In April 2018, the Concertgebouw Orchestra played Doodenmarsch, a short but powerful work that the prominent Dutch composer Henriëtte Bosmans (1895-1952) completed after the Second World War. Although former artistic director Marius Flothuis labelled this work as probably her best composition, it had never been on the music stands before.

This is not the case for the Concert piece for violin and orchestra, which will be performed this month. During her lifetime it was played no less than eight times by the orchestra, from its premiere on 31 October 1935 with concertmaster Louis Zimmermann and conductor Willem Mengelberg to the performance in September 1951 conducted by Eduard van Beinum – with whom Bosmans had a secret relationship for some time – with the renowned musicologist and violinist Willem Noske as soloist. Noske had already taken the work to his repertoire in 1938.

Bosmans’ Concertino for piano and orchestra received more than twice as many performances with the orchestra, in which she herself was a soloist; an unusually large number of repeat performances for an orchestral work written during the author’s lifetime. This makes it all the more shocking that the Concertino subsequently had to wait so long to be performed again, and that after the performance of the Concertino for flute and orchestra in 1953, shortly after her death, not a single work by this composer was played until 2018 by the orchestra with which she had such a profound connection.