Newsletter 3: January - June 2003

The new year started with a trip to the former GDR. In Leipzig I played my Blues program (with exclusively pieces by German composers and composers living in Germany) on January 27 at the Music School “Sebastian Bach”. The Blues by 3 composers from Dresden - Matthias Drude, Stefan Weiss and Alexander Keuk - had their first performance here. The composers were present at the concert and before it started they still could listen to their pieces (I always feel privileged that it’s possible to play a piece for the composer). On my way to the concert hall I passed the church, where in 1989 the opposition again the former East German government started. Now there was, close to that church, a demonstration against the imminent war in Irak. A whole street was decorated with ‘tea-warmers’ on the pavement. The next morning I visited Bach’s grave and for a moment I felt very close to the history of the city where also Schumann and Mendelssohn once lived. In Dresden I played the next day in the ‘Kleine Szene’. Before I left I had time for a stroll along the ‘Brühlsche Terrasse’ where one can admire the Dresden skyline with i.e. the famous Semper opera. Chemnitz, where I had my last concert that night, is a real East German town. My hotel was located along the ‘Allee der Nationen’ (Avenue of the Nations). The huge bust of Karl Marx was covered with a thick layer of snow. A cheerless city, where I played in the ‘Neue Sächsische Gallerie’(New Saxonian Gallery) for a nice and attentive audience.
Shortly afterwards I left for the USA where the threat of the inevitable war against Irak could be felt. In New York I played a new piece by the Israeli pianist Anat Fort for her. Sitting at her piano in her Brooklyn house you see the Manhattan skyline. So she could see ‘September 11’ from her living room.... In Cincinnati I played my Blues program at the University. Before the first performance of his new Blues piece (‘Blue Mask’) I met Chinese composer Gao Ping, a fascinating composer, who will also compose a piece for the ‘Six Continents Project’ (see elsewhere on this site). With him and with my host, composer Joel Hoffman, I had a delicious (authentic) Chinese meal in a large kind of living room located on a completely desolate, snowy parking lot. In Middletown (Connecticut) I finally met Neely Bruce, whose 2 Blues pieces I had already often played. He teaches at Wesleyan University where I performed after a cold night. It had been snowing heavily and the 17th-century, draughty house of the Bruce family is located quite isolated.....Even colder it was in Buffalo where a landing was only possible after the landing strip had been cleaned from snow.
It was encouraging that my host in Buffalo, composer Chester Mais, was very much anti-Bush like my two hosts before him. The war had not yet started, but security measures at the airports where so strict that it seemed a matter of days.
At the end of February I had two concerts at the ‘Kunsthal (Art Hall) Rotterdam’ with the French soprano Valerie Guillorit. The reason was a special exhibition of impressionistic paintings, many of them quite unknown. We had put together a program with songs by Fauré, Debussy, Ravel and Satie. In March I performed at the Kunsthal also as a soloist for four times with a program around the Impressionists. I really hope that in the near future museums pick up the idea of organizing concerts on a regular basis, preferably related to the current exhibitions. The Kunsthal has an auditorium which is very suitable to realize this idea.
On February 25 I played my Blues program in the Music Centre the ‘IJsbreker’ in Amsterdam. Dutch composers Loek Dikker, Robert Nasveld and Leo Samama were present at the Dutch premieres of their pieces. From Paris Kaori Okatani (Japan) had come to Amsterdam to listen to her work and Stéphane VandeGinste from Antwerp had done the same. Even the young Mexican composer Alvaro Herrera had come from Mexico City to hear the first performance of his ‘Babus’.
On March 24 I played in Barcelona. In the ‘Centro de Cultura Contemporànea de Barcelona’ the complete ‘Canciones y Danzas’ by Federico Mompou were combined with recent Blues compositions in a program titled ‘Mompou and the Blues’. Many works by this Catalan composer (see newsletter 1) have a bluesy mood in my view and I was curious to know how this combination would work. Señora Carmen Bravo, the composers widow, had taken her friend Alicia Delaroccha to the concert and wisely had not told me in advance about the presence of this grand old lady of Spanish pianism. On the program there were also new works by Ricardo Massari Spiritini and by Christiaan de Jong, composers from respectively Italy and the Netherlands who are both living in Barcelona now. Christiaan is also the organiser of this concert series, in which many Dutch musicians presented themselves in Barcelona in the past couple of years. Also in Barcelona (what a marvellous and lively city it still is...!)there were plenty demonstrations against the war, that had started in the meantime.
