#ntr-zaterdagmatinee — Public Fediverse posts

Theo Loevendie The Rise of Spinoza

Ten years after the rave premiere of The Rise of Spinoza in 2014, the Dutch label Attacca released the live recording of Theo Loevendie’ one-act opera on CD. Here’s the review of the concert in NTRZaterdagMatinee I wrote at the time. After a decade, the opera is as poweful as ever, and the recording catches all the subtle details.

Amsterdam, 11 October 2014

The audience jump to their feet the minute conductor Markus Stenz lowers his baton after the final notes of The Rise of Spinoza have drifted away in the ample acoustics of the main hall of the Amsterdam Concertgebouw. The Radio Philharmonic Orchestra, Radio Choir Groot Omroepkoor and soloists are cheered for minutes. Well deserved, for Stenz steered his forces with a strict, but supple hand through this new and colourful one-act opera from the 84-year old Theo Loevendie.

When the composer finally sets a somewhat shaky foot on the stage, the audience bursts out in an even louder applause. Waves of warmth flow towards Loevendie, who is a purebred Amsterdammer if ever there was one. He grew up as the stepson of a market vendor in Amsterdam-West, and became fascinated by Baruch Spinoza, his fellow townsman from the 17th century. Spinoza’s philosophy that God is to be found in nature appealed to the young Loevendie: “As an agnostic, I am wary of religious dogma,” he declared.

So when NTR ZaterdagMatinee asked him to compose a short opera for a double bill with Stravinsky’s Oedipus rex, Loevendie decided to fulfil his lifelong dream. He wrote his own libretto (in English), focussing on one tragic moment in Spinoza’s life. In 1656 the philosopher was banished from the Jewish community because of his ‘atheist’ motto Deus sive natura (God or nature). This not only shocked his fellow Jews, but also the Catholics and protestants, and in the end Spinoza was even expelled from Amsterdam by the city council.

Though set in the 17th century, the opera is strikingly topical. Like Loevendie, the soft-spoken Spinoza follows his reason and can’t accept religious dogma. Be it from his own Jewish community, the catholic faith Spanish and Portuguese Jews adopted to escape persecution, or the many protestant factions claiming the ‘true faith’ in the Netherlands. Spinoza may not be decapitated, but the wording of the kherem (curse) is extremely harsh: “May he be condemned by day and by night […] nobody may be under the same roof with him, nor approach him closer than four yards, nobody may read any paper written by him.” 

The Rise of Spinoza opens with dark, mysterious rumblings from the orchestra in a darkened hall. The lights go on slowly to fervent cries from market vendors: “butterrrrr, cheese, eggs!” in loud, polyrhythmic, yet minutely notated cacophony. This may indeed be “the longest market scene in operatic history” as Loevendie asserts, yet the intended effect of hearing ‘fishwives’ and ‘peddlers’ gets a bit lost in the all too sophisticated interpretation of the singers of the choir.

A lucky strike is the introduction of Jacob van Eyck, a blind recorder player and composer who weaves the scenes together as an objective onlooker. When Spinoza has a discussion with his former mentor rabbi Morteira, Van Eyck (a sovereign Erik Bosgraaf) slowly paces the hall from right to left, playing a sopranino recorder in virtuosic, bird-like melodies.

In the second scene, François van den Ende exhorts Spinoza to become a catholic, yet the young philosopher indignantly refuses because of the murderous doings of the Inquisition. Van Eyck breaks the tension with a folk-like melody that is taken up by the orchestra, the jaunty music forming a welcome counterpoint to the serious issues at hand.

Loevendie chose a countertenor (Tim Mead) for the role of Spinoza, both to symbolize the philosopher’s isolation, and stress his kind-heartedness. Spinoza has touching, lyrical lines, especially in the moments when his burgeoning love for Clara flares up.

Yet, however competent a singer Tim Mead may be, he did not quite bring across his smouldering affection, nor his agonies and doubts in the confrontations with Van den Ende and rabbi Morteira. By contrast, the bass-baritone Hubert Claessens commands the stage with his mesmerizing presence and utterly convincing impersonation of the forbidding rabbi.

Loevendie’s treatment of both the orchestra and choir is refined and varied, and the libretto is compact and convincing. Compelling are the chanted slogans and rhythmic clapping of the choir, the frenzied dissonance in the orchestra at times of stress, and the subtle, almost romantic harmonies at moments of more quietude. The vocal parts of the soloists are unusually tuneful and singable.

With the 45 minute long The Rise of Spinoza Loevendie has wrought an attractive opera that may well become part of the repertoire. 

It formed a worthy double bill with Igor Stravinsky’s Oedipus rex. This oratorio about the Greek hero who unwittingly killed his father and married his mother, was performed after the interval. Stenz again led his forces with formidable precision through Stravinsky’s inescapably tragic score, with it’s furious ostinati and broad harmonic spectrum. The Russian tenor Sergey Semishkur blew us off our socks with his strong voice and regal tenure. Yvonne Naef vividly brought to life his wife/mother Jocaste with her resonant mezzo soprano, the bass Dimitry Ivashchenko was an agile Tiresias, and the Flemish reciter Benoît de Leersnyder held the audience captivated with his perfect diction. 

With this concert NTR ZaterdagMatinee once again proved the value of radio concert series, because these can programme a bit more adventurously than orchestras and choirs that have to keep a keen eye on the box-office. This double bill also showed the audience is not a priori afraid of contemporary music: the hall was packed and the acclaim was staggering.

#BaruchSpinoza #KatrienBaerts #MarkusStenz #NTRZaterdagmatinee #TheoLoevendie #TimMead

Unsuk Chin: ‘I want to entice the listener into a cosmological fantasy land’

Unsuk Chin (Seoul, 1961) is at the centre of this season’s radio concert series NTRZaterdagMatinee in the Amsterdam Concertgebouw. On Saturday 13 January the Dutch Radio Philharmonic Orchestra will play the Dutch premiere of Alaraph ‘Ritus des Herzschlags‘ (Ritual of a heartbeat).

This is the third concert featuring music by Chin. In September te young Korean pianist Sunwook Kim was the soloist in her Piano Concerto, a month later her witty, street-theatre-inspired ensemble piece Gougalōn was performed by Asko|Schönberg, and Chin’s widely acclaimed opera Alice in Wonderland will conclude the series in June.

Chin is certainly no stranger to the NTRZaterdagMatinee. She first appeared as a guest in 2004 with her Double Concerto for piano, percussion and ensemble. In the years that followed, several solo concerts were on the roster, and in 2019 her large-scale Le chant des enfants des étoiles for orchestra, mixed choir and children’s choir had its Dutch premiere.

Like her new piece, this is about stars and cosmic phenomena. After its premiere in 2016 a critic wrote that ‘from the opening bars, the music draws you into the unfathomable abyss of the cosmos, as if you were taking a spacewalk in the infinite universe.’Another critic deemed its dynamics ‘akin to Stravinsky’.

Primal power

Alaraph is the name of one of the so-called heartbeat stars. According to a Wikipedia entry quoted by Chin, these are ‘pulsating variable binary star systems in eccentric orbits with vibrations caused by tidal forces’. The name ‘heartbeat’ is derived from the fact that when their brightness is mapped over time, the light curve is similar to what a heartbeat looks like on an electrocardiogram. Abracadabra to the average layman, but Chin was so fascinated that she decided to devote her new composition to it.

Her interest in science and cosmology has its roots in her childhood, she explains: ‘The initial impetus dates from when, as a child, I began to wonder about dreams, an encounter with another world where very different laws of physics prevail. Dreams, like music, are phenomena that flow through time but at the same time are frozen, like a sculpture, in a small moment of timelessness.’

‘All this made me suspect that what we perceive in our daily lives is only a fraction of reality. To explore these questions further, I became curious about cosmology and physics. What fascinates me so much in the heartbeat stars is their primal power and haunting rhythmicity.’

Musical material demands percussion

Chin lives up to her reputation as a wizard of sound colour. As a listener, Alaraph irrevocably sucks you into a universe of mysterious sounds, in which percussion plays a central role. Six musicians play an immense number of percussion instruments, ranging from cymbals, drums, timpani and gongs to thunder sheets, piano strings, whips and woodblocks. Tuned instruments such as glockenspiel, marimba or xylophone were deliberately left out.

Asked for the reason behind this, she explains: ‘I didn’t so much make this decision myself, the musical material simply demanded it. Moreover, I wanted to write something completely different from all my other orchestral works. For instance, I use gongs, timpani and piano not for their pitch, but to generate special timbres.’

The score teems with unusual sound effects, such as the indeterminate murmur of cymbals resonating on timpani, the chattering sounds of twigs hitting a bass drum or the scraping sound of plastic rulers stroking low piano strings.

One swaying current

The piece opens with a short bright rattle of a ‘bamboo tree’ that changes the tone colour of the ensuing gong strike. After this, a slow-moving mass of sound unfolds with a static and ritualistic character. Beneath the surface swarm stacks of rhythmic pulses, ranging from extremely slow to extremely fast. Glissandi in both strings and horns – with or without mutes – intensify the atmosphere of otherworldliness and deprive you of any sense of grip.

The whole is one breathing organism, in which there are barely any recognisable melodies or rhythms. You are carried along on a swaying current into the dark universe, with short motifs flaring up like falling stars. An accordion evokes the vibrations of the Alaraph with bright, ever-recurring tremoli. The piece ends with a five-fold pianissimo, as if the music continues to float forever in the infinite universe.

The premiere in Basel in September 2023 was acclaimed by both audience and critics. ‘The pulsating vibrations of the Alaraph are not only heard in the percussion but also in the pizzicati of basses and celli’, wrote the Aargauer Zeitung. The critic of Das Opernmagazin was so overwhelmed he simply noted that Alaraph is ‘a sort of sound installation’.

You can judge for yourself during the live broadcast of the Dutch premiere on 13 January on NPO Klassiek (starting at 2.15 pm).

#Alaraph #HeartbeatStars #NTRZaterdagmatinee #UnsukChin

Let me tell you Hans Abrahamsen – Ophelia resumes control

Hans Abrahamsen hopes to celebrate his 70th birthday in December 2022, but is already a central composer in NTR ZaterdagMatinee. On 29 January his Horn Concerto received its belated Dutch premiere; in May Asko|Schönberg will perform his trilogy Winternacht / Wald / Schnee and a month later his opera The Snow Queen, based on an Andersen fairy-tale, will get its first performance in The Netherlands. On Saturday 12 February his song cycle Let me tell you will sound for the second time in this radio series.

Abrahamsen wrote Let me tell you for the Canadian soprano Barbara Hannigan, who premiered it in 2013 with the Berlin Philharmonic, ensuring his international breakthrough. In February 2014 Hannigan sang the first Dutch performance both with the Rotterdam Philharmonic Orchestra in Rotterdam, and with the Dutch Radio Philharmonic Orchestra in Amsterdam. Now she returns for a second run in NTRZaterdagMatinee.

