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PODIUM ART

Alles waarvoor mensen een podium betreden.

Music journalist Erik Voermans: 'I keep interviewing composers whether they want to or not'

On 4 February, music journalist and musicologist Erik Voermans' latest book was presented: From Andriessen to Zappa. After twenty-five years of writing for Het Parool, Voermans has collected his conversations with the greats of modern-classical music in a chic edition. Paul van der Steen's detailed drawings inspire listening to the music discussed. The presentation in the Great Hall of the Muziekgebouw... 

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wu wei

Wu Wei: 'Eastern and Western cultures can enrich each other.'

Chinese musician Wu Wei plays sheng. For him, the four-thousand-year-old instrument encompasses more than just music. 'Sheng means hope and hope is life,' he says during the dress rehearsal on the eve of the Saturday Matinee on 31 January where he performed with the RFO conducted by Edo de Waart. Confucius ' "A human being has two... 

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De Vriend leaves Orchestra of the East, former chief Van Zweden new boss New York Philharmonic

It is not often that Norman Lebrecht, author of the globally widely read blog Slipped Disc, covers conductors of the Orchestra of the East two days in a row. First on the departure of principal conductor Jan Willem de Vriend, then on the appointment of former principal conductor Jaap van Zweden to the world-famous New York Philharmonic. Naturally, Lebrecht brought both... 

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A scene that sticks with you in: Spectre. A psalm as a warm-up for sex.

Every stage show, film, or concert has a scene that touches you. A moment that evokes emotion, amazement, or perhaps disgust. Even in director Sam Mendes' James Bond film Spectre, there is such a moment that stays with you. It concerns the excerpt in which classical music, namely the aria Cum dederit from Antonio Vivaldi's Nisi Dominus RV 608,... 

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Singing Gustav Mahler and stammering Beat Furrer touch the soul

Mahler on a programme by Asko|Schönberg - the face of avant-garde atonality, is that possible? For regular guest conductor Etienne Siebens, this is no question: in his programmes, he likes to explore the boundaries between beloved classics and composers still alive. On Thursday, 4 February, he places the ensemble version of Mahler's romantically singing Fourth Symphony - performed with... 

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Musicians pay to save their orchestra. TV programme Maestro helps a little.

The Orchestra of the East is cutting its coat of arms, focusing primarily on Overijssel and has applied for collective redundancy. This - and a whole lot more - can be read in the new business plan. It is enough for the province to release a one-off €1.1 million and make 3.5 tonnes of annual subsidy available again from now on. The... 

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Krzysztof Penderecki: 'In chamber music you can't gloss over anything'

In 1961, Krzysztof Penderecki (Dębica, 1933) put his name on the map in one fell swoop with Lament for the Victims of Hiroshima. This avant-garde, expressionist piece for string orchestra flogs the ears with heavily dissonant harmonies full of microtones. With this uncompromising orgy of sound, the Pole struck the mental and physical inferno caused by the atomic bomb on the Japanese city in 1945 in the... 

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Stefan de Walle and Joris Smit (Kurt van der Elst photo)

The reviewer, for anyone whose flesh is occasionally weak

Anyone who wants to credibly transfer a historical play to the present had better be radical, director Theu Boermans must have thought. And anyone who sees his adaptation of Nikolaj Gogol's The Revisor at the Nationale Toneel cannot help but agree with him. With references to asylum seekers, cubicle snoopers, data espionage and subsidy fraud, the play seems written yesterday. Yet Boermans remains... 

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Storioni Festival: champagne bottle whose cork almost pops off

Thursday 21 January sees the start of the ninth edition of the Storioni Festival, dedicated to the five-hundredth anniversary of Hieronymus Bosch's death. Free after his famous triptych Garden of Earthly Delights, the musicians of the Storioni Trio and Frank Veenstra, artistic manager of Muziekgebouw Eindhoven, chose the theme 'Dreams and Demons'. Composer in residence is Poland's Krzysztof Penderecki, who became famous... 

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Billy & Bowie

Since I can't put all my music musings about Bowie in the (already planned before his death) animation column in mid-March anyway, I'm just musing now with the rest of the world after B-day 10 01 2016. After all, see the cover of Heroes come up quite often in the media. That black-and-white picture where he's in some kind of puppet-like pose... 

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Ursula Mamlok: atonal music with heart

With the death of Pierre Boulez on 5 January, modernism seemingly came to an end, but the two-year-old Ursula Mamlok (1923) is still alive and kicking. Although the German-American Mamlok hopes to turn 93 on 1 February, she is steadily composing.# In 2009, she wrote Aphorisms II for two clarinets, in which, as in all her pieces, she manages to couple atonality with a warm-blooded... 

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Bowie-Blackstar vinyl cover

Blackstar: Bowie gives lesson on ageing

Technically, of course, he has already risen from the dead once. After all, open heart surgery (2004) shuts down your heart. Before, you were then dead. Now you come back from anaesthesia with a new life. Not surprising, then, that 69-year-old pop culture phenomenon David Bowie hangs his current life on Lazarus: a musical theatre piece, a song, named after the biblical wanderer... 

