Cellist Maja Bogdanović, contrabassist Nicholas Schwartz en het Toonzetters Ensemble: twee pianisten en twee slagwerkers

Paleiskerk, The Hague

Heaven on Earth

Mikrokosmos and Makrokosmos

Tickets: €29.50

Till 27 and Ooievaarspas: €10

Performers

  • Daniel Rowland violin
  • Yuval Gotlibovich viola
  • Maja Bogdanović cello
  • Nicholas Schwartz double bass
  • Toptalenten van de Davidsbündler Academy violin, viola, cello
  • Toonzetters Ensemble
  • Ramon van Engelenhoven piano
  • Shane van Neerden piano
  • Agostinho Sequeira percussion
  • Arjan Jongsma percussion

Programme

  • Richard StraussMetamorphosen (1945) — version for seven strings
  • Interval
  • George CrumbMusic for a Summer Evening (Makrokosmos III) (1974) — for two amplified pianos and percussion
  • Interval
  • Béla BartókMikrokosmos for two pianos (1940) — a selection
  • Sonata for Two Pianos and Percussion, Sz. 110 (1937)

About this concert

A cosmic drama

The very smallest and the very largest. Thinkers through the ages have held that each mirrors the other. With Mikrokosmos, Béla Bartók composed worlds in miniature. A generation later, George Crumb answered with Makrokosmos: music as vast as the starry sky.

An ensemble led by Daniel Rowland and Maja Bogdanović opens the evening with Metamorphosen by Richard Strauss, in the version for seven strings. Everything changes, everything flows, and in that change much is lost as well. Strauss captured both the momentum and the melancholy: at the close he quotes the funeral march from Beethoven’s Eroica Symphony.

In Music for a Summer Evening, Crumb uses the forces of Bartók’s sonata for two pianos and two percussionists, but with a far larger arsenal of percussion. He called it a “cosmic drama”. We will be filling the stage of the Paleiskerk with instruments. The Toonzetters Ensemble ends with the source of it all: Bartók’s Sonata for Two Pianos and Percussion of 1937, rugged, full of suspense and driven by extraordinary rhythmic energy.

The concert venue