few of his compositions written after he made conducting his primary occupation in 1893. As a composer, he followed in Edvard Grieg's footsteps in drawing from Norwegian folk music, but his output was far more weighted toward orchestral music than Grieg's. (Halvorson in fact arranged a number of Grieg's piano pieces for orchestra, married Grieg's niece, and composed music for Grieg's funeral.) Halvorsen is best known today for the incidental music he wrote for more than thirty plays, as well as for a few show pieces he composed for violin or viola; his most performed work is an extremely virtuosic Passacaglia on a theme by Handel for an unaccompanied duo of violin and viola.
In January 2016, librarians at the University of Toronto stumbled across one of the most significant musical discoveries in recent years: Halvorsen's only violin concerto, believed lost for over a century, turned up in the process of digitizing the library's music collection. Composed in 1908, the concerto had been dedicated to a Canadian violinist named Kathleen Parlow. Parlow performed the concerto three times in 1909 to widespread acclaim. She reportedly intended to continue performing the piece, but apparently misplaced the score and orchestral parts; the Norwegian music community was almost immediately aware of the disappearance Halvorsen's "Lost Concerto." Upon Parlow's death in Toronto in 1963, her papers were donated to the University of Toronto library, but the violin concerto was not among her music collection. Instead, it was misplaced alongside Parlow's pictures and other personal items and remained lost until 2016. The "Lost Concerto" received its modern premiere in July 2016 at the International Musicological Society's annual conference, with Halvorsen's countryman Henning Kraggerud playing the solo violin part. Kraggerud has continued to perform the Halvorsen concerto, and in early 2017 recorded it with the Malmö Symphony Orchestra. It is this recording that you are hearing today.
Halvorsen may have drawn some inspiration for his violin concerto from Max Bruch's 1st violin concerto: it shares the same key and much of the same unorthodox form. Noting Bruch's own penchant for drawing from Scottish music, some modern critics have referred to Halvorsen's concerto as a "Norwegian Bruch concerto," though they probably overlook Halvorsen's close connection to Grieg. The last movement, in particular, is based on a rather acrobatic Norwegian folk dance called the halling. In one interview, the modern soloist Kraggerud described the conclusion as especially apt: "It's a dance which always ends by the main dancer trying to kick a hat either off a person or off a staff, held high in the air. At the very last chord, you can hear the violin hitting a high harmonic on the G-string as a musical equivalent of this trademark of that dance. . . . You never know if you're going to miss the hat, or in the case of the violin, the harmonic! It's a very exciting dance."