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Opera 'The Rise of Spinoza' by Theo Loevendie deserves permanent place in repertoire

In 2014, the world premiere of The Rise of Spinoza by Theo Loevendie received an enthusiastic reception at the NTRZaterdagMatinee. Rightly so, as Markus Stenz steered the Radio Philharmonic Orchestra, Groot Omroepkoor, vocal soloists and recorder player Erik Bosgraaf through the colourful one-act aptly. The live recording was recently released on CD, allowing the opera to reach an international audience as well. The now 87-year-old Loevendie... 

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'Renew yourself, or languish.' How the @hollandfestival gives regulars a refreshing kick in the ass.

That's at least one mistake you can make: booking for a Christoph Marthaler performance and then expecting something new to happen. Yet I did it, on my last visit to this year's Holland Festival. Someone had said that the Swiss playwright, who has been creating performances in which lost souls are... 

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Bach and Moore, a sublime combination

Johann Sebastian Bach and Kate Moore in one concert programme. With this choice for the fifth episode of her 'Cello 020' series, cellist Lidy Blijdorp once again outdoes herself in originality. And the effect of this choice is phenomenal. Enhanced interaction Not only does she bring together works by two completely different composers, she further enhances the interaction by playing their... 

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The colonial image of the black woman with bared upper body is rewritten in Legacy by Nadia Beugré at @HollandFestival

A sizable group of women, their skin all shades of brown, white and black, their breasts and chests hopping briskly to the beat of stepping and running movements on the spot, swirls around its own axis upon entering the auditorium at the Brakke Grond. Legacy is an intimate performance that moves loosely up and down between concert, performance,... 

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How Wiek Hijmans makes the electric guitar socially acceptable

Wiek Hijmans (b. 1967) is tirelessly promoting the use of the electric guitar in contemporary composed music. He also likes to be influenced by jazz and rock in his own pieces. On Electric Language, his latest CD, he presents music by eight composers alongside his own Victus. Six pieces were composed especially for him. The disc appeared on the label... 

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Podcast: Would the Netherlands ever be ripe for Science Fiction? @Hollandfestival provides context with Octavia E. Butler

Of course, we have Chriet Titulaer. But it kind of ends there. And to say we took those very seriously, back in the day? No. The future, and fantasising about it, is not really a thing in the Netherlands, at least not with the big publishers and broadcasters. A writer dealing with science fiction will never join a big... 

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Panic is contagious, sex is not. About my anxious hours during and after Sex and Anxiety at the @hollandfestival.

Panic. On the tram between Leidseplein and Amsterdam Centraal, I suddenly lost the Dutch translation of 'string quartet'. So I typed 'violin quartet' into my facebook update, trying to make a connection between a blow job and Ligeti. Joking, perhaps, but there was something much deeper behind it, in that tram, after the music and theatre event 'The String Quartet's... 

Read More "Panic is contagious, sex is not. About my anxious hours during and after Sex and Anxiety at the @hollandfestival.

Kunstraad has profile for new Stedelijk Museum board ready: an Amsterdam rascal (m/*/f).

The cultural sector is sometimes behind, but more often ahead. In the - otherwise very much to be welcomed in terms of content - advice issued by the Amsterdam Arts Council on the future of the local Stedelijk Museum, you can read that job security in the art sector is once again under pressure. Especially for young entrants from 'diverse' backgrounds: 'Preferably, the museum will make greater use of... 

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'Kata' shows at @hollandfestival how inspiring a peaceful fight can be (review)

What a grandiose invention to think of breakdance as martial arts dance! In a sense, of course, it has been so from the beginning. Young people in New York's poor neighbourhoods developed their spectacular dance techniques in the 1980s. These were a means for them to express themselves in their own unique way. This was a necessity of life in a society that... 

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Richters Patterns @Hollandfestival: Traffic light jumps to red, traffic light jumps to green

Music and images, it remains a tricky combination. Do you see a picture with music, or do you hear music with a picture? That question was not answered unequivocally at the opening concert of the Holland Festival. The slowly changing colours of Gerhard Richter's canvases were matched by Marcus Schmickler's slowly fading sounds. While Richter's Patterns soon became boring,... 

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Ruth Mackenzie's latest Holland Festival promises to be just one of the most exciting

Here it is. The one and only interactive Culture Press Holland Festival Special. A special that has already been deployed over the past few months, and will be added to in the coming month. During the festival, we have regular reviews and reports, and podcasts. A new edition of this Special will appear every week. On Mondays. And then you can also subscribe via... 

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Arno Schuitemaker @hollandfestival: 'I want to find a new way, a new vocabulary, that has not yet been seen in my previous work.'

With 'The Way You Sound Tonight', which will have its world premiere at Holland Festival 2018, choreographer Arno Schuitemaker takes the next step in his creative development. He describes his performance as an 'acoustic ballroom'. I speak to the 1976-born dance maker, who once studied at Delft University of Technology, about his work and his motives. 'In the trilogy 'WHILE... 