BLINDING RAYS OF LIGHT

Let me tell you continues to deeply impress both critics and audience. ‘An effervescent fountain sprays indefinable, high-pitched sounds of glockenspiel, woodwinds and violins, making the power of Ophelia’s love tangible’, wrote Biëlla Luttmer in de Volkskrant, after its Dutch premiere. She described the sweeping brushes in the death scene at the end as ‘a snow scene from Thomas Mann’s novel Der Zauberberg congealed into sound’.

In 2016, Abrahamsen was awarded the authoritative American Grawemeyer Award. A year later, the serene song cycle was released on a CD, again incurring rave reviews. According to the daily newspaper NRC, a ‘magical prism of sound’ was transformed into ‘blinding rays of light or downy snowfall’; The Guardian heard a ‘typically spare and wintry’ orchestral sound, offering ‘a magical panoply of spangly microtonal sounds’. The Gramophone dubbed it ‘a small, tragic Winterreise’.

Abrahamsen composed Let me tell you at the request of Barbara Hannigan, who was impressed by his subtle use of colour and the emotional eloquence of his music. In an interview with yours truly, she said: ‘I admire his originality and gentleness.’ She added: ‘I have gone through all the possibilities of my voice with Hans, but have made it clear to him that boundaries can always be broken.’

481 WORDS

The title Let me tell you is taken from Paul Griffiths’ 2008 novella of the same name, in which Ophelia tells her story in exactly the 481 words Shakespeare allows her to speak in Hamlet. By arranging these differently each time, Griffiths creates a kind of autobiography, in which Ophelia reflects on her life. In about thirty minutes, she transforms from a defenceless victim into a self-confident woman who resumes control over her fate.

‘In some 30 minutes Ophelia transforms from a defenceless victim into a self-confident woman who resumes control over her fate.’

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Griffiths composed a libretto of seven songs, divided over three movements. In the first, ‘Let me tell you how it was’, Ophelia looks back to a time when there was ‘no music’ in her life. With high piccolo tones and bell-like sounds of a celesta, Abrahamsen sketches a tenuous, dreamlike world in which each and every movement seems to be solidified. The soprano gropes her way through stratospheric heights and abyssal lows, with sustained tones; sometimes with a stuttering voice that evokes Monteverdi’s stile concitato.

The second movement, ‘Let me tell you how it is’, is a passionate declaration of love to Hamlet – ‘you have sun-blasted me / and turned me to light’. The music is agile and passionate, with fierce coloraturas from the soprano and swirling cascades of crystalline sounds after her sighed ‘You have made me like glass – like glass in an ecstasy from your light / like glass in which light rained’.

FEET SHUFFLING IN THE SNOW

In the concluding movement, ‘I know you are there,’ Ophelia looks to the future: ‘I will find you’, she sings, as she steps into a snowy world full of identical frost flowers. The serenity of the first movement returns, with spun out lines of the soprano swaying on a sea of fragile, slowly drifting sound fabrics.

‘I will go on’, she concludes, while a percussionist imitates her shuffling feet in the snow by rubbing a sheet of paper over a large drum. While the music slowly fades away, a question floats up from the almost sacred silence: does Ophelia die, or does she enter a new life?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cJNfpPoM3ug

#BarbaraHannigan #HansAbrahamsen #LetMeTellYou #NTRZaterdagmatinee #PaulGriffiths

Le grand macabre György Ligeti: Surprisingly topical opera about the end of time

In Le Grand Macabre, the only opera György Ligeti ever composed, the protagonist Nekrotzar announces the end of time, but at the moment supreme he is the only one who perishes. The absurdist work was staged in this country in 1998 by the Netherlands Travelling Opera. On 27 November, the NTRZaterdagMatinee presents a concert performance, with the Netherland Radio Philharmonic Orchestra and Netherlands Radio Choir conducted by regular guest conductor James Gaffigan.

György Ligeti (1923-2006) was an original mind, who did not let anyone dictate the rules. In 1956, he fled the Hungarian dictatorship and knocked on the door of Karlheinz Stockhausen in Cologne, whose tape composition Gesang der Jünglinge had made a deep impression on him. He had once heard it on a German radio station – in a mutilated version, because the Hungarian government distorted Western broadcasts with electronic signals.

AVERSE TO DOGMATISM

Although he was generously included in the circle of avant-garde composers around Stockhausen and Pierre Boulez, Ligeti refused to embrace their serialism, based on mathematical principles. He had not fled a political dictatorship in order to submit to a musical one. In contrast to the strict ordering of all musical parameters, he placed a large degree of freedom. Instead of the imperative tone and rhythm sequences, he used clusters of microtones swarming through each other in a free rhythmic pattern. In 1960, he established his name for good with the orchestral work Apparitions.

But he was too idiosyncratic to limit himself to one particular style and, moreover, cared little for the heavy-handed seriousness of many of his colleagues. In his music there was room for humour and irony. For Die Zukunft der Musik, he chalked only a few instructions on a blackboard in 1961, and a year later he placed 100 metronomes on the stage in Poème symphonique. With their ticking in different tempi, they created a complex ‘micropolyphony’.

https://youtu.be/qOcBSFTu1oI

The world premiere in 1963 in the town hall of Hilversum caused quite a stir. It had been commissioned by the Gaudeamus Music Week and was performed at the closing concert of this international competition for young composers. The audience listened attentively and applauded politely afterwards, but the municipality of Hilversum asked the national broadcasting company NTS not to show the film.

The newspaper Trouw deemed the concert a success, however: ‘It was a delightful parody on the musical experiment that so many young composers are pursuing with deadly seriousness. In 2003, the piece was performed in NTRZaterdagMatinee and in 2020, the filmed recording was recovered and shown at the Gaudeamus Festival.

LE GRAND MACABRE

Time and again, Ligeti chose new paths and continued to surprise his audience. In 1966, for instance, he created harmonic anchor points in his choral work Lux Aeterna. From 1974-77, he worked on what would become his magnum opus, the opera Le Grand Macabre. It is based on the absurdist play Ballade du Grand Macabre by the Belgian author Michel de Ghelderode and is set in Breugel’s time. The hero Nekrotzar – the ‘Grand Macabre’ of the title – announces the end of time, which will take place at midnight. The fear of death constantly haunts the play, but when twelve o’clock finally strikes, Nekrotzar is the only one to die.

In Le Grand Macabre, Ligeti brought together everything he had achieved so far; the music is often downright hilarious. The opera opens with an overture of car horns and juxtaposes Rossini-like arias with alienating recitatives and abyssal screams. The singers burp and we are treated to the sound of whips and other ‘unmusical’ objects. This gives the musical references to predecessors such as Rossini and Monteverdi an ironic charge.

The opera premiered in Stockholm in 1978, but Ligeti radically revised the score in 1996. He made several cuts and set spoken passages to music after all. This revised version was premiered at the Salzburg Festival in 1997, directed by Peter Sellars. His staging greatly displeased Ligeti. Instead of the intended ambiguity the American director had made the approaching Apocalypse explicit with references to the Chernobyl nuclear disaster. By turning it into a ‘pamphlet against nuclear energy’, Sellars had robbed him of his opera, Ligeti felt.

EXTREMES AND BLACK HUMOUR

A year later, the Dutch Travelling Opera staged Le Grand Macabre for the first time in our country, on the occasion of Ligeti’s seventy-fifth birthday. The French director Stanislas Nordey was responsible for the direction. The Asko and Schönberg Ensemble and the Choir of the Travelling Opera were conducted by Reinbert de Leeuw, a great advocate of Ligeti’s music. – Five years later he was the one to put the Poème symphonique on the programme of NTRZaterdagMatinee.

In his biography, De Leeuw calls the opera characteristic of Ligeti, in whom he discerns an almost violent side: ‘That need for madness, hysteria, extreme states of mind, black humour goes a long way. This is most strongly expressed in Le Grand Macabre, in which he ridicules death. Everything is grotesque in the piece. He turns the world upside down with bizarre characters, incongruous stories, absurdist twists, but also in his instrumentation. – Just think of the opening with car horns.’

The production was well received. The newspaper NRC praised the ‘visually sober, almost concertante production’; Trouw lauded the way in which Nekrotzar was immediately recognisable as an outsider. His appearance as a ‘crazy businessman in a blue mackintosh’ contrasted sharply with the white Pierrot outfits of his fellow actors. The Eindhovens Dagblad spoke of an ‘excellent portrayal of Ligeti’s idea of a man who tries to escape death in a monstrous Breugelian landscape’.

Ligeti himself attended a performance on 8 June 1998 in the Stadsschouwburg in Amsterdam. His arrival had been awaited with some trepidation, considering his reaction to Sellars’ 1997 production, but this time he was extremely satisfied. At the final applause, he stepped onto the stage, bowed deeply to the performers and exuberantly shook hands with conductor Reinbert de Leeuw. Only then did he turn to the audience to receive their loud cheering.

TOPICAL THEMES

In two acts and four scenes, we follow the drunkard Piet the Pot, who experiences the wildest of adventures and is relegated to his unwilling help by Nekrotzar (Death). Nekrotzar proclaims in increasingly ominous terms that he will destroy the world. At midnight, a comet will strike: ‘The bodies of the people will be scorched, and all will turn into charred corpses, and will shrink like shrivelled heads!’ – Words that sound frighteningly topical in the light of the climate crisis and corona pandemic.

The libretto is a dazzling parody of the human desire for debauchery, intemperance, sex and power. The names of the love couple Amanda (Servando) and Amanda (Clitoris) speak for themselves, but politics are also ridiculed. Prince Go-Go rides a rocking horse, and from this position he urges two politicians to put the ‘interests of the nation’ above their own. – A parallel with Prime Minister Rutte and Minister of Public Health Hugo de Jonge springs to mind.

The music is a long succession of humorous pastiches and persiflages of (song) styles from earlier days. The second act opens with the ringing of doorbells and alarm clocks, seemingly announcing the end of time. Mutilated quotations from Scott Joplin to Beethoven can be heard. At the end of the third scene, when the planet Saturn crashes, the strings play a raw sort of lament, followed by swelling crescendos and decrescendos in the winds. The apocalypse seems to be a fact.

FAILED APOCALYPSE

In the fourth scene, Ligeti depicts the post-apocalyptic landscape with sweet chords and harmonics in the low strings, accompanied by a prominent harmonica. It appears that everyone is still alive. In a slapstick-like passage with abrasive clusters of woodwinds and furious percussion, three soldiers and Prince Go-Go set off in pursuit of Nekrotzar. He must ultimately acknowledge his defeat and disappears into thin air, under the estranging sounds of a mirror canon in the strings.

