After the premiere of Ships Vanishing in the Horizon during festival Dag in de Branding, the film will be screened at Panorama Mesdag from August 1. The film was inspired on the new piece by Basque composer Mikel Urquiza, played by the New European Ensemble.

When Urquiza visited the Panorama Mesdag Museum in The Hague, he was impressed by the Panorama and saw it as a great source of inspiration for the next composition assignment for the New European Ensemble. To capture this piece of music in film, the ensemble collaborated with Museum Panorama Mesdag and captured images of the composer in the panorama.

Artistic director of the New European Ensemble Emlyn Stam: ”I think the connection between the music and the images is very clear by the way of filming”. “You can see the ensemble playing the piece, interspersed with images of Urquiza in the Panorama. He literally goes through all parts of his composition. The work consists of ten parts, each one deals with a different element of the panorama. Part 10 of the composition is an inversion of part 1; you walk down the stairs that you go up to get to the panorama. The other parts are, for example,  about the horses or ships on the canvas. Also, Urquiza has made a more playful part about the one hundred and forty-year-old chair standing there in the sand. At the time, it was put there to give the illusion of the panorama. The composer deals with that in a humorous way.”

Museum director Minke Schat: “We cherish this collaboration with the New European Ensemble. It is always special to notice how Mesdag’s art still inspires contemporary makers to create new art forms. Present and past are connected and the art of Hendrik Willem Mesdag thus remains current and relevant. In addition, the piece of music adds a new and unique sensory experience to the Panorama of Scheveningen, Mesdag’s artistic highlight.” As a private museum, it’s difficult for Museum Panorama Mesdag to survive without a structural subsidy and without a major benefactor. The members of the New European Ensemble would like to investigate what they could do to help Museum Panorama Mesdag. On August 1, 2021, the museum will be 140 years old. With this film, the ensemble hopes to persuade more Dutch, German and Belgian public to visit the panorama.

The New European Ensemble recorded the music in the Nieuwe Kerk in The Hague in an instrumentation for four strings, trumpet, horn, percussion, piano, flute and clarinet.