Trondheim Symphony Orchestra & Eivind Aadland - Hjalmar Borgstrøm: Tanken; Jesus i Gethsemane (2024)

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Trondheim Symphony Orchestra & Eivind Aadland - Hjalmar Borgstrøm: Tanken; Jesus i Gethsemane (2024)

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The critics reacted with somewhat greater moderation to the evening’s last program offering, presumably because of its religious subject: Jesus in Gethsemane op. 14. Iver Holter and the Musikforening had premiered this symphonic poem on 12 November 1904 during a concert that had continued with Johann Sebastian Bach’s Suite in C major, Joseph Haydn’s Cello Concerto, and Peter Tchaikovsky’s Rococo Variations (soloist: Hugo Becker). Already in Christiania the reaction had been mixed, given that the members of the audience vigorously applauded the composer and called him out on the stage repeated times, while the reporter for the »Evening Post,« though he did find words of praise for the various instrumental effects, registered his doubts about the legitimacy and realization of the subject matter. These reservations could not stop the work on its further path. Borgstrøm himself and Georg Schnéevoigt conducted Jesus in Gethsemane on various occasions, and in 1929 J. Chr. Bisgaard wrote in Fra Musikkens Verden (From the World of Music) that the composer had given the best and the richest in substance in his symphonic music: »Of his oeuvre, many especially will value his wonderfully beautiful Jesus in Gethsemane. Here the music stands in an inner and deep relation to the occurrences on which it is based. Here text and music combine to form a noble whole. The music automatically reminds one of Wagner’s Parsi- fal but is entirely original. It was surely also not simple for such a staunch program musician like Borgstrøm to avoid the Parsifal mood when one wants to lend musical expression to suffering and redemption.«

On 6 January 1917 Johan Halvorsen appeared in front of the Orchestra of the National Theater in order to conduct Borgstrøm’s latest, most complex, and most extensive symphonic poem, Tanken (Thought) op. 26 – a musical cosmogony, a fully dimensioned creation cycle from Thought, to matter, to world, to perversion of values, to destruction, to dissolution, to Thought…