The opera concludes with a succession of tonal chords deprived of their functional context. Then the entire cast turns to the audience: The opera concludes with a succession of tonal chords deprived of their functional context. Then the entire cast turns to the audience: ‘Fear not to die, good people all! No one knows when his hour will fall! And when it comes, then let it be… Farewell, till then in cheerfulness!’

This could just as easily be an appeal both to the vaccine opponents who fear unforeseen consequences of the shot, and to those who believe that vaccination should be made mandatory…

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0l43g9x_LlE

Thomas Larcher voices fatal mountain climb in Third Symphony

In 2020, the world premiere of Thomas Larcher‘s Third Symphony fell through due to corona. The subtitle A Line Above the Sky refers to British mountaineer Tom Ballard, who fatally crashed in 2019. It wasn’t until February 2021 that the Symphony actually sounded for the first time, in Brno; on 25 September the belated Dutch premiere will be presented by the  Netherlands Radio Philharmonic Orchestra under the baton of chief conductor Karina Canellakis as part of the radio series NTRZaterdagMatinee.

Thomas Larcher, born in 1963 in Innsbruck, is considered one of the most important composers of his generation. He is also a welcome guest in the Netherlands. He was the resident composer of the Concertgebouw in 2019-20 and the NTRZaterdagMatinee has staged many (world) premieres. Just this past May, the Radio Philharmonic Orchestra, pianist Kirill Gerstein and principal conductor Karina Canellakis reaped great acclaim for the (also postponed) premiere of his Piano Concerto.

‘Pianist Kirill Gerstein and the orchestra draw you into an enchanting landscape’, wrote the Volkskrant – and gave five stars. ‘What follows is an exuberant finale on jazzy hopscotch rhythms’, the NRC noted. ‘Afterwards, you’ll want to hear Larcher’s Piano Concerto again immediately.’ I’d be surprised if his Third Symphony doesn’t lead to jubilant reviews again. The recording of its Austrian premiere in August, once more illustrates his apt sense of form and colourful way of orchestrating.

TYROL

Thomas Larcher is also valued in his homeland. In 2019 he received the Grosser Österreichischer Staatspreis and last June he received the Tiroler Landespreis für Kunst. This highest art award of the Austrian state of Tyrol is not only a tribute to the musical significance of the composer and pianist, but also a thank you for his relentless commitment to the culture of his native region. In 1994 he founded the Klangspuren festival, focused on new music, followed ten years later by the interpreter’s festival Musik im Riesen; both attract international luminaries.

The mountainous landscape of Austria is a constant source of inspiration for Larcher. An avid mountaineer and skier himself, he says he finds relief and solace in its rugged nature. No wonder he is fascinated by British alpinist Tom Ballard (1988-2019). Ballard established several imaginative climbing routes, including the Seven Pillars of Wisdom on the Eiger in Switzerland. He was also the first mountaineer to solo climb all six major alpine north faces in one winter season.

SILENT GIANTS

In 2015, Ballard gained world fame when he created the D15 route in the Dolomites, A Line Above the Sky. He designed this track using the dry-tooling method: the climber only has crampons on his shoes and an ice axe in each hand. Back then the route was the most difficult one in the world, though it is only some 45 metres long: it starts out vertically but very soon becomes almost entirely horizontal, so that the mountaineer quasi climbs ‘under a ceiling’.

In his own programme notes, Larcher expresses his admiration for Ballard: ‘He was one of the most fascinating and best alpinists of his generation, and was particularly strong in winter climbing.’ The composer is convinced that the fact Ballard named his infamous dry-tooling route A Line Above the Sky testifies of his desire to ‘live in the light’.

As an amateur climber, Larcher recognizes the strong connection Ballard felt with the mountains, ‘those silent giants that have been watching us for a long time’. He compares the Brit’s passion for mountaineering to his own devotion to music.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5ITyPMDVR9s

LIFE’S WORTH

Larcher, however, has less understanding for Ballard’s deliberation to put his life on the line, which eventually proved fatal  to him. During an expedition to Nanga Parbat, Pakistan in February 2019, Ballard disappeared from the radar; not long after, they found his disembodied body. Larcher: ‘That someone should persist in his attempts to climb the Nanga Parbat even in very poor weather conditions is beyond me.’

For the composer, this inevitably leads to metaphysical questions such as, ‘What is life’; ‘How much is your life worth to you’, and ‘What does your life mean to others?’ With these thoughts in mind, he composed his Third Symphony in 2019. The thirty-minute piece has two, untitled movements. The first is ‘a testimony to the intensity of life’, the second a ‘Trauermusik’ (mourning music)..

FROM COOKIE TIN TO THUNDER PLATE

As in earlier orchestral works, Larcher has expanded the regular orchestral lineup. Thus, in addition to their own instruments, the wind players play slide whistles, vibraslaps and water phones. The four percussionists not only operate an array of tuned and un-tuned percussion, but also a cookie tin, a milk pan, paper, an oil drum and other unlikely musical instruments.

Wind machine and thunderplate are generously employed and a starring role is given to cimbalom, accordion, celesta, harp and piano. – Some of the piano strings are fitted with E-bows or dampened with erasers, almost a matter of course in Larcher’s sound universe.

With this orchestral apparatus, Larcher manages to evoke both the expansive vistas and the implicit menace of the mountains. In claustrophobically dense sound fabrics, ascending and descending motifs battle for precedence. Icy highs find a counterpoint in abyssal lows; frivolous swirls are intersected with ominous thunderclaps; sudden silences make you hold your breath. The pace is slow, the orchestral sound luscious and expansive; Mahler is never far away.

SPIKE STAIRS

The soundscape constantly shifts between intoxicating stillness, arcadian lyricism, restrained tension and deafening roaring, just as in the mountains new landscapes and dangers lurk behind every corner. Striking are the many passages in which a soloist ‘climbs’ melodically up or down, while the cimbalom builds a spiky staircase with measured strokes. Toward the end, dissonant cries from the brass, solid drumbeats, violent tremoloes in the strings, a fierce accordion, and roaring tubular bells create an anxious climax.

The Symphony ends with a shrouded heartbeat in the piano, which is smothered in a charged silence, the strings softly dying away. – Suspended in mid-air hangs the almost rhetorical question: was it all worth it? 

#KarinaCanellakis #NTRZaterdagmatinee #RadioFilharmonischOrkest #ThomasLarcher #TomBallard

Sam Adams’ take on Concerto grosso premieres in Concertgebouw: Movements (for us and them)

For the season 2020-2021 Samuel Adams was booked as composer in residence of The Concertgebouw. Both his residency in Amsterdam and the new orchestral work he was to compose for NTRZaterdagMatinee fell prey to Covid-19 however. On Saturday 22 May the Radio Philharmonic Orchestra will instead perform the Dutch premiere of Movements (for us and them), under the baton of chief conductor Karina Canellakis.

Sam Adams (San Francisco, 1985) is determinedly shaping his career as a composer. – Preferably under his own steam: his biography does not even mention he is the son of the world-famous John Adams. In 2019 he was awarded the Guggenheim Fellowship.

He had been looking forward to exploring our capital city by bike in order to find inspiration for his new orchestral work, he said in 2020. Though this fell through, he did complete his new composition, Variations, for the Radio Philharmonic Orchestra.

However, the line-up proved too large for a corona proof performance, therefore it was replaced by Movements (for us and them) for string orchestra. Adams composed this in 2018 for the Australian Chamber Orchestra. Critics praised its ‘trance-like energy and radiance’, ‘subtle emotional power,’ and feverish rhythms’.

As the son of a composer and a photographer, Samuel Adams seemed predestined for a career in the cultural world. He started out as a double bass player in jazz ensembles – just as his father had once played the clarinet in jazz orchestras – and only later started composing.

But where John had been more or less caught between serialism and minimalism, Sam ‘didn’t have to choose sides’, as he remarked in an interview: ‘I can use anything I like in my music.’ His work is often lyrical and makes regular use of electronics; besides composition, he studied electroacoustics.

ITALO CALVINO

Movements (for us and them) was inspired by Sei proposte per il prossimo millennio (Six Memos for the New Millennium) by Italo Calvino (1923-1985). The celebrated Italian author wrote these for a series of lectures at Harvard, defining the different criteria he believed literature should meet. Calvino died when he had only worked out five themes: lightness, quickness, exactitude, visibility, and multiplicity.

Adams built his composition mainly around the first three characteristics. There is a regular emphasis on high registers (lightness); the driving triplets give the piece an enormous velocity (quickness); the carefully dosed syncopations and irregular rhythms testify of his love for structure (exactitude).

COLLABORATION INSTEAD OF COMPETITION

This is also evident in his second source of inspiration: the concerto grosso, which was popular in the Baroque era. The string orchestra is divided into two groups: a string quartet – similar to the concertino – and a thirteen-piece string ensemble that also includes a double bass.

But Adams gives his own twist to the genre: instead of placing the two groups opposite each other like rivals, he subverts the traditional hierarchy by having them work together, hence the subtitle ‘for us and them’.

In what he himself describes as ‘role fluidity’, both groups – and within them the individual musicians – are constantly changing roles. Sometimes they team up or even merge, but continuously new soloists detach themselves from both ensembles, now playing a sweet love song or wistful lament, then a jolly tune or a Scottish-style dance. The other strings produce a heartbeat of muffled pizzicati, knot a luscious carpet of sustained sounds, or play counter-melodies.

COLLECTIVE SIGH

The furious tempo is abruptly halted several times on an eighth note in triple sforzando, after which the dense fabric breaks open and a moment of relaxation sets in. Adams repeats this trick at the end. After an exceptionally frenetic passage and a sledgehammer exclamation mark (‘sfff possibile’), the piece ends in deep quietude.

The soft tones fading away into nothingness create the impression of a collective sigh of relief: we’ve finally reached our goal…

#JohnAdams #MovementsForUsAndThem #NTRZaterdagmatinee #RadioFilharmonischOrkest #SamuelAdams

Thomas Larcher: ‘Each composition is an excavation from my past’

On Saturday 22 May, the Radio Philharmonic Orchestra, principal conductor Karina Canellakis and pianist Kirill Gerstein will premiere the new Piano Concerto by Austrian composer Thomas Larcher in NTRZaterdagMatinee. – Unfortunately still no audience is allowed in Main Hall The Concertgebouw, but the concert will be broadcast live on NPO Radio 4. I wrote the programme notes and Larcher was kind enough to answer some questions.

ARCHAEOLOGICAL EXCAVATION

Thomas Larcher (1963) has been featured in NTRZaterdagMatinee many times, both as a pianist and as a composer. He composed several (co-)commissioned works for the series. In 2017, his Second Symphony “Kenotaph” had its Dutch premiere in this radio series. The scheduled first performance of the Third Symphony last year was postponed because of corona. Larcher was composer in residence of The Concertgebouw then (2019-2020), and as such the predecessor of Samuel Adams, whose piece Movements (for us and them) opens the concert.

