Saturday evening, 20 April 2024, Chamber Choir Ad Parnassum will give a concert of choral works by Dutch composer Henk Badings in the Grote- or Barbara Church on the Grote Kerkstraat 2 in Culemborg. The concert is titled ‘Never Quite Home‘. After World War II, he was vilified (now we would say cancelled), partly because of his appointment by the Germans as director at the Royal Hague Conservatory. Ad Parnassum is keen to show why, despite the label “controversial” that has stuck to his person, Badings’ music is performed worldwide.
The musical language of Badings is the subject of a PhD thesis that conductor Anthony Zielhorst is currently working on at the University of Utrecht. This program is a resounding part of this study.
Anthony Zielhorst:
Ad Parnassum presents a cross-section of his works for mixed choir a cappella, composed between 1940 and 1987. This includes a selection from two cycles linked to his Indonesian native soil. There are also several sacred compositions on Latin text, a cycle for choir and electronics, a meditative work for alto solo and mixed choir and a whirling vaudeville on English text. About the cycle Java en poèmes, Badings noted in 1940: ‘All the poems were about Java, so for me a dear subject, because even though I was 33 at the time, I still didn’t feel at home in the Netherlands and I was still nostalgic for the wonderful atmosphere of my early youth’. The Evocations (1962) also conveys his connection to the mystical world of his native soil with gamelan music and his melodic patterns.
According to musicologist Leo Samama, Henk Badings is one of the greatest composers of the 20th century. He praises him as “a versatile artist who seemingly effortlessly switches from serious concert music to the style of the great American ‘wind bands’, from electronic music to educational collections, from voluminous and dramatic choral works to works for amateur orchestra. His musical style, lyrical and sombre, heroic and elated, dramatic and effective, remains omnipresent and leaves its mark on every score. What Badings wrote between 1930 and 1960 is of international stature. But his later works are also particularly popular, especially in the United States, and show unbridled energy and spirit.”
Composers in the crosshairs of our attention