Old or new, classic or modern, minimal or world. Pop. Tonal and atonal.
American-Dutch violinist Joseph Puglia is a passionate advocate of contemporary music. Last year he scored highly with his rendition of the Violin Concerto by Anders Hillborg, together with the young musicians of the NJO Symphony Orchestra. He is first violinist of Asko|Schönberg, with whom he presented the world premiere of the violin concerto composed especially for him earlier this year Roads to Everywhere By Joey Roukens.
After it was announced in January this year that Jan Willem de Vriend was leaving at the end of the 2016/2017 season, the Orchestra of the East announced that it was in no hurry to find a successor. One would start working with "renowned guest conductors". Just over six months later, a few months before the departure of interim director Bart van Meijl, a successor was still presented. That this successor, Ed Spanjaard, is given the title of 'permanent conductor' seems mainly a semantic issue.
'I feel cheated,' said the man next to me as we left the auditorium at ten to nine-thirty. He had come all the way from Tilburg to the Stopera for the concert that concluded the National Opera's 50th anniversary on Wednesday 29 June. 'It will take me even longer than the concert lasted, including intermission,' he grumbled. He also had little to say about the offering itself. And that while all around us the audience stood on their seats to cheer on the internationally renowned soprano Eva-Maria Westbroek.
A big band, a ticking clock, conspiracy theories and twelve-tonality. Mix that in a theatrical setting and it can go whooping out of control. Yet composer Darcy James Argue manages to make it a propulsive and energising whole, with help from director Isaac Butler and cinematographer Peter Nigrihi.
It is good that the Holland Festival dares to stick its neck out, by making Olga Neuwirth (1968), unknown here, its focus composer this year. On reflection, by the way, I would have preferred to hear her high-profile opera Bählamms Fest in a staged version once, rather than Le Encantadas. This piece composed last year did not quite manage to live up to the high expectations...
Bassoonist Pascal Gallois gets laughs when he tries in vain to insert the flowers he has just received into the tube of his instrument. Also in the now classic Dialogue de l'ombre double by Pierre Boulez, he manages to make the audience chuckle on Sunday 19 June, when he produces a kind of elephant-like trumpet with much misfiring. His performance is part of the ''Save the bassoon', which will conclude on Sunday 25 June with a concert at the Holland Festival Proms at the Concertgebouw. For this hundreds of (amateur) bassoonists ON. Action successful, in other words.
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The biggest applause at the end of Tchaikovsky's opera Pique Dame went to the choir of the National Opera and the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra on Wednesday 15 June. And rightly so: choristers and orchestral musicians brought the highly varied score to sound flawlessly, without once getting out of sync with each other. Dynamics, rhythm, phrasing, empathy, everything was solid. A performance of stature rarely seen in the Stopera. The vocal soloists were somewhat pale in comparison.
Austrian politician Jörg Haider labelled its work Weltkatzenmusik. When his far-right Freiheitliche Partei Österreichs joined the government in 2000, it led to mass protests. At one such rally, Olga Neuwirth (Graz, 1968), under the title 'Ich lass mich nicht wegjodeln', denounced his anti-intellectual and anti-cultural agenda. The rest is history: Haider drove himself to pieces in 2008, Neuwirth...
We are all going to die! We already have that certainty in. And since the dawn of mankind, every new generation invariably knows that it is going to happen to them now. After all: their successors have never prospered anywhere like today's youth. Nice premise for a concert, thought German director Sebastian Nübling[hints]Nuling was a guest at the Holland Festival last year with an adaptation of Hebbel's play Nibelungen, read the review and a interview.[/hints], good idea to programme, thought the Holland Festival. I seriously wonder why.
Full of religious inspiration, Joseph Haydn (1732-1809) wrote the oratorio Die Schöpfung, his famous musical ode to the Biblical creation story. Berlin-based artist Julian Rosefeldt (b 1965) reflects on Haydn's masterpiece with an aesthetic film that shows how humans bend the world to their will. During the Holland Festival this film was screened at a live performance of the music by Collegium Vocale Gent and baroque orchestra B'Rock led by conductor René Jacobs. Got Die Schöpfung an extra charge by this film, which largely consists of people in white suits walking around sandy landscapes?
In his youth, Harrison Birtwistle (1934) was one of the Angry Young Men of English music, now elevated to the peerage and going through life as 'Sir Harry'. He trained as a clarinetist and composer at the Royal College of Music in Manchester, where he was annoyed by the conservative climate. Together with John Ogden,...
For Theatre of the World, his fifth full-length opera, Louis Andriessen (1939) drew inspiration from the Jesuit scholar Athanasius Kircher (1601-1680). He was the last Renaissance man, someone who could do everything and knew everything. Kircher wrote books full of the most diverse subjects, from the meaning of hieroglyphics to vulcanology and musical instruments. He even designed a cat piano, based on the idea that each cat screams at a different pitch when you tap its tail. After his death, Kircher fell into disrepute as a charlatan.