Larcher’s Piano Concerto again is a co-commission from NTRZaterdagMatinee. The composer often relates to music history, and this goes for the new piece as well: ‘Each of my pieces is an archaeological excavation from my own past’, he says. ‘Especially now perhaps, since it involves the piano, “my” instrument. The Piano Concerto is mostly inspired by pieces I wrote in the early 1990s, when I resisted composing for piano. There’s a lot of aggression and conflict in it.

This seems paradoxical, because in Larcher’s early compositions the piano plays a prominent role. However, he does sometimes ask the pianist to forcefully pound away on its keyboard, as in Naunz (1989). Moreover, he often works with a ‘prepared piano’, not always treating the instrument with excessive care. In Noodivihik for piano solo (1992), for example, he manipulates a vibrating bass string with a pair of rusty nail scissors. In Mumien for cello and piano (2001) he places an array of erasers between the strings and even covers some with duct tape.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xejixZOiFik

Embalmed MUMMY

In the Piano Concerto, the instrument is mainly played in a ‘normal’ way. Apart from a few moments when the soloist hits the strings with the flat of his hand, scrapes them with his fingernails, employs an eraser or dampens them with a piece of denim. At times the dynamics change per note from fortissimo to piano.

The unorthodox orchestral line-up with accordion, two saxophones and cimbalom, is striking. However this is no coincidence, as Larcher has a name to lose in terms of using unusual sound colours. ‘The traditional orchestra is in dire need of change’, he explains.  ‘It must open up for instruments other than the usual ones, otherwise it will end up as a wonderfully embalmed mummy. The saxophones give the woodwinds more transparency, and their colour provides clear contours.’

Thomas Larcher: “The orchestra must open up for instruments other than the usual ones, otherwise it will end up as a wonderfully embalmed mummy.”

SPINE

Percussion also has a prominent role, with four musicians playing such unconventional instruments as tambourin de Provence (a narrow, portable drum) and steel drums. ‘The percussion acts as a kind of clock that sets the structure. It simultaneously serves as a timer, metronome, heart rate monitor, prompter, and blood pressure monitor.’

‘At other times the emphasis lies more on the melodic progression, for percussion may no less be a melody  instrument than the piano.’ Often the soloist teams up with percussion, accordion, cimbalom and celesta. Yet this does not mean they are acting as a kind of concertino or shadow ensemble: ‘Rather, these instruments constitute the spine and the nerve tracts enclosed within.’

CONSTRUCTION AND EXPRESSION

The Piano Concerto is dedicated to Larcher’s former composition teacher Erich Urbanner: ‘Both as a teacher and as a composer, he has meant a lot to me. A very outspoken, strong-willed and incorruptible personality, he taught with great passion. But he was also ruthless in his towering musical demands. For one, you had to master counterpoint to the hilt.’

Larcher greatly admires Urbanner’s own compositions. ‘I have known them since I was twelve. I am still deeply impressed by his Cello Concerto from 1981, which I heard in a performance by Heinrich Schiff. It opened up new worlds for me. For the first time I experienced a synthesis between construction and profound expression. That has left a big mark on my own music.’

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wVQ8osHmx7s

#KarinaCanellakis #KirillGerstein #NTRZaterdagmatinee #RadioFilharmonischOrkest #ThomasLarcher

Conductor Markus Stenz: ‘Sometimes I feel: now it’s music’.

Markus Stenz (c) Josep Molina

In 2012 Markus Stenz was appointed chief conductor of the Dutch Radio Philharmonic Orchestra, based in Hilversum. He conducted both classical masterworks, world premières and lesser known repertoire by Dutch composers, in NTRZaterdagMatinee in Concertgebouw Amsterdam and AVROTROSVrijdagconcert in TivoliVredenburg Utrecht.

On 7 June he takes his leave as chief conductor with Szenen aus Goethes Faust Robert Schumann. We know Stenz as a passionate and well-informed conductor, who always strives for the best result. But what is his background, and how did he end up in music?

Markus Stenz (1965) grew up in the village of Kaltenborn in the Rhineland-Palatinate: ‘A hamlet with two farmhouses, a church, a pub and a village school of which my father was headmaster. We lived above it. It was deadly boring and my parents made music to drive away the boredom. My mother was always singing, whether she was cooking, ironing, or doing any other household chores. My father was a skilled amateur musician, who, besides piano and organ, also played wind instruments and conducted a choir. As a toddler of two, I crawled under the grand piano, that’s how beautiful I thought it was.’3333

Little Markus also bangs the keys himself and at the age of five his parents send him to piano lessons. ‘They chose the best teacher in the region, Mrs. Haas-Paquet in Ahrweiler. She was such a typical gnome woman: small, with bony fingers and a bun. For my first lesson I refused to go inside, because I thought she was so ugly. I clasped myself to the door of the car. When my mother told her in distress what was going on, Mrs. Haas said wittily: “You’re right, I’m ugly! And now we’re going to start.” – And then I had lessons from her for ten years.’

This wasn’t a matter of course, however. ‘It was 45 minutes’ drive and I always got sick in the car. Both on the way up and back the question arose where to stop: in Kempenich or in Ramersbach, so that I could throw up.’ Moreover Haas-Paquet proved to be a strict teacher: ‘I drove her to madness because I improvised rather more than I practiced, so when I played she often corrected me: “You missed that note again!” – But she was also very sensitive, and I learned a lot from her.’

Although he grows up in a musical environment, Stenz only visits a concert once as a child: ‘Around my tenth my father took me to the Beethovenhalle in Bonn. I don’t remember what was played, but I do remember the conductor. With his bald head he looked very much like Professor Charivari from my children’s book Raumschiff Monitor, which I liked. I suspect it was Georg Solti.’

A few years later he sees Leonard Bernstein’s Norton Lectures on television. ‘A key moment! I thought it great that he brought jazz and classical music together in a self-evident way. He was so free in his thinking and illustrated his lectures with live music, from The Beatles to Beethoven, electrifying.’ At the age of eighteen he started studying conducting with Volker Wangenheim in Cologne and after that he took a course in Tanglewood with his hero Bernstein.

Stenz enjoys working with the Radio Philharmonic Orchestra, where he will regularly return as a guest conductor in the coming season. ‘I like the adventurous programming and the unconditional commitment of the musicians. The repertoire ranges from the classical canon – from Haydn to Beethoven through Mahler – to Dutch composers such as Rudolf Escher, Peter Schat and Joey Roukens. We’ve also performed a lot of concertante opera, often in combination with the Radio Choir, as last week we performed Die Gezeichneten Franz Schreker, and in 2017 we played the world première of Babylon Jörg Widmann.’

‘I hardly know of an orchestra that plays with more dedication and passion. We faced hard times because of the ongoing cuts on funding in the Netherlands, but we’ve responded to this with highly motivated playing. For me it is essential that an orchestra is able to play commissioned compositions. Discovering new avenues is a basic instinct, for all musicians. The great thing is that the public here has always been very open to the very latest notes.’

The reactions of the audience are of vital importance to Stenz anyway: ‘Without an audience there is no concert, they are the determining factor! We musicians are experience artists, we create art in the moment, and hopefully the audience will be carried away. It’s great when people come and tell us from the bottom of their hearts how much they liked a concert.’

‘I drew a lot of inspiration from the book Zen in the art of archery. It describes how in the perfect case it is not the shooter or the archer who shoots, but ‘it’. It may sound a bit ethereal, but at concerts I sometimes feel: now it becomes music, not I conduct, but ‘it’. – Those are magical moments.’

I interviewed Markus Stenz on Goethes Faust and his leave as chief conductor for the live broadcast of the concert on Radio 4.

#AVROTROSVrijdagconcert #GrootOmroepkoor #MarkusStenz #NTRZaterdagmatinee #RadioFilharmmonischOrkest #SzenenAusGoethesFaust

Carola Bauckholt concocts music from sludge flakes and animal sounds

On May 18 NTRZaterdagMatinee presents an adventurous programme. The German Ensemble Musikfabrik will perform two world premières and a Dutch première by five composers of the same generation, four of whom are women. I earlier wrote about the pieces of Unsuk Chin, Rebecca Saunders and Sander Germanus, today I’m zooming in on Carola Bauckholt, whose Schlammflocke (Sludge Flakes) will be performed in the Netherlands for the first time.

Born in Krefeld in 1959, Carola Bauckholt is one of the most original voices in German musical life. She studied with Mauricio Kagel at the Conservatory of Cologne and was  associated with the avant-garde Theatre am Marienplatz in her native city of Krefeld for many years. In this venue a lot of hers and Kagel’s pieces had their first run.

Bauckholt likes to draw on ‘unmusical’ sources. The rattling of a rusty sign, the terrifying howling of wolves, the squeaking of a door, or the stuttering of a faltering petrol engine, however farfetched a source may seem, Bauckholt hears music in it. She develops the most inventive playing techniques and combines a pleasant kind of alienation with a refreshing sense of humour.

Curiosity

In an interview she told me: ‘My motive is curiosity. When I know where something is going, I feel superfluous, even as a listener. I find it fascinating how elusive music is: people hear the same notes and textures, but have totally different thoughts and associations. I try to understand this over and over again, that’s why I experiment with sounds and connections that I’ve never heard before.’

During the concert on 18 May Bauckholt will make her debut in NTRZaterdagMatinee with Schlammflocke, which she composed in 2010 for the Cologne based Ensemble Musikfabrik. The piece for 16 musicians is inspired by the operation of water purification installations, in which so-called sludge flakes play an important role. These are microorganisms of dead and living material that are used for the biological degradation process of sewage.

Just as the sludge flakes purify our wastewater, Bauckholt wants to ‘clean’ our aural perception. For this purpose she uses a wide range of resources. The musicians not only play their own instruments but also produce all kinds of animal sounds. Bauckholt uses nose whistles, puts a saxophone mouthpiece on the tuba, and has the upper octave of the piano strings taped with adhesive paste.

Virtual zoo

The sounds she conjures up in this way are derived from CD recordings of birds, frogs, foxes, sea lions and chimpanzees, which she has translated to the instruments as faithfully as possible. Pitch, rhythm, timbre and dynamics are accurately noted, but the performer is expected to interpret them as he/she sees fit. The result is a soundworld that is as exciting as it is mysterious, and that stimulates both our ears and minds in a playful way.

In Schlammflocke Bauckholt masterfully blends technique and nature. Against a tranquil background we hear the squeaking of what sounds like a metal blade yearning for a drop of oil moving slowly through the water. The ubiquitous animal callings and bird twittering create the feeling that one finds oneself in a virtual kind of zoo.

At the same time, Bauckholt creates a striking image of the surroundings of a water purification plant. After all, such constructions are often found in solitary places in nature. After its première one critic wrote: ‘Sometimes these places even seem to concretize geographically, when the music evokes the biting cold and rigid ice formations of the polar regions.’

