5 questions to Henk Heuvelmans, director of Gaudeamus Music Week
From Sunday, September 2 until Sunday, September 9 the Dutch city of Utrecht forms the center of the international Gaudeamus Music Week. This festival of new music is one of the main activities of Gaudeamus, an organization established by Walter Maas. Having found refuge in the Netherlands during World War II, he opened up his ‘Villa Gaudeamus’ in Bilthoven to young musicians and composers in 1945. Soon Gaudeamus not only organized concerts, lectures and discussions, but also a competition for young composers. Among the winners were Unsuk Chin and Michel van der Aa. Nowadays the winner gets € 4550 (US $ 5700) to write a work for the next edition. Director Henk Heuvelmans (1954) answers five questions…
When did you get involved with Gaudeamus Music Week?
In the early eighties, when I was studying musicology at Utrecht University, I became a frequent guest at Gaudeamus. When it appeared their librarian couldn’t tell apart a score for solo violin from one for piano and cello, I was asked to take over. This was really exciting, for new music was booming in the Netherlands: ensembles were springing up, museums featured concerts with contemporary music, Jan Wolff founded the concert hall De Ysbreker in 1982, and the government strongly supported new initiatives. Gaudeamus got to distribute most of the funding, and we worked together with over twenty organizations throughout the Netherlands, staging concerts from Maastricht and Arnhem in the South, to Groningen and Leeuwarden in the North. In 1983 we moved to Amsterdam, taking up office at the back of De Ysbreker. This was an enormous boost to our activities, for now we were in the center of the latest developments. Soon our concerts in De Ysbreker drew so many visitors that ensembles such as the Arditti’s offered to play almost for free – clearly a larger hall for modern music was needed. Thanks to Jan Wolff’s incessant fights with successive governments and city councils, this was finally realized in 2005, when Muziekgebouw aan ‘t IJ was opened by Queen Beatrix.
Henk Heuvelmans – Photo by ISCM
[Read more →]
In a modern world too often marked by conflicts of humanity versus nature, an exhilarating human communing with nature unfolded in the pouring rain on the fields of that most modern of landscapes, Chicago Millennium Park, on Sunday afternoon, August 26, 2012. Over 100 musicians, led by eighth blackbird and production designer Doug Perkins, performed John Luther Adams’ epic Inuksuit as they mingled with an audience of several hundred stalwart music fans.
It is not only complete works that are presented at The Tête à Tête Opera Festival (Riverside Studios, London) but it also offers the opportunity to works in progress to get aired publicly and David Knotts’ An Eye for an Eye: A Wild Evening with the Papin Sisters is one of those incomplete works that was presented. This was the first performance of the first seven scenes. Knotts is a British composer, a finalist in the first BBC Young Musician of the Year Composer competition, and has led a fruitful career writing for leading ensembles and soloists. His output includes operas, notably his Stormlight for W11 Opera. His sound has a strong harmonic drive, rich with melodic invention, a sensitivity to timbre and fine control of rhythm to make him an ideal composer for theatre works.
On August 19, the NJO Symphony Orchestra and conductor Antony Hermus ended their three-day concert tour with a bang. Their immaculate and tempestuous performance of selections from Prokofiev’s ballet Romeo & Juliette evoked a stampede in 