Highlights

He is gradually becoming the audience favourite of the Great Singers series: Florian Boesch. He performs here regularly, as does Malcolm Martineau, one of the world’s most renowned lieder accompanists. Boesch is a true lieder singer, not an opera singer who does lieder on the side. His calendar is reserved for lieder. Today the most beautiful songs of Brahms and Schumann.

Schumann’s Dichterliebe is the jubilant cry of a man madly in love. Newly married to Clara, he expressed his irrepressible happiness in no less than 138 lieder. For Dichterliebe, he selected the sixteen most beautiful. The song Im wunderschönen Monat Mai is of a delicate tenderness. Brahms had less luck in love and mainly expressed his melancholic feelings through his songs.

Classical Album of the Week: 'This is as fine a recorded performance of Dichterliebe as any released in recent years.' ★★★★ – The Guardian

Please note: This programme has been changed with respect to the previous announcement. Ticketholders have been notified.

Programma booklet (Dutch)

He is one of the youngest exponents of the illustrious Russian piano school: Alexander Malofeev, born in 2001. Malofeev is not only a technically gifted pianist, above all he is a musician who knows how to put profound expressiveness into his playing. In this recital, he plays imaginative romantic pieces by his countrymen Sergei Rachmaninoff and Alexander Scriabin, in addition to works by Franz Schubert and Frédéric Chopin.

In 2014, as a thirteen-year-old, Malofeev, who publicly speaks out against the Russian invasion of Ukraine, won the International Tchaikovsky Competition for Young Musicians, held at the Moscow Conservatory. In that place, in the year 1900, Scriabin composed his Fantasy Op. 28, a turbulent and passionate work that already foreshadows his later style. Schubert’s Drei Klavierstücke are a paragon of balance in comparison. Chopin wrote the Grande polonaise brillante for orchestra and piano and later added a dreamy Andante spianato at the beginning.

Programme booklet (Dutch)

Acclaimed performer Olga Pashchenko plays a piano score compiled by Jed Wentz, as she did previously for Der Golem, Herr Tartüff, and Nosferatu. She accompanies this gem from director F.W. Murnau with music that was popular when the film was released a century ago. Der letzte Mann (The Last Laugh) shows the director’s ability to turn a small story into great cinema through innovative camerawork, leaving an indelible mark on the history of film. 

Dressed in his long, braid-trimmed uniform coat, the doorman (Emil Jannings) of a grand hotel welcomes the chic guests. On the eve of his daughter's wedding, after years of loyal service, he faces a crushing blow: demotion to a toilet attendant. The shame keeps him silent. The freely moving camera, which often adopts the doorman’s point of view, immerses the audience in a personal tragedy.  

Film from the holdings of the the Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau Stiftung (www.murnau-stiftung.de) in Wiesbaden

Singer Somi is widely admired for her supple voice, which can sound ‘both serious and seductive’, according to The New York Times. Born in America, she feels a strong connection to her parents’ native lands, Rwanda and Uganda. She mixes her background in jazz with her love of the music of the African continent.

In addition to her musical studies, Somi Kakoma also studied African Studies at university. The renowned South African trumpeter Hugh Masekela became her musical mentor. Under the name Somi, she has released several albums, most recently Zenzile, a tribute to the legendary singer Miriam Makeba. On this album, she collaborates with outstanding jazz musicians from New York and superstars such as Angelique Kidjo and Gregory Porter.

i.s.m

What connects Mahler and The Beach Boys? Contemporary ensemble Stargaze and American band Dirty Projectors answer that question with Song of the Earth. This kaleidoscopic song cycle reflects on the cyclical nature of life and death. Composer and Dirty Projectors leader David Longstreth drew inspiration from Mahler’s classic Das Lied von der Erde and Brian Wilson’s ingenious Beach Boys songs.

Dirty Projectors’ unique blend of dazzling, unconventional guitar work and layered vocal harmonies has kept the band on the indie rock map for the past twenty years. They have collaborated with stars such as Solange, Björk, and David Byrne. Dirty Projectors is now teaming up with Stargaze, an ensemble that has previously wowed the Muziekgebouw with ground-breaking collaborations with musicians like Terry Riley, Mica Levi, and Lee Ranaldo.

This is a production of Muziekgebouw Productiehuis

With De Staat (1976), Louis Andriessen composed music for eternity. This highly personal mix of Stravinsky, American minimal, European avant-garde and jazz caused a shockwave in the international music world. Asko|Schönberg presents this politically charged work alongside a brand new work by Oscar Bettison. Bettison studied with Andriessen and is composer in residence at Asko|Schönberg this season. 

Andriessen drew inspiration from minimal music when composing De Staat, but applied minimalism in his utterly unique way. Bettison has written his piece for the same ensemble as De Staat. He sees his work as a ‘nocturnal wonderland’. A group of pianos, harps, and guitars are positioned centre stage, with some musicians changing positions. The singers incite the brass players and invoke the night.

18.00 / Context programme / 17 new reflections on De Staat

Louis Andriessen composed De Staat between 1972 and 1976, with the idea of ​​contributing to the debate about the relationship between music and politics. In 2024 we live in a completely different - political and musical - world than 48 years ago when De Staat was first performed. In an attempt to once again contribute to the debate about the relationship between music and politics and to place De Staat in 2024, Asko|Schönberg, Ensemble Klang, Gaudeamus, Musica Strasbourg and Muziekgebouw aan 't IJ have each asked three to five composers to make a reflection at De Staat. A free assignment, anything is allowed! From a completely conceptual, unexecutable idea or a completely new score. Only limitation is that the final reflection fits one page.

Seventeen composers accepted the commission. Some knew Louis Andriessen well, studied with him, others look at De Staat from a different perspective.

Before, after and during the performance of Andriessen's De Staat, the reflections can be seen and heard in various places in the building. Some reflections are only shown on paper, others are performed at unexpected moments in different corners of the concert hall.

This concert will be broadcast live by NTR on NPO Klassiek

Programme booklet (Dutch)