18 May 2.15 pm Concertgebouw Amsterdam: Musikfabrik. The concert forms part of the radio series NTRZaterdagMatinee and is broadcast live on Radio4.

#CarolaBauckholt #ConcertgebouwAmsterdam #Musikfabrik #NTRZaterdagmatinee #Schlammflocke

Rebecca Saunders composes music like a sculptor

Women composers invisible? Yes, they are still very much underrepresented in most concert series, though not in this season’s NTRZaterdagMatinee. Of the five compositions the German Ensemble Musikfabrik presents on 18 May, four were written by a woman. Among them the British-German Rebecca Saunders, who was recently awarded the Ernst von Siemens Prize 2019. Helen Bledsoe will play Bite for bass flute solo.

Saunders, born in London in 1967, studied violin and composition at the University of Edinburgh. In 1991 she received the German DAAD stipend, with which she studied composition with Wolfgang Rihm at the Hochschule für Musik in Karlsruhe. After three years she returned to Edinburgh, where she obtained her doctorate with Nigel Osborne in 1998. A year earlied she had moved to Berlin.

Magical physicality

Saunders has won many prizes, was a visiting professor at the renowned Ferienkurse für neue Musik in Darmstadt and was awarded an Honorary Doctorate at Huddersfield University in 2018.

She is particularly interested in timbre and likes to explore the possibilities of instruments by means of playing techniques of her own designing. ‘For me what’s really important is enabling the listener to feel the magical physicality of sound: the timbre, the colour, the mass and the weight of sound,’ she once said. She compares herself to a sculptor working with different materials.

Her scores are teeming with detailed instructions, sometimes she also employs objects such as metronomes, radios, record players and mechanical music boxes. In her music she regularly refers to artists and writers, such as James Joyce and Derek Jarman. In her recent work, she often leans towards Samuel Beckett and his fascination with shadow and silence.

This also applies to Bite for bass flute solo, which she composed in 2015 for Helen Bledsoe, Musikfabrik’s solo flute player. It is part of a series of solo pieces she has written in recent years for performers with whom she has worked together closely; in her score she explicitly thanks Bledsoe for their pleasant ‘sound sessions’.

Daunting solo

The score is quite daunting. The flutist produces quarter tones and multiphonics, plays with Flatterzunge and has to constantly – and – quickly switch between (extremely) fast and (very) slow tempi. The dynamics vary from the softest pianissimo to the loudest fortissimo. Meanwhile, Bledsoe whispers, sings or shouts texts by Beckett in her instrument, giving the physical sound a different colour and intention.

On her website Helen Bledsoe describes Bite as ‘a massive, expressive, sighing and ranting piece for bass flute with low B’. She premiered it in 2016, one critic praising it for being was ‘quite athletic’. Yet two years later Saunders made a revision in which she deleted several parts. This version will be performed for the first time in the concert on 18 May, after which Bledsoe hopes to record it for CD.

NTRZaterdagMatinee 18 May, Concertgebouw Amsterdam 2pm
Musikfabrik/Emilio Pamárico
World premières by Rozalie Hirs and Sander Germanus; further works by Rebecca Saunders, Unsuk Chin and Carola Bauckholt

#CarolaBauckholt #HelenBledsoe #Musikfabrik #NTRZaterdagmatinee #RebeccaSaunders #RozalieHirs #UnsukChin

Unsuk Chin: grinning teeth and false magic in Gougalōn

Unsuk Chin (1961) is one of the most successful composers of our time. She won the Gaudeamus Award in 1985, the prestigious Grawemeyer Award in 2004, and was recently honoured with the Bach Prize 2019 of the city of Hamburg. On Saturday 18 May the German ensemble Musikfabrik will perform her popular piece Gougalōn in NTRZaterdagMatinee in Concertgebouw Amsterdam. The concert will be broadcast live on Radio 4.

Chin was born in Seoul, the capital of South Korea, as the daughter of a minister. When she was two years old her father bought a piano for his church services. She was immediately fascinated, but there was no money for piano lessons. She learnt to play the instrument on her own account and from the age of eight she contributed to the family income as a piano accompanist for wedding ceremonies.

From Tchaikovsky to Ligeti

In high school she got to know music by composers like Brahms and Tchaikovsky and decided to start composing herself. When she heard a piece by György Ligeti at the Seoul Conservatory, she was so impressed that she asked him by letter to teach her. He agreed and in 1985 she moved to Hamburg. The acquaintance was a shock: Ligeti rejected all her previously composed pieces. According to him they were well written but lacked personality.

Ironically, it was precisely in this period that she won the Gaudeamus Music Prize with Spektra for three celli, the piece with which she graduated from Seoul Conservatory. Under Ligeti’s tutorship she developed her own style, in which beauty of sound and humour go hand in hand. In 1991 she composed the witty Akrostichon-Wortspiel for the Dutch Nieuw Ensemble and solo soprano, based on nonsense lyrics. Two years later, this piece marked her international breakthrough.

East meets West

Chin tirelessly searches for unheard sounds and timbres. She writes for common western instruments, but manages to elicit eastern sounding sonorities from them; sometimes she also uses Asian instruments. In this way she organically links her Korean background with her western education. In her frequently performed ensemble piece Gougalōn Chin once again addresses her roots.

The idea arose during a stay in China in 2008-09. In her own words she experienced a ‘Proustian moment’ when visiting cities such as Hong Kong and Guangzhou. The atmosphere of the old and poor residential neighbourhoods with their narrow, winding alleys, ambulatory food vendors, and market places reminded her of her childhood in Seoul. This evoked long forgotten images of travelling amateur musicians and actors trying to foist homemade medicines on the common man/woman by means of street theatre.

Clattering teeth and dancing barracks

The title Gougalōn derives from old High German. The word’s meanings range from ‘tampering’ and ‘fooling people with fake magic’ to ‘making ridiculous movements’ and ‘divination’. Chin emphasizes she does not directly refer to the amateurish street theatre of her youth and that the music is not intended to be illustrative; she describes her piece as ‘imaginary folk music’. Yet it is difficult to avoid associations with the subtitles of the six movements, especially since Chin paints hilarious scenes with special sound effects.

For instance, the solo violin plays seemingly completely out of tune glissandi in ‘Lament of the bald singer’, the percussionists suggestively produce rattling sounds in ‘The grinning fortune teller with the false teeth’, in ‘Dance around the shacks’ long held lines of the strings are supported by swaying brass, while in ‘The hunt for the quack’s plait’ a pandemonium bursts loose that would well suit a pursuit scene in an animated film.

Gougalōn was well received by both audience and press. ‘Vivid, extravagant and technically assured to the point of virtuosity’, opined The Guardian; ‘Chin successfully pairs a typically German love of the grotesque with an Asiatic sound world, to hilarious effect’, wrote Backtrack. 

On the programme, too are world premières by Rozalie Hirs and Sander Germanus, and works by Carola Bauckholt and Rebecca Saunders.

https://youtu.be/Gp-dm9OS10M

#Gougalōn #GyörgyLigeti #Musikfabrik #NieuwEnsemble #NTRZaterdagmatinee #UnsukChin

Mathilde Wantenaar: Lush harmonies in new piece for Dutch Radio Choir

Mathilde Wantenaar

This season NTRZaterdagMatinee makes up for decades of neglecting female composers, featuring well-known names such as Kaija Saariaho and Unsuk Chin next to lesser-known composers such as Calliope Tsoupaki and Kate Whitley. On Saturday 23 March the Dutch Radio Choir will present both Gubaidulina’s Canticle of the Sun and Dit zijn de bleeke, bleeklichte weken by Mathilde Wantenaar.

This piece for choir a cappella was commissioned by the renowned radio series in Concertgebouw Amsterdam. As always the concert will be aired live on Radio 4. Underneath you find the translation of my text for the programme booklet.

Mathilde Wantenaar (Amsterdam, 1993) has been steadfastly working on her development for years. In 2011 she attracted attention with her entry for the annual composition competition of the Nederlands Blazers Ensemble. Seven years later the wind players asked her for their project Bach & Sufi. “She sliced up the Hohe Messe, inclined her ears towards Persia, and arranged a musical treat that amply transcends good intentions”, opined de Volkskrant.

In 2014 she won the Alba Rosa Viëtor Composition Prize with Sprookjes 1, 2 & 3 for violin and piano, and a year later her Song of Songs for soprano, guitar and percussion won an award in the Princess Christina Composition Competition. She composed pieces for pianist Ralph van Raat, vocal ensemble Wishful Singing and soprano Johannette Zomer. In 2016 she presented the successful chamber opera p e r s o n a r for the Opera Forward Festival of Dutch National Opera. Her Octet for Strings, written for violinist Liza Ferschtman, represented the Netherlands in 2017 at the International Rostrum of Composers.

She studied composition with such diverse teachers as Willem Jeths and Wim Henderickx at the Conservatory of Amsterdam, graduating in 2016. Wantenaar does not limit herself to composing, however. During her studies she also took cello lessons and vocal training, and currently she is enrolled at the Royal Conservatoire in The Hague to become a professional singer. She has a great affinity with the human voice and even her purely instrumental compositions are remarkably melodious.

Elusive atmosphere

No wonder her first commission for NTRZaterdagMatinee is a composition for the Dutch Radio Choir. For this a cappella piece she chose a poem by Herman Gorter, Dit zijn de bleeke, bleeklichte weken (which roughly translates as These are the pale, pale weeks). This is not the first time she was inspired by Gorter’s poetry. In 2017 she made a setting of De stille weg (The silent road) for chorus, piano and violin, a commission from the Festival De Muze van Zuid.

Wantenaar was attracted by ‘the stillness, the stratification, the visual, the elusive and the transient’ in Dit zijn de bleeke, bleeklichte weken. The poem evoked strong images in her: ‘In my mind’s eye I envisioned the poet sitting in a quiet room at a table next to the window. The sun is hidden behind an endless expansive cover of white clouds, it is as if the world has been drained of all colour, even though there is a lot of light.’

‘Outside there is life, but in the poet’s room everything sounds muted, it feels as if time is standing still and the sky has solidified. We sit under a bell jar, shimmering dust particles float in the air and in the meantime the world slowly passes us by. It is nice to be there, but at the same time also oppressive and lonely.’

Wantenaar translated this static, somewhat floating feeling into a 3/2 metre, which we often associate with older music. The text is sung largely homophonic and the tempo is low, time seems to stand still. Under the calm atmosphere, however a ‘mildly longing romantic undercurrent is simmering’, says the composer. Underneath this yet another layer is concealed, with a ‘darker feeling of constriction’. The play of light and dark finds its equivalent in a varied dynamic, the tranquillity is expressed in sonorous harmonies. A single dissonant chord echoes the subcutaneous tension that shimmers through the poem.

