The time that music and literature went hand in hand, is history. Nowadays, music is expected to speak for itself. However, there’s literature inspired music being made today.
A composer can, of course, like the great Romantic song composers, set a text by a celebrated poet to music. Or he can write an opera based on a book. Jan Boerman does the former. He took a poem by Lucebert and set it to such lengths that the result, entitled De Aarde (The Earth), grew into a veritable cantata. Klaas de Vries sought his inspiration in the Chinese author Han Shaogong. Two novels by this writer, both set in the time of the Cultural Revolution, formed the basis for an opera full of terror, despair and absurd situations.
The third concert is a different matter. Here, poetry and music remain largely separate. We hear works by various, mainly French composers, interspersed with poems by Pierre Kemp. This Maastricht poet, who would have preferred to become a composer, owned a large collection of 78 rpm records and was intensely inspired by classical music for his writings.
Playlist:
1. Klaas de Vries – Pa pa pa vrouw vrouw vrouw
2. Jan Boerman – De Aarde
3. Maurice Ravel – Oiseaux tristes
4. Claude Debussy – Syrinx
5. Erik Satie – Gymnopedie nr. 3
6. Frédéric Chopin – Mazurka opus 17 nr. 4
7. Benjamin Britten – Phaeton (from Metamorphoses)
8. Hendrik Andriessen – Drie romantische liederen
