Oud of nieuw, klassiek of modern, minimaal of wereld. Pop. Tonaal en atonaal.
Cellist Maya Fridman was born in Moscow in 1989, where she emerged as a child prodigy. Even while still studying at Schnittke College, she won first prize at the International Festival of Slavic Music. In 2010 she came to the Netherlands, where six years later she graduated Cum Laude from the Conservatorium van Amsterdam. Fridman naturally places contemporary...
Donderdag 19 april staat de componist Michel van der Aa in de spotlights van Muziekgebouw aan ’t IJ. Het avontuurlijke Nieuw Amsterdams Peil speelt naast zijn eigen muziek ook door hem gekozen stukken van geestverwanten. Speciale gast is Wende Snijders, die samen met Van der Aa een aantal liederen componeerde. Zij soleert bovendien in de wereldpremière van de integrale cyclus…
To have an Ode to Debussy begin with one of his last compositions is a fine choice. Cellist Lidy Blijdorp and pianist Julien Brocal perform this programme to mark the centenary of the composer's death. Last strength Debussy suffered from cancer for the last six years of his life. This disease made his life unbearably hard. Yet three years later he...
De naam van Sedje Hémon (1923-2011) zal niet bij iedereen onmiddellijk een belletje doen rinkelen. Zij was een van de eerste kunstenaars die multidisciplinair werkte, door composities te baseren op haar eigen schilderijen. Haar schilderij-partituren werden recent getoond tijdens Documenta 14 in Kassel en Athene, maar haar muziek is al bijna 4 decennia niet meer uitgevoerd. Het Haagse Ensemble Modelo62 zet Hémon…
'If Mohammed doesn't come to the mountain, the mountain will come to Mohammed,' they thought at Operadagen Rotterdam. Earlier this year, the Enschede-based Nederlandse Reisopera gave a press presentation in Carré. This time, the Rotterdammers travelled to the capital. Artistic director Guy Coolen and dramaturge Tobias Kokkelmans told a select club of journalists what the audience could expect from 18-27 May,...
The City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra is coming to our country. On Monday 9 April, they will give a concert in TivoliVredenburg Utrecht under their young chief conductor Mirga Gražinytė-Tyla. They will play music by Wagner, Debussy and Beethoven, a fairly standard programme at first sight. But fortunately, Lithuanian Gražinytė-Tyla brings a piece by her compatriot Raminta Šerkšnytė. Who wrote Fires...
Hungarian composer György Ligeti (1923-2006) suffered under several dictatorships; the Nazis killed his father and brother during World War II, and after the War the Communists forced him to write sweet 'folk music'. After the 1956 Hungarian uprising, he fled to Vienna and then to Cologne. In the West, he unpopularised into an idiosyncratic composer, who already...
Abonneer je op onze gratis nieuwsbrief. Omdat het kan! Dit is waarom. Holland Festival, Poetry International, een zomer vol kunst. En ondertussen wordt een heel nieuw kunstbestel in elkaar gerommeld. Nederland staat te springen om naar buiten te gaan, muziek te beleven, kunst mee te maken en foodtrucks leeg te eten. En het subsidiestelsel om te gooien. Het is een…
Sofia Gubaidoelina has become a true audience favourite in our country. She is also a welcome guest in broadcasting series. The AVROTROS Friday Concert, for instance, brought the Dutch premieres of Glorious Percussion (2011) and O Komm, Heiliger Geist (2016). Friday 23 March will see the first Dutch performance of her Triple Concerto for bayan, violin and cello. The piece is dedicated to...
Amsterdam, 8 March 2018. Today is Women's Day, no one can fail to notice. The media are brimming with articles about women's unequal pay and their still limited representation in prestigious positions. Whether in politics, business, academia or the arts. Perhaps the most conservative is the classical music world. There, the female composer has yet to...
Joel Fried, artistic director of the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra visibly startled for a moment. I asked him if there is really only one female composer scheduled in the 2018-19 season. Indeed, during the presentation on Monday 26 February at the Concertgebouw, I only heard the name of Lotta Wennäkoski. Indeed the Finn appears to be the only one to defend the honour of composing women....
Although Estonia is almost 4,000 square kilometres larger than the Netherlands, it has barely more inhabitants than the province of Utrecht. For centuries, superpowers such as Denmark, Germany, Russia, Sweden and Poland disputed rule over this country on the Baltic Sea. Indeed, its geographical location made it an important link between East and West. It was not until 1918 that a state of its own was declared, but...
