Naar Nederlands 
Newsletter 5: January - July 2004
The new musical year starts in January with a new series of the childrens concert we did last year. With dancer Valerie Valentine and the ‘little ballerina’ Nicki de Graaff, with violinist Misha Molthoff and his young alter-ego Terence Dom, double bassplayer Marijn van Prooijen and director Roeland Kerbosch we play ‘the little ballerina’ in Vredenburg in Utrecht, in de Harmonie in Leeuwarden, in the Anton Philipszaal in the Hague, in the Music Centre in Enschede and in Musis Sacrum in Arnhem. Playing for children is very satisfying but I’m not born, I’m afraid, to participate in an endless series of nearly identical theatrical performances.
On January 18 I participate in a marathon performance of Erik Satie’s Vexations in the framework of de Slapeloze Nacht (Sleepless Night) in Vredenburg. In 27 hours a group of about 40 pianists - each one of them playing for about 40 minutes - manages to play this short piano piece 840 times, the number of times the composer indicates on top of the score. In this way this short work pardoxically becomes the longest piece in music history. It’s exciting to hear every pianist play the piece in his own way. Some really make an interpretation of it while others consciously try to avoid every personal mark on the score.
Rather unexpectedly I am invited to come to Iran for the Fajr Music and Theatre Festival. After two concerts in Teheran on February 8 and 9 I play a concerton the 10th on Kish island , tax paradise in the Persian Gulf, where the climate is warmer and more tolerant than on the mainland. At midnight the hall is still well filled. I have to play at in instable, barrelhouse piano, but once dining on the ground in the open air at 2 a.m. with a water pipe as a dessert inconviences like this are readily forgotten. The concert planned in Esfahan is unfortunately cancelled for no clear reasons. I had been looking forward to see this beautiful city......
In Teheran I meet the composer Nasser Shokraee in the hotel. When after the islamic revolution all music was forbidden, his musicology study at the University of Teheran was declared ‘finished’. He then started to study composition in Cologne with Clarence Barlow. Allthough this study influenced greatly his views on music he continued using Persian elements in his compositions and he promises me to do this as well in the new blues he is going to compose for me. At the Festival some positive developments can be noticed, for example the fact that female vocalists can be heard as soloists. This is tolerated on the condition that on the program these women are announced as ‘choir members’, allthough there is no choir at all involved in the concert.
My concerts are received well by the audience, but the final applause is weak. Afterwards I’m told that in the Middle-East applause tends to be brief and still people expect the artist to give an encore. The applause was, however, convincing after I had explained, that Loek Dikker’s South Side Ground Zero Boogie Blues has been inspired by the attack on the Twin Towers. And when I play the clusters, representing the invading airplanes, the applause is even stronger. Allthough the Iranian goverment at the time condemned this action, the feeling comes over me that the audience may have another opinion. I cannot judge what the audience thinks about my announcement that Iris Szeghy is a female composer - anyway nobody leaves the hall while I’m playing her Bolero Blues.
A week later I leave for the USA with Eleonore. The security agent at Schiphol Airport looks doubtful when he glances through my passport: with visa for Cuba and Iran I want to enter the US....But the customs officer in Boston hardly takes a look at it and so Eleonore and I, irony of fate, can breathe new life into the music of murdered and forgotten jewish composers. We start doing this at the Zeitgeist Gallery in Cambridge, near Boston, with works by a.o. Leo Smit, Erwin Schulhoff and Rosy Wertheim. We also play the piece that Israelian composer Alon Nechushtan wrote for our 6 Continents Project (see the preceding newsletter). Alon has come all the way from New York to hear and see us. He has connections here and it seems to me that his contacts has agreed to organize this concert in the first place to please him: the organizers don’t show any involvement in us or our music. Fortunately the situation at Bowdoin College in Brunswick (Maine) is completely different: composer Elliot Schwartz has done good publicity for our concert. We stay at his tastefull house amongst snow-covered trees. The audience at the concert is not particularly young, the students don’t seem to be interested to much in this music. Eleonore travels on now to Chicago where she’ll have concerts and masterclasses. I stay one more day in Boston, where I’m lucky to hear an impressive concert by the Boston Philharmonic Orchestra.
