Outside the Box

How do we bring classical music to audiences? To bring music into people’s lives, to give them an experience which they didn’t know was possible; that’s one of my biggest goals in my musical life.

LOWLANDS: Alpha and Ligeti

Lowlands is one of the biggest pop-festivals of the Benelux. Around 50,000 people attend this amazing festival every year. I’ve had the honour to perform at this incredible festiva three times, most recently for over 8,000 people in the Alpha Tent together with the North Netherlands Orchestra.

I’ve never witnessed such enthusiasm for classical music from non-classical music fans. Many of these 8,000 spectators discovered classical music for the first time, listening to a special version of Ligeti Mysteries of the Macabre, performed by Sara Hershkowitz. Yes, you read that right, Ligeti at a pop-festival. That’s a first!

Watch here:

SCRATCH CONCERT: journey and destination

What is a Scratch Concert? Well, singers come together in the morning, without auditions – some experienced, some not – and start rehearsing, from scratch. First they rehearse with the piano, then in the afternoon the professional orchestra joins and in the evening there is a concert, come what may!

Is that possible? Yes, it is possible!

Often our road is about the journey, not the destination. You will be surprised about the quality of the destination, if humour, passion, knowledge and love for music are your companions on the journey…

Here is a documentary about Carl Orff’s Carmina Burana with around 600 passionate singers and musicians:

SYMPHONIC CINEMA: Masterpiece and movie

Symphonic Cinema is a new genre, created by the brilliant cineast Lucas van Woerkum, in which masterpieces of classical music are used as the inspiration for a contemporary film. During the performance of the music, Lucas is able to edit his film in real-time, so the film follows the music. Extraordinary experiences and rave responses from audiences at the Concertgebouw, Bridgewater Hall, Koningin Elizabethzaal Antwerp and many other places make that this concept is conquering the world at a fast pace.

After successful performances of Stravinsky’s Firebird and Ravel’s Daphnis et Chloé, in February 2020 there was a highly acclaimed new world premiere of Mahler The Echo of Being, performed at the Concertgebouw by the Netherlands Philharmonic Orchestra for the Concertgebouw Mahler Festival 2020.

TWEETFONIE: Music and Media

During the year of my residency at the international Kurt Weill Festival in Dessau, the motto of the Festival was “Kurt Weill and the Media.” Kurt Weill wrote music for the media of his day, namely radio and film, but what is the media of present day? Social media, of course. So, we decided to organise and perform a ‘Tweetfonie’: music performed through the means of Twitter and the World Wide Web.

On a dedicated website, people from all over the world were invited to compose a musical theme, which was translated into a tweet. This tweet was sent to 45 composers, who had one day to write a one-minute-symphony for a typical Kurt-Weill-disposition on the basis of this musical theme. It resulted in two concerts with 53 world-premieres in one day, all sight read at the Bauhaus Dessau, and live-streamed on the internet with thousands of spectators. There was widespread interest in this crazy but very fulfilling project, from South-Africa FM to the Argentinian newspaper.