Fanny Mendelssohn (1805-1847) was the four-year older sister of Felix Mendelssohn. They both received a solid musical education, with her surpassing him in virtuosity at the piano. Her relationship with Felix was intense, but also suffocating. At his hands, Fanny Mendelssohn failed to build an independent career as a composer. To this day
The neat couple next to me, in the front row at the Holland Festival press conference, hadn't counted on it for a moment. Four members of the Nederlands Kamerkoor starting to undress one by one down to their pecker-sized nakie. A giggle, a small cough, but hey, this is the Holland Festival, they said to each other. So too...
The greater the resistance to be overcome, the greater the achievement. This wry wisdom is expressed in the Russian narrative concert 'Living under a tyrant'. Cellist Lidy Blijdorp adds another beautiful, personal and original episode to her Cello 020 series with this programme around the life story of composer Shostakovich. She performs in this concert together with...
De verwachtingen waren hooggespannen. Zowel Reinbert de Leeuw als Barbara Hannigan was genomineerd voor een Grammy Award 2018. Hannigan was voorgedragen voor Best Classical Solo Vocal Album, voor haar opnames van muziek van Berg, Gershwin & Berio. De Leeuw dong mee in de categorie Best Classical Compendium met zijn compilatie van alle gedirigeerde koor- en ensemblestukken van György Kurtág. Hannigan…
Whether flowing melodies, driving rhythms or dense clouds of sound, the music of Silvia Colasanti (Rome, 1975) is always lyrical. On Monday 29 January, Quartetto di Cremona will perform the world premiere of her string quartet Ogni cosa ad ogni cosa addio at Muziekgebouw aan' t IJ Amsterdam. The concert is part of the String Quartet Biennale, which takes place from 27 January...
On Wednesday 24 January, the Nederlands Kamerkoor presents an adventurous concert at Muziekgebouw aan 't IJ to kick off a short tour. On the lecterns are rarely heard music by Lili Boulanger and Ton de Leeuw. The highlight is Igor Stravinsky's famous Psalm Symphony in a version for choir and piano four hands by Dmitri Shostakovich. Ralph van Raat and Bobby Mitchell sign...
At the end of the nineteenth century, Western music gradually began to come apart at the seams. Composers used more and more dissonances so that the familiar tonality hardly fitted into its shell. From a constant desire for even more expression, the orchestra was expanded with ever new instruments. This led to monster productions such as Gustav Mahler's 'Symphony of the Tausend', with more than a thousand...
Het meest recente wapenfeit van de Russisch-Zweedse componist Victoria Borisova-Ollas (1969) is Dracula. Deze opera naar het gelijknamige boek van Bram Stoker ging in oktober 2017 in première bij Koninklijke Opera Stockholm. Een ‘kleurrijke en zeer sfeervolle muzikale partituur’, met daarin ‘een van de meest emotionele scènes in de geschiedenis van de Zweedse opera’, schreef een criticus. Zeven jaar eerder…
The string quartet is considered Joseph Haydn's invention; Goethe considered it the nec plus ultra of instrumental music. 'One hears four intelligent people conversing with each other' said the poet. 'One believes to understand something of their conversation and to know the idiosyncrasies of the instruments.' We get plenty of that opportunity from 27 January to 3 February, during...
A Saudi prince is paying $450 million for a mediocre painting by Leonardo da Vinci; a Dutch politician is pledging a crate of beer for a new composition. In a nutshell, these two extremes capture our current dealings with culture. Total contempt on the one hand and unimaginable overvaluation on the other are two sides of the same coin. We do not judge art for its...
Poldowski re-imagined is the name of French Ensemble 1904's latest CD. Poldowski who? Well, like many of her colleagues, this Polish-British composer (1879-1932) is all but forgotten. Her name, too, is problematic. Born the youngest daughter of violinist and composer Henryk Wieniawski, her official name was Irène Régine Wieniawski. However, she published her first compositions as Irène Wieniawska. After...
On Saturday 2 December, Australian-Dutch composer Kate Moore (b 1979) will receive the Matthijs Vermeulen Prize for her composition The Dam. The prize money is €20,000, made available by the Performing Arts Fund. The prize was established in 1972 and named after the Dutch composer and critic Matthijs Vermeulen (1888-1967). Until now, it invariably went to men, some even getting it two...
Ondanks zijn hoge leeftijd is de Duitse componist Aribert Reimann (1936) nog altijd zeer actief. In oktober 2017 beleefde zijn opera L’invisible zijn wereldpremière aan de Deutsche Oper Berlin, naar een toneelstuk van Maeterlinck. Op 14 december klinkt alweer de eerte uitvoering van zijn cyclus Die schönen Augen der Frühlingsnacht in Muziekgebouw aan ’t IJ. Hij componeerde deze voor de sopraan Mojca Erdmann en…
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