Mikrokosmos and Makrokosmos (Classical NOW)

Doors open, 19:00

Concert starts, 19:30

Performers:

Daniel Rowland, violin

Yuval Gotlibovich, viola

Maja Bogdanović, cello

Nicholas Schwartz, double bass

Toptalenten van de Davidsbündler Academy violin, viola, cello

Toonzetters Ensemble

Ramon van Engelenhoven, piano

Shane van Neerden, piano

Agostinho Sequeira, percussion

Arjan Jongsma, percussion

Program:

Richard Strauss

Metamorphosen (1945) — version for seven strings

-Interval-

George Crumb

Music for a Summer Evening (Makrokosmos III) (1974) — for two amplified pianos and percussion

-Interval-

Béla Bartók

Mikrokosmos for two pianos (1940) — a selection

Sonata for Two Pianos and Percussion, Sz. 110 (1937)

A Cosmic Drama

The very smallest and the very largest. Thinkers through the ages have held that each mirrors the other. With Mikrokosmos, Béla Bartók composed worlds in miniature. A generation later, George Crumb answered with Makrokosmos: music as vast as the starry sky.

An ensemble led by Daniel Rowland and Maja Bogdanović opens the evening with Metamorphosen by Richard Strauss, in the version for seven strings. Everything changes, everything flows, and in that change much is lost as well. Strauss captured both the momentum and the melancholy: at the close he quotes the funeral march from Beethoven’s Eroica Symphony.

In Music for a Summer Evening, Crumb uses the forces of Bartók’s sonata for two pianos and two percussionists, but with a far larger arsenal of percussion. He called it a “cosmic drama”. We will be filling the stage of the Paleiskerk with instruments. The Toonzetters Ensemble ends with the source of it all: Bartók’s Sonata for Two Pianos and Percussion of 1937, rugged, full of suspense and driven by extraordinary rhythmic energy.