Concertgebouw 23 March 2.15 pm: NTR ZaterdagMatinee
Dutch Radio Choir /Philipp Ahmann; Ivan Monighetti, cello
Wantenaar – Dit zijn de bleeke, bleeklichte weken (commissoned by NTR ZaterdagMatinee, WP)
Tchaikovsky – Nine Sacred Pieces
Gubaidulina – Canticle of the Sun

#DutchRadioChoir #GrootOmroepkoor #MathildeWantenaar #NTRZaterdagmatinee #SofiaGubaidulina

Early work of Galina Ustvolskaya in Concertgebouw: no ‘lady with the hammer’

Galina Ustvolskaya (c) Leendert Jansen

On Saturday 12 January Vasily Petrenko conducts the Dutch Radio Philharnonic Orchestra in three works by Brahms, Shostakovich and Ustvolskaya as part of the NTRZaterdagMatinee series in Concertgebouw Amsterdam. Despite their very different backgrounds, there are some similarities. The two Russian composers suffered under the repressive regime of the communists, the German Brahms was accused of writing old-fashioned music that lacked Beethoven’s ‘social-forming’ power.

‘Lady with the hammer’

Galina Ustvolskaya was dubbed ‘the lady with the hammer’ because of her relentless style, but she did not always compose drastic music that excels in extremes. Under the wings of Dmitri Shostakovich she first trod more traditional paths as a composer. She destroyed most of her early works, but spared the symphonic poem The Dream of Stepan Razin for baritone and orchestra that will get a rare performance in NTRZaterdagMatinee.

Ustvolskaya was born in Petrograd in 1919, two years after the Russian Revolution. In the same year Dmitri Shostakovich started studying piano and composition there. Ustvolskaya would remain in the city all her life, which was renamed Leningrad in 1924 in memory of the hero of the revolution and only regained its original name St. Petersburg in 1992.

Just like Shostakovich, she was confronted with an increasingly strict and repressive Soviet regime. Nevertheless – or precisely because of this – Ustvolskaya developed into one of the most elusive and idiosyncratic composers of our time. She studied composition at the Leningrad Conservatoire, being the only female student admitted to Shostakovich’s composition class in 1939.

He soon recognised her exceptional qualities and predicted her ‘worldwide recognition of everyone who is concerned with truthfulness in music’. Bravely he defended her music in the Composers’ Union, and it is rumoured he even proposed marriage to her. He asked her to review his own scores and incorporated one of her themes in his Fifth String Quartet and the Michelangelo Suite.

‘Formalism’

Shostakovich courteously wrote to her: ‘You are not influenced by me, it is rather the other way round.’ It is all the more distressing to read how fiercely Ustvolskaya later rejected her mentor and former friend. In a letter to her publishers she wrote: ‘Then, just like now, I resolutely rejected his music. (….) One thing is certain: a seemingly eminent figure like Shostakovich is not at all eminent to me; on the contrary, he burdened my life and killed my best feelings.’

In any case, just like Shostakovich, Ustvolskaya was accused of writing ‘formalist’ music. In order to earn a living she composed film scores and ‘music for the people’. This resulted in a number of works in the prescribed ‘socialist-realist’ style, which she later withdrew. An exception is The Dream of Stepan Razin, which she composed in 1949 on a text from Russian folk poetry. This is an ode to the Cossack leader Stenka Razin (1630-1671) who rebelled against the Russian landed gentry that exploited and repressed the common people.

‘Truly national art’

This early work is full of lyrical melodies, heroic fanfares and rousing Cossack rhythms. To top it off there’s a soaring solo part sung by a baritone, who gives a lively description of how Stepan Razin envisions his impending execution. The apparatchiks were so pleased that the piece was chosen for the opening of the new season of the Leningrad Philharmonic Orchestra in 1949.

Tichon Chrennikov, secretary of the Composers’ Union, even recommended The Dream of Stepan Razin to other composers, as ‘an ideal example of a truly national art’. The composition was even nominated for a Stalin Prize. The hyper-romantic music is a far cry from the radicalism of Ustvolskaya’s later compositions. Thus it fits well with Brahms’s First Symphony and Shostakovich’s Second Violin Concerto that are also on the programme. The concert is broadcast live on Radio4.

NTR ZaterdagMatinee, 12 January 2 pm Concertgebouw Amsterdam
Radio Philharmonic Orchestra / Vasili Petrenko; Alina Ibragimova, violin; Anatoli Sivko, baritone
Ustvolskaya (1919-2006): The Dream of Stepan Razin (1949)
Shostakovich (1906-1975): Violin concert no. 2 in c-sharp minor op.129 (1967)
Brahms (1833-1897): Symphony no. 1 in c minor op.68 (1876)

#DmitriShostakovich #GalinaUstvolskaya #JohannesBrahms #NTRZaterdagmatinee #RadioFilharmonischOrkest #TheDreamOfStepanRazin #VasilyPetrenko

Composer Victoria Borisova-Ollas: ‘I wondered what the music of the pharaohs sounded like’

The latest achievement of the Russian-Swedish composer Victoria Borisova-Ollas (1969) is Dracula. This opera based on Bram Stoker’s book on the famous vampire was premièred at The Stockholm Royal Opera in October 2017. ‘A colourful and highly atmospheric musical score’, containing ‘one of the most emotional scenes in any Swedish opera’, wrote a critic.

Seven years earlier she composed her highly successful clarinet concerto Golden Dances of the Pharaohs for Martin Fröst and the Swedish Royal Philharmonic Orchestra. This was dubbed ‘a wondrous song from an ancient realm that reaches very far’.

On Saturday 13 January 2018 the concerto will be performed in NTRZaterdagMatinee by Residentie Orkest and Martin Fröst. In 2010 Fröst also played the Dutch première, with the Radio Philharmonic Orchestra; I interviewed Borisova-Ollas for the live broadcast on TROS Radio 4.

You were born in Wladiwostok in the easternmost part of Russia, near China and Korea. Yet you studied in Moscow, why so far away?

Russia is a very big country, indeed. The Soviet educational system was good, but centralized. If you didn’t live in the central towns of Moscow, Leningrad or Kiev, you had to go far away to study. I had wanted to be a composer from when I was very young, but the academy of music in Wladiwostok didn’t offer composition in its curriculum.

Therefore my mother sent me to The Central Music School in Moscow when I was 13 years old; it was the junior department of the Tchaikovsky Conservatory. Fortunately that same year they decided to do an experiment and let us, who were still quite young, study composition directly as a main subject.

Why did you continue your studies in Sweden and England after graduating?

I went to Sweden because I married a Swedish man. I had already finished my education by then, but found the climate in Sweden very much different from what I was used to in Russia. I realized that in order to understand how the cultural climate works in Sweden, I should continue my schooling there. After having studied at the Malmö College of Music for some years, I took part in an exchange programme with the Royal College of Music in London. I was really curious to find out how people teach composition in different countries.

What were the differences?

I found the British system to be rather similar to the Soviet one. You start studying music from an early age and move through ever higher levels of education to eventually reach the conservatory. A difference was that in England you had more opportunities to study modern styles of composing; during my years in Russia contemporary music was only just being discovered.

In Sweden I couldn’t quite work out where and when musical education actually started. Almost all of my fellow composition students had only had private teaching. There were no schools or music gymnasiums to prepare young people, so it was all up to chance: if you were lucky with your first teacher maybe you could enrol at the conservatoire. The basics of music were learnt at a much later stage than in Russia and Britain. Fortunately all this has changed, there are more music schools now in Sweden.

You composed ‘Golden Dances of the Pharaohs’ in 2010. Was it your own idea, or a commission?

I had been thinking of doing something with ancient Egypt for a while, already. I always have a list of some ten titles in my mind. When Martin Fröst asked me to write a clarinet concerto for him, the theme of the pharaohs immediately sprang to mind. The Royal Philharmonic Orchestra who commissioned it also thought it a great idea, so we decided to go ahead and do it.

Why ‘golden dances’, not just ‘dances’?

My idea was to create something dancing for Martin Fröst, who is not only a great clarinettist, but also moves very beautifully while playing. When I was thinking of his stage performance, I came across an art-book on ancient Egypt. On the cover was the famous golden mask of pharaoh Tutankhamun. This image is iconic: when we think of ancient Egypt, we think of gold, of mighty things.

Curiously however we  never think of sounds. We know practically everything of their daily habits, but not about the instruments the Egyptians used, how they danced or how they sang. The mask triggered my imagination. I thought: let’s imagine a dancing party in the pharaoh’s palace. How could it have sounded? With this in mind I started composing.

At the beginning we hear a voice on tape. Who is this, and what text is he reciting?

It’s Martin Fröst himself, whose voice has a kind of ancient…

…timbre?

Yes, we changed the timbre of his voice. Thus I refer to Herodotus, the father of historians, who travelled through Egypt in the 5th century B.C. I quote a text from the book he wrote about this: ‘Concerning Egypt I will now speak at length, because nowhere are there so many marvellous things, nor in the whole world besides are there to be seen so many works of unspeakable greatness.’ I asked Martin to read these words, and then we gave the recording an ancient touch.

Since you’re deeply rooted in Swedish musical life now, do you consider yourself a Russian or a Swedish composer?

I would like to see myself and my music to be cosmopolitan. And anyway, what might the nationality of music be?

Part of my talk with Borisova-Ollas can be heard on YouTube

#GoldenDancesOfThePharaohs #MartinFröst #NTRZaterdagmatinee #RadioFilharmonischOrkest #VictoriaBorisovaOllas

Michel van der Aa: 3D-opera Sunken Garden in NTRZaterdagMatinee

In 2013, the ‘first 3D opera’ in the world was launched in the Holland Festival with a lot of fanfare. This fourth opera by Michel van der Aa (1970) got mixed reviews. Two years later the Dutch composer made a revised version for the Opéra de Lyon. Based on this, he wrought a semi-scenic performance that will be premièred in NTRZaterdagMatinee in the Amsterdam Concertgebouw on Saturday 21 October.

At the time I was impressed by the technology, less by the libretto and the music of Sunken Garden. Also I considered it somewhat too long. Hopefully the new version will be more convincing.

Here’s a translation of the review I wrote in 2013.

Crime & Punishment before, after and in Death

Amsterdam, 5 June 2013 – It’s hard to find a production that created such a stir as Sunken Garden by Michel van der Aa. After its première at the London Barbican Theater last April this ‘first 3D-opera’ was both called ‘soporific’, and dubbed ‘the future of opera’.

Therefore I curiously entered the Rabozaal of the Amsterdam City Theater, where I was given 3D-glasses and a note with instructions when to put them on. The string orchestra Amsterdam Sinfonietta was complemented with winds, percussionists and a keyboardist; the young André de Ridder conducting.

