Saturday 26 June at the Holland Festival, a special evening around two music films by Frank Scheffer: the documentary Inner Landscape and the opera film Si Fan. Supplemented by a short live performance by Chinese musician Wu Wei. This will present a musical journey from the seventh-century Tang Dynasty to contemporary electronic music. An evening with unexpected perspectives.
This year, November Music not only has a house composer, but also a house ensemble, the New European Ensemble. Naturally, the Hague club will play in the opening concert with Seung-Won Oh's Bosch Requiem. And, of course, they present a portrait concert with greatest hits by composer-in-residence Kaija Saariaho.
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...
'Thanks to a radio presenter, my grandfather found an entrance to classical music. With my new piece, I, in turn, am paving a path to him.' On Thursday 30 March, Elements by Brechtje (1993) will have its world premiere in the fifth episode of An Evening of Today at the Muziekgebouw aan 't IJ. In this series by the Nieuw Ensemble, conservatory students are given ample opportunity....
Diversity in the Amsterdam art world is not yet flourishing. The Amsterdam Fund for the Arts, which announced its grant awards today, is getting a bit tired of it: "Across most disciplines, committees note that cultural diversity of audiences, staff and governance is disappointing, as are efforts to change this. Outside specialised organisations for which cultural diversity is a core business, ambitions are still not high, despite two decades of cultural policy in this area. If the ambitions are there, organisations do not always manage to give them hands and feet. There often seems to be a certain discomfort or 'not knowing how'."
So to start with the good news: Marmoucha grows 398 per cent compared to the previous grant round. The capital's producer and promoter of performing arts in the field of North African and Middle Eastern arts and culture in the Netherlands was severely cut back in 2013, but the Amsterdam Fund for the Arts found its work over the past four years to be so good that the grant has been more than deserved. In the new round of awards which became known on 1 August they rise from 25,070 euros to a tonne, adding that perhaps they should not be so ambitious.
Music students are generally conservative. When I studied musicology in the 1990s, we could go to the concerts in new-music temple the IJsbreker for only five guilders. I eagerly used this opportunity to hear the very latest notes by living composers like Pauline Oliveros and Sofia Gubaidoelina for a trifle. I never saw a single fellow student there. Still I am...
In 1985, Unsuk Chin (Seoul 1961) won the Gaudeamus Music Prize with Spektra for three cellos, six years later she made her breakthrough with her Akrostichon-Wortspiel for soprano and ensemble composed for the Nieuw Ensemble. In 2004, she won the Grawemeyer Award, the world's most prestigious music prize; in 2007, she made a deep impression with her opera Alice in Wonderland. Tomorrow, Thursday 22 October.
The new operas by Arnoud Noordegraaf and Guo Wenjing, which the Holland Festival presented shortly after each other, both thematise the loss of traditional values due to the meteoric developments in modern China. Both also feature a Chinese soprano in the lead role and draw on classical Chinese opera and folk music. The inner landscape of Guo Wenjing, which will be performed Tuesday, 16 June,...
On Wednesday 1 August 2012, the Performing Arts Fund will announce the results of the lottery that granting arts subsidies has now become. Huge cuts are looming: companies and makers that by now seemed to be a permanent part of the Dutch arts landscape will disappear. Exactly what it will look like, we know
Between 21 and 30 January 2011, Amsterdam, Utrecht and Rotterdam will host the Flamenco Biennial, a music and dance fest around that mythical Spanish primal music that leaves no one untouched. A style of music, moreover, that developed in parallel with the history of the Iberian peninsula, where the culture of the Indian Roma gypsies came together with that of the...
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