November Music focuses on multimedia

's Hertogenbosch 9-11-2012 - November Music was successfully kicked off last Wednesday and also focuses on multimedia in its twentieth edition. The duo Strijbos & Van Merwijk was a frequent guest there and that afternoon received the Prince Bernhardcultuurprijs Noord-Brabant, presented by former Concertgebouw director Martijn Sanders. In the evening, their pulled for the American string quartet ETHEL multimedia spectacle made Cross Avenue many audiences, the two performances of Cloud-Messenger By Fred Momotenko were even completely sold out.

Momotenko based Cloud-Messenger at Meghaduta, an Indian poem from the fifth or sixth century about a Yaksha, a divine servant who is separated from his young bride for a year and goes mad with loneliness. He starts hallucinating about her and asks a passing cloud to send his beloved a message. The Russian-Dutch composer sees in this ancient story a link to our times, when we are twittering and Facebooking ourselves silly, but forget to listen to each other.

A recorder (played with verve by Jorge Isaac) depicts the cloud, which acts as a kind of shadow of the Yaksha (excellently danced by Gilles Viandier to choreography by Hans Tuerlings). Animations by Jasper Kuipers appear on two semi-sliding panels, including visions of the absent lover (Daniele Lehman). She makes kissing movements, sticks out her tongue and darts around a tree. However, there is no real interaction with the live dancer, whose movements are also somewhat flat and predictable - trotting in heavy passages, slow walking in quiet moments.

Musically, too Cloud-Messenger somewhat disappointed. Momotenko based his forty-five-minute composition entirely on the sounds of the recorder. Frenetic virtuoso runs or long-drawn-out notes are manipulated by live electronics and sampled into a computer - at times, apocalyptic sound waves thunder through the hall in surround sound. Impressive, but too lacking in variety to remain captivating for the full duration.

More exciting was next Cross Avenueby Strijbos & Van Merwijk and the four strings of ETHEL. The duo manned an island full of electronics in the middle of the Verkadefabriek's Great Hall, the musicians were arranged in a square around them, the audience allowed to walk around freely. While the strings were bathed in different colours of light, they played imperturbably stretched sounds or more melodic passages. Sometimes Strijbos & Van Rijswijk would arrange these into an almost Wagnerian orchestra, other times footsteps would sound, or thinly veiled night sounds. Moreover, at every spot in the hall you had a different sound experience. Nevertheless, even this soundscape was too uniform to hold attention from start to finish.

This Sunday, November Music will conclude with a portrait concert by Amsterdam Sinfonietta around Michel van der Aa, which was already performed last night at the Muziekgebouw aan 't IJ. Van der Aa is pretty much the multimedia composer incarnate, and his Up-Close for solo cellist, string orchestra and video animations is a masterpiece of integration: all the parts interlock so seamlessly that they are indistinguishable from each other. Van der Aa gives the term 'multimedia' a new twist - in ten years' time, we will wonder in amazement what that term actually meant anyway....