User's manual
Welcome to the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra’s digital Concert Archive. If, after reading this help menu, you experience a technical problem with this application (e.g. the search screen is not displayed), please send an e-mail to support@digitect.nl.
Should you have any questions or comments, or wish to submit additional data, please contact the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra at concertarchief@concertgebouworkest.nl.
Carrying out a search
Clicking Search brings you to the Search the Concert Archive screen. Here you can enter your query by selecting either the Simple search or Extended search mode (button at the bottom of the screen). The List and Concert details menu buttons are available only after you have made a selection here.
Important: To prevent system overloads, the search function is limited to queries generating no more than 1,000 hits.
NB: Many diacritics (accented characters), such as those in Janáček, Martinů and Schönberg, are respected in Dutch. It is not possible to enter names or titles fully without these characters.
Search criteria
Search criteria are divided into the following categories: WHO (top left), WHAT (bottom left), WHEN (top right) and WHERE (bottom right, available only in Extended search mode).
WHO lets you search for performances featuring a particular conductor, soloist, chorus or ensemble.
WHAT lets you search for performances of works by a particular composer, specific works or movements of a work,
and even works by composers from a specific country.
You can opt to exclude arrangements and incomplete or partial performances,
or limit your search only to works whose world premiere the orchestra performed. If you enter a complete or partial title in the
Search title field, then press Tab, all titles meeting your criteria will appear in the Title field.
WHEN lets you search for the programme of a concert given on a certain date, or during a certain period or season.
WHERE lets you search for performances given in a particular hall, city or country. You can also search on performances given at the Concertgebouw, elsewhere in the Netherlands or outside the Netherlands. You can clear a name, title, season or location selected in one of the lists by clicking on the × in the field.
Lists and concert overviews
After defining your search, you have the following options. If you select Search -> Concert overview (at the bottom of the screen), you will see the full concert programmes shown with the starting time, interval and the works performed in their correct order. The criteria you specified are also shown at the top of the screen.
If you select Search -> List, you will be presented with a list of the data meeting your criteria.
The default order is date – city – composer – work – conductor – soloist. You can use the List layout
function in the menu to adapt the list to any specific wishes you may have. You can also define fewer than six columns.
The new list layout will be applied to each subsequent search and can be cleared by clicking on the Default layout button.
At the bottom of the list, the number of hits generated by your query is shown.
You can toggle between these two display options by selecting Concert overview or List from the menu. From the list, you can also easily view a full concert programme by clicking on the number in the last column (this is often a ‘1’, depending on the list layout). This number indicates how many concerts are linked to the relevant hit in the list.
Your search criteria are saved until you define a new search. You can go back to the search screen from any other page to make changes. Select Reset fields to define a completely new search.
You can print lists and concert overviews without making further changes.