Echo of the past

For decades, the Ives Ensemble has been the dedicated guardian of 20th-century modernism and its contemporary offshoots. In the Thursday Evening Series, they present surprising music by unconventional composers. This season the ensemble will be performing premieres by Piet-Jan van Rossum and resident composer Richard Rijnvos. He based his new Riflesso on vocal cycles by Ravel and Stravinsky. The versatile soprano Keren Motseri will perform both this premiere of Rijnvos’ piece and the works that inspired it.

As in the famous Droste image on a cocoa tin of yesteryear, the past echoes in Richard Rijnvos’ Riflesso sull’aria. Beneath the surface, the reflection of music that Stravinsky and Ravel composed after they heard Arnold Schönberg’s Pierrot Lunaire shimmers. Though you won’t hear a note by Ravel, Stravinsky, or Schönberg in Rijnvos’ ‘echo of an echo’, their music is present. Likewise, Piet-Jan van Rossum’s music is infused with the past. He searches always for ‘new beauty in a corroded old (sound) world’.