In the Netherlands she is known to a wide audience as a jury member of the television program ‘Maestro’. But when Isabelle van Keulen plays, as a listener you often fall from one surprise to another. The violinist effortlessly captivates her audience. She does this with impeccable technique, while enchanting you with her sound beauty and intense expression that caress the ear like balm even in the very highest notes.

Isabelle van Keulen broke through in 1984 as the winner of the Eurovision Young Musician of the Year Competition. Since then she has steadily built an international career. She plays with major orchestras in Europe and the US and works with renowned conductors, including Riccardo Chailly, Sir Colin Davis and Valery Gergiev. She can also be found regularly on stage as a chamber musician. Isabelle was founder of the Delft International Chamber Music Festival.

The accomplished Serbian pianist Aleksandar Madžar has won several prizes at international competitions and has been described by The Times as ‘the most creative musician’. Madžar has played many solo performances with orchestras such as The Royal and BBC Philharmonics, Scottish Chamber Orchestra and BBC National Orchestra of Wales. He has also performed elsewhere in Europe and Asia, both for solo recitals and for chamber music. In chamber music, Madžar regularly performs with Ilya Gringolts, Isabelle van Keulen, the Takács Quartet and the Belcea Quartet. He teaches at the Hochschule für Musik und Theater in Bern and at the Royal Conservatory of Brussels.

On this evening Isabelle and Aleksandar will play sonatas by Mozart, Turina and Strauss and the world premiere of a completely new composition “Dass mir das Wollen der Musik nie vergehe” by the acclaimed Dutch composer Micha Hamel.

The composer says about his work: 

This piece, like many of my works, is a mosaic of disparate, separate elements. The composition is not smooth, because the welds and pivot points remain audible in the assembly.

Thus, the differentness of the elements results in discontinuity – a musical discourse that is interrupted and restarted, barely remembering itself.

This experience of fragmentation is, in my view, the experience that underlies our 21st century existence, where everything appears equally close and as an assemblage, where the past does not end and a future is impossible. In order to source and rethink our existence a new understanding with time is therefore required. Caught and liberated in the moment as we live, the mosaic reflects the simultaneity of the multiplicity, in which the experience of the ‘now’ multiplies into a view of the unknown by virtue of the present. In each subsequent performance, I will supplement the piece with new fragments that interrupt the existing structure, so that the work – having become amorphous, no longer recognizable as a work – gradually erases itself.

Isabelle van Keulen plays together with the internationally renowned Serbian pianist Aleksandar Madžar. A special duo for an equally special evening.

Programme:

Mozart, Sonata for violin and piano in A major, KV 526 nr 25;

Turina, Sonata for Violin and Piano No. 1 in D major, op. 51;

Hamel, Duo for violin and piano, opus 49: ‘Dass mir das Wollen der Musik nie vergehe’

Strauss, Sonata for violin and piano op. 18 in E