Anything for which people enter a stage.
The Zuiderstrandtheater in The Hague premiered Ballet Blanc on 8 March. It is the new full-length performance by The Dutch Junior Dance Division. The young dancers tour the country with a collage of fifteen short pieces. Blanc is the unifying factor in a fresh mix of classical and modern ballet, with tragedy, poignancy and humour. The juniors...
The stupidest question I come across all too often is THE question: what is the tangible result of your projects for audiences? Or more broadly drawn: what can art & culture measurably add to lives? Add that question together with the current clamour for 'utility in art' and I get accutely red pimples from these non-answerable questions. And I...
Mothers and daughters: is there a closer bond? Their lives are an extension of each other. Mother treads the same path her daughter will later follow. She is a friend, to whom one can always fall back. But under the skin, a suffocating power struggle rages in which they hold and attack each other. Jealousy and competition gnaw at the domestic idyll. Escape is impossible. It is a...
What does the future of opera look like? The National Opera tries to answer this in the Opera Forward Festival: new visions new voices, organised for the first time this year to mark its 50th anniversary. The ten-day festival kicks off 15 March with the world premiere of Only the Sound Remains by Kaija Saariaho. About...
1. Kwatta, Mariken (youth) The question was not whether Nijmegen youth theatre company Kwatta would ever venture into Mariken van Nieumeghen, but when. The bar was set high with successful previous book and film adaptations, but where the medieval Mariken needs two miracles, Jibbe Willems' adaptation is exciting even without a fall from a great height and the miraculous loosening of iron rings...
Huge, deep black shadows fall on a backdrop of calligraphic foliage in every conceivable shade of grey. Director Peter Sellars intently follows the movements of the three main characters during a run-through of 'Feather Mantle' at De Nationale Opera. Together with 'Always Strong', this short opera forms the double-bill Only the Sound Remains by Kaija Saariaho with which 15 March's Opera Forward Festival...
The great thing about visiting openings is that sometimes you get to experience something that no one expected. Like at the mini-exhibition 'Bep Rietveld, daughter of...' at Kunstruimte Kuub in Utrecht. It features 72 paintings by the daughter of Gerrit Rietveld, the man who gave De Stijl its furniture and houses. This Bep, not without merit with the paintbrush, created a...
On 30 January, choreographer Erik Kaiel was presented with the prestigious Victor Award at IPAY, an international youth theatre fair in Canada, for his performance Tetris. "It's a kind of Buchmesse for youth theatre. If you get picked up there, you go around the world" says Kaiel. Kaiel (1973) has been working in the Netherlands since 2003 and has so far produced his work at...
'The most important thing is to bring music to the audience,' says Daniele Gatti on Thursday 25 February during the presentation of the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra's new season. 'Amsterdam meets Gatti' we read on large posters behind him. That does not appear to be a word too many: the brand-new principal conductor will be involved in all series, travels on the tour RCO meets Europe,...
When such a broad-minded prof (composer, poet and more) as Hamel, along with allies, offers his thoughts on a subject close to my heart, I can't help but run to the bookstore (fortunately, one of them ordered without my purchase guarantee, because hey, imagine if it turns out to be a dry fact summary)....
Joey Roukens (Schiedam, 1982) studied composition at Rotterdam Conservatory and took private piano lessons with Ton Hartsuiker. Since graduating in 2006, he has been able to reach a large audience with his energetic, infectious music. Commissions are pouring in, from no small number of clients. He has already written two pieces for the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra: Out of Control (2011) and Chase...
The raw in Something Raw can mean all sorts of things. The first thought might be something rough, as in the effect of sandpaper on skin or the havoc left by an elephant in the china shop. But rough is a derivative meaning. Raw first of all means unprocessed and fresh. There is a certain hope in the combination of rough and raw: artists who like...
Years ago, Nederlands Dans Theater profiled itself with the slogan "challenging dance". That applies well to Straight Around. This performance by youth company NDT2 premiered at Holland Dance Festival in The Hague on 18 February. The company does not immediately make things easy for its audience with the four danced pieces, but for those who know how to empathise, there is...
There is one thing almost as much fun as going to see a play. According to some, it is even more fun than going to see a play: reading a play yourself. And then not by yourself, but with a few others. That you divide the roles and start reading aloud. With a cup of tea, coffee or a glass of wine on the side....
Following the exploration of the labour market in the cultural sector made by the Social and Economic Council (SER) and the Council for Culture last month, there was a lot of attention on the low earning self-employed in the cultural sector. Promising headlines such as "Everyone gets paid except the artist" (NRC) and "It's a matter of waiting every month to see if I earn enough" (Volkskrant) could account for recognition...
'In the new season, we go back to normal,' Pierre Audi said on Monday 15 February during the presentation of the new season of The National Opera. He does, however, continue the forward-looking Opera Forward Festival, which was set up to mark its 50th anniversary. There are also quite a few new own productions on the roll, including the world premiere of...
Mozart's Così fan tutte performed by the Nederlandse Reisopera on 12 February at the Theatre Carré, is far from playful. Xander Straat's direction has many pretensions that deliver little substance and a static picture. The momentum of this opera giocoso is in the music itself and in the formidable voices of the young soloists. Unreliable Women Così fan tutte, or The School...
Three mongols playing Mongols. Dschingis Khan, the opening performance of Something Raw, is provocative and consequential. With this performance by German theatre collective Monstertruck, or the also Berlin-based Man Power Mix by Sheena Mcgrandles and Zinzi Buchanan, the festival Something Raw lives up to its name. Something Raw is a festival in which Amsterdam theatres Frascati, De Brakke...
Never before has the Holland Festival placed itself at the centre of society as it is today. The 2016 programme is steeped in the turbulent times in which we live. The Netherlands holds the presidency of the European Union this spring. Artistic director Ruth Mackenzie has taken this fact unflinchingly to give 'Europe' a wide place in the programming. In presenting...
Baroque specialist and conductor Andrea Marcon, together with his La Cetra Barockorchester, manages to weave a fine lace work in Vivaldi's opera seria Catone in Utica (1678 - 1741), on which, among others, German soprano Anett Fritsch, Swedish mezzo-soprano Ann Hallenberg and striking Italian mezzo-soprano Francesca Ascioti shine like precious jewels. The international cast of Catone in Utica...
Erik Voermans (1958) is one of those people who writes down what you think yourself, but would never air publicly. The music editor of Het Parool likes to pose as your unsuspecting neighbour's boy, watching the music world with amazement. Take the phenomenon of opera: 'That's when someone with a knife in his taas walks around for half an hour singing that he's going to die.' If he...
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...
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...
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...
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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