As in his previous opera After Life, Van der Aa takes us to the antechamber of death. Where in After Life the characters relive their dearest memory before finally passing into afterlife, in Sunken Garden they can escape their responsibilities. Amber Jacquemain caused the death of her rival in love, Simon Vines was asleep when his daughter died in the cradle, Toby Kramer committed euthanasia on his mother.

The three protagonists make different choices: Amber finally leaves for the empire of the dead, Simon decides to live on with his guilt and Toby is reincarnated in the shape of his benefactor/tormenter Zenna Briggs. She built the sunken garden to become immortal, but was counteracted by Doctor Marinus, who lost his life over this. In passing the Orpheus theme is addressed: Toby falls in love with Amber, whom he tries – unsuccessfully – to free from the underworld. This is visualized by a 3D explosion of brightly colored plants.

Also musically, Van der Aa expands on former compositions. He supports the story with functional sounds, whether or not combined with electronics. Long-drawn chords are interspersed with frantic sound eruptions, yet at times there’s more lyricism. His favored broken branches aren’t missing either. Striking is the use of a consciously nerdy sounding synthesizer, which evokes associations with the seventies. Amsterdam Sinfonietta and conductor André de Ridder were in excellent shape, but the music was too uniform to engage our attention for two hours.

The vocal lines are slightly less angular than in After Life, yet still mainly move back and forth between the high and low registers. Thanks to the recitative style and the great performance of the singers, the texts were understandable. With his warm baritone, Roderick Williams convinces as the tentatively searching artist Toby Kramer, the soprano Katherine Manley is great as the venomous, lightly hysterical Zenna Briggs and Claron McFadden shines as the desperate Marinus.

In the filmed parts the baritone Jonathan McGovern (Simon Vines) also holds our attention, though you unconsciously squeeze your ears shut during his larmoyant “aria” about his daughter’s death. The pop singer Kate Miller-Heidke moves us as the naïve-devious Amber Jacquemain, especially when her sultry vocal lines surface above the stampeding dance-beats that threatened to drown her earlier.

Unfortunately all music is amplified, sometimes resulting in distorted vocals. Moreover it creates distance, because you see an orchestra in the pit and singers on the scene, yet hearthem through speakers to the left and right of the stage. Identification with the characters is problematic anyway, because David Mitchell’s storylines are so complicated and far-fetched that after one and a half hours boredom creeps in. – But then it continues for another thirty minutes.

Sunken Garden is a brave attempt to search for new ways, but it seems unlikely this opera ‘will change history’, as Van der Aa’s alter ego Toby Kramer postulates.

The revised, semi-staged version of Sunken Garden will be performed in Concertgebouw on 21 October in the series NTRZaterdagMatinee and broadcast live on Radio 4. 

#AmsterdamSinfonietta #ClaronMcFadden #DavidMitchell #MichelVanDerAa #NTRZaterdagmatinee #RoderickWilliams #SunkenGarden

At Swim-Two-Birds: double concerto for violin & cello by Pascal Dusapin

‘I’ll never write a motif, rhythm, or chord that I cannot sing,’ Pascal Dusapin (Nancy, 1955) once said. And indeed, all his music has a vocal, cantabile quality. On Saturday 30 September the Dutch Radio Philharmonic Orchestra will première his concerto At Swim-Two-Birds for violin, cello, and orchestra in Amsterdam Concertgebouw. Soloists are the violinist Viktoria Mullova and the cellist Matthew Barley, to whom the piece is dedicated. The première is broadcast live on Radio 4, organizer of the concert series NTR ZaterdagMatinee.

As a child Dusapin was so impressed when he first heard a jazz trio, that he decided there and then to start playing the clarinet. From his tenth he developed a passion for organ, but only when he heard Arcana by Edgard Varèse, he knew he wanted to spend the rest of his life composing.

Colourful tapestries

Instead of going to a conservatory – which he deemed too academic – Dusapin studied art history and aesthetics at the Sorbonne. He developed his compositional skills mainly on his own, yet did take some seminars with Iannis Xenakis between 1974 and 1978. He considered the Greek composer to be the living heir of Varèse. Unlike his heroes, he was not interested in using electronics in the compositional process. With purely physical instruments Dusapin creates highly organic music, full of colourful sound tapestries and lyrical solos.

He composed At Swim-Two Birds at the request of the violinist Viktoria Mullova and the cellist Matthew Barley. At first Dusapin had doubts about writing yet another piece for solo strings. Having recently finished both a violin and a cello concerto, he ‘felt a bit swamped by these two instruments’. When Mullova and Barley opined that the combination of a violin and a cello would make ‘a new instrument altogether’, he accepted the commission after all: ‘This changed everything.’

Extravagant narrative

While composing, Dusapin stumbled upon the experimental novel At Swim-Two-Birds by Flann O’Brien from 1939. This is literally swarming with unlikely figures and characters, who in the end take over the initiative from the author. It is a mixture of farce, satire and fantasy and ranks as one of the important exponents of postmodern literature.

‘I was struck by the narrative and formal extravagance of this book’, says Dusapin. But though he took its title, he never intended his concerto to be a musical equivalent. Rather more he was taken in with the way the characters become entangled with each other. –  ‘And then, of course, there are two birds in the title…’.

Sensually intertwined

The number two not only applies to the soloists, but also to the form of the concerto. Instead of the current three, At Swim-Two-Birds has only two movements, both slow. Dusapin gives a lot of room to the soloists, who often play virtuoso solo lines against a silent orchestra. At other times the two ‘birds’ sensually intertwine in soaring duets, the orchestra moving in so cautiously you hardly notice they’re taking part in the argument.

The overall pace is slow, but towards the end vehement tapping on a tambourine triggers a faster tempo, while the dynamics become louder. The solo violin ‘breaks loose’ in staggeringly virtuosic figurations, giving the orchestra and fellow soloist the go-by. Yet they pull themselves together quickly, ‘overtaking’ the violin and restoring the quiet atmosphere. The concerto ends with softly rumbling drums and gongs, the string orchestra playing a chord that slowly fades away into nothingness.

I hope the actual performance will be as enchanting as is promised by the score.

Saturday 30 September, 2.15 p.m. Concertgebouw Amsterdam
Radio Filhamonisch Orkest / Markus Stenz
Ligeti: Lontano
Dusapin: At Swim-Two Birds
Larcher: Symphony nr.2 “Kenotaph’ (NL premiere)

Photo credit: Jean Radel

#AtSwimTwoBirds #MatthewBarley #NTRZaterdagMatinee #PascalDusapin #ViktoriaMullova

Abschied in Panorama de Leeuw XV

A.s. woensdag 6 januari draai ik in Panorama de Leeuw op de Concertzender het grootschalige orkestwerk Abschied, dat Reinbert de Leeuw in 1973 componeerde. Met dit kolkende stuk – ‘een permanent soort razernij’ – in zijn eigen woorden, leek hij voorgoed afscheid  te nemen van de Romantiek, het symfonieorkest én zijn carrière als componist.

Het werd in première gebracht door het Rotterdams Philharmonisch Orkest o.l.v. Edo de Waart en verscheen op een elpee, die echter zelden of nooit op welke zender dan ook te horen is. Op deze langspeler staat ook Hymns & Chorals, dat ik draaide in aflevering XII.

Wat zou het mooi zijn als het nieuwe jaar ook een Abschied zou betekenen van het vele geweld in het afgelopen jaar – en in de jaren daarvóór. Dit zal helaas wel te veel gevraagd zijn, want de mens schijnt nu een keer de onbedwingbare behoefte te hebben de ander zijn of haar wil op te leggen, desnoods met geweld.

Maar hoop doet leven, en op 7 januari speelt het Brodsky Quartet in het Muziekgebouw aan ‘t IJ de cyclus Trees Walls Cities over de helende kracht van muziek. Ze vroegen acht componisten een stuk te schrijven over een iconische stad waar muren een belangrijke rol spelen: om de vijand buiten te houden, het volk binnen, of om bevolkingsgroepen van elkaar te scheiden.

De wal op Cyprus die werd opgeworpen tussen de Turkse en Griekse bevolking

Een zeer actueel thema, gezien de vele muren die alom worden opgericht om vluchtelingen uit conflictgebieden te weren uit ons comfortabele, rijke Westen. Maar ook de verzoenende werking van muziek heeft zo zijn grenzen. Zo vertelde Daniel Rowland, primarius van het Brodsky Quartet, me in een gesprek voor Cultuurpers dat de burgemeester van Dubrovnik weigerde  de Servische componiste Isidora Žebeljan toe te laten bij de première van haar eigen stuk. Je leest mijn interview hier.

Op zondag 20 december verzorgde ik de inleiding bij een concert van het Residentie Orkest in TivoliVredenburg, met o.a. het Concert voor twee piano’s van Mozart. Solisten waren Lucas en Arthur Jussen, met wie ik sprak over hun aanpak en over mogelijke meningsverschillen over interpretaties. Ze speelden twee varianten voor, waarbij ik het publiek liet kiezen: unaniem opteerde men voor de wat lyrischere interpretatie van Lucas.

Thea Derks – Arthur en Lucas Jussen, TivoliVredenburg 20-12-2015

Een week eerder speelde het Residentie Orkest in de NTR ZaterdagMatinee de wereldpremière van het Pianoconcert Unscrolled van mijn Chinees-Amerikaanse vriend Huang Ruo, dit seizoen composer in residence van het Amsterdamse Concertgebouw. De eerste componist ooit die deze eer te beurt valt, ik ben heel trots op hem. Ik leerde Huang Ruo kennen in 2005, toen hij meedong naar de Gaudeamus Muziekprijs en we werden meteen vrienden. 

Helaas moest ik wegens familieomstandigheden zijn wereldpremière missen, maar we hebben de schade daarna ruimschoots ingehaald. Op dinsdag 15 december was Huang Ruo te gast bij het Conservatorium van Amsterdam, met onder andere een interview en een uitvoering van zijn stuk Leaving Sao. Arnold Marinissen leidde het studentenensemble The Score Collective en Ruo nam zelf de zangpartij voor zijn rekening. Het stuk werd een dag later met groot succes herhaald tijdens een lunchconcert in een uitpuilende Kleine Zaal van het Concertgebouw.  Diezelfde avond kwam hij met zijn vrouw Shelley en zijn zoontje Nike bij me eten.

Nike – Huang Ruo – Thea Derks, 16-12-2015

Ook op 16 december overleed de legendarische Nederlandse alt Aafje Heynis, 91 jaar oud. Ze was niet alleen geliefd vanwege haar warme, diepe timbre, maar ook om haar eenvoudige en bescheiden persoonlijkheid. Ze was altijd dienstbaar aan de muziek en werd wel vergeleken met de Britse alt Kathleen Ferrier, wier docent haar met vooruitziende blik ooit een grootse carrière voorspelde. Ik schreef een in memoriam.

