Reviews

Reviews: 'Nieuwe Nederlandse Oogst'

15.04.2009

“Five brand-new compositions, written specially for the Nederlands Kamerkoor and commissioned by the Fund for Performing Arts+, figured yesterday evening on the a cappella menu entitled ‘Latest crop of Holland’s finest’. This enabled Leeuwarden, as the first concert location in this series,  to witness at one fell swoop four world premières in the presence of two composers.” [...]
“As well as volume there was fortunately much attention paid to detail and to the lightest of accents, for instance in the somewhat impressionistic A questo punto (2008) by Elmer Schönberger. In the poem La verita this resulted in a wonderfully dreamy and soft veil of sound.” [...]
“With his Poèmes de Paul Celan (2008) Matthias Kadar had created a series of little sound pictures. The choir, alternating with some flawless singing from a quartet and solos from a dramatic bass and a lyric tenor, created an enchanting atmosphere.  Schizophrenic girl (2007) by Micha Hamel contributed a trace of English Romanticism in a swinging style, at times coming to a halt with some more introverted soul-searching.  This piece was one of the most valuable of the evening’s crop.
The socially orientated Pas de Quatre (2008) by Bernard van Beurden relied on a clever show of technical skill to be convincing. Something this glittering choir achieved with consummate ease.”

Jeanine Kramer in the Leeuwarder Courant, 26 March 2009

“‘Latest crop’ full of vocal strata teeming with life and sharp accents”
[...]
“Nonetheless, in each of the five compositions presented under the overall title ‘Latest crop of Holland’s finest’, the relationship between text and sound is hugely different.
Take Ove ‘l mar non ha vanto, for instance: a work on a grand scale, but still unfinished, in which Eric Verbugt has set more than a hundred verses from Dante’s Divina Commedia to music. Verbugt pulls out all the stops, with vocal strata teeming with life, sharp accents and angelic female choirs.” [...]
“Kadar does succeed in painting Celan’s poems word for word, sometimes melodiously, sometimes with delicate vowel changes. With his A questo punto, a setting of texts by the Italian Eugenio Montale, Elmer Schönberger achieves similar results, but does so by employing the whole choir, which chants the text in transverse chords and dislocated rhythms which the Latvian conductor Kaspars Putninsh only barely manages to keep in place. The dreamy vowel changes in the third section (Truth) are the most vocally conceived.
Bernard van Beurden’s Pas de Quatre is in terms of intelligibility similar to Verbugt’s Dante music, but that is because he has divided the choir into four subsections which all sing at once, though each has its own musical characterization. This causes the content to be largely lost, but not the effect. It is a richly variegated work, in which even the passages where all the ensembles swamp each other remain transparent. The last piece, Schizophrenic Girl by Micha Hamel, is a short and, despite its title, agreeable work, which, after the other demanding pieces, trips effortlessly off the tongues of the NKK singers.”

Frits van der Waa in the Volkskrant, 28 March 2009