Le Concert Olympique olv. Jan Caeyers 14/11/2013

The successful combination of Jan Caeyers and Le Concert Olympique will be returning to deSingel for the fourth season in a row: with true classics, historically underpinned, but played on modern instruments. For this programme, Beethoven specialist Caeyers has selected two works from the year 1806. With violinist Lorenzo Gatto, winner and audience favourite at the 2009 Queen Elizabeth Competition, Caeyers embarks on a new reading of Beethoven's Violin Concerto. The work is dedicated to violinist Franz Clement, who was the first to perform it - in the Theater an der Wien on 23 December 1806. The contemporary press criticised the Violin Concerto for lacking coherence, and spoke of "an unceasing stream of noise emptied out over the public by a series of instruments". It was not until several decades later that this was understood to be the point where the classic concerto fused with romantic aesthetics. The Fourth Symphony can be seen as the first neoclassical symphony. And yet we hear a born romantic successfully employing new techniques. He starts out with a simple musical motif, and by means of endless repetition and variation, expands it into a whole symphony, cast in a highly classical mould.