Spring Festival is the annual festival for new music, organized by the composition department of the Royal Conservatoire den Haag.
Every year, the youngest generation of composition students at the Royal Conservatoire presents themselves with new work. They show through their performances, installations, concerts and spectacles that the composition department has lost none of its radicality and inquisitive attitude in all these years.
The New European Ensemble will perform ‘La Arqueologia del Neon’ by composer in residence Oscar Bettison and new compositions by Aaron Israel Levin, Annija Zarina and Hesce Mourits.
Grand World Premiere Around Iconic Poem
A world premiere at the India Dance Festival! This year, the festival opens festively with the spectacle performance Cloud Messenger.
Cloud Messenger is a contemporary, interdisciplinary music and dance performance at the intersection of Indian and Western traditions. The creators previously signed for the special dance adaptation of Philip Glass’ opera Satyagraha in previous editions of the India Dance Festival. This performance is a collaboration between professional and non professional arts institutions.
Cloud Messenger is inspired by the ancient poem ‘Meghaduta’ by one of India’s greatest poets, Kalidasa. In this poem, an exiled nature spirit, lonely and longing for his beloved, asks a cloud to bring a message of love to her. Clouds are seen as the fleeting celestial bodies that can connect people with each other. A provocative idea in a time when people, institutions, and governments seem to be moving further apart from each other. What does this more than two thousand years old, magical poem say about the current time, which is called the loneliest century ever?
Composers Samhita Mundkur and Boudewijn Ruigrok looked for common ground and differences between Indian and Western composition techniques for the new music. They drew inspiration from the ancient Sanskrit of the original poem and from the interpretation given by the British composer Gustav Holst in his composition from 1913. Dancers, under the direction of Gauri Sharma Tripathi, bring a challenging mix of modern dance and classical and modern Indian dance styles, accompanied by the New European Ensemble, soloists, and a large, specially assembled choir of singers from the Hague and Indian community. Together, they create a connection between past and present, between India and the West, and with each other…
Cloud Messenger is a production by Klapstuk in co-production with Korzo, developed in collaboration with Zangam, and supported by the Municipality of The Hague, Fund for Cultural Participation, société Gavigniès, Cultuurschakel, Cultuurfonds, Fonds Podiumkunsten, and Gravin van Bylandt Foundation.
Why are we inclined to draw such hard boundaries? Whether it concerns national borders, between us and them, between inside and outside, between the digital domain and ‘real’ life – physical and psychological borders play a prominent role in our consciousness. In the narrative performance Grensvariaties on music by Martijn Padding (1956), writer P.F. Thomése answers this question based on stories from his own family history and from his daily life. An intimate performance about a wide-ranging subject.
Felicia van den End, flute
James Meldrum, clarinet
Ryan Linham, trumpet
Astrid Haring, harp
Emlyn Stam, viola
P.F. Thomése, narration
In 2024 it will be 150 years since the great music innovator Arnold Schönberg was born. The New European Ensemble celebrates this with two of Schönberg’s own works and a new composition by Martijn Padding. The title Padding chose, Ma vie en couleurs, recalls that Schoenberg was also a talented expressionist painter. The NEuE plays an ensemble arrangement of the notoriously difficult Violin Concerto by Henk Guittart, with Maria Milstein as soloist, who can regularly be admired in the Muziekgebouw.
Schoenberg composed his Violin Concerto in 1936 in America, where he had fled after the Nazi takeover. Like much work from that first period in the US, it sounds quite tonal, although Schoenberg did make use of his famous twelve-tone technique, in which there is no fundamental note anymore. One of the first works that Schoenberg constructed entirely according to a twelve-tone series was the Serenade (1921-1923). Nice detail: the Serenade was also the very first piece that the NEuE performed.
Arnold Schönberg Violin Concerto (arr. Henk Guittart)
Martijn Padding Ma vie en couleurs
Arnold Schoenberg Serenade op. 24
New European Ensemble
Maria Milstein violin