Anyone entering the former town hall entrance in Eelde feels their gaze is immediately drawn upwards to Matthijs Röling’s painted firmament. Those who have had the good fortune to contemplate the real firmament for a while without light pollution may have been just as bowled over with amazement and wonder because of that palpable dichotomy between the infinity of the universe – the macrocosm – and the transience of life, the microcosm, so to speak, of our own existence. And is the word capable and adequate and indeed the calibrated means of interpreting our hybrid existence, or is it only up to some art to bridge that gap?
The couple Jos and Janneke van Groeningen thought the latter and asked several ‘figurative’ painters to adorn their ‘Nijsinghhuis’, which later involved music. Not the abstraction of modernism seemed appropriate, but a tonal art that could draw on a rich past, just like the building itself. This is how they ended up with composer Willem Stoppelenburg (*1943), who had already shown in his intense Westerbork Symphony (1992) that he could make the connection between past and present. The premiere of Schilderingen in hetNijsinghhuis was on 23 October 2004 in ‘De Buitenplaats’ – the museum built next to it – by the Noord Nederlands Ensemble (selection Noord Nederlands Orkest) conducted by the composer himself. For an arrangement for (chamber) orchestra to ‘Stoppelenburg-80’ by the Noord Nederlands Orkest (NNO), the Entrance Hall (De Hal) seemed the most suitable, and at the same time a fine example of commitment, which stands out in almost all his work.
For this arrangement, the composer chose the independent title Microkosmos because of its duration (about 11 minutes) but, above all, a certain insight and perception of the universe, a humanistic view to which his recent great oratorio Erasmus also attests. Thus, at the foot of The Hall, prehistoric faces can be seen, at eye level the painter (Röling) himself with dog and friend and, on the other hand, all kinds of scholars, literally pointing to the firmament with supposed orders. Ultimately, everything also refers back to the self-consciousness of the old Nijsinghhuis itself, in which formerly earthly administration and later art had its domicile.
Composers in the crosshairs of our attention