For generations of music lovers and Dutch radio listeners the Sunday morning Concerts in the Concertgebouw form a festive highlight of the day. The programme for this Sunday had an extra festive touch thanks to the specific chosen repertoire with one common feature: bells. The Main Hall of the Concertgebouw was chiming, resonating and reverberating together with Russian church bells, weddings bells, sleigh bells, funeral bells – bells in all ranges and timbres, from silver bells to full open sounds and profound, mournful ones.
The order of the programme was changed just before the concert began and the audience was welcomed with the bells of Mussorgsky. The short but powerful Coronation Scene from Boris Godunov set the mood (and the level of artistic performance) and created a bright festive atmosphere. The impressive reverberation of bells filled the hall taking advantage of its exellent acoustics. The Groot Omroepkoor (Netherlands Radio Choir) with its spontaneous outbursts of jubilant song sounded as a vocal monolith: perfectly articulated, expressive in dynamics and in good balance with the vivid colours of the Radio Filharmonisch Orkest (Radio Philharmonic Orchestra). Colourfully imposing orchestral figuration and onstage bells gave a powerful ornament not only to Boris Godunov’s ceremonial entrance from the Cathedral after his coronation, but also to the whole concert.
The dramatical intensity of Mussorgsky’s mass scene with its characteristic tuning of Russian church peals asked for a few moments of silence and deep breath. These moments were provided by the magnetic transparency and clarity of Arvo Pärt’s Cantus in memoriam Benjamin Britten. The Estonian composer, who celebrated his 80th anniversary on the 11th of September, wrote this canon as hommage to the “unusual purity” of Britten’s music in 1977. The orchestral lament of the strings and bell surrounded the audience with an increasing soundfield of intertwined lines and layers growing around the mournful bell.