The @Hollandfestival Proms are many, bold and full. Every now and then, that's quite nice

That George Benjamin is this year's Holland Festival court composer makes perfect sense. And I say that as a non-expert. After all: the way contemporary classical music is often written and talked about scares laymen like me. Would I ever have enough knowledge to appreciate those gourmet sounds? On Saturday night, I made my first live acquaintance with work by the British composer and I was bowled over. Not because I had suddenly learned a lot, but because the music touched me.

It was already a somewhat older work: Sometime Voices dates from 1996. As the final piece of a programme around his work at the Holland Festival Proms, it formed a fine crown to an hour of orchestral music. That started with another more recent piece by Benjamin, 'Dance Figures', which was mostly a lot. A small army of timpani and basses created musical thunderstorms that reminded me of dancing dinosaurs in Jurassic Park.

Later in the programme, Benjamin did something with horns in Bach's fugues and they suddenly sounded remarkably firm as a result. The composer's muscle remained at home with the finale. Finely subtle, fragile here and there, and so simply moving. Despite the fact that an entire choir turned up and a full Radio Philharmonic Orchestra was still hooting.

Air alert

The Proms had started on Saturday with a very different kind of honking. Twelve horns, to be precise, doing something with the sound boxes of twelve grand pianos. At three in the afternoon, we were allowed to flatten ourselves on rugs in the centre of the Concertgebouw, while the twelve open pianos were arranged around us. The horn players aimed their horns at the strings of the grand pianos, which would gently vibrate along with them, producing a very subtle echo to the sound.

The world premiere of this piece by Icelandic composer Daniel Bjarnason impressed, but its trick piano reverb was just too thin to hold up for the work's tight hour. Meditative it was, but in the long run mostly literally monotonous. Then at some point it becomes more about foghorns and air alarms in your head. The title 'We Came in peace for All Mankind' then becomes a little ironic.

Full Nerd Mode

Meanwhile, during practice in the main hall, something else was going on in the small room. There, Colin Benders, aka Kyteman, was busy hiding his modular, analogue synthesiser under a spaghetti of patch cables. That was to be the beginning of a quest for a new kind of sound experience of synthesiser music. Set up on stage, behind the 'beast' whose knobs Benders operated, was an orchestra of speakers, each of which would respond to a different tone, spectrum or signal from the infernal machine.

The sound was massive. Jean Michel Jarre in overdrive. It was especially nice to see the inspired Colin Benders going at it in full nerd-mode. This is what computers looked like in old science fiction movies. This is what they should still look like. Mysterious cabinets that emanate an inimitable menace. Next time, Colin Benders should put on a blue dust jacket. Fits better.

Stereo

Downstairs, the Concertgebouw had by now filled up with Moroccan visitors. A few men with beards, but mostly a huge number of women with and without headscarves had turned up for Jalasat Rouhiya, a never-before-seen collaboration between the men of the Amsterdam Andalusian Orchestra and Orchestre Temsamami from Tetouan, around the Hadra singing of Ensemble Rhoum el Bakkali from Chefchaouen. That's quite a mouthful and so it sounded.

Never before had the orchestras worked together on this scale and - it has to be said - it was a bit noticeable. Without a conductor, everyone was kind of following their own rhythms, which gave you a funny stereo effect when someone on the left started something that only got through to the right a second later. This modern Argentine football really came into its own with the loud and fast passages. The audience perked up, movement ensued and infectious enthusiasm rippled through the room. Was it going to be fun after all.

A Space Odyssey

Meanwhile, in the small room, chairman of the day Maarten Heijmans, whose jokes were starting to sound very similar for those who were watching the whole day, had managed to get Colin Benders to pull all his hundreds of plugs out of The Beast again, to show from scratch how the Synthesiser would come to life.

Benders gave in a little too quickly, Heijmans envisioned a scene from 2001, a Space Odyssey and then it was quiet for a very long time. I didn't wait to see how life finally came back into the machine: Benders had to pull out all the stops to make a somewhat meaningful sound again. Fascinating as it was, the Great Hall cried out.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I1iRWKARwTY

Blackstar

We would get Bowie as the big finale of the day. Dutch Ensemble Stargaze, led by Berlin conductor André de Ridder, would play its own take on Bowie's latest, and presumably best, album 'Blackstar'. Already known from the BBC Proms, it can be found on YouTube and yet fell a little short live. Not that the title track was creditably reworked. Also exciting to have it derive from the equally legendary Bowie song Warzawa. Still, the other arrangements suffered somewhat from the composition of the orchestra, which has an organ but no piano and no tenor sax in its ranks. Lazarus, in particular, had been severely worked to death, having sacrificed its last life force to a little too many violins.

Jherek Bischoff, responsible for the orchestral arrangements, is no marvel of subtlety. Then you have quite a problem if you want to compete with Bowie. That all came right, by the way, on the very last encore. A version of Lady Grinning Soul, which magnified Bowie's kitsch to absurdity, making it so over the top went that it became fun again. Could we still go into the night with a smile on our faces. Behind us, Colin Benders' sequencer lines boomed out of the Kleine Zaal of Het Concertgebouw with weighted ferocity.