News
Vriendenhof
27.02.2008
“The first bars of the work by Caplet (Inscriptions champêtres), sung by the ladies of the Nederlands Kamerkoor and conducted by Klaas Stok, immediately made the audience sit up straight. In this work a serenely impressionistic sound picture, wreathed in an acoustic mist, was painted of the four seasons. Only singers of Nederlands Kamerkoor quality can achieve that so thrillingly.”
Thus the Friesch Dagblad sang the praises of the sopranos and altos of the NKK, after which it was the turn of the gentlemen: “Jan Vriend drew from a totally different musical source for his work without text Ab Origine. This piece was inspired by the sounds the inhabitants of Bali make when performing a monkey dance. Vriend gave it his own twist with different kinds of rough sounds. The men of the choir gave a performance of this work which was both highly convincing and solid as a rock.”
No less impressive were El tren de los heridos from Vriend’s Choir Book for men’s voices and his cycle for mixed choir entitled Du-Dich-Dir. The audiences in Amsterdam, Gouda, Kampen, Budapest and Amersfoort can testify to this. The concert in Budapest took place in the Frans Liszt Academy, as part of the large-scale Low-Festival, a Hungarian-Dutch collaboration, held this year for the first time. The audience there went absolutely wild with enthusiasm. It’s just as well that immediately following the concert series the Nederlands Kamerkoor made a CD recording of all the works by Jan Vriend from the concert programme. This CD, recorded in the Waalse Kerk in Amsterdam, will appear in November 2008, when Jan Vriend will be celebrating his 70th birthday.
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