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Martin Crimp on Lessons in Love and Violence at the @hollandfestival: 'The past is a playground, in which I can escape from the rolling news.'

No love without power relations. And certainly not when that love takes place in a royal bedroom. That bedchamber is now the setting for a tragic love triangle between a king, his lover and his wife in Lessons in Love and Violence, the third opera by English composer Georges Benjamin and playwright Martin Crimp. The Elizabethan drama Edward II... 

Read More "Martin Crimp on Lessons in Love and Violence at the @hollandfestival: 'The past is a playground, in which I can escape from the rolling news.'

Four men were given the task: invent a festival you want to go to yourself. That became TREK, a mishmash of food trucks, mayor and pastor.

You must be a serious misanthrope not to have a good time in Stadspark Maastricht that Friday. The sun is shining. It is subtropical warm with a light spring breeze. The location, next to a pond embraced by ramparts and turrets, is perfect. Under the ancient oaks, some 40 food trucks and bars with simmering kitchens await you. Oh... 

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Rainer Hofmann (SPRING): 'After the populist attack from the right, the performing arts now face an attack from the left.'

Thursday 17 May opens SPRING Performing Arts Festival in Utrecht with, among others, Sic Transit Gloria Mundi by Dries Verhoeven and to come (extended) by Mette Ingvartsen. Over ten days, over twenty-five international dance and theatre productions, installations and performance works will be on show in public spaces and urban environments. A week earlier, festival director Rainer Hofmann looks relaxed. 'Until now... 

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German Anna Karenina in @hollandfestival as seventies disco show: 'We were sometimes worried whether we were going too far. But then we always had the music.'

Germans and humour. I have a bad experience with that. Will largely be because I don't get the finer nuances of the language, especially if it is meant for laughter. So it's not that the German sense of humour is wrong. In fact, sometimes something can just happen in German theatre that makes you laugh. I want... 

Read More "German Anna Karenina in @hollandfestival as seventies disco show: 'We were sometimes worried whether we were going too far. But then we always had the music.'

Resolved(?): Ombudsman Allegiance admits carelessness.

This was the email from the editors of Trouw, dated 9 May 2018: "Mr A. Bakx has had the phone number and email address we now have from him under this name since 2014. We therefore assume that he is A. Bakx." Was supported by an email to Erwin Roebroeks, which mentioned a telephone conversation with... 

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Everyone is welcome at Pitfest. 'Bands playing at our place should be especially hard, or dirty and grimy.'

The Drenthe village of Erica was rocked on the last weekend of April by the cosy noise festival Pitfest. And that attracted a motley mix of people. I walked around there for a day. A golf cart zooms across the roundabout of the 4-star resort in the outskirts of the Drenthe town of Erica. To the right of the tarmac are tightly mowed golf courses, to the left is a plot of land... 

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Daria Bukvić holds up a mirror to theatres and companies on SPOT Live: 'I don't shy away from new forms of marketing.'

'With my performances, I always try to make people feel that they are really going to miss a happening. 'The first performance with personal stories of four Moroccan-Dutch actresses in the big theatres of the Netherlands, the newest this, the most surprising that.' Daria Bukvić is one of the most exciting creators to enter the theatre world in recent years. She is not only... 

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'Saigon' director (@hollandfestival) seeks extreme emotions: 'I don't want any more distance between the story and the audience.'

'Never, never would I make a performance about my mother, or about myself. Jamais.' Caroline Guiela Nguyen, child of 'a marriage between a Vietnamese mother and a 'pied-noir' (Algerian colonial) is not into personal stories. The theatre-maker captured audiences' hearts at last year's Avignon Festival with the play Saigon. This moving, deeply human play... 

Read More "'Saigon' director (@hollandfestival) seeks extreme emotions: 'I don't want any more distance between the story and the audience.'

Merlijn Twaalfhoven on SPOT-Live: 'Outside the Randstad lies a huge source of inspiration'

'I have knocked on the door of the Congress of Performing Arts a few times in recent years on my own initiative, really from the idea that we can do a lot more as venues in the Netherlands. But yes, every time I was there, people got enthusiastic, but does it stick?' Composer Merlijn Twaalfhoven is happy that he now serves as 'curator' of SPOT Live, the new... 

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Who pays the artist? Lower House hears about shocking reality in the arts in roundtable discussion

Whether the artists performing on DWDD got paid for their performance. Esther Ouwehand of the PvdD did not know. She was not the only one, at the roundtable session on Wednesday 25 April on the labour market in the cultural sector. None of the MPs, fund managers, trade unionists present knew. So we asked on facebook and twitter how it was even done.... 

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Cellist Maya Fridman: 'The best thing about making music is communicating with my audience.'

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... 

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