However, unusable for science, he forms gefundenes Fressen for a composer like Andriessen, who likes to explore the boundaries between reality and fiction. His opera Writing to Vermeer (1999) is based on fictional letters to the Delft painter; Rosa, a Horse Drama (1994) is about the murder of a composer, allegedly part of a conspiracy against music.
Had her name been Marc, Marie Jaëll (1846-1925) was undoubtedly considered one of the important French composers of the late nineteenth, early twentieth century. But then again, she was once a woman - so unimportant. Praised during her lifetime by none other than Franz Liszt, she was soon forgotten after her death. At most, she lived on in the by...
The Kröller-Müller Museum does not immediately associate you with classical music. Yet on Sunday afternoon, 29 May, I attended a concert at this institution located in the Veluwe forests. It was organised by the Helene Kröller-Müller Fund in association with 401 Dutch operas. This organisation aims to bring forgotten and never-performed opera' from the Netherlands and Flanders (back) into the spotlight. On this occasion, arias and duets were performed from the period when Helene Kröller-Müller (1869-1939) built the art collection of the museum named after her.
Dutch music of the late nineteenth, early twentieth century seems hot again.
It must have been down to my indestructible mood, and the deep need to finally deliver some good news about the cultural sector, but I was so wrong. Tuesday I reported that the performing arts were recovering after Halbe Zijlstra's draconian cuts, but that is so not the case. As much as the sector itself would like it to do well, the figures contradict it time and again.
Surely the Association of Theatre and Concert Hall Directors has taken us all for a ride again. With a real infographic still do. But, as it goes with infographics: you can put in all the bright colours and shouts, and even shout 'Bravo!' and 'Applause!'at the bottom, the numbers themselves don't lie, even if you present them slightly differently than last year.
On Monday 23 and Tuesday 24 May, the VSCD met, and the Congres Podiumkunsten (@congresPK) was going on at the Nijmegen Concert Hall De Vereeniging. I went to check it out and discovered some new things.
Things have changed in Dutch theatre since the beginning of this century. Somewhere around the year 2000, I was a guest at a meeting of the Association of Theatre and Concert Hall Directors, and it was a bizarre experience. I found myself among a gathering that could best be described as a gentlemen's club, where the number of upstanding municipal officials exceeded the number of artistically inspired theatre lovers.
Now, 16 years later,
"For someone to interfere with an artistic interpretation, I find that quite hefty. Let me put it this way: you have this prime minister in Turkey... To interfere with something artistic, I find that rather hefty." This was stated by Emil Szarkowicz, musician and cultural editor from Limburg, in a broadcast by regional broadcaster L1 yesterday, Reason being the negative opinion of...
Champagne at BAK in Utrecht, deep disappointment at The New Institute in Rotterdam: the Council for Culture has spoken. Today, Thursday 19 May 2016, the first advice after the draconian art cuts by the first Rutte cabinet came out, and heads are rolling. Amsterdam loses prestigious presentation institution De Appel, in The Hague fellow institution Stroom has to redo its homework. The Orkest van het Oosten and the Gelders Orkest have to come up with merger plans within two years. In Utrecht, the city company Theater Utrecht will no longer receive funding despite artistic appreciation. Het Zuidelijk Toneel in Eindhoven Tilburg must make new plans and Opera Zuid must quickly raise its artistic quality. These are the main conclusions of the Culture Council's opinion.
As dramatic as some of this may sound, the advice is actually not, when you look over the whole battlefield. Thanks in part to
"Thea, I must have that concert organiser's number!", his commanding baritone sounded in my ear. Bernard van Beurden (1933-2016) invariably phoned from the South of France, where he lived - he had a modest pied-à-terre in Amsterdam. As a music journalist, I had interviewed him several times and seemed the right person to help him get information from his distant homeland. Subsequently, we sat for hours...
'She is the embodiment of the incredible lightness of existence, agile, alert and precise on the beat.' So says one critic about Korean-American conductor Han-Na Chang (Suwon, 1982), who led just about every major orchestra after her debut in 2007. In 2014, she scored highly at the renowned BBC Proms with her fresh interpretation of the Fifth Symphony....
The Radio Philharmonic Orchestra and the Groot Omroepkoor should focus more on broadcasting and less on concert practice. So says the Council for Culture in an opinion released today on the policy plan of the Netherlands Broadcasting Music Foundation (SOM), which includes the choir and orchestra.
While the Council is very appreciative of the Saturday matinee, are the two other series the Foundation is bringing
For a dramma giocoso, there was precious little to laugh at during a performance of Don Giovanni by De Nationale Opera on Tuesday 10 May. This production, taken over from the Salzburg Festival, is weighed down by a leaden seriousness, exacerbated by the turbo-Mozart presented to us by conductor Marc Albrecht and the Netherlands Philharmonic Orchestra. Despite his often punishing tempi, the...
Grandfather Louis Toebosch was a famous organist and composer. His daughter - her aunt - Moniek an equally famous artist and performer; mother recorder teacher, father Mozart-crazy: 'When I left home I couldn't hear a recorder or Mozart anymore!' Mayke Nas (Voorschoten, 1972) is no stranger to making music and composing. In doing so, she likes to avoid the beaten track and...
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