Timeless Beauty – A tribute to Tristan Keuris

Music of contemporary eloquence that wholeheartedly embraces beauty. The work of Tristan Keuris, who would have turned eighty this year, is still very much alive. The Animato Kwartet and clarinettist Jelmer de Moed are great admirers and honour Keuris on the eve of his birthday with a festive concert. They come bearing a gift, too: a brand-new CD of three Keuris masterpieces, which you’ll hear alongside a string quartet by Mozart: one of Keuris’s favourite composers.

Tristan Keuris once said in an interview that he composed out of ‘an infernal jealousy of beautiful things’: the beauty he heard in the work of idols such as Mozart, Stravinsky and Verdi. That jealousy did not paralyse him – rather, it inspired him to seek beauty himself and to tell stories in sound. The result is music that sounds unmistakably modern yet sweeps you along: full of sudden contrasts, glowing colours and catchy melodic lines that linger.

The First String Quartet (1982) shows Keuris’s art in full: three movements conceived as a single great arc. A masterpiece. He wrote the Clarinet Quintet (1988) for the centenary of the Concertgebouw. Across its four movements, the clarinet is in dialogue with the strings – a dialogue that deliberately harks back to the two great models in the genre: the quintets of Mozart and Brahms. The Canzone for solo clarinet (1990) was written as the set piece for the Tromp Music Competition: seven minutes in which virtuosity is in plentiful supply, but never an end in itself. As its title promises, this piece sings from the first note to the last.

And then Mozart himself

Keuris considered Mozart one of his favourite composers. Which is why this celebratory evening also features Mozart himself: the String Quartet No. 22 in B-flat major, K. 589. Mozart completed it in Vienna in May 1790, the second of his three ‘Prussian’ quartets, intended for King Friedrich Wilhelm II of Prussia, himself an accomplished amateur cellist. That explains the strikingly songful cello part, which regularly climbs above the viola. This is late Mozart at his richest. He wrote the quartet shortly after his own Clarinet Quintet (1789), and in doing so created the sound world to which Keuris would pay homage two centuries later.

The musicians

The Animato Kwartet is widely regarded as the most promising young string quartet in the Netherlands and received the Kersjes Prize, the country’s foremost award for chamber music talent, in 2023. In early 2025 the quartet won first prize at the international Irene Steels-Wilsing Foundation Competition. Clarinettist Jelmer de Moed has been a welcome ‘fifth member’ of the quartet for more than a decade. At Classical NOW! they have by now become regular guests, surprising audiences time and again with imaginative programmes.