Asko|Schönberg concert and performances in May 

The Underground NITE, 5 to 22 May; Chilling nature images Saturday matinee, 14 May

The Underground
The Underground is a gritty, witty and tragic performance by director Guy Weizman and the NITE ensemble (NNT, Club Guy & Roni, Asko|Schönberg, Slagwerk Den Haag).

The performance is inspired by Notes from underground by Fyodor Dostoevsky; a monologue by a man who has suffered many blows in his life and has decided to stop participating in the system and entrench himself in his home; his 'underground'. Within this theme, lyricist Rik van den Bos wrote a phenomenal, topical text, about someone who cannot accept how the world works, who fails to join the rules of the game and retreats to the margins with all his spiritual wealth.
What needs to happen before you feel nothing less than a clown? The Underground is a tragicomic, interdisciplinary theatre show about the art of failure.

Directed Guy Weizman, choreography Roni Oats, composer Brendan Faegre*), text Rik van den Bos, by NNT, Club Guy & Roni, Asko|Schönberg and Slagwerk Den Haag.
*) with support from Fund Performing Arts.

De Sluisfabriek Drachten, 5 to 22 May, 8.30pm

• The Underground - Asko Schoenberg (askoschoenberg.nl)

Chilling nature images
A concert entirely dedicated to Danish composer Hans Abrahamsen in the NTR Saturday matinee.

The ensemble works Winter Night, Schnee and Wald can with some justification be called a trilogy. They are about winter, forest, ice, night sleigh rides, romantic images. The composer himself calls Wald the twin sister of both Schnee as of his earlier wind quintet Walden (1978). The title for Walden derived from the 1854 book of the same name by US author Henry David Thoreau, which describes his two-year stay in a cabin on the shore of Walden Pond in Concord, Massachusetts.

Wald places Thoreaus back-to-nature idea in a German-romantic framework. The title builds a bridge to the piano cycle Waldszenen by Robert Schumann. For both Schumann and Thoreau, Abrahamsen writes, the forest is "the magical romantic place that brings man to spiritual understanding. Laced with German lecture notes, the Wald contains, in nineteenth-century spirit, a real Nachtmusik and a hunting scene with galloping horses. The to Walden The horn player Abrahamsen will have been moved to the heart by the hunting horn call of a rising quarter. He himself once went to the woods with a Waldhorn to experience this magic at first hand.

Asko|Schönberg olv Brad Lubman

Het Concertgebouw, Sat 14 May, 2.15pm

• Chilling images of nature - Asko Schoenberg (askoschoenberg.co.uk)