Hendrik Andriessen (1892-1981)

Symphonie No. 1 : voor orkest (1930)

Orchestra: Radio Filharmonisch Orkest
Conductor: Albert van Raalte

Recorded: 05/23/1947

dedicated to Eduard van Beinum.


Hendrik Andriessen was a composer, organist and teacher. He studied the organ with Louis Robert and Jean-Baptiste Charles de Pau and composition with Bernard Zweers at the Amsterdam Conservatory, and in 1913 he succeeded to his father's appointment as organist in Haarlem. In 1927 Andriessen gave up his job as a journalist on the local Haarlem newspaper to teach composition and analysis at the Amsterdam Conservatory, concurrently teaching the organ, improvisation and Gregorian chant at the Roman Catholic School for Church Music, Utrecht. He was made organist of Utrecht Cathedral in 1934 and, three years later, director of the conservatory in that city. In 1949 he was appointed director of the Royal Conservatory in The Hague, and in 1952 he became professor of music history at Nijmegen University, a post he held until his retirement in 1963.
Andriessen could not remember a time he was not composing he was ten when he wrote an Andante religioso for organ and he first received attention as a composer through a number of organ works and the Missa in honorem SS cordis (1918). The outstanding feature of this piece was its novel treatment of the text: abandoning the conventional Romantic approach, Andriessen provided a meditative consideration of intimate, mystical simplicity. This style initiated a renewal of Dutch Catholic church music, and the large number of liturgical works that he subsequently composed are marked by the same manner of treating the text and by a devout atmosphere of glorification. In settings of the Mass he preferred cyclic forms, with all sections constructed from a single melodic idea.
During the 1930s Andriessens orchestral works also began to attract notice. His Symphony no.1 (1930), given its première by Eduard van Beinum and the Haarlemsche Orkest-Vereeniging, has a form deviating widely from the conventional: a slow introduction precedes five short sections which merge into one another and are arranged symmetrically according to tempo and character. All of the thematic material develops from the introduction, and the orchestration is notable for surprising changes in colour and nuance. One of Andriessen's most successful orchestral pieces appeared in 1935: the Variations and Fugue on a Theme by Johann Kuhnau. It is a particularly well-balanced composition, warm in sound and poetic in atmosphere. The contemplative variation technique changes in nature with each new section; the first variation explores only the first notes of the theme, while the second develops just four notes in a scherzo-like manner. In the third variation, the themes inversion is the basis, and the fourth surrounds the theme with full, broad chords. After a fifth variant illuminating the harmonic possibilities of the idea, the work concludes in a lively double fugue that shows Andriessens contrapuntal mastery.
In the same year, 1935, he wrote three Rimbaud songs, the Trois pastorales, which underline Andriessen's links with French culture and are among the finest Dutch songs of modern times. Two important liturgical works of the period are the Magnificat for chorus and organ, a work of apt exaltation and gladness, and the spacious six-part Missa diatonica, composed wholly in the Aeolian mode.
The Second Symphony was written in 1937 and was first performed a year later by Van Beinum and the Concertgebouw Orchestra. Its first movement, Fantasia, freely uses elements of sonata form, the second is a polytonal pavane based on an earlier piano work, and the last movement is a rondo. As a whole, the work shares those qualities of poetic expressiveness, inventive melodic treatment, transparent texture and organ-influenced changes of orchestration which were typical of the First. In 1940 Andriessen produced one of his major organ works, the Sinfonia, a piece that is characteristic of his music for the instrument in its frequent passages of polytonal harmony, vigorous contrapuntal working and modal melody. Aside from the solo pieces, he later wrote an Organ Concerto (1950) in two parts: a passacaglia and a toccata built on the Phrygian tetrachord of the passacaglia theme. Andriessen himself was one of the foremost organists of his generation, particularly renowned for skills in improvisation.

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