Wheat Field with Crows

With their unusual ensemble, they open up new sound worlds. Konstantyn Napolov, Helena Basilova and Maya Fridman play percussion, piano and cello. A combination for which hardly any composer has written music. These three musicians will soon change that. They play so superbly together that composers are happy to work with them. For the Van Gogh Year 2020, two composers were inspired by the trio’s unique line-up and by Vincent van Gogh’s paintings: the American Molly Joyce was inspired by the iconic painting Wheat Field with Crows, the Venezuelan Martin Francisco Mayo by the correspondence between the painter and his brother Theo.

A musical journey to the centre of the earth

The French writer Jules Verne was a contemporary of Van Gogh. With his novel Journey to the Centre of the Earth, he wrote a bestseller. The story is still science fiction, as we can only penetrate below the earth’s crust through a borehole. The Russians reached the deepest point in 1989: at 12, 262 metres below the surface, on the northern peninsula of Kola, on the border with Finland. There, according to urban legends, they stumbled upon nothing less than the gates of hell. ‘СГ-3’ was the code word for that spot. The composer Aart Strootman wondered: what does it sound like there? In his imagination he descended from the exosphere to the earth’s core, with the thermosphere, mesosphere, stratosphere, troposphere and earth’s crust as substations. With Obscure Atlas СГ-3 he wrote a gripping musical journey: an intriguing masterpiece.