Off to the US with Klaus Mäkelä
This article is an excerpt from the article (in Dutch) in the November edition of Preludium, the monthly magazine of the Concertgebouw Orchestra and The Concertgebouw.
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The America tour 70 years ago
Our current tour to the United States is the 25th. The first time that the Concertgebouw Orchestra ventured over the Atlantic was 70 years ago, in 1954. Since that long, eventful and acclaimed tour, the orchestra has built up a solid reputation with the Americans.
However, some things were very different in the 1950s. Today, we put the whole orchestra on an airplane and they land ten hours or so later. In 1954 they travelled by ship, and with high waves slowing them down even more, the crossing took ten days. All in all, the orchestra players were away from home for two and a half months!
The orchestra gave a total of 45 concerts in 42 venues. Besides Carnegie Hall in New York they performed in cities such as Boston, Chicago, Rochester, Detroit, Portland, Tuscaloosa and Atlanta, with one concert in Toronto, Canada. Chief conductor Eduard van Beinum and Rafael Kubelík (then the permanent guest conductor) shared the task of conducting.
A political instrument
The first concert of the tour was also a real first: on 11 October, the same day the ship docked in Hoboken, the Concertgebouw Orchestra played in the assembly hall of the United Nations (find a recording of the concert below).
With an international programme – the American national anthem (not in the recording) followed by music by Beethoven (German/Austrian), Haydn (Austrian), Mussorgsky (Russian) and Ravel (French with Swiss-Basque roots) – the Dutch orchestra stressed the power of music to connect people.
And their message was received, according to the review in The New York Times: ‘There was unaccustomed harmony in the great domed General Assembly tonight as the Concertgebouw gave a concert for an audience of 2,500 diplomats and guests.’ Representatives wondered: ‘what can any other country offer the UNO delegates in the future that surpasses this artistic achievement?’
Meanwhile, back in 2024
Between 18 and 23 November we’ll play in Orlando, West Palm Beach, Naples (all three in Florida), the Kennedy Center in Washington D.C. and Carnegie Hall in New York. Lisa Batiashvili is coming with us and will play the solo part in Prokofiev’s Second Violin Concerto. Also on the programmes are Mahler’s First Symphony, Schoenberg’s Verklärte Nacht, Glinka’s Overture to ‘Ruslan and Lyudmila’, Rachmaninoff’s Second Symphony and – last but not least – the new commissioned work by Ellen Reid, Body Cosmic.
Recording of the concert for the United Nations on 11 October 1954.
The concert opens with a short speech by Eelco van Kleffens, who was President of the United Nations General Assembly at the time.
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Written by orchestra historian Johan Giskes
Read his complete story about the UN concert (in Dutch) on preludium.nl, the magazine of The Concertgebouw and Concertgebouw Orchestra.
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