Op donderdag 10 december gaf ik de derde les van mijn cursus over hedendaagse muziek in het Muziekgebouw aan ‘t IJ, ditmaal gewijd aan de Tweede Weense School. Met aansluitend een concert van het Vlaamse Collectief o.l.v. Reinbert de Leeuw, met als soliste de sopraan Katrien Baerts. De uitvoering had helaas niet het hoge niveau dat De Leeuw eerder dat jaar bereikte met een geheel aan Janácek gewijd programma waaraan ook Collegium Vocale Gent meewerkte.

Een dag eerder klonk in het Muziekgebouw aan ‘t IJ de wereldpremière van de opera Eichmann, gemaakt door de componist Alejandra Castro Espejo en de librettist Bo Tarenskeen. Ik sprak met Castro Espejo over haar compositie, maar helaas werd geen van de hooggespannen verwachtingen ingevuld. Ten eerste was er geen sprake van opera: het merendeel van de tijd werd er niet gezongen maar gesproken; elke vorm van drama ontbrak en er was evenmin interactie tussen de personages.

Adolf Eichmann tijdens zijn proces in Jeruzalem, 1961 (c) https://www.timesofisrael.com

Ten tweede bestond het ‘libretto’ uit nietszeggende teksten over van alles en nog wat, maar ging het nergens over de beloofde spanning tussen het volgen van ons eigen geweten of bureaucratisch uitvoeren wat anderen ons opdragen, zoals Adolf Eichmann deed. Dat de antropologe Hannah Arendt hem niet als een bloeddorstig monster beschouwde, maar als een onbetekenend individu, kwam evenmin uit de verf. De thematiek heeft beslist operapotentie, maar kwam geen moment tot leven.

Zoals ik in mijn vorige blog al meldde, verzorgde ik op donderdag 3 december de inleiding bij een uitvoering van Mantra voor twee piano’s en elektronica van Karlheinz Stockhausen. Ik had mijn gesprek met Pierre-Laurent Aimard, Tamara Stefanovich en de elektronicus Marco Stroppa geregistreerd met mijn smartphone. Anders dan ik verwacht had, was de opname van een behoorlijke kwaliteit, dus plaatste ik deze op YouTube.

Het toeval wil dat diezelfde week ensemble Insomnio nóg een keer de 90e verjaardag van Pierre Boulez vierde met een minifestival. Hij was samen met Stockhausen een van de belangrijke vernieuwers van de muziek van na de Tweede Wereldoorlog. Het door hen gepredikte serialisme is allang op zijn retour, maar hun status is er niet minder om.

Tijdens de kerstvakantie sprak ik voor Cappella Amsterdam met dirigente Maria van Nieukerken over haar carte blanche concert rond elegiën, dat 26 en 17 januari wordt uitgevoerd in Utrecht en Amsterdam. En voor het Noord Nederlands Orkest schreef ik een toelichting bij Canto ostinato voor vier piano’s van Simeon ten Holt en bij de wereldpremière van diens orkestwerk Une musique blanche in de Oosterpoort te Groningen op 22 januari 2016.

Op de valreep van het nieuwe jaar werd ik door Huize Gaudeamus gestrikt voor een lezing over mijn biografie Reinbert de Leeuw, mens of melodie op donderdag 4 februari. En vanavond heb ik een afscheidsdiner met Huang Ruo, die morgen terugvliegt naar New York.

Mijn jaar kan nu al niet meer stuk. Ik wens ook u een mooi en gelukkig 2016!

#AafjeHeynis #Abschied #AdolfEichmann #ArnoldMarinissen #ArthurJussen #BoTarenskeen #BrodskyQuartet #CantoOstinato #CappellaAmsterdam #CollegiumVocaleGent #ConcertgebouwAmsterdam #Cultuurpers #DanielRowland #EdoDeWaart #HetCollectief #HuangRuo #HuizeGaudeamus #Insomnio #IsidoraZebeljan #KarlheinzStockhausen #LeavingSao #LucasJussen #Mantra #MariaCastraEspejo #MariaCastroEspejo #MariaVanNieukerken #MensOfMelodie #mensOfMelodiePanoramaDeLeeuw #MuziekgebouwAanTIJ #NoordNederlandsOrkest #NTRZaterdagMatinee #Oosterpoort #PanoramaDeLeeuw #PierreBoulez #PierreLaurentAimard #ReinbertDeLeeuw #ResidentieOrkest #RotterdamsPhilharmonischOrkest #ScoreCollective #SimeonTenHolt #TamaraStefanovich #TheaDerks #TivoliVredenburg #TreesWallsCities #TweedeWeenseSchool #UneMusiqueBlanche #Unscrolled

Maarten ‘t Hart over #Reinbertbio: ‘Derks verdient een pluim’

Net terug van vakantie is het leven meteen weer druk. Ik ben onder andere volop bezig met de voorbereidingen voor mijn reportages van het komende Festival Oude Muziek voor Radio 4. En afgelopen maandag had ik een zeer boeiend gesprek met Theo Loevendie over zijn nieuwe opera Spinoza. Deze gaat op 11 oktober 2014 in première in de NTRZaterdagMatinee, waarvoor ik de toelichting schrijf. Toen ik bij hem aanbelde, had Loevendie net de laatste noot van de partituur geschreven, hij was opgetogen. We maakten een selfie als ‘Theo & Thea’.

Theo & Thea, 25-11-2014

In de spaarzame momenten dat ik niet aan het werk was, heb ik de aflevering bekeken van VPRO Zomergasten met Reinbert de Leeuw van 10 augustus 2014. Een boeiende avond, waarin Reinbert op zijn bekende bevlogen manier vertelt over componisten als bijvoorbeeld Olivier Messiaen, Galina Oestvolskaja en Charles Ives, vaak in bijna exact dezelfde bewoordingen als in mijn biografie Reinbert de Leeuw, mens of melodie. Maar daarin komen uiteraard nog véél meer toondichters aan bod. Jammer dat Reinbert zich opnieuw misprijzend over mijn biografie uitliet en wederom ontkende dat ik hem het manuscript in januari 2013 ter correctie heb voorgelegd.

Enkele lezers stuurden mij links van recensies van deze aflevering van Zomergasten uitzending die ik niet zelf over het hoofd had gezien. Bas Paternotte bespreekt hem uitvoerig op The Post Online, onder de titel ‘Een bezield mens met een rauw randje en een kalasjnikov’. Hij roemt de bevlogenheid van De Leeuw en diens ‘avond-college over vernieuwers in de muziek’ en vindt het jammer dat hij niet zelf piano speelt, want de man ‘is muziek’. Over De Leeuws reactie op mijn biografie schrijft Paternotte:

Deze aardige welbespraakte – en –denkende zeventiger bleek namelijk met een brok rancune te kampen waar stervoetballer Robin van Persie nog een puntje aan kan zuigen. […]

Hier zat een man die zo min mogelijk over zijn privéleven kwijt wilde. De verwende kijker die méér wilde weten over de achtergrond van deze muzikale alleskunner kreeg het lid op de neus. U begrijpt, een deel van deze aflevering was dus een perfecte advertentie voor Derks’ biografie Reinbert de Leeuw, mens of melodie. Vandaag voor 23:00 uur besteld, morgen in huis.

De uitzending werd zelfs besproken door Henk Brussen op de website Geenstijl.nl. In zijn inleiding zet hij het programma neer als een speeltje van de elite dat zijn beste tijd gehad heeft en ‘waar geen hond naar kijkt’. Maar vervolgens erkent hij toch wel geboeid te zijn geraakt.

Ook Brussen reageert op De Leeuws uitlatingen over mijn biografie:

Zelden illustreerde iemand zo pijnlijk duidelijk wat ‘ongeautoriseerd’ betekent in de zin ‘een ongeautoriseerde biografie’. […]
“Ik vertrouw geen enkel citaat uit die biografie”, zei hij toen De Jong een vleiend citaat van een muze-actrice voorlas uit de biografie, waarmee hij alles over die biografie had gezegd.

Een andere vriend stuurde me een filmpje waarin Maarten ‘t Hart mijn biografie aanprijst, samen met Van Bach tot Bernstein van Thierry Baudet en Arie Boomsma. Hij noemt Reinbert de Leeuw ‘een nurkse man, een Einzelgänger’, en vindt mijn boek ‘juist zo leuk, omdat het een mooi, afgerond portret schetst van een fanaticus […] Ik vind dat mevrouw Derks een pluim verdient.’

Gistermiddag werd ik in het programma ‘Matinee’ geïnterviewd door RTV Apeldoorn over mijn lezing volgende week donderdag 4 september bij boekhandel Nawijn & Polak in Apeldoorn.

#ArieBoomsma #FestivalOudeMuziek #GeenstijlNl #HenkBrussen #NawijnPolak #NJOZomeracademie #NTRZaterdagmatinee #ReinbertDeLeeuw #RTVApeldoorn #Spinoza #TheaDerks #TheoLoevendie #ThierryBaudet #VPROZomergasten

Reinbert de Leeuw componeert monsterstuk voor ZaterdagMatinee

Reinbert de Leeuw werd in september 2013 vijfenzeventig jaar, wat bepaald niet ongemerkt voorbij ging. Dit hele seizoen staat hij in de spotlights, niet alleen als dirigent en als pianist, maar ook als componist. Zo werd tijdens het aan hem gewijde Reinbertfestival zijn op Schubert en Schumann geïnspireerde liederencyclus Im wunderschönen Monat Mai uitgevoerd.

Ook de NTR ZaterdagMatinee wilde niet achterblijven, en gaf De Leeuw een opdracht voor een nieuw orkestwerk, dat a.s. zaterdag 1 februari zijn wereldpremière beleeft in het Concertgebouw in Amsterdam. Reinbert de Leeuw dirigeert zelf het Radio Filharmonisch Orkest Der nächtliche Wanderer, dat zijn titel ontleent aan het gelijknamige gedicht van Friedrich Hölderlin. Dit wordt op band voorgedragen door een acteur.

De Leeuw noemt het zelf een compositie die ‘in alles extreem is’. Deze duurt 50 minuten, maakt gebruik van een honderdkoppig orkest & een extra orkest achter het podium en zet bovendien muziek in vanaf band. Het werk is geïnspireerd op het laatste pianostuk van Wagner en de Vioolsonate van Galina Oestvolskaja.  Ik schreef hierover voor Cultuurpers.

Naast zijn eigen stuk, dirigeert De Leeuw nog een wereldpremière, van de eveneens Nederlandse componist Wim Boogman, Raving. Tevens staat een werk van Igor Stravinsky op de lessenaars.

#ConcertgebouwAmsterdam #DerNächtlicheWanderer #Hölderlin #NTRZaterdagMatinee #RadioFilharmonischOrkest #ReinbertDeLeeuw #TheaDerks