A week later a couple started to dance spontaneously on ‘A fuego lento’ during my Tango concert at the University of Twente in Enschede, in the east of Holland. You can hear this Tango on this site (see discography). In ‘Theater Romijn’ in Leeuwarden (in the north of the country) I made a combination of Tangos and Blues. Here I played the first performance of ‘Hitch’ by Dutch composer Toek Numan. At the end of April I played my Tango program in Middelburg (this time you have to travel in your imagination to the south-west of Holland) in the ‘Kloveniersdoelen’, a beautiful old building. Unfortunately it will probably have been my last concert there as the ‘Centre for New Music Zeeland’ is going to move to the cathedral(‘Dom’) of the old town of Veere, close to Middelburg, which is an exciting space with many possibilities.
In April there were also 5 showings of a children’s concert , ‘de kleine ballerina’ (the little ballerina), in the Amsterdam ‘Concertgebouw’, close to my house for a change. We played for large crowds of enthusiastic children and I am looking forward to the tour we will make with this program throughout the Netherlands in January 2004.
My tour in China, planned for the first half of May, had to be cancelled because of the SARS-epidemic. So no Beijing, Nanjing and Chengdu this time, where everything had already been arranged.....Because of that I could play, on the other hand, in the old town of Leiden in the Grand Cafe ‘de Burcht’, i.e. the first performance of ‘Rat’, a ‘Rap blues’ by Huub de Vriend. It always strikes me how cosy concerts with a small audience use to be (it was a very sunny Sunday...).
On May 18 I was invited to play as guest with the Willem Breuker Kollektief in the ‘Amstelkerk’ in Amsterdam. I heard the Kollektief play throughout the years and always admired their energy, their flexibility and their equal treatment of ‘high’ and ‘low’ music. The ‘Concerto Franco-Américain’ by the French composer Jean Wiéner, which we played at the concert, was originally scored for piano and string orchestra. It’s a typical example of a cross-over piece in which jazz influences and popular music are combined successfully with classical examples. Already many years ago I had asked Willem Breuker to arrange this work for piano and wind orchestra. In the meantime we recorded this arrangement on CD and as soon as it will have been released I’ll inform you about it on this site.
By the end of May I left for Tirana, Albania. I was invited to play on a Festival of New Music by the Albanian composer Aleksander Peçi, one of the organizers of this Festival. On a theme from one of his fathers film scores his son Elvis Peçi had composed a Blues (‘Obstinate Blues’). This piece was premiered at my concert at the Music Academy, which has been recorded by Albanian television. I also gave a lecture for music students about my Blues project.
Tirana is an exciting city, beautifully situated in a valley and surrounded by mountains. Various cultures are completely mixed here: there are mosques, churches, tall flats side by side with crumbling, little houses; gypsies, women with veils as well as fashionably dressed ladies, beggars, moneychangers, vendors and remarkably many big, old Mercedeses. I was lucky to meet many people who spoke Italian quite well and thanks to that I have learned a lot about a country that always was surrounded with mystery for me. Before I left, my taxi driver drove me to the sea (by the only highway in Albania): I visited Dürres where in 1997 many Albanians embarked on ships to Italy. We had a simple lunch in the mountains and a couple of hours later I found myself again in the luxury of Vienna airport.
In the framework of the 150th anniversary of Vincent van Gogh’s birthday I played in the Kröller-Müller Museum a program with music from the time of the painter. In 1998 I had already played a similar program, which I recorded on my CD ‘Pictures at a Van Gogh Exhibition’ (see discography). On the program there were works by Liszt, Chabrier, Skrjabin, Mompou, Milhaud, Debussy and Satie. In spite of the sunny weather in the middle of June there was a big audience. Once more I was convinced that museums should be breeding places where different forms of art, including music, can meet. Unfortunately many museums consider concerts as a time consuming and expensive side activity instead of making it a indispensable part of their regular activities.