Young composers are doing well. The Toonzetters-project contains works by Celia Swart, Rick van Veldhuizen, Bram Kortekaas, Jan-Peter de Graaff and Mathilde Wantenaar and more…
From De Volkskrant:
What does the latest generation of composers in the Netherlands sound like? Anyone curious about that is made easy. Young composer Primo Ish-Hurwitz initiated Toonzetters, a project for which twenty twenty twenty-somethings all wrote a short piece for piano and/or percussion. After the compositions have already sounded at festivals such as Oranjewoud and November Music, there is now an album. On Thursday night, it will be presented at the Muziekgebouw in Amsterdam.
Toonzetters offers a sampling of contemporary composing in the Netherlands. The pieces are played by contemporaries Ramon van Engelenhoven and Shane van Neerden (pianos) and Agostinho Sequeira and Arjan Jongsma (percussion). In many cases, they are successful but also short showcases, as they are only three to four minutes each time. Who stand out?
Terschelling-raised, hyper-ambitious Jan-Peter de Graaff has become a regular in the columns of the Volkskrant. He composes a lot, and his mainly tonal work has a high note density. His biggest piece to date, Event-Horizon (2021) for the Radio Philharmonic and Groot Omroepkoor, also showed that he likes to challenge musicians to the extreme. ‘It’s as if he knows too well what you can do with a symphony orchestra to let things go too,’ we wrote – he just lost sight of the listen-through stimulus a bit. We were more enthusiastic about his fifth (fifth!) cello concerto The Forest in April: ‘De Graaff’s greatest strength lies in a paradox: stillness shimmering with tension.’
Looking at the programmes of Dutch orchestras and ensembles, one might easily think that the male-female ratio among the young guard is starting to balance out nicely. But among the 20 ‘Toonzetters’, there are only four women. Perhaps the picture is distorted by the many premieres by Mathilde Wantenaar, who is undoubtedly the freshest and has already been noticed by almost all major institutions in classical music. She has great melodic talent and an eye for variety, her idiom is French in colour. Success has a downside: she has already received so many commissions that she ran out of time to complete the orchestration of her violin concerto for Simone Lamsma (in the Saturday Matinee) last year.
We’ve got them figured out: the promoters have smirked. Composer (and political scientist) Bram Kortekaas was born in 1989. That was not a leap year, so Kortekaas cannot possibly claim 20thhood. His Forty to the Dozen, a rhapsodic piece with piano and marimba, is therefore one of the most mature compositions. We got to know him through his composition based on the Voetnoten written by Arnon Grunberg for the Volkskrant. Kortekaas was also unlucky: the premiere at the Concertgebouw in 2017 was postponed due to the memorial service there for Amsterdam mayor Van der Laan. In 2019, the piece sounded after all.
Composers in the crosshairs of our attention