The legendary conductor Frans Brüggen had a close collaboration with the Stavanger Symphony Orchestra for many years, including serving as artistic director for early music from 1990 to 1997. This is an important chapter in Norwegian early music history.

Rameau’s «Les boréades» is located in Bactria in the very middle of Central Asia, an area that today constitutes northern Afghanistan and southern Tajikistan. In this opera we find ourselves in the fourth century before Christ, when the area was under Greek rule. As we may expect from this era, the opera is a cannonade of moody gods, human sacrifice, unknown paternity, and fatal tempests in addition to a cast that fills several pages. But in all this complexity Rameau’s music glitters in its genial simplicity, an absolute high point in French Baroque.

All the movements in Bach’s concerto in E major come from various cantatas that were composed many years apart, and which solo instrument Bach really had in mind is uncertain. Consequently, the concerto is played with almost whatever is at hand: harpsichord, flute, violin, oboe, and bassoon, and this evening in Frans Brüggen’s arrangement for recorder. The piece shows the shining, uncomplicated Bach with outer movements that swing and a rocking, refreshing siciliano as the central offering.

Mozart was initiated into Vienna’s masonic lodge before Christmas 1784, and over the years he composed quite a few works for solemn occasions. Many of these sound like rush work, but the funeral music he wrote during the summer of 1785 is truly impressive; the very musical character and the weird instrumentation with among others English horn, counter bassoon, and basset horn creates colors that we otherwise hear only rarely in Mozart.

Only very few people have Beethoven’s 8th symphony as their favorite. But Frans Brüggen did, and it was also a work that Beethoven himself valued. It was composed at the same time as his 7th, a grandly conceived and powerful work – just think of the final scene in “The King’s Speech” which is accompanied by the symphony’s second movement. Beethoven must have suspected that a comparison would be inevitable, and how did he stop it? By composing something that is almost an anti-symphony and filling it with humorous moments. The first movement sounds as if it suddenly runs out of power, the third movement sounds like a frivolous rural feast, and at the end it may sound as if Beethoven parodies himself with unending hammering on the final chord before he finally manages to tear himself away and stop it.