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Forever waiting for Godot: Pierre Boulez died

He would have turned 91 on 26 March, but died Tuesday night, 5 January, in his hometown of Baden-Baden. Pierre Boulez was the last surviving composer of the group that reshaped the direction of music after WWII. His fellow maestros preceded him: Karlheinz Stockhausen died in 2007, Luciano Berio in 2003, Karel Goeyvaerts in 1993 and... 

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Vijf redenen waarom de Nederlandse Reisopera Amahl and the Night Visitors ieder jaar moet uitvoeren

Alleen Maastricht, Den Bosch en Enschede konden genieten van Menotti’s Amahl and the Night Visitors. Veel te weinig voor een opera die slechts tweemaal eerder in ons land te zien was (in 1988 en 1965) maar alles in zich heeft om een jong publiek voor het genre te winnen én de decemberopera bij uitstek is. Zeker als de mini-opera zo… 

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You are young and you want classical music

Last summer, the Britten Youth String Orchestra made its own Tour de France. It kicked off in Zwolle, where conductor Loes Visser founded the ensemble in 2007 to give young string players orchestral and stage experience. Interested parties are tested on things like intonation, bowing technique and musicality during a rigorous audition and those who are admitted must rehearse every week and participate in all concerts.... 

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Van Veen (vvd), Pechtold (d66) and Monasch (pvda) during the culture budget debate

We were read in 2015: 300,000 visitors, a total of 10,000 hours of reading time.

Time for our success list. In 2015, we attracted 60,000 more visitors than in 2014. That's something to be proud of. A website that focuses on the stories that existing media find the small, and then figures like that. That we attracted those 300,000 visitors is one, that they spent an average of 2 and a half minutes per story,... 

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The 10 theatre performances you wish you had seen in 2015

Although the supply has been declining for years, there are still more new shows than a person can see. So nobody sees everything, everybody misses a lot, which was the case in 2014. But these performances no one would have wanted to miss, even if two of them were not even seen in a theatre. And no dance, for that our partner was dance audiences this year too. #1... 

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Nieuwpoort 05 © Sanne Peper _ Flickr - Photo Sharing!

Alum plays "1600, Battle of Nieuwpoort": promising start to historical series

Today it was announced that the Gijsbrecht tradition, revived since five years, will end again due to lack of subsidy. A shame, of course, although we don't have to mourn so hard the end of this Amsterdam custom, which has existed since 1638. After all, the play is totally unplayable, historically completely off the mark and all in all a rather pretentious representation of the history of... 

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Violinist Daniel Rowland: 'One spontaneous action can change the world'

The healing power of music, some firmly believe in it - in 2013, it was even the premise of the City of London Festival. Believing that music can connect people and have a healing effect on conflictual societies, festival director Ian Ritchie asked the Brodsky Quartet to commission a composition around this theme. Thus was born the by... 

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Bowie expo in Groningen more compact than the British original, but well worth seeing

Cultural philosopher Ad Verbrugge has never had very much with David Bowie. He told that at the beginning of his lecture, Friday night 18 December, as a special attraction of the David Bowie Late Night at the Groninger Museum. That was the first disappointment for the assembled fans. More were to follow. Indeed, Ad Verbrugge had not quite prepared for his... 

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Legendary alto Aafje Heynis died

'So, that one is hanging again', the alto Aafje Heynis is said to have exclaimed after a performance of Bach's St Matthew Passion. The statement is probably apocryphal and is also attributed to the soprano Jo Vincent, but fits perfectly with her typically Dutch sobriety*, which was diametrically opposed to her lived performances of very diverse music. In 1983, she quit until... 

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Firma Mes - BOT (photo by Joris Jan Bos)

BOT by Firma MES: delightful drama for laughers and thinkers

'KUT TONEEL' has been spray-painted over BOT's poster. Another features penises and a clown's nose. Does Firma MES' new show arouse so much aggression? In any case, the young theatre company from The Hague promises us a play about "unkind people". But that doesn't quite pan out. On the flat floor of Theater aan... 

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Welcome back to Amsterdam Huang Ruo!

Saturday 13 December, the NTR Saturday matinee presents the world premiere of Unscrolled for piano and orchestra by Chinese-American composer Huang Ruo (Hainan, 1976), with pianist Emanuele Arciuli and the Residentie Orkest conducted by Emilio Pomàrico. This kicks off his three-month stay as composer in residence of the Amsterdam Concertgebouw. Ruo is the first to receive this honour,... 

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Nederlandse Reisopera, Orkest van het Oosten, Consensus Vocalis ánd 600 sing-alongs give lessons in the capital: connecting is how you do it!

Tight and razor-sharp? No. But that's not what this afternoon is about at all. Here the feast of singing together is celebrated, the end result being a performance of Handel's oratorio that you wouldn't want on CD, but which is of a surprisingly high standard and, above all, one you wouldn't have wanted to miss for the world. Much has been written about the problems... 

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Opera Eichmann zonder Eichmann

Je moet het maar durven: een opera vernoemen naar de belangrijkste organisator achter de massadeportaties en vernietigingskampen van Joden in de Tweede Wereldoorlog en hem dan niet als personage opvoeren. Componist Alejandra Castro Espejo en librettist Bo Tarenskeen deden het: hun opera Eichmann, een productie van de Diamantfabriek, gaat woensdag 9 december in première in het Muziekgebouw aan ’t IJ. Adolf Eichmann werd… 

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