On March 13 I play in Cologne at the Forum of New Music, organized by ‘Deutschlandfunk’, German national radio. I owe this concert to musicologist Michael Arntz who produces radioprograms about new dutch music. In the past he devoted two items to my Bluesproject and now I’ve come to Cologne to play my bluesprogram at the Festival. Portugese composer Sara Carvalho is present when I play the first performance of her new blues. When I confess to her that the closing section of A distant mirror doesn’t comvince me completely, she is immediately willing to reconsider the end of the piece. Her Portugese colleague Patricia Almeida on the other hand wrote a very complex and practically speaking unplayable work for me and was absolutely not ready to change a single note. This leads to one of the rare occasions in which I am not playing a piece which I commissioned. Working with composers, who can look at their compositions from the performers point of view, is always pleasant. Fortunately this is the normal situation. After my concert - late at night but attented by a big audience and recorded by the radio - Sara and I have dinner with Kölsch beer in the intimate ‘Brähaus’ Früh, close to the Dome. This gives me again this nice feeling of being a cosmopolitan.
Shortly afterwards I meet Sara again when I play in Aveiro at the International Festival, where she is in the artistic committee. I was in Aveiro before when I visited Sara last summer taking the train from Lisbon. It’s a typical provincial town with a surprisingly big University. The morning of the concert I give a lecture recital for music students about my bluesproject. In the afternoon Daniël Schvetz is coming from Lisbon. He is a composer from Argentina, living in Portugal for a long time already, who composed a blues for me with elements of fado and tango. We have time for an intensive rehearsal. He is, like Sara, the type of a flexible composer who takes the problems and ideas of the performer into consideration, allthough he is also very well able to communicate his intentions. How priviliged I always feel when I have the composer at hand! At the concert, that evening, I play the premiere of the Whoo-Whoo Blues by the Italian composer Roberto Beccaceci, of course Sara’s piece again and two short, blueslike pieces by Dutch composer Joost Kleppe. Joost has a special relationship with Portugal and he lived for some time in Lisbon. That’s where I met him last summer and at that time he promised me already a piece for this Festival. So it’s quite appropiate to play his Memento and Fado Irado (angry fado) here. For me he is one of the most talented dutch composers of the young generation.
Before and after the Festival I seize the opportunity to enjoy the many beauties of Coïmbra and Porto (visit the stylish ‘Majestic’ cafe!) before the Euro 2004 will burst out there.
In April Eleonore and I play a series of concert in the second round of our 6 Continents Project. The Kikker (frog) Theatre in Utrecht has the advance performance of the new compositions. The number of visitors at this concert is depressing low and it increases once more our doubts about the effectivity of the promotional activities by subsidized venues in the Netherlands. In a city like Utrecht it must be possible to attract a bigger audience! This time the Brazilian composer Gilberto Mendes and his South-African colleague Martin Scherzinger wrote the foreign contributions. Both came over to Holland from São Paulo and New York respectively (Martin is living and working in the USA for many years now). They introduce their work on this and on following concerts and Martin furthermore plays beautifully on the mbira (thumbpiano). His piece, the Whistle of the Circle Movement, makes use of the rhythms and colours of this African instrument. Ronald Snijders, Surinam born Dutch composer, wrote a Suite for us, full of festive Caraibean sounds. At the premiere concert in the Amstelchurch in Amsterdam - organized by the Icebreaker Music Centre - he is present again and this time he also improvises with Eleonore and plays his song Amor y Saudade with me. Also Chiel Meijering, the fourth composer in this round of the project, is there: we play his 3 Ballroom Dances, a typical Meijering-piece, what means that playing it is a physical pleasure for me as well. We repeat this program -slightly altered - in Middelburg (April 3) and in Haarlem (April 6).
Our foreign composers accompony us there as well. Gilberto Mendes gives a lecture at the Amsterdam Conservatory (where we play his piece) and on the national radio he is a guest in the popular program A4. Martin Scherzinger gives a lecture at the University of Amsterdam, which we grace by performing his piece. Finally we are able to perform the African cross-rhytms without counting anymore....In the Rotterdam World Museum Cuban singer Estrella Acosta is our guest. She performs brazilian songs, which fit well in the program with Gilberto Mendes work.
On VPRO-radio Walter Slosse devotes plenty of time to our project in de Wandelende Tak (the Walking Branch), a program devoted to World Music.
On May 9 I am a guest at de Burcht (the Fortress) in the city of Leiden. My program there is titled Mompou and the Blues: new bluespieces are alternated with the complete 'bluesy' Canciones y Danzas by Catalan composer Federico Mompou. I also do the first performance of Booze by Ronald Halier: a drunken pianists confrontation with the blues leads to a total chaos. Furthermore I play Rat, the ‘rap-blues’ by Leiden-based composer Huub de Vriend. The ‘Grand Café’ of de Burcht, by the way, is one of the most informal and relaxed venues I know!
A few days later I leave for Kosovo. It’s already my third visit there, this time I'll play with Eleonore and with soprano Irene Maessen, who arrives a couple of days later. In the meantime Eleonore and I do two performances for Kosovarian children, organised by War Child. First we play on an Albanian school near Peja, a city, beautifully located at the foot of the barren mountains of neighbouring Montenegro. The children - probably hearing their first concert ever - had made drawings for us. We were surprised to see that damaged houses - which we had seen plenty of along the road - were absent in the drawings. Given the fact that some years ago only destroyed houses were to be seen on childrens drawings one could consider this a hopeful development. In the afternoon the Warchild car with the indefatigable Suta brings us to the Serbian enclave of Gracanica. In a village pub we play between dartboard and pooltable for mentally and physically handicapped Serbian children. After our performance we enjoy the peaceful sight of freely roaming pigs and goats. Shortly after our return to Amsterdam we read in the newspaper that a Serbian youngster has been killed by bullets fired by Albanians from a passing car in the village of Gracanica, just south of the capital Prishtina....
Quite unexpectedly Eleonore and I have to do an extra concert at the Festival: Japanese pianist Aki Takahashi broke her wrist and we have to put together a program which has to be different from the one we’ll do 2 days later. We admire Aki’s positive attitude towards this accident, which is of course every musicians nightmare.
On May 15 we present a program with Irene at the Festival of New Music in Prishtina. It’s almost a complete Dutch program with works by Hendrik and Louis Andriessen, Bob Zimmerman, Rosy Wertheim, Sylvia Maessen, Joep Straesser, John Borstlap and Jeff Hamburg. In addition we play two Kosovarian compositions: Rafet Rudi’s Prishtina Blues (which he wrote for my bluesproject) and a new composition by Valton Bequiri which he wrote for our 6 Continents Project. It’s still special for me to play here: after the Serbian occupation Kosovo is trying to find a new, national identity. Art plays an important role in this process, for example in the form of this Festival, which Rafet Rudi started in 2002.
On May 23 Eleonore and I play in Museum de Buitenplaats in Eelde, in the north of Holland, to illustrate a lecture by Prof.Tjeerd de Graaf about disappearing languages. Tjeerd de Graaf spent a long time doing research in a.o. Japan and Siberia to study and record threatened languages there. We play music by composers, whose works were in danger to disappear as well, like the music of Leo Smit and Erwin Schulhoff. We feel that the lecture and the music tend to reinforce one another and we hope to work together with Tjeerd again in the near future.
The highlight of the Poortersfestival 2004 in Amersfoort are the performances of the opera der Kaiser von Atlantis by the Czech composer Viktor Ullmann, until recently a forgotten composer as well. As a warming up to the opera I play some short recital in the Mondriaanhouse (the birthplace of Dutch painter Piet Mondriaan) with works by Viktor Ullmann and Karel Berman. The work by Berman is the Theresiënstadtsuite, partly composed during his stay in this concentration camp. In this way I have the opportunity to try out allready two works from my new program with music by jewish composers during the interbellum which I’ll play soon completely.
Meanwhile the Sri Lankan composer Lalanath de Silva composed a Suite in 4 movements for the 6 Continents Project. Lalanath works as environmental laywer at the United Nations in Geneva and he arranges that we can do the first performance of his work there in the impressive Palais des Nations. The concert itself takes place in the atrium but as a dressing room we can use the big Assembly Hall, where so many peace conferences have been held and treaties have been signed! We play also the Ballade for flute and piano by the Swiss composer Frank Martin, who was born in Geneva. Ms. Maria Martin, his widow, is in the audience. Thanks to the many sarongs of the Sri Lankan visitors the hall looks very colourful during the concert.
My last concert before the summer holidays takes place in Middelburg, in Art Gallery de Osseberg. For the first time I play my program with works by Jewish composers before and during the second World War: Karel Berman, Gideon Klein Nico Richter, Erwin Schulhoff, Leo Smit and Viktor Ullmann. It’s already for the third time that I play the first performance of a new soloprogram here. Addy Nieuwenhuijze, the owner of the Gallery, always generously gives me the opportunity to give a try-out of a new program. In the next season I hope to play this program again as well as a similar program for flute and piano with Eleonore. At the Dutch Institute of Music in the Hague we found exciting chamber music by a completely forgotton dutch, jewish composer. In my next newsletter I will tell you more about the plans we have with this valuable music which was composed in the twenties and the thirties of the last century as well